Claire can only bear to be up when they are out. She hides under the warm puff of Issy’s duvet, eyes squeezed shut as Ian’s panicky voice floats up the stairs.
‘Have you got your lunch, Zipporah? I made some sandwiches. They’re on the side in the kitchen. Well, I didn’t know you don’t like tuna. Do you need some bus money? Sorry, it’s all the change I’ve got. Can’t you get off a stop early? Jacob, come on, hurry up. Where’s your helmet, Alma? Don’t be silly – you’ll look a lot worse with your brains on the road. Jacob, come on.’
The front door closes and Claire remains under the cover in case one of them comes back for something. When the quiet has settled she climbs out of bed and inches down the stairs like an old woman, one hand on the banister, the other braced against the wall, dragging the ugly lump of her grief behind her.
The kitchen smells of toast and decomposing flowers: roses, delphiniums, chrysanthemums, carnations and lilies; they’ve been stuffed into vases, jam jars and plastic beakers, two especially large arrangements languish in buckets. The stink of the lilies turns her stomach; something sour and rancid lurks under their sweet pungency. She ought to throw the flowers away, they are long past their best, but to remove them would be to admit something, to mark a conclusion. She sits at the table trying to ignore the incongruous optimism of the homespun crafts and knick-knacks. No Other Success Can Compensate for Failure in the Home – the laminated jumble of cutesy letters is particularly inapt. There have been so many failures; when the children were younger they were all hers: impatience, disorganisation, boredom, tiredness; but as the children have grown older, the tent of Failure in the Home has marqueed to also include their inadequacies: untidiness, disobedience, irreverence, breaking the Sabbath, and a multitude of other discouraged behaviours and sins of omission; all evidence of her spectacular Failure in the Home. She shuffles over to the sign, pulls it off the wall and drops it in the bin, wondering what to get rid of next.
So far this year, the sisters have made felt flowers, sugar-cube Temple sculptures, Daughter of God fridge magnets, Temple marriage clocks – ♥ For time & Eternity ♥ – oatmeal bath sachets and wooden wall signs. She’d been looking forward to the wooden wall signs, she’d been thinking about painting her sign with something kitschy and self-deprecating like God Bless this Mess. But when she arrived at the chapel, Sister Stevens had already stencilled a quote onto each rectangle of wood.
Claire hates her sign. She brought it home from the Relief Society meeting and hid it in the musty cupboard under the sink, punishing it with darkness and a top note of shoe polish and bleach. Ian found it; perhaps he inexplicably decided to clean his own shoes and saw it lying there purposelessly. She followed the racket one Saturday morning and discovered him kneeling astride the sink pushing a gyrating drill bit into the window lintel.
‘Pride of place.’ He grinned and blew her a kiss.
Because Sister Stevens stencilled the letters, the sign is the neatest of Claire’s home-made efforts. The characters sweep and loop in even calligraphic curls.
Home is where women have the most power and influence; therefore, Latter-day Saint women should be the BEST homemakers in the world.
Sometimes Claire sneers at the sign, occasionally it makes her feel like crying; she is definitely not one of the best homemakers in the world – there is evidence of this all over her kitchen, all over her life. The BEST homemakers in the world buy supplies for their children’s birthday parties ahead of time, they check on their children and notice when they are seriously ill. She pushes the chair to the sink, climbs up and reaches for the sign. It is solid and heavier than she remembers. She steps down and puts it on the table. She would like to deface it, to replace BEST with a word like stressed or depressed. If she was clever she’d be able to think of something funny, a way of changing the words around to make it say something entirely different, then she could hang it back up and take pleasure in everyone’s obliviousness. Instead, she unlocks the back door, takes the sign outside and stuffs it in the wheelie bin.
