Between Blossom and Snow

Ada was wearing Max’s gloves on the wrong hands again. This time, I could not bring myself to ask for them back.

I watched her while I tidied things that did not need tidying and returned to work notes I had already read. Beyond our front garden, eight chestnut trees stood across the green. She was beneath the nearest, playing as she did when the conkers fell, although that had been a couple of months ago. Every few moments, her bouncing dance paused and she reached towards the same low branch.

Curiosity eventually got the better of me. I stepped into my boots and swung on a jacket, catching the lining at one wrist. I would have been going out to help Max with his things anyway. This was a more inviting reason to open the door.

It was a Saturday in November. His van was running outside.

Behind me, he stopped in the doorway with the work things we had agreed he could collect that morning. One of his coats still hung beneath Ada’s. That was probably where she had found the gloves.

She turned, saw us both and bounced higher. Then she shushed me and motioned for me to be gentle.

My heart sank a little. An injured animal, perhaps. But she would have fetched me long before now, and she would not have been smiling like that.

I searched the ground, then her hands. One was closed around something.

‘We should get you back inside soon, sweetheart. It’s colder today.’

Her cheeks were pink with cold. I drew her close, and she opened the oversized glove towards me.

A soft pink petal.

One fallen petal.

‘Look, Mammy.’

My eyes followed her finger. There, opening against the dark wood, was a single blossom.

The other seven trees stood in their thinning leaves and bare branches, quite certain of the season. Only ours appeared to have misunderstood.

Not only unseasonable, but unseasonably pretty. Or perhaps that was what made it seem so: all that pink where I had stopped expecting colour.

‘Max, come and see!’

I had prepared for bags, keys and a conversation short enough to survive. But I could not bring myself to interrupt her delight and ask her to leave him to his task.

Behind us, he put down his things.

That small gesture undid me more than his leaving had.

Part of me wished I had stayed with my work. Another part — the hopeless romantic, still there despite my best efforts — wanted to believe something had called me outside.

He crossed the grass and crouched beside her. Ada pressed herself against his shoulder with the ease of someone who had never needed to question being loved.

‘That looks like spring,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ she asked, her brow furrowing. She had only just begun looking forward to winter, encouraged by Jack Frost’s visits and the possibility of snow.

‘No, sweet girl.’

‘Should we tell it?’

He looked through the branches. I recognised the tiredness around his eyes.

‘I think the cold will.’

The forecast on my phone suggested Ada might get her winter’s wish.

‘Why weren’t you here when I was a baby?’

She had asked him over breakfast a fortnight earlier, studying a photograph of herself asleep in a rainbow blanket. The same angelic expression she still wore in sleep, before waking to rearrange our day.

Max glanced at me before answering.

‘I hadn’t come to live with you yet.’

‘But you knew Mammy.’

‘Yes.’

She considered this failure of organisation.

‘You could have come sooner.’

He smiled, but I saw what it cost him.

‘I’d have liked to know you then.’

She pushed the photograph towards him.

‘That’s me. You can keep that one.’

Later, I found him fitting it into his wallet. One corner had to fold.

Now, beneath the tree, she kept hold of his sleeve while he stood.

‘Are you taking your gloves?’

‘I need them for work.’

Her fingers tightened.

He crouched again. ‘You can help me put them in the bag.’

‘And then?’

He looked at me. There were things we had not decided. I hated that she had reached the edge of them before we had.

I knelt on the wet grass.

‘Max and I need to talk about some grown-up things. You haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘I know.’ Her chin trembled. ‘I don’t want him to go.’

‘I know you don’t.’

I put my arm around her. For a moment she stayed stiff inside it, then pressed her face into my coat.

Max rested his hand on her back.

It stayed there. When I looked up, his eyes were on mine.

‘Would you come back after work?’

He hesitated. I felt my face grow hot, then made myself wait.

‘For tea,’ I added. ‘And perhaps we could talk.’

He held my gaze, troubled, for a moment almost too long. Then something softened in those green eyes.

‘I’ll be here.’

Ada lifted her head. His hand moved once across her back, reassuringly, before he stood. She slipped off his gloves and handed them to him.

At the gate, while she bounded inside, dropping her coat and boots in a jumbled pile, I stopped him.

‘I’m sorry for how I spoke to you. For telling you to leave like that.’

His gaze dropped to the latch. He fumbled with it, then looked back at me.

‘I didn’t want to go.’

‘I know. I think I knew then.’

The van hummed behind him. He brushed his fingers over the back of my hand before turning away.

