Easter

The message came at eight, which was four in the afternoon in London, and it was in Swedish, and it was an instruction.

At nine your time I will telephone you with the picture. Ebba has shown me how. Do not be on the stairs. Be somewhere with light. M.

He read it twice on the bed by the door. Then he wrote, With the picture?

With the picture, wrote his mother. I have something to show you. Be in the light, Fredde. I want to see your face and not a fire notice.

---

There was only one place in 312 with light, and it was Tyler’s.

Tyler was asleep. He was asleep on his back on the bed by the window with the headphones round his neck and one arm flung out over the edge, the way he had been asleep at eight in the morning on every Sunday since August, and on the two screens over the desk the snow was falling on the forest and the thirty-four were standing round the fire. The blind was down. It had been down since January, except for the inch at its edge.

Frederick stood by the window for a while.

Then he took hold of the cord, quietly, and pulled, and the blind went up with its long rattle all the way to the top, and the morning came into the room, white and enormous, and in the middle of the window, over the roofs, with the sun full on its face and the A on its flank, was the butte.

Tyler did not wake. He turned his head away from the light on the pillow and said, quite clearly, “Got it,” and was still.

Frederick sat on the end of Tyler’s bed, with his back against the wall and the window beside his shoulder, and waited.

---

At four minutes to nine the telephone rang, which meant that she was early, because she always was; and when he answered it, the screen showed him a ceiling.

It was a London ceiling, white, with a plaster rose in the middle of it and a long crack running out from the rose like a river on a map, and he knew it, because he had lain on the carpet under it on a weekend home from school, the winter he was seventeen, and named the river. Somewhere below the ceiling his mother was saying something in Swedish, quite sharply, and Ebba was saying something back, and the ceiling tilted, and became a wall, and then an ear, very large, with a pearl in it, which was Ebba’s, and then swung round.

And there was his mother.

She was in a chair by the long window, in a grey cardigan buttoned to the throat and a blue scarf, and she was thinner than in January and a different colour from in January, which he did not at first understand, until he understood that it was the right one. Behind her on the table in a jug there were birch twigs, bare, with small feathers tied to the ends of them, yellow and pink and green, the way there had been on every table she had ever sat at at Easter, in Stockholm and in New Westminster and in a flat in Uppsala in 1994; and she was looking at him, out of the telephone, with the expression she had used all his life for things that had gone right and that she did not wish to make a fuss about.

“There you are,” said his mother.

“Glad påsk, Mamma.”

“Glad påsk.” She looked at him for some time, in silence, the way she had looked at him in October from the end of his pillow. “You are brown.”

“It’s April.”

“You are brown, and you need your hair cut, and you are sitting on a bed that is not yours.” She leaned a little to one side, to see past him. “Is that the window?”

“It’s Tyler’s.”

“Is he there?”

“He’s asleep.”

“Of course he is,” said his mother. “It is Sunday, and he is twenty.” She sat back. “I have never done this. With the picture. Your father has done it twice, with Brannigan, and both times he talked to the ceiling for ten minutes before anybody noticed.” He heard, from somewhere off to the side of the screen, a short indignant breath that was his father. “I do not like it. You can see everybody’s nostrils.” A pause. “But I wanted you to see something, and I could not think how else.”

“What?”

“Be quiet,” said his mother, “and watch.”

---

The picture moved.

Ebba was carrying it. It went across a carpet he knew, a long faded one, red and blue, with a worn place in the middle of it where for thirty years people had stood in front of the fire, and turned, and settled; and then it was looking down the length of the room from one end, propped on something, the piano or the table, and he could see all of it. The long window, with the chair in front of it and his mother in the chair. The fire, not lit. The worn place in the carpet. And at the far end of the room, a long way off, the door, which was white, with a brass handle; and in front of the door, with his back to it, in a jersey, with his stick, his father.

His father had gone and stood there. Frederick had not seen him go. He was standing in front of the door with both hands on the top of the stick, upright, the way he had stood all his life on the steps of things, waiting for the car.

