Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [51]
On one shelf were a number of small objects: a cylindrical seashell patterned with purple whorls; the tiny skeleton of a fish with every needle-sharp bone intact; a spray of dried seaweed as delicate as carved jade. She had touched these objects, moved them when dusting, without ever really looking at them. She saw now that they were all surviving evidence of past life: a creature had inhabited the shell; a fish had clothed the skeleton; the seaweed had once bloomed in salt water.
There was one last object, man-made, not growing in nature: a wooden spinning top, its paint so worn with time that it had returned to monochrome simplicity, the surface giving no more than a hint here and there of what had once been brilliant red and yellow.
She reached out and touched the battered toy with her fingertip. Her voice thick with tears she said, ‘Oh, Joey, the spinning top, you went back for the top. If only you hadn’t gone back, if I hadn’t gone after you . . .’
And once again she was stabbed by the ugly, racking pain of guilt, of regret – that old lament: Oh, to turn back the clock. But to when? Which moment?
‘That day,’ she began, ‘when I heard you call out . . .’
She had raced back into the paper house and seen the woman crumpled on the matting floor, Joey crouched next to her, his small hand tugging at the white scarf that was slowly dissolving into crimson. A moment of nightmare. Nancy knew what she was looking at: one of the passengers on the ship had explained the Japanese tradition of suicide. Head whirling, holding back panic, she scooped up the child and the gleaming wooden toy beside him, and fled.
Later she had rationalised her act: the boy’s mother had already agreed that Joey was to go to his father. With the woman dead on the floor, what would be the point of subjecting them all to unanswerable questions? An official inquiry could deny them custody, deprive the boy of his one remaining parent, lock him away in an alien institution. But had she been certain that Joey’s mother was dead? She could have looked more closely, tried to get help. What kind of a person was she, to have snatched up the child and run from the house? Overtaken by a sort of madness, she had abandoned her humanity.
That day the gates clanged shut. All ease left her. A Catholic could have turned to confession; Nancy had only her silent prayers, asking forgiveness of her sin. Her sins: there was more than one to acknowledge. Abandoning a young woman to die alone was only part of it.
Joey said, ‘But if you were unsure, why did you tell me she was dead? You could have checked, found she had survived; you could have told me then.’
And risked losing him. She recalled the day she became a mother, a lifetime ago, collecting Joey from school and he leapt into her arms, clutching her around the neck, almost strangling her. A passing parent glanced, startled, at the child wrapped so tightly round the fair-haired woman. Joey had called out to her, ‘This is my mom!’ and the woman nodded, moving on, looking away, taken aback by the vehemence of a rather obvious statement.
But Nancy had held the small body close against her shoulder and said, silently, and with amazement, ‘This is my son.’
She could have made enquiries, discovered that Joey’s mother was alive. Yes, she could have. But would it have been better? Might he, perhaps, have said he wanted to go home, to his real mother? ‘Perhaps’ is a dangerous word; who knows which way things could have gone.
As it was, Nancy took on the thankless role of survivor. Nancy had permitted him to grieve for a perfect, lost mother, a clean grief from which new shoots could grow.
Now, grimly, he confronted a different version of the past. ‘So she just gave me away. She didn’t want me—’
‘She wanted what was best for you, and for your father.’
Well, that was the truth; a version of the truth, not the whole truth.
And what now? she wondered. Would Joey write to Cho-Cho, tell her he wanted to come ‘home’? To his real mother,