I went indoors with that small warmth still on my skin.

Years before, I had stood at the front window after putting Ada to bed, looking towards that tree. The house was quiet behind me. I remember how tired I was of being the last person awake.

I had asked God for someone to share the ordinary things.

Someone who would notice when the milk was running out. Someone to tell about the funny thing she had said. Someone whose key I would be glad to hear in the door.

I had not named Max.

I had known him for years by then, in that distant way you can know somebody without knowing where they keep their sadness. When he eventually came into our lives, Ada was four. He let her finish her stories. He learnt which cup she wanted. He came home with sawdust caught in his clothes and listened while she explained things he already knew.

Once, she fell asleep against him halfway through a sentence. He stayed where he was until his arm went numb, her small hand still folded inside his.

I took a photograph.

For a long time, whenever I was frightened, I looked at it.

Lately I had stopped looking. I told myself it was protection, although I could not explain why I needed protecting from the very thing I had prayed for.

I returned to the tidying. Ada arranged a family of soft toys on the rug while I worked, bringing me occasional reports about their behaviour. By mid-afternoon I had written three paragraphs and deleted two.

She appeared beside me with a drawing just before Max was due.

There was our chestnut tree, with one enormous pink flower. Immediately above it sat a robin, its red breast coloured so firmly that the paper had buckled.

‘We haven’t seen a robin there,’ I said.

‘We might.’

I traced the air above the flower.

‘You’ve made that lovely and big.’

‘So you can see it from here.’

She held the drawing against the window. Beyond it, the real blossom was a small pale interruption in the bare wood.

When the van returned, I heard her breath catch before she ran to the door.

I realised I was holding mine too. Beneath the nerves was that familiar flutter, unexpectedly lovely. Something in me still opened at the sound of him coming home.

Max came in smelling of cold air and cut timber. He admired the picture with her, then looked towards me.

‘Tea?’ I asked.

‘Please.’

I made his the way he liked it. He took off his coat.

Ada returned to her toys. We stood in the kitchen doorway with our cups, speaking quietly.

‘I meant what I said this morning.’

‘I know.’

‘I don’t know how it got so far.’

He looked into his tea.

‘We both kept going.’

There had been days of such happiness that I hardly recognised my life. Then a silence, a tired reply — something small — would catch against an old hurt. Before either of us understood what was happening, we were defending ourselves from people who were no longer in the room.

‘When you go quiet, I think you’ve stopped caring,’ I said.

‘Sometimes I’m trying not to say the wrong thing.’

‘I know that now.’

‘I need you to ask me.’

I nodded, although something in me wanted to point out how often I had tried. I put down my cup.

‘You’re right.’

He watched me carefully.

‘I hear anger and I shut down,’ he said. ‘Then you’re trying to reach me, and I’m giving you nothing. I know I do that.’

‘I don’t want us to keep doing it.’

‘Neither do I.’

Ada asked for a missing toy. I found it beneath the sofa, then stayed beside the window a moment. Max came to stand nearby.

‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never wanted a life with someone the way I want this.’

His face tightened.

‘But I can’t keep wondering when you’ll ask me to pack.’

The words hurt. I wanted to explain how frightened I had been, how much of that fear had existed before him. My mouth opened with the beginning of an answer I had given too often.

The more I loved our life, the more there was to lose. I had begun listening for the ending in every silence, bracing myself until even tenderness could find me ready for a fight.

Then I looked beyond him.

The setting sun had found a narrow opening beneath the clouds. Gold caught the sky behind the chestnuts, outlining every twig. A robin sat on our low branch, immediately above the blossom.

Just where Ada had drawn it.

I held my breath.

Snow was beginning to fall, so lightly I first mistook it for something floating from the tree. A flake touched the glass. Another settled on the branch.

The blossom trembled.

For a moment it held there, impossibly pink against the coming winter. Then it loosened, turned once and fell with the snow. The robin tipped its head and watched it down.

I waited for the familiar sinking feeling.

Instead, I saw the tree whole. Its strong trunk, the branches resting against the sky, the bird settled where something lovely had been. Nothing was being asked to flower now. It could stand through winter and still be alive.

Beside it, the other seven trees darkened in the same evening light.

I had wanted love to arrive when everything in me was ready. When I could offer only the good parts. Yet here it was, asking to be lived while I was still learning.

I looked at Max’s reflection beside mine. My jaw was tight; one hand gripped the windowsill. I eased my fingers open. There was old hurt I could not simply put down, but I could stop letting it answer for me when he tried to tell me how he felt.

