Page 12 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
She picks up a piece of potato with her spoon. Forks are only for cutting now. No more knives, something she’s accepted after much protest.
‘Too hot.’
‘Okay.’
She goes in for a second one.
‘If the first one was too hot then don’t take a second one. Have some salad first,’ I say. I feel my frustration set in, an irrational impulse to raise my voice, shake sense into her.
She goes for the potato a third time, and I give up. It’s not her fault.
‘What do youthinkhappened, when Sven failed to show up?’
Mum pushes her thin lips together.
‘I don’t know. But he would have been there if he could. He was never late. Scandinavian and punctual. He never gave me reason to doubt he’d always be right next to me, whatever happened.’
Mum in love. It’s an impossible picture. If she had relationships over the years, she hid them well. Timed them when I went to camp or succumbed to daytime trysts during my school hours.
‘Therebeing the bus stop?’ I ask.
‘“Wait for me there,” he said. “I’ll have everything ready and tell you the plan, so you can start packing. Time to learn Swedish,” he said.’
‘Right, but where, Mum? Where exactly were you meant to meet him?’
‘“At three o’clock,” he said. “I’ll be there at three. You’ll see me waiting at the bus stop.”’ She finally manages to eat the potato, chewing it before continuing her answer. ‘“At the corner of Hornton Street, right between the town hall and the library.”’
And there it is again, that damned street.
Waking up before Mum is becoming more challenging considering the summer light causes her to stir at six and either spring out of bed or call the buzzer I installed for her, until Icome down the hall with a T-shirt thrown on to cover myself. The next morning is a new scenario entirely.
‘Please tell me there is a reason you are attempting to get into the attic at seven in the morning.’ Somehow, in the time I had a shower, Mum has managed to locate a ladder and is now balancing on the second step.
‘We have to go through all our leads, Blade. Remember the letters?’ she says as if we are detectives solving a riddle. ‘They’re up there.’
I gently guide her down under the promise that I will go up.
‘There is so much stuff up here,’ I shout down a few minutes later. Cardboard box after cardboard box full of books, summer clothes and lampshades. ‘Fuck.’ My toe crashes into something hard, just as I finally locate and drag out a box of what looks like old school crafts. I kick my other foot into a box just for good measure.
‘Are you all right up there?’ Mum’s faraway anxiety travels up the ladder and into the void I’m in.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s what I always say when things are going incredibly well.’
I manage to make the journey down, covered in dust but with the box of letters safely in my grip.
I carry the box downstairs, placing it on the coffee table.
When I open the box, I’m thrown by how few there are, a couple of single pages on the cardboard bottom, no more.
‘Where did you last see him?’ I ask, realising I might have asked that before but not gotten an answer.
She thinks. Sometimes the harder she thinks the less words she finds. Same way the more she looks for an item the more she forgets. But she is clear today; it’s a good day to talk. She hasn’t even used the flash cards we made. Flash cards that say things likeHarriet is a physiotherapist who has two sons; one hopeless and one not so hopeless.They each have a label likeFamily(I’m the onlycontent there apart from the one Australian cousin),Friends,Care Team,SocietyandNorms.
‘Two days before. All we had left to do was to meet up and for him to give me my ticket.’ Then she falls quiet, and I realise that’s all that the information I will get for now.
‘Do you have a picture of him?’
‘He didn’t like being in pictures. But he took so many of me. Of you, too. Almost all the ones I have of you and me together were taken by him.’
