Caring For His Child

by Amy Andrews

  Her head felt foggy and her bones felt heavy and her muscles ached with a weariness that went right down to a cellular level. With the rhythmic stroking of David’s fingers through her hair, fatigue and post-coital malaise invaded her body with lassitude and she fell asleep to the reassuring thud of David’s heart beating beneath her ear.

  He knew the moment sleep claimed her. Her breathing changed from rapid and stuttering to slow and even. He reached his hand up behind him and felt blindly for the rug she had left discarded on the chair. He found the fringed edge and pulled it down, covering them both.

  Even though it was spring, the nights could still be cool on the coast and as the heat from their joining dissipated they would no doubt cool off. Hopefully covering up would avoid the unpleasant experience of waking cold and shivering. The fire had burnt low and at some stage he would have to get up and tend it, but for now…he was pretty damn weary himself.

  Dawn was poking its cold fingers into the room when David next woke. Fran hadn’t moved a muscle and his arm was asleep from where her head had lain all night. He carefully extricated himself and pulled his underwear and shirt on for extra warmth, although he didn’t do up the buttons. He crawled over to the fireplace on his hands and knees, stretching his joints as he went, catlike. He was too old to sleep on the floor all night!

  The fire was all but dead and he built another one. Fonzie stirred briefly and David gave him a scratch behind the ears before the puppy dozed off again. The fire burnt brightly and the radiant heat warmed him all over. He sat staring at the orange flames for a while, mesmerised by their beauty as he relived the beauty of making love to Fran.

  He caught a movement in his peripheral vision and turned to see Fran sitting up. ‘Hey, sleepyhead,’ he said quietly, and smiled at her. She looked even more beautiful by the firelight. Her complexion looked warmer and her hair, dry now, looked like spun silk.

  And there was an openness about her this morning, a frankness in the depth of her pale blue eyes. Like all her shutters and barriers had been removed and he was seeing the real Fran for the first time.

  Fran smiled back at him and thought how homey and nice he looked by the firelight. Domesticated but in a way that was strangely sexy, too. His open shirt afforded her a view of his six-pack that she had touched last night and his cotton boxers fitted snugly.

  She shuffled forward on her bottom, the rug pulled around her shoulders concealing her nakedness. She sat with her knees bent, her arms hugging her legs, her chin resting on her knees. He mimicked her pose and they sat opposite each other, the fire crackling beside them, just their toes touching.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked after they’d stared at each other for a few moments.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘but I’m better than I’ve been in a long time.’

  He nodded and they continued to stare at each other as the fire crackled.

  ‘What happened with Jeremy?’ he asked quietly after a while.

  ‘He said he didn’t love me any more and he left me,’ she said.

  David blinked at her frankness. His first instinct was to gather her up and make love to her again to help erase all the painful memories, but he sensed she was ready to unburden and he knew she needed that more.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because he blamed himself for our daughter’s death.’

  David felt the breath whoosh out of him. Hell! He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been that. So Ethel had been right. ‘Oh, Fran,’ he whispered, because he was lost for anything else to say. He thought of Miranda and how close he’d come to losing her, and knew a fraction of Fran’s pain. But she had known so much more grief than he had and it was no wonder she’d been so damaged when she’d arrived at Ashworth Bay.

  Fran looked into the fire, away from the horror in his stare. ‘Her name was Daisy. She died two years ago. She was ten.’ She looked back at him then and she saw the light dawn. Had he done the maths and worked out that Miranda was the same age as her dead daughter would have been?

  Of course! Now things made more sense. Knowing that Fran had had a daughter Mirry’s age explained a lot of Fran’s behaviour with Mirry over the past couple of months. Her initial reluctance to get too involved with his daughter and the almost pained expressions he’d sometimes witnessed when Fran had looked at Miranda.

  ‘How?’

  ‘She had a cerebral bleed from a ruptured AVM.’