As she comes back indoors, she notices Issy’s goldfish and can’t remember when she last fed him. She hunts for the little pot of food and discovers it behind a jar of flowers. After she’s fed the fish she thinks about feeding herself. The fridge is littered with foreign casserole dishes, cling-film-topped and crusted with leftovers. They must be passing a sheet around in Relief Society – Sign here to make a meal for the Bradleys. The sisters choose recipes rich in calories and comfort and leave them on the doorstep alongside Tupperware tubs of treats: chocolate brownies, biscuits, cupcakes. They don’t ring the bell. Claire imagines them tiptoeing up the drive, arranging their offerings then dashing away before she can assault them with her sadness on the doorstep. There’s nothing she’d like to eat so she closes the fridge and sits down.
Sympathy cards are stacked in a zigzag pile on the table; the mantelpiece and windowsills are full. The postman slides fat bundles of commiseration through the letter box every day: heartfelt wishes and bad poems in muted, floral pastels. People write little notes inside the cards. She is longing for a note saying I’m so sorry; she is sick of explanations and justifications.
You must be a very special family to have been given such a challenge.
Bless Issy for coming into your family and giving you a heavenly destination to work for.
Heavenly Father knows there are important lessons for you to learn from this experience.
What is she meant to learn from this experience? Ian would answer the question with a list of virtues like the ones written on the Sunday-school chalk board each week, irrespective of the lesson topic: patience, faith, long-suffering, endurance … It’s easy for him, his thoughts traverse a one-way system, there’s no room for roundabouts of doubt or recalculations; once he settles on something it’s true and she mostly likes this about him, it’s what makes him so steadfast and loyal. When he decided he loved her she knew he wouldn’t ever change his mind, loving her became a fact of his existence, as veritable and infallible as scripture. He’s a man who sticks to the road of his experience, he doesn’t look left or right or back; he never rubbernecks or pulls over to glory in the wreckage of other people’s lives, he never gossips or points fingers; he calls encouragement as he passes those who’ve broken down, he throws a tow rope to people in difficulty, but he always keeps to his designated route. There’s one truth, one way, and Ian is following it. It’s true she has caught him once or twice staring into the distance, hands clenched, blinking back tears, but, with the exception of that first night, each time she has reached out to touch the hem of his unhappiness he has wiped the feelings from his face and pulled away. She wishes he’d come to a halt. Pause. Just for a while. Why can’t everyone just stop? Even the children adhere to their routines in a way that suggests their feelings are superficial. She has wondered if Zipporah is hiding her grief in her bedroom, whether Jacob’s tiptoeing and whispers to no one in particular are a symptom of cheerlessness or conciliation, and as for Alma, he has dressed whatever unhappiness he feels in a coat of jokes.
‘It’s no wonder Sister Valentine is so fat,’ he said as they tackled one of her monster meals, last week, before Claire retreated upstairs.
‘That’s unkind,’ Ian chided. ‘Perhaps she can’t help it. You don’t know, it might run in her family.’
‘No one runs in her family.’ He looked around, waiting for someone to laugh; when they didn’t, he carried on. ‘The best thing about this is the food. What? I didn’t mean I was glad or anything. Wow, that went over like a fart in church.’
Ian told him not to say fart at the table, so he got up and went into the kitchen and said it there. Ian told him to sit down, but he was incorrigible.
‘If a rat catcher is called a ratter, what’s a bug catcher called?’ he asked Jacob.
Sadness that’s so easily disguised can’t run deep. None of them are sad like she is, no one else’s grief is immobilising. The way they are carrying on – going to school and work, pretending everything’s OK – sickens her. They are allowing the momentum of routine to push them onward, ever onward, as if they are marching to the chorus of a relentless hymn.
There is a smack as another bundle of sympathy lands on the mat in the hallway. She gets up, retrieves a handful of envelopes and a small package, and shambles back to the table. She opens several cards, the verses are absurd and twee.
One day a beam of light shone through a crevice that had opened wide,
the rose bent gently toward its warmth,
then passed beyond to the other side …
Although it’s difficult today to see beyond the sorrow,
may looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.
Not ever gone,
Just moved on.
She dumps the cards in the pile with the others. There are two envelopes left. One looks like a letter and the other is the small package. She opens the package first. It contains a book and a note from Sister Stevens.
