WHO: Lumos Boot & her second child WHAT: An introduction. WHEN: July 2019 WHERE: A cemetery
It was early July and not nearly as sweltering as the last July had been, but Lumos still had a little brimmed hat pulled low over the baby’s head to protect her skin as she settled them both carefully in the grass growing in front of Byron’s headstone.
They’d done this before, she and Byron. Only the last time he’d been there, but a million miles away. This time it felt a little like, though he was gone, he was still there somehow. And this time she was the one who’d brought flowers, stowed away in the basket of the baby’s pram. And this baby would be six months old in a few days, born just before Byron’s birthday back in January when it’d been too cold to bring her here, instead of new and wrinkled from birth like Terry had been. There was a lot that was different, but some of it felt just close enough to the day he’d met their first child that it made her throat feel tight.
She cleared her throat, though, and bounced the baby on her knee, drawing a gurgly smile for the father who couldn’t see it. She had a feeling he would hate this if he knew it was happening.
But he wasn’t there to stop her.
After a moment, she said, “So, this is Josephine.” She paused before adding, “Kettleburn.” Then, quickly, “Terry said you would probably hate it, but I thought since she couldn’t have you she deserved something. And I don’t care if you’d hate it, you —” Her throat felt tighter still.
It’d been over a year since he’d died and a lot had changed, but it was still hard.
She took a breath.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Tilting, she peered at the baby’s face, automatically wiping under the baby’s nose with her fingers and then sitting up straight like it had never happened. “I think she looks just like Terry. Except for these cheeks.” She drifted the pad of her thumb over one of the baby’s extra chubby cheeks. “My dad says she looks just like I did when I was a baby, but I still think she mostly looks like Terry. My mum —”
Her mother had said something unkind about this being when she’d expected to become a grandmother. But Byron didn’t need to hear that. And then something else about how Byron had wasted all of her potential. But Byron really didn’t need to hear that.
“My mum is the only one who calls her Josephine. Everyone else calls her Joey. I can see why. She looks like a Joey, don’t you think?” She tilted again, to look at the baby, who gave her a wide smile that Lumos couldn’t help but return.
When she turned back to Byron’s name, the smile faded a little.
“It’s weird seeing her every day. I keep half-expecting to be whisked off to school, but I wake up and I feed her every morning and I try and talk her into falling asleep every night.” She laughed a little under her breath, exhaustion seeping in just thinking about their strings of sleepless nights. “She’s starting to sleep through the night, though.”
To the baby, smiling in earnest again, her voice almost too bright for a cemetery, “Aren’t you? Aren’t? you?” She tickled Josephine’s side and earned a peal of laughter that was almost too bright for a cemetery, too.
To Byron, though, “But I love it. I love her.” She dropped a fond look on the baby again, before fixing his headstone with a skeptical one. “I still can’t believe I got pregnant, though.” She laughed again, under her breath. “You of all people know how careful we were!” But her eyes drifted down to the crown of the baby’s hat. She couldn’t feel too put about the whole thing now that Josephine was there. “I really wish you were here. Everyone’s been so, so helpful. But…”
She shifted Josephine to her other knee and her other arm, winding it around the baby’s middle as she steadied her little body against her. She studied Byron’s headstone and tried not to think about how she would always be older than him now. Instead, she focused on the ‘LOVING SON & FATHER’ his mother had engraved just above his name. It still made her smile in a way she felt guilty about so she quickly wiped it off with the back of her hand across her mouth and just focused on his name.
But…
“Things would’ve been different this time, right? You were coming around.” She sounded uncertain, like she still had to convince them both that he’d come around. “I know it’s a lot, but…” She broke off, looked down again. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. You can’t say.”
She felt suddenly foolish, having a one-sided conversation with Byron’s grave. But she didn’t stand up to leave yet.
“Things are different this time, with or without you,” she said, forcing bravado in an attempt at making herself feel less silly. It worked, but only a bit. “I’ve been writing again, you know. I joined a writer’s group with a lot of really talented writers and I’m taking courses at WADA. It’s really been helping. I’m learning a lot! And Terry’s writing, too. He’s working at the Beacon with Betty and Gwen. I’m proud of him — of all of them.” She bit her lip and hugged Josephine a little closer. “I was proud of you, too. I just wish you were here to tell me how stupid you think that is.”
A clump of grass seemed to catch the baby’s attention and Josephine spilled forward, pinned mostly in place by her mother’s arm. She swung her hand at the grass, getting bits of green stuck in the sticky spaces between her fingers, while Lumos smiled faintly at her and let a comfortable silence descend over the three of them.
But the grass remained just out of reach and Josephine quickly grew fussy. Almost without thinking, Lumos summoned a toy from the pram and gave it to the baby before she had a chance to really start to cry. It was bright and made a noise that seemed to echo in the quiet of the cemetery, but it seemed to satisfy her.
Lumos wasn’t sure what would satisfy her until it struck her how much she had to say to him.
“I, um — I’ve never said this to anyone, but I think I always kind of loved you a little.” She shook her head, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. She’d barely said the words to herself. “What we had — we were always really complicated and sometimes I didn’t like you very much and I know I was the one who cared more, but you were — you were kind of my first love, Byron. And I never really got the chance to get over you. I mean, even now…” She flapped her free hand helplessly at the baby and then, in a rush, said, “I think Joey really does have your ears. Terry keeps measuring them every time he comes over to see her and I think he’s going to give her a complex about them one day and — and — I don’t know. Admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?”
She laughed, a little ruefully, and Josephine threw her toy in the way she’d started to pick up from Terry, who thought it was as hilarious as measuring his baby sister’s ears. Lumos leaned forward, stretching to reach it. Her eyes caught on the words on his headstone again and when she handed the toy back to the baby, it was with a sigh. She wasn’t smiling about it now.
“I think you could’ve been a loving son and father, Byron. I don’t know why you didn’t let — and if it was my fault, I’m really sorry, but I don’t think it was. Not entirely, anyway.”
It was starting to feel a bit like she was lecturing him and that wasn’t why she’d come here so she hauled herself and the baby to her feet. “We should go. It’s almost time for Joey’s nap and — we should go.”
But when Josephine was safely fastened into her pram, Lumos crouching before her, she looked from the bright happy face of her daughter to the cold marble headstone of her children’s father and came to a decision. She didn’t care if Byron hated anything. He was gone.
Bracing a hand on the pram’s handle, she said, “I wish you’d given us all the chance to prove how much you meant to us while you were alive. I think you would’ve been surprised how important you were, just being you. You were your worst critic — and I, of all people, understand that. But you were too hard on yourself and you were too hard on the people who cared about you. Like you were punishing us for having bad enough taste to like you the way you were. But you were wrong. Not us.”
With that, she swept up the flowers she’d brought and placed them carefully in the vase in front of his headstone, arranging them just so. When she stood up, she wiped the palms of her hands on her jeans and stared down at his name.
“Anyway,” she said, “we’ll be back.” She pressed her fingertips to the cool marble for a long moment, allowing herself the luxury of a frown, before turning back to the pram and Josephine with a put on smile. “Let’s go home, little one!”
A breeze fluttered through the cemetery as she pushed Josephine’s pram towards the gate. She glanced once, over her shoulder, and then they were gone.