Digging Out (33 page)

We hold each other.

“Shall I call your mother and tell her everyone’s staying here and we’ll all be over to throw some supper together a bit later? Is that all right?” Evan asks.

I nod.

When we finally get over to my parents’, Da seems not to be doing as well as he had been yesterday. His eyes look more sunken and his breathing is raspier. But when he finds out that Dafydd and Hannah have shown up on his doorstep unexpectedly, he smiles and pulls his oxygen mask up. “Alys, you’re joking? You must be joking?”

Apparently Mam hadn’t told him.

“I’m not joking, Da. They’re downstairs right now.”

When he hears the homesick Hannah story he laughs out loud. “Not a bit like her mam, huh, Alys? Mind of her own.” Before I can respond, he says, “Having you show up is absolutely wonderful, but your children—ah, Alys, I am already in heaven. Bring my grandchildren up immediately. I’ve not a moment to lose.”

“Stop it, Da.”

“Stop what, Allie? Should I be pretending with you that I’m going to live forever? You and I both know what’s what, and if I’m not allowed to have a bit of fun with it, what is left for me?

“Get the children, Allie,” he says sternly, starting to cough with his exertion. “And, by the way, have we any of that gorgeous chicken
broth left? And I wouldn’t mind a touch of whiskey if Mam has any about. This calls for a celebration, don’t you think?”

In just a few moments, Dafydd stands near Da’s bed, and Hannah’s right up next to him. With my permission, Mam has given Hannah the teddy bear I got from Princess Margaret after the disaster. She is clutching it close. I am surprised, after all she and Dafydd have been through this year, that neither seems put off by the oxygen and other hospital paraphernalia.

“Thank goodness,
finally,
a TV,” Hannah says when she first walks into the room and spies it. Then she goes round the room picking up photos, asking questions about each of them. Before long, Da and Mam are telling my children all about my childhood. Mam tells Hannah how naughty I was when I was five and six.

“Alys loved to go into the shops with me. One day I’d taken her to the Tesco. I let her out of my sight for less than a moment, truly, less than a moment.” Mam laughs. I hadn’t seen her so animated since I was a small child. She is as I remembered her when I was little, very little, her eyes full of light, everything about her relaxed. “And she’d grabbed a tin of tomatoes from the middle of one of those high pyramids, the middle, like, and the whole thing came down around her. I heard her wailing from the back of the shop, and my heart stopped. By the time I got to her, there were people gathered from everywhere trying to comfort her. And there she sat among dozens of tomato tins. Lucky for her, and me of course, it hadn’t come down on her head. It would have made mincemeat of her.”

Hannah picks up another photo. “Who’s this?” She brings it over to Mam.

Mam looks at it and says as she points, “Well, that’s your mama, and that’s your mama’s little friend Hallie.”

The picture was taken just days before the disaster.

“She and Mommy were best friends, right?” She looks at me. “Until she got buried, that is.”

You could have heard the brush of a bird’s wing, it was that quiet. I don’t remember ever telling her that.

Everyone seems to have stopped breathing.

“I’m afraid that’s true,” Evan says, stepping up to Hannah and putting his hand out for the photo.

“Did you know Hallie, Evan?” She is challenging him, making certain he knows me as well as he appears to.

Evan nods.

“What was she like?”

My throat begins to close up. I tell myself to take a deep breath.

“They were a pair, all right. Your mother and Hallie. Inseparable. Hallie was a bit of trouble, she was, always on the edge of it. Bit of a daredevil, too. She liked to break the rules. She had a laugh that was contagious. Once she started, the whole crowd around her would go off, too.” He looks at me, puts his hand over mine. “They were a wild pair, right. Hallie and Allie.”

“Whatever happened to the little one?” Da asks. “Brother, wasn’t it? What’s he doing now? I’ve forgotten.”

“Niko,” Mam answers. Her whole tone has changed, she is solemn, unsmiling, her posture stiff. She inhales audibly three times.

“He’s married with two kids. He and his wife own an ice-cream shop,” I say. Mam shoots me a questioning look. “Remember, I stopped over at the Joneses’ house,” I remind her.

She nods. “In Newport,” Mam adds.

“You must have really been sad,” Hannah says in a small voice.

“I was so sad,” I say.

“For a long time, huh?”

Dafydd moves closer to Hannah, puts his hands on her shoulders.