Dear Claire,
I ordered this from Salt Lake as soon as I heard the news. It finally arrived. Hope it helps,
Ashlee x
The book is small and slender. It’s called Angel Children and Jesus is pictured on the cover, holding a small boy, his right hand outstretched. He looks like the Child Catcher. She flicks through the pages, glancing at the chapter headings: ‘Faith and a Time to Die’, ‘Faith Sufficient to Heal is a Gift’, ‘Overcoming the Challenge’. Her eyes are drawn to a quotation near the end of the book: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick. She cracks the narrow spine and begins to read about King Hezekiah. Isaiah tells the king to set his house in order as he is about to die, but when Hezekiah prays the prayer of faith, God allows him to live for another fifteen years. Claire remembers not praying in the hospital, not believing her words would work: the prayer of faith – was it so simple? She keeps reading. Hezekiah’s story is followed by that of an ordinary man whose son is sick. The man prays for his boy’s recovery, he absolutely refuses to give him up to death, and Claire wonders about the apparatus of such a refusal – how does one go about refusing God? The boy’s life is saved, but when he grows up he becomes a great sorrow to his parents and they decide it would have been better if he had died when he was a child. She slaps the book against the table.
The remaining envelope contains a letter.
Dear Sister Bradley,
I went to the Temple yesterday. I was sitting in the Celestial Room, contemplating Eternity, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. When I looked, there was nothing, but then I saw it again, flickering, and I knew it was a spirit. The Holy Ghost whispered to me that it was Issy. I know she is nearby, watching over you all at this time, and if you stay faithful you will see her again.
Gospel love,
Sister Anderson
Claire tears the letter in two. Perhaps someone might have noticed how ill Issy was if Ian hadn’t disappeared to coax Brother Anderson to the hospital. Why would Issy appear to Sister Anderson and not her own mother? Clearly she wouldn’t, she just wouldn’t. She screws each half of the letter into a ball and stares at the empty space above the sink.
At first she tried to carry on. She walked Jacob to school and survived the playground, feeling like a member of the royal family as she greeted people and collected flowers. Things quietened down in a matter of days – once people had expressed sympathy they didn’t have much else to say. Grief enclosed her like an invisibility cloak, and with no one to talk to, she thought about the empty chair in Issy’s classroom and wondered whether her teacher had removed her name badge from her tray and unpeeled the little sign above her coat peg.
On the walk home, she meandered around the park scuffing through piles of fallen leaves, thinking about where she was in relation to memories of Issy, which were everywhere, poking her from all directions – she couldn’t stop them, it felt wrong to try. At home, she couldn’t pass Issy and Jacob’s room without entering it. She opened drawers, searched for Issy’s scent on things, and her sadness fastened itself to ordinary objects: unfilled slippers, abandoned toys and empty clothes hanging in the wardrobe, waiting. It began to feel as if these objects ought to leave of their own accord, disappear quietly in order to save her feelings. She hovered in the bedroom, haunting the vestiges of Issy’s life, and watched from the window as the hedge sobbed leaves and the breeze huffed them into every corner of the garden.
Things changed after General Conference weekend. She experienced the newly familiar horror on waking that Monday morning, but it also felt as if there was something heavy in her chest, pressing her into the mattress, and she longed to fall back into the obliviousness of sleep. Her legs ached as she stepped into her clothes and she could hardly lift her arms as she pegged out the washing. When she dropped Jacob off at school the Reception teacher stepped into the playground holding Issy’s PE kit.
‘Mrs Bradley, I – this – I didn’t know – do you want it?’
Claire took the bag and walked home with it pressed to her chest. She carried it straight upstairs and hung it on the hook on the back of Issy and Jacob’s bedroom door. Then she stood at the window and looked out at the garden as she thought about the story the prophet had told at Conference.
