Yesterday

It was early morning and late in winter, the sky bruised and cold. Grass sheened with frost. I wanted to step outside and draw a deep breath of the air, feel the sharp cold of it filling me.

Behind me, in the kitchen, my husband was on the phone to another woman. I turned to look at him. His hair was damp from the shower, face shaved.

“Tonight will be fine,” he said. I could hear the soft lilt of her reply but couldn’t make out what she said.

“If you come around eight no one else will be home,” he said. He hung up and turned toward me. His eyes the same color as the winter sky. I had looked into those eyes for twenty-five years. All my adult years. Who was I without him? 

We had been eighteen when we met, twenty when we married. Now Alex, our eldest son, was twenty-one and I understood just how young we’d been.

He rubbed his arms as if he felt the cold from outside, although the kitchen was warm. Drew a breath and gazed down at the floor then put his phone on the table and walked out the room. Not once looking at me. I was no longer in a form he could understand. He never did believe in ghosts.

XXX

He left the kitchen and I didn’t follow. Didn’t dare. He was going to wake Jordan who always had to be coaxed out of sleep. I used to stroke his hair, talk to him quietly. Morning, baby, time to wake up

My youngest child who came five long years after his brother, when I’d already given away the cot and the pram and all hope of another.

I knew how Wayne would wake him. He had no patience and would pull the cover off him, yank the pillow from under his head. Not like that, I wanted to say. I was still his mother, but Wayne was his only parent.

XXX

Jordan came into the kitchen half dressed, doing up the belt on his school trousers, shirt hanging loose. He opened the fridge and stood looking into it. He always did that. As if still waiting for me to appear and offer to cook him something.

He’d came in late the night before. Me and Wayne in the kitchen waiting for him. In that moment it felt like were a team again, the way we once were. He was strict with our sons and I was soft. I wanted to keep them safe and he encouraged them to take risks. You need to let them grow up, he used to tell me. Between us it balanced out, but now the scales were swinging without the counterweight.

That night he did all the things I would have done. Called him and left a message on the answer phone when he didn't pick up. Phoned our eldest son at work and asked if he’d seen him. Looked toward the window and the winter night every time there was a sound.

But when Jordan walked in the door he did what I wouldn’t have. Stood up fast and angry and shouted. Didn’t hug him or tell him he’d been worried.

I wasn’t there to stand between them anymore, the buffer, the magnet. To say to Jordan; Your dad loves you so much, that’s why he gets angry.

Jordan didn’t apologize or explain, only stood pouting and silent. Let his father’s words wash over him as if they didn’t touch him. He does care, Wayne, I couldn’t say. He just wants your attention, he needs to know you love him as much as you do his brother.

But neither of them ever did anything the easy way.

Wayne came back into the kitchen and for a moment stood beside me.

“You want me to cook you some bacon and eggs?” he offered. Just like I would have. We both watched our sons’ stiff shoulders, his cold back.

“No, thank you, I’m not hungry,” he said. The overly polite way he spoke when he was angry at one of us, as if to some barely known adult he didn’t care enough to be rude to.

“Suit yourself then,” Wayne said, the conciliatory tone gone. He wouldn’t plead. No more than Jordan would.

Jordan let the fridge door swing shut and turned and watched Wayne’s departing back. He was like his father, quick to anger, sorry later.

I watched him button his shirt. It was too small for him, the sleeves above his wrists. I would have bought him a new one already but Wayne either hadn’t noticed or didn’t think it mattered. I didn’t know which would pain me more to know. 

XXX

Jordan pushed the kitchen door open and stepped out on the concrete porch. His breath spilled smoke-like from his mouth in the icy air. Look, mummy, I’m smoking, he used to say when he was little. Such a short time ago.

I watched him standing in the cold and wished I could reach out and touch his shoulder, stroke his hair.

