M O L L I E

He called her at 4 p.m.

Not to tell her about the parcel. He'd tell her that on Thursday, in the booth, where the important things lived. He called because his voice sounded different and she could hear it through the phone the way she could hear everything about him through the phone, the register, the weather, the interior climate of a man she'd learned to read across a table and could now read across a city.

"Something happened," she said.

"Yeah."

"Good something or bad something."

"Good something. I think. I'll tell you Thursday."

"You can't say something happened and then say Thursday."

"I can. I'm doing it. Thursday."

"You're infuriating."

"I know. How are you?"

She was sitting in the flat. The chair, not the floor. The chair had been winning lately, the chair and the standing and the walking and the eating, all the vertical things, the things that meant the body was participating in the world instead of opting out of it. Gregory was on the windowsill, green, growing, leaning. The portrait was on the wall, he'd brought it to the diner on Tuesday, wrapped in newspaper, and she'd carried it home against her chest the way she'd carried the first painting, and she'd hung it beside the diner painting and now she had two. The booth and the face. The view and the viewed.

"I'm okay," she said. And meant it. Not the Dana okay, not the work okay, not the okay that meant I am holding something and you can't see it. The real okay. The small, domestic, unspectacular okay of a person sitting in a chair in an apartment on a Saturday afternoon with a plant and two paintings and the sound of a man's voice on the phone.

They talked for a while. About nothing. About the restaurant mural he'd started, the harbour, seen from George Street, the colours bigger than anything he'd done. About the 102-year-old grandmother's funeral, which had happened yesterday, and which had included the jazz band and the red dresses and not a single person in black, and Mollie had stood at the back and watched the family celebrate instead of mourn and had thought: that. That's how Charlie would have wanted it. Loud. Colourful. A room that got louder when you walked into it.

She told Fayiz this. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "You should tell your mother about the red dresses."

The sentence arrived the way his sentences always arrived, simply, without decoration, the weight of it carried entirely by what he didn't say. He didn't say you should call your mother. He didn't say it's been five years. He didn't say she's alone in a house in Cornwall with Charlie's room still intact and nobody calls. He said: you should tell your mother about the red dresses. As if the telling was a gift, a thing she could bring, a reason to call that wasn't about grief but about something grief had produced, a funeral that was a celebration, a room full of red, a woman who had lived to 102 and demanded colour.

"Yeah," she said. Quietly. "Yeah. Maybe I should."

They hung up. She sat in the chair. Looked at the phone.

•  •  •

She'd been carrying the number for five years.

Not her mother's mobile. The landline. The one in the kitchen in Porthcurno, the one on the wall, the one her mother kept because what if there's an emergency. The number Mollie had called from that same kitchen at 3 a.m. five years ago when the ringing woke her and the voice on the other end was her mother saying it's Charlie and the world ended.

She'd stopped calling because her mother's voice sounded like Charlie's. Same cadence. Same warmth. The Cornish vowels. The particular music of a family that had lived in the same place for generations and whose voices carried the geography the way the cliffs carried the wind. Every time she heard her mother speak she heard Charlie underneath, the echo, the genetic harmony, and the hearing was a knife and she'd stopped picking up the knife.

Five years.

She thought about Siobhán Hennessey. The girl in the brother's jumper. The conversation isn't over, Mollie had told her. It just changed. She'd said it to a stranger and meant it and had not applied it to herself because applying it to yourself was always the hardest application, because the distance between knowing and doing was the distance between the floor and standing up and she'd been on the floor for a very long time.

She was in the chair now.

She picked up the phone. Dialled the landline. The number she knew by heart, the number that was encoded in her fingers the way the eleven stirs were encoded, the way the three loops and twice-folded scarf were encoded, muscle memory, the body holding what the mind couldn't.

It rang.

Once. Twice. Three times. The particular sound of an English landline ringing in an English kitchen three thousand miles away. She could see the phone on the wall. The cord. The tile floor. The window above the sink that looked out at the garden where Charlie used to kick a football against the fence until the neighbours complained.

Four times. Five.

She was about to hang up. The relief was already forming, she's not home, I tried, I can try again tomorrow, the trying was the thing, when the line clicked.

"Hello?"

Her mother's voice.

And there it was. The knife. The sound of Charlie in the vowels, in the warmth, in the particular way her mother said hello like it was an invitation rather than a greeting. The same voice. The same music. The ghost of a boy who had been loud and impossible and who had put tinsel on the toaster and wrapped presents in newspaper and who had said don't settle, Molls on a dance floor in Soho.

Mollie closed her eyes. Held the phone. Let the knife do what the knife did.

It hurt. It would always hurt. The hearing would always be a losing, the voice would always carry the echo, and the echo would always be Charlie. That was the price of calling. That was the cost of staying on the line. You heard the dead in the living and the hearing was a wound and you stayed on the line anyway because the line was the only thing connecting you to the person who was still there, the person who was alone in a house in Cornwall, the person who had lost a son and then lost a daughter to the losing and had been waiting, for five years, on the other end of a phone that used to ring.

"Mum," Mollie said.

A pause. Long. The kind of pause that contained five years and a kitchen and a landline and a 3 a.m. phone call and every Tuesday and Thursday that had passed without a word.

