We Own the Sky(103)

Anna is staring at one of the photos, one Jack took of the two of us, wearing our raincoats on a Dorset beach.

“There was something you said the other day,” I say, “that made me feel so low. You said you were ashamed of how you were with Jack, that you wished and regretted that you hadn’t done more and I understand that, I really do. But it’s not true, because he adored you, he really did. Fathers and sons are one thing, but it’s different with a mother. He needed you in a special way, a way he could never need me.

“Do you remember in the mornings sometimes, the times he slept late and we were already downstairs in the kitchen and he would come, still sleepy, his hair standing up, and he always wanted his mom first, to come and rest his head on your lap. Never me. He always had to go to you first. And I always loved that. I loved watching the way he so obviously cared so much about you.”

I can see Anna’s bottom lip begin to quiver, so I put my arms around her. She doesn’t pull away and buries her head into my neck.

I have a sudden and desperate urge to be with her, to know her once again, to discover the person she had become, the person she’d been even before we had first met. Because that was love. To feel sorrow that you had no part in someone’s past. To be with her when she was washing paint pots, or running through sunflower fields, or sitting at her desk, trying to make sense of her sums.

That Christmas when we went to Suffolk to visit her parents, Anna took me to her secret place. We were bored, wanted to escape the house, so we went for a walk. It was, she said, the place she would come as a child when she wanted to be alone.

We walked deep into the woods around her house, until we came to a dense

thicket of trees and shrubs. It seemed impenetrable, but Anna said there was a way through, a way she had to learn. She went first and I followed, twisting and turning, getting down on our hands and knees. After the last part where we had to crawl, we came to a huge clearing, the trees and shrubs forming an awning, as if it had been hollowed out by a giant machine.

She came here to read, she said, to escape her parents. She would bring a blanket and some fruit and cheese and stay here all day. It was pristine, untouched, a place where no human apart from Anna had been, and I don’t think —then and now—I had ever loved her more. I wished I could have seen her as a child, her knees pulled up to her chest, needles of sunlight pricking through the canopy of branches and leaves.

I pull her close to me and kiss the top of her head, and it is inadequate as a gesture, but I do not know what else I can say or do.

“Did you see this one?” I say, pulling over the laptop, wanting to divert her, to make her feel better. She clicks on a photo of Beachy Head, the day we had a picnic.

“Aw, I remember that day. The weather was just perfect.” She looked at the photo again, as if she is remembering something. “Rob, I just don’t know what to say, they’re so lovely. God, that box from the Chinese, I remember that, how he used to sleep with it.”

Anna closes the laptop. “I’m sorry, though. I can’t look at them here, or I’ll be an absolute mess. More to the point, I had forgotten what a huge geek you are.”

“We all need a project, right?”

“Right. So are you working on something new?”

I smile nervously, not sure whether to mention it or not.

“What?” Anna says, looking at me sideways.

“Well, don’t laugh, but I’m actually still trying to do something with my drones.”

Anna smiles at me, as if she was a teacher reprimanding a naughty but favored child. “I think you just need more time, Rob, more time to perfect it. How long has it been now, nearly ten years?”

Her eyes sparkle and, because we are still a little brittle with each other, she nudges me to let me know she is joking.

“Fuck off,” I say, smiling back at her. “It’s gonna be huge.”

“Actually, that reminds me, I have something for you,” she says, opening her handbag and rummaging around inside.

“Here it is,” she says to herself and hands me a small flash drive. “It took me a while, as I couldn’t bear to look at them for so long. But I finally went through all my old photos and videos of Jack. There’s something in particular you’ll like on there. Something I watched, and then the name of your website suddenly made sense.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just take a look. You’ll like it. There’s a lot of the Greece holiday on there, as well. Jack loved that holiday, every single minute of it.”

“Yeah,” I say, “he did.”

Jack, my boy. Our boy.

  *

On the train back to Cornwall, I settle at my table with a coffee and open my laptop. I plug in the flash drive Anna has given me and see that she has made folders: Birth, Christmas 2010, Christmas 2012, Spain, Brighton.

I click through every folder, every photo. Jack’s first Christmas dinner, little slices of things he didn’t eat on his Mickey Mouse plate, his paper hat pulled down over his face. Jack making a happy lion’s face in a ball pit; Jack pretending he was in prison, smiling at me through the bars of his cot.

There is a video of Jack’s Zoo, and I cannot stop myself grinning. I watch as we lined up the animals on his bed and made a hollow mound out of the duvet— a cage, Jack said, for the monkeys. And then Jack kissed my neck, a kiss so