Chapter 20
There were things Marcus understood about Auntie Beverley only gradually, the way you understand a house more fully the longer you live in it not through sudden revelation but through the slow accumulation of detail.
He understood that she missed his mother every day in a way that was physical, like a limb absent. He could see it in the way she sometimes picked up the phone and held it before dialing as though she was preparing herself for the particular pleasure-pain of her sister's voice. He understood that she had chosen England over Jamaica with clarity and without regret, but that choosing a thing and not missing what you left behind were not the same thing at all.
He understood that she was lonely in a way she would never name. She had friends women from the hospital, from the church she attended irregularly, from the Caribbean community association she went to on the second Thursday of every month. She had a full enough life. But there was a specific kind of aloneness that Beverley carried, the aloneness of a woman in a foreign country who had built her life largely through her own effort and who had learned to need very little because needing things from people meant they could fail you.
He was seventeen when he began to understand this consciously, rather than just sensing it. He was in the kitchen doing homework late one evening when she came downstairs in her dressing gown, unable to sleep, and made tea without speaking. He watched her from his textbooks, this woman who had housed him and fed him and attended his school events and told him the truth about his mother and asked nothing in return except that he not waste the effort.
'Auntie Bev,' he said.
She looked up from her mug.
'Thank you,' he said. 'I don't think I've said that properly. Not really said it.'
She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who has been handed something they didn't expect and aren't entirely sure what to do with.
'You don't need to' she started.
'I know I don't need to,' he said. 'I want to. You gave me somewhere to be. When I was nine years old and terrified, you gave me somewhere. That matters to me more than I can say.'
Beverley looked down at her tea. Her jaw moved slightly, the way jaws do when people are keeping something contained.
'Your mother asked me to take care of you,' she said finally. 'I was always going to take care of you.'
'That's what I mean,' Marcus said. 'You didn't have to. You chose to.'
She looked up at him. Her eyes were wet. Just slightly. She wouldn't have wanted him to notice so he looked back at his textbook. But he had noticed. He stored it.
She got up and refilled her mug and topped up the one she had quietly made for him without being asked.
'You're going to be all right,' she said, sitting back down. 'You know that, don't you?'
'I'm beginning to,' he said.
She nodded as if this were the right answer. Then they sat in the warm kitchen together with their tea and the quiet, which was not an absence of things to say but a presence of comfort that didn't require words.