The Fire Baby

She’d married Don two years ago. The best wedding picture was in the front room over the gas fire. He could have been her dad, she knew that’s what everyone was saying behind their hands. Sometimes she wished he was. Then she could have shared the memory, the memory of the falling star that had taken Matty away.

Why had she married him? Children, security, kindness, decency. Four powerful reasons she knew now did not add up to love.

She went to the front room and touched Matty’s picture: the one she’d taken when he was a week old. She loved this image, the one she saw every day, but she loved her secret more. So she ran, up the stairs, to the laundry room where the chest was. It was burnt too, like her cheek, and she ran her finger down the scar with an almost sensual caress. She lifted it open and slipped her hand down beside the old clothes until she found the waxed wallet that held the air-letters. They’d started to arrive last year on Lyndon’s first birthday. She’d had to ask, by registered letter. She’d lost Matty, they knew that, she only asked to see how the boy she’d saved was growing. And he was growing. Her favourite showed him naked, just two, standing in a lake with a smile like a searchlight and a plastic Captain Hook cutlass.

She flipped it over but she knew the inscription, knew all the inscriptions: ‘Tokebee, Michigan. Summer 78. London plays pirates.’

That’s all she had until now: pictures of a memory. Until now. She checked her watch: 9.38.

Where was Don? He should be here, they’d agreed that, together. She ran to the nursery and checked the temperature: 74°F, just like the book had said. She rested her hand on the blanket in the cot and felt the familiar surge of grief of loss, the almost overwhelming conviction that she could feel his body warmth even now, two years later.

She cried at the funeral. Cried openly for the little boy she didn’t know, and secretly for the little boy she’d sent to live another life 5,000 miles away. Her lover’s tears were real. They burst out of him like a spring and he’d knelt in the red dust and wept like a child who can find no logic in the world’s cruelty. It was the only time she’d felt like touching him since the night she’d seen the pictures. The pictures of her. She could have reached out, told him even then, and ended those tears. But she kept her secret, and bathed instead in his grief.