Digging Out (37 page)

“Are both exactly like him!” Dafydd fills in quickly.

“How did you know what I was going to say, you lucky sods, you?” Evan says, slapping Dafydd on the back. “Nothing like genetics!”

I have moved to Gram’s graveside. We all stop and stare quietly at the words on her stone:

LET THE RIVER RUN THROUGH US
AND EMPTY INTO OUR HEARTS.

“That’s beautiful,” Dafydd says, looking up at me.

“Your mam wrote it,” Evan says. “It was part of a poem she wrote for your gram.”

I look at Evan, and he reads the question on my face.

“Because I know everything about you.” He winks.

Later that evening we all go back to Mam’s. Many of the neighbors bring food and drink. Someone has brought a lamb with all the trimmings, chips and many plates of overcooked vegetables.

And Evan is right. Hannah’s sore throat has gone quickly, the fever broken after her long nap the day Da died.

In bed that night, after we make sweet and very quiet love, he says, “Why are you leaving me again?”

On top of him, I kiss him on his eyes and his nose and then deeply on his mouth.

How can I leave this man who seems, in almost every way, everything I’ve always wanted? “I have to,” I say. “There’s still so much I have to unravel.”

“But why can’t you unravel it from here?”

“Because I can’t. I have a life back there,” I say sadly. But also just around the edges, there’s that familiar feeling of being cornered like some wild animal. “And Hannah has a life. School starts for her soon. I can’t just stay.” He starts to pull away and I stop him.

“I am not leaving you forever. Just for now. Come to Los Angeles. Come see how I live. I want you to know what
I’ve
grown into. You could come back with Hannah and me.” And the moment I say it, I know the impossibility of the request.

“In August I have the Royal Court appearance.”

“Well, perhaps I can figure out a way to come back for that. Or you could come after that.”

“After that, school starts. And then the anniversary of the disaster.”

There is a long silence between us.

“I am not leaving you in the same way,” I say.

“Why does it all feel so familiar?”

“Please, Evan, understand. I need to be where I lived with Marc so I can figure out where to put him and his other family. I need to reexamine all the stuff that has occurred in my life that until now I wasn’t willing to look at. Separate it all out and see where it ends and I begin.” I don’t mention that there is still a large part of me that is paralyzed by the thought of living in Aberfan.

I want to ask him to come live with me in Los Angeles, but I know
it is as much of an impossibility as it is for me to stay in Aberfan. Just the same, I need to hear him say it so that he will know, this time, that it is not all my fault, my leaving him.

“After you have finished your performances, you could come live with me?”

Another long silence. We don’t say any more.

We put Dafydd on the bus early the next morning for Cardiff. His plane leaves in the evening from Heathrow to New York.

“I’d like to come in August for the Buckingham Palace ceremony,” Dafydd tells Evan before he leaves. “I want to know what she keeps in that purse of hers.”

“I’d love to have you come,” Evan replies, looking straight at Dafydd despite the fact that I stand between them. “Why don’t you come a day or two early so we can go round London together? I’ve a friend in Soho who will loan us his flat.”

They shake on it.

After Dafydd is gone, I walk the long way to Mam and Da’s, everything feeling completely different from the way it did even a day ago. The sky has clouded over and it is dank and cold, now a typical dreary Welsh morning. I have a sudden feeling of wanting to be done here. To be on my way. The once wide-open space and grand view of the valleys are again closing in on me, and I know in part that it is my way of trying to block the pain.

An hour later, when I am sitting at breakfast with Mam, Beti says, “I’ve decided to stay on for a fortnight. You’re looking tired, Allie. You go on home, then. Colin will go with you and the children. Get Hannah back to school on time. I’ll bring Mam home with me soon as we’ve tidied everything here. It’ll be good for her to have a time away with all of us in the States.”

As I pull my own loose ends together at Mam and Da’s, I try to include Evan in everything. He puts up a friendly front, but it seems an effort for him even to have a full conversation with me. He is already moving far, far away, tuning me out, the distance between us becoming as wide as the great blue-black Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

On the morning Hannah and I leave, he makes us a big Welsh breakfast with heaps of fried bread, thick rashers of bacon and fried eggs.

