Amy Cole has lost her mind: The perfect laugh out loud, feel-good comedy (The Amy Cole series Book 1)

by Elizabeth McGivern

  This also wasn’t a big revelation, nor did it make me push myself above the surface, I just accepted that this was a stupid way to die but I’d got this far so it seemed like too much effort to turn back. Even in suicide, I was ridiculously lazy.

  It was then I felt the pull towards the other side – not to heaven, to the other side of the lake. I was unceremoniously dragged through the water and on to surprisingly sharp reeds that surrounded the water.

  I could hear him talking, asking questions but all I could do was cough. The taste of pond water was horrific.

  Sometimes, even now, I can still taste it.

  “Love? Love what’s your name?” my rescuer asked.

  I couldn’t answer for coughing so he tried again:

  “Can you hear me, love? Can you open your eyes? Just tell me your name; can you do that for me?”

  Blinking into the sun I tried to speak: “It’s… it’s… ”

  I stopped speaking and just lay my head back on the grass to stare at the clouds. He didn’t press me further for my name, just waited patiently for me to start talking again.

  It took a few seconds to focus my eyes on my saviour. He was a middle-aged dog walker, who I later found out was called Malcolm.

  “Are you ok? Jesus, here take my jacket. Down Jess! Get back,” he shouted.

  A very enthusiastic cocker spaniel licked my face and made me feel more awake by the second. I pushed myself onto my elbows and looked down to find my clothes covered in green sludge from the pond. Apparently, Jess found this delicious. I knew Malcolm was asking me questions but I couldn’t understand them. He asked where I went in, so he could find my belongings, and I limply pointed across the water.

  He gave Jess a command which meant she sat down right beside me while he took off in a sprint.

  I remember thinking the dog was nice company. We both sat at the side of the water staring into the disgusting depths while I listened to her breathe steadily beside me. It was the first time I felt comforted by a living thing in a long time.

  I don’t know how long it took for Malcolm to return with my muddy shoes and handbag. He kept asking my name but he could have been speaking Norwegian for all I could process. I may have been awake but even simple sentences were hard for me to understand.

  “You’re in shock, love. We need to phone someone to come here. I’ve already got someone to call an ambulance, they’ll be here soon. Now, you have a wedding ring, can you tell me what your partner’s name is? I’m going to look in your mobile if that’s ok, can I phone them?”

  “Ben.” It was the only information I offered.

  “Great, now we’re getting somewhere. This is Jess, I’m Malcolm and we’re not going to leave you until you’re looked after. Ok, love?”

  I didn’t respond. I just looked back to the water again and gave up on holding my own body weight. I lay on the uncomfortable reeds and let the universe go on around me. I felt at peace lying there.

  They don’t tell you about the peace you feel when you properly give up on everything. Letting go of my meaningless existence, in the grand scheme of things, was marvellously freeing.

  It could have been hours before the ambulance arrived, I had no real awareness of time, but I liked watching Jess.

  She had it right, just be happy. I worried about what people were going to say when they found out. I would have to put up with people saying things like:

  “Have you tried not being a miserable cow?” or “Just get on with things, you have children to think of.”

  The kids.

  Adam, who we’d tried for three years to conceive and Arthur, my wild child.

  I was actually going to leave them behind.

  It was the first time I really thought about what me ending my life would mean. I would have left Ben behind to raise our children alone. Would they have grown up hating the mother that abandoned them? Would they hate all women because they all represented the first one in their life to leave them?

  That hurt – even more than the poisonous words I’d been listening to on repeat for the last few months. I allowed myself to finally think about the damage I could have caused to those I left behind and it really stung.

  I don’t know how long Malcolm had been silently sat beside me but when I lifted my head to look at him he smiled back, kindly.

  “Are you ready to tell me your name?” he asked.

  “It’s Amy.”

  “That’s a pretty name, Amy. Now, why would you want to go swimming on a day like this?”

  “I wasn’t going for a swim, I was trying… trying… trying to kill myself.”

  The tears burned in my eyes and a lump the size of a brick was lodged in my throat. When I looked back to him he had a knowing look on his face and sympathy in his eyes.

  “I know, love. I just want to get you talking is all. I’m not going to ask you why, I think that’s a silly question, but I will ask you about these two.”

  He held my phone up and there was a picture of my two beaming boys as my screensaver.

  I started to cry again.

  “Now, now, no need for that. Is that why you’re here? Did something happen to your babies?”

  “No,” I said in between sobs. “Another. My baby girl.”

  My shoulders shuddered with every word. It was the first time I’d ever admitted that I was still grieving for a child, despite everyone around me thinking I should have been over it by now.

  To finally do it was such a relief. It felt like the dam wall had burst apart. This kind stranger and his dog sat with me and listened to my sorry tale in between sobs.

  In my mind I thought he would be less sympathetic when he found out that I was crying over a child I didn’t even meet, but instead, he put his arm around my shoulder and let me cry even harder than before.

  When the tears subsided enough for me to hear him, he told me about his wife: Aurelia.

