“Esme?” Rory tugged at her and she opened her eyes and looked into his, finding in them something she hadn’t known she needed but wondered how she could ever have missed. She kissed her son and drew strength from him.
“Yes, darling,” she whispered. “I know.”
“It can be our little secret, if you like, about Granny Mac,” Rory whispered back, snuggling up against her, and she treasured him more in that moment than she had treasured anything ever before.
“I’ve not been myself these past few weeks,” she finally said to the room. “I’ve had trouble. I’ve been struggling. Everything seemed wrong. Nothing fit properly. I felt wretched on the inside. All messed up and horrid.”
She thought of the turmoil that clawed at her innards all the time and wondered, dimly, if perhaps now that everything was out in the open, she would be free of it.
“You’re always so damnably cheerful,” Henry said, “no matter how dire the circumstances. How are we supposed to know when there is something wrong?”
Esme almost laughed. “Well, you’re not,” she said. “That’s the whole point of me. It always has been. You can always rely on me to make you laugh and feel better. It’s actually one of the things I like most about myself. I’m the feel-good girl.”
“But Esme,” Pog said, the pain clear in his voice, “you can’t go through what you’ve been through and still bear that responsibility. It’s too hard.”
This was true, Esme knew, but only to a point.
“But, Pog—if I climbed into bed with a vat of gin and cried myself to sleep for a year, what would you do?” He knew the answer as well as she did.
“I would climb in, too,” he said. “To be with you.”
A faint whistling from Esme’s lap told her that their son, after saying his bit, after sharing a little magical drop of himself with her, had nodded off to sleep. She smoothed his curls off his forehead.
“Well, I couldn’t bear that,” Esme said softly, so as not to wake him up. “I don’t want to think anyone else could feel the same deep, dark, horrible, awful bloody pain that I do. And I certainly don’t want to see it. It would be the end of me.”
“Don’t say that,” Henry said, with some of his old fierceness. “He would never let that happen. He loves you too bloody much. For better or worse.”
“It’s true,” said Pog. “I love you so bloody much, Es.” And he exploded into tears so loaded with grief that Esme thought she simply could not bear it. Her aching heart rendered her silent.
Henry, at this, pulled himself out of his chair, took the sleeping Rory off her lap and wordlessly limped out of the room.
Then out into the air between them, so full of unspoken thoughts and raw, ragged feeling, burst the pent-up declaration Pog had long been holding and hiding.
“I love you so much,” he exploded again. “You’ll never know how much, Esme.” Tears pinged off his cheeks and onto the carpet. “I just—” His voice shook but he took a stuttering breath and plowed on. “Talking about it doesn’t do it justice, Es. I don’t know the right words, what to say to make you feel better. I just know that I have adored you since the moment I first saw you and that if you were to leave—” The thought brought with it fresh tears but he brushed them away. “If you were to leave it would be devastating—but that’s not even the word. It would be, God, living hell, Esme. Absolute living hell.”
He tried to curb his emotion before he continued. “But I’ve thought about it all afternoon, I mean I’ve thought about the possibility for years, and if you want to go off with Louis,” he said, “and live in some bloody bakery in the middle of France, well, part of me wants to shake you till your head drops off, Esme. How could you do this? To me? To us? But part of me only wants you to be happy because you bloody deserve it, you truly do, no matter what, so if you want to go to Louis I will help you pack your bags, Esme. I will fold your clothes and brush your hair and rub lavender moisturizer into your legs before you go. I might die afterward, or at least never live properly again, but if going with Louis is what will make you happy then I will help you, Esme. I will. I swear I will.”
He had a lot to get off his chest as Esme sobbed silently next to him.
“But will he ever love you the way I do?” he burst out again, his face wet with sorrow. “Will he love the way your hair springs out one side of your head first thing in the morning, or the way you smile in your sleep, or the little fold of skin near your armpit? Does he know that you can’t stand marmalade but eat apricot jam out of the pot with your fingers? Will he understand that you always keep in touch with your friends even though they neglect you and take advantage of you and don’t take care of you and will you tell him that you need to take painkillers an hour before a bikini wax or it makes you cry?”
