A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  She knew Lucas was right: even after all this time, Candace had never really turned the page on the traumatic events of her childhood. Perhaps seeing her parents in death, however dreadful, would have helped her to accept they had truly gone. Maddie didn’t know what was best for Emily and Jacob, but she trusted Lucas on this.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she whimpered. ‘I can’t bear that they have to deal with this.’

  ‘You don’t have to go in with them. I’ll do it.’

  She clasped his hand against her cheek. ‘We should both do it. It’ll be the last time we’re together as a family, all five of us. I want to be there.’

  She nearly changed her mind when they arrived at the hospital, where Lucas had arranged for her mother to meet them with the children. She’d only managed to get there at all by focusing on one simple task at a time, refusing to let herself look even a single step ahead. Find underwear. Pull on sweater. Drink the coffee Lucas is thrusting into my hand. Don’t think about what comes next. One step at a time, one foot in front of the other. Just do what needs to be done. Don’t think, don’t think at all.

  Lucas stopped at the entrance to the hospital car park and opened his window to take a ticket. He circled the multistorey until he found a free parking bay at the end of a row, near the wall.

  ‘Maddie, are you coming?’

  Unbuckle seat belt. Get out of car.

  But she couldn’t move.

  Lucas closed his door again. ‘You don’t have to come in, Maddie. You can wait here while I take them.’

  ‘Give me a minute,’ she managed. She couldn’t make him do everything on his own. How he’d found the strength to get them this far, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t let him down now.

  She forced herself to get out of the car.

  Sarah was waiting with Emily and Jacob in the hospital lobby near the gift shop. As soon as the children saw them, they shouted and ran over. Lucas scooped Jacob into his arms, while Emily threw herself at Maddie, wrapping her arms around her mother’s waist and burying her face against her stomach.

  ‘How have they been?’ Lucas asked quietly.

  ‘Jacob doesn’t understand,’ Sarah said. ‘Hardly surprising, at his age. He’s asked for Maddie a bit more than usual, but that’s all. Emily hasn’t said much since I told her. She’s been very quiet.’

  At the mention of her name, Emily raised her head from her mother’s waist. ‘Mummy, can we go home now?’

  ‘In a little while. I promise.’

  She spotted Jessica, the bereavement counsellor, coming across the hospital lobby, another clutch of folders and paperwork in her hands. Jessica greeted them and introduced herself to Sarah and then dropped into a crouch so that she was on eye level with the children. ‘And you two must be Emily and Jacob,’ she said. ‘I have a couple of books for you to read later that I thought you might like.’

  ‘Mine!’ Jacob exclaimed, bouncing in Lucas’s arms.

  Jessica smiled. ‘They have lots of pictures. Let me see if I can find some crayons so you can colour them in.’

  ‘Are we going to see Noah now?’ Emily asked.

  Maddie felt her heart turn over. The closest her little girl should be coming to death was the tiny mouse corpses the cat left as a gift at the foot of the stairs. Right now, Emily should be out playing in the sunshine or watching some nonsense on her phone – anything but saying goodbye to her dead baby brother in a hospital morgue.

  ‘Remember what I told you?’ Sarah asked her granddaughter, as they all followed Jessica. ‘Noah isn’t really Noah anymore. He won’t look the same. The bit that makes him Noah isn’t there. It’s like when you turn off your computer. You can still touch the screen and the keys, but nothing will happen and the screen won’t light up. It’s just an empty box.’

  ‘I don’t believe in Heaven,’ Emily said unexpectedly. ‘If there was a Heaven, NASA would have found it by now.’

  ‘How do you know about NASA?’ Lucas asked.

  She shot him a look of contempt. ‘We did it in school. The International Space Station is way higher than Heaven. They’ve put robots on Mars and taken photos all the way out to Saturn and Jupiter. No way would they have missed Heaven if it was there.’

  ‘It’s not a place you can travel to, like Mars or Jupiter,’ her grandmother said. ‘It’s not really a place at all. It’s more like another dimension.’

