Chapter 12
It was a Thursday evening in November, Marcus's second winter in England, when he came home from school and found Auntie Beverley sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water she wasn't drinking and an expression he hadn't seen on her before.
"What happened?" he said.
She looked at him. He had gotten taller. She registered this each time, the steady physical evidence of time passing. "Your Mama Vie passed this morning."
The room was very quiet.
Marcus sat down at the table. He thought about the yard on a Tuesday morning. He thought about being kissed on the forehead, hard, like something being pressed in.
"Diane called," Beverley said. "She's alright. She wanted you to hear it from me in person, not over the phone."
"Okay," Marcus said.
Beverley watched him carefully. "It's alright to cry," she said.
"I know," he said. He wasn't crying. He wasn't sure why. The grief was there he could feel it clearly, like a weight in his chest, a pressure behind his eyes. But it seemed to require more from him than he had available right now, sitting in the kitchen in Wolverhampton with the November dark pressing at the windows.
He called his mother. The connection was slightly delayed, their voices overlapping in that way of long-distance calls that makes real conversation feel like shouting across a wind.
"She went peaceful," Diane said. "In her sleep. The way she always said she wanted to go."
"I should be there," Marcus said.
"You can't be here," Diane said. "And she wouldn't want you to interrupt your education. She told me to tell you that, actually. Before she got really bad. She said, tell Marcus to stay and study. She said you had things to do."
He almost smiled. That was exactly Mama Vie. Issuing instructions from the far side.
"I miss home," he said. He hadn't said it directly before. To his mother, he had always managed it more obliquely.
"I know you do," Diane said. "I know. But Marcus you are building something. What you're building is real. Don't let grief pull you backwards."
"Grief doesn't go backwards," he said, not quite sure where the words came from. "It just goes with you wherever you go."
A pause. Then, quietly: "Yes. That's right. That's exactly right."