The prophet usually tells stories about himself. The stories are heartening and refreshingly straightforward, replete with uncomplicated goodness: hospital visits, Christmas presents for the needy, small acts of kindness; the things Claire values, the things she believes are at the heart of religion. But the story he told this time was different. When the prophet was just a boy he left a five-dollar bill in his pocket. He only realised after his clothes had been sent to the laundry. He was worried about losing the money so he prayed and pleaded with Heavenly Father for its safe return. The clothes came back and the five-dollar bill was miraculously intact; the prophet’s prayers had been answered. When the broadcast ended and the chapel lights were switched on, Claire looked around at people she considered to be friends, hoping one of them might whisper, ‘It must be hard for you to hear about the miraculous rescue of a five-dollar bill,’ or even dare to murmur, ‘Maybe the prophet was mistaken and it was just good luck that saved the money.’ But no one said a thing, she didn’t encounter so much as a sympathetic eye roll, and although she thought the story might bother Ian too, she was wrong. ‘You’re not criticising the prophet, are you?’ he asked.
She watched through the bedroom window as the breeze buffeted the clothes she’d pegged on the line and stared at the fallen apples, unfazed by the waste. She imagined the prophet as a little boy, panicking about the money, praying that everything would be all right. It was easy to feel sorry for him, to understand his need, but it wasn’t an answer to prayer or a miracle – God would never exercise His power to save money, even for a child. He wouldn’t.
She was weary, utterly tired of trying to get everything straight in her mind: faith, miracles, prayers, blessings … She turned away from the window and crossed the room to lift Issy’s covers, and for a moment she could smell Issy’s skin and hair. That was when she decided.
She popped downstairs briefly to fetch Issy’s glasses from her handbag. As she passed the telephone, she bent down and unplugged the cord. When she got back upstairs she changed out of her clothes and into her nightie. Then she climbed into the bottom bunk where she lay, holding the glasses. She unfastened them and ran her fingers along the arms where they’d hugged Issy’s head from temple to ear. The vacant round lenses gaped oh at her, as if they were aching to be animated by the arcs of ears and the underscore of a smile. She positioned them on the pillow next to her. Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
When the front door burst open, she jumped. She heard footsteps racing down the corridor followed by the fling of the lounge, dining-room and kitchen doors. The feet attacked the stairs and dashed along the landing to her bedroom and then up the second flight to Zipporah’s room, before pounding back down to open Alma’s door, the bathroom door and finally the door to Jacob and Issy’s room.
‘You’re here!’ Ian was out of breath. His hands braced the door frame. ‘You’re here! I was so worried. What’s going on? Are you all right? I had a call asking why no one had picked Jacob up. I tried to get through, but the phone just rang and rang. I thought –’
‘I unplugged it.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone.’
‘You can’t just unplug the phone! Jacob was waiting. He didn’t know where you were. I had to leave work. What are you doing?’
‘Resting.’
‘In here? Why? Are you ill?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, you’d better get up.’
‘No.’
‘Come on.’ He stepped into the room, slipped his hand under the bedcovers and searched for her arm. His fingers squeezed hard. ‘Stop being silly.’
‘Get off. You’re hurting me.’
‘You shouldn’t be here.’ He grasped her and tugged until she was half hanging out of the bed. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to go limp. He’d never touched her like that before, never. He yanked her further until her head and back made contact with the floor and then he leaned in to move her legs out of the bunk. The covers slid away, Issy’s glasses must have slipped onto the carpet, and when Ian tried to grab her ankles there was a crack as the glasses shattered under the sole of one of his sensible shoes.
Upturned and frightened, Claire kept her eyes closed while he determined the source of the noise. She heard his intake of breath when he realised and the creak of the floorboards as he knelt down to pick up the pieces but she didn’t open her eyes because she knew if she watched she would feel sorry for him and she wasn’t ready to forfeit her anger.
‘I’ve broken Issy’s glasses,’ he said. ‘We can get some new ones, can’t we? They’d let us, wouldn’t they? In the shop, they’d let us buy some without her … They’re in pieces. Look what you made me do.’