Esme had never heard anything so clearly in all her life.
“I know he’s a baker. I know he bakes bread. I know that’s what you love about him, Esme, but there’s more to life than bloody bread, you know. Man cannot live by bread alone, Esme. Everybody thinks you’re so strong, so capable, so funny, so amazing and you are, my God, you are, but I understand you like nobody else ever will. I understand that you needed to wait to talk about Teddy. I understand that you can’t look at Rory without wondering how being half a twin for the rest of his life is going to affect him. I understand that Granny Mac was more to you than a guardian, she was an angel, a crotchety old angel, and everyone else came second and I love that about you, Esme, I really do. And if you go with Louis and I never see you again I will still wake up every day and thank God that I knew you and understood you as well as I have because every day with you has been a marvelous bloody gift and I treasure each moment.”
What have I done to deserve this man? Esme thought as she watched him pour his heart out into a puddle on the middle of Alice’s swirly orange and brown carpet. How could she ever have doubted that where she belonged was with him?
Esme slid off the sofa, sank to her knees in front of Pog and took his hands from his head, which had sunk into them again. She placed his precious arms around her shoulders.
“Nothing happened with Louis,” she said softly. “I had lunch with him twice, Pog, and I went to his hotel today but nothing happened, I swear to you.” She stopped. How could she hold anything back from Pog when he had just bared his own battered and bruised soul so bravely to her? “I thought it might,” she said, sniffing as her tears dried, “happen, I mean. With him, Pog. With Louis. I talked to him about our baby, our Teddy, and it just felt like such a huge bloody release that I thought it must mean something, that there was more to it. But once I got there and saw him for who he really is, I just . . .” She thought about the pacifier and how it had saved her from making the worst mistake of her life. Without it, she might not have seen who Louis really was until she had already betrayed her husband. Maybe destiny had played a part after all. She cleared her throat.
“I don’t love Louis,” she said and the words tasted far from sour in her mouth and gave her courage. “I’ve been lost and scared and I thought meeting him again was a sign that I could find the sort of happiness that I knew when I was young and uncomplicated and pure, not the screwed up, heartbroken mother of a dead little boy.”
Pog clasped her tightly and wept into her curls.
“But I was wrong, Pog,” she continued. “I don’t think I can ever have that happiness back. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” She felt her husband shudder with anguish as she realized she had not put it the way she meant it.
“Shhh,” she hushed him. “I don’t mean it like that. I mean that I don’t want it again. I think I can have a new kind of happiness. I have had a new kind. A better kind. With you.”
She pulled away and lifted Pog’s face so his waterlogged eyes met hers.
“I’ve loved you from the moment I spat up the regurgitated cheese ball, Pog. You’re my best friend in all the world, I’d trust you with my life—I do trust you with my life. You’re the kindes
t, sweetest, most patient, adoring husband any woman could ever hope for and you are the father of my son, my sons. There is no other man in the universe I will ever want for that job. You’ve loved me and taken care of me and made me feel like a beautiful princess all these years, and I can’t believe that I have even got close to messing that up, Pog, and if I could wind back the clock I would but I can’t, you know that, because you know just when I would wind it back to.”
Pog nodded as his eyes filled with tears again.
“We have to move on,” Esme continued, a path clearing in her mind, “we have to look forward not backward. I haven’t really understood that until now because the future seemed so grim, so Teddy-less, but we can do it, with each other, I know that now. Oh God, Hugo Stack, I love you! With all my heart. I truly, truly do. I know I’ve bungled it, I know I don’t deserve it, but do you think you can ever, will ever be able to forgive me?”
