“Mina, that’s not—”
“Are you looking properly?” The pitch of my voice rises higher, anxiously. “I can’t believe you don’t see it!”
“This is irrational.Youare being irrational. He’s been dead six years, Mina—I mean, what do you expect me to say?”
Something hard in my throat. I swallow against it.
“Iknowhe’s dead. I just mean—”
“What? What do you mean? Please explain it to me because I’m struggling to understand.” He removes his glasses and stares at me in that way he does, amber eyes unflinching. I roll my hands into fists, frustrated because I get it, I do. IknowEddie is dead. But.But.
“It’s ‘spook,’” I snap instead, nodding toward his crossword. “Five across, ‘Frighten, as a horse.’ Spook.”
I snatch the photograph away from him as hot, frustrated tears prick my eyes. Oscar sighs.
“Listen. I’m trying to be kind when I say this—” He reaches for me and I stiffen, but don’t pull away. My hands are trembling. “It might be time for you to go back to the group, Mina.”
It’s been six monthssince I walked into the church hall on Newham Road with its familiar smells of furniture polish and curdled milk, the flickering light over the doorway which draws all the moths in the dark winter months. Oscar had directed meto it a year ago, after I’d had a spate of bad dreams in which Eddie appeared under a shelf of thick blue ice, screaming and hammering against it as bubbles floated out of his mouth.“You need to go and talk to other people like you,”Oscar had told me, handing me a leaflet with a printed heart at the top and below, the image of two hands reaching toward each other.Hope and Hands Bereavement Support,it had read.Let go of loss, not love.
The group was small back then. Just nine of us sitting in a semicircle on hard plastic chairs, drinking tea out of clumsy, mismatched mugs. Sometimes people spoke and sometimes they didn’t, and although I can’t say that it helped me much, the bad dreams stopped coming and for a while, it was okay. I met widowers and orphans, victims of tragedies far greater than my own, astonished at their ability to keep going, to persevere. Everyone spoke of empty beds and unworn clothes, the totems left behind by the deceased. We laughed and got angry and rubbed each other’s backs when we cried. We fluctuated; the people who joined, left, and rejoined were like the ebb and flow of the sea. That’s how Horace, the man who led the group, referred to grief. Sometimes small and quiet and shallow, sometimes a tsunami, cold and frightening. But inevitable, just like the tide. I like Horace. He lost his wife and son in a house fire at the beginning of the decade, still wore the burn scars up his arms, his skin brown and stippled like the bark of a gnarled tree. Even though Eddie had been dead five years by that point, Horace treated me with sympathy and understanding, urging me to pull up a chair with the others and handing me a mug of tea with what I would come to understand was his usual greeting, “You’re always welcome here.”
As I walk into the room that evening, Horace greets me with a big smile and open arms, my name ringing in his mouth likea bell—Mina!A hug, the flat clap of his open palm on my back, his smile so wide it reveals the pink of his gums. He hands me a mug of tea, unsweetened, and I wince slightly at the taste, which makes Horace laugh again. There is a cluster of others here tonight, a few who I recognize but most I don’t, new faces all with the same expressions; pinched and haunted, shocked hollow. As I take a seat I see a man hovering in the kitchen doorway, neither in nor out, his face tight with indecision. He is tall and long limbed with dark upward tilted eyes and a scrubby beard, holding a piece of paper in one tightly clenched hand. Our eyes meet briefly and then Horace is touching my arm and saying, “Why don’t you tell everyone about Eddie, Mina?” and I’m nodding and saying okay and what I tell them is this:
It was cold the winter my brother had died. Chrome skies and snowstorms which buried the windowpanes and masked the sound of his labored breathing. They said that’s what probably finished him off in the end, that cold. As though it had somehow seeped into the hollows of his bones and turned his blood to ice. Eddie had always been sickly, my mother had told me, even as a baby. Later, after the funeral, I would realize she had been in denial about just how sick he had been—her and my father both. His immune system hadn’t formed right, couldn’t fight off illness. They never talked about it, but they must have known, both of them. They must have.
I settled on the bed beside him, taking his hand in my own. His skin was as heavy and cold and pale as milk. Eddie opened his eyes and smiled at me, weakly.
“I’ve been thinking about the end,” he whispered. He squeezed my hand, just once. “You’ll make sure they play the right music won’t you, Meens? I don’t want Mum screwing it up and putting on her stuff. Not if there’s a load of girls frommy school there. I don’t want to be carried out to Rod fucking Stewart.”
I laughed, even though I felt the swell of tears suffocating me, burning the backs of my eyes. The choke hold of his illness, sinking him, shrinking him. He was only fourteen. It wasn’tfair.
“Of course.”
“Iron Maiden or nothing.”
“Sure thing, Eddie.”
There had been a twinkle about him that day. After days of lethargy he’d developed a flush in his sunken cheeks that hadn’t been there in a long time. Of course, afterward, I learned that this is known as “terminal lucidity” and is common in end-of-life patients. A surge of energy prior to the body’s shutdown. I took his hand and the silence enfolded us gently, like a soft blanket. His voice was trembling and whispery and I needed to lean in closer just to hear it.
“If there’s anything out there, I’ll come back and tell you, Meens.”
When I finish talking,there is an ache in my chest like something is being crushed, my eyes brimming with unshed tears. I’ve told this story in this room dozens of times because each telling is a panacea. I don’t subscribe to a lot of what Oscar refers to as “new age nonsense” but the idea that grief gets heavier the longer you carry it alone is one that has helped me.
Horace smiles as I excuse myself to go and get a glass of water. In the kitchen, that tall man is still hovering, standing beside the sink with that piece of paper in his hand, a lit cigarette smoldering between his lips. The window is open, the night outside still and humid and pricked with stars.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he says to me, this man. I notice his long fingers. Piano player’s fingers, my mum would have called them. I wonder if he is a musician. “It sounds like it happened very fast.”
“It did.” I pull a glass from the draining board. “It took us all by surprise.”
“Your parents must have been heartbroken.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. Truth is, my mum switched off completely after Eddie died. Staring out the window with nightshade shadows beneath her eyes, fingers worrying at the loose skin of her neck. I was sixteen years old, just scraping through my exams and getting through college by the skin of my teeth. Her withdrawal was abrupt and immediate, and I felt it like a punch to the throat. The day I left home for university, she looked right through me, her face a rictus, holding my gaze long enough to say, “He should still be with us, Mina.”My dad, on the other hand, found God. It was a rock in a storm, he said. He became fervent and heated when he prayed, started hanging crucifixes around the house. I don’t blame him. I don’t blame either of them. But I find it hard to be around them, even now. Prayers and paralysis. Old wounds.
The man dips his head. Under the fluorescent lights, I can see glints of red in his hair. I glance down at the crumpled piece of paper he is holding. It is covered in scrawls and loops, scrappy-looking, like something a child has done.
“You should come in and sit down. Everyone is very friendly. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“My daughter’s name was Maggie. She was seven years old and mad as a hatter. She had hair the color of autumn leaves. I loved her so much.”