Salted with tears
The lake sparkles just as I remember, but the water is muddy and uninviting. Colours look off somehow – paint is chipped, yellows are faded, benches are sun-bleached. I want to put down my towel, but the abundance of options unnerves me. Should I choose the concrete by the water or the grass a bit further back? This never used to be a problem – you put your towel wherever there was room big enough. If you came first thing in the morning, there was still space right next to the water – I remember the shrill excitement of my brother and I racing to the lakefront and spreading our little legs and arms as wide as possible while our grandparents caught up and spread our towels. Our ribs would ache from the hard of the concrete, but it was a happy aching. A victorious aching.
I settle on the grass and sit down facing the water. The few people around favour the tables, chairs, and benches; there is no one on the concrete. They are old, sipping on lemon-flavoured beer and half-heartedly solving crossword puzzles. They seem left behind, as if everyone else got up and left years ago and somehow forgot to tell this lot. They are reminiscent of an era I can just remember, yet somehow their presence isn’t a familiar comfort but a source of some unexplainable sadness.
Everything else is still the same – the stalls selling cheap plastic toys and inflatable animals, the ice-cream truck nestled in overgrown bushes, and the overwhelming scent of frying oil and sugar settling on the early afternoon. And still, somehow, things seem out of proportion. As if everything was picked up and then set down a bit to the left. Nothing too drastic, but even someone painstakingly familiar with the scene would bump into them in the dark. An abandoned, childless swing sings a sorry melody of rust in the distance.
Suddenly, a boy passes me. In the sea of one-piece bikinis and sweaty beer guts his presence takes me by surprise. He has a half-deflated football, and he bounces towards the lake, happy and unworried, without so much as a glance in the direction of others.
My body stands on its own accord. I move after him, clumsy, drawn by his lankiness and joyous self-confidence in the world. His movements are boyishly familiar, his bursts of energy overpowering the world around him.
He spreads his towel on the concrete, kicks the ball far off into the lake, and jumps after it. He is the only one in the water – he seems unconcerned by the mud, the greyish water, the lack of company. Alone in the world, he plays games known only to him. I should leave him, I know. I should leave him alone and return to the world of adults and buy some fatty food and complain about loud splashes and other forms of expressive childhood giddiness. But I can’t. It feels like a magnetic pull, this masochistic desire to enter the world of the boy. I step in the water, wince at the coldness on my stomach, catch up to him in a few strokes. He is trying to bounce the ball on his head and failing with pure glee on his face. I envy him.
‘Seems like you need someone to play with?’ It’s a question more than anything else, and for a second he looks at me suspicious, but agrees with the stubborn reluctance of someone his age. We start passing the ball, then bouncing it back and forth on our heads, then racing for it, and soon he loses himself in the thrill of play, screaming and laughing and swallowing the water in equal parts, and I feel like a little girl, enjoying with my brother a flicker of childhood again.
*
This is the first time in years that my mother celebrates her birthday.
‘It’s your sixtieth, after all.’
‘You don’t have to invite everyone – it can be something small.’
‘It’d be good for the family to get together a bit.’ It took us some convincing, but she agreed in the end.
Despite the late summer morning, I’m covered in a film of cold sweat as I make my way to my parents’ house. It’s not the one I grew up in – they sold that and I haven’t visited it since. Still, the closeness of memories unnerves me as I pull up on the driveway and see my father poke his head through the door. I carry the bags filled with food I made or picked up on the way in and kiss him on the cheeks.
‘How are you, honey?’
I shrug – the years have made words unnecessary between us. He knows. I pile the ingredients on the counter.
‘Do you need help?’
We have always been the cooks of the family. It was something he taught me early on, moulding me into a version of himself with every new life lesson disguised as a recipe. I never minded – I’m proud to be like him, to see parts of myself in the way he chops and stirs and bends, a well-practised, well-maintained choreography. I steal a glance at my father’s profile, a weathered, bullet-proof image that has been an ever-afloat raft in the waters of my life. It’s the same profile that framed my childhood, the same profile that followed me through good and bad.
We prepare salads and cheese platters and meat for the grill. We work nicely together, but the space between us is a fraction too wide, as if it’s missing something. Or someone. Parsley is mixed with garlic, vegetables are cut up, balsamic vinegar is honeyed. He tries the potato salad. He hesitates.
‘It needs something, but I’m not sure what.’ We stop and look at each other, and for a second his expression is worn and heavy. I place my hand on his and feel the papery skin lined with the carvings of a lifetime. I try to smile at him, but somehow it misses.
My mother walks in. She looks at us, at our hands, and her presence forces my father’s face back to its cardboard cut-out.
‘The birthday girl is here,’ he exclaims, and I go over to kiss her on the cheeks too. Ever since I can remember, she’s always looked tired. It has been a permanent feature that stuck to her like wax – it dripped and formed her, her words, her body, her smile. It’s only gotten worse, and no amount of sleep has been able to fix it.
‘Happy birthday, Mum!’ She tries her best not to look weary, but she doesn’t thank me. It hasn’t been happy for many a year now. I want to reach across, to reach inside her, to comfort the part of her that she’s locked away and tried to forget about. I want to take her fragile body in my arms and cradle her the way she used to cradle my brother and I, together, fighting for and revelling in her love at the same time – but I know she wouldn’t want me to. The act itself, the reversing of it, could never be complete. And so I stand as close to her as I dare, willing my presence alone to provide that comfort. I’m here. I’m still here, Mum, I want to say, but I know I never will. To say that some things still are is to admit that others aren’t anymore – and that’s not a conversation we would willingly have.
