A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [138]
“You could stay in the city,” Jerome persisted. “If money is a problem you could probably get paid for making those maps.”
“Not very much,” said Sylvia, still smiling. “It’s mostly volunteer work. No, no I have to go back.”
“Why?” asked Jerome. “Why?” In the background he could hear Mira laughing at something Malcolm had said. Little did she know, he thought. Everything in him now wanted to protect this woman.
“Because people do what they have to.”
“Just tell me one thing,” said Jerome, his eyes burning, “just one thing then.”
“Yes?”
“Was there ever a condition?”
“Oh Jerome,” said Sylvia softly, sadly, “there is always, always a condition.” She turned slowly away from him and walked across the room to join her husband at the door.
Just before stepping over the threshold, Sylvia handed the envelope she had been holding to Jerome. “The answer to what happened to Branwell and Ghost is in this envelope. Or, at least the way I imagine it. It’s not long, but still a kind of final chapter, I suppose.”
They drove out of the city with excruciating slowness in the thick of rush hour, silence a third but strangely benign presence in the car. Once, when they were halted by gridlock on a major thoroughfare, Malcolm pointed out a garbage truck inching down the opposite side of the street, stopping every twenty feet or so to pick up trash. “ What the hell are they doing collecting garbage at this time of the day?” he asked with irritation, not expecting an answer.
Sylvia glanced over her shoulder to look at something as ordinary as a garbage truck, even though her thoughts were still with Andrew, still with the way she had been able to reconstruct his mouth just a few minutes before, the curve of his brows, and how this reconstruction had felt smooth and inevitable, like recalling with pleasure piano music or an old poem one had memorized in one’s childhood. She was about to let her mind slide back into Andrew’s embrace when something caught her eye. A young man, holding on to a steel bar with one hand, rode on the back of the truck, and each time the vehicle stopped he swung easily down to the pavement, picked up a plastic bag with the sweep of an arm, then tossed this bag over his head into the bin, the motion so fluid and filled with such grace, it was as perfect as a dance. Sylvia was able to watch this young man, this repeated gesture, for three of four minutes until the truck moved beyond her peripheral vision. The thought struck her that if she and Andrew had had a son early on, he would have been about that age. By twisting in her seat she might have been able to see more of the dance, but the traffic had begun to move again, the light had changed.
“Youth,” she thought as she was driven away, “how beautiful.”
Mira was holding on to Jerome as he wept, shaking in her arms like the child he had never permitted himself to be. Her own eyes were filled with tears, but she would not let herself go fully into his sorrow. This was his territory, his arena; he had opened the door to show her, but he did not want her to enter these dark spaces and she knew this and loved him harder for it.
After Sylvia had left, he had kicked a cardboard box across the room and punched his fist through the temporary wall that marked the bedroom space. “I want her to get away!” he had yelled at an amazed Mira. “I want her to be finally free of it!” Mira, her eyes wide and mouth partly open, had remained standing as if she would be glued forever to the time when a young man she thought she had known had punched the wall.
“She wasn’t your mother, Jerome,” she had said quietly.
“You know nothing about my mother,” he had shouted, and then, once he had seen and fully registered her shocked expression, he had added more softly, “but, goddamn it, she was another chance.”
He had told Mira then about the nights he had spent listening to his father roam the apartment like an angry nocturnal beast, the sounds of bottles breaking, his father collapsing