She didn’t move, she lay perfectly still with her back on the floor and her legs in the bed. He waited for a moment and then she heard his feet on the stairs.
She kept her eyes closed as she manoeuvred her legs out of the bed and onto the floor. She knew she’d done something terrible by not collecting Jacob and by refusing to get up when Ian asked. She felt ashamed, but not enough to go downstairs and apologise. It was something of a revelation to realise that her daily life was fuelled by expectation and its structures were fragile and easily transgressed. She scrambled onto all fours and climbed back into the bed.
She didn’t join the family for tea. She didn’t wash the dishes or bring the laundry in off the line; she lay in bed rehearsing years of tentative, often reluctant, obedience and pondered the dimensions of a proportionate punishment.
Congratulations on your eternal marriage! Now you can get on with the things that really matter – although she laughed at the note which accompanied Ian’s parents’ baby quilt wedding gift, Claire was pregnant before finals. Swept away by everyone’s happiness, she read baby magazines and allowed the older sisters to fuss and stroke her belly in the church corridors, listening as they offered unsolicited advice about breastfeeding and suitable baby names.
Ian’s parents were at the hospital within an hour of Zipporah’s birth. ‘You’re a lovely girl, aren’t you?’ his mum cooed as she held her first grandchild. ‘Yes you are! And you’d like a little brother, wouldn’t you? Yes you would!’
‘Give us a chance, Mum,’ Ian laughed.
People at church began asking Claire when she was going to have the next one before Zipporah was three months old and she didn’t mind because she thought it would be a good idea to have two children quite close together.
When Alma was born, Ian’s mum was ecstatic. ‘Hello, future missionary,’ she said as she held him in the hospital. ‘You’d like a little brother too, wouldn’t you? Yes you would!’
That was when Claire realised she wasn’t going to get away with just the two.
Alma was busy blowing the roof off her life with his noisy toddler tantrums when Ian’s mum asked whether she had started trying for number three. Claire explained that she didn’t want any more and Ian’s mum said, ‘I’d have had at least half a dozen if I’d been able … I always think it’s a shame when women don’t throw themselves into motherhood. After all, it’s what they’ll be doing for Eternity. They may as well get the hang of it now.’
‘I’m not sure I want to keep reproducing for Eternity,’ Claire confided. ‘I don’t think it’s my thing. I mean, I love the children, but I don’t want to do this forever.’
‘But it’s exactly what you’ll be doing! You’ll be populating whole worlds – not by yourself, of course, Ian’s other wives will help.’
‘His other wives?’
‘In the Celestial Kingdom.’
‘There’ll be other wives?’
‘Of course. Polygamy is eternal – just because we don’t practise it now doesn’t mean we don’t believe in it. It’s in Mormon Doctrine. We gave you a copy before you got married. Where is it? I’ll show you.’
Claire fetched the book and listened as Ian’s mum read aloud from the section which dealt with the Ennobling and Exalting Principle of Plural Marriage. She learned that the Holy Practice would commence again after the Second Coming and she felt nauseated for the remainder of the afternoon.
‘It’s just the way it is, Claire,’ Ian said when he got home from work. ‘It was that way in the Old Testament and it’s that way in nature. You won’t mind in the Celestial Kingdom, you’ll be perfect, so you won’t feel jealous. It’s silly worrying about it now.’
‘You said polygamy was in the past. I asked you about it before I joined the Church and that’s what you said.’
‘It is in the past.’
‘You said it all ended more than a hundred years ago.’
‘It did.’
‘You didn’t tell me the truth.’
‘I answered the question you asked.’
She thought about it for days, humbly at first, and then with growing indignation. She couldn’t believe in it, but that wasn’t enough, she wanted to stop him believing in it too. She bought unauthorised underwear which exposed her thighs and belly and wore it before bed so he could enjoy removing it. She did things she had previously heard him describe as immoral and impure. He was startled, but she quashed his objections. She maintained a heightened level of attentiveness for several weeks until life caught up with her and she couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for perpetual sexual acrobatics, no matter how eternally binding. She resolved not to think about polygamy and retreated to their familiar, hokey-cokey sex which was nice because it was comfortable, and she knew all the words and moves by heart.
