Page 144 of Still Me
I was a mess after Christmas. I can tell you that now. I like to feel I’ve done the right thing. But I didn’t do the right thing. I hurt you and it haunted me. There were so many nights when I just gave up on sleep and went to work on the house instead. I’d fully recommend behaving like an arse if you want to get a building project completed.
I think about my sister a lot. Mostly what she’d say to me. You don’t have to have known her to imagine what she’d be calling me right now.
Day after day they came, sometimes two in twenty-four hours, sometimes supplemented by e-mail but most often just long, handwritten essays, windows into the inside of Sam’s head and heart. Some days I almost didn’t want to read them—afraid to renew an intimacy with the man who had so comprehensively broken my heart. On others I found myself running downstairs barefoot in the mornings, Dean Martin at my heels, standing in front of Ashok and bouncing on my toes as he flicked through the wedge of post on his desk. He would pretend there was nothing, then pull one from his jacket and hand it over with a smile as I bolted back upstairs to enjoy it in private.
I read them over and over, discovering with each one how little we had really known each other before I left, building a new picture of this quiet, complicated man. Sometimes his letters made me sad:
Really sorry. No time today. Lost two kids in a traffic accident. Just need to go to bed.
X
PS I hope your day was full of good things.
But mostly they did not. He talked of Jake and how Jake had told him that Lily was the only person who really understood how he felt, and how each week Sam would take Jake’s dad on a walk along the canal path or make him help paint the walls of the new house just to try to gethim to open up a bit (and to stop eating cake). He talked of the two hens he had lost to a fox, the carrots and beetroot that were growing in his vegetable patch. He told me how he had kicked his bike exhaust in desperation and fury on Christmas Day after he had left me at my parents’ and hadn’t had the dent repaired because it was a useful reminder of how miserable he had felt when we weren’t talking. Every day he opened up a little more, and every day I felt I understood him a little better.
Did I tell you Lily stopped by today? I finally told her that you and I had been in touch and she went bright pink and coughed out a piece of gum. Seriously. I thought I was going to have to do the Heimlich on her.
I wrote back in the hours when I was neither working nor walking Dean Martin. I drew him little vignettes of my life, my careful cataloging and repairing of Margot’s wardrobe, sending photographs of items that fitted me as if they had been made for me (he told me he pinned these up in his kitchen). I told him of how Margot’s idea of the dress agency had taken root in my imagination and how I couldn’t let it go. I told him of my other correspondence—spidery little cards from Margot, still radiant with joy at her son’s forgiveness, and from her daughter-in-law, Laynie, who sent me sweet flowered cards updating me on Margot’s deteriorating condition and thanking me for bringing her husband some closure, expressing her sadness that it had taken so long for it to happen.
I told Sam how I had begun to look for apartments, how I had headed, with Dean Martin, into unfamiliar new neighborhoods—Jackson Heights, Queens; Park Slope, Brooklyn—one eye trying to assess the risk of being murdered in my bed, the other trying not to balk at the terrifying differential between square footage and cost.
I told him of my now weekly dinners with Ashok’s family, how their casual insults and evident love for each other made me miss my own. I told him how my thoughts returned again and again to Granddad, far more so than when he was alive, and how Mum, freed from all responsibility, was still finding it impossible to stop grieving him. I told him how, despite spending more time by myself than I had in years, despite living in the vast, empty apartment, I felt, curiously, not lonely at all.
And, gradually, I let him know what it meant to me to have him in my life again, his voice in my ear in the small hours, the knowledge that I meant something to him. The sense of him as a physical presence, despite the miles that separated us.
Finally I told him I missed him. And realized almost as I pressedsendthat that really didn’t solve anything at all.
—
Nathan and Ilaria came for dinner, Nathan bringing a clutch of beers and Ilaria a spicy pork-and-bean casserole that nobody had wanted. I had thought about how often Ilaria seemed to cook dishes that nobody wanted. The previous week she had brought over a prawn curry, which I distinctly remembered Agnes telling her never to serve again.
We sat with our bowls on our laps, side by side on Margot’s sofa, mopping up the rich tomato sauce with chunks of cornbread and trying not to belch at each other as we talked over the television. Ilaria asked after Margot, crossing herself and shaking her head sadly when I told her of Laynie’s updates. In turn she told me Agnes had banned Tabitha from the apartment, a cause of some stress for Mr. Gopnik, who had chosen to deal with this particular family fracture by spending even more time at work.
“To be fair, there’s a lot going on at the office,” said Nathan.
“There’s a lot going on across the corridor.” Ilaria raised an eyebrow at me.
“Theputahas a daughter,” she said quietly, when Nathan got up to visit the bathroom, wiping her hands on a napkin.
“I know,” I said.
“She is coming to visit, with theputa’s sister.” She sniffed, picked at a loose thread on her trousers. “Poor child. It is not her fault she is coming to visit with a family of crazies.”
“You’ll look out for her,” I said. “You’re good at that.”
“Color of that bathroom!” said Nathan, arriving back in the room. “I didn’t think anyone did cloakroom suites in mint green. You know there’s a bottle of body lotion in there dated 1974?”
Ilaria raised her eyebrows and compressed her lips.
Nathan left at a quarter past nine, and as the door closed behind him Ilaria lowered her voice, as if he could still hear, and told me he was dating a personal trainer from Bushwick who wanted him to visitat all hours of the day and night. Between the girl and Mr. Gopnik he barely had time to talk to anybody these days. What could you do?
Nothing, I said. People were going to do what they were going to do.
She nodded, as if I had imparted some great wisdom, and padded back down the corridor.
—
“Can I ask you something?”