“So if your book is due to the publisher in August, you must have a lot of work ahead?” Evan asks.

“I do.”

“August is a big month for all of us,” he says, dishing out the food.

“It’ll be a whole year then,” Hannah says. “A whole horrible year since Daddy died.”

“Yes,” I say. “A whole year.”

Evan gives me a long look and I am hoping that he finally understands why I am having to leave, why even coming back for the ceremony in August will be hard. I am thinking he can see that my life is not only about me.

As I have arranged, Mr. Jenkins, from the car service, knocks promptly at three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Ms. Davies,” he says, bowing low. “I trust your trip home has been a good one?”

I nod, once again fighting back tears. Mr. Jenkins gathers our bags and puts them into the boot of his Daimler.

“Lovely car,” Evan says.

“Come with us, Evan,” Hannah pleads. “We’ve got lots of room in our house.”

He rumples her hair, as has become his habit, and crouches down to give her a hug. “You take care, lovey.”

Then it is time for us. We stand face-to-face, not knowing what to do.

“Will we speak?” I ask.

“Of course we’ll speak.”

We wrap our arms around each other, both tentative. I kiss him. “I love you.”

He nods, a small smile on his face. “Me, too.”

As Mr. Jenkins turns the car around, from the backseat I see that Evan stands watching us as the car moves down the drive, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

Field after field passes away as we move away from my home.

P
ART
III

A
UGUST 2003

E
van.

There is not a blue-sky fall day that he isn’t in my thoughts. I dream of him, write him poems and letters, call him.

At first he is so distant, I wonder if he is trying to put me off.

“Evan?”

“Hello, Alys.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“How’s the choir going?”

“Fine.”

One-word answers. I know he is hurt, responding from that hurt. In the old days I might have given up. But I can’t stop myself, can’t cut him off; he is there all the time, inside me, amazing and frightening.

Each morning I ask myself the same questions: Can I go back? Can I live in Aberfan? And each morning, the answers, hard as they are to bear, are no.

Then, one afternoon while I am watching Hannah in a soccer game, she has a breakaway and is running down the middle of the field. I am jumping up and down, shouting her on, and I actually look around for him, for Evan. I realize there is no one on earth with whom I would rather share this moment. When Hannah kicks the ball into the goal, I know I have to figure something out.

Marc’s absence is still a black-and-blue bruise I touch tenderly and often.

Since our return, I have packed up his scores and donated them to the UCLA Film School. His clothes, those Dafydd couldn’t use, I gave to a local synagogue, and I packed up most of the photos that hung everywhere in our house. There are still many of him hanging in the library and in Hannah’s room. I keep circling back and finding less and less of him and myself where we once were, together.

Last week, in my garden, I planted artichokes, and it excites me to think about the future possibility of digging into their sweet hidden hearts.

My latest book of poetry comes out in the spring, and already there are book parties planned in California and a small tour in the Midwest and the Northeast to look forward to. Getting back to work has helped place me in the world again. I feel less insecure and more as if there might be some future for me.

Mam flew back with Beti. She stayed with Beti and her family for a week and with Hannah and me for three weeks. Her presence in my home filled me with a deep pleasure, healing all of us, filling up the sad space in each of our lives. She loved our mountains and the sea, the warm air and bright sun. We took long walks, during which I really opened up, telling her about my feelings for Evan and the conflict of not being able to live in Aberfan, having made a life and a home in America. I asked her a lot of questions about her own experiences after the disaster, and how she was able to stay with Da.

“I can’t really explain all of it, Alys. It was such a tough time.”

“But did you ever think about leaving him, or leaving Aberfan?”

“No, I never really did. It may have passed through my mind, but I couldn’t have done that. It was too many years we’d been together, too many nights. It would have been too hard for either of us to start over.

“But don’t compare us, Alys. That would be very dangerous for you. The truth is, I may not have actually moved out of the house, but I certainly moved away emotionally. And I guess that meant I moved away from you, too.” She puts both her arms around me. “I hope I still have some time to make that up to you.”