  ‘Doctor Who can travel through dimensions,’ Emily said thoughtfully, as the lift doors opened. ‘Maybe Heaven is just a different dimension, where Noah is still alive. I’m not buying God, though,’ she added firmly. ‘No way would God let so many bad things happen in the world, like polar bears getting extinct. He’d have to be a pretty mean person, if he was real.’

  Maddie had never been religious. Sarah was an atheist, in a low-key way; she’d brought her daughter up to be curious and open-minded about everything, including the existence of a God she didn’t believe in herself. Maddie had been agnostic before, not really believing in anything very much, other than the general idea of ‘something out there’, but she refused to countenance the idea that she’d never see Noah again, in this or any other life; she had to believe her child would be returned to her one day or she’d go mad. But that meant accepting there was a God and that he had deliberately allowed her baby to die.

  ‘I like your idea,’ she said, giving her daughter a fierce hug. ‘Noah’s not in Heaven, he’s in another dimension. We just can’t see him right now.’

  ‘I hope he’s not crying so much there,’ Emily sighed.

  Jessica showed them into the same lilac room they’d visited before. Lucas went in first, carrying Jacob, and Sarah followed, holding Emily’s hand. Maddie noticed her mother stiffen slightly when she saw Noah’s still form in the plastic crib, but her composure didn’t slip.

  Jacob looked around the room, clearly bewildered. ‘Where Noah?’

  ‘He’s here, Jakey,’ Lucas said, moving closer to the plastic cot so the little boy could see down into it. ‘Do you want to say goodbye?’

  ‘Where Noah?’ he asked again, confused.

  ‘Noah’s right here, Jacob. Look.’

  Jacob lurched violently in his father’s arms, squirming away from the crib and burying his face in his father’s shoulder. ‘Not Noah! Not Noah!’

  ‘He’s right here, son …’

  ‘Not Noah!’

  ‘Take him back outside,’ Maddie cried over Jacob’s screams. ‘It’s upsetting him. He doesn’t understand.’

  Emily hadn’t moved since her first sight of her brother. She stared at his small body, her expression curious rather than distressed. ‘He doesn’t look like Noah,’ she pronounced. ‘That’s why Jacob doesn’t understand. He looks like a doll.’

  ‘Remember what I told you about the computer?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘What’s that purple mark on his face?’

  Sarah put her arm around her granddaughter as Emily peered into the crib. ‘He got squashed up against the side of his cot a few days ago, remember? It gave him a bit of a bruise, that’s all.’

  ‘Is that why he died?’

  Maddie flinched. That stupid lie was going to haunt her forever. Noah’s accident couldn’t have had anything to do with his death, she was sure of it. Only not quite sure enough.

  ‘We don’t know why he died,’ Jessica said gently. ‘The doctors will try to find out, Emily, but sometimes it just happens. Something is broken inside a baby and we just don’t know what it is.’

  ‘I don’t see how he got such a big bruise just from squashing up against his cot,’ Emily shrugged. ‘Are you sure he didn’t get stuck, Mummy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maddie said faintly.

  Emily nodded firmly. ‘I think that’s what it is. I think he got his head stuck and that’s why he died.’ She slipped her hand into her mother’s and looked up, her blue eyes filled with anxiety. ‘Please, Mummy. I promise I won’t get my head stuck and die. Can we go home now?’

  Chapte
r 14

  Tuesday 2.00 p.m.

  Maddie didn’t even glance up when she heard a vehicle pull into the driveway. There had been a steady stream of flowers arriving for the past two days; the front of the house was starting to look like Kensington Palace after Princess Diana had died. Lucas refused to let her bring any of the bouquets inside. He’d always loathed cut flowers; he said they reminded him of the banks that had filled his aunt’s house after his parents died. She understood now what he meant. She didn’t think she’d be able to smell flowers again without thinking of death.