  “We wanted a big family,” he began, “but that wasn’t meant to be. We tried and tried but God decided we weren’t to be blessed. Then one day she came back all excited with this test in her hand and tears in her eyes. I’ve never seen any person in the world look as happy as she did that day.

  I was terrified from the start but she just kept calm. She took to it like a duck to water and I couldn’t have been more proud to hold back a woman’s hair when she got sick every morning.

  “The bigger that bump got the happier she became but when she was five months pregnant she got too sick to move from bed and then we realised that something wasn’t quite right.”

  His face darkened with every sentence and his knuckles whitened as he gripped Jess’ lead.

  “Cancer,” he said flatly, “she needed an aggressive therapy and needed it right away. She wouldn’t hear of it of course – wouldn’t risk the baby.

  “I tried to convince her otherwise but my Aurelia was a stubborn one. I didn’t love the baby. God, forgive me, but I didn’t. It was just this thing that wasn’t even here yet and it was helping that sickness kill my wife. I remember one day I punched a wall in frustration and my dear old mum put ice on it for me, when she finished she said: ‘A man becomes a father when he sees the baby, a woman becomes a mother when she finds out she’s pregnant.’ I never forgot those words and I stopped trying to convince her of the therapy after that.”

  We lapsed into silence and I waited for him to continue.

  “Neither of them made it,” he finished.

  “I got to hold my little son but he was just too young, his wee lungs couldn’t take it, but I tell you what, my mum was right. I loved him as soon as I laid eyes on him. Had his whole life planned out and all. Begged him to stay with us, his mum was a fighter and he would be too. God took him three days later and took my Aurelia a week after him. They started the treatment but her wee heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t cancer that took her, she just knew our boy needed her up there with him. I like to think that’s where they are, happy together, you know?

  “So I got to m
eet my wee lad but I know had he not made it that far my wife would feel just like you right now. Just because you didn’t get to hold your little one in your arms doesn’t mean you didn’t have her whole life planned ahead of her.”

  It was comforting that someone understood and validated my grief. I didn’t offer any words of comfort – something I regret even now. We just went back to sitting in silence, side by side, waiting for the ambulance. By the time the paramedics gave me the once over, he was gone. I didn’t know his surname or how to reach him after that day.

  I used to imagine inviting him over for dinner when all this was just another painful memory I wanted to hide from. We would talk like two normal people who met under extraordinary circumstances, and forge some kind of everlasting friendship. It was a nice thought but it was never meant to be – like my daughter, and like his family.

  I was taken to the local hospital as a precaution and sat, wrapped in a blanket, in the corridor of the accident and emergency department waiting for my husband. He arrived, ashen-faced and dropped to his knees in front of me. His head collapsed into my lap like a petulant child hoping for forgiveness. I could feel him crying but I couldn’t join him. The wall was back up but I already felt like a weight was gone.

  “I want to go home,” I pleaded.

  “Not until I talk to a doctor,” he said, in between sobs.

  As we sat together in the hallway, I knew he wanted an explanation but I was in no fit state to tell him what had led me to this point. I knew I would have a lot of talking, explaining and apologising to do but for the first time in months, I could see the great expanse of our lives ahead of us. There was no need to rush into talking.

  I don’t know if it was the hyperthermia setting in, the ingestion of duck faeces or the time spent with Malcolm that set the change of mind in motion, but I knew that I had enough strength to get through the rest of the day without trying to hurt myself.

  Of course ‘she’ wasn’t happy about it but I was hoping that there was some sort of magic pill they could give me that would shut her up. There wasn’t. Instead, I was given a medley of medication that would at least help to subdue her.

  I was discharged after I convinced the on-call psychologist that I wasn’t going to commit suicide and Ben promised to not let me out of his sight for the next forty eight hours while they set up a mental health home treatment team to come and visit. The hardest thing to hear was that social services would need to be contacted and would likely want to visit our home to make sure our children weren’t in any danger.

  “Is this a joke? I was killing myself to protect them from my depression and now you’d think I’d harm them?” I fumed.

  “It’s just standard procedure,” Dr What’s-her-face, explained.

  I resented her and her judgemental questions like: “What’s your date of birth?”

  Honestly, I don’t remember why I didn’t like her. I suspect I would have considered a mop my mortal enemy had it ‘looked’ at me in the wrong way at that moment.

  Ben drove us home as we sat in silence. I stared out the window, wrapped in an overgrown jumper and leggings that were two sizes too big. In his rush to get to the hospital, Ben hadn’t stopped for clothes and this was all they could find in the emergency department’s lost and found box. I didn’t mind, they were dry and didn’t smell of algae.

  As we sped silently down the motorway I decided to switch on the radio. Just as I did, the song from the first dance at our wedding came on. It was the final straw for Ben. He violently hit the brakes and stopped at the side of the road. Undoing his seatbelt in a hurry meant it sprung out and hit him in the face. I pursed my lips together to stifle the laughter reflex and he glared, daring me to giggle. He got out of the car, slamming it behind him. I waited for a few seconds before undoing my belt. I took a deep breath and got out of the car to face the man I loved and try to explain why I was planning on leaving him a widower with two young children.

  “Ben,” I began.

