The Missing Pieces of Sophie McCarthy

by B M Carroll

  ‘Fuck … I didn’t see it … Fuck, fuck … Are you all right, Chlo?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m –’ He’d already flung open his door and was halfway out of the car.

  As soon as I had a full view of the other car – the concertinaed bonnet, the shattered windscreen, the inflated air bags, the girl slouched forward – I realized that this was no everyday accident. This was serious. The girl was hurt. Because of us.

  Aidan had wrestled open the door to her car and seemed to be talking to her. She had dark, glossy hair. That was all I could see of her.

  ‘Call an ambulance, Chlo.’ Aidan turned his head around to face me. There was blood trickling down his face from a nasty-looking gash on his scalp, but he seemed to be unaware of it. The colour had leached from his face, leaving it a sickly shade I’d never seen before.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Damn it, never mind me, she’s losing consciousness.’ He dug in the trouser pocket of his uniform, extracting his phone, which he tossed my way. ‘Tell them it’s urgent.’

  My fingers were shaking so much it took two attempts to dial. Then the operator fired questions at me: what, when, where. I held the phone to Aidan’s ear so he could answer what I couldn’t.

  ‘No, she isn’t conscious at the moment. She was at first … Yes, she has a pulse but it’s weak … No, I won’t move her. I think she’s broken some ribs. Her breathing sounds laboured, so maybe some lung damage too … No fuel leakage that I can see.’

  His army training had kicked in. Even though he was as shocked and devastated as I was, he could still function and do what was required. He gave information on the severity of the injuries and stabilized the young woman until the ambulance got there. Aidan’s a good person to have around in an emergency: level-headed, practical and trained in first aid, as well as many other things.

  The ambulance seemed to take an eternity and, in the end, two arrived. One of the other witnesses must have made a call too. Aidan’s cut obviously needed attention, and my ear was really hurting at that point, so Aidan and I were taken to the hospital in one of the ambulances; the young woman went in the other. I caught a brief glimpse of her on the stretcher before we left: her deathly white face under the dark hair, bruising and blood around one eye, an oxygen mask sealed over her mouth, and one arm hanging lifelessly over the side. I realized that our lives were changed for ever.

  ‘I pulled out right in front of her,’ Aidan explained to the police when they took his statement at the hospital. ‘I can’t believe I did it … I just didn’t see her.’

  The police officer – a man in his fifties who had obviously been around a while – seemed somewhat startled by his honesty.

  ‘Any drugs or alcohol in your system, sir?’

  ‘None.’

  Aidan’s cut needed four stitches, and he had to give blood and urine samples. They sent me for a CT scan. It turned out I had a temporal bone fracture and a ruptured eardrum. It wasn’t severe, and surgery wasn’t required, but it hurt … a lot. I felt I had no right to complain, though, not when the young woman’s injuries were obviously so much worse.

  Both Aidan and I were discharged from the hospital by noon. We caught a taxi home. Very little was said on that journey. Both of us were feeling utterly shocked and miserable.

  ‘Why does Daddy have a bandage on his head?’ Jasmin asked when one of the other mothers dropped her home from school. ‘What happened to him?’

  She asked the question of me, even though her father was standing right there with us. Probably because she could sense how shell-shocked he was, how incapable of answering even the most basic question.

  ‘Mum and Dad had an accident in the car,’ I replied, when Aidan didn’t, then I pulled my daughter into my arms, hugging her with a ferocity that surprised us both. ‘Thank goodness you weren’t with us.’

  Aidan was like a caged animal for the next few weeks. He dissected that morning, the series of events that preceded the crash, agonizing over what he could have done differently. He rang the hospital several times – we knew that she’d been taken to Prince of Wales, like us – asking for updates. He discovered her name: Sophie McCarthy. Two weeks later, when the news came through that she was starting to show signs of recovery, he said he wanted to visit, to apologize in person for the hurt he’d caused. He actually asked for my opinion.

  ‘Do you think I should go to see her?’