“Fredde,” said his mother, from the far end of the picture, by the window. “Are you watching?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She put both hands on the arms of the chair and stood up.

---

She did it in one movement. That was the first thing. All year she had done it in two: the hands on the arms, and then a pause, and then the rest, with the breath after it that came a fraction too long, which he had heard on every call since August and had learned not to say anything about. She did it in one. She stood up out of the chair by the window and stood for a moment with her hand on its back, in the grey cardigan, very straight, the way she had stood up in January from a plain chair in Stockholm in front of nine million people; and then she took her hand off the chair.

And walked.

She walked down the long room towards the door. She did not hurry and she did not look at the telephone. She looked at the far end of the room, at the door, and at the man standing in front of it with his hands on his stick, and she walked towards him across the faded carpet at an ordinary pace, the pace of a woman walking down a room in her own house, past the fire, across the worn place, past the piano, one step and then the next; and Frederick sat on the end of Tyler’s bed in Arizona with the telephone in both hands and the butte in the window at his shoulder, and did not breathe, and listened.

He was listening for the breath.

He had been listening for it since August. He had listened for it on the step under the narrow window and in a stairwell at Christmas and under an arcade in January, and it had always come: long, and careful, and drawn up as though it had to be lifted, and a moment longer than a breath should be. He listened for it now, across five thousand miles, under the sound of her feet on the carpet and the small creak of a floorboard by the piano that had creaked when he was seventeen.

It did not come.

She reached the door.

She stopped in front of his father, quite close, and looked at him, and Frederick could not see her face, only the back of the grey cardigan and the blue scarf and her hand, which came up and rested for a moment flat on the front of his father’s jersey, in the middle, the way Jack’s rested on his back at airports. And his father looked down at her. And then his father took one hand off the top of the stick, and reached behind him without looking, and found the brass handle of the door.

“Door,” said his father.

He said it in English, quite clearly, to her, and not to anyone else.

Then he turned the handle, and the door swung open behind him onto the landing, onto the light from the stairs, and his father said, as he had said it once before down a telephone at ten to six in the morning, from a room with a kettle in it, with all the words in his house to choose from:

“Open.”

---

She came back to the telephone more slowly.

She came back down the long room on his father’s arm, the two of them, at his father’s pace, which was the stick’s, and Ebba picked up the telephone and gave it to her, and she sat down in the chair by the window again with it held out in front of her, and looked at him.

She was not out of breath.

He looked for it, in the picture. He looked at her throat, under the scarf, and at her shoulders, and at the hand holding the telephone, which was steady. She was a little pink, as people are who have walked down a room. That was all.

“Well?” said his mother.

He found that he could not say anything at all.

“I told you in February,” said his mother, “that I wanted you to see me walk to a door.” She looked at him out of the screen with the expression for things that had gone right. “I thought it would have to be in the summer, when you came. The man with the clean hands thought so too. He said July.” A pause. “I did it on Thursday. For the first time. Ebba timed it, and I am not going to tell you how long it took, because it was too long, and today it was not.” She looked past the telephone, at someone, and back. “Your father has been standing at that door every afternoon since Thursday, so that I would have something to walk to.”

“Practising,” said his father, beside her, with dignity.

Frederick put his hand over his eyes.

He sat like that on the end of Tyler’s bed for a while, with the telephone in the other hand and the light coming in through the window onto the side of his face, and his mother let him, and did not say anything, because she knew the length of every silence and this was a long one and she let it be as long as it was.

“Mamma.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t breathe.”

“I breathed all the way,” said his mother. “You did not hear it. That is the difference.” A pause. “That is what they mended.”

---

“Show me the hill,” said his mother.

He turned the telephone round, and held it up to the window, so that the screen was full of it: the roofs, and the palms, and the butte in the full sun, rough and brown, the colour of a flowerpot, with the stepped path going up its face in its thin pale zigzag, and the A.

There was a silence from London.

“There it is,” said his mother.

She had said it in October, lying with her head at the end of his pillow to see it through an inch of window. She said it now in exactly the same voice, as though no time had gone by at all, and a great deal had.