Pog looked at her with his steady, unwavering gaze. “It’s not about forgiving you, Esme, it’s about being sure you love me as much as I love you because if you don’t, I can’t bear it.”
“But I do!” cried Esme. “I do! That’s what this whole horrible mess has taught me. Honestly, Pog, I’ve never been more sure about anything in all my life.”
He was silent for a moment and when he spoke, his voice did not need to be chocolate-coated. “I know you think you’re plain old flour and water, Es,” he said, “and that Louis was your starter, but that’s not true, it’s never been true. We’re the flour and water and you’re our starter.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to any of us,” he said, and she leaned in, raised her face and kissed him, tasting the salt of his tears and the promise of their future.
It was delicious.
Chapter 20
Esme and Alice both sat on Granny Mac’s bed but the Hello! magazine they had snuck in to ogle was discarded between them.
“You have been what?” Alice was asking Esme, aghast.
“I have been talking to her,” Esme answered, her cheeks turning pink. “I know it sounds nutty but I have. She told me to start baking bread again and she told me to go and meet Louis.”
“But Esme, sweetie, Granny Mac is dead,” Alice said. “She died two months ago.”
“Well, I know that. That is why it sounds nutty that I have been talking to her,” Esme returned, as though Alice were the crazy one. “But I found her in here, sort of sitting up large as life, the day that Brown peed on the quince, and she started talking to me and I started talking back.”
Alice was stunned. She stared at the ceiling and wriggled her jaw, uncertain what to do or say.
“Oh, don’t go all thingie on me, Alice,” Esme pleaded. “You wanted me to tell you everything from now on so I’m telling you. And I haven’t gone all crystal-gazing or psychic phone number or anything. I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts, either. But I don’t think that was what she was. She just hadn’t quite finished with me. Or with here. Or something.”
Alice’s face crumpled into an expression of hopeless worry. “But, Esme,” she groaned. “That’s loony! People don’t come back from the dead in real life. It only happens in films.”
“I know,” her friend sighed. She was silent for a moment. “It’s just that if you take away the whole not actually being alive and well and, you know, here, thing then it almost makes sense.”
“It does? How can it?”
Esme had thought about this long and hard and had a theory that she believed enough to know that she had not gone mad.
“You know, when Teddy died,” she explained, “I thought that as long as I had Granny Mac everything would be all right. That was all that kept me going, Alice: the thought that she was with me. And I know I had Pog but Teddy was his son, too, and he was going through everything I was, whether he showed it or not, and I couldn’t bear for him to have to grieve for me as well as himself, but Granny Mac was there for me. Just for me. She was mine. She would never let me crawl into a hole and not come out again. And you know that’s a real possibility with MacDougall women, but we had a sort of secret unspoken pact about saving each other from that particular fate. It’s just that I never let myself contemplate a life without her so when she went with so little warning, I think a switch flicked in my head that I couldn’t unflick myself without a little bit of help.”
“Esme, you mustn’t say things like that.”
“But it’s true, Alice! There’s no blueprint for surviving the loss of your child, you know. You bloody well grasp on to whatever you can to stop yourself from drowning and for me it was Granny Mac. She was my life support, she always had been. It’s not as though we talked about him, Teddy, I mean, but she was just there, my life raft, keeping me afloat. And I thought I would know when I had to let go and that I’d have the chance to prepare for it, but instead Dr. Gribblehurst just steps out of her door after his regular visit and tells us to make arrangements, that it’s a matter of hours, and it was.”
“Esme, she’d been bedridden for two years. She could barely speak. You must have known.”
“I couldn’t bear it,” Esme said. “I just couldn’t bear it, Alice. I just couldn’t let her go.”
“And so,” Alice said, rather skeptically, “she came back, from the other side, from beyond.”
