Hurrying home under a sky the colour of spilled tea, Thomass mind wandered to the morning when his wife told him she was expecting. To surprise her, he had set about arranging a celebratory supper, carefully laying a table with cheeses and bowls of blackberries, oranges, and pomegranatethe colours seemed richer than usual, as though borrowed from a palette in a dream. Three long years had slipped past in their quiet attempts for a child, and at last the moment was real; Thomas felt joy like a belltower ringing in his chest.
Before she returned, he drifted through the rain-laced streets of Oxford, buying a pair of delicate silver earrings. He was certain theyd light up her face to receive them. Yet when he stepped through their door, the world shifted oddly. Mary was ghost-white, her eyes glassy, and she moved as if wading through fog, climbing into bed without a word for supper. Shadows danced oddly across the walls. Thomas, uneasy, reached for the phone to ring the surgery, but Marys voicedistant and hollowtold him not to worry, to simply leave her be.
So they sat side by side in the watery hush of evening, their voices barely brushing one another, and the roast dinner cooled untouched as if the hands of time itself had become weak. The days wobbled forward, folding in and out of each other, until the long-awaited birth pains twisted their house into something unfamiliar. In the night, a nurse announced in a singsong echo that they had a son.
But following the midwife down endless hospital corridors that bent in impossible angles, Thomass steps became heavy and slow. In the doctors office, a shape behind the desk told him gravely that the boys legs would fight him, that walking would be uncertain territory. Stranger still, Mary, his Mary, declared that she would not keep the child. Her words hung in the air, strange and shimmering. No matter how Thomas pleaded, or how Marys mother tried in her own trembling way, she sat unmoved, her face set like a mask from some ancient play.
Finally Thomas gathered himself up, agreed to take the child, and the next morning passed through a London that twisted in the morning mist. He packed Marys belongings, locked their flat in Ealing, and bought a crib and pram for baby Marcus, the notes in his pocket turning into crisp pounds that fluttered down the high street.
Steeped in a resolve that tasted of steel, Thomas became a scholar of his sons rare condition, scanning books that seemed to rewrite themselves with every reading. Through village whispers, he heard of a woman skilled with children, a healer of sorts. He set out, expecting to find an old cronewhich is perhaps why he was not surprised to discover the cottage veiled in lavender mist and the woman at the gate young, with a laugh like rain on glass. She would help Marcus, she said, but only if Thomas would stay as well.
Six months floated by like moons on a river. Marcus dragged himself across the creaking floorboards, trailing dreams behind him. Thomas and the young womanher name was Harrietgrew close, as if drawn together by the very logic of this dream-world. Although years seemed irrelevant here, and age a flicker, Thomas confessed he had no wish for divorce; he told Harriet his feelings, and her reply was a smile as wide as the English countryside. They married beneath an ash tree that hummed with birdsong. Now Marcus had a loving mother, and Thomas a devoted wife.
Two years stitched themselves into thistledown and spring storms. One day, in the bright corridors of St. Georges Hospital, Thomas, Harriet, and Marcus celebrated the arrival of a new baby. For a moment, time folded in on itself and Mary reappeared. She saw Marcusa boy running wobbly-legged, laughing through a puddle of lightand her eyes filled with a soaring admiration. In that strangeness, all paths seemed right, all endings curled softly into new beginnings.