  He was a wreck at that point, hadn’t slept properly for nights.

  ‘I think that’s a marvellous idea.’

  I wish I could take it back, that permission, just as much as I wish that we had left earlier for the fertility clinic that morning, and that I hadn’t been so distracted in the car.

  We never went back to the clinic. The thawed embryo that was due to be transferred into my uterus was refrozen, on our instructions. It didn’t seem right to be starting a new life when we were unsure if Sophie would survive. Then, when it became clear that she would pull through, there were other consequences to be dealt with: Aidan’s torment over what had happened, having his driving licence suspended by the police, the fact that he insisted on pleading guilty to negligent driving. Then waiting to be sentenced, to be punished for that tiny moment of inattention. And still waiting (Aidan has now been given a new date, in May, which looks like it’ll go ahead). Needless to say, with all that going on, the myriad emotional and legal consequences, there was never the right time to talk about our frozen embryos, about when one of them might be thawed again and given the chance to be part of our family.

  The army has a lot to answer for when it comes to babies and having a family. Months on end without seeing my husband at all, and then months of readjustment when he got back from whatever godforsaken place they had sent him to and we felt as though we were falling over each other. Even when he was in Australia, on home soil, they still moved him around. Seven different houses since Jasmin was born. A horrendous cycle of packing and unpacking, some items never even making it out of the boxes before it was time to move on. Not to mention the exhausting process of making new friends, putting yourself out there, only to turn around and leave just as those connections are starting to take hold and mean something.

  On top of being so unsettled, there was also a bit of complacency about our second child, because Jasmin had been conceived so easily. It took us a while to wake up, to realize that number two was going to need a little help: specialists, examinations for both of us and a surgical procedure for me. Then Aidan got posted to Afghanistan and everything was put on hold. We were living in Canberra when I finally accepted that it wasn’t going to happen naturally and we needed to go down the IVF path. I found a clinic and a specialist and had some eggs harvested. Then we moved to Melbourne. We implanted one of the Canberra embryos in Melbourne, but it didn’t work. Maybe it was angry with us for leaving it there, in storage, for almost a year. Maybe it, like us, didn’t appreciate being moved from one city to another. Before I had the chance to rally myself, to go for round two, the army sent us back to Sydney again.

  So you can see where my head was at that morning on our way to the clinic. I was thinking: This is it. At long last. We’re on our way. Our embryo, our baby-to-be, is waiting for us. Sorry that we have kept you waiting all this time, but we will make it up to you. We will love you so very much, darling.

  Not once did I think we would hit another car. Or that my husband would eventually fall in love with the driver of that car. Or that he would leave me and Jasmin for her. When did I lose him? At what point, exactly? That first visit to see her at the hospital? Or one of the later visits, when he realized there was something happening between them. Or maybe it was even later, when he would go to her house and do odd jobs around the place, desperate to make it up to her, to make good the wrong he had done. What does it matter, anyway? Whether I lost him in a gradual way, bit by bit each and every time they met, or if it was a sudden and definite moment in time, an epiphany that startled them both. All that matters is t
hat those confused and often miserable months following the accident led to the night he sat me down, admitted that he had ‘feelings’ for Sophie and thought he should move out for a while, to think things through. ‘I haven’t cheated on you. I promise I haven’t cheated on you. But I can’t deny that I have these deep feelings for her. I’m sorry, Chloe. I don’t know how this happened. I wasn’t looking for it. But I have to be honest with you, with myself. I can’t hide it. I’m so sorry.’ A few weeks of limbo followed, when he slept on the couch of one of the officers at the barracks. Sorting through his feelings, striving to do the ‘right thing’, to be as moral as he could be in the circumstances, when it had become painfully obvious – even to me – that he would eventually choose Sophie.

