“Hey,” Bee said. “Where are you?”
“I can’t talk really.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“I’m at UCH,” I said. “My mum’s in the hospital.”
I could hear her breathe in. “What’s happened?”
“She cut herself,” I said, and I started to cry again. People were looking.
I said would she do me a favor. I said Stroma was at Mrs. Hardwick’s and she didn’t know her very well, and she didn’t know anything, really, only that Mum was in an ambulance. I said, “She’s there on her own and she’s going to be scared. Will you get her? Can she stay with you and Carl?” I couldn’t speak properly because my voice wouldn’t stay in one place.
“Of course she can,” Bee said. “I’ll go right now. We’ll pick her up in the car. Give me the number.”
I did and I asked her not to tell Stroma anything. “Just say Mum’s fine.”
“Is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Bee asked if it was an accident and I didn’t say anything. “Oh God. Oh, Rowan.” She was all muffled like she had her hand over her mouth. I wanted to stop talking now.
“Let me know when you’ve got Stroma,” I said. “I want to make sure she’s all right.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Who’s looking after you?” she said.
“My dad’s here,” I told her. “And anyway, I’m sleepwalking. I’m not awake.”
I stayed there for a minute, looking at the rain falling out of the dark in the orange lamplight, and the lamplight in the puddles, rush hour, and the endless rhythm of people getting on and off buses, crossing roads in the traffic, like a pulse. And then I turned and went back into the hard glare and the swinging doors and the shiny floors and the waiting.
I must have slept where I sat because the nurse woke me up talking to Dad. She was saying things about “immediate risk” and “possible nerve damage.” She said Mum was sedated and that the psychiatric people would be assessing her as soon as they could.
I said, “Do you want to know what drugs she’s on?” The nurse looked at me with this tight smile. “For sleeping and stuff. I’ve got a list with the dosage and everything.”
The nurse said someone would come and get that information from me later. Her smile didn’t budge, and she and Dad both kept on looking at me for a second too long. I closed my eyes and pretended not to be there until she’d gone. Her shoes made a squeaking sound on the floor, really loud and high-pitched. White lace-ups. I couldn’t have worn them.
Nobody came, of course. I gave the list to Dad and he read it for a while, then put it in his wallet. He said, “Why didn’t you tell me, Rowan?”
I didn’t answer. I kept my eyes shut and I didn’t speak.
Bee texted me to say that Stroma was fine. She said CALL ME IF U WANT OR NEED, but I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t.
I told Dad that Stroma was at Bee’s. I told him she’d be happier there so he didn’t have to worry. For a second he almost looked like he’d forgotten who Stroma was.
He said, “You should go home and get some sleep,” but I didn’t want to be alone with the bathroom, and when I said so, he went pale and he put his head in his hands and breathed out hard, like a horse.
“It was hard carrying her out,” he said, and he was looking straight at the memory of doing it. I figured it was him that got blood on the floor and the walls and the door and the stairs. I imagined Mum just bleeding quietly into the water.
We slept in our chairs, on and off. There was a draft and it was noisy, and everyone we saw had this shocked look about them, like this wasn’t the day they’d been expecting by a long way.
Jack and I used to watch a show called Casualty and play a game. You had to watch the first five minutes of the program while they set up the stories—lonely old lady with six cats and a rusty can opener; victim of a bully finding a gun in a garbage bin—and then you had to predict who was heading for the ambulance, and how, and if they’d see out the day. Casualty itself was pretty rubbish so we’d turn the sound down and play cards and wait to see who was right.
I didn’t see any old ladies with tetanus or any gunshot wounds. Mainly I saw the wall in front of me, a sickly sea-foam green with pockmarks and little pinholes, like the back of Jack’s door where he used to keep his dartboard.
In the morning Harper came.
I thought I was dreaming. I got up and my body was stiff and kinked out from living in a plastic chair. I said, “What are you doing here?” and then I held on to him and I wouldn’t let go.
His voice in my ear said, “Sssh,” just quietly, over and over, like the sound of a seashell. He smelled of cut grass.
I said, “How did you know?” and he said, “Bee.”
He told me she came on her bike, rode around looking for him, banged on the window to wake him up.
Bee did that for me.
Harper took his jacket off and I put it on. It was only then I realized how cold I was. He asked me if I needed anything, something to eat, a drink of water.
“A time machine maybe,” I said.
He asked me if I found her.
“No, my dad did. I just went in after.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Dad was watching us from where he was sitting. Watching us and staring straight through us at the same time.
“I was doing everything I could. I was helping.”
“It wasn’t you, Rowan. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“Do you think it was us in Jack’s room? Do you think it was that?”
“It’s grief,” he said. “It’s chemicals in the brain. It wasn’t us and it wasn’t you.”
A nurse was talking to Dad. I went over and she said it all again, like a waitress doing the specials. Mum was awake, but heavily sedated. We could go in, but one at a time, and only for a few minutes. She was very drained.
Dad went in first. He squeezed my hand like he was wishing himself luck.
I went back to where Harper was standing. I said, “What’s it like outside? What kind of day is it going to be?”
“It’s a good one,” he said. “Come and see.”