The three of us move to the kitchen as if pulled by invisible strings. Movement helps, I’ve noticed. It fills time and the space left behind by the unspoken – you only have to concentrate on the task at hand.
‘What do you need help with?’ My dad and I glance at each other. It’s been a long time I’ve seen my mum in the kitchen.
‘Would you please try those potatoes? Something isn’t quite right.’
I try to think of my mother as a sixty-year-old. As someone who has lived most of her life and has fulfilled whatever dreams she might have had when she was younger, but that’s not my mother. My mother stopped aging when she was thirty-seven. No, that’s not quite right either. She hasn’t stopped aging, but she has stopped living. It’s a crucial difference.
At one point before the guests arrive, my parents disappear to get changed. The armchair I sink into hugs my body effortlessly and I listen to the familiar creaks and chimes of a house I lived and grew in for years but never considered my own. A flooding pool of sunlight gathers in my lap, and I think about all the made-up stories my dad used to tell us, folded under our weight in a chair scarily similar over the years. I almost drift off to sleep, but before I do I hear them walk in, and through blurry hot eyelids I see them as they used to be, warm and smiling and carefree – and for a second I’m transported back in time and everything is right in the world.
*
I stop dreaming after the accident. I don’t realise for a while – at the beginning I can’t even sleep, but when I finally do, my mind is blank and milky grey. It’s hard to notice the absence of something, but when I do, I start to revel in it. I go to sleep early and I don’t wake up till late in the afternoon. When I finally have to go back to school, it’s a struggle. I fall asleep during class and I can’t seem to concentrate on anything. Everyone is kind and understanding, but even kindness and empathy are finite. I feel constantly tired and I start to drag my feet. My mum suddenly ages ten years and my grandparents become sick. Not the nagging, old-age sort of sickness that creeps in, but the kind that kicks down the door unannounced. I don’t know who to blame, and this makes everything harder. I wish I could be angry. I wish I had someone I’d want to set on fire, or strangle, or beat up. But I don’t. And so I go to school, sleep during maths and literature, stare blankly at our school nurse as she rambles on, go home, sleep some more, have dinner in dreary silence, then go to sleep for the night.
My dad tries, he really does. If it wasn’t for him, we would have never survived. He cooks and buys me board games and sits us down every Sunday afternoon for his own book club. We read listlessly and discuss the books without much enthusiasm – but we do it anyway. He sells our house below price and moves us into the new one within a week. We leave the furniture untouched, so that whoever moves in only have to pile their personal belongings into our cupboards and wardrobes. This act, my imagining it, becomes something I fixate on in my hours awake. I imagine the most mundane things, toothbrushes and books and an ironing board and cups, all vaguely familiar but ultimately alien, filling our old house till it bursts at the seams. I want to cry, but I never do. In fact, none of us do. Instead we go about with our lives, limping and dripping blood all over the carpet, pretending we’re unaware that one of our legs has been chopped off.
My dad is the one who sorts through our things – drawings and clothes and other mementos. He is a good man for chaos; he tackles the horrific and unexpected without so much as a complaint. He tries to pull me out of my trance, to reignite my love for cooking and crafts and play and other things important for my development.
‘Come on honey, will you help me with the pancakes today? We can make them just how you like it, with honey and ricotta and that berry compote with the cinnamon sticks. I even bought some chocolate chips, just don’t tell your mother!’
He is my dad, just like he’s always been, but now there are two of him – a shell that I can see and touch and that gives and supports and holds until he’s worn thin and papery, and a soft, oozing heart inside this shell that I’m terrified to see when I open his office door unexpected or find him at the kitchen counter late at night. These occasions are scarce, but they force me to step forward again, to reach out and take the pan from his hand and offer to make dinner one afternoon.
His face becomes well-guarded and his teachings – about life, about food, about literature – gather a soft, heartfelt edge that betrays more about him than anything he ever does. He grows bones that are made of iron – or so I believe.
He reminds my mum to get dressed, to water the plants, to call her parents, and when my grandma dies, he is the one who organises the funeral.
I sit in my black dress I last wore almost a year ago and I don’t feel much at all. I look at my grandpa and my parents, listen to their words, and study the photographs projected behind them. Even the weather picks up the mood – it starts to drizzle halfway through, but no one moves under cover out of respect. In minutes we’re all drenched. Sitting there, for the first time in my life, I feel sorry for someone other than myself – I feel sorry for my mum. And I feel sorry for my dad. And because I do, I go up to them after the ceremony and hug them really hard and I say I love them. And somehow, that does it. They both start crying, and then I start crying, and that day we do a year’s worth of crying, and some in advance.
That night, I have a dream about a boy, roughly my age, whose features I simply cannot catch. He runs through a river, against its flow, and his laughter fills the rolling green valley. The next day, I wake up in time for school and find my mum in the kitchen, making breakfast for the first time in over a year. We look at each other in the soft morning light, and there is some unspoken acknowledgement between us. I don’t really understand it, but I feel like I might not have to. I sit at the table and manage to force down the eggs she’s placed on my plate, even though they’re too salty – and then I continue to do this for days, for weeks, for months to come. Eggs, salted with tears. Every single morning.