Authors: Giselle Green
Finding You (26 page)
35 - Charlie
By the time I park up at Huddersfield General Infirmary, I’m wiped. The rain has delayed me by hours. Whether it was battling through the storm tonight that did it or the tumultuous thoughts assailing me all the way up, I can barely think. Unfolding my body, cramped and exhausted, from my car, I can barely stand. It’s five a.m. already. Am I in time? Inside the cardiac ICU, it’s quiet for the moment, lights dimmed at reception. The nurse on duty ruffles through some papers on her desk, brow furrowing slightly when I tell her my father’s name. ‘He was transferred in from
Thirsk,
you say?’
‘He was. I spoke to someone in here not two hours ago,’ I keep my voice level though I am exhausted, distressed. His name’s not on the board behind the desk, either. It should be. While she goes to check with whoever did the intake, I stare out through the third floor window and wait. Behind the edge of the adjacent building, I can just make out a new dawn trickling onto the horizon, a few squally winds chasing away the last of the night’s storms. In a while, I’ll ring home, speak to Julia, but for the next few hours, my time needs to belong to my dad. If I get a few hours.
If there are a few hours left.
I drum my fingers on the counter, peer round the corner to where the nurse just disappeared off to. After my heroic efforts speeding all the way up here to get to him, standing here waiting for her to come back, I feel as if I’ve just slammed into a great big wall. I’ve been stopped.
I’ve been stopped in my tracks while my father’s possibly taking his last few breaths and I’m not being allowed in to see him. A huge sadness fills up my lungs and my chest and my back as I think it, a sadness like a sharp-beaked bird that’s swooped down from some dark corner. A bird that’s hopping now from thought to thought, caught between protocol and despair:
could he be dying this very moment, dying while I wait here?
They can’t stop me from going in to see him
, the thought surges, breaking into the bank of my memories. I was already prevented from being there for Mum’s last moments, wasn’t I? I was ten years old then, stuck in a school in England, kept at bay, though I’d begged them to let me go to her.
I had loved her, too. I’d loved her more than any of them, and he’d kept me at bay.
He
had. My dad. I feel a strange trembling in my legs as the old moment resurfaces, standing at the