“What darling?”
And so it went.
I still saw a lot of Grandma. She quizzed me endlessly about my mother. Her behaviour, her habits, any changes in mood.
“Why are you asking me these things, Gran?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean why are you asking me about mother? You’ve noticed she’s changed too haven’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean darling.”
“Gran.”
“I think maybe it’s the pressure at work. That’s all.” She smiled. “Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.”
And I didn’t worry really. I was a teenager. Teenagers don’t worry about their parents for the most part, they have enough of their own problems, real or imagined, to deal with.
*
Mother died for the third and final time on the day of my eighteenth birthday. The day I became an adult. Just like that. She left for work and never came back. A car accident. Utterly random.
I was numb. I was hysterical. I was inconsolable.
I realised that I hardly knew her, that I was just on the cusp of being able to get to know her.
Yet I carried on.
I went to university.
I went a little crazy.
I moved to London, inevitably.
I made a name for myself.
I had a succession of nice, but ultimately pointless men.
I missed my mother.
*
“It’s like this.” Grandma bent forward in her wheelchair and scooped up a handful of gravel from the path.
I’d asked her about mother, about her work. It was more out of lack of anything else to say than any hope I might hear something new. We’d spoken of it a thousand times before. Grandma enjoyed talking of her genius daughter.
She held out her frail, translucent hand to me, filled with pebbles and bits of twig, clods of dirt. It shook gently as she spoke.
“Each of these stones is a person, the same person give or take a few minor details.”
She hefted the handful high into the air and we watched them splash down into the pond.
“The ripples that spread from each are their lives. Those points where they touch, they interfere with one another, you can feel. That inexplicable feeling of serenity that strikes you when you least expect it, at the oddest moments. Where our lives touch. An infinite number of me, an infinite number of you. All just ripples on the pond’s surface. That’s how your mother explained it to me. I mean your real mother.”
“Gran?”
“Oh I’m sure there was more to it than that. When they recruited her she said she couldn’t talk about it anymore, not even to her own mother.” A small smile. “But she did. Sometimes. If they touch, we can see into them, she said to me. If they touch we can travel between them.”
“Gran I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Your mother, darling. She drove a hard bargain. They needed her and she knew it. She was brilliant. There was nothing they could do about her condition, about her heart, but she got insurance. She made them promise.”
“Promise what, Gran?”
“That if she died they’d bring another her through.”
*
I watch the light through the leaves on the old oak. My hand traces the creases in the bark, fingertips brushing lichen and moss. The sun is good on my skin. It soaks through my pores, down though muscle and bone, into the marrow. I feel lifted, inexplicably alive, and I know in this moment that my sister, one of many sisters, is near.
I wonder if she knows her mother. Our mother. Or if, like mine, she too disappeared one day. An empty space left behind. A hollowness that always had been there, muted, but now pushed to the fore.
And as the feeling passes, as it always does, I long to reach across the radius of the ripple, to see her, for her to take me in her arms and for her to tell me that everything is going to be okay.
Dan Grace lives in Sheffield. His novella, Winter, is published by Unsung Stories and was reviewed in Shoreline of Infinity 4. The review is also published on our website, www.shorelineofinfinity.com
Brother’s Keeper
