Apricot Press

It was no longer half-light. Dawn broke like the golden yolk of an egg over the sky, dripping into the water, and the air sizzled with birdsong. She sat on the wooden terrace that jutted out over the lake and watched, keeping half an ear open for her mother who had never understood sunrises and who had never eaten breakfast, who would have been loudly bemused at her sitting out here as one life faded and another life joyfully began. She kept half an ear open even though her mother’s things were mostly packed away in boxes, stacked and sturdy and sealed with packing tape, and wondered whether the day should be this joyful considering her mother was no longer there. Still, it was, and there was nothing to be done.

Yesterday they’d been through the kitchen. Pots and pans and crockery that all matched. Old mayonnaise and tomato ketchup in the fridge. Lemons, still fresh, deep yellow and soaked in sunshine. Why, she wondered, did people die in the summer? They’d each picked what they wanted (a spice rack for her with most of the jars almost full, no point in wasting them, and a crystal fruit bowl for her sister), threw out the mayonnaise and tomato ketchup, and packed the rest for the storage container. Neither of them could decide on what to do with it. Neither of them was quite ready to let it go even though they didn’t want it. The lemons were still there, painted like ovals of colour on the white of the kitchen island, and she thought that today she would throw them away and scrub the surfaces. It would be as if the lemons had never existed.

It would be a hot day. Already the air was sparkling.

There had been other dawns here, too many to remember. Sharp, sweet, flecked with clouds like pips. None of them had stayed in her mind. She couldn’t picture the detail. The tender, vulnerable sunrises were the most transient, diffused as they were in light mists and the wings of the heron; as fleetingly innocent as her sister’s lips on hers in the cool freshness of the lake water, as light as the childish giggle that followed. Nothing more than a touch of morning light, and yet suddenly it seemed important that she remember more than that even if there was nothing else there.

What year had it been, what season? She couldn’t recall. All of the memories, old and sepia coloured, had been packed away the day before yesterday. They were in the living room now, stacked against the bookcase that had been emptied the day before that. She didn’t even know if it would be worth looking. If it had faded from her mind then surely it must have faded from paper too. It would have slipped off the album page and into another sunrise, but it still seemed important that she find something. A clue. A hint. It never occurred to her to ask her still-sleeping sister.

She turned her back on the lake and left the dawn behind. The smells of the morning followed her into the cool shade of the house: water rising in new heat, the sharp tang of blue sky. They hadn’t yet taken the pictures from the walls, because that would have been too final, and she sat on the floor underneath a reproduction of a Van Gogh sunrise, the only kind of sunrise her mother used to like. This sun glared orange, not lemon. Its ripples burned her back and she thought of hot wheat fields brushed by the wind, but then the floor underneath her bare legs was cold and she thought again of lake water, of soft and twisting weeds brushing her skin. The tape on the boxes was hard to peel. It came away clinging to the top layer of cardboard and she discarded it in a screwed-up ball. They had more.

There were eight albums in each box. Old fashioned albums, with self-adhesive paper and protective film. Some of the photos were falling out, the stickiness evaporated and their edges now curled, and they undulated in her hands, soft pulses of light and shadow that had lost most of their meaning. The four of them, in faded citrus colour, on the wooden jetty. A rowing boat. A barbecue, and endless faces that she didn’t recognise and no longer knew. Then two young girls with their arms around each other’s shoulders, barefoot and tanned. She didn’t remember it being taken, but she remembered the shorts. They were the same ones that, in her mind, she had put on after that morning swim.

She wondered how many times the lake water had renewed itself since then, how many times it had dissolved and filled with sun and rain. She wondered how many times her memory had faded and bloomed like algae on the far shore, until it became the glimpse she had seen.

“What are you doing?”

She looked up, but her sister’s face was not the one she remembered either. The differences were subtle. Harder than mist, still softer than water-glass. Sharper rays of light.

“I wanted to look for something.”

“Could have looked before I packed them all up, Cari.” Her sister turned away, hair still mussed from sleep, and walked towards the kitchen. “Did we leave anything in the fridge for breakfast?”

She looked at the open box. A pile of her mother’s memories, not hers, pictures of a life that she barely recognised as partly her own, and her sister was a different person now who wouldn’t remember. She had found an image that might have been from that day, but what did it matter? It would always be too much and not enough, an ache into the past that she could never ease. She didn’t know why it had suddenly seemed important.

She followed her sister into the kitchen. The lemons sat on the island, and she thought again about throwing them away. Maybe later.

“I’ll go to the village,” she said. “There are only those left here.”

Photo credit: Kael Escobar