Free The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel by Steve Mosby Page B

should go inside.’
    ‘Can I ...?’
    ‘Yes, you can smoke inside. Today.’
    Inside, the dam broke. The way other couples might leaf through a wedding album on an anniversary, they looked through all the photographs of Jamie that Caroline had collected in an album and brought with her. They drank more wine. They talked about him a little more, until finally the barrier disappeared entirely and he became all they talked about. The long, soft blond hair that they’d never had the chance to cut; his favourite books and toys; his little idiosyncrasies. How gentle and lovely he had been.
    In such a way, for a while at least, they brought him back to life. But their shared memories were like a stone skipping over the sea of his absence, and no matter how hard you throw it, a stone can’t skim for ever.
    ‘I miss him.’
    Caroline was sobbing now, clinging to Groves on the settee, and he to her. She was close to passing out by then, while he was drunk but wished he was more so.
    ‘I miss him too. So much. I can’t say.’
    It seemed to him that Jamie had somehow become real now. So real that he might as well have been standing in front of them, fingers moving by his sides, that quizzical expression on his face.
    Why are you crying, Mummy and Daddy?
    ‘I just want him back,’ Caroline said.
    Groves hugged her tightly. ‘I do too.’
    ‘I’d give anything. Absolutely anything.’
    ‘I know.’ His neck was soaked with her tears, but he just held her, wanting her to be okay, for everything to be different, for Jamie to be here. ‘I know.’
    He imagined Jamie’s ghost walking over and standing in between them, leaning into the embrace, wanting to be a part of it, the way he always had. Wanting to make things better.
    Mummy and Daddy, are you happy now?
    It was too much.
    ‘Come on.’
    Groves helped Caroline up to the spare bedroom. He helped her get enough of her clothes off to collapse comfortably into the bed, then pulled the sheet over her. She was asleep in seconds, lying on her side, her breath rattling in her throat.
    Then he went back downstairs and drank more wine, and thought about Jamie’s grave. It was a decent-sized plot with a large headstone, big enough for an adult. Jamie had been little for his age, and when Groves had seen him dead, he had been diminished even further. Aside from the clothes and the toy, his remains might have been those of a kitten. But while the body sealed beneath the packed, silent earth was small, the space that had been allocated to him was not, so that it always felt as though they’d buried everything Jamie might have been. All the possible men he might have grown into.
    The inscription on the headstone read:
Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
    The last words of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories his son had loved so much. Words that signal that even as we move on, into adulthood and beyond, a part of us is always left behind, remaining as it was. We remember it, and perhaps it remembersus back, but however desperately we reach out to each other, our outstretched hands can never touch.
    ‘I love you,’ he told the empty front room. ‘I love you so much. I miss you more every day.’
    And like that hardened writer allowing his bluebird out when nobody was there to see, Groves began to cry.

Mark
    When you’re dead
    After leaving Paul Carlisle’s house, I headed back north.
    The afternoon light was beginning to dim slightly now, but it seemed warmer than ever. As I drove along the ring road, with the woods in the distance ahead, the fields to my right seemed hazy, as though the air above the grass was dozing off. The trees in the distance there were blurred by the heat rising from the land: vague watercolours, smudged on to the sky.
    The road curled steadily west as I drew closer to the woods, until the countryside on the right was replaced by the dark wall