Pandora & The Music Box

Part 8

That was the first and last time I met Drew's free-spirited, eccentric relative. Iris and Drew went back the following week, but I stayed in Maspalomas with the baby, unable to stomach the journey, and because I had other distractions by then.

Three months after we met, Esperanza passed away from heart failure, her devoted Tito at her side. She hadn't even told Drew she was ill.

Despite my reluctance to make a promise, in the months since her death I've often wound up the music box and let it play its soothing, tinkling lullaby. Mostly I do this when I'm scrolling through photos on my laptop. They arrive attached to long emails. Evocative landscapes, misty sunrises, cobwebs covered with dew, sometimes the odd woolly sheep. But always, they seem to capture something beyond the physical. Amazing pictures, from a stunning raw talent. I burst with pride when I look at them. They inspire me. Urge me to push on through my own daily grind.

I've skipped too far ahead with the story, though. My time on that island on the edge of the Atlantic wasn't over, the day we travelled to the centre and back not quite done. Iris had yet to return us to our resort in the south, where the weather was normally more suited to holidaymaking than the north. She had yet to take it upon herself to make a diversion on the way back, because 'it might be the only chance we ever get', driving upwards in an almost perfect spiral to a dedicated viewing point.

Once parked, she dragged me out of the car to stare down into the immense crater of an old volcano, a caldera, as the wind whipped our hair and made us small and powerless. I even felt less car-sick – a brief respite only. Life just seemed in perspective somehow, as if we had been blowing up all the bad and shrinking the good for too long.

I'd expected the caldera to be brown and dead, but it was green and alive.

'I'm sorry,' said Iris, as we pulled away from the view, back to the car.

'What for?'

'For not taking responsibility lately. Or maybe taking too much. I don't know. It's crazy, I know, but it's been easier to be angry with you for opening a box than blaming you for acting the way you have, or accepting that I don't always get things right. I'm not perfect. We've made our own mess. There was never any curse. Not that sort. I've been a fool.' The wind whisked her words away, as if she were making a confession and nature was absolving her.

'Then I guess we can clear it up again... Right?'

Maybe there was something in my voice – a fresh spark of optimism. Iris regarded me intently, then smiled. 'I suppose so.'

'I'm not a child, Iris. I had to grow up, sooner or later.'

'I know, Dor. I'll try not to forget anymore.'

It wasn't the first time I'd reminded her of the fact; it just seemed, from that point on, she would be true to her words and remember.

*

The day my brother-in-law arrived, haggard and colourless, as if he needed this holiday more than anyone, I insisted Iris move into the room Drew had reserved across the corridor from ours.

I had to remind her she was his wife. 'You ought to be spending every moment here together,' I reasoned, 'you never get enough to yourselves back home. You've been missing each other like mad, it's obvious, even to a plank like me.'

'But the baby—'

'Will be fine with me, you know she will. It's time, Iris.'

And so, the following morning, I found myself nabbing a spot close to the pool in the shade of a hotel parasol; a rare feat. There had been no sign of Iris or Drew at breakfast.

I was drying the baby off after taking her for a float around in the rubber ring I'd bought her, when a nearby voice made me jump.

'Hello again.'