  “Don’t, Amy. Just… don’t.” He said, with his hands in the air in exasperation.

  “Don’t make a joke about this or try and play this down. You were going to kill yourself today. If this had gone the way you wanted it to I would be picking up your corpse. Your corpse! How? How did we get to a point where I’m this oblivious asshole who didn’t know this was coming?”

  “Are you really making this about you? How you didn’t know? I’m the one this is happening to.”

  “No, Amy, it’s not. It’s happening to all of us: You, me, Adam and Arthur – we are a team, remember? The days they were born we sat staring at those little balls of fat with complete love. We vowed there and then we would do everything within our power to make sure they didn’t have a day of unhappiness if we could help it. So what do you think would have happened with you gone? We’d just move on and get over you? You are everything to me. Everything.”

  I didn’t have the strength to fight with him so instead, I sat on the barrier waiting for him to finish.

  “Please, Amy. Please promise me you won’t try this again. If you can’t keep yourself safe for me or you then do it for the boys. Yes, I’m using all the emotional blackmail in my arsenal. I will fight dirty and for as long as there’s a breath in my body to keep you with me. Do you understand that? I don’t work without you. I just don’t.”

  His words didn’t touch my heart at the time but I would call on them in my darkest times in the weeks to follow.

  I knew I would keep myself safe for them.

  I tried to speak but nothing came out so I stood up and hugged him at the side of the road. Commuters drove past on their way home from work and stared at this odd couple. They probably thought we were just some ordinary people who were fighting over a flat tyre or whose fault it was they were lost. Little did they know we were trying to figure out how to put a broken woman back together.

  We made another vow at that roadside, one that was more sacred than the ones we nervously swapped in a church, years previously. We vowed that it was him and I against the world and I believed him.

  After we returned to the car the rest of the journey was once again silent – but not like before. Instead, I was mentally picking up tiny fragments of my soul and tentatively fixing them back together.

  When we got home, I picked my son up for the first time in months and kissed him on his beautiful, tiny lips. That was a fragment put back in place. Later, that night, I lay my head on my husband’s chest and listened to his heart like I used to. Another one connected.

  That’s the way it was, that’s how I found my way back to a new normal. It wasn’t some shocking realisation or epiphany as I washed the dishes. It was the simple, somewhat boring, yet beautiful routine of my daily life that brought me back to life.

  I was shopping one day when I saw one of those god-awful shabby chic plaques that are in every bargain home store in the world. It said: ‘Remember the little things, because one day you’ll look back and realise they were the big ones’; or something equally as trite, but that’s the only way I could describe my journey home.

  I had no grave to go to and grieve for my daughter, but I gave her a life, if only in my head. I named her Lily and she had the most beautiful red curly hair and green eyes, like me. Her smile was like Ben’s and she would wrap him around her little finger. Even now, when nosy people ask when I’m going to ‘try for a girl’ after my two sons I swallow down the lump and refuse the urge to tell them that I had a daughter. Even if I never got to hold her, she was mine and she was as real to me, in those short weeks, as both my sons are now.

  That was the hardest part of coming back into the world: people. Well-meaning as they were, they were all dumbfounded at how badly I’d taken it all.

  Apparently, there’s a socially acceptable amount of grief a woman is allowed to express after a miscarriage (an early one at that) and I’d far exceeded my quota.

  I gladly accepted the medication they gave me. There was one that levelled out t
he sadness, one to help me sleep, one that helped the anxiety. They had covered all their bases, but it didn’t stop there.

  I was sent to therapy.

  I spoke about my childhood, the relationship with my parents and a whole host of other things that I thought they wanted to hear. If I had enough of a ‘dodgy’ background then maybe my little swim in the lake would make sense.

  It was all lies, of course. I had a wonderful childhood. The truth of the matter was: my baby died and I was suffocating with grief. I didn’t even last a full session before I left. I refused to go back since.

  As the months rolled on, I successfully managed to completely alienate myself from all of my friends. It didn’t help that while I was trying to collect my sanity, my whole persona changed. The natural air of confidence, the surety in my voice and my abilities as a writer had all but gone.

  All this meant I was floundering at work so I decided to make the leap out of the viper’s nest and retreat back home where I felt safer – citing rising childcare costs as the reason.

  Looking back, I know I wasn’t pushed out per-se but the way I was treated in the office had certainly changed. I couldn’t figure out if they were deliberately hiding scissors and other sharp stationery or if I was being paranoid, but I thought it was for the best that I just got out of there.

  Sometimes I missed the adult conversation but mostly I managed to convince myself that I hated people. Small talk, although tedious, became something I grew to almost fear. I stopped short of becoming agoraphobic but I was frightened that’s where I was headed.

  The panic attacks and the social anxiety as a whole were getting out of hand and it was building. Now, I was avoiding a parent and toddler group.

  I weighed up how much of my story I was willing to reveal to this stranger but I decided to open up as best I could.

  What have you got to lose? It’s not like you’ll ever be back here again and this is a kind of therapy.

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what had led me to this point in my life (or into his café) so I spoke to him about other things. I told him about my old job, my new job and the fact that I was still adjusting to life at home - nothing of real consequence.