Life Support: Escape to the Country

by Nicki Edwards

  Mary-Margaret turned and indicated the stranger. “This is Andrew Williams, one of the family lawyers.”

  Emma’s eyes widened at the name. This was Lleyton’s lawyer? The same man who had emailed her? The man she and Lleyton were supposed to meet to begin their divorce proceedings? He was younger than Emma expected.

  “Andrew works in partnership with his father, who happens to also be one of Winston’s best friends,” Mary-Margaret explained. “The boys grew up together.”

  Emma’s heart sped up. Why was the lawyer here? Did the Chirnsides know about the divorce?

  Andrew shook her hand. “Hello Emma. I’m sorry we have to meet properly like this.”

  His tone was neutral but an odd look crossed his face, which Emma was unable to interpret. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and something in the way he looked at her warned her not to say another word.

  “Now Emma, go and find the doctor would you?”

  Emma drew a deep breath and spun on her heel. Sometimes there was simply no point in arguing with the woman.

  *

  Half an hour later, Rick Knight called a family meeting in the same bland waiting room and explained the situation. All evidence indicated Lleyton was brain dead.

  There was mass hysteria from the girls at first, followed by calm as the family huddled together and drew strength from one another. Andrew and Emma were left on the outside of the circle like the kids not chosen to play in the school sports team because they weren’t good enough. Emma tried to shrug off the hurt – after all, she’d been on the outer of the Chirnside family from the day Lleyton had first introduced her – but in light of Lleyton’s grim prognosis, their snubbing angered her.

  Her husband was not going to recover and there was no one to offer her comfort.

  Time, which had moved so slowly for forty-eight hours, finally sped up, and in Lleyton’s final moments it went too quickly. Everyone had a chance to say their private good-byes, even Andrew, and at Winston’s decision, the entire family gathered for the moment when the nurse turned the machines off. Despite the unit manager’s insistence that perhaps they didn’t all need to be there, ten people plus two nursing staff crowded into the tiny room.

  Emma was still reeling over how Mary-Margaret and Winston had overruled their son’s wishes to have his organs donated. She had pleaded with Andrew, but he’d sadly shaken his head. It seemed he had no power to change their stubborn minds either.

  Other than Emma, Andrew was the only person in the semi-darkened room to shed a final tear when Lleyton’s soul left his body. Emma bowed her head as relief flooded through her. Lleyton was finally at peace.

  One by one, the family trudged from the room, leaving Emma sitting beside the bed, Lleyton’s hand in hers. For the first time she noticed his wedding band was missing. She stroked his cooling fingers, unable to bring herself to look at his bruised and battle-scarred face. He’d fought and lost a fight he was never going to win.

  “Emma?”

  Andrew was at the door, alone. Gone was the stiff suit from the day before and in its place he wore khaki-colored chino pants and a buttoned-up check shirt, open at the neck. His casual dress reminded Emma of Lleyton in his weekend attire.

  “Until death do us part,” she whispered, closing her eyes and trying to shut out the sights around her. Her words seemed to echo around the empty room. “I never gave much thought to those vows when we made them.”

  Red-rimmed eyes met hers. “He always loved you,” Andrew said softly.

  Emma cocked her head. “Surely not after he knew I wanted to divorce him?”

  “Yeah, he still loved you. Even then.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  The affair gave her hindsight to realize Lleyton had never really loved her. At least not the way she yearned to be loved – like the love her parents shared or like the way her brother Joel had fallen head over heels in love with Kate. Emma wanted that kind of love, and Lleyton couldn’t offer it. Now she knew the reason why.

  They were silent for a few minutes.

  Emma rubbed her eyes. “His death. It’s such a—” She paused, unable to find the right words.

  “Loss?”

  She nodded. But it was more than that. His death was a tragedy. A total waste of a life, particularly if, as the police believed, Lleyton had simply fallen asleep at the wheel.

  Andrew looked sadly at Lleyton’s body and he too sighed heavily. His face was a mixture of grief and something else Emma didn’t recognize.

  “Now’s not the time Emma, but after the funeral, can you come and see me in my office? I’d like to chat to you about Lleyton’s will.”

  Emma’s eyebrows shot up. “But we were getting a divorce. I can’t be entitled to anything. Besides, surely it’s unethical for you to represent me. Shouldn’t I have my own lawyer?”

  “I hadn’t finalized your divorce paperwork yet. Technically you and Lleyton were still married.”

  “But he had an affair. We were separated. I …”

  Her vision blurred and she broke down and bawled.

  Andrew laid a hand on her shoulder and waited for her tears to finally subside.

  “I did love him once, you know,” she hiccupped, pulling a crumpled tissue from her pocket and blowing her nose loudly. “Before …”

  Andrew nodded. “I know you did. He told me that. And in his own way, he loved you too.” Andrew shrugged. “But it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “I was never going to leave him though. Our marriage wasn’t great but I would have hung in there. But after the affair …”

  Emma started crying again and this time Andrew pulled her toward him and let her weep on his chest while his arm circled her shoulders and rubbed her back in support. Eventually she stood and moved away to the other side of the room. Lleyton’s body lay between them. Again neither of them spoke for what felt like hours.

