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Jean wanted to go back, go back to a time where she wasn’t Aunty Jean, wasn’t an ungrateful daughter, and wasn’t a disappointing wife and snobby sister.
She missed how she would sit under the tree at Pa’s house. She used to love staring down at her knees. They were knobby. She’d watch the shadows cast by the trees slowly move across them. She’d always have French literature sitting over her knees as she would flip her fingers through the pages and pretend she was in all lace and a corset, sipping tea in a French garden tucked away in a quiet castle in Europe.
But time is a bitch.
She met a sweet boy; small town; Nick isn’t poster-boy handsome, but he promised to take her to Hobart, maybe even Sydney, maybe even Italy one day.
She married him; small town, small chapel; small flat house sitting in the middle of nowhere, with rusted fences and broken wires. But she told herself that she was happy. She had been pregnant at the time, a life growing in her; it grew in her, a bittersweet, grimy feeling. She wanted to scrub it away.
Time is a cruel, cruel bitch.
She saw the edges around her knobby knees soften and pillow, and blood ran down her knees, and they quickly sagged with time and sorrow.
By that time, she had stopped reading and stopped going to church; her sweet boy grew silent and distant.
She always knew about Nick and her sister.
She couldn’t care less, honestly. She wanted Nick because she wanted a way out, but as soon as his empty promises slipped through her fingers, like trying to grip onto a handful of sand, He became dead to her. She was sadder about her sister, seeing someone whom she used to share a pink bedroom and silly dreams with take something that is hers. Every time Jean looked at them, an eerie sense of itchiness that she couldn’t quite scratch would crawl under her skin.
And then they died.
At first, it didn’t feel like much. She was glad that the two bitches who stole her happiness were gone. She faked crying at the funeral and forced Steven to buy Nick’s share of the boat. She didn't give a fuck. In fact, she felt a thrill, a thrill that came from something that felt like karma.
She now lives alone in the big house.
She painted it white and began collecting kitsch garden gnomes.
But time is a cruel bitch.
As seasons passed and the thrill wore off, her sister and Nick began haunting her through Harry. His voice, his curly hair, his big wide smile and his fucking stupid ass horrible kindness, just like her stupid sister.
Jean, now properly referred to as ‘Aunty Jean’, would kneel on the sterile kitchen floor and scrub after Harry and Miles like she was trying to scrub away that deep, deep memory.
Soon seasons came and went, and Harry had passed too, in a storm; her son-of-a-bitch brother-in-law pushed him, she heard.
Time seemed to ease off, and nothing seemed to matter anymore.
She would sit near where Miles buried Harry’s silly things. She started reading French literature again and would sometimes whisper it to Harry:
"Ainsi tout passe sur la terre:
Esprit, beauté, grâce, talent,
Telle est une fleur éphémère
Que renverse le moindre vent."
(Thus everything passes on earth:
Spirit, beauty, grace, talent,
Such is an ephemeral flower
That the slightest wind overturns.)
With time, she stopped trying so hard to maintain the house like a hospital room; she stopped replaying that stormy night and stopped haunting herself with her memories. With time, those dark years became an insignificant speck passing in her life. It didn't seem to matter anymore, not in a prozac indulging way, but in a calm, collected, “I’ve now got a deeper understanding of life” way.
Jean stopped trying to go back. Also, her knees felt lighter too as she stopped walking with the burdens of trauma, guilt and regret.