The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

The time between doing it once and doing it again was suddenly mapped onto a clockface, with hands that ticked the seconds away. I watched it tick, heard it tick, felt it tick. The clock was a special secret just for me. People would sit next to me in the classroom and walk past me in the street and play with me in the playground and they wouldn’t know who I really was, but I would, because I would have my ticking to remind me. And when the clock had ticked all the way round, so the hands were twinned at twelve, it would happen. I would do it again.

That was the rule I had made when she was born: I would give her everything, and ask nothing in return.

Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.”

“You seem pretty good to me,” I said. She looked down, and pink crawled into her cheeks in blotches. It occurred to me that it might be the first time I had ever told her she was good at anything. She couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth dragging upward. It was obvious for me to want to go back in time and undo the big wrongs, but in that moment I would have settled for changing the small ones. I wished we could go back to being eight years old, just so I could be nicer to Linda, just so I could tell her she was good at handstands, a good best friend.

She coughed a wet-sounding cough and wiped something off her cheek. “She did terrible things. She did. But she’s just a kid. She needed people like me to come through for her and I didn’t. I failed her. We all did. She’s just a little girl.”

Over the years I had spent hours imagining the things I would say to her when we were reunited, and I hadn’t voiced even a fraction. It was the way it had been with Mam: these weren’t the grand unburdenings I had rehearsed, but surreal run-ins with people very different from the characters who lived in my head.

I thought perhaps that was how it would always feel, even if I talked to them for a month, because I couldn’t be unburdened from something that was mine to carry.

I pressed Molly’s body closer to mine. She whimpered, and I felt her fist open and close around folds of my jumper. She liked it here. She liked Linda. But she needed me.

When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t real dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.

I have done badly at so many things in my life. But I have done well at being this little girl’s mum.”

If I could have got the words out, I would have told Sasha that I loved Molly. “I love her because she grew inside me, because she kept me company and saved my life, and because when she came out she liked me straightaway,”