Now I’m just glad that she’s here.
Rachel and I take seats and I hand the Walcott to Frederick. From the way he holds it this time, I’m almost certain it’s his, but he tells us, sadly, that it’s not. Even when the shop’s gone, I’ll keep looking, I tell him. He thanks me, and accepts the offer. ‘I think perhaps,’ he says, ‘it’s the looking that keeps her alive.’
We sit here missing the bookshop before it’s gone, working out the logistics of what to do with stock. ‘Can’t we keep the Letter Library?’ I ask.
‘It’s huge, Henry,’ Dad says. ‘I already have copies of all of those books. That’s why I want the catalogue.’
‘We could house it,’ I say. ‘In the shed.’
‘What shed?’ he asks.
‘The shed of wherever we all move together.’
He smiles, and waits for me to catch up.
‘We’re not all moving together?’
‘I thought I might travel. See Shakespeare’s country, and some plays in the West End. Keep going from there to Argentina. Perhaps learn Spanish and read Borges without an interpreter before I die.’
‘You’re not dying.’
‘Well, not immediately, Henry. None of this is your fault. Your mother is right,’ he says, taking her hand. ‘We make very little and none of us can live on dreams.’
‘You need some dreams,’ Mum says.
‘Dreams and a little money,’ he says.
Mum’s crying as much as any of us and I know this is just as hard for her. I catch her looking at me after a while. ‘You’ve grown up,’ she says, when I ask her what she’s thinking. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
Rachel
soft thoughts pass between us
Henry was in the middle of a rant when I pulled him close and kissed him. He was waving my letter and querying the validity of a love that’s date stamped.
I had a whole speech planned. I was going to make him explain, point by point, with sub points, why he’d decided it was me and not Amy that he loved. How did the turnaround happen exactly? I was going to ask for proof.
But then I decided proof was overrated and possibly not possible. It would likely just spoil the moment – a moment I’ve been waiting for, for a long, long time.
So I decide to take control of the situation and kiss him. It felt as though we were trapped in honey. And the rest of what we did, and how it was, and the words that were said, are secret.
Lying in Henry’s bed, life is not like it was before, and there are things other than death that draw lines and markers. We move in and out of sleep and talking. Henry’s window is open, and the warm night drifts through. I put my feet on the ledge to feel it.
Soft thoughts pass between us. We are the books we read and the things we love. Cal is the ocean and the letters he left. Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.
Henry and I go downstairs after a while, to give the Walcott to Frederick. It isn’t the one he’s looking for. It’s out there, though, Henry says to him, and promises to keep looking. Frederick says it’s the looking that keeps her alive, and I understand completely. I must search for Cal always in the things he loved.
Later, when I walk inside, the Walcott is sitting in the Letter Library, facing out.
There’s a letter in it, and it’s for me. I know it before I open the book.
Dear Rachel
I hope you don’t mind that I’m writing to you. But I have been thinking about our conversation and the death of your brother, and the great sadness that you must be feeling.
As you know, I lost my wife twenty years ago. Sometimes I feel as if I have lived without her for a decade, and sometimes I feel as though I lost her just a minute before.
I write lost, but I have grown to hate that expression. She was not a set of keys or a hat. Losing her is the equivalent of saying that I have misplaced my lungs.
I know you understand what I mean; I can see it in your face. There comes a time when the non-grievers go back to life, even some of the grievers go back, and you’re left trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.
What’s the point in living on past the point when those we have loved have left us? And how can we ever forgive ourselves for letting them go? Without Elena in the world, time did not exist. A world without time is a terrible thing. There is no certainty. Days could move quickly or slowly, or not at all. The laws of the universe have been tinkered with, and you are blindly wheeling.
But you know this already, Rachel.
You know that you must hold on to any laws that you can find.
I love my son, and he is the law that cannot be tinkered with. Love of the things that make you happy is steady too – books, words, music, art – these are lights that reappear in a broken universe.
You say that the ocean is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and the thing that terrifies you the most. This describes how it was for me to fall in love with Elena. So perhaps all things that are worthwhile are terrifying?
Go back to the ocean, Rachel. It’s a part of you, and so is Cal.
Frederick
In the morning, while Henry is sleeping, I take a pen and some paper out into the garden. There are people sitting in it already, even though the bookstore isn’t open. They’ve come through from Frank’s, bringing their croissants and coffee. They ask me what time the bookstore opens, and I tell them the hours – ten till it depends – for book emergencies they open in the middle of the night.
I try not to think about the time when the reading garden will be gone. I try to look on the practical side. People need housing. But right now, I can’t make myself believe that it’s a good thing they have it here.
Frank brings me a coffee. ‘On the house,’ he says. ‘It’s a day of national mourning.’
I hear a soft sound, a small cough, and turn to see Frederick standing next to me.
‘Thank you,’ I say, and instead of writing to him, we have breakfast together in the reading garden.
I tell him that yes; I am going back to the ocean. ‘I want to swim again,’ I say.
After Frederick’s gone, I imagine I’m in the ocean again. I’m floating in it with Mum, our backs to the salt, our faces to the sky.
The line from the Borges story goes through my head – about the narrator ending up where he started. I think about things I’ve read, other readers who have pointed things out to me, strangers’ circles directing the way. I think about Cloud Atlas, all the stories that, in the end, add up to one. I think about the beautiful, impossible thought that Cal might have, at the moment of dying, transmigrated.
I step from that thought to another – that he had been transmigrating all his life; leaving himself in the people he loved, in the things he loved. I think of the cover of Cloud Atlas, the pages turning into clouds and turning into sky, raining into ocean; Cal, brimming at the edges, escaping.
As I’m leaving, I see Michael sitting in the corner of the garden. He must have been there all along. When I get closer I see why he was silent. He’s been crying.
I let him have his privacy, and walk back inside. I look at the Letter Library for a long time, thinking about the catalogue, and how it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Because a record on a computer doesn’t record the way people have underlined. You can’t tell from a database the deep mark that Michael left under the words where Pip tells Estella that she’s part of his existence. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here.