You couldn’t see the sky from where we’d been all night. You couldn’t see outside at all. I don’t know if that was to protect the healthy from the sick or to stop the sick seeing what they were missing.
Harper was right. It was a good morning. Big blue-violet sky, last night’s rain shining on the road, the gaps between the buildings day bright and peppered with cranes. People moved past us double-time, oblivious, on the phone, scanning the paper, sipping coffee, one last smoke before work. Business as usual except for those of us who couldn’t remember what day it was. I wondered if I should phone school or if that was Dad’s job now, if they’d even believe me.
“Do you think things will start to get better now?” I asked Harper, as if he knew.
He was squinting into the sun and said, “Well, I suppose they could have been worse.”
After a while, Dad came out to join us. He looked so strange in the outside light, with his bloodstained shirt and his tearstained face, like an actor playing my dad, like the person I didn’t know underneath.
He said, “Go in and see her if you want to. You don’t have to.”
I left them there together, Dad and Harper. I was too busy controlling my breathing to wonder what they’d find to talk about.
Mum was lying on her back with her hands palm up at her sides. Tears fell the shortest way from her eyes to the pillow, straight down, making little pools in her ears. I bent down and she put her arms around my neck and I kissed her cheek and I shook from not crying.
I said, “Don’t do that again, Mum.” She closed her eyes and let her arms fall back on the bed.
I said I was sorry if I’d done the wrong thing and she shook her head, and the tears moved faster to the pillow, like rain on the car window when you’re driving t
hrough it. She didn’t ask about Stroma, but I told her anyway. I said she was being looked after. I said, “She doesn’t know.”
After that I didn’t know what to say, so I kissed her again and I smoothed her hair with my fingers. It was odd being able to touch her. She didn’t pull away while I did it. She didn’t look at me.
Afterward I said to Dad that I didn’t think Stroma should see her. Not yet. He said one of us should go and tell Stroma that everything was OK, and could that be me because he wasn’t ready to go yet, he wanted to stay here with Mum.
Harper said he’d take me to Bee’s. I wanted to stop by the house and pick up a few things for Mum, like her toothbrush and some pajamas, maybe a long-sleeved cardigan or a dressing gown. I thought it might help. I kept talking about it in the hospital parking lot.
“How much sleep have you had?” Harper asked me.
I didn’t know. “Not much.”
He made me a bed in the back of the van. He folded the sofa down and got out the bedding. I was too tired to argue. The sheets smelled of him. I wrote him a list of what I’d thought Mum needed and I gave him my key. I fell asleep with the purring of the road beneath me.
Stroma got under the covers and woke me. She lay on her side in front of me and put my arm around her waist, shifting to make the same shape with herself as I had, to fit exactly. I snuggled in a bit toward her, opened my eyes.
“How’s Mum?” she said, like she knew without even looking I was awake.
“She’s sleeping,” I said.
“What happened?”
“She hurt herself in the bathroom.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she fell.”
Stroma giggled. “Silly.”
“Yep,” I said. “Silly.”
Harper pulled out into the traffic and me and Stroma rolled a little in the bed.
“I like Carl,” Stroma said. I nodded into her hair. “We did flower pressing. Guess what Bee showed me,” she said, turning to lie on her back, all elbows and knees. “Pictures of Jack. Loads and loads of pictures of Jack.”
“How lovely,” I said.
“Can I tell Mum about Bee being Jack’s girlfriend?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t talk about Jack with Mum, not today.”
“Why not?”
“She’s too tired, Stroma. You don’t get much sleep in a hospital.”
“Why? You need sleep when you’re sick. That’s what Mrs. H said. She said Mum would be having a nice long sleep. You said she was asleep.”
“Just don’t talk about Jack, Stroma. It makes her sad.”
“Everything makes Mum sad,” Stroma said, and she moved away from me slightly, kept her eyes on the roof of the van.
I asked Harper if he got Mum’s stuff and he pointed at a shopping bag on the seat next to him. I sat up and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was after twelve. “What took us so long?” I said.
Harper looked at me in his mirror. “I had a little cleanup.”
I didn’t get it for a minute.
“I went to get her toothbrush,” he said. “I couldn’t leave things like that.”
“Like what?” Stroma asked, while I tried to tell Harper how I felt just by looking.
“Your mum made some splashes when she fell,” Harper said. “The bathroom was a bit wet.”
I got out of the bed and I put my arms around his shoulders from behind. Harper rested his head against mine. “I can’t believe you did that,” I said quietly.
Stroma was going, “Did what? Did what?”
Neither of us answered.
Nineteen
Stroma went straight to the bathroom when we got home. As soon as the front door was open she started up there, hit the stairs running like she wanted to make sure we weren’t hiding something. She missed the trash bags Harper had put outside, full of towels and cloths and water and Mum’s blood. I followed her up there slowly while he looked in the fridge for something to eat. I didn’t want to go in, even though I knew there’d be nothing to find.
I was standing outside Stroma’s room. She was in the bathroom. I listened to her washing her hands and I heard her walk toward the door, and then I glanced back and saw the envelope on her bed. White like the one on mine, and when I got closer I could see it was Mum’s writing. I kind of went white hot, and when I picked it up I wasn’t entirely sure my hand would work and I bent it in half and shoved it in my back pocket when Stroma walked in.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“What have you got?”
