How I Live Now (12 page)

3

W
hile waiting for my connection out of London, I found a phone booth that worked and punched in the number Piper sent me. A man's voice I didn't recognize answered after a long time, and said no one else was there, so I left a message with my approximate time of arrival and before he hung up he paused and said They are so happy you've come.

There was no such thing as a direct route. Seven hours and two buses later I finished my final leg of the journey just outside a village that looked as if it had been deserted for a century.

The bus was early and there was no one around, but coming down the road toward me was a graceful young woman with a heavy curtain of dark hair and the most perfect pale skin I'd ever seen.

Her face lit up in a radiant smile when she saw me and then she was running and of course it was the smile that tipped me off that she was the same as ever, and then I heard the voice crying Daisy! which was exactly the same as it always had been and I tried to look at her face and connect her with the little girl I knew but my eyes were blinded by tears and I couldn't focus.

She didn't cry, you could tell from her expression she had made up her mind she wouldn't. She just looked at me with her huge solemn eyes and looked and looked like she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

Oh Daisy, she said.

Just that. And then again. Oh Daisy.

I couldn't even find a voice to answer so I embraced her instead.

Eventually she pulled away and leaned down to pick up my bag.

Everyone's desperate to see you, she said. And then, We still haven't any petrol for the jeep. Shall we walk?

Then I laughed, because what if I'd said no? And I picked up the other bag and she took my hand just as if we'd been together all along and she was still nine years old, and we walked home in the spring sunshine alongside the flowering overgrown hedgerows, past the apple trees in blossom and the fields gone to seed, up the hill. And everything she hadn't explained well enough in her letter she told me now, about Isaac and Aunt Penn and Osbert.

Neither of us mentioned Edmond.

Here are some of the things she told me.

She told me Aunt Penn's death had finally been confirmed two years after she first left for Oslo. I knew that. But I didn't know she'd been shot trying to reenter the country a few months after the war started, desperate to get back to her family.

Poor sisters, I thought. Both murdered by their children.

Our war and theirs turned out to be remarkably similar. There were snipers and small groups of rebels everywhere, disorganized bands of covert fighters and half the time you couldn't tell the Good Guys from the Bad Guys and neither could they. Buses blew up, and occasionally an office building or a post office or a school, and bombs were found in shopping malls and packages, and sometimes for no reason that anyone could explain there would be a cease-fire, and then someone somewhere would step on a land mine and we'd all be off again. You could ask a thousand people on seven continents what it was all about and you wouldn't get the same answer twice; nobody really knew for sure but you could bet one or more of the following words would crop up: oil, money, land, sanctions, democracy. The tabloids waxed nostalgic for the good old days of WWII, when the enemy all spoke a foreign language and the army went somewhere else to fight.

And yet life went on. Although the borders remained sealed to tourists, life started returning to something a little closer to normal after The Occupation ended, which was soon after I left.

By the time it became official that Aunt Penn wasn't coming home, Osbert was eighteen, and since no one else was interested in adopting what was left of the family, it fell to him, though as Piper said, nothing much changed. He moved out last year, she told me, to live with his girlfriend but we still see him all the time.

Isaac, apparently, was still Isaac. He spoke more now, but mostly to the animals. He'd spent the last five years building up the flock of tangly-haired sheep again, and he and Piper had goats, a small herd of cows, pigs, two riding horses, a pony, and chickens. The vegetable gardens were huge, with a section left untouched to provide seeds for next year.

They had decided to be self-sufficient; it seemed the safest thing to be now, and the natural way for them to live. In addition to the farm, Piper said people brought Isaac livestock with a variety of physical and mental problems because they knew he could fix them and it was a luxury these days to give up on a sick or dangerous animal. She said people in the country called him the Witch Doctor, but in a nice way.

And then she told me about herself, how she was in love with Jonathan, and how he was training to be a doctor and she wanted to be one too. The universities had opened again but the waiting list to get in was long and Piper thought she might not qualify for entry this year. I could tell by what she said that it wasn't some temporary teen romance, but what else would you expect of Piper? She told me he loved her. Well of course he did. I told her I couldn't wait to meet him and it was true.

We walked the last few hundred yards uphill in silence and as we approached the drive I could see the honey-colored stone of the house. My hand tightened around Piper's and my heart stuttered, contracting so hard on each beat that the blood whooshed in my ears.

Isaac was there to greet us, holding a pretty border collie by the collar.

He smiled as I hugged him close and smelled his familiar smell and saw how he had grown taller than me, and quiet and slender and strong.

“I wanted to come collect you,” he said gravely. “But Piper wouldn't let me. She's very possessive you know.” And he smiled at us both.

I think it was the longest sentence I ever heard him speak. It was accompanied by the familiar tilt of the head and a slightly raised eyebrow and I felt the ground rush away from me, so strong was the memory, and the fear.

“Come on,” Piper said, taking hold of my hand once more. “Let's go see Edmond.”

4

S
ix years.

My fantasies were as constant as I was: Edmond and me. Living some sort of life.

That was it. I never bothered filling in the details. The details didn't matter.

The day was warm and Edmond was outdoors, sitting carefully upright on a lawn chair in the white garden, his eyes half closed. He sat facing away from us and Piper went and knelt in front of him.

“Edmond,” she whispered, her hand resting lightly on his knee. “Edmond, look who's come.”

He turned his head then and I couldn't even move toward him or make my face have an expression.

He was thin, much thinner than I am now, his face worn. Where Isaac was lean and graceful, he just looked gaunt.

His eyes narrowed slightly and he turned his head back away from me and closed them again. Closed the subject.

I wasn't prepared.

