The Memory of Us: A Novel (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sadly, it was the day after Kyle finished the beautiful cradle that I started bleeding.

I had been told that a little spotting wasn’t unusual, but it became heavier and wouldn’t stop. Kyle insisted that we go to the hospital. Although it was a familiar setting to me, it was unnerving to be on the other side of things. To have a stranger tell me the worst news that a woman would ever want to hear. To arrive as a family and leave as a couple.

When we returned home, I didn’t leave my bed for two weeks. Physically, I felt fine, but as the shock wore off and the grief set in, it just overwhelmed me and I could barely breathe. It surprised me that I could ache like this for someone whom I had not known. Cries rose up inside me, but wouldn’t escape. I even wondered, more than once, if the penalty for having married Kyle had finally come due. But I kept that particular thought to myself out of fear that the account might not yet be settled.

Kyle came home every evening, made my dinner, and helped me change into fresh pajamas because I had not changed from those of the previous night. I caught him looking at me with worried glances when he thought that I was asleep, and it broke my heart to think that I was hurting him. I knew that I had to let him in, but I didn’t know how. It was as if I was at the bottom of a dark well, struggling to get out but without a rope to climb with.

Lucille begged to come down and take care of me, but I refused to see her. She was about to be a bride, the happiest time in a girl’s life. If I had brought this retribution upon myself, especially for something she had warned me against, I couldn’t bear to bring her down into it.

I found out later that Kyle corresponded with my friends and professors, keeping them apprised of my condition. In hindsight, I don’t know how he managed to pay the bills without my income.

He slept on the sofa, thinking that I wanted to be alone. But he
didn’t
want to be alone. In the third week, he came to our bed hesitantly, gently pulled the quilts up, and crawled in behind me. The warmth of his body flooded me. Having him next to me filled the void more than I would have expected. I pulled his arm around me tighter and wailed. Turning to look at his face, I saw that his eyes, too, were red and impossibly weary. He took my hand, pressed his lips to it, and closed his eyes tightly. Saying nothing, we lay there all night.

We fell asleep just before dawn and woke up in the late morning. The sun had forced its way inside, inviting us to rediscover the world that was awaiting us. Kyle got out of bed first, and he pulled out a soft pink blouse and pleated white skirt for me to wear for the day. I looked at the clothes as if they were brand-new. While he made breakfast, I showered, feeling the water wash away the hurting inside me. He had thrown me a rope in that well, and as I climbed, I saw light in the distance. It was the beginning of feeling normal again.

On a chilly March morning Kyle walked in with bags in his arms and frost on his cap. “I’ve come back from the market, Julianne,” he called. He set them down on the table and rubbed his hands together.

“Did you bring the headache pills?”

“Yes, and some chicken and carrots for dinner.”

“Sounds grand. I’ll help.”

“Nope,” he said, as he came and kissed me on the head. “I have another project for you.”

I eyed him with suspicion. “You’ve got something up your sleeve, Kyle McCarthy.”

“I do, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“What kind of surprise is that?”

“It’s not a surprise. It’s a task I have for you.”

He came around to sit with me on the couch. “I brought you some writing paper. I want you to write to your mother.”

“I’m sorry, did I lose my hearing these past few months? Did you say that you want me to write to my mother?”

“Think about it, Jul.” He held my hand. “There will never be a better time to reconcile with her. Whatever you can say about her, she did bring you into the world, and you can see yourself now that it’s no easy task. You don’t have to tell her anything about the baby. But maybe you can find a few nice words to say. After all, Mothering Sunday is coming up next week.”

I sat quietly for a moment. “I know you’re right. It’s one of the things that would have made you a great priest, Kyle. You won’t let anything stand in the way of family and forgiveness. But I just don’t have the words.”

“I thought of that, too, just in case. Look.” He pulled a card and an envelope from the bag. Its lithographic print depicted a floral scene, and the interior had a benign message that could have been sent to nearly anyone. “Someone already wrote the words for you. You can just sign it,
Love, Julianne
, and I’ll post it for you.”

“
Love, Julianne
? This is Beatrice Westcott we’re talking about.”

“How about
Affectionately, Julianne
?”

“How about
Warmest regards
?”

“We have a winner! I’ll bring you a pen.”

Kyle posted it as he’d promised, and I marveled once again at this man that I married. He had been dismissed, ignored by my parents. They had tried to bribe me out of my marriage to him. And still he sought to create a truce to our estrangement.

For whatever it was worth, his plan worked. I received a birthday card from my parents signed by each of them and containing another ten-pound banknote. Kyle was not mentioned, of course, and my instinct was to consider it nothing more than another attempt to lure me home. As if they were showing how easily I could have all the things they thought I wanted. But I decided to follow Kyle’s lead and assume the best of them.

As I continued to emerge from the fog and return to routine, I looked at everything with new eyes. I was not the same person that I was before, and I felt like a more grown-up version of myself. It was easier to be gay and lively when the realities of life hadn’t set in yet. In just a year, I had gone from a girl who pined over love, danced at every opportunity, and shopped at all the best stores, to a wife, a mother of a lost child, and a citizen of a country on the precipice of war. Leaflets prepared us for rationing, recruitment for air wardens had begun among civilians, and an engineer came to our building to assess its potential for a basement shelter. One had no choice but to grow up.