  She picked up another card from the pile on her desk. Everyone was being so kind. There were dozens of letters and cards, not just from friends and neighbours, but from people she barely knew, colleagues from Lucas’s office, parents of children in Emily’s class, friends she hadn’t spoken to in years. Most of them didn’t really know what to say, falling back on the same familiar clichés Maddie herself had relied on in similar circumstances in the past: time is a great healer, he’s in a better place, at least he didn’t feel any pain. But she supposed it wasn’t what they said that really mattered. It was the fact they’d cared enough to try.

  Jayne had come round to be with her as soon as Sarah had broken the news, but Maddie hadn’t been able to face her. She wasn’t ready to see anyone yet, to deal with their awkwardness and pity, not even Jayne. She was beginning to realise she was now part of an exclusive club, a club no one ever wanted to join. She was a mother who had lost her child and that set her apart from everyone else. It was like an invisible wall had gone up around her, cutting her off from the life she’d known.

  There was the sound of running footsteps overhead, then a thump, followed by wailing. She heard Lucas run up the stairs, calling out that he was coming. She should go too, but she didn’t have the will to move. It took an effort just to keep breathing. She’d wanted to send Emily back to school and Jacob to nursery yesterday, to try to maintain some semblance of normality, but Lucas had insisted on keeping them both home. He said Emily and Jacob needed to be with their parents, but she suspected he was the one who needed them. He hadn’t let them out of his sight since they’d come home.

  She closed the card and stared at the angel pictured on the front, unable to connect it with Noah. He wasn’t a cherub or an angel. He was her baby, her flesh-and-blood baby. Death hadn’t changed that. She put the card aside and reached for another. Lucas sought refuge from his grief in the children, but she found their reaction to Noah’s absence unbearable. When they’d got back from the hospital two days ago, Jacob had run from room to room looking for his brother, excitedly lifting sofa cushions and checking cupboards and peering beneath his bed, as if they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. Lucas had wretchedly reminded him they’d said goodbye to Noah in the hospital and Jacob had flown into a terrifying rage, sobbing and screaming that the ‘white baby’ in the hospital wasn’t Noah. Maddie had shut herself in the study, unable to listen to Lucas having to explain it all again.

  But Emily hadn’t asked about Noah once, which worried Maddie more. Her daughter had been eerily cheerful, getting up early to make her own breakfast and playing with Jacob for hours – two things she never normally did except under strict protest. Maddie didn’t know if her daughter was in denial or just terrified that if she didn’t behave, something bad would happen to her, too.

  At least her children’s reactions were normal. Rage, denial, bargaining; these were all recognisable stages of grief. And ever since she’d returned home without her baby, Maddie hadn’t been able to feel any of them. She was utterly detached from it all, as if it was happening to someone else. Intellectually, she understood the enormity of her loss. Her baby had died. For the rest of her life, a part of her heart would be missing. Every time she kissed her two living children goodnight, every time they had a birthday, at every Christmas and school play and Mother’s Day and football game, she would be reminded afresh of the child she had lost. And yet she didn’t even feel sad. She couldn’t summon a single tear for the death of her own son.

  The study door opened. ‘Lucas told me I’d find you in here,’ her mother said. Maddie hadn’t even heard her arrive.

  Maddie gestured towards the pile of cards and letters on her desk. ‘People have been so kind. All these cards and letters. I don’t even know half the people sending them. And the flowers. Did you see them outside? People have been bringing us meals, too. Leaving them on the doorstep. Shepherd’s pie and lasagnes and stews. We can hardly get the freezer door shut.’

  ‘It was the same after your father died,’ Sarah said, sitting on the small love seat beneath the window. ‘People don’t know what to say, so they do what they can. But you don’t have to read them all now. No one expects you to reply. Look at them later, when you’re ready.’

  ‘Listen to this: “There is no foot too small that it cannot leave an imprint on this world.” Isn’t that beautiful?’ Maddie said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘It’s from Emily’s teacher, look. She’s got the whole class to sign it. How sweet of her.’

  Sarah gently took the card from her. ‘Lucas said you’ve been holed up in here all day. Yesterday, too.’

