The Ocean at the End of the Lane (18 page)

Epilogue

I
sat on
the dilapidated green bench beside the duck pond, in the back of the red-brick
farmhouse, and I thought about my kitten.

I only remembered that Ocean had grown into a cat,
and that I had adored her for years. I wondered what had happened to her, and
then I thought,
It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer:
death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

A door opened in the farmhouse, and I heard feet on
the path. Soon the old woman sat down beside me. “I brung you a cup of tea,” she
said. “And a cheese and tomato sandwich. You've been out here for quite a while.
I thought you'd probably fallen in.”

“I sort of did,” I told her. And, “Thank you.” It
had become dusk, without my noticing, while I had been sitting there.

I took the tea, and sipped it, and I looked at the
woman, more carefully this time. I compared her to my memories of forty years
ago. I said, “You aren't Lettie's mother. You're her grandmother, aren't you?
You're Old Mrs. Hempstock.”

“That's right,” she said, unperturbed. “Eat your
sandwich.”

I took a bite of my sandwich. It was good, really
good. Freshly baked bread, sharp, salty cheese, the kind of tomatoes that
actually taste like something.

I was awash in memory, and I wanted to know what it
meant. I said, “Is it true?” and felt foolish. Of all the questions I could have
asked, I had asked that.

Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “What you remembered?
Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll
not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or
not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents
away for all it means anything.”

There was another question I needed answered. I
said, “Why did I come here?”

She looked at me as if it were a trick question.
“The funeral,” she said. “You wanted to get away from everyone and be on your
own. So first of all you drove back to the place you'd lived in as a boy, and
when that didn't give you what you missed, you drove to the end of the lane and
you came here, like you always do.”

“Like I always do?” I drank some more tea. It was
still hot, and strong enough: a perfect cup of builder's tea.
You could stand a
spoon straight up in it,
as my father always said of a cup of tea of which he
approved.

“Like you always do,” she repeated.

“No,” I said. “You're wrong. I mean, I haven't been
here since, well, since Lettie went to Australia. Her going-away party.” And
then I said, “Which never happened. You know what I mean.”

“You come back, sometimes,” she said. “You were
here once when you were twenty-four, I remember. You had two young children, and
you were so scared. You came here before you left this part of the world: you
were, what, in your thirties, then? I fed you a good meal in the kitchen, and
you told me about your dreams and the art you were making.”

“I don't remember.”

She pushed the hair from her eyes. “It's easier
that way.”

I sipped my tea, and finished the sandwich. The mug
was white, and so was the plate. The endless summer evening was coming to an
end.

I asked her again, “Why did I come here?”

“Lettie wanted you to,” said somebody.

The person who said that was walking around the
pond: a woman in a brown coat, wearing Wellington boots. I looked at her in
confusion. She looked younger than I was now. I remembered her as vast, as
adult, but now I saw she was only in her late thirties. I remembered her as
stout, but she was buxom, and attractive in an apple-cheeked sort of a way. She
was still Ginnie Hempstock, Lettie's mother, and she looked, I was certain, just
as she had looked forty-something years ago.

She sat down on the bench on the other side of me,
so I was flanked by Hempstock women. She said, “I think Lettie just wants to
know if it was worth it.”

“If what was worth it?”

“You,” said the old woman, tartly.

“Lettie did a very big thing for you,” said Ginnie.
“I think she mostly wants to find out what happened next, and whether it was
worth everything she did.”

“She . . . sacrificed herself for
me.”

“After a fashion, dear,” said Ginnie. “The hunger
birds tore out your heart. You screamed so piteously as you died. She couldn't
abide that. She had to do something.”

I tried to remember this. I said, “That isn't how I
remember it.” I thought about my heart, then; wondered if there was a cold
fragment of a doorway inside it still, and if it was a gift or a curse if there
was.

The old lady sniffed. “Didn't I just say you'll
never get any two people to remember anything the same?” she asked.

“Can I talk to her? To Lettie?”

“She's sleeping,” said Lettie's mother. “She's
healing. She's not talking yet.”

“Not until she's all done with where she is,” said
Lettie's grandmother, gesturing, but I could not tell if she was pointing to the
duck pond or to the sky.

“When will that be?”