  Emma paced around the room. She felt trapped, claustrophobic, shut in. She was grateful for Andrew’s silence. She had so much to sort through in her mind. Conflicting memories of her marriage threatened to reach out and smother her. She had loved him once, and yet in the end she’d hated him too and the guilt of that only made the reality of his death a hundred times more painful.

  “He was a good man,” she said, at last. “But he took me, and our relationship, for granted right from the beginning. I think he assumed I’d always be there for him. And for two years, I was. The stupid thing is if someone had come in and swept me off my feet, right in front of him, he never would have realized.”

  “I’m so sorry Emma, really, I am,” Andrew said. “You didn’t deserve this.”

  She made a funny sound in the back of her throat. “It’s hardly your fault.”

  “Partly it is my fault. I should have helped Lleyton understand he needed to end it with you much sooner. Before you were hurt.”

  Emma looked at him in surprise. What an odd thing to say. “I would’ve been hurt anyway if he’d left me.”

  “Because you loved him?” Andrew asked.

  “Yes, and because I believed in marriage. Still believe in marriage,” she quickly corrected herself. “But I wanted more from him.”

  “He wasn’t there for you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Emma nodded. “No. Looking back he was there physically, but he was emotionally absent much of the time. I wanted him to feel passionately about me but he never did. To be honest, right from the beginning of our relationship he wasn’t passionate toward me. He blamed it on being too busy. What a joke. Too busy to give me five measly minutes of his day. Five minutes of his precious time. That’s all I wanted.” Her words tasted bitter on her tongue. “Instead, he gave those five minutes to someone else.”

  A ghost of something flashed past Andrew’s eyes. “And once again, I’m so sorry.” Andrew sighed heavily. “At least he never had to hide his love for you.”

  The
words were so quiet Emma wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. She stiffened and stopped moving. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she whispered.

  Andrew exhaled and stared deep into her eyes. “I didn’t want to tell you here,” he said, pointing to Lleyton’s body. “Lleyton and I were—”

  Shock ripped through her and she collapsed onto a chair, her eyes wide in stunned disbelief. “It was you?”

  Andrew nodded and hung his head but not before Emma saw the tears dripping down his own cheeks. “I’m so sorry I had to tell you like this.”

  The world seemed to rotate then slow down. “It was you?” she repeated. “You and Lleyton at the house that night?” She’d only seen the other man’s back, but they had been kissing which was more than enough for her to understand the full picture.

  He nodded slowly, not meeting her eyes.

  She exhaled. “Do the Chirnsides know?”

  Andrew’s head snapped up. “They have no idea. And they can’t find out. Ever. Neither can my parents. They’d never understand, never cope and probably never get over the shock.”

  “Why not? Lleyton’s dead. What difference does it make whether either of your parents know you’re gay?” Andrew looked shaken and she quickly apologized. “I’m sorry. That was harsh.”

  There was a long heavy silence in the room. The clock ticked on. It sounded so loud Emma wanted to rip it off the wall and throw it through the window.

  “Both of us have a secret to keep,” she said finally. “So where do we go from here?”

  Andrew didn’t answer.

  Emma ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it off the back of her neck before letting it fall back across her shoulders. She sighed again and rolled her neck where it had become stiff.

  “Great. That’s great. My life just became a bloody television soap opera.”

  Chapter 7

  They held the funeral for Lleyton Charles Winston Chirnside six days later. It was a cold and blustery winter day. Gusty winds whipped gray clouds across the sky from west to east, bringing squally rains and hail followed by brilliant sunshine and blue skies then rain again. Melbourne was known fondly for her four-seasons-in-one-day weather and today she was making every effort to impress and live up to her reputation.

  The one-hundred-year-old Trinity College Chapel at Melbourne University was overflowing with Lleyton’s family, friends and work colleagues. Outside, cars whizzed past, people going about their daily lives oblivious to the amount of grief trapped within the old building.

  Emma had little to do with the service preparations – Lleyton’s parents had seen to all the arrangements, right down to organizing a company to create a professional DVD presentation in which she barely featured. Not that she minded. His parents were grieving the loss of the man they’d known since birth. She was grieving the loss of a man she’d only known for three years and been married to for two. And as it turned out, she hadn’t really known him at all.

  She sat in the front row, dressed in an uncomfortable but obligatory tailored black dress and jacket, flanked by her parents. During the service, she surprised herself when her tears flowed freely as the minister spoke of Lleyton in glowing terms. She roughly wiped them from her cheeks with the back of her hand and sniffed. Win glanced at her before quickly averting his eyes, but not before Emma caught the sheen of tears that glistened.

  Maybe the tin-man does have a heart.

  Andrew sat behind her, slightly to the left, in the pews reserved for close family friends. At one point Emma heard him weeping openly and her heart broke for him. As difficult as the circumstances were surrounding Lleyton’s life and death, it was clearly as hard for Andrew to say farewell as it was for her. She sighed. The physical pain of Lleyton’s death wasn’t as bad in its intensity as the emotional pain it had caused.