Not long after, Ian asked about having another child. The decision was mostly hers, he said, but the Lord would show her the way. The Lord kept quiet, giving Claire the impression that He wasn’t especially bothered. Ian was. He explained his theory that replicating was the best way to describe the creation of two children; multiplying and replenishing required three or more. She agreed to have another, deriving a secret glee from her body’s refusal when nothing happened. Ian was patient. ‘The Lord’s time isn’t our time,’ he said. But his mum wouldn’t leave it alone, she tugged and worried at it like a dog on the end of a shoe. She gave advice about ovulation and offered to babysit Zipporah and Alma overnight, if it would help. Eventually, once Alma had started school and Claire had begun to daydream about part-time jobs and separate bank accounts, she fell pregnant again.
Not long after Jacob was born, Ian’s mum started to say things like, ‘Three is an awkward number,’ and, ‘Alma’s got that middle-child problem, hasn’t he?’
Claire prayed about it and made a deal: One last time, but I want a girl. As she lay on the bed in the scanning room it felt as if her whole life hinged on the revelation of the baby’s sex. She knew she wasn’t like the other women at church; she didn’t have spiritual experiences, unless she counted the way she felt when she walked on the beach. She never knew what to say in Testimony Meetings; she couldn’t muster tearful declarations and statements of absolute truth like Sister Stevens: ‘We were on vacation in Disneyland and I couldn’t stop crying because we have the gospel – we were the happiest people in the happiest place on earth.’ She couldn’t speak like Sister Campbell, either: ‘I know the Church is the only true Church on the face of the earth. I know Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. I know we have a living prophet who converses daily with Jesus Christ and leads the Church by revelation.’ Whenever possible, she avoided bearing testimony, and on the occasions when she was compelled to as the Bishop’s wife, she simply stated that joining the Church had made her feel a part of something good. The sonographer said, ‘You’re having a little girl,’ and Claire felt like Hannah in the Old Testament, as if she had prayed Issy into existence.
After Issy was born, Claire caught Ian’s eye in the hospital. ‘No more,’ she mouthed and he nodded and said he loved her hugely, more than she could imagine. But love isn’t measured by size or weight, she learned that after Issy was born. Love is measured in ways. It isn’t a case of more and less. It’s this way and that way, gladly and carefully, freely and gratefully. That’s how it was with her last baby; her lovely, make-the-most-of-it child. Each of Issy’s firsts was also a last; a joy and a relief, a beginning and an ending, all of Claire’s own choosing.
Ian returned a few hours later with food on a tray. He stood in the doorway and cleared his throat. ‘Will you get up now?’
She pulled the covers over her head and mumbled, ‘I don’t think so,’ into the duvet.
‘Are you going to get up tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What’s wrong, Claire?’
She tugged the covers down a little so she could see him. He’d removed his tie, undone his top button and his shirt was partially untucked; he looked forsaken, like an unmade bed.
‘You didn’t even come down for Family Home Evening. What’s happened today? Has something upset you?’
Of course she was upset, but the upset was sharper than Issy’s returned PE kit, less fathomable than the prophet’s story and heavier than the weight she’d felt in her chest when she woke that morning.
‘Jacob needs to come to bed.’ He stepped into the room and placed the tray on the floor, as if he might tempt her out like an animal. He’d folded a piece of kitchen towel in half to make a napkin and put a rose from one of the sympathy bouquets in a glass of water. He sat down in front of the wardrobe, his knees pointed straight at the ceiling, and his trousers rode up past the tops of his socks. ‘I know it’s difficult. But you, you’ve got to –’
‘It’s not the kind of sadness that just dries up.’