  Arteriovenous malformation. David sighed heavily and shuffled forward so her knees fitted between his and his thighs cradled hers. He rubbed his hands up and down her arms a few times and then rested them on her shoulders and kneaded them lightly.

  He’d had a sixteen-year-old patient back when he’d first gone into general practise who had died as a result of an AVM. He’d been rushed to hospital after sustaining a head injury from crashing his motorbike, only to discover on CT that the rupturing of the AVM in his brain had come first and caused the accident rather than the accident being responsible for his head injury. He’d been dead before he’d even hit the ground.

  Hell, most people didn’t even know they had an AVM until it ruptured. There had even been a patient at the home a few years ago who had died at the age of eighty-three from an overdose and they’d made an incidental finding on autopsy of an AVM. He’d had the condition all his life and not known about or been killed by it.

  David knew that an arteriovenous malformation was a congenital defect and that Fran probably had unreasonable levels of guilt about being responsible for Daisy having it in the first place. To that he could relate. Knowing he and Jen had passed HOCM on to Miranda had, and still did, give him terrible feelings of guilt.

  It didn’t matter that AVM was purely an accident of foetal development that caused a malformed area of blood vessels in the brain to have weakened walls, thus making them susceptible to rupture. Just as it didn’t matter that he and Jen hadn’t known about her HOCM until after Mirry had been born. The guilt you felt as a parent wasn’t rational.

  Fran’s voice was husky as she continued. ‘She came home from school one day and complained of a headache. I was at work.’

  David saw the bitter twist to her lips and guessed she blamed herself about that also.

  ‘Jeremy gave her some paracetamol and she said she might have a bit of a sleep. I got home about an hour later. Jeremy told me about Daisy and I went to check on her. I sat down next to her on the bed and noticed she’d vomited. I called her name and shook her but…she was unconscious…barely breathing.’

  Fran closed her eyes against the pain that that day still engendered. It had been the worst day of her life. She felt David squeeze her shoulders and gave him a sad smile. ‘She was rushed to hospital but it was too late, the bleed had been massive and the damage had been done. She was brain dead the next morning. We let her go that afternoon.’

  A tear tracked down her cheek and glistened in the firelight. Fran swallowed the lump of emotion choking her throat. ‘I left for work one morning and she’d stood at the front door waving me goodbye, and thirty-six hours later she was dead.’ Fran’s voice broke. ‘If only I’d known that morning…. I wouldn’t have gone to work or I would have given her twenty kisses goodbye instead of ten, I would have told her I loved her to the moon and back more than I ever had before.’

  Fran stopped because she knew if she said any more at the moment she was going to break down again.

  ‘Oh, Fran,’ said David, and pulled her into the circle of his arms, hugging her close. ‘How awful. How very, very awful for you.’

  Fran sheltered in the security of his arms and waited for the emotions to simmer down. She sat back after a while and turned her gaze back to the fire. ‘I lost the plot after that. I could barely function. I spent whole days crying. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I quit my job. I existed within the four walls of our house and that was it. I was like a hermit.

  ‘I pushed Jeremy away, too self-involved with my own grief an
d anger to respond to his. He blamed himself, hell, I’d blamed him in more than one argument and although, rationally, I didn’t mean it, I think some small part of me did. Why didn’t he check on her after she went to lie down? Why didn’t he realise it was something worse than a headache? Daisy never had an afternoon nap. Why didn’t he take her to the GP instead of giving her paracetamol?’

  David listened to her quiet voice running back over that horrible day and the remorse and guilt since then.

  ‘We became completely dysfunctional. I existed in this dark shell where there was just me and this constant oppressive grief. He would get up and go to work while I was sleeping and he’d came home late at night and we barely talked. And if we did, we argued. We were just going through the motions. Two people who were bound by a legal contract and a ring but emotionally disconnected from each other. I mean, something like this should have brought us closer, right?’

  David shrugged as her questioning eyes sought his. ‘A child’s death is hard on relationships. Grief can make them go either way.’

