A Daughter's Kiss

A Daughter’s Kiss

It is Monday morning, and I am walking to work. Yesterday’s thunderstorm has filled the ditch with grey-green rainwater. The hawthorns, ferns, ash and oak and a hundred other species of trees and plants line the disused railway track; they are reinvigorated and a new perfume has replaced last night’s petrichor, cheerily soothing Friday’s dusty itch.

I walk this way every day and know this path, which links our flat with my office, so well. I anticipate each undulation. The gates and paths which lead toward the horses’ field or the golf course, and the seared pathway where the stolen car was torched, are so familiar they have provided a solitary certainty.

In the field by the river that flows into the lake, I watch the wild horses we used to feed with carrots, before Lucy stopped the weekend walks with me a year ago. This morning, a foal is using the barbed wire fence to scratch its neck. Its coat is the colour and texture of grey marble. I offer the foal a carrot, the first I have brought for a year. Its mother watches until she sees I mean no harm.

I stroke the foal’s nose, and I try to make sense of what happened yesterday and this morning. I want to understand where we are, and how and whether we have regained lost certainties. What I do know is this; in forty minutes, I will sit on the bench by the lake, and I will feed a duck with the bread I bring every day. Our life used to be this certain. We would get married and have children. And then our daughter died. For three hundred and sixty-five long days I have been unsure that our lives would ever be certain again. Occasionally, a hopeful voice tells me that I am wrong, but the tinnitus has never been drowned out until this morning, and even today I fear its noise will return.

Yesterday, we drove ten miles to the country park we love, and, after a long walk in the sun, we talked in the shade of an ancient oak. We drank White Rioja – hot, but happy for once, to read our books and relax in the calm of this familiar place.

‘You look like The August Farmer,’ Lucy said, as she rubbed grass dust from my arm in a rare moment of intimacy, ‘bringing in the harvest.’

A black and white feather fluttered to the grass at our feet. Lucy watched it fall, looked at it for several moments then picked it up and placed it carefully into a pouch in her rucksack.

Before moving to the city, we both lived on farms. Lucy’s mother used to paint, and Lucy loves The August Farmer. Her mother gave it to us when we got married. It is on our bedroom wall, and I have seen Lucy staring at it. She was, and is, so close to her mother. She is Lucy’s best friend and Lucy wanted to have the same relationship with Annie.

I looked into Lucy’s eyes, and at the recent lines around them, but just then, in the afternoon sunshine, they did not seem so pronounced.

‘Another drink?’ I asked, gesturing across the lawn to the refreshments van.

‘I think so. Not wine though. What else did they have?’

‘Beer?’

She considered beer. ‘No thanks.’

‘Sangria?’ I remembered the small handwritten sign on the back wall of the van.

‘Sangria?’ she said, not sure. ‘Is it cold?’

‘I don’t know. I won’t get it if it’s not.’

‘OK. Sangria,’ she said, decision made. ‘Cold though!’ Feigning sternness.

After a couple of yards, I looked back. Lucy was watching something intently. I followed her line of sight to where a small girl in a striped tee shirt danced in front of her mother. Lucy was smiling. Our girl danced in her daydream.

The grass was brown and worn in places, revealing rock-hard grey-white earth. It reminded me of youthful summers; 2003, on my uncle’s farm, my home until I left for university. That bright blue year when the sun appeared in May and stayed until October when, with my cousins we made hay in rectangular bales.

After the forecast storm, the hot weather was set to return. In a few days, I thought, it will bleach to beige, before being scrubbed almost white like the cricket pitches in 2003, this time by dancing children and loving mothers on purple blankets.

‘Is the Sangria cold?’ I said to the girl when I arrived at the van. Earlier, I had found out that the boy wanted to be a vet. He was at university in his second year. He told me that his sister was going to university in October, to study medicine. She wanted to be a surgeon. As the girl fetched more ice, I wondered what Annie would have done. Something with animals, like her mum, I decided.

The siblings wore National Trust tee shirts and pink faces, boiling in this kettle of a van, painted racing green, deliberately but stylishly old fashioned.

‘Here's the ice.’ The girl put her palm to the side of the jug. ‘It’s not too bad and the ice will soon make it perfect. Can you bring the jug back? Leave it there if we’ve finished.’ She pointed to a shelf underneath the hatch. She added the remaining ice cubes from the bucket and put the jug on a silvered tray with two plastic glasses full of ice, orange, apple, and grapes. Condensation had formed rivulets on the jug and the glasses.

‘How much?’

‘It should be twenty including the deposit. Make it fifteen. We’re finishing in ten minutes. I trust you to return the jug and I won’t be here to give you the money back, unless you’re fast drinkers?’ She smiled again. The blue sky and the sunlight had reminded us that we can be funny and kind. Young and bright eyes beaming expectation; I made a wish for them.