  Her head told her to move on, but her heart was trying to find a way to do that. At times her grief felt like an insurmountable brick wall. As much as Lleyton had let her down, she had loved him once, and inexplicably she found herself missing him at the strangest of times. She dragged her attention back to the choristers hoping for anything to distract her from the raw memories.

  When the long and formal Anglican service was over and the final hymn was performed by the choir, Andrew managed to pull himself together long enough to perform his duties as a pallbearer. His eyes caught hers briefly as he proceeded past, his back ramrod straight. They shared a tiny smile of comfort and understanding. As extraordinary as the whole situation was, they’d formed a mutual respect for one another and Emma saw no point in hating the man. It was far better to forgive him so she wouldn’t be entrapped in a lifetime of bitterness.

  She was, however, still working on forgiving Lleyton.

  Her parents stayed for the week after the funeral, but at Emma’s insistence they headed north back up the highway. She needed time to grieve alone. They pleaded with her to come back to Birrangulla with them, but Emma made no plans or promises. She simply had to get through one day at a time.

  *

  On the fourth of July, a week after the funeral, Emma sat opposite Andrew in his thirty-ninth floor corner office with its commanding views across the city toward Port Philip Bay. She hadn’t seen or spoken to any of the Chirnsides since the afternoon of the funeral and this was the first time she’d had any contact with Andrew. It was the day Americans celebrated their independence, but Emma felt anything but independent. She felt anxious, unsettled about the future, and nervous about the meeting with Andrew to hear the details of Lleyton’s will.

  “The police are calling it an accident, which is good,” Andrew said once he sat and straightened the pens and papers on the desk in front of him.

  “How is that good?” Emma asked.

  “If it was deliberate, there wouldn’t be a life insurance policy which would mean no money for you.”

  “Lleyton would never have taken his own life.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Andrew straightened his already perfectly hung tie and smoothed his hand down the front of his shirt. He rubbed at a spot on his wrist. Why was he so nervous?

  “I’ve already told you, Andrew, I don’t want his money,” Emma said.

  “Legally it’s yours.”

  “Maybe we should split it,” she said, with a halfhearted laugh. She was trying to lighten the heavy mood that hung between them.

  Andrew scowled. “Emma, this is serious. You need to understand, if Mary-Margaret or Winston get any sniff of the plans for your divorce or any hint of my … er … relationship with Lleyton, they’ll make sure you don’t get a cent.”

  Emma’s heart stilled as a thought landed in the pit of her gut. Fear gripped her. “If they thought I was having an affair, would they go after Lleyton’s money?”

  Andrew’s eyes bored into hers. “Were you having an affair?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “No.”

  Andrew sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, I know this can’t be easy for you.”

  She appreciated his empathy. It couldn’t have been easy for him either. Her eyes dropped to her lap. She cleared her throat. “There may be a small problem. Mary-Margaret did, um, catch me kissing someone in Sydney. Two weeks before Lleyton died.”

  Andrew’s eyes snapped open wide. “Who?”

  Josh’s face – the face which reminded her of Tom – came to mind, and Emma flushed at the memory. “No one important. A doctor. A man I met at a conference.”

  “Is it someone who knows Lleyton, or the family?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he’ll tell anyone about the affair?”

  “It wasn’t an affair.” Emma realized she was shouting when Andrew glanced at the closed office door. She lowered her voice. “I kissed him once. That was it. I’ve never seen or spoken to him since and I don’t intend to. We never swapped numbers or anything. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. I was upset. I’d gotten your email about Lleyton agreeing to the divorce and I wasn’t thinking strai
ght. He reminded me of a guy I used to know and when he came onto me in the bar I—”

  Andrew was shaking his head at her. “Let’s hope he keeps his mouth shut if the Chirnsides go looking for him.”

  Emma frowned. “Why would they do that?”

  “Trust me, you have no idea what this family is like. Lleyton has left you a considerable amount of money – the money he received when he turned twenty-one as part of his inheritance. Although Winston and Mary-Margaret have no legal entitlement to it whatsoever, they’ll try anything to get their hands on that money because they believe it’s rightfully theirs. The Chirnsides are the type of people to go looking for dirt. If they can prove you were having an affair with this doctor in Sydney you can expect they’ll challenge the will.”

  “I told you, I wasn’t having an affair and I also told you I don’t want Lleyton’s money!” She was shouting again, but didn’t care. She folded her arms and glared at Andrew. It was partly his fault she’d found herself in this predicament.

  He stared at her in return but kept his mouth closed, drawing his lips together in a tight grimace. He looked withdrawn and pale and on closer examination, Emma saw the lines of grief etched around his tired eyes. He looked terrible, and suddenly she felt sorry for him. Unlike Emma who had been surrounded by love and casseroles after Lleyton’s death, Andrew would’ve received nothing.

  She sighed. “Okay, because you keep going on about it, because I’m here, and because you have to do the right thing as Lleyton’s lawyer, how much are we talking? Define considerable. A million dollars for his life insurance policy? Maybe a few grand in savings? I think he might have shares too, but I’m not sure.” Or he may have blown the whole of his family inheritance. Lleyton might have been a control freak, but he was also the type of person who acted on a whim and thought about the consequences of his actions later.