Chapter 59
Beverley came to Kingston for the last time when she was seventy-one, knowing it was the last time and not saying so. She had developed a heart condition the year before managed, not critical, but the kind of condition that changes the geography of your decisions, the distance you can travel, the plans you can make with certainty.
She arrived in December, as she had for years for Christmas, for the family gathering that had become a fixture. Marcus picked her up from the airport. She was smaller than the last time, or he was larger, or both. She walked with a cane now.
She stood in the arrivals hall and looked at him with his mother's eyes.
'Look at you,' she said.
'Look at you,' he said.
She stayed for three weeks. She sat with Elise and told her stories about Jamaica and England. She held Joseph on her lap and sang to him in the old way. She sat with Diane in the room with the window and they talked as they had always talked two sisters who had made a pact about who stayed and who went and who had lived with what it cost and who had loved each other across the distance without interruption.
Marcus drove her to the airport on the last day. They sat in the departure drop-off and she held his hand.
'I was afraid,' she said. 'When you came to me. When I collected you from the airport, nine years old, so serious, so not crying. I was terrified I would fail you.'
'You didn't,' he said.
'I know,' she said. 'But I want to say it out loud. Because I was afraid for years and now I know how it came out and I want to say: I'm proud of what we did. Together. You and me. What we made of those years.'
He held her hand properly.
'I am too,' he said.
She squeezed his hand once, firmly. Then she released it and picked up her bag and straightened up.
'Tell your mother I'll call on Sunday,' she said.
'She knows you will.'
He watched her walk into the terminal, upright and precise, his mother's walk in a different body.
She died the following October, in Wolverhampton, in her own bed, at seventy-two. Marcus flew to England for the funeral. He stood at the front of the church and spoke about her, about what she had given him, about the kind of courage it required to build a life far from home and still hold the home inside you intact.
He flew back to Kingston carrying her clearly.
He always would.