I walked across the baking lawn, past the dancing girl, and put the tray at Lucy’s feet.

‘Give it a short while for the ice to work.’

I read four or five pages then sat and poured the Sangria slowly so as not to tip the lightly walled glasses. I passed Lucy her drink and relaxed into the chair and tasted mine.

‘Lovely.’ I took another mouthful. ‘Positively arctic.’ I winked.

Encouraged, Lucy took a sip and slowly, as she assessed the taste and temperature, a contented smile transformed her mouth. She looked at the dancing girl and as I followed her gaze, I saw the sweep of the child’s arm as she trailed a satin rainbow ribbon in figures of eight. Her mother looked on in contented bliss.

‘Thank you.’ Lucy swallowed and closed her eyes. She settled into the cushioned headrest. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Lovely.’

After a moment or two, she opened her eyes and drank some more Sangria. More than a sip this time; half a mouthful perhaps. She looked at the girl again and a tear blurred the reflection of the scene in the pupils of her emerald eyes. I wanted to say something to help Lucy and us, but there was nothing I could say.

Lucy wiped a tear with her hand.

‘Why don’t you try to sleep? It’s an hour until closing time.’

She nodded, put her empty glass in the holder in the chair, leant back, and closed her eyes. Her breathing became even. After a few minutes I thought she may be asleep, or at least, the half-sleep that comes under a tree on a sweltering day.

I watched the dancing girl who, in Lucy’s half-waking dream, would have had Annie’s face. The girl played with her ribbon and sang. Her mother looked on and cleared the plates and emptied the contents of glasses onto the thirsty grass.

Then, the dancing girl walked towards her mother and beamed with unbounded love as she put her hands on her mother’s cheeks and kissed her squarely on the lips.

At that moment, I looked across and her eyes were wide open.

I could only read her lips when she said silently. ‘It should have been me,’

I could see that the imagined family scene was breaking her heart, and my heart broke for her, and for us.

Lucy closed her eyes again. I don’t think she had been fully awake as she was soon breathing evenly again.

There are times – on days and nights when grief wins and the self-destructive voice rises in volume – that Lucy allows herself to think that I did not want our child enough, or as much as her. As if she sees betrayal in my ability to function after that dreadful night while she cannot contemplate life as it was.

After a month, Lucy went back to work; robotically, mindlessly, but more heroically than the bravest soldier. Usually, she knew that I must function, that we must eat and pay the mortgage. It has been twelve months since that hospital room – that cold black temporary morgue – echoed to the middle-aged doctor’s words said through apologetic tears.

‘I am so sorry.’

That night which should have been the happiest of our lives, was the worst. He did not use the word ‘stillborn,’ we heard him say, ‘It’s gone.’

The doctor cried. What must he have seen in his career and still he was brought to tears when he saw my wife’s devastation and my catatonic state?

At times, the unwelcome voice tells me that our relationship will not survive, that the grief will win.

Another voice, a voice of hope, tells me, but not us, that there will be more days like this, away from these dreaming gardens and swathes of baked lawn, where we will recapture this feeling. That we will keep the light of this wonderful afternoon all the way home, into sleep and that it will still be there in the morning.

I closed my eyes.

‘Excuse me, Sir.’

Trying to shake a forgotten dream I looked up into the dark eyes of a woman; I recognised her from the entrance. She took our tickets.

‘We are closing now. Can you make your way out?’

Her expression encouraged a positive response. ‘Of course.’

I stroked Lucy’s arm. Startled, she jumped ever so slightly, but then said, ‘Hey,’ with love in a yawning smile. As she acclimatised to the sights and sounds in that moment of incomplete consciousness, she stretched, arms pushed into the air. The strain of the last year which had tired me, had exhausted Lucy, but in this moment, with sleep still close by, she looked happy.

‘It’s half five,’ I said as the woman made her way toward the exit. The dancing girl and her mother had left, leaving no trace except a memory of her life, her dance and of that kiss.

‘We need to get a move on.’ I gestured toward the darkening clouds.

Lucy nodded and looked towards the storm. The clouds reflected in her pupils, but they were not sad eyes.

No, the smile had not gone, and the distant thoughtful look had not reappeared. ‘Hope’ winked its encouragement. ‘Hope’ smiled, and so did I.

I nearly forgot the jug but took it to the van and we walked towards the exit.

‘You drive,’ Lucy said and threw me the keys.

As lightning flashed, a raindrop hit me on the forehead with an audible ‘slap.’ We scrambled into the car.

Trying to be funny, I looked with crossed eyes at the raindrop on the end of my nose. I hoped Lucy would respond in kind; she smiled and wiped the raindrop away.

