Her eyes sparkle and, because we are still a little brittle with each other, she nudges me to let me know she is joking.
“Fuck off,” I say, smiling back at her. “It’s gonna be huge.”
“Actually, that reminds me, I have something for you,” she says, opening her handbag and rummaging around inside.
“Here it is,” she says to herself and hands me a small flash drive. “It took me a while, as I couldn’t bear to look at them for so long. But I finally went through all my old photos and videos of Jack. There’s something in particular you’ll like on there. Something I watched, and then the name of your website suddenly made sense.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just take a look. You’ll like it. There’s a lot of the Greece holiday on there, as well. Jack loved that holiday, every single minute of it.”
“Yeah,” I say, “he did.”
Jack, my boy. Our boy.
* * *
On the train back to Cornwall, I settle at my table with a coffee and open my laptop. I plug in the flash drive Anna has given me and see that she has made folders: Birth, Christmas 2010, Christmas 2012, Spain, Brighton.
I click through every folder, every photo. Jack’s first Christmas dinner, little slices of things he didn’t eat on his Mickey Mouse plate, his paper hat pulled down over his face. Jack making a happy lion’s face in a ball pit; Jack pretending he was in prison, smiling at me through the bars of his cot.
There is a video of Jack’s Zoo, and I cannot stop myself grinning. I watch as we lined up the animals on his bed and made a hollow mound out of the duvet—a cage, Jack said, for the monkeys. And then Jack kissed my neck, a kiss so tender and so full of love, it makes me gasp.
There are two videos remaining that I don’t think I have ever seen. They are from the house in Hampstead, taken in the summer, the year before Jack’s diagnosis. We were buoyed with wine and good friends, and kids were running madly and perilously around the garden. Jack was being boisterous, and Anna wanted me to have a word with him. So I did, but with perhaps a little too much wine, I started tickling Jack and soon he was laughing hysterically, and we were both rolling around on the grass.
A tear falls, then two, three, and they do not stop, but I don’t care who can see me crying on the train, because I am watching us all, sun-kissed with happiness, nothing tainted in our little world. This was our before. Our wondrous before.
I click on the second video and the time stamp shows it is from the same night, after the guests were gone, as the sun was going down. It was a holiday and our neighbors were doing the same and having a barbecue. They were louder, younger, without children, and it sounded from the noise like they were a little drunk.
Jack was shouting at the moon, charging around the backyard with Little Teddy and a toy plane. There was suddenly a huge burst of laughter from next door and Jack looked at me, wagged his finger and said, “naughty, naughty” and narrowed his eyes, just like he did when he saw a dinosaur with bared teeth or a knobbly scary tree in a book.
Jack ran back to the patio and pressed his head onto my knees and then looked up at me and asked who was making the noise.
“They’re our neighbors,” I said, “they live next door.” Then a pause, Anna saying something inaudible off camera.
Jack looked up at me with his big wide eyes and asked what neighbors were and I said, “Well, we own this house, and they own the one next door.”
And then he asked, “But what about the yard, who owns that,” and I said, “Well, we own our yard and we own the house and the patio and everything you can see around us.”
“Everything,” he said, opening his hands wide as if he had caught the biggest fish.
“Yes, everything,” I said. “The trees, the walls, your bedroom window, the roof with the birds.”
The camera shakes slightly, as Anna, out of sight, attempts to stifle a laugh.
Jack looked up at the sky and then at me. “Dad,” he said, pointing at the red sunset and the moon and the streaks of airplane dust, “do we own the sky, as well?”
Epilogue
The sky is tenuous, as if it is going to break, and I know that I will have to leave soon. For now, though, the garden at The Rockpool is too inviting. The sunlight is blazing, and it is the first time in a long time that it has felt this hot.
The benches and tables are full of people, scattered haphazardly under the trees. Children run in through the wide-open doors, dodging, running rings around the bar staff. Bags of potato chips are fanned open on tables for families to share.
I am taking advantage of the Wi-Fi to work on my new project. One day, I was reading an article in the Guardian. It was about a little boy with a terminal disease who was using a camera to document his last few months. I remember looking at this boy’s photos and thinking just how much they reminded me of Jack’s. It was their sense of wonder about ordinary things, the shapes and colors we had become so accustomed and indifferent to: the vivid, bright blue of a pen lid; the ribbed texture of a teddy bear’s nose; the digital red glare on the display of an infusion pump.
So I started Sunflowers—the name had been Anna’s idea—and I asked tech companies to donate high-end cameras to children who were terminally ill. We offered free photography lessons to
