After the End(63)

“I understand if you hate me. I—” He looks up at the sky. Takes a deep, slow breath. When he looks at me again he holds my gaze with fierce determination. “I just couldn’t do it, Pip. I couldn’t give in. I had to fight, I had to. Even though I knew what it would do to us.”

“I missed you,” I whisper. A convoy of cars turns into the drive and heads for the car park. Inside the crematorium they’re singing the final hymn. They’ll be out soon, wiping away tears and giving directions to the wake, saying what a beautiful service it was, how Granddad would have loved it. My hands creep from my pockets, just as Max’s make their way to mine.

“Our boy,” Max says. “Our beautiful boy.” The break in his voice makes my heart hurt. I move into him, my head slotted beneath his chin in the space that must surely have been made for it, and feel his tears dampen my hair.

“Come home,” I say, before I can stop myself.

He pulls away, still holding my hands. Searching my face. “Do you mean that?”

“You’re the only person in the world who knows exactly how I feel right now. I can’t do it without you.” And I lean against his chest again and feel the thrumming of his heart, because this is what I’ve missed the most, that physical proof of life, proof of love. “Please, Max, come home.”





twenty-seven





Max


   2016


We were married in this church. Pip was baptized here. She walked through the churchyard every day on her way to school, attended Sunday service with her parents, floated sticks in the brook that runs by the lych-gate. And now here we are, saying goodbye to our son.

Today isn’t a funeral. A celebration of life, we’re calling it. Please join us to celebrate the life of Dylan Adams, the invitations said; 5 May 2010–1 September 2016. In front of the congregation, on the projector screen bought for hymns and movies, a slideshow of photographs puts Dylan front and center, a two-foot smile lighting up the church. Some are of Dylan before he got sick, kicking a ball around, but most are more recent. I look at the screen just as the slideshow changes from Dylan at his music group to Dylan on the trampoline. We bought one on the suggestion of his physiotherapist, sinking it into the middle of the garden, to make it easier to transfer Dylan from his chair. He would lie on the trampoline, and we would gently bounce the edges, and Dylan would laugh because to him it must have been like flying.

That laugh filled my heart with joy. It wasn’t the laugh of your average six-year-old, and if you didn’t know Dylan, maybe you wouldn’t even have recognized it as one; certainly there were stares from people in malls, when my boy dared to be happy in public. But it was a laugh. Webster’s defines laughter as a show of emotion with an explosive vocal sound and I can’t think of a better way to describe Dylan’s laugh. It wasn’t always predictable—he found joy in places I never thought to look—and it came at a volume disproportionate to his small frame. It was as though all the energy that had once powered his now-quiet limbs had instead been channeled into this one sound.

“Penny for them?” Pip’s wearing a blue dress, with a lemon-colored cardigan bought especially for today.

“I was thinking about Dylan’s laugh.”

Her smile is brave. “Earplugs on standby.”

I hold her gaze. OK? She nods. No tears, we’d agreed. A celebration, not a wake. Hesitantly, I take her hand and squeeze it. She returns the pressure, but a second later she slips her hand away, fiddling instead with her necklace.

There was a time when I never took Pip’s hand, because it was always already there. We would fall into step together, and Pip’s fingers would slide into mine, and I wouldn’t have felt whole without them. Now, I see other couples walking hand in hand, and I feel . . . not jealous, but sad. Sad that we’ve lost that closeness. And then I think of everything we’ve been through, and know that it’s a miracle we’re walking together at all.

A woman I don’t recognize walks hesitantly through the churchyard, a yellow scarf in one hand. “Cousin Ruth,” Pip whispers. “She came to our wedding.” We’re standing in the entrance to the church, greeting guests and handing out the orders of service. On the front of each one, there’s a photo of Dylan; on the back, a picture he produced on the computer at school, with the help of their eye-tracking software. It’s a riot of color, but if you look carefully you can make out three shapes, distinct yet interconnected. It’s called My Family, and the original hangs in our hall at home.

“Ruth! So good of you to come.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.” She holds up the scarf, uncertain of this departure from convention. “Is this—”

“It’s perfect,” Pip says. “Thank you.” Reassured, Ruth drapes it around her neck, and walks past us into the church.

“No black,” Pip said, when we were planning today. “It isn’t right. Not for a child, not for Dylan.”

And so the dark pews are lifted by bursts of yellow ties, scarves, hats, dresses . . . even a mustard corduroy jacket that Pip’s uncle Frank dug out of his wardrobe. Four-year-old Darcy wears a Little Miss Sunshine T-shirt, her dads sporting yellow handkerchiefs in the breast pockets of their jackets.

There are so many people here. Family we haven’t seen for years; friends who stuck by us through the tough times, and others who have drifted in and out. Alison and Rupert, Phoebe and Craig, Fiona and Will. Even Emma and Jamie, the young couple whose campaigning raised so much of the money for Dylan’s US trip.