A Family Matter

by Claire Lynch

Teenagers. Sometimes she is simply too tired to argue with him, so she disappears into the screen of her laptop, pretending to work, while searching for a gadget that might unblock the sink. Or buying a new dress that will take her from day to night, whatever that means. Any task that lets her hide in plain sight.

This boy who hasn’t begun yet. He wants to say, you will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognize some of the people you have been. Heron looks at his grandson, his pen poised over his homework. “Just do what you think is best, Tom. That’s all you can ever do.”

This is a day she has been waiting for all her life. Her chance to repay him. The one who loved her. The one who stayed.

She cannot say, you cannot die, not now, because I will sometimes want to call you, to tell you a joke I read in the paper, or that I saw a famous person on the platform at London Bridge. You cannot die, because you will be missing from the photographs of all the days that haven’t happened yet—the children grown up, graduations, weddings, their babies. Maggie knows you cannot tell someone they are not permitted to die, no matter how reasonable the request.

Maggie’s daughter sits at the desk in her bedroom, writing a Christmas card for every child in her class. Her task will surely never be finished, since she plans to write a long and personalized message, in gold pen, to each recipient. When she remembers, Olivia dots each letter i with a heart. On a small selection she troubles herself to doodle a sprig of holly, or a careful snowflake. On even fewer, she seals the envelope with a foil Santa sticker, the code by which eight-year-old girls say, I am devoted to you.

The fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, all that might gift you or cost you.

While the characters in this novel are all works of fiction, the words spoken by the lawyers and judge in the court scenes and repeated in the legal documents are not. Their words are included here as a reminder of how far away the recent past is. And how close.