“I was sad for a really long time, Hannah. But now I have you.”

She smiles at me.

Mam clears her throat.

Evan rubs my shoulder.

Da adds, “It was a long time ago, Hannah. Time has helped us all to forgive life’s harder moments. I am grateful for that.”

Hannah moves toward Da and pulls herself up next to him. I am envious of their easy, unconditional acceptance of each other. And so quickly.

“Did someone say something about chicken broth?” Da asks.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” I answer. “I’ll just get it now.”

Down in the kitchen, warming some of the leftover chicken soup and making a salad, I remember that yesterday it felt strange to be a grown woman preparing a meal for Mam and Da in the kitchen in which I grew up. Today, somehow, it doesn’t feel so strange to be a
grown woman in my mam’s kitchen, preparing a meal for my parents, my children, and Evan. I think how Marc would have fit right in. He could easily have been a friend of Evan’s.

I hear footsteps and half expect to turn and see Marc. But it is Dafydd, come down to help, he says.

“So I know it’s a personal question.” He pinches some of the sliced tomato. “And you don’t like personal questions. But what’s up with you and Evan?”

I take in a deep breath and say quietly, “I don’t know.”

“Mom, this is me you’re talking to. Come on. You can do better than that.”

Facing him directly, and almost without thought, I say, “I think I’m either falling in love with him, or I am in love with him. Some of it feels very new, because it is new, and some of it feels like it’s always been there.”

“You’re kidding, right?” He is smiling in disbelief. He runs his hand through his thick hair. “You think you’re in love with Evan?” He walks around in a small circle. He snags one of the carrots I’m shredding for the salad and crunches off a bite, shaking his head at me. “Let me just get this straight. This is too much. This is like, like, I don’t know what it’s like.” He breathes in deeply and throws his head back slightly and I think how unbelievable genetics are. “I don’t know whether to be upset because it’s only a year since Marco’s been gone or to be totally relieved that my mother has found some happiness after all she’s been through, and it happens to be with my father.”

“Dafydd …”

“This is weird.”

“Dafydd.”

“Or to be completely freaked out because ’ are you going to move back here? Are you going to live in Aberfan?”

“Wait…”

“Mom, this is just too weird. You’ve only just met him. I mean, I know you knew him in your youth, but ’ this is so fast ’. this is ’ “

“Wait! Stop it, Dafydd. You’re making this into some cheap, predictable Hollywood film. Please. I’m having enough trouble as it is with all of it.”

Dafydd looks at me as if he doesn’t know me, like I’m not the same person who left the States a week ago.

“Then tell me, Momma.”

“I don’t know, Dafydd. That’s the truth. I didn’t come over here to reunite with Evan. I came over here to see my father before he died. To see my mother. To face what I wasn’t able to face a million years ago because I was too young to fully understand it. I came over here to try and put some of the jagged pieces of my life to rest. And now I have all these feelings and I don’t know what to do with them.

“There’s so much about my past I haven’t shared with you or anyone. And now you guys are here before I’ve had a chance to bring myself up to date with it, to understand where I am with all I left behind, now.

“Here’s what I know for sure. Marco was the best friend I’ve ever had. I loved him. We had a good relationship, which as you witnessed was not always perfect. He raised you, not like you could be his own, but like you absolutely were his own. And then in a way, the three of us had Hannah.” I want to tell him about Gabriella, about Isabel. I’d like Dafydd to know, and on the other hand, I don’t want him to know.

“But he died,” I continue. “And that threw me into a deep black hole. A place that was so familiar. And when Hannah went off to camp, and I got the letter from Mam saying Da was ill, I thought it was time for me to go back and …” I start to cry, quietly.

Dafydd puts his arms around me. “Oh, Mom.”

“So when I say I don’t know, I really don’t know.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“You did the right thing, fetching Hannah. You did. I probably should have brought both of you with me in the first place. You should have met Evan years ago. I should have come long before now. I’m sorry, Dafydd. I’m so sorry.”

“Mom, it’s okay.”

“I wish my da weren’t dying,” I say stupidly. “I want you to know him. I want you to know Mam, too. And Auntie Beryl.”

“It’s not too late. We can have a start, can’t we?”