Behind him, on the bed, something moved.

“Hey,” said Tyler, thickly, into the light. He had rolled over and was lying on his front, squinting, with one hand up against the window, like a man who has woken up on a beach. “Why’s the blind up?” He saw the telephone. He saw what was on it, which Frederick had turned back round. “Is that Christina?”

“Good morning, Tyler,” said his mother.

“Hey.” Tyler pushed himself up on one elbow and looked at the small face in the screen with sleepy interest. “Happy Easter. You look better. Than the TV.”

“I am better than the TV,” said his mother. “I walked down a room just now. The whole of it. Fredde watched.”

“Sick,” said Tyler, with real warmth. He considered the screen for a moment longer. Then he leaned down off the side of the bed, slowly, and opened the little white refrigerator, and took out a bottle of something blue, and held it up to the telephone, across five thousand miles, the way he had held it out on the stairs of Palo Verde Hall in October.

“You want a Glacier?”

His mother laughed.

It was the real one, low and sudden, the one that the room heard, and it went on, and he heard his father somewhere beside her laughing without any voice, the breath in short pieces; and it went on longer than it had ever gone on since August, and at the end of it there was nothing at all, no breath, no lifting, only his mother, laughing until she had finished, and then stopping, because she had.

“Tell him,” she said to Frederick, in English, wiping her eyes, “that a nice Swedish lady says thank you, and that she can walk to the shop now and buy her own.”

---

Sam came back from church at twelve, from the brick church of 1889, with the order of service in his top pocket folded into four.

He stood in the door of 312, where Tyler was asleep again with the blind up and the sun across his legs, and Frederick was at the desk by the door, doing nothing, looking at the butte.

“It was full,” said Sam. “Easter. People standing.” He took the order of service out and looked at it, as though checking. “There’s a list. At the back. For the sick. You write a name on it and they read it out.”

Frederick looked at him.

“I put her on it in February,” said Sam. “Christina, London. No title. Every Sunday.” He folded the order of service again. “They read it this morning. With the others.”

“She walked down a room,” said Frederick. “This morning. To the door. My father opened it.”

Sam stood in the doorway for a moment with the paper in his hand.

Then he took out his notebook, and a pencil, and wrote something in it, small, and Frederick did not need to see what it was, because Sam told him.

“I’ll take her off the list,” said Sam. “Next week.”

---

Theo rang at seven, which was ten at night in New Westminster, and he sounded as though he had been outside all day.

“The blossom’s out,” said Theo. “On the river basin. All of it at once, the whole avenue, it’s like somebody’s been at it with a hose. There are school parties everywhere. There was a coach from Ohio parked on Kate’s street this morning with forty kids in it singing.” A pause. “I thought of Tyler.”

“Tyler’s asleep.”

“Course he is.” Theo was walking; Frederick could hear his feet, and a car going past, and somewhere a long way behind him a crowd in the warm. “How is she?”

He told him. He told him all of it, on the step under the narrow window, with the window open an inch and the warm air coming in off the car park, which no longer smelled of orange blossom, because it was over: the ceiling, and the feathers, and the long room, and his father at the door, and the one movement out of the chair, and the walk, and the breath he had listened for that had not come.

Theo did not say anything until he had finished. Then he said, in the other voice, the one from the Hartigans’ kitchen:

“How many steps?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t count.”

“How long’s the room?”

Frederick thought about it. He thought about lying on the carpet at seventeen under the river in the ceiling, and how far it had seemed then from the window to the door, on the bad afternoons, when he was waiting to be told something.

“Ten yards,” he said. “Maybe eleven.”

There was a silence on the line from New Westminster.

“Did she stop?”

“No.”

“Did she hold on to anything?”

“Him,” said Frederick. “At the end.”

Theo breathed out, all of it, the way a lineman breathes out at the end of a play, and was quiet for a while, walking, under the blossom, two thousand miles away.

“That’s good, Freddie,” he said. “That’s really good. That’s eleven yards without stopping, two months out.” His voice had gone. “That’s what you want. You want her bored of it by June.”