‘I know … but will you get out of bed, please?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I don’t either, in the mornings, it’s … I think one day it won’t be such an effort. I know it’s going to get better, it’s just going to take some time.’ He stretched his legs out in front of him; his feet almost reached the bed, there were holes in the heels of each of his socks and she felt glad his mother was on the other side of the Irish Sea. ‘I’m sorry about the glasses. Do you need a blessing? I’ll phone President Carmichael and ask him to come and assist. I know it’s Monday, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.’
She couldn’t talk past the sudden lump in her throat. She thought about the little business cards in the pocket of his suit jacket, tracing his Priesthood Line of Authority: Ian James Bradley ordained a High Priest by Ronald Bradley, Ronald Bradley ordained a High Priest by James Poulter, and on, and on, until it reached Brigham Young, then Joseph Smith and Peter, James and John who came back to earth in 1829 to restore the priesthood, and finally back to Jesus Christ. Ian had the cards made specially, so the men he ordained could verify the source of their authority to bless and bind on earth and in heaven. All that power, passed down by the laying on of hands like a sacred Midas touch. It should work – she’d thought about it a lot since the blessing in the hospital; unworthiness on Ian’s or Issy’s part would affect the outcome of a blessing and invalidate the promises made, but they were both eminently worthy. Lack of faith may also cause failure and her own lack was a fact; from the moment they arrived at the hospital she hadn’t believed in anything except the evidence of her eyes. She wished she could go back in time to sit next to Issy’s bed and say, ‘I do believe, I do, I do!’ like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. But even as the thought took hold, she couldn’t imagine having enough faith to support the magic of healing.
‘I don’t want a blessing,’ she said. ‘It won’t help. It won’t work.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
She considered telling him that she did mean it but pulled the covers back over her head instead.
‘I don’t know what else to do to make it better,’ he said. And then he got up off the floor and went downstairs to tell Jacob to come up to bed.
Claire realises she is crying. She used to know when she was about to cry, but it’s not like that any more. There’s no anticipation, no winding mechanism. She is full of tears and every so often they just slop out. They drip onto her hands and onto the balled-up pieces of Sister Anderson’s letter. It’s only when she gives the pieces a further scrunch that she notices the envelope, propped next to the pile of sympathy cards. Ian has dotted the ‘i’ in her name with a heart like she used to when they first met. She tears it open, embarrassed for him and his stupid, ineffectual optimism. Inside she finds an article from the online version of Ensign magazine which he must have printed off specially. Several sentences have been highlighted.
Mother, Do Not Mourn, she reads. The story is about a bishop’s son who was run over by a freight train. The boy’s mother felt no relief from sorrow during the funeral and continued mourning after the burial. She reads this sentence several times, partly because Ian has coloured it bright yellow but also in an attempt to grasp its significance. Are funerals supposed to relieve sorrow? Is burial meant to signify the end of mourning? Is Ian implying that she is not following the correct pattern of grief? She reads on, warming to the boy’s mother. The boy’s mother lay on her bed in a state of mourning. This part of the story has also been highlighted, so she reads it again. It’s a realistic detail and it makes her feel slightly more charitable towards Ian, who probably stayed up late, looking for helpful stories in the Ensign archive. The feeling doesn’t last long.
While the mother lay on the bed, her dead son appeared to her. He told his mother not to cry. He said that he was all right and assured her that his death was an accident. ‘Tell Father that all is well with me, and I want you not to mourn any more.’
So that’s his point. Nearly three weeks of mourning is enough. Time to move on. She scrunches the paper into a ball. Other people’s stories are suffocating her, she is sick of their assurances, their miraculous interventions and happy endings. She stuffs the balled-up papers in the bin and shuffles up the stairs.
The room smells of musky, unwashed woman. She picks a furry white bear out of Issy’s toy box and gets into the bed. She holds the teddy up to her nose and waits. She isn’t expecting much, she’s not a greedy person. All she wants is a small sign, an ounce of reassurance that Issy still exists somewhere outside of memory.
She is still waiting several hours later, and when the front door opens and voices fill the hall, she tugs the covers over her head and goes to sleep.