A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [29]
“The day that you found Andrew you became the present, the end of the story, the end of my story, the reply to the last unanswered question,” she told him. “And you were the end of Andrew’s story as well. You were, in a way, the last thing he told me. Toward the end, one of the very last things he said aloud was something about a hook of the past sewing us together. By then it was difficult to grasp what he was talking about. I’ve always pictured the kind of needle sailors used for making sails. I saw these in the museum … the museum where I sometimes do volunteer work.” She paused. “They look a bit like long silver question marks.”
Andrew had gone to the museum to see the needles after she had told him about them, but he had gone on a day when he was certain she would not be there. It was she who had insisted on this, unable by then to bear the idea of seeing him in a place that was not entirely their own. The whole room between them. She had read that line in a book somewhere and had never forgotten it. The room was never between them when they met privately. The room was a part of them then, an extension of the story Andrew was building, sentence by sentence, the long journey through the tangled highways of his family’s past.
“Memories are fixed, aren’t they?” she said. “They might diminish, they might fade, but they don’t change, become something else. I am now, you see, his memory.” She sat forward in her chair. “Andrew thought he was the history that his forebears created, he felt responsible for that history, I think, and for those people. They are my responsibility now.”
Jerome glanced at her. Then he looked quickly away as if he felt suddenly shy or embarrassed. Sylvia couldn’t tell by the expression on his face what he was thinking.
“I’m not certain that what you said about memory is correct,” he said. “I think it can change.”
“Can it? Perhaps it only becomes stronger, purer.” What she wanted was to sharpen her memories of Andrew, memories she feared were beginning to separate themselves from her. She had never before felt separate from Andrew. No, that was not quite accurate. There had been times when she had wanted to remain apart even in her imagination, times when she would spend an entire day examining, one by one, the goblets and candlesticks and wineglasses of her mother’s cranberry glass collection rather than think of him at all, because the slightest shadow of him in her mind brought with it too much pain. But once she had seen him again, she would begin to crave inclusion, the encircling arm, the connection. She had never felt anything like it before. She began to believe that she could feel him moving toward her and then turning away from her, even when they were hundreds of miles apart. Such was her affliction. Despite her parents’ care, despite her husband’s love, she believed that the only family she had had until him was the family of the dead. Objects, maps, and vanished children.
“What kind of a young man found Andrew, I wondered,” she said to Jerome now. “How would what he saw have affected him?” Because she read that he was an artist, she suspected that he might have been looking for a way to become haunted, by something, anything, and that being the case, this event might have entered his psyche like a dark, permanent gift. “All I really knew about you