The Parable

“What was he like Mom?”

It was a question Sam asked time and again.

His Mum, Juliette, was a strong and able woman, a life of hardship read on her sharp eyes and thin, wrinkled skin. But this question crumbled her. It hit a spot so delicate and raw that no measure of early rises and sleepless nights worrying about bills, food, school books, university, medicines, rent, death or taxes could form a hard, calloused scar upon it.
In her eyes he saw the pain and through her words he heard the awful sadness of it all.
The day she had found out she was pregnant was the day he had gone.

She remembered everything about that day, from waking up angry to eventually falling into a whimpering sleep on the bathroom floor, an unlit cigarette in her hand, lifeless, pointless.
She would go to that bathroom and stand there every night, her hand pressed against the glass where she swore she saw him once, crying in the mirror, mouthing the words “I never left you”, his eyes pleading as she fell away and crashed to the floor, exhausted and drained.

The same bathroom where she had agreed to marry him. Where they had planned their mortgage, every morning, together, between toothbrush strokes and scrubbed faces, shared showers and the ever so often, uncomfortably luxurious shared bath. It was the room that had been beholden to their most intimate whispers and where a love, once sown between a pair of awkward strangers, had flourished in a powerful companionship. The kind of love where nothing could ever be the same without the others company and where that urge to share time, laughter, tears and fears, to speak in earnest of dreams, of parenthood, blossomed.
Here, on these simple cold tiles, between these banal white walls, a canvas had been filled with a thing so beautiful that only they could see it. A secret treasure of times.

She would visit this shrine every morning for the passing years, hoping to capture him again. Hoping that that delusion would return.
There in the clean, morning light where those memories lay exposed everywhere. An old shaver kept on his side of the mirror cabinet and littered with tiny shavings. The fancy cologne that he wore every so often and which all of his good shirts still reeked of. How she had hated it, but now..
His brown hairs, still caught in an old brush of hers, she hadn't dared to move it, it’s placing was too perfect, just where he had last left it. That morning he left, and never returned to her.

Gone were those dreams now, and what a cruel thing that was to do to a person. A life sentence of the things they would never again share, where every topic held a secret torture of unfulfilled promises.
Who would share these things with her? Why had he left now? When it was all so, perfect.

He should have woken her that morning like she had asked him to, but he was late again, in too much of a rush.
She should have held him in their small bed just a few minutes more, clenching the warmth from him as she loved to do. But that day she had simply rolled over and snoozed onwards, deep in a dream that she would now never escape from.

When the second alarm had grated its way into her sleep, she had sprung like an angry cat from its den.

She had cursed him several times and speedily thrown her work clothes together. It was only when she had thought to visit the bathroom, had she remembered the test, bought the day before and then forgotten.
She cursed some more as she tried to angle herself so as not to pee all over her hand and then she had paced the icy tiles, her thoughts a frenzied muddle as she wrung her arms and chewed her bottom lip, waiting.
And then… She had never felt so vulnerable and yet, so calmly assured. This was the last piece of a shapeless puzzle for them. They would be a family now, not just another couple. She had even yelped a little in excitement and smiled through tears that held no sadness.

The drive to work was a rehearsal for Nick and she smiled the whole journey as her phone silently buzzed in the back seat.
They could still take that trip to Italy, but it wouldn't be the party they had imagined once they met up with Fabio and Angelisa. The spare room would need some work too, no loss to get rid of Nicks old video-games anyway along with that gaudy old TV he had since college.
She yearned to know if Nick would cry as she had.
She would make love to him that evening, hold him close and whisper the news into his ear. Watch those blue eyes light up, watch that excited grin spread across a new fathers face.

When she got to work she was too distracted to notice the change in the air. Principle Sears had approached her, like she was a fragile glass, teetering on a table’s edge, his hands spread out before him and his eyes bulging with tears. And her sister, what was Lisa doing there?

“Juliette, they tried calling you. We all did. Oh Jesus Juliette I.. It’s Nick.”

