After the End(62)

“Occupational hazard,” said the police officer in my kitchen. “She should be looking at prison this time, though,” he added cheerfully, as though that was what I wanted. As though that was what mattered. None of it mattered. Not the police, or the ruined coat, or the Blood on your hands! she’d screamed in my face. I didn’t care.

But there was the dog mess through the letterbox, and the violent gouges that ran like go-faster stripes down my car, and the letters—so many letters—from people who knew so much more than I did about what was right for my son. The man who spat at my parents in the street; the journalists who wanted to cover the event, as though Dylan’s death were a village fete.

And so the funeral was small and quiet. The crematorium, instead of my childhood church. Voices too thin to be heard. My parents, mourning as much for me as for their grandson. Everyone crying, everyone grieving. And I know it’s unjust, and I know I’m not the only one with the right to feel as though her heart is torn out, but still . . . Dylan was our son. What right does anyone have to grieve more than us? To cry, when our eyes are dry? When we’re trying so hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other?

“Come back with us.” My mother’s mascara is smudged beneath her eyes. She puts a hand on Max’s arm. “Both of you. Stay. As long as you want.” Her eyes rest lightly on Max. “You must be tired of living out of a suitcase by now.”

“Karen.” A warning from Dad. “Let them sort it out themselves.” As though it were a teenage squabble. He gives me a smile that isn’t really a smile, his lips pressed tightly together, and his brow furrowed in silent acknowledgement of the pain he would take on in a heartbeat instead of me.

“I’ll come over at the weekend,” I say. “I think I—I think I need to be on my own for a bit.”

We watch them leave. Max’s mother, Heather, comes to join us. She makes no secret of her grief, and of her resentment that Max didn’t ask her to visit while Dylan was in PICU.

“Are you OK?” I ask, because that is what I seem to have done all day—comforted other people, reassured other people. It will get easier, he’s at peace now, I know it’s hard. Yes, almost three. Yes, so hard. I know. I know. I’m sorry. Handing out the words I need to hear myself.

“I’ll wait in the car,” Heather tells Max.

She hasn’t forgiven him. I don’t know if she ever will. Come when he’s better, Max told her. When he’s home. Such was his conviction that the court would rule in his favour. Only they didn’t, and although we might have had time—we might have had months—we didn’t. We had three weeks. Three weeks of sitting silently in a room with my silent son, and my equally silent husband. We weren’t talking, but we weren’t fighting, either. The bitter fury that inhabited Max for the weeks leading up to the hearing evaporated as quickly as it had arrived, both of us wanting nothing to sully the time we had left with our boy.

Three weeks of avoiding protestors, of saying No comment, of leaving the hospital together, because it meant less speculation in the papers; then driving in opposite directions, and coming home alone to an answerphone flashing red with requests for interviews.

And then, out of the blue, the call from PICU at two in the morning. You need to come. You need to come now.

Max was already there when I arrived, a coat pulled on over my pyjamas and no memory of the miles I’d driven. I looked at his eyes, red rimmed and swollen, and for a second I thought, I’m too late, I’m too late, but he reached for me and pulled me to the bed, to where our boy lay quiet but alive, and we stayed that way, the three of us, until the end.

Heather was halfway across the Atlantic when her grandson died. She heard the news in Arrivals, surrounded by joyful reunions and happy tears, and she fell against Max like she’d aged a decade right there. “Once more,” she said. “I just wanted to hold him once more.”

Music starts up inside the building behind us—fifty voices launching gustily into “How Great Thou Art.” Tears prick my eyes. I want to leave but my feet won’t move, and maybe Max feels the same, because he isn’t leaving either. We stand in silence, and I look at the squares of engraved stone by the entrance and try to imagine coming here, to this conveyor belt of grief, to remember my son. I push my hands deep into my pockets.

“We could have a bench, instead,” Max says.

I turn to look at him.

“Instead of a stone,” Max says. “At the park, maybe, or the nature reserve. Somewhere we can sit and be with him.”

On my fourth date with Max I was finishing his sentences; on our fifth he was finishing mine. By the time we got engaged we could have whole conversations without needing to speak. I remember thinking, This is it. I’ve found the half to my whole.

“We could—” The words catch in my throat as I imagine scattering Dylan’s ashes somewhere beautiful, instead of burying them here.

Max nods. “Yes. They said we can collect them next week.”

You cannot feel grief without first feeling love, and now my heart is filled with both. For my son, for my husband, for my marriage. Max turns to face me, lines around his eyes that weren’t there a month ago. He screws up his nose, blinking away the tears that make his eyes gleam. “I’m so sorry, Pip.”

I start to cry.