“Nothing, Stroma,” I said, and I started to walk across the room.
She stamped her foot and screwed up her face at me. “What have you taken from in here?”
“I haven’t taken anything.”
“Liar! Give it back.”
I pushed past her and I said it again. “I haven’t taken anything.” And I started going downstairs.
“Right, then, well, I’ll take something from yours,” she said, and she tried to pass me on the stairs.
Mum’s letter was still on my bed. I hadn’t touched it.
“STROMA!” I shouted at her, and she stopped dead on the bottom step, three paces from my room. “STOP MAKING IT SO HARD FOR ME TO LOOK AFTER YOU!”
“I’m not,” she said, but she stayed where she was.
“Yes you are. You’re six and life’s hard enough and you can’t know everything so stop fucking trying.”
“You sweared,” she said, and her face started to crumple.
I thought, That’s right, but who have you got to tell?
She sat down with her arms on her knees and her forehead on her arms. I went in and got the letter. I put it in my pocket next to hers and I took some deep breaths while she cried.
Harper called from downstairs, “Everything OK up there?”
Stroma shouted, “NO!” and I shouted, “YES!” at the same time. Then I sat on the landing floor and ducked down to look up at her face. There was a teardrop at the end of her nose.
“Look,” she said. “I made a puddle of tears.”
I thought about being Stroma, being sad enough to cry and then noticing the puddle on the floorboards and not being sad enough anymore. I put my arm around her and said I was sorry I shouted at her. I said it was for her own good.
“I hate secrets,” she said.
I said that sometimes they were better than knowing.
“Is that why you won’t let me tell Mum about Jack being Bee’s boyfriend?”
“We can tell her,” I said, “but not today. We have to pick the right day.”
“And is there a right day for you to tell me your secrets?”
“Probably,” I said. “Maybe. Yes.”
The letters were burning a hole in my pocket. I wanted to read them and I was scared to read them and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t talk to Harper about them because nothing was getting past Stroma now she knew something was hidden, and I couldn’t risk her finding out. The only way I could think to get away from her was to lock myself in the bathroom. But then I’d be on my own, reading suicide notes from my mum, with nothing but toilet paper and old magazines for comfort. I’m not saying there’s a perfect way to do something like that. I don’t think there is. Just a better one, that’s all.
Dad phoned to say that they’d moved Mum to a ward and she was asking for me and Stroma and we should come in. He said they’d had “a long talk.” I wondered if Mum had done much of the speaking.
When we got to the hospital, Harper distracted Stroma with the vending machines while I slipped in to make Mum look better. Dad was in there sitting by the bed, holding her hand. She let me brush her hair and we put a cardigan on over her gown so Stroma wouldn’t see the bandages. She winced when we pulled the sleeves over her arms. She looked pretty awful still, but Stroma didn’t seem to notice. She let go of my hand as soon as the door was open and she bent her head to Mum’s chest and spread her arms over her.
&
nbsp; She said, “Did you have a nasty fall?” Mum looked at Dad and he looked at me. “Are you all better?”
Mum just nodded and stroked her hair.
Stroma got something out of her coat pocket. “I made you a card. I didn’t think I’d be able to because Mrs. H doesn’t even have one colored pen, but Bee’s got loads so I stayed up specially and I made it then.”
It had a picture of Mum on it, except she was smiling, and it said GET WELL SOON at the top with about three hundred kisses. When Mum opened it, a clump of squashed flowers fell out onto the bed, moist and flat and browning at the edges.
Stroma said, “Why weren’t we allowed in?”
“Where?” Dad said.
“Our house. Mrs. Hardwick wouldn’t let us in our house. Except Rowan did, but I didn’t.”
I kept my eyes on the wall.
After a pause, Dad said, “It was messy.”
“Rowan told me. All splashed with water, but Harper cleaned it up.”
“Harper?” Dad said, and Mum closed her eyes for a second, rolled them up in her head.
“Rowan’s boyfriend,” Stroma whispered to Mum behind her hand like they were two old ladies on a bench. “He’s lovely.”
Harper was sitting in the corridor. He stood up when we came out of the room.
Dad was embarrassed, I could see that, and he wanted to say something. He was surprised and uncomfortable and exposed. Talk about dirty laundry.
I took Stroma to buy a hot chocolate. I didn’t want her hearing anything she didn’t need to hear. She was craning to listen even while we walked to the machines. The hot chocolate was too hot and too watery and too sweet. Stroma spilled some on her hand and it burned. We couldn’t find anywhere to dump it so I had to drink it.
We watched from where we were standing. Harper was taller than Dad. He rubbed his hair with the palm of his hand, leaning into it, small circles. He put his hands in his pockets and twisted a little from side to side, his arms dead straight and tight against his body. Dad was doing most of the talking. Then he held out his hand to shake Harper’s, and Harper said something and Dad smiled and gripped the side of his arm with his other hand, like he really meant that handshake, like it said something that maybe he hadn’t.
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