“Someone is dying?” Thomas offered. He was so unflinching about this, so equanimous in the face of death, that I promised myself right then and there that I would be like this on my own deathbed. That I would somehow cultivate the serenity he exuded right now, even though I knew he had be wrestling with pain and exhaustion.
“Yes, when someone is dying,” I conceded. And then after a moment of internal debate, I decided to tell him. The entire story, from last year up until a few days again, from love to heartbreak and then love to heartbreak once more, and he listened to the whole melodramatic saga, sometimes closing his eyes, but the small noises he made in response to my story assured me that he was indeed conscious.
“And then she asked me for a day for her to figure things out. Which is so painful, because I’ve known that she’s the only person I’ll ever want to marry for a year, and if she doesn’t know that about me, does that mean that she loves me less than I love her? Or that she’ll always love her freedom more?”
Thomas made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a derisive snort.
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t care if you’re dying, I will still fight you.”
That earned something like a real laugh from Thomas, although it was short-lived as the action seemed to bring on an intense wave of dizziness. He closed his eyes, and I noticed once again how ashen his face was, how hollow his features. Pain scissored across my heart.
“The real question is,” he whispered, his eyes still closed, “is whether you love her enough to stay with her on her terms. If you love her enough to give her whatever space and time she needs, even if she needs it until the end of your lives.”
He opened his multi-colored eyes again, meeting my gaze with the full force of thirty-some years of fraternal affection. “Silas, what is more important to you? Molly? Or your pride?”
Thomas died peacefully seven hours later, after getting to see his children one last time. The physician had the children don masks and stand against the far side of the wall, and so their goodbyes came in the form of stilted words from the older ones and confused tears from the youngest.
I hated that. I wanted them to hug him and kiss him. I wanted him, one last time, to have his bed invaded by a herd of snuggling, warm, wriggling kids. But in the end, it was me that invaded his bed after the children had left, remembering my own childhood and all the nights I had crawled into his bed after a bad dream. On those nights, with my older brother’s sensible intonations that dreams weren’t real (and also with the lamp he’d considerately light for me,) I’d fall back asleep, feeling safe and certain in the knowledge that nightmares couldn’t follow me into real life. Not with Thomas beside me.
Except for today. Except for right now.
With the Occitan sun pouring in through the window, with the sounds of the baby squealing happily elsewhere in the villa, my nightmares became living, present entities. There was no escape from Thomas’s labored breathing, no escape from the strange groans and wheezes he made as his body struggled valiantly against the inevitable.
He couldn’t talk any more, he could barely open his eyes, and so I talked for both of us, laying on my back next to him and staring at the ceiling. I talked about Coke Manor and the parents we’d both loved so dearly. I talked about the children, and the way my heart twisted whenever I thought of Molly. And every now and again, his eyes would open or his mouth would move in the facsimile of a smile, and I knew that he was hearing me, that this in some way was soothing, my voice a constant reminder that he wasn’t alone. Like he had done for me when we were children, I ushered him into sleep and darkness, and the moment that he’d finally gone, I felt it. A feeling like a hovering presence, a weight that wasn’t oppressive but that nonetheless felt strange and unnatural, and then it was gone.
The room was empty—save for me—Thomas had gone from Thomas to Thomas’s body, and after several long moments of numbness, I left the room to go tell his children—who were, in a sense, now my own.
A week passed. It felt like a year and it felt like a day, and thank God for Bertha and the servants, who kept us fed and clean while I dazedly arranged for the burial. After Thomas was interred next to Charlotte, I held off with making any official plans about returning to England. Instead, I sunk myself into the minute-by-minute life of my nieces and nephews, reading stories and playing chase and picking lavender alongside the road. It was an opiate, a salve, although the moment my mind opened up to the fact that this was now my life forever, my chest gr
ew tight as I remembered why. Remembered those two sandstone crypts on that dusty hill.
The other danger of long hours of play or wandering and picking plants was that my mind also had time to drift to Molly O’Flaherty. To her hair and her smooth, freckled stomach and her shaking voice as she’d asked me for time to think.
Where was she now? Was she thinking about me, missing me, or was she simply grateful to have space away from me? She hadn’t written or sent any word, although I’d been here less than two weeks, and it often took longer for letters to make their way down from England.
You should write to her.
But though I thought this more than once, I never did. Or I should say, I never finished the letter, because once I had sat down to write, I couldn’t stop. I wrote pages and pages of rambling thoughts and feelings and memories, some of her and of us, and others of the brother and sister-in-law I’d just lost, and whenever I set down my pen and looked over what I had written, I knew it was an un-sendable missive. It was honest and raw and jagged and far too emotive for someone as closed off as Molly.
And then I would look around the dinner table, at the four children chattering and eating and little Silas in my lap messily squashing peas in his fist, and I would want to laugh a terrible, mirthless laugh. Molly had been afraid of getting engaged. How much more would she despise a connection with me when it came along with five children?
I remembered Thomas’s words the night before he died, when he’d asked me what was more important, being with Molly or my pride, and perhaps in another life, I would have been able to swallow my pride and open myself to being with Molly however she wanted me.
No. There was no perhaps. I would’ve. Because I loved her so desperately that I would take her any way I could have her.
But things were different now. I couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t willing to be an adoptive mother to my nieces and nephews, but also how could I ask that of any woman, much less one as skittish about commitment as Molly was?
I needed to resign myself to my new life. I would have these children who I loved like my own, but that would be it. Because Molly wouldn’t take me now, and there was no other woman I would ever want other than Molly.
And the letter grew longer. And remained unsent.
Paris was thankfully cool on the morning I boarded the train south. The journey from London to Dover, then Dover to Calais, and then Calais to Paris, had been delayed by several days of torrential rain, which made the Channel nigh impassable and the country roads wet quagmires that sucked carriage wheels deep into the muck and refused to let go. But today had—finally—dawned clear and dry, if slightly chilly, and the passage south was smooth and untroubled.
Not at all like my jumbled, fevered mind.
When I’d left Silas’s house that day, hurt that he’d left without thinking to leave me so much as a note, I’d initially set down to write him, to try to explain the myriad of conflicting feelings I felt, to convey the deep, needy love I had for him and also my burning desire to be my own woman.
But as I had tried to write it, I couldn’t articulate what I needed to say. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure myself what I meant. Maybe it was because I had to see his face as I explained to him, I had to know that he understood.
