PART 1 — THE RED MAPLE
Gethin and my mother took against each other almost immediately.
For nearly thirty years every holiday in that family ran the same way. Polite smiles, short answers, long silences, and then one or other of them remembering somewhere else they had to be.
She never once called him her son-in-law in a warm sentence. She said your husband.
He told me in about 2011 that he would rather work a Christmas morning than sit at her table again, and he was not joking and I laughed anyway.
I asked both of them what it was, for years.
“We’re very different people.”
“We’ve never understood each other.”
“We come from different worlds.”
I accepted it. My mother built a business out of a two-man millwork shop and was the most self-contained person I have ever met, and Gethin grew up with nothing and is proud of everything he has ever earned, and a clash like that is not hard to believe in.
But there was one night, after an argument in her kitchen about something that was not the thing, when I heard my mother say:
“You know exactly what you did.”
And Gethin did not get angry. He did not defend himself.
He went completely silent, which in that man is not a thing I have seen more than four times in twenty-nine years.
I asked them both afterward. She changed the subject. He said it was nothing.
Eventually I stopped asking, because I had a daughter and a job and because whatever it was had clearly stopped mattering.
My mother died in the March at seventy-eight.
At the reception I realised Gethin was not in the room.
I went looking, and I found him at the far end of the corridor outside the small room where the coffin had been.
The door was about six inches open.
I was going to push it when I heard him.
“I kept it, Rowena.”
I stopped.
He had one hand on the edge of that coffin.
“Nobody ever found out. Not once, in twenty-seven years.”
Then his voice came down.
“And it’ll stay under that red maple in your yard forever.”
I got away from that door before he turned round.
The red maple.
She planted it behind that house the year my daughter was born. Twenty-seven years.
Which is exactly as long as those two had been unable to be in a room together.
And then everything about that tree arrived at once.
She would not let a gardener near the roots. Not once in twenty-seven years; she did the mulching herself into her seventies.
When the roots lifted the walkway in 2014 she paid eleven hundred dollars to relay the concrete rather than take out a tree.
And once, when Nessa was about four, she started digging by the trunk with a plastic spade, and my mother crossed that lawn and spoke to her in a voice that made my daughter cry, and then would not discuss it.
I went back to that house at about ten that night after the last of them had gone.
It was completely silent. The porch light put a thin grey light across the lawn and that maple was enormous and black at the end of it.
I stood there for about ten minutes telling myself I was being ridiculous.
Then I went into the garage and got a shovel.
For twenty minutes I found nothing but roots and stones and wet soil, and I was starting to feel foolish in a way that was almost a relief.
Then the shovel hit something and rang.
Two feet down, under a mat of old root, there was a metal box wrapped in about four layers of plastic that had gone brittle.
I got it out and carried it up to the porch and sat with it on my knees for a long time before I opened it.
Inside were papers from 1998.
A share transfer. A missing person notice with a photograph on it.
And a notarised affidavit, dated the eleventh of November 1998, with my husband’s name typed on it and my husband’s signature at the bottom.
I read that page three times on a porch in the dark with a shovel lying on the grass eleven feet away.
I did not understand what it was. I want to be honest about that. I am not a lawyer and it is a page of formal sentences, and it took me about four minutes to work out that the words in my presence were the entire document.
What I did understand straight away was the missing person notice, because it has a photograph on it.
I knew that face. Not from a poster. From the wall of my mother’s front room, in a photograph from 1991 of two people standing in front of a rented unit with a roller door, one of whom is my mother at forty-four and one of whom is a man I was told was called Corbin and who had gone.
I sat on that porch until about half past one. At some point it started raining lightly and I did not move, which is how the plastic on the outside of that box came apart in my hands.
I did not ring my husband.
I rang the non-emergency line at twenty to two in the morning and was on hold for nine minutes, and when a woman answered I could not get the first sentence out and had to start it three times.
What I said in the end was: “I’ve found some documents buried in my mother’s garden and one of them is a missing person notice from 1999.”
She said, “Is anybody in danger?”
I said no. She said somebody would ring me in the morning, and somebody did, at ten past nine.
Then I sat in my car outside my mother’s house until it got light, because I could not go home.