"Mollie?"

Her mother's voice broke on the second syllable. Not dramatically. A hairline fracture. The sound of a word that had been waiting to be said and was being said and the saying was too much and not enough and both at once.

"Yeah," Mollie said. "It's me. I'm... yeah. It's me."

Silence. The transatlantic kind. Three thousand miles of ocean and cable and signal, the infrastructure of connection, the engineering required to carry a daughter's voice to a mother's ear across a distance that was not measured in miles but in years.

"How are you, love?"

Four words. Ordinary. The most ordinary four words in the English language. The four words her mother had said to her every day for eighteen years before Charlie died and had not been able to say since because saying them required the phone to ring and the phone had stopped ringing.

Mollie pressed the phone against her ear. Pressed hard. As if the pressure could close the distance, could compress the ocean, could turn the signal into touch.

"I'm okay," she said. "I'm... mum, I'm okay."

Her mother made a sound. Not a word. The sound Mollie remembered from the 3 a.m. call... the sound between a word and a noise, air pushed out, the sound of a body doing something it had no instructions for. Except this time the sound was different. This time the sound was not loss. This time the sound was the opposite of loss, the sound you made when something you had given up on came back, and the coming-back was so unexpected that the body responded before the mind could catch up.

"You're okay," her mother said. Not a question. A confirmation. The same thing Mollie had said to Fayiz on the phone twenty minutes ago. Okay. The word this book ran on. The word that meant: I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. The worst thing didn't happen.

"I want to tell you about a funeral," Mollie said.

Her mother laughed. A small, wet, incredulous laugh, the laugh of a woman whose daughter had not called in five years and was now calling to talk about a funeral, which was either the most Mollie thing imaginable or the most insane, and the two were not, as Dottie would say, mutually exclusive.

"A funeral," her mother said.

"A good one. The woman was a hundred and two. She wanted a jazz band. She wanted everyone in red. No black. She said black was for people who hadn't lived."

Her mother was quiet. Then: "Charlie would have loved that."

The name. In her mother's voice. Through the landline, through the ocean, through five years of silence. Charlie. Said the way her mother said it, with the warmth, with the vowels, with the particular music that was also Charlie's music, because the son and the mother shared the same voice the way they shared the same laugh and the same inability to sit still and the same conviction that the world was better loud.

"He would have," Mollie said. "He'd have worn the loudest red thing he owned. He'd have danced."

"Terribly."

"Terribly. With full commitment."

"With full commitment," her mother agreed. And the agreement was a door, and the door was the one Mollie had closed five years ago when the voice on the other end became the knife, and the door was opening now, not wide, not all the way, but a crack, just enough for a voice to pass through, just enough for a name, just enough for the beginning of a conversation that had been interrupted for five years and was not over.

It just changed.

They talked for forty minutes. About the funeral. About work. About Gregory, which required explaining what Gregory was, which required explaining that Mollie had named a plant, which her mother received with the specific, gentle bewilderment of a woman who had spent five years imagining the worst and was now hearing about an aloe vera called Gregory. Mollie didn't tell her about Fayiz. Not yet. Not on the first call. She would. She'd tell her on the second call, or the third, or the Sunday that would come after, the way Sundays came, reliably, without drama, one after another, stretching forward.

At the end, her mother said: "Will you call again?"

The question was careful. The question was the question of a woman who had been left before and was bracing for it again, the question of a mother who had lost one child to a car and another to the grief of it and was standing in a kitchen in Cornwall holding a phone and asking the only question that mattered.

"Sunday," Mollie said. "I'll call Sunday."

"What time?"

Mollie thought about Fayiz's mother. The Sunday calls. Seven o'clock. The calls that had stopped because a father had decided they should and a mother had been silenced and a son had spent three years listening to the absence.

"Seven," Mollie said. "Seven o'clock."

Her mother said: "Seven o'clock."

Mollie hung up. Put the phone down. Sat in the chair.

The flat was quiet. The April light was coming through the window, warm, late, the light of a season that had arrived while she wasn't paying attention. Gregory was on the sill. The paintings were on the wall. The crack was on the ceiling.

The crack was still there. It would always be there. The crack was Charlie and the crack was the floor and the crack was the distance between the life she'd had and the life she'd lost and the crack did not go away just because she'd called her mother and burned a napkin and kissed a man who tasted like cardamom. The crack was permanent. The crack was part of the ceiling.

But the ceiling was higher than she remembered. Or she was standing taller. Or the distance between the floor and the ceiling, which was the distance she'd been measuring for five years, had changed, not because the room had gotten bigger but because she had stopped lying down and started looking at it from a different angle. From the chair. From standing. From the height of a woman who was alive and had a plant and two paintings and a mother who would answer the phone on Sunday at seven and a man whose voice on the other end of a line sounded like the beginning of a sentence she hadn't finished yet.

She looked at Gregory.

"I called her," she said. To the plant. To the flat. To Charlie. "I called mum. She sounds the same. She sounds exactly the same and it hurt and I stayed on the line."

Gregory leaned toward the window. The light was there. The light was warm.

"Sunday," she said.

Sunday.

☕︎