After Forever Ends - Ramone Melodie - Страница 48
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She was my harshest critic. I’ll never forget how she tore me to bits while we were gown shopping for a Yule Ball. “Oh, God! Silvia!” She scolded, “You can't wear ruffles! You look like a fucking retarded six year old!”
To this very day I can't even think of wearing a ruffle.
But in contrast she was my greatest, most honest supporter. “Now that dress, Love! Is gorgeous!” She had gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth. I had tried on an off the shoulder black, sequence satin gown, “Bloody gorgeous!”
“Is it really?” I turned in the mirror and looked at myself over my shoulder.
“Oh yeah!” She placed her hands on her slim hips, “I'd fuck you in that!”
“Really?”
“Really! I hate you!”
“Really?”
“No, I love-hate you! You're too cute!”
“I love-hate you, too! You're so tall!”
“Shut up and zip me!”
Sandy and Silvia. That was us. I loved her like a sister, true and real, and I knew that because I had a sister and it was difficult to compare the two.
On that quad the day we left Bennington, we wept knowing we'd be apart for a good, long time.
“You’ve got my address,” I finally let her go, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
“I do! And I’ll be back in Wales around Christmas, we can have tea then.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “I can come back sometimes and you can come to Ireland, too!”
“Of course we can!”
“Oh, Silvia, I feel like I’m losing a sister!”
“You’re not losing anything!” I swore. I grabbed her up again and squeezed her hard, “We’ll be mates forever! I’ll see you around Christmas!”
As much as I meant the mates forever part, I knew somehow deep down in my heart that we wouldn’t meet for tea at Christmas or at any time soon after that, either. She might come to Wales from time to time, but she'd have no time to leave her obligations to come and see me. We would send posts and make phone calls and one day we would reunite, but our lives were going to take us to different destinations. My world was below hers, a simple one, where hers was one born with responsibilities I would never understand. It was like a stone sitting in my gut. I knew that Sandra knew it as well.
As Oliver and Alexander approached us, she let me go and turned to them. They both hugged her and the three of them stood chatting for a bit.
I suddenly felt incredibly lonely. The meaning of the old saying, “A page has turned” dawned on me. How true it was. I had spent three years writing a page of my life at Bennington and it was now over. Those days were safely tucked away, bound by time in my memory. My past could never be edited, revised or changed, but I could re-read it as time went on and review its lessons if I needed to. It was the first time I understood how precious memories are. I felt so empty and so full all at once.
Moments later, Sandra left off with her older brother for their home in Ireland. Lance had left off with his mother for their estate North in Caernarfon. Alexander left off with his parents for the family home in Welshpool and Oliver and I took one last walk around the lake together in silence. We looked at the little gamekeeper's cottage that had been our temporary home, at the tree we sat under when he had kissed me for the first time, and the spot on the bank where we would hang out with our little group of friends and laugh until we ached. Neither of us said a word. Then we walked across the grounds to the bench where we had first met.
“I want to take this with me,” Oliver said quietly, patting its surface. “Maybe I’ll steal it.”
“It’s made of stone. We couldn’t lift it.”
“Yes, but Professor Wilkins took the rubber ball from Lance when Merlyn broke a window with it and wouldn‘t return it, remember?”
I nodded, “You lose a ball and you can’t have a bench. But you ended up with me.”
He wrapped his arm around me, “Just Silvia, who’s not hurt or ticked off, but just fine.” We watched a butterfly flutter past and land on the grass, “What would it have been like here without you?”
“You’d have had loads of girlfriends.”
“Like who?”
“Oh, like Peggy McGhee!”
“Who? Oh, her. Yes. I mean no. Definitely not her.” He was looking straight ahead.
“Serena McLaughlin then.”
Oliver snorted. “Try another!”
“Amber Monahan.”
“No way! She‘s revolting!”
“Well, you could have had the half of the female students that Alex didn’t,” I squeezed his arm, “Or the two you might have exchanged if it wasn’t a good fit. Wait! Would that be twincest?”
I watched the dimple appear in his cheek as Oliver smiled and shook his head, “Gargoyles, ninety-five percent of them. I wouldn’t have wanted any one of them and none of them would have been clever enough to get me through Physics.”
“I didn’t help! You nicked the password to Professor McClellan’s computer, picked the lock on her office and changed your mark yourself! And maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to keep any of those girls, but they’d have wanted to keep you.”
“So? You practically wrote my essay once!” He looked up into the sky, “I’d have been miserable here without you!” He paused, “Well, maybe I’d have gotten an urge to go to Edinburgh then. Maybe I’d have gone and seen a beautiful red haired goddess on a bench and beamed her straight in the back of the head with a rubber ball just so I could meet her.”
“You did that on purpose?”
He looked at me with the devil in his grin, “No, but it would have been brilliant, yeah?”
I lay my head against his arm. We were quiet for a long moment. “So it’s good bye to Bennington now and off to our little house in the wood.”
“Oh, I’ll make it big. I’ll make a mansion out of it for you.”
“I don’t want a big house.”
“Really?”
“No, just a couple of rooms.”
“A toilet with a window?”
“Up high, sure,” I squeezed him again, happily imagining it, “Nothing we can’t manage. Just something where we can go at night and be warm and eat fat sausages and bacon and toast in the morning. Of course, running water would be nice.”
“A room for us and a room for a muffin or two?” He nudged me.
“Oh, yes, definitely, but we’ll worry about the muffins as they come. They can always share a room for a while if they have to. Lucy and I did.”
“I really do think you are absolutely the most fabulous person in the world, Sil.” He looked at me seriously, “Marry me again?”
“As many times as you ask, Sweetheart.”
“Then I’ll keep asking.”
“Good.”
We sat there awhile longer before we both knew that it was simply time to leave the place and everybody in it behind. Both of us sighed, taking one last glance around. How special Bennington was, really. Despite its constraints, it had been a sort of magical place for us. Oliver had spent a good amount of time growing up there, but I tell you this for nothing. That is that I was born there. I said it in the beginning that I swear my life began the day I walked through those gates and I wasn't joking. I certainly would not have grown to be the woman I did had I never set foot on that quad or sat on that bench that morning to check my schedule. It is so amazing the way such a simple act can launch the direction of your destiny. One just never knows, do they?
As we were exiting the quad, Headmistress Pennyweather came scurrying across it, “Ah, the young Dickinson’s! I was hoping to find you!” She was all smiles, her hair tucked up under a grey fedora, “Lovely day, is it not?”
“Yes, ma’am, lovely,” Oliver told her.
“Well, since the term is over and you two are no longer students, there is something I have wanted very much to give to you,” She reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope, “It is from not only me, but some of the other faculty. We could not formally present you with a wedding gift while you were enrolled here, but now that you’ve graduated we all wanted to wish you well.”
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