101 Words

He spots the paints when I decide it’s time to go through your things. I tell him not now. Not yet. He sees red, kicking my coffee everywhere. I kneel, surveying the tan Arabica sinking into the powder blue rug. We both cry. I reach out and he cuddles me.

“Sorry, mummy.”

I try and remember where the paintbrushes are.

I watch him, as I watched you; the frantic strokes causing paint to splash his hair and face. He is contented. Swirling my brush into his multicolour mix, I draw a smiley face. He adds purple glasses. He never forgot you.

Love is art. I understood that as I watched his brushstrokes. He was in the park painting a tree. I was sitting on a bench nearby. After deciding to abandon my fears and be brave, I approached him.

When I asked him about his painting, his response was simply that he loved trees. It was then when I decided I loved him and always would. I’d like to think he decided the same about me then, too.

We exchanged numbers, my excuse being that I wanted to keep up with his work. We are now married. He paints, and I write.

The first time, you were my little seed. Five weeks old. Just a sesame, they said. I knew you were much more.

From poppyseed to blueberry to kidney bean, that autumn you made it through a riot of shapes and colours. I laced a nest of fingers around my belly; thought I kept you safe.

I was wrong.

This time, I stay as still as you allow. I curl into a ball, bedbound, and count the minutes, hours. A knot of prayers inside my hands.

My little mango, twenty-three weeks. Sweet. Plump. Almost ripe. Almost.

I need you to reach twenty-four.

“Why is it still raining? The storm finished an hour ago.”

I had taken my granddaughter for a walk in the woods. A week had passed since the funeral and she had barely spoken a word since.

“Some of the raindrops haven’t made it to the earth,” I explained. “They’ve been trapped in the leaves, waiting for the wind to knock them loose.”

“Oh. Like when you cry about something long after it’s happened,” she replied thoughtfully. “Even though time has passed, it doesn’t mean your tears have fallen.”

“Yes,” I whispered, her words and her suffering piercing my heart. “Precisely.”

There wasn’t enough holy water but it would have to do. Guilt pricked Father John’s conscience at getting books wet. He spied books three and nine of his sister’s favorite novel series in the heap. He’d never gotten past book two. Other books he liked were there, totally helpless. He worked faster, sprinkling the water higher. He finished the blessing just as his brother priests arrived with the torches.

“You can’t destroy these books. They’ve been blessed.”

Father Austin laughed. “Brother, you’ve forgotten an important lesson. One of the only ways to get rid of something blessed is to burn it.”

At some point, Stephen started cracking his knuckles in the shower: his fingers, wrists, even his neck. He did this in a specific rhythm, one he spontaneously performed once when he was 14 during a family vacation in Orlando. He remembered these details exactly because the nasty habit caused his father to strike him as Mickey Mouse paraded down Main Street.

Decades later, Stephen made this rhythm a ritual. He surrendered to the waterfall as it held him and kept the tears secret. And he remembered his father, and how he had loved him and hated him at the same time.