Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [115]
She felt dread building inside her; if she spoke or looked at him the tears would spill. She stared at a button on his shirt hanging loose on its thread. She wanted to cry out, don’t abandon me! But appalled by her shocking admission of need she pressed her fingers to her lips to prevent such words of weakness from tumbling out.
He took the hand she had pressed to her mouth and held it tightly between his own.
‘If it weren’t for you, Nance,’ he said. And then was unable to continue.
Outside, the sun had been blotted out by heavy clouds seeping rain. Tyres hissed briefly. In a silence between passing cars, she heard him say, ‘I have to go back.’
She pulled her hand free and nodded, as though he had announced he needed to fill the car with gas.
‘Right.’
She waited, resigned.
‘She’s probably a statistic,’ Joe said. ‘But who knows? People did survive.’
He said, without bitterness, ‘I’ve tried to understand, to accept she thought giving me away would give me a better life. But I always come up against a wall. There has to be something more.’
And this, Nancy sees, is what is meant by the moment of truth.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘That day in Nagasaki . . .’
Weighed down by a guilt that has burdened her for half her life, she no longer has the strength to put up another barrier.
‘I talked to her, you were with Ben playing outside the house. I talked and talked. She just listened. And I found the way to get to her. Just me. Your father never knew.
‘I’d tried everything: a better future for you, a boy needs a father, all that. She was like stone. Then . . .’ Nancy faltered. ‘Then I told her I could never have a child. You were Ben’s only chance to have a son. I told her how it would finish him, never to be able to care for his only child.
‘I said to her, “You’re a young woman, you can rebuild your life, have another child. Ben can’t do that. We are in your hands.”’ She stopped, took a deep, shaky breath.
Joe had wondered, in the past, why Nancy had never produced any children of her own. It must have been hard, he says to her now, to have been aware so young that she could never bear a child. For her to live with that knowledge.
‘Ah, but I didn’t know, then. I did an evil thing. I lied.’
She tries to lick her lips but her dried-out tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth.
‘I told her I was barren and she parted with her most precious treasure. She gave you to me.’
Now was the time to go through the words she knew so well: how she had never forgiven herself. How the Church became enemy territory, God out of reach, how she could no longer pray to be forgiven. But she said none of this.
‘And then it turned out to be the truth. We tried for years. I never conceived. My lie became a self-fulfilling prophecy.’
She is shaking as he holds her. Joe is surprised by how small she is, the way her head rests, tired, on his breast. She, who has always been the strong one. He draws her close, rubs his chin gently against her hair.
‘Hey, Nance, trust a churchgoing gal to beat up on herself,’ he says, and Nancy attempts a shaky laugh, and sobs on his shoulder, in an abandonment of grief and the healing release of an old, enduring sorrow and her long agony of punishment and guilt.
PART FIVE
54
What was he expecting of Tokyo?
The Germans bombed Guernica; the Japanese bombed Chungking; the British bombed Dresden, the Americans Tokyo. Tokyo the last of a terrible line.
On one March night, two hundred and seventy-nine B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped half a million napalm-filled incendiary cylinders