  Aidan was the most loyal and trustworthy of husbands. Him leaving me was as inconceivable as me leaving him, so I never saw this coming. But I was dreadfully worried about him after the accident. He wasn’t the same man. He was plagued by what he had done, couldn’t come to terms with it. Control – everything is about control in the army. Accidents are hard to understand for men like Aidan. He was at fault, so he had to take responsibility, he had to make good. And of course he is not the kind of man who lets himself off lightly. Aidan would go to lengths that no one else would dream of to make things right.

  Every month I get a bill for the storage of our embryos. It was always strange – even when Aidan and I were together – paying for the embryos to continue to exist in whatever form of life they are at. When I got a bill last week it felt like the saddest moment of the last year, and that’s out of so many dreadfully sad moments I don’t know how or where to start cataloguing them. I paid the bill. I cried on and off for the rest of the day, for those three poor little embryos, waiting to be thawed, to be transferred, to be born, to be loved, to be part of a family.

  I was there, right beside him, when it happened. Jasmin could have had a brother or sister by now, if only I had looked.

  21

  Hannah

  Today I’m going to make more of an effort with the other parents. I’m determined, so determined that I suspect it shows on my face and I probably look more scary than friendly.

  ‘Helloooo. I’m Hannah, Callum and Finn’s mum.’

  ‘Oh, the twins,’ says one of the dads. His tone implies that my boys already have a certain notoriety and my determination is instantly punctured, making me want to slink into the background.

  ‘Which is which?’ asks one woman politely.

  ‘Callum is the bigger one. Much to Finn’s disgust.’

  They smile at that. Nobody has offered their name yet. The men all look similar. Board shorts, surf T-shirts and baseball caps. None of them seems to feel the chill in the air. The women, by contrast, are overdressed: stylish scarves, padded jackets, jeans, boots.

  ‘So who belongs to who?’ I ask, forcing myself to soldier on.

  Various children are pointed out to me, and I try to retain whatever names I can. Some of the parents tag on their own names to that of their offspring, and within moments all the names are tangled in my head. Is Josh the name of the dad or the kid?

  A young child comes up, sobbing and holding out her arm. The parents crowd around her, examining her injury.

  ‘Let’s see. Only a scratch.’

  ‘What happened, love?’

  One of them produces a lollipop. ‘Look what I found in my bag.’

  They’re nice people. It’s just that they’ve known each other for years. I can’t expect to infiltrate their group in one measly go. I move away as unobtrusively as I can. Job done. I made the effort. Next week I’ll chat to them again. That’s all I can do.

  My phone rings, and I don’t even have to look to know who it is. It wouldn’t be Saturday morning without a call from Sophie. Sometimes I can laugh it off, call her a workaholic and leave it at that. On other occasions, like now, I get a tight feeling in my chest. What does she need? How long is it going to take? How am I going to squeeze in the time?

  I know Sophie’s intentions are good – she wants everyone in the department to be the best they can be – but in her enthusiasm she forgets what time of the day or night it is, the fact that weekends are meant to be a time of rest, and that some of us have children who need to be cared for.

  My phone rings out. I’ll pick up the message later, at home. Hopefully it won’t be anything too complex.

  The game is about to kick off when I notice Callum on the bench with another kid. His head is down and, even though his face is hidden, I can picture the scowl on it. He was busting to get on the field this morning, and would hate not being on the starting team.

  Please, Callum, don’t make a scene. You’ll get your turn.

  ‘Run, Jasmin. Don’t just stand there.’

  I hear Chloe before I see her. There she is, further down the sideline, standing beside a tallish man. Her husband? Something in how they’re standing sets them apart from the other parents: remarkably straight, heads high. My eyes fix on her husband. Short hair, tanned, very handsome for this rather ordinary Saturday-morning setting. Lucky Chloe.

  It’s a tough game. The other team are significantly bigger and are using it to their advantage. The goal, when it comes about fifteen minutes into the game, has an air of inevitability. Our goalkeeper – his actual name is jumbled up with all the others I’ve heard this morning – looks as if he’s about to burst into tears.

  ‘Head up, son,’ Davy, the coach, shouts in his thick Scottish accent. ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry.’