  She nodded and liked how his face looked with the firelight dancing shadows across his stubble. ‘I know this sounds awful but by the time he told me he was having an affair and was leaving I was so removed from my old feelings for him that I didn’t care. My grief over Daisy was still so huge that there was no room left for him and he was so needy all the time. He tried to reach me but I kept pushing him away until he decided not to come back one day. I just didn’t have any love left for him.’

  David bit back his automatic response to criticise Jeremy for his actions. He’d had an affair? Had he not realised that such a betrayal was the last thing Fran would have needed? ‘Still,’ he said gently, ‘it was a pretty low act.’

  She smiled at him for his words of defence and shook her head. ‘No. I don’t blame him for trying to find solace and comfort elsewhere. God knows, I wasn’t there to give it to him but everyone in the family was in such a flap about it. All I cared about was that Daisy was gone. I couldn’t understand it. My little girl, my baby, had been gone a year and still it hurt so much I could barely breathe. And they were worrying about the actions of a grown man.’

  ‘It must have been a terrible time for everyone,’ David said quietly.

  She nodded. ‘It was actually a relief, though, you know, in lots of ways. I was so sick of the same old argument. About how he couldn’t live with our decision and how could we have done that to our daughter. Like somehow it was easier for me because I wanted it more than he did.’

  Fran drew in a ragged breath, remembering the horrible bitterness and recriminations that had been wreaked by their decision to donate Daisy’s organs.

  David stopped following Fran’s meaning. What decision? The one to switch off Daisy’s machines? Had Jeremy not grasped the full implications of Daisy’s condition?

  ‘I’m sorry? He had a hard time with the concept of brain death? He didn’t want to withdraw treatment?’

  Fran looked at him and shook her head. Their decision to donate Daisy’s organs was still painful to think about, without having to talk aloud about it, but she was unburdening herself and suddenly she wanted him to know everything.

  ‘No. We donated Daisy’s organs. He was…reluctant.’

  David felt his breath hitch in his throat. Fran had donated her daughter’s organs? He searched her face for a sign that she knew the personal implications of this subject for him but found none. The Ibsens were showing discretion in their old age! If it wasn’ t for people like Fran and her courageous decision, children like Miranda died. His daughter had received the gift of a heart three years ago and without it she would be dead.

  ‘It’s such an awful time to be asked such an awful thing,’ he said. How often had he thought about the family that had suffered so Miranda could live? Every day. At least.

  Fran remembered that dreadful time vividly. The friction between Jeremy and herself over their decision to donate still felt as real as ever. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she said, and couldn’t block out the bitter tone shadowing her voice.

  David looked at her assessingly. ‘There was some conflict?’ he probed gently.

  She sighed. ‘Jeremy was…unsure. It’s funny how life turns out, isn’t it? Like a lot of people, I’d never really thought about what would happen in the situation we found ourselves in. But Daisy had. She’d come home from school only the week before and told me all about the discussion they’d had in class about the pros and cons of organ donation. She looked me in the eye and made me promise that if anything ever happened to her, I would donate everything they could use. I laughed and we did a pinkie promise.’

  Fran paused and remembered vividly how she and Daisy had linked their little fingers together. Why wouldn’t she have promised? It had obviously been very important to her daughter and, really, what had the chances been?

  David didn’t interrupt. He could see Fran had gone back in time and was reliving that day.

  ‘But when we were actually faced with it, Jeremy was reluctant. And I got really mad. I cried hysterically and demanded that he fulfil our daughter’s last wishes. I remember yelling at him, ‘This is the only thing we can do for her now.’ Fran shuddered. ‘It was horrible. And we ended up haggling over her bits and pieces like…like we were fishmongers at a market.

  ‘He drew the line at donating her corneas and no matter how much I tried to convince him that Daisy could give someone back their sight, he got really distressed at the thought of them removing her eyes….’ Fran stifled a sob. ‘Her beautiful blue eyes. And so I conceded and he consented to the rest.

  ‘The whole year afterwards he had nightmares about Daisy. Maybe if I hadn’t insisted on donating her organs, our marriage might have survived. But it was the one last thing I could do for her. I was her mother. I couldn’t do anything else. Nothing.

  ‘If I could have bought her back to life with my bare hands, I would have. If I could have gone back in time to that moment of her conception and fixed the broken link in the chain that gave her an AVM, I would have. If I could have traded my own life for hers, I would have done that also.

  ‘But life’s not like that and it didn’t matter how much bargaining I did with any god I could think of, it was all futile and the only thing I could do for her was to see that her fervent wish be granted.

  ‘Jeremy kept saying, ‘She’s only ten, what does she know? The teacher’s just filled her head with fanciful stuff. She’s not old enough to make an informed decision.’ And I stood there in that room and begged him. ‘I made a pinkie promise with her,’ I said to him. I said it over and over. I told him I would end our marriage and never speak to him again. I called him gutless and callous….’

  David gently wiped away the tears that were rolling down her face. He heard the raw anguish in her voice and it clawed at his gut. What a courageous woman Fran had been. He was seeing firsthand the flipside to Miranda’s donated heart. Had the family who’d donated Mirry’s heart been through this?

  He had comforted himself with the fact that at least the anonymous family would be able to take solace out of their loved one’s death and no doubt they had, but had their decision been as hard as Fran’s? Did it still haunt them? Had it torn the family apart?

  He hugged her close and marvelled that Fran had managed to survive the ordeal at all. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how horrible it must have been.

  She raised her head off his shoulder and looked at him with anguished eyes. ‘I mean, did he really think it didn’t tear me up inside, thinking about them cutting her open and using her for spare parts?’ Fran sniffled and stared into the fire as she wiped her face on the rug.

  ‘I‘ve had more than my fair share of nightmares, too, but knowing Daisy has helped five people have a normal life again has given me enormous solace. If I was faced with that awful decision again, I wouldn’t do it any differently.’

  He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and pulled her close. The
room was bathed in full light now and Fonzie had gone out the cat flap to do his morning rituals.

  Fran turned so she was leaning against him now, her back to his chest, supported by the solid weight of his body. She felt weary from the emotional roller-coaster of the last few hours. Confession may have been good for the soul but it was totally exhausting for the body. David nuzzled her neck and they both let the fire mesmerise them for a while.

  David watched the flames crackle in the hearth and tried to decide what was best. Would it help Fran to know about Mirry’s heart transplant? Or would she run a mile? Maybe giving her a face to relate to would humanise her dreadful decision. Because the world needed selfless people like Fran and knowing that her decision had directly helped someone like Mirry might just be the soothing balm her damaged soul was craving.

  There was only one way to find out for sure. ‘You don’t know about Miranda, do you? About her heart?’

  ‘The Ibsens told me she’d been very sick and had to take medication for the rest of her life. I assumed when you told me abut Jen’s HOCM that she’s inherited her mother’s condition and is being managed by medication.’

  David shook his head. ‘I wish,’ he said ruefully. Talking about it had taken him right back to that fairly awful chapter of their own lives. Not the transplant itself but how sick Mirry had been and how he had despaired that she would die before she could undergo the lifesaving operation.

  ‘She did inherit from Jen and was being managed pharmacologically, but three years ago her condition deteriorated very rapidly. Her anti-failure medication couldn’t help her any longer and her options had run out. She needed a new heart. They emergency-listed her and we waited. It was awful. Waiting for someone else to die so Mirry could live.’

  Fran heard the huskiness in his voice and felt his arms tighten around her.

  ‘She was on the list for five days. I watched her deteriorate day by day. She got her heart on the sixth day.’

  Miranda had had a heart transplant? She felt her heart beat loud in her ears. She was too stunned to move. She said nothing, her mind a complete blank. Gradually her brain started to function again and things that had seemed odd fell into place.