He turned and looked right at the spot on the kitchen floor where I had fallen. He hadn’t been there that day. I would never know what Wayne had said when he told him, if he’d hugged him. Surely, he would have hugged him.

Wayne came back into the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Jordan said. “Just seeing how cold it is.”

I watched my husband watching him. I saw the regret in him too. “I can give you a ride to school if you want?”

I could hardly stand the wait for Jordan’s answer. Say yes, I wanted to whisper in his ear. Don’t make it so hard.

Jordan shifted in the doorway, stepping back inside. “Sure, thanks,” he said.

Wayne reached out to touch his collar, gently folding it down. Just like I would have done. “You need a new shirt,” he said.

XXX

When they were all gone from the kitchen I only waited. Time passed around me, through me. I was no longer a part of the world. It had been six months I heard Wayne tell someone yesterday. Or maybe a while ago he said that. The days and nights all ran together. Everything was yesterday.

I had woken from a terrible dream. A dream I had been at the bench cutting potatoes, it was summer and through the window I could see Wayne heating up the barbeque, Alex and his girlfriend sitting on the edge of the deck drinking beers.

Wayne looked up and saw me at the window and he smiled. His eyes winking light at me. The day flashing, the blue sky, a black wave coming over. Blue again. Black. A great pressure pushing inside my head. Black.

I woke with a feeling of lightness after the memory of pain, then looked up and was disorientated. The lightshade was wrong, the window was wrong. I was in the kitchen not the bedroom.

My husband was at the table with his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

“Emma, Emma,” he said. And the hopeless way he said it, not expecting me to answer, it sent a terrible knowing deep into me.

The dream came rushing back to me. How I had seen myself carried out of the kitchen on a stretcher by paramedics with Wayne and Alex following. The hands pumping into my chest.

They took my body and here I stayed. Sometimes I stood in the doorway which led outside or to the hallway but I never crossed that barrier. I didn’t know what would happen if I did. Where would I be?

XXX

Wayne turned chicken on the pan. Too soon, I wanted to say. It’s not browned enough. He smiled at something, turned it back. Jordan sat at the kitchen table watching his father. Not much talk passed between them, but it felt easy. Jordan played him songs on his phone.

“Listen to this one, dad. What do you think?”

I would have pretended to like it but Wayne didn’t. “That’s not a song, it’s just some guy bragging about his money.”

“At least it’s not some guy crying he lost his wife and his job like the stuff you listen to.”

Lost his wife. The words jolted me but my husband and son didn’t seem to realize. They only smiled at one another. I saw it then, without me between them they had drawn closer. All that time I had been standing in the way of what I wanted. 

XXX

“You're getting good at making this,” Alex said, pointing a forkful of chicken at his father.

“I remembered what it was your mum used to add,” Wayne said. When they spoke of me it always made the room waver around me. Who was I if they forgot me? But I loved to hear it too.

“Still don’t taste like hers,” Jordan said. He poked at his food. Looked up again. “It’s pretty good though, dad.”

He was learning to be more measured. Growing up even without me there.

“Me and Kelly got a flat we applied for last week,” Alex said. Dropped it in out of nowhere. He was twenty-one but somehow I didn’t see it coming. I looked at Jordan’s impassive expression, not letting any hurt show. Wayne only nodded a little.

“That’s good, son,” he said. He would miss him, although he wouldn’t show it.

“That’s cool,” Jordan said. “Is it the place you showed me?” I saw then he wasn’t hurt, just unsurprised. It was something he already knew about.

I tried to recall if I’d heard Alex talk about moving out and couldn’t. There was so much I could never know. Everything was yesterday and there was no tomorrow. The room receded around me again. As if I needed to grab something to stay. There was nothing in this world I could touch anymore.

Time had stopped for me but for them it moved on. They would move on.

XXX

“Movie starts at eight, we should get going,” Alex said to Jordan. They had cleaned up after dinner, loading the dishwasher, wiping the table. They had fallen into a rhythm which worked around the space I’d left. After Alex moved out they would change again, reshape.

