Cars

Fogging up the window with his breath, my little boy amuses himself on the long drive home with windscreen artwork. We’ve spent two hours on the road already, but he makes no complaints. Sometimes he is quiet, concentrating completely on the trails and swirling patterns he tells me are fish in an aquarium. In other moments he talks animatedly, about the weekend with his father, their trip to the zoo, and the very important facts of a four year old’s life.

I listen with half an ear, happy that he is happy, not really interested in the number of lions in the zoo, but content to listen to his cheerful babbling. It had not been an easy weekend for me and as ever, the two brief encounters with my ex-husband had left me aching inside from bruises I’d never quite managed to heal.

“Mummy, why don’t we live with Daddy all the time?” asks Joe suddenly, twisting round from the intricate snail trails to look at me with clear curiosity in his father’s brown eyes. My breath catches in my throat and for one millisecond my attention drifts from the road and I am forced to swerve and narrowly avoid a supermarket delivery van.

It isn’t like I haven’t anticipated a question like this. I just never expected it to happen so soon. It is no time at all since my child was learning to walk and talk; how has he so quickly begun to question the structure of his family life? A feeling of foolishness sweeps over me as I realise I have not even started to prepare an answer to this fundamental question.

“Lots of kids at school live with both their parents. Can’t I do that?” he prompts me, still gazing at me through those large, coconut-brown eyes. My own eyes suddenly sting a little as I glance back at him and a memory hits me like a fierce wind.

Those same eyes, holding my gaze across a cheap plastic table, melting my heart all over again, a hand clasping mine tightly in an unspoken promise. Alec had brown hair, flopping softly over his eyes, giving him that angelic, yet reckless, daring look. I did not linger on the memory; it hurt too much, still. I asked myself how such an unconditional love as ours had been could come to be broken, but the answer came far too quickly. We broke it ourselves. Through isolation, blame and guilt. Which one of us was really responsible, I might never know.

I have no idea how to tell Joe the truth, but I cannot lie to those innocent, trusting eyes. “Well, Daddy and I. We just don’t love each other, Joe. Sometimes mummies and daddies aren’t right for each other. But we both love you, very much.” It is not nearly enough to fulfil his curiosity, I know.

“Oh.” And then…“Like my old shoes. I still like them, but they don’t fit anymore.” With the accuracy of youth, he hits the nail on the head.

“But if I love both of you, and both of you love me, couldn’t we all live together anyway.” This time, the tears force their way out and down my cheeks, clouding my vision for a few seconds.  I open them and know a second of paralysing terror as the same delivery van seems to expand while we are catapulted into it, before a scream is heard and I lose consciousness.

* * *

Memories chase each other through my mind in an effort to be the one remembered most vividly, and this time there is no escaping them. I remember three years ago, waiting at home for Alec to bring Ellie home from her first day at school. Joe is walking; he is a little unsteady on his legs but he laughs as he trundles around the kitchen. His birthday cake is sitting on the kitchen table. I am impatient; Alec should have been home by now.

The phone rings and I answer it, expecting another happy birthday from one of our friends. The world dissolves around me as I am told my husband is in hospital, comatose. My heart twists but I wait with a hammering heart to hear about my little girl.

“I’m sorry, she’s dead.”  It’s a moment I seem to have blocked from memory until now. A car crash. Loss of concentration for a single moment, it lost us Ellie for an entire lifetime.  Alec recovered, but things were never the same. He felt nothing but guilt; I tried my hardest, but deep down inside I felt blame and resentment.

So we fell apart. And now I am sitting in a hospital, staring lifelessly at Alec across a plastic cafeteria table. Everything is backwards this time. I am consumed with grief, and guilt, and gut-wrenching heartache.

Last time, we argued, screamed, and tore ourselves apart with anger. This time the loss is too much; too painful. There is a numbness and I realise that it wasn’t our grief that broke us; it was how we dealt with it. With this knowledge comes a breaking of the barrier and I let out the tears I have held at bay since I saw my son lying broken underneath a crumpled car.

I cry silently and across the table, Alec is crying too. Through the veil of tears, his hand reaches across the table and clasps my own. We will never recover what we had; it is too late for that, and our losses have been too great.  But this time around we will not suffer alone.

Silence is a great healer.