‘Yes! You were always the superstar in our cohort. I can’t find you anywhere online …’ someone is saying as I join the video call from my phone and grab my bag and keys.
Shame creeps through my veins at her words, until my body is on fire with it.They can’t find me anywhere because I quit. I let this one thing beat me. I’ve stayed small. I’m weak …
Just as I’m scrambling for words I canactuallysay, I miss another call.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to my classmates. ‘My stepdaughter’s school is calling me. I’ll have to rush—’
I’m out the door and in the car and pulling into traffic within the minute, carrying a foreboding sense of dread.Something always goes wrong at weddings, doesn’t it? Isn’t it meant to be good luck?
‘We’ll message you,’ Annie says.I shouldn’t be on a video call while driving.‘Thanks for coming on board, Audrey. You’re amazing!’
Hardly …
I end the call and immediately another fills the screen. I hit the green button.
‘Is this Audrey Sullivan?’ a woman asks.
‘Yes, who is this?’
‘My name is Abbey,’ she says. ‘I’m with the ACT Ambulance Service. One of our teams is just leaving the school in Ainslie on the way to Canberra Hospital. There’s been an incident …’
My stomach falls through the floor.Why is a paramedic calling me from Parker’s school?The message said she was unwell. Not that it was an ‘incident’.Did she hit her head?She may not technically be my child. I’m not listed on her birth certificate and I’m third in the parental pecking order, so why are they calling me? But I’ve become a mother figure in all the ways that count.
I am weak with fear.Is this punishment for all the times I said I never wanted children?I was allergic to the whole idea. But Parker crashed into my heart like nobody ever has, not even herfather, and the idea that something serious might have happened to her justimpalesme.
I blurt out ‘I’m on my way’ and end the call, flooring the accelerator, instinct telling me if I’d let the paramedic finish her sentence, I wouldn’t be able to drive at all.
On the way to the hospital, heart in my mouth, I undergo a tectonic shift. This is what parenting feels like. This rush of love. This panic. This sense of wanting to swap with her, to hook myself up to her and siphon the pain out of every cell …All those yearsI’ve wasted, agonising that I’d never measure up for a child. Telling myself I couldn’t handle this. Actively repelling the idea. And now this one shocking moment has shaken the fully-fledged mother out of me, despite myself.
But what if it’s too late?
20
FRASER
We’re an hour into another insufferable faculty meeting when a sharp rap on the boardroom door is followed by my colleague, Keith—an unpleasant and officious man at the best of times—phone in his hand, looking harassed.
He scans the room. Somehow I already know he’s looking for me. I’ve been overcome with what I can only describe as an inexplicable urge to slam the brakes on time and stop whatever is about to unfold.
‘Fraser,’ he says, waving me over urgently, manhandling me into the corridor. ‘I’m sorry. I think the office missed several calls from your daughter’s school. It doesn’t sound good.’
He passes me the phone as if it’s a poisoned chalice. There’s more humanity in these few seconds than he’s demonstrated in the full six years that we’ve worked together, which must be a very, very bad sign.
‘My name is Abbey,’ a voice says. ‘I’m with the ACT Ambulance Service …’
And by the time Keith has rushed me to his car and driven like mad through the roadworks on Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, flown through two red lights, and dropped me at the entrance to emergency, all I catch is the blur of blue scrubs as she is whisked from the ambulance through swinging doors.
Someone has clambered on top, pumping her chest as she disappears from sight, and I’m restrained, helplessly, every molecule wanting to leave my body and trade places while they work on her …
AUDREY
I didn’t let the paramedic finish. Perhaps on some primal, instinctive, awful level, Iknew. The incident didn’t happen inside the school, with Parker. It happened to Fraser as he belted there.Because they couldn’t reach me …
FRASER
It should be me in that OR. The school had tried me several times. It’smydaughter she was rushing towards …
AUDREY