Piper pulled a metal folding chair over and pushed me into it and went off to make tea and at first I just looked at him and eventually he looked back with his eyes the color of unsettled weather. His arms were covered in scars—some new, some healing over, some disappearing into thin white lines. I could see the same thin lines etched around his neck and he'd developed a nervous habit of running his fingers along the ridges over and over again.

Edmond . . .

I didn't know how to continue.

Not that it mattered. To him I was still thousands of miles away. The borders were still closed.

I sat there, awkward, not knowing what to do. I wanted to touch him but when he opened his eyes again the expression in them was poison.

Piper came back with the tea. Good old reliable English tea. Two world wars ago, battlefield nurses gave cups of tea to the wounded and it leaked through their bullet holes and killed them.

I turned and looked at the garden, meticulously tended, by whom, I wondered. The child angel had been cleared of moss and planted all around with snowdrops and white narcissus that poured out an overpowering scent. I thought of the ghost of that long-dead child, watching us, its desiccated bones sunk deep into the ground below.

On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage.

It was Edmond, I thought. I recognized him in the plants.

I turned back and met his eyes, hard and angry and unyielding.

It was such a beautiful day. Warm and full of life. I couldn't reconcile it with this scene.

Piper looked at me and smiled a small tired smile.

“Give him time,” she said as though he couldn't hear us at all.

Well what choice did I have?

After that day, I could barely enter the garden without a huge effort of will. The air was suffocating, charged, the hungry plants sucking at the earth with their ferocious appetites. You could almost watch them grow, pressing their fat green tongues up through the black earth. They emerged selfish and starving, gasping for air.

Once inside, I couldn't breathe. I felt claustrophobic, choked, desperately thinking bright thoughts so Edmond couldn't get inside my head and know how terrified and furious and guilty I felt. But I don't think he even tried.

And still he sat there, as still and as cold as the statue of the dead child.

I sat with him for a shorter and shorter time each day as my fear took over and the grasping whiteness of the garden blinded me.

I thought of excuses, involved myself totally in the farm. There was plenty of work to do so I could fool myself that no one noticed the obvious. It was like not eating. Everyone knew.

After a few days I found myself alone in the barn with Isaac. Piper had gone to meet Jonathan, returning from a week at the hospital. Travel was so difficult that it made sense for him to stay for long stretches without coming home.

For once Isaac looked at me directly, the way he looked at the dogs.

“Talk to him,” he said with no preface.

“I can't.”

“Why else did you come?”

“He won't listen.”

“He is listening. He can't help listening. It's what caused all the trouble for him in the first place.”

I knew any of them would tell me the whole story but I didn't dare ask. I didn't dare know.

I looked at Isaac's eyes with their strange mix of warmth and dispassion. I could see that he suffered for Edmond as much as he could suffer for another human being.

And suddenly the thing inside that had kept me focused all these years rose in my throat like vomit. It was as strong as poison and for once I didn't fight it down or try to reshape it as something polite.

“IF HE'S LISTENING SO HARD,” I shouted, “WHY CAN'T HE HEAR THAT THE ONLY WAY I'VE MANAGED TO SURVIVE EVERY DAY FOR ALL THESE YEARS IS BECAUSE OF HIM?”

“He knows,” Isaac said. “He's just forgotten how to believe it.”

I said nothing for a long time.

“The garden frightens me.”

“Yes,” he said.

We stared into each other's eyes and I saw what I needed to see.

“Keep telling him,” he said calmly, and then went back to feeding the pigs.

There was nothing else to do. I kept telling him. I returned to the garden and sat with him hour after hour saying it again and again, and most of the time I could feel the doors slammed shut so he didn't have to listen. But I was determined.

LISTEN TO ME YOU BASTARD.

He didn't move.

LISTEN TO ME.

In the end something happened. In the end, the warmth and the scent and the heavy slow buzz of bees seduced me, worked on my brain like opium, so the tightly clenched core of fear and fury that had sustained me all these years began to unfurl.

I began to open too.

I love you, I told him at last. And then I told him over and over, until the words no longer sounded like words.

And finally he turned to me, his eyes dull, and he spoke.

“Then why did you leave me?”

And so I tried to explain about our journey and the day Piper and I were at the house looking for him as usual and the phone ringing and my father's voice at the other end and how for all those years I wished I hadn't picked up the phone that day but I did and by the time I realized what his plan was for me there was nothing I could do because he knew where I was and he had International Connections and despite all my journeys and triumphs over adversity I was still just a fifteen-year-old kid stuck in a war, powerless in the face of an Official Medical Certificate Requiring Immediate Hospitalization. Abroad.

My father thought he was doing what was best for me.

Edmond turned his face away. Of course he knew the story. He must have heard it a hundred times from Piper.

I guess he had to hear it from me.

I leaned over and took both his hands in mine and pressed them to my face and when he tried to pull away I wouldn't let him. And then, not caring whether he was listening or not, I told him everything else. I told him about all the years reliving every second of our time together, the years trying to find him, the years of nothing and nobody else. And every minute of every year I was trying to come home.

We sat there as day turned to twilight and twilight to evening and the moon rose and the constellations moved across the sky and I talked and he listened and it took almost all night to tell him everything but I didn't stop until there was nothing left to tell. And when I finally went to let go of his hands because mine were cold and exhausted and cramped, I couldn't.

We sat like that, close together in the white garden, lit by the cold white light of the stars, with only each other for warmth.

“OK,” he said finally, and he said it out loud, his voice odd and strained, like he'd forgotten how to speak.

That was it. OK.

And then he freed his hands and took mine, stiff and icy cold, and wrapped them in his, which were warm.

It was a start.