“From wherever,” Esme said. “Don’t laugh at me! I know it’s losing your marbles territory, my God, you think I don’t know that? And now I sit in here like I did before and think perhaps I was just imagining her. Perhaps I was only telling myself things I already knew, suggesting things I really wanted to do. But the room felt different, Alice. It felt full of her. It smelled of her, too. You know, Embassy Regal. And Rod bloody Stewart was always playing. Constantly. You know how she always loved to sing along. He seeped from the walls, Alice.”
She looked around at the walls, now freshly painted a gentle spring yellow. The smell of smoke was gone. The handbags were gone. The hat was gone. Rod was gone. The curtains were open and sun streamed into the room in which she had shared such a strange, spirited time with her grandmother.
“You have to admit,” she said to her friend, “when hasn’t Granny Mac been here when I needed her? She’s always been my guardian angel.”
The hairs were starting to stand up on the back of Alice’s neck.
“She’s not here now, is she?” she asked, her skepticism fading.
“If she was,” Esme answered, “you would be sitting on her and dead or not you would know all about it.”
“Well, when she was here,” Alice wanted to know, “could you see through her and was she all blurry around the edges and did things float around the room?”
“No! It wasn’t like that. It was just that when I came in it was as though she was sitting up in bed and so I would snatch a few minutes to myself and talk to her. It wasn’t spooky or anything like that.”
“But could you see her?”
“I never opened the curtains. She liked it in the dark.”
“But was she really here?”
“I can’t explain it, Alice, to you or to myself but yes, she was definitely here.”
“And you could hear her.”
“Yes. I think so, anyway.”
“And does Pog know about this?”
“I’ve told Pog everything.”
“And what did he say?”
“I’ve told Pog everything but this,” Esme clarified. “And I will tell him. I just thought I would test it out on you first to see what happened, and I have to say I don’t know that I would consider it a raging success.”
“Well,” conceded Alice, “I don’t think that you shagging Louis was the best idea Granny Mac ever had but then technically you never actually did, and along the way the little slimeball did seem to clear your pipes on the, you know, Teddy front.” She bit her lip. She was so used to dancing around the subject that it still felt unnatural to broach it.
Esme smiled, sweetly, sadly. “I miss him,” she said
, and Alice breathed again. “But I can think about him now without hating myself. And I can remember more than the snot bubble he blew out his nose that last morning.” Her voice faltered. Alice scooted closer and hugged her. “But it feels better,” Esme whispered. “Better than before when I could hardly bear to look at Rory without seeing that same little face, never growing up, just staying two and a bit forever.”
“Oh, Esme, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” wept Esme, “really it is. I’m much happier now.” Her shoulders shook with grief but instead of fighting it, of pushing it away, she let it embrace her, and with that, as she had come to learn, came a warmth, a calmness.
“He was a gorgeous boy, wasn’t he?” Alice said, gently rocking her friend.
“Yes,” sniffed Esme, her tears subsiding. “He was. Remember the night you baby-sat and he ate the contents of his nappy?”
Alice laughed. “How could I forget? I had to clean it out of his teeth, for goodness’ sake. And what about the time Ridge swapped their clothes and the Crumblies never noticed and it wasn’t until you gave them a bath the next night that you realized what he had done and swapped them back?”
“Oh, don’t,” Esme cried. “That makes it sound like I was such a crap mother!”
“You are the best mother a boy could have,” Alice said robustly. “And Teddy might not have had you for long but he couldn’t have had anyone better. Don’t shrug me off, Esme, it’s true. And I know you worry about Rory and who wouldn’t, in the circumstances, but he is actually one pretty cool little bloke and he is going to be all right. He might have lost his brother but he’s still got two wonderful parents, a doting grandfather, adoring friends and a donkey with the biggest dick I have ever seen in my whole entire life.”
Esme laughed and the sound bounced around and around the sunny room, chasing away, once and for all, the spirit of the past.
Alice squeezed her again and they sat there, quietly staring at crumpled Elizabeth Hurley squashed on the cover of Hello! magazine between them until Esme sniffed at the air and sat up.