  ‘There’s so much to do. All these cards—’

  ‘None of it needs to be done now.’

  ‘Did you know we can’t have a funeral?’ Maddie asked abruptly. ‘We can’t bury him till after the inquest.’

  ‘I know,’ Sarah said steadily. A beat fell. ‘Maddie, I know the pain you’re in, but you can’t hide in here forever. The children need you. Lucas needs you. Shutting them all out isn’t going to help—’

  Maddie had stopped listening. She couldn’t think about Lucas or the children, because then she would have to think about carrying on for them, about finding a way to go back to being normal, when there was no normal, and never would be again. She had to distract herself, to keep busy. To think about anything but the thing she couldn’t think about.

  She grabbed another card. ‘Oh, look at this one. I’ve always loved this poem. Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped into the next room—’

  Then she read the signature at the bottom of the card.

  ‘I need to get some air,’ she said suddenly, dropping the card as if it burned. She stood up and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I have to get out of here. I’ll be fine, don’t worry. Tell Lucas I’ll be back soon.’

  Sarah picked up the card. ‘Maddie? Who’s Bill O’Connor?’

  But she was already halfway out the door. She could hear her mother calling her name as she banged out of the house, but she didn’t stop. She threw the Land Rover into gear and tore off down the drive without bothering to put on her seat belt, her own personal fuck you to the universe.

  Was it really only four days since she’d spoken to her accountant? It seemed like a lifetime. She pitied the woman who had thought discovering her husband had borrowed money without telling her was the end of the world. The loan didn’t matter anymore; it was so irrelevant she couldn’t believe she’d ever cared about it. But the only way she was going to survive the thing she couldn’t think about was with Lucas, and she couldn’t do that if she couldn’t trust him. She needed to clear her head, and there was only one thing that ever did that for her.

  Ten minutes later, she was jolting over the long, muddy track into the sanctuary’s yard. She parked and got out. The yard was deserted; it was another tauntingly beautiful spring day and she guessed Izzy and Bitsy had probably taken advantage of it and had gone hacking for the afternoon. She was relieved they weren’t here, so she didn’t have to face their kindness and sympathy.

  There was a soft whicker from the end stall as she walked across the cobbles. ‘Oh, Finn. I’ve missed you, boy,’ Maddie sighed, as he poked his head over the half-door. She stroked his velvety nose. ‘I could use your company. Fancy a ride?’

  Finn whinnied and gently nuzzled her shoulder. She opened the stable door and he stood p
atiently as she tacked him up, shortening the stirrups and looping his bridle over the saddle as she led him out. She and Finn usually took a gentle route through the woods, but today she needed to feel the wind in her hair.

  She mounted and guided Finn along the lower paddock towards the bridle path over the downs. There was a long section where she’d be able to give him free rein; it’d been a while since they’d enjoyed a good gallop together, but she sensed Finn was as ready for it as she was. She didn’t bother with her hard hat, for the same reason she’d eschewed her seat belt.

  Finn was already snatching at the bit as they reached the bridle path. She rose and fell in the saddle as he broke into a trot, the two of them moving in a perfect syncopation of movement and strength and energy. They complemented each other effortlessly. It was what she had always believed her marriage to Lucas was like.

  The path suddenly widened as they came out of the trees. Finn’s stride lengthened into a canter and then, as she let him have his head, a gallop. She shut out everything but the thunderous pounding of his hooves beneath her, the exhilarating, terrifying rush of the landscape around her, the fierce burn of the wind against her cheeks. For the first time in four days, the suffocating blackness lifted and she could almost breathe again.

  When Finn finally pulled up, she collapsed against his neck, panting as if she’d been the one running. She kicked her feet free from the stirrups and slid off, burying her face against Finn’s neck and inhaling the pungent smell of horse sweat.

  Suddenly her grief hit her like a tidal wave, a tsunami of sorrow and loss. Raw, wrenching sobs tore through her with brutal savagery. She found herself gasping for air, choking on her own tears, and had to hang on to Finn just to stay standing.