“When she's good and ready,” said the old woman, as
her daughter said, “Soon.”

“Well,” I said. “If she brought me here to look at
me, let her look at me,” and even as I said it I knew that it had already
happened. How long had I been sitting on that bench, staring into the pond? As I
had been remembering her, she had been examining me. “Oh. She did already,
didn't she?”

“Yes, dear.”

“And did I pass?”

The face of the old woman on my right was
unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, “You don't
pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

I put the empty cup and plate down on the
ground.

Ginnie Hempstock said, “I think you're doing better
than you were the last time we saw you. You're growing a new heart, for a
start.”

In my memory she was a mountain, this woman, and I
had sobbed and shivered on her bosom. Now she was smaller than I was, and I
could not imagine her comforting me, not in that way.

The moon was full, in the sky above the pond. I
could not for the life of me remember what phase the moon had been in the last
time I had noticed it. I could not actually remember the last time I had done
more than glance at the moon.

“So what will happen now?”

“Same thing as happens every other time you've come
here,” said the old woman. “You go home.”

“I don't know where that is, anymore,” I told
them.

“You always say that,” said Ginnie.

In my head Lettie Hempstock was still a full head
taller than I was. She was eleven, after all. I wondered what I would see—who I
would see—if she stood before me now.

The moon in the duck pond was full as well, and I
found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones
who had gone fishing in a lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the
reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung
in the sky.

And, of course, it always is.

I got up and walked a few steps to the edge of the
pond. “Lettie,” I said, aloud, trying to ignore the two women behind me. “Thank
you for saving my life.”

“She should never've taken you with her in the
first place, when she went off to find the start of it all,” sniffed Old Mrs.
Hempstock. “Nothing to stop her sorting it all out on her own. Didn't need to
take you along for company, silly thing. Well, that'll learn her for next
time.”

I turned and looked at Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Do you
really remember when the moon was made?” I asked.

“I remember lots of things,” she said.

“Will I come back here again?” I asked.

“That's not for you to know,” said the old
woman.

“Get along now,” said Ginnie Hempstock, gently.
“There's people who are wondering where you've got to.”

And when she mentioned them, I realized, with an
awkward horror, that my sister, her husband, her children, all the well-wishers
and mourners and visitors would be puzzling over what had become of me. Still,
if there was a day that they would find my absent ways easy to forgive, it was
today.

It had been a long day and a hard one. I was glad
that it was over.

I said, “I hope that I haven't been a bother.”

“No, dear,” said the old woman. “No bother at
all.”

I heard a cat meow. A moment later, it sauntered
out of the shadows and into a patch of bright moonlight. It approached me
confidently, pushed its head against my shoe.

I crouched beside it and scratched its forehead,
stroked its back. It was a beautiful cat, black, or so I imagined, the moonlight
having swallowed the color of things. It had a white spot over one ear.

I said, “I used to have a cat like this. I called
her Ocean. She was beautiful. I don't actually remember what happened to
her.”

“You brought her back to us,” said Ginnie
Hempstock. She touched my shoulder with her hand, squeezing it for a heartbeat;
she touched my cheek with her fingertips, as if I were a small child, or a
lover, and then she walked away, back into the night.

I picked up my plate and my mug, and I carried them
along the path with me as we made our way back to the house, the old woman and
I.

“The moon does shine as bright as day,” I said.
“Like in the song.”

“It's good to have a full moon,” she agreed.

I said, “It's funny. For a moment, I thought there
were two of you. Isn't that odd?”

“It's just me,” said the old woman. “It's only ever
just me.”

“I know,” I said. “Of course it is.”

I was going to take the plate and mug into the
kitchen and put them in the sink, but she stopped me at the farmhouse door. “You
ought to get back to your family now,” she said. “They'll be sending out a
search party.”

“They'll forgive me,” I said. I hoped that they
would. My sister would be concerned, and there would be people I barely knew
disappointed not to have told me how very, very sorry they were for my loss.
“You've been so kind. Letting me sit and think, here. By the pond. I'm very
grateful.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “Nothing kind about
it.”

“Next time Lettie writes from Australia,” I said,
“please tell her I said hello.”

“I will,” she said. “She'll be glad you thought of
her.”