“You sure you don’t want to come, dad?” Jordan asked. He was leaning back against the bench, looking grown up and assured. No anger left in him. Maybe he understood his father loved him without me having to tell him so.

Wayne shook his head, smiled at Jordan like I would have. Seeing what I did.

“I’ve got something to do, I’ll talk to you about it later.”

That morning phone call, it came back to me. Even being dead I still had things to fear.

XXX

She was nothing like me, that was the first thing I saw. She walked right in and stood in the middle of the kitchen and turned, looking around, as if sizing it up. She didn’t introduce herself, but then he already knew who she was.

If only I could have made something fall on her head. I tried to direct some force at the light, to make it flicker or explode, but nothing happened.

“Drink?” Wayne offered. “Coffee, or a cold drink?” I was reassured by how uncomfortable he seemed, standing by the bench, putting his hands in his pocket, taking them out again.

“No, thanks,” she said. Smiling at him then, her face so warm it startled me. I’d forgotten the sight of a woman smiling at a man. I’d forgotten almost everything except what was right in front of me, it was hard to hold onto anything else.

“Look,” Wayne said. “I don’t believe in this sort of thing. I think it’s all bullshit, really, sorry.”

“I understand, a lot of people don’t believe it, until they something happens which they can’t explain. Shall we sit?”

She gestured at my table. They sat on opposite sides. Wayne looked down at the floor where I had died. Then he looked around, his gaze passing over me as it always did.

“It’s just sometimes, at night I come in here, and I feel like she’s here. Like she’s on the chair beside me.”

I was. I was with him those long nights when he couldn’t sleep. I was with him when he waited up for our boys to come home. When he cooked dinner after a long day at work and tried to make it the way I had. The day he sat at the table and phoned everyone we knew, one after the other. I was with him.

“Do you think she’s trying to communicate with you?” the woman asked. Her name was Diana. Maybe she had told him when she arrived, I couldn’t remember.

“Sometimes,” he said, and laughed shortly, embarrassed. “It sounds crazy. Sometimes when I’m in the shower I talk to her, I ask her what I should do. I don’t even believe in ghosts or angels or anything like that.”

The shower. I wasn’t in the other rooms, only this one. I wondered what he asked me, but then I knew. Did you know I loved you? Am a good father? Do our sons know how much I love them?

Diana put her hands down flat on the table. Shut her eyes for a long moment then opened them.

“I am sensing a woman here,” she said, tilting her head back and gazing at something. Not me. “She’s in the room with us.”

“Really?” Wayne asked, sceptical.

Tell him yes, the answer to everything is yes.

“She’s telling me her death was very sudden. She said it was quick and she didn’t suffer.”

I remembered the bright flash of the sky and the glimpse of my husband and our son. It was true, in that last moment of life I didn’t suffer. It was all the lightness and the darkness of the world moving through me.

“She loves you very much,” Diana said. “She says you made her happy, you had a good life together.”

“I was happy too,” Wayne said. His voice soft, as if speaking only to me.

“She wants you to be happy again,” Diana said. “She knows you’ll never forget her.”

“I just want her to know we’ll be alright,” Wayne said. “She always worried so much about our boys, I used to tell her she had to let go.” He did used to say that. Don’t worry so much. Let them grow up.

“She tells me you’re doing a great job. You’re a good father.”

I could see emotion flickering across his usually stoic expression. The hope and the doubt and the fear.

“Ask her,” he said, the words hesitant. “Ask if I’m doing what she would have wanted?”

No, not always, but you are doing everything I could hope for. Loving them enough for the both of us.

Diana pressed her hands across her eyes and scrunched her face up, as if trying to hear something. Wayne looked up, looked around. Right at me. So many things to tell him and all of them he already knew. 

I saw for a moment his whole long life ahead of him, sadness and happiness and the memory of me running through it. Let go, he always told me. They will be alright.