I pull away from him and hold his face in my hands. “I love you, Dafydd.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

Together we bring the salad and six bowls of chicken soup up to Parry’s old room. Hannah has managed to get them to turn the TV on and the four of them are watching the BBC news. Actually, the three of them are watching. Hannah is stretched out on the bed next to Da, fast asleep. Evan is sitting on the floor with his back against the bed. Mam is in Parry’s desk chair with her feet propped on the foot of the bed.

Evan helps Dafydd hand the bowls round.

“I think we should let her sleep,” Evan says, nodding his head toward Hannah.

Later, walking back to Evan’s, Dafydd carries Hannah down the road in the light rain. She opens her eyes briefly. I am already worrying about the sleeping arrangements, but Evan whispers to me that he’ll use the sleeping roll and camp on the floor in the kitchen area near the fire. Odd that I have managed for twenty years without him, but after last night I don’t like the thought of not sleeping next to him. But considering the consequences of my children’s reactions, it is probably wise.

We tuck Hannah up on the sofa in the library, and with all the high emotions of the day, I find I am completely shattered. Dafydd is wide-awake and so, it seems, is Evan. When I go off to prepare for bed, I hear the two of them on about soccer again, and then big American films versus independent foreign films. I wonder if Evan has seen any of the films that Marc scored. I wonder if they will talk about Marc. Despite Dafydd’s feelings about my relationship with Evan, they seem initially easy together, lots of common ground between them to build on.

“Good night,” I say from the library door before going in to kiss Hannah. The two of them, like bookends, look up.

“ ‘Night, Mom.”

Evan smiles.

In the library, I bend to kiss Hannah on her cheek, but she pulls me toward her.

“Don’t go, Mommy. Rub my back,” she whispers. It is an old request. “I miss Daddy.”

“I miss him, too.”

“No, you don’t. And neither does Dafydd.”

“Of course we do.”

“Dafydd has Evan and you have your dad. I don’t have anyone. I’m the only one who doesn’t have a dad. And I’ll never have a dad again. Even if you marry Evan, he won’t be my dad. He won’t. No one will be.”

I stay quiet. Here is the other shoe, dropping.

“Suzanne, at camp, has two dads. That’s all she talks about. I hate her. Every night she told these stories about her birthday parties and stuff, and about what good friends both her dads are. She has a dog, too. I tried not to listen and one time I told her to shut up. She said she was going to tell on me and that I was mean.”

I rub her back lightly.

“She told me I was just jealous ‘cause I didn’t have a dad. I hate her. Anne Foley, our bunk counselor, told me I should try and get along.” Hannah starts to cry. “I don’t want to get along with her. I hate her.”

“It must have been very hard,” I say, lying down next to her and taking her hand.

“If you marry Evan,” she starts, “he probably would never have a dog. I bet he doesn’t even let the cats in when it rains. I can tell.”

She yawns and turns over. “Scratch lightly. Under the T-shirt. Don’t leave till I’m asleep.”

T
he house is dark except for a small light over the kitchen stove. Wide-awake, I sneak out of the library, putting on my boots and a Polarfleece of Evan’s hanging near the door. I rummage in my purse for the pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. The door scrapes on the flagstones. The cool night air is a relief against my face. I walk up the pathway toward the field, the stars hanging huge and bright, the grass dew-wet from the rain earlier and the smell of jasmine climbing up the side of the cottage, still strong as it was last night. At the top of the field I sit down on the picnic table and light a cigarette. In the distance the glow of the village seems festive. Tomorrow, Evan’s choir will be singing at the Welsh Baptist Chapel. And later, we’ll take Dafydd and Hannah up the valley to meet Auntie Beryl.

What would life in Aberfan be like for me now? After all, I certainly can write poetry anywhere. I try to imagine myself waking up, making breakfast and taking Hannah to school. She would get used to it—children adjust more quickly even than adults. She would grow to love Evan. He would be one of the teachers at her school. What would it be like to come back to this cottage to write? An ordinary day, the quiet dailiness of life here, Hannah and Evan together.

I pull deeply on the cigarette, looking up at the sky, up beyond the clouds, through the stars, straining to see beyond all we know: the sun, the moon, the solar system. I wonder about the fine line between life and death. Maybe it is just a gauzy piece of silk that separates the
two? Is Marc still somehow within my reach? Are the dreams I have the unconscious workings of my own psyche, or are they moments when my spirit actually interacts, connects, with his?