I got into the car and started the engine. The old
woman stood in the doorway, watching me, politely, until I had turned the car
around and was on my way back up the lane.

I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview
mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky
above it, like a pair of eyes watching me from above: one moon perfectly full
and round, the other, its twin on the other side of the sky, a half-moon.

Curiously I turned in my seat and looked back: a
single half-moon hung over the farmhouse, peaceful and pale and perfect.

I wondered where the illusion of the second moon
had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my
thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that
had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be
real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a
shadow into the dusk.

Acknowledgments

This book is the book you have just read.
It's done. Now we're in the acknowledgments. This is not really part of the
book. You do not have to read it. It's mostly just names.

I owe thanks to so many people, the ones who were
there in my life when I needed them, the ones who brought me tea, the ones who
wrote the books that brought me up. To single any of them out is foolish, but
here I go . . .

When I finished this book, I sent it to many of my
friends to read, and they read it with wise eyes and they told me what worked
for them and what needed work. I'm grateful to all of them, but particular
thanks must go to Maria Dahvana Headley, Olga Nunes, Alina Simone (queen of
titles), Gary K. Wolfe, Kat Howard, Kelly McCullough, Eric Sussman, Hayley
Campbell, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Melissa Marr, Elyse Marshall, Anthony
Martignetti, Peter Straub, Kat Dennings, Gene Wolfe, Gwenda Bond, Anne Bobby,
Lee “Budgie” Barnett, Morris Shamah, Farah Mendelsohn, Henry Selick, Clare
Coney, Grace Monk, and Cornelia Funke.

This novel began, although I did not know it was
going to be a novel at the time, when Jonathan Strahan asked me to write him a
short story. I started to tell the story of the opal miner and the Hempstock
family (who have lived in the farm in my head for such a long time), and
Jonathan was forgiving and kind when I finally admitted to myself and to him
that this wasn't a short story, and I let it become a novel instead.

The family in this book is not my own family, who
have been gracious in letting me plunder the landscape of my own childhood and
watched as I liberally reshaped those places into a story. I'm grateful to them
all, especially to my youngest sister, Lizzy, who encouraged me and sent me
long-forgotten memory-jogging photographs. (I wish I'd remembered the old
greenhouse in time to put it into the book.)

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of
the joy of just writing every day. Words save our lives, sometimes.

Tori gave me a safe house to write it in, and I
cannot thank her enough.

Art Spiegelman gave me his kind permission to use a
word balloon from his collaborative conversation with Maurice Sendak in
The New
Yorker
as the opening epigraph.

As this book entered its second draft, as I was
typing out my handwritten first draft, I would read the day's work to my wife,
Amanda, at night in bed, and I learned more about the words I'd written when
reading them aloud to her than I ever have learned about anything I've done. She
was the book's first reader, and her puzzlement and occasional frustration, her
questions and her delight were my guides through subsequent drafts. I wrote this
book for Amanda, when she was far away and I missed her very much. My life would
be grayer and duller without her.

My daughters, Holly and Maddy, and my son, Michael,
were my wisest and gentlest critics of all.

I have wonderful editors on both sides of the
Atlantic: Jennifer Brehl and Jane Morpeth, and Rosemary Brosnan, who all read
the book in first draft and all suggested different things I needed to change
and fix and rebuild. Jane and Jennifer have also both coped extremely well with
the arrival of a book that none of us was expecting, not even me.

I would very much like to thank the committee for
the Zena Sutherland Lectures, held at the Chicago Public Library: the Zena
Sutherland Lecture I delivered in 2012 was, in retrospect, mostly a conversation
with myself about this book while I was writing it, to try and understand what I
was writing and who it was for.

Merrilee Heifetz has been my literary agent for
twenty-five years now. Her support on this book, as with everything over the
last quarter of a century, was invaluable. Jon Levin, my agent for films and
such, is a fine reader and does a mean Ringo Starr impression.

The good folk of Twitter were extremely helpful
when I needed to double-check how much blackjacks and fruit salad sweets cost in
the 1960s. Without them I might have written my book twice as fast.

And lastly, my thanks to the Hempstock family, who,
in one form or another, have always been there when I needed them.

Neil Gaiman,

Isle of Skye,

July 2012