She didn't remember sitting on the floor, barely recalled Sears and Lisa bring her a water and then usher her to his car. Take her to the police station as Lisa held her hands in the back seat, tears tumbling down her cheeks as she told her everything would be ok.
The policeman had been very kind as he mentioned something about Nicks car going off the road by Jacobi River. There were plenty of witnesses that day, all going the same way into Burton for work. All saw him veer off the road and tumble down the embankment some two hundred feet.
Diving teams were working around the clock until they, found, her husband.
The way he had said that word, found.
That’s what had set her off. She had begun to scream the only words that made sense to that situation. A wholehearted refusal, “No”, she told them, “no”.
And they never did find him. Clothes were found, his wallet, all his belongings. He had gone in, probably gotten caught in the strong winter current and dragged out. It was a common thing that the clothes were torn off, one officer explained, before receiving a cold stare from his superior.
A few days later they found his shoes, miles downstream, before the river became the sea estuary.
No remains could be found, nor were they likely to be so.

The wound that opened that day lay there still, sixteen years later.

The seed of a child in her belly as she sat, stoic and catatonic, her family in black all around her, watching her life sink into the brown earth to the music of angels and as the words of a man she did not know bid farewell to an empty box.
How many days had she sat there on that floor? Hands draped over her belly, throat raw from mourning and eyes like two swollen sores. Her heart as empty as that coffin, with nothing left to give.

It was her mother who had answered the pitiful sobs and had carried her gently from the floor to the bedroom at first, and then to the kitchen to help her organize the house.

“This is awful, what you’re going through child, awful. But you've got to start thinking about that little one, because they’ll never stop thinking about you. And boy will they need you.”

She had only seen her mother smoke a handful of times in her life, it had always been her private thing for some reason, but she did so openly now, out the kitchen window as she gazed upon the world and spoke.

“Roger passed when you were only three, Lisa was ten. I’d have given up without your sister, I really would have.” She exhaled and shook her head.
“I just sat out the back garden, watching the tadpoles in that old pond, wishing I was small enough to fall in and drown. Just to put away all that, sadness, forever.” She wiped her nose and then looked her daughter straight in the eye.

“Your sister came out and saw me out there. Dunno if she knew what I was thinking, but you know what she said? I’ll never forget it.” She went back to her cigarette, smiling.

“What did she say Momma?” Juliette asked. Her grief temporarily confused by her mother’s openness.

Annette Briggs, as hard a woman there likely ever was, turned and spoke, a strange smile on her lips, tears glazing her eyes.

“She said, “Momma, Daddy will always be my Daddy right?”
“Of course” I said. Then she hugged me so tight and said, “well Mamma, if he’s still my Daddy then he hasn't left you at all has he?”

She walked to her daughter and grasped her face in both hands.

“Now you listen to me Juliette Briggs and you listen good. There’s a person coming soon whose gonna need you strong enough for two, who’s gonna need you there for every fall and stumble and in return, well you’ll see it, Nick will never really be gone.
He’ll show up in their smile when they ride that first bike, and you’ll hear him laughing in them when you tickle them senseless. He’ll hug you back, you’ll see. Just be there Juliette, give it everything you have and I promise you girl, it will be the best thing you've ever done.”

Juliette cried differently then, a release came with it as the numbness left her.
Held by her mother, she allowed herself to be rocked gently to an easy sleep. And in that moment, in the tender arms of the only one who understood her pain, her sinking heart drew a gasping breath and began to beat, anew.

Now, years later, sat at that same table, she recalled the whole thing for her boy.

“He was funny, you’d have liked his jokes. He always had this smile on his face before he said something witty, you’d see it coming, but God he used to make me laugh!”

She turned to her son, her face filled with the excitement of a newly dawned memory.

“Oh did I ever tell you about the time we went to Paris and he grabbed the wrong camera to take a picture!?”
She began to giggle, and as she did so, Sam giggled back.

And there it was, her husband’s laugh, sixteen years later, laughing with her at the shared story.
She didn't notice her tears as she spoke and recalled and laughed herself out of breath, her son wiping cheerful tears from his cheeks in return as he laughed that great laugh. She didn't notice the tears were more joy than sorrow.

Nick didn't notice either as he listened from the bathroom and laughed with them, his hand pressed against the glass that would never break, from a world that would not release him, where he had, for the past sixteen years, tried to find his way back home.

In the dark room, the dimmed light from the screen held his haunted face as he smiled sadly before whispering, as he always did, “Juliette, I never left you.”