Alex felt the first tears escape the corner of her eyes. She saw Finn relent, the tension slipping with an almost indecipherable dip of his shoulders. Gentle, calm Finn was trying to come back. ‘You’re right, Alex. Dill won’t get to do any of those things now. And I’d do anything to change it. To go back and stay right there on the riverbank, instead of messing around in the undergrowth where we couldn’t see. But we can’t change that now.’
Finn moved silently back to the bed but Alex looked away. He stopped short of reaching her.
‘I need my dad to know that I haven’t forgotten what I did, Finn. That I’ll never forget. Sorry just isn’t a big enough word,’ she said quietly.
Finn shook his head gently. ‘You’re right, Foster, it’s not. But you have a life to live. How are you going to do that if every achievement, every bit of happiness or fun you have, feels like an insult to Dill? Live half a life because he lost his? You can’t hide from your own life, Alex.’
Ted moved quietly between the headstones, taking in the riot of discarded colour across this quiet little corner of St Cuthbert’s. Blythe would never have left Dillon’s grave in such disarray, not unless she really was as ill as he feared. No-one had tidied the mess of abandoned flowers because no-one else had been party to Blythe’s episode, as the docs kept calling it. No-one except for that damned Sinclair boy.
Ted bristled. The Sinclairs had a knack for lurking somewhere within the fallout zone of another family’s heartache. Ted made his way over to the granite stone next to the yellow blooms left scattered across the ground and checked that he was as alone as he liked to be here. If Blythe had been home this morning, he’d have given her a kiss and told her how he needed to get an early start at the garage before slipping away to this yearly ritual of his. To visit his boy the morning after his birthday, when the rest of them had already been and gone, just to be sure he wouldn’t be crossing paths with the wrong well-wisher. Year in year out, he’d given way to a person who had no goddamned right in this world to mourn his boy.
Ted regarded the abundance of flowers Blythe and Jem had arranged with care in the water pots. He tried not to examine Blythe’s reasons for coming back down here alone yesterday evening, tried not to feel so inadequate because of them. Ted looked over his shoulder again at his peaceful surroundings. The churchyard was no place for a mother, it was sure as hell no place for child. He wanted to break the silence, speak out the way other people could. Morning, son, he always wanted to say, sorry I don’t come by as often as your mother … But Ted wasn’t like Blythe. Once he was here, in the middle of all this quiet, he could never get the words out.
Ted crouched beside Dill’s headstone ignoring the immediate ache in his knee joints. It had been Jem’s idea, to have an image of an arrow etched into the granite. He’d hated the thought, he didn’t need reminding how Dill came to be reaching so far over the water, or that it was him who had given Dillon permission to keep that goddam bow set – him who was supposed to be showing Dill how to use it. But Jem had hardly spoken a word in the run up to the funeral and Blythe had forbidden him from saying anything to risk unsettling the girls any more than they already were.
‘Do you think it will be any easier for Alexandra? To be reminded of her mistake?’ Blythe had argued.
The Finn boy barged his way into Ted’s thoughts twisting something inside him on the way. Not now, Ted. He pinched at the tension building between his eyes. There was every chance Alexandra was going to turn up here in the Falls, he knew she would. Alexandra loved her mother too much to think up one of her endless reasons to stay away. But now wasn’t the time to pick at old wounds, not when Blythe’s needs were greatest.
Over on the church path, movement stole Ted from his thoughts. He watched the elderly couple and their little dog stop and take in the temporary wooden cross where the mayor had been buried back in January. That’s it, pay your respects to the pretentious bastard. Arrows or not, at least Dillon’s memorial was modest, befitting of a Foster. Not like the monstrosity the town was awaiting to be erected in the mayor’s honour once the earth had settled around his good-for-nothing carcass.
Ted reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a clean rag, running it over the letters engraved before him. Beloved son. Blythe and Jem had already cleaned and tidied Dillon’s plot yesterday morning of course, read and replaced the cards of the bouquets Helen Fairbanks and Susannah Finn still remembered to leave each year. Ted never read the cards, all that was between the women. They’d been good to Blythe over the years, long after she’d stopped singing with them and the rest of the choir girls, but only Helen Fairbanks had carried on coming up to the house. But that was your choice, Susannah. I never said you couldn’t come into our home, just not that boy of yours.
Ted felt that seasoned nip of guilt towards Susannah Finn. He thought of the way Susannah had stood in front of Finn while Ted had fought his rage. Ted promptly laid another thought over the top of the previous one as if laying salve over a stubborn cut that wouldn’t heal. Her boy had it coming.
Ted replaced the redundant cloth in his pocket and began gathering up the stems lying forgotten on the ground. He didn’t know much about flowers but he knew these ones had arrived after the rest or Blythe would’ve already had them neatly arranged in the water pots she and Jem had finished with yesterday morning. No, these had arrived later in the day. Fancy, expensive types ordered from one of those overpriced florists. Ted looked about himself for one of the fussy little miniature envelopes with the cards inside to reunite with them, but there was nothing. He tried to jolly through it but he’d already felt his back go cold. Of course there wasn’t a card. These were them, that one last anonymous bouquet that always turned up. Ted felt an instant rage burning up his neck. ‘Even now, you’ve got your filthy hands on my family, you son of a bitch.’ He’d been a fool to hope that this might be the year they finally stopped arriving.
Ted gathered up the last of the stems, a few at a time in big hands used to handling wrenches and jacks. Never a card. But then there were some who couldn’t find the words weren’t there? Could only ease their conscience by sending Dillon a hollow gesture before sodding back off to their own neat and tidy lives. Ted straightened up, trying to calm the resentment building in him but there was already a burning along his eyes. His voice was hoarse and metallic as the first tears tried to overcome him.
‘God damn you and your goddamned flowers,’ he growled under his breath.
Ted deftly eradicated the trail of moisture over his cheek with back of his wrist. The rage was instant. He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew it was wrong. Knew that if there was a God in heaven who by chance might be glancing down upon him right now, right at this minute, then he was damned for sure.
Good men don’t do these things, he told himself, looking out across the churchyard to the plot of disturbed earth awaiting its monumental tribute to that charlatan. Mayor Sinclair, pillar of the community and all round nice guy. A good man, the Eilidh Mail had reported, if only there were more like him. Huh. The trouble with this town was that there were too many like him. People you thought you knew, trusted, right up until they nearly destroyed everything you held dear.
Ted’s stomach churned, the blooms suddenly heavy in his hands. Flowers were for conveying sentiment, what sentiment did these convey? Regret? Shame? Love? The anger was already flaring in his stomach; an ember he knew would never completely die away. He should have felt shame for what he was about to do, here in the middle of St Cuthbert’s churchyard at the grave of his boy. And maybe he did feel something like that, but it wasn’t enough to stop Ted from taking the heads of those pretty, expensive, anonymous flowers and crushing them right there in his hands.