‘I love you,’ I said, my hand on her face. I did not remember moving it there. Lucy touched it and looked straight ahead.

‘Let’s go Chris,’ she said. A moment later, she squeezed my hand, and for the first time since the doctor spoke those words said, ‘I love you too and I am so sorry that it wasn’t me.’

‘Sorry? Oh Luce.’ I held her face in my hands and kissed her and tasted our tears on each other’s cheeks.

We drove home and took the lift to the flat. I went onto the fifth-floor balcony of our modern apartment; one of the many towers you see in our adopted, booming city home. The river underneath our balcony which flows to the sea was swollen, running fast and high, full of branches, bad dreams, and lost love.

I looked across the river; the homeless man was drying the bench with newspaper. As hot June became sweltering July, he had started sleeping on the bench on the opposite bank. He must have sheltered under the bridge as the storm hit. In that moment, I saw that life, once established, fights hard for its place on a bench because it hopes for a better future.

Last night, in the cool evening air, Lucy slept deeply for the first time since Annie died.

While she slept, I left our flat and crossed the bridge to the sleeping homeless man. I touched his shoulder. He woke and I smiled to calm his worried eyes illuminated in the streetlight. I gave him an old phone, a number, and some handwritten instructions. I wished him well and thanked him for giving me hope. In the streetlight, he looked at the phone and the instructions and smiled, his clear blue eyes no longer worried.

The man’s eyes drift from my memory … it is Monday, and I am back by the lake. I shift my weight on the bench as a raft of ducks paddles towards me. I think about the homeless man. I wonder whether he will ever know what he did for us. He showed us that there is always hope.

This morning as we lay in bed, Lucy spoke Annie’s name for the first time in weeks.

‘Annie would have been a wonderful person you know?’ And she grabbed the back of my head and kissed me, without reservation, and it was the most intimate moment of our lives.

‘You know?’ Lucy was crying. ‘She would have been perfect. She would have loved the world and everyone in it, and she would have judged people by their actions and their character you know?’ And she pulled my head towards her and kissed me again, ‘YOU KNOW?’

And I knew.

‘I wished I had died, Chris. It should have been me. I wish I had died in Annie’s place, but I didn’t, and we have to start again.’

As if I had been struck by a lightning bolt from yesterday’s storm I realised I had misunderstood Lucy when she had said, ‘It should have been me,’ whilst we watched the dancing girl kiss her mother in her waking dream. I thought she meant it should have been her watching Annie dance. It was not just that she wanted to be kissed by our daughter, of course she did, but her love for her daughter meant that she would have given everything to save her.

And then I knew that all year, this is what she had been feeling.

‘She would have danced whilst she fed the wild horses next to the river, and she would have crushed the bullies that hurt her friends and strangers too. She would have been brave and clever. You know?’

And I knew.

‘She would have been all the good that we are and none of the bad. YOU KNOW?’ She said imploring me to understand. And her tears fell.

And I knew.

Lucy held my head and pressed my temples.

‘And you would have been Atticus Finch. And I would have been Jane Austen. Annie would have been Scout. And it would have been perfect.’

And I kissed Lucy so hard I worried I might have hurt her. ‘I know.’ I speak as quietly as she spoke in the park.

I realised that I had been crying. Lucy pushed me onto my back and for the first time since Annie died, we made love.

Afterwards, we showered together and washed each other’s hair. We dressed in silence and drank tea on the balcony. Lucy put down her cup and went to the bedroom. When she returned, she brought her rucksack. She took the black and white feather from the pouch and let it fall. It floated toward the river.

‘I love you Annie,’ she said. I will always love you and I will never forget you.’ She turned to me and smiled, tears, hopeful ones, rolling down her face. ‘We are going to be OK.’ She stroked my face, green eyes shining brighter than the blazing morning sun. I wiped her tears with my palm and took her head and gently held it to my chest. We stood on the sunlit balcony for a few minutes bathing in the sunshine and our new beginning.

We walked to the front door. Lucy kissed me goodbye and playfully pushed me into the corridor.

‘Have a good day Chris.’

‘You too Luce.’

Forty minutes later I am on my bench, writing my diary on my phone.

Sleeping in the shade and the Sangria Storm gave a respite from the heat, a breathing space and the chance to feel the unbounded love of a daughter for her mother. The homeless man gave us the strength to heed the hopeful voice and to start again.

The air is already warm, and the trees cast rippling shadows on the lake. It is going to be hot, but the storm has cleared, and while there will be days of doubt, we can see our future, our path. In a few moments, the ducks will look hopefully, I will throw them bread, I will watch them eat, then I will stand, turn away from the lake, and I will walk to work.