Oddly, I didn’t miss my former self. She felt like a shell that was now being filled with memories and experiences. We already had so much to look back on and treasure, with even more to come. But I discovered that even painful experiences could help fill the shell. I had been a girl last year, and now I was a woman. That didn’t come without some bruises.

We felt the grief through the beginning of the summer, and we coped together by taking walks in the evening and going out on the weekends. Kyle treated me like I was a porcelain doll capable of breaking at any moment. Sometimes it irritated me, but I knew that he was just concerned for my well-being. It occurred to me what a wonderful and understanding priest he would have been, and I felt more than a little guilty for taking him from that. I voiced that once, and never again, when I saw how vehemently he stated that he was exactly where he wanted to be.

Gradually, as the weeks went on, it became easier to be at home, and I no longer spent
every
moment recalling that there was someone missing.

The whole experience left me thankful that I had chosen nursing and caused me to reflect on how I could empathize with other women in the future. I had made the decision months earlier to follow the midwifery course, and I was especially glad now. It seemed as if it would be painful to deliver babies after the loss of my own, but I knew that there would be women coming in just like me, and they would need my support just as I had received it.

Besides, I was confident that one day Kyle and I would successfully bring a child into the world and I could share that experience with my patients, too.

The end of the summer also brought our first anniversary, and it was a welcome celebration. We spent the evening on a dinner boat that cruised up the Thames and back for a couple of hours. There was music, mostly slow, and we swayed while holding one another. I didn’t know how I could possibly love him any more than I did at that moment.

I thought that the dinner
was
our anniversary gift, but Kyle told me that he had something else planned, something that I couldn’t have for another week or so. When I pleaded with him to tell me, he looked at me with the laughing eyes that I had missed for the past couple of months. Tapping my nose with his fingertip, he told me that I would have to wait, and that there was nothing that could be done about it.

I busied myself in these last days before school started by freshening up the paint in the flat, thoroughly scrubbing every surface, and having hot meals prepared when Kyle came home from work. I was eager to slip back into normalcy.

One evening I decided to surprise Kyle with cinnamon rolls. It was my first batch since the miscarriage and the last that I could make before classes. I wanted to show him my appreciation for all that he had done for me over those troubled months.

Concentrating on a measurement, I didn’t hear him come in, so I squealed in shock when I felt him put his arms around my waist.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he said into my ear, nibbling the tip just a bit. Despite the doctor’s orders being lifted weeks before, Kyle was still reluctant to make love to me for fear of hurting me, and that absence made me especially sensitive to his touch.

“Hello, yourself,” I said, turning around and kissing him quickly on the lips.

He laughed at me and brushed my cheek with his finger, where I had apparently splattered myself with icing sugar. I put my hand to my cheek, only to leave a dollop of dough where the sugar had been. Mortified, I turned back to face my bowl and gently scolded Kyle for ruining my surprise.

Turning me back around, gently but firmly, he reached behind me and scooped up some icing onto his finger. Tracing my lips with it, he proceeded to taste the icing slowly, repeating the step again. This time, I kissed him back steadily, eager to connect with him again in every way. I think that I surprised him with my enthusiasm, and he pulled back briefly to ask if I was all right with this. I set my wooden spoon on the counter and put my hands behind me to untie my apron.

Kyle stopped me and put his own arms around me to untie the strings. He lifted the apron over my head, and then my blouse. He leaned in to kiss my cheek, my jaw, my neck, less careful now with his porcelain doll.

We didn’t even make it to the bedroom.

I don’t know what time I woke up, but I was in our bed and it was still dark outside. Kyle was asleep next to me, and he stirred when I moved. Reaching over me to turn on the lamp, I smiled with utter contentment and ran my hand down his arm.

“Good morning,” he murmured, eyes blinking as he adjusted to the light.

“Good morning.” I stretched and felt that every nerve had been reawakened from a dormant sleep.

We turned on our sides, facing each other, and he drew little circles on my hand with his finger.

“Are you ready for your present?” he asked.

“My present? Didn’t you give that to me last night?”

“Mmm, you can have
that
present today, tomorrow, and anytime that you want.”

“Then can today be my birthday?”

“You’re skipping holidays. You still have to go through Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day . . .”

“OK, stop it. Just tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Our anniversary present. I
was
going to give it to you last night, but you made me forget all about it.”

I leaned up on my elbow. “Well, I’ll be certain
not
to let you forget if you don’t tell me what it is!”

“Ouch! Blackmail! You win. Here you go.”

He handed me a plain white envelope. I opened it and found tickets to
The Dancing Years
at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane for the next day.

“Kyle! You remembered! How did you get tickets? They’re impossible to get now that the show is closing for the war!”

“I had a little help from Abigail’s father. He knows everyone, apparently, even theater managers.”

“Yes, he does, doesn’t he? Oh, I don’t care
how
you got them. I’m just so excited!”

Kyle had arranged to take the day off, the first in as long as I could remember. We got up for breakfast and went back to bed, but not in order to sleep.

The tickets were for a matinee. There was a time not long ago when it would have thrilled me to be able to say that I was seeing such a popular show. But such empty thrills were behind me now. In their place was the joy of being married and of being loved.