I am so grateful for this apology, for how aware Mam seems to have become. Any small sore spot left inside me seems smoothed. My own experience has taught me how hard it is when your world falls apart to take care of anything outside of yourself. Perhaps if Mam
had been more attentive I’d never have learned how to reach inside and take care of myself.

“Leaving all of you back then seems so selfish now,” I say sadly.

“Like your gram used to say, ‘You just can’t take things out of context—sometimes you miss the whole reason for an action.’ It was just too hard for you to stay. You’ve said it’s even hard for you now. Maybe when you get yourself clear of these latest tragedies you might feel differently?” Mam smiles and pats my cheek. “Home will be there. And I bet Evan will, too.”

A shiver runs through me.

Home. Such a huge concept. It seems like I’ve been looking for home a long time. I know it is more than just a place, Los Angeles or Aberfan—more than any one person, Marc, my children, even Evan. In the past, home has been the place that opens for me when I feel afraid, lonely or brokenhearted. It is the place where a poem begins for me. It is a wild place, a place more often now of great romance, as light and bright as an angel’s wing, a place I am just beginning to feel good in.

A week before Evan and the choir’s royal audience at Buckingham Palace, I am pruning the lemon tree. I think how well Hannah is doing now that we are back—particularly considering we’ve only just passed the year anniversary of Marc’s death. Work left on my poetry book isn’t creative as much as line editing. I wonder if I could sneak away for a long weekend for Evan’s big day this Sunday. The more I think about it, the more desperate I am to be in London for the performance. I call Elizabeth in Durango and ask her to come stay with Hannah. I intend to surprise Evan, and hope Dafydd won’t feel encroached upon. I pack my bag, excited about the possibility of being there with Evan, imagining a long walk in Hyde Park, perhaps a rowboat ride on the Thames, a candlelighted dinner at some small Italian restaurant in Soho. I imagine the three of us together, Dafydd and his parents. I let the full possibility of us as a family roll around in my head and then in my heart. I look for the telltale signs of guilt and fear and I am surprised at how little of either there seems to be. But a night before I am to travel, Elizabeth calls to say she’s broken two ribs in a river rafting accident and she won’t be able to help out.

I have, of course, done an endless amount of thinking regarding
Gabriella and her relationship with Marc. In fact, in the last months, it feels like it has consumed my every waking moment.

I loved Marc—that’s for sure. I loved being with him. But because I’d run from home and hadn’t ever really faced what I’d run from, I was in many ways emotionally frozen, my soul reined in tight. And while Marc grew, I struggled to keep control in order to hold on to the small amount of safety I felt I had. And as Marc tried to penetrate, I became less penetrable. In the beginning, Dafydd stood between us. And later, Hannah. They were my foils. With them in the forefront of our relationship, I didn’t have to push deeper.

I was so young. We were so young. Despite the fact that somehow we’d just missed each other, Marc and I had managed with all our love to raise remarkable children.

And now there is Isabel. Not my child, but Marc’s child. And because of all Marc and I had been together, I begin to feel that Isabel is owed the same chance as Dafydd and Hannah.

So just after Mam leaves, when Gabriella rings me up, I am prepared. She is in Los Angeles. Before she plunges in, I surprise her by asking if she will meet me for a quick dinner at an Indian restaurant in Beverly Hills.

I arrive an hour early and nervously window-shop, finding myself in front of the map store, Marc’s favorite. Inside, I scan the walls, moving up close to a map of the Cote d’Azur. I locate Nice, where we spent a splendid fortnight when Hannah was two while Marc worked on a Steve Morgan film. Such luxury, being in Europe together at the expense of a movie company. The continuous stretch of clear blue water, white sand beach and warm sunshine was magical. I remembered the open-air market spread for what seemed miles with stacks of fresh fruits and vegetables. Each morning, we consumed rich steaming cafe au lait with a fresh warm baguette. In the evenings, while the sun set over the sea, we spooned thick, rich bouillabaisse and sipped the light local pinot noir in small cafes on the edge of the Mediterranean.