‘What is it?’ Max asked.

I touched his wrist and pointed. His eyes moved from the robin to Ada’s drawing on the sill.

‘Look at that,’ he whispered.

I turned back to him before the moment could become another way of avoiding his words.

‘You shouldn’t have to wonder,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve made home feel uncertain for you.’

His eyes shone. I reached for his hand, slowly enough for him to choose, and felt his fingers close around mine.

‘I’m frightened too,’ he said.

‘I know. I want to hear it.’

We stood with our foreheads together until Ada noticed the snow.

Her shout brought us laughing back into the room.

We ate together. Max’s knee touched mine beneath the table and stayed there. Afterwards, he took the old photographs upstairs with Ada while I washed the plates. They made their own bedtime stories from the pictures, filling in the years he had missed.

Their voices travelled through the ceiling. Hers interrupting with a correction. His repeating it in an increasingly ridiculous voice until her laughter swallowed the story.

When he came downstairs, his eyes found mine before they went to his coat.

‘She’s asked whether I’ll be here in the morning.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That we were still talking.’

I dried my hands.

‘Will you sit with me?’

On the sofa, we left a little space at first.

I told him about the prayer at the window. How I had asked for this and then found myself frightened by how much it mattered.

‘I thought being loved would make trusting it easy.’

He rubbed his palms together.

‘I thought if I got everything right, you’d stop being afraid.’

‘That’s too much for you to carry.’

He nodded, looking down.

I moved closer.

‘You don’t have to earn your place here every day, Max.’

‘Neither do you.’

I cried then. Quietly, with his hand against my cheek, while I tried to tell him how sorry I was that things done to us long ago had found their way into what we were doing to each other.

‘I don’t want to keep apologising for the same thing,’ I said. ‘I want to change what happens before it.’

We talked about asking instead of assuming. About saying when we needed a pause, and agreeing when we would come back. He told me things I had hurried him past before. I listened, even when I wanted to defend myself.

‘Thank you for forgiving me,’ I said. ‘For all the patience. I see it, even when I haven’t shown you.’

‘I want us to be happy here.’

‘So do I.’

It was his face I had wanted to turn towards at the end of every good day. His ridiculous voices that made Ada laugh. His warm skin I searched for in sleep. No imagined, easier life without him held what we had made between us. I wanted to learn how to love this particular man well.

‘It’s you,’ I said.

He brushed the damp hair from my cheek.

‘It’s always you.’

When he kissed me, I could feel how carefully we were both beginning again. I let my hand rest against his neck, felt him come closer. The second kiss was longer. Afterwards, he held me until my breathing slowed against his chest.

‘Stay,’ I whispered. ‘I want you here.’

He kissed my forehead.

‘I want to be here.’

On Sunday, I woke with his arm around me.

For a few moments I stayed still, feeling the warmth of his hand beneath mine. Then Ada appeared at the door, stopped at the sight of us and smiled with her whole face.

‘You stayed.’

Max lifted the duvet for her. She climbed between us, bringing cold feet and questions about snow. He leaned across her and kissed me.

Later, before getting ready for church, we crossed the front garden and went to the tree.

The snow had barely dusted the green. Beneath the low branch, sheltered beside a root, lay the blossom. Frost had edged it in silver, holding its pink petals in their delicate shape. It looked as though it had only just fallen.

Ada crouched beside it.

‘Can we keep it, Mammy?’

‘Yes. We can press it and keep it with your picture.’

Max knelt and helped lift it onto a fallen leaf. Ada carried it home between both hands while we followed, his arm warm around my shoulders.

At the kitchen table, I let the frost melt and gently blotted away the moisture. Then we laid the flower between clean sheets of paper inside a heavy book. Ada’s drawing waited beside it, ready to keep them together when the blossom was dry.

Through the window, our tree stood among the other seven. Its empty branch no longer looked like something missing. I could see room there: for the bird, for snow, for whatever would come in its own time.

Max set my coffee beside me — he always made it better — and bent to kiss my cheek. Ada was asking if she could take her doll, a colouring book, six pencils and a carefully saved conker to church.

The ordinary things.

I reached for his hand before he moved away. Yesterday I had wanted certainty from a flower. This morning, I could feel it in the choice we had made and the small ways we were already keeping it.

I knew we could grow from here.

I knew I could.

Outside, the chestnut had settled into November. Inside, with Ada talking and Max’s thumb moving gently over mine, I took a full, unguarded breath.

The prayer I offered that Sunday began with thank you.