“And that was you?” Her voice was timid and quaky. “You were broken?”
I’m still broken. I’m still alone. I just didn’t know it until I had someone to sit next to.
“I was broken, Helen, yes.”
I could see the questions behind her eyes, and she dropped her knees, her hand dithering in the air as she considered making contact. She didn’t. “What was… I mean… what did…?”
“A beautiful, gifted, vivacious young woman called Anna,” I said. “She died and she left me broken. Heartbroken.”
“Anna…” she repeated. “Who was she?”
I cleared my throat and stared at the river as the sun disappeared behind the trees.
“Anna was my wife.”
***
Helen
My wife.
The words smacked me in the temples, and my heart was racing.
His wife.
He had a wife.
And she was dead.
“I didn’t know…” I took a breath. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry… I’m really sorry… I shouldn’t have pushed… I’m such an idiot.”
“It’s ok, Helen. I rarely talk about it, grief often makes those around us feel uncomfortable, even with the very best intentions, so I keep it to myself. Anna was full of life, and soul, and spirit. I prefer to remember her that way rather than dwell on her death. That’s often been a lot easier in theory than in practice, of course.”
“Please don’t think I’m uncomfortable, please don’t.” A brave hand reached out for his and squeezed it tight. He curled his fingers around mine and didn’t pull away. “You can talk, if you need to. If you want to… I’m a good listener, I think. I hope.”
“You are a good listener,” he said. “You have an intuitive soul and you see more than you say. It’s a good quality, don’t ever lose it.”
“When did she… um… when did she pass?”
“Some days it feels like she was here yesterday, other days it feels like a lifetime ago. In reality, it’ll be nine years this coming January.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Yes, it is.”
I had so many questions, so many things I wanted to say, trying to find the right words, words that would help me scoop his soul out of him — all the pain and the loss and the broken pieces — and lay them all out on the bench between us and love those pieces until they were better again.
But they would never be better again. How could something like that ever be better again?
I felt like a stupid teenager in stupid fake clothes, in my stupid flouncy shirt and my stupid frilly underwear, as though those stupid superficial props would have ever snared a man like Mr Roberts. They’d never snare a man like Mr Roberts.
I tried to string some questions together, wondering what questions are even acceptable to ask. I had no experience of death, or marriage, or grief. Or anything.
He solved the problem for me. “It was a car accident. She was on her way home from setting up an exhibition at the Birmingham Academy.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“So am I.”
“She was an artist?”
“A very talented artist, yes. She was twenty-eight when she died, just beginning to make real inroads in her career. It was her first solo exhibition, she was so excited. And I was so proud.”
“It’s so unfair. I don’t know how you’d even start to deal with something like that.”
“Slowly.” He smiled and it was sad and it hurt my stomach. He let go of my hand to reach for a cigarette. “You know what’s strange? What I think about sometimes?”
I shook my head.
“I was lucky enough to know Anna for ten wonderful years before she passed, and I always try to remind myself just how lucky I was. But now, every so often, I realise that soon I’ll have been without her for longer than I was with her. And that seems so strange to me.”
“That’s beautiful, that you focus on how lucky you were.” And it was beautiful. He was beautiful. Even his pain was beautiful.
He met my eyes, and he was so unguarded, so open and vulnerable, and in that one moment all the air around me seemed to disappear. “Those nights after Anna died, the sun would go down and the house would seem so lonely then, so quiet. I felt like I’d die from the pain before the sun came back up. But then one night it occurred to me that grief is the ultimate price we pay for love. And to grieve so hard means that you have loved so much, so very much. And I’d grieve all over again, die every single night without question, rather than have lost out on loving a woman like Anna. She was worth it, to love so intensely was worth it. A love like that is worth any price.” I pictured him staring out of the window at the rain, those fleeting moments I’d been watching as his guard came down, always watching. And now I knew.