Outside, in the hallway, time continues. They can hear the voices of nurses, of visitors in a nearby room. An elderly man is wheeled out on a gurney, his wife holding his hand as he glides past.
Ansel says, “Would you tell him I’ll come back this evening?”
“I will.”
“Do you need anything?”
He cannot read her expression. She seems lost in her own thoughts, trying to turn over a line, a word, that she cannot quite comprehend. What was it Alistair had said, so many months ago? No more questions, no more doubts.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I am.”
Behind the words, he sees loss as if it were a tremor of light around her. Ansel walks towards the doorway, is about to leave the room when she returns to the window. Her back is to him, dark hair against her shoulders, and she gazes out over the shining city.
At home, after nightfall, the house is unbearably quiet. In the kitchen, he switches the radio on, listens as a physicist describes the latest images transmitted back by the Hubble Telescope. Ansel has seen them on the Internet: a nebula six light-years wide, impossibly strange and glorious. The shape, with its swirling tentacles of dust clouds, is somehow familiar. To him, it resembles a deep-sea creature let loose in space. Or one could imagine it minuscule, a dot in a Petri dish, now magnified large.
He tries to imagine Gail in the kitchen, preparing a meal as the radio plays. She stands with one hand resting on the counter, her eyes closed, listening intently.
On that night when she returned from Amsterdam, he had been waiting for her at the airport, watching the unending line of travellers emerging through the double doors, pushing their baggage ahead of them as they crushed into the waiting crowd.
For a long time she did not see him. At last Ansel reached her. “There you are,” she said.
“Here I am.”
The crowd parted around them as if they were an island in a flowing river.
In the car on the way home, she had asked him to detour towards the peninsula, to the cliffs on the west side where the city ended and the ocean began. It was a clear night, and sitting on the hood of the car she had pointed out the glow of a lighthouse on the tip of the northern bank. The air smelled of brine and the cold.
She seemed exhausted from the flight, distracted, and yet she had not wanted to go home. They talked at first about Harry Jaarsma, then she told him about travelling north to the province of Friesland, about someone she had met there, a man named Sipke Vermeulen. She said that he had known her father. “There was a place we visited,” she said. “To arrive there, we drove across a piece of land that, fifty years ago, lay beneath the sea. Maybe one day, we can go back together and I’ll be able to show you.”
Neither of them had wanted to leave, and so they had remained there, despite the lateness of the hour, wrapped in their winter coats. She told him about William Sullivan’s diary. Something about it had moved her, the numbers now transformed into sentences. She said that Kathleen had wanted to open a window from her father’s life onto her own.
“Remember when we were kids,” she said, “and the world consisted of the streets we knew, the streets we’d walked on. I always wanted to keep going, to roam as far as I could and make everything a part of me.”
For a moment, he cannot move. His grief takes hold again, the pain worse than it has been in many months. He goes upstairs to their bedroom. Gail’s clothes lie neatly folded on the bed, on the floor, and he gathers them into plastic bags. Each one is familiar, it has a scent and a memory. He lays her sweaters in a box, covers them with her winter coat. When the last piece of clothing is put away, he feels a spreading numbness, a distant calm. He sits down on the bed, then lies back.
The skylight above frames the evening sky. He remembers how, when he was a child, he and his sister would climb onto the roof of the garage. They would stretch out on the warm tiles, gazing up at the heavens. His sister told him to hold still. Could he see the clouds moving? He must have been only six or seven years old, and he remembers, even now, how the ground seemed to lose its substance. He felt the Earth making its rotation and he saw himself as a tiny thing, a breath, carried along with it. When he sat up, the sky retreated, giving way to the tips of the highest trees. Giving way to the house, the familiar details.
Now, he feels that same vertigo, a sense that he is falling. He gets to his feet, imagining her near. Love, this heaviness, this weight, holds him steady.
The rain begins, but Matthew remains outside for a little while longer. In the park, there are boys playing soccer, a blur of green and red jerseys looping across the grass. They clap their hands, calling to one another, put on a burst of speed to keep the ball in play. He sees a young man coming towards him. He wears a suit and an overcoat, as if he has just come from work, and he makes his way across the wet grass to a child who stands waiting, knapsack over one shoulder. Together they watch the game. The father stands awkwardly, trying to shield them both from the rain with a folded newspaper. The child looks straight ahead, but slowly, imperceptibly, he shifts his body sideways so that he is resting against his father’s legs.
He tries to remember himself at that age, so small and serious. He sees the mission school as it was in the late 1930s, atap roofs in Sandakan town, the little boats anchored in the harbour. When he went back for the last time, people still could not talk about the war. If he mentioned it, they would shake their heads, their eyes would grow distant. “Terrible times,” they said. Opening and closing the memory in the same breath. “But it was long ago, wasn’t it? Those days are behind us.”
“Yes,” he had said, nodding, agreeing.
Days later, when the plane touched down in Jakarta, he’d felt as if he had awoken in a country that had no markers, no guides. There, with Ani, the past was no longer just a memory, a fog, it had the face and shape of a boy. Wideh had stood with his hand resting on his mother’s knee, the gesture reminding Matthew of one he himself had made long ago. He saw in Wideh’s face the resemblance to both Ani and himself, a gathering together of what had once been lost.
His son had been shy at first, gazing at the grass by Matthew’s feet. But when Wideh lifted his face and pointed out the kites above them, some part of him seemed to unfold, delight emanating from him. Between mother and child, another language existed. He could not bring himself to disturb Wideh’s happiness, he could not let the truth be spoken, tell him that his father had returned only to disappear and leave them again. He saw that this part of his life must always remain broken.
He went home to Canada. When he opened the door of the house, all the lights were off. Upstairs, in the doorway to her bedroom, he listened to the even sigh of his daughter’s breath, and then he found Clara, already asleep, the lamp still on, a book open on the pillow beside her. When she woke, he would find the way to tell her. She would not look away, she would know what the future could be.
He had remembered this last night, when Ansel came to the house and they’d sat together on the front porch, in the unusually mild night. As Clara had requested, Ansel had brought with him a copy of Gail’s documentary, which had just been finished. Clara set the CD into the player and then there was the sound of an airplane lifting off. Newsreels announced the start of the war. Harry Jaarsma, the cryptographer, was introduced, and then Sullivan’s two children.
It was a little more than a year ago now, Matthew remembered, that he had walked with his daughter near this field. Gail had just returned from the Netherlands. He thought she looked well and told her so.
At first, she had seemed anxious, unable to settle. It reminded Matthew of when she was a child, the bursts of energy that left both him and Clara amazed. Gail would race around the house like a being possessed, then collapse on the living room floor, gazing up, dreaming. He asked about her work in Amsterdam, and as she spoke she seemed to calm, telling him about William Sullivan and the diary he had kept some fifty years ago during the war. How, when she read the pages, her own emotions had unsettled her, the intensity of them, the compassion she felt for all that he had set aside.