  Davy continues to bellow instructions, and the kids nod to show they understand. They put up a good fight, but the opposition step and weave around them and score another two goals. Finn has hardly touched the ball; all the play has been down at the other end. Callum’s still on the bench, busying himself kicking dirt with his boot. Davy must have forgotten about him.

  Chloe comes to stand next to me. ‘We’re under a bit of pressure this week.’

  ‘Looks like it.’ I smile, grateful that she came to say hello.

  ‘Goodness me, those kids are huge. I can’t believe they’re under ten.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing.’

  ‘What are they feeding them?’

  She stays next to me, shouting the odd direction but not as vocal or as loud as she was last week. Maybe her husband doesn’t encourage it.

  Half-time comes and goes without Callum going on the field. Quite a few other substitutions have been made by now, and suddenly it becomes obvious to me that Callum is being punished. Something must have happened before the game. His bravado – the scowl, the anger – has dissipated and he looks smaller now and suspiciously close to tears. What did he do to deserve this? What could have been so bad? Does Davy have any idea what he’s been through? Tears prick my own eyes just from watching him.

  ‘What’s up with Callum?’ Chloe asks, no doubt seeing my repeated glances towards the bench. ‘How come he hasn’t been on? Is he injured?’

  ‘I think he’s in trouble with the coach,’ I mumble, feeling embarrassed on his behalf. Callum’s ten years old. Sitting out a whole game seems rather extreme, whatever he’s done.

  Chloe stays with me for the rest of the game. She’s definitely more subdued than last week. I probably seem different too. I’m feeling increasingly upset, and finding it hard to disguise it. I should have gone up to Davy at half-time and found out what was going on. Typical me, avoiding confrontation. Now I’ve let Callum down.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ Chloe announces when the whistle goes. ‘Five–nil. A thrashing.’

  ‘They might’ve had a chance if he’d let Callum play,’ I say, unable to contain myself any longer. ‘Excuse me, Chloe.’

  Davy is crouched on the grass, the team circled around him, spouting something about marking players and not giving up.

  ‘Sorry for interrupting.’ I’m not really sorry at all, and the kids can tell because I can sense their shock at my obvious rudeness. ‘I just want to know
what happened. Why Callum didn’t get to play today.’

  Davy regards me through his glasses, which have thick, old-fashioned glass that magnifies his eyes. Then he runs a hand through his hair, which is white and thinning. ‘Callum knows why he didn’t play. Don’t you, son?’

  I turn my eyes to my child, who is just fifteen minutes older than his brother, yet so significantly bigger, stronger and more challenging.

  ‘Just leave it, Mum,’ he mutters, hanging his head in embarrassment.

  ‘Don’t talk to your mother like that, son,’ Davy admonishes, in a tone that makes all the kids sit up straighter. ‘Apologize now.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’ Callum’s face is burning. He looks completely miserable.

  ‘Tell her why you didn’t play, son.’

  ‘Because I was disrespectful.’

  Davy nods. ‘I run a tight ship. I have rules, and they know I have rules, and there are consequences when those rules are broken. Now that Callum is clear on what the consequences are, I don’t expect any more trouble.’

  Trouble? I would like to know what his definition of ‘trouble’ is. A smart remark by Callum? A push or a shove or fooling around? Not listening? Small things, minor transgressions for a child who has endured the worst loss imaginable.

  ‘Rules?’ I’m trembling from head to toe. I know I should shut up, walk away, not make a scene. All the things I tell my boys to do when they get angry. But I can’t. Because this isn’t fair. None of this is fair. And the sheer and utter lack of fairness spurs me on, gives me courage when I’d otherwise have baulked. ‘He’s lost his father. Did you know that? Callum and Finn lost their father, and they’ll spend their whole lives without him there to back them up. What are the rules for that? Tell me –’

  ‘Hannah.’ Someone has taken hold of my arm. Chloe. ‘It’s OK, Hannah. Come –’

  ‘No!’ I cry, trying to shake her off. ‘I want to talk about rules, and what’s fair.’