One, two.
He’ll feel what I felt. The stiffness.
He’ll shake his head at the other and turn to me and tell me he’s sorry, while I make one final attempt to rally her broken heart, frantically trying to undo this and bring her back to me.
One.
That’s when I’ll hear the crack of her rib and feel it break into pieces underneath my hand. A sound and a touch that I know will haunt me for the rest of my days.
I’ll fall onto her frail body, sobbing.I’m sorry, Mum. I’m so sorry.
Then I’ll notice the silver bracelet, shining on her wrist under the ambulance officer’s headlamp, three words engraved on it that will hit my heart with a regret that seems to spread cancerously through my entire body, poisoning my spirit, cell by cell.
DO NOT RESUSCITATE.
56
Evie
“I came as soon as I could,” I tell Drew, fighting back tears as I dump my handbag onto the kitchen table. I probably haven’t been in this room since I last studied for an English exam there, when there would have been textbooks and junk food spread all over. Drew is standing here, in adult form, exactly where he used to annoy me as a teenager, eating cereal and teasing me about Oliver.
There is no teasing now. And, despite the lapse in our friendship and the awkwardness of our quick reunion just days ago at my graduation, I throw myself into his arms. “I’m so desperately sorry, Drew.”
I’m not just sorry about his mum. I’m sorry about my silence. Sorry I didn’t try harder to clear up what happened that night he abandoned me. Sorry I listened to Oliver. And I’m sorry we let our lives decouple from each other’s so convincingly it’s taken a tragedy to bring us back.
When I go to pull out of the hug, he grabs me harder, holding me to his chest. I wrap my arms tighter around a body that feels unfamiliarly tall and broad, despite how close we used to be. His heart is racing. And breaking. I could tell the latter just by the torment on his face when he opened the door. Thehaunting shock in his eyes as he looked straight through the gap in our fractured friendship and met me here in this moment.
“Evie, it’s me,” he’d said on the phone. “Can you come to Mum’s? I need you.”
I hadn’t asked why. Hadn’t needed to. I knew from the tone in his voice what had happened. That almost telepathic connection, intact after everything else had been shredded between us, brought me up sharp on the way over in the car as I turned onto his street and arrived to the glow of lights from the paramedics. The knowledge that, even after we fell out, I’m still the first person he calls suddenly means everything.
They have Annie on a gurney. My heart aches at the sight of her. She’s smaller than I remember, her skin drawn, lips a bluish gray. I’ve never been exposed to death up close like this. When my grandpa died when I was little, I went to the funeral, but Mum and Dad shielded me from the burial.
I don’t want to be this close to it now, and I feel myself shaking. But this is not about me, even though Drew shields my face, aware of my response to her.
“Cup of tea?” I manage to ask, turning the other way.
Drew doesn’t look like he wants tea, or that he’d say no to a cup. He is completely and utterly lost, as if deciding one way or the other on tea would be beyond him.
I fill up the kettle and sit beside him while a police officer asks questions.
“Do you know what she last ate?”
Drew shakes his head.
There’s half a sandwich on a plate on the bench beside the kettle. The bread is dry, the cheese curled up at the edges. “Perhaps that?” I offer.
The idea of the half-eaten sandwich almost undoes me. That we could just step out of life one day, unfinished. Books half read. Wet washing still in the machine. Places unseen. Ambitions unmet. Grudges held, long after they should have been …
The sandwich seems to undo Drew too. It’s the simplicity. She deserved something scrumptious for her last meal. As he stares at the stale bread, I grieve for the years of support he’s needed in my absence. I have every intention of making up every moment we missed.
“We need to check the air vents in the ceiling,” the officer says. “Standard procedure. Can we see what medication she was on?”
I glance at all the packets and bottles on the bench. Pain relief that never quite worked. And I don’t have a clue what to say. I want to make it better. Lighten it. Soften it? Obliterate it altogether. But somehow I hold back that impulse and manage just to sit with it at the kitchen table, while the kettle sings.
The officer excuses herself and says she’s going to check the garden before it gets dark. Why can’t people just slip off at home in peace? All this suspicion, when it’s abundantly clear from her frail appearance, the wad of medical records Drew fetched from the study, and the fact that she’s frequently visited by in-home caretakers that Annie had been sick for years. I’m stung by even more guilt that I stepped so far away and left him struggling with this.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him again, slipping my hand into his. “About your mum, but about so much more.”
