Beyond That, the Sea

by Laura Spence-Ash

The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life. —WILLIAM TREVOR, Two Lives

He had thought he would be the lead parent, the one who always knew what to do, the one the children would follow. But strategies that work in the classroom don’t work at home. What works with Gerald doesn’t seem to work with William. And they both gravitate toward Nancy, whose touch is often too gentle. It’s messier at home, he’s less in control, and more and more, he retreats to the comfort and solitude of his study.

She’s never said anything—about the disappointment with having one boy and then another, about the miscarriages, about the doctor’s orders—as she’s always unfailingly positive. About everything, really. And that’s what he had seen in her at the start. He’d hoped that her willingness to see the good would help draw him out of himself, help him become a better version of who he thinks he truly is.

What about you, she asks. Do you love it, too? When she asks questions like this, she tilts her head to the side and she wants to know the real answer, what he really thinks. He’s not sure there’s anyone else in his life who asks questions without an answer in mind.

This ocean that she’s swimming in right now, the ocean that separates her from them, has grown wider over the past year. That life, that girl has begun to evaporate.

She’d heard her parents arguing the night before she left London. I don’t want her to grow up so fast, Dad said. I want her to be a child as long as she can. She rolled under her covers, blocking her ears with her fists. I stopped being a child on the day war was declared, she wanted to scream. And you both disappeared even as you stayed by my side.

He’s never been to a funeral. He has little idea of what happens at one. But she seems to like the idea. Yes, she says, her eyes meeting his, that sounds good. Let’s do that. Later, in his room, he lies on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. It frightens him, sometimes, how he longs for her approval. For her smile.

He hadn’t wanted to see her. But then, when he learned of Father’s death, he could think of nowhere else to go. Nowhere else he wanted to be. He told himself it was for her, that she would want the company, but he knew that wasn’t true. He was the one who needed her.

And yet, it was William. Together, they would always be fifteen and seventeen, on the cusp of something. How sweet that moment is, that moment of before. When anticipation is everything. When everything is new. When there are no consequences, when there is no after.

She is proud of her, but there’s something else, too, a feeling that she had little to do with the woman Beatrix has become.

Millie wonders about that. Here they are, all these years later, and she often feels farther from Beatrix than she was when Beatrix was in America. She knows she has made mistakes—marrying Tommy is probably at the top of that list—but she and Beatrix haven’t yet found their way back to each other. She’s not sure, now, that they ever will.

Her openness was a classic American trait, one that Millie had never quite believed. And yet here they were, all these Americans, being loud and friendly and willing to talk to you about almost anything.

Before, she’d dismissed this quality about Americans. But then she wondered. She suspected you had to be that way to open your home to a stranger. To love someone else’s child as your own. Millie understands now, in a way that she never did before, that had the tables been turned, she would not have done the same.

What a beautiful day, he says. I can never decide. Is it better or worse when the world looks like this? Does it mitigate the loss when the world is so insistent on being beautiful?

We love people for all sorts of different reasons and in all sorts of different ways, she says. Remember that. And it only gets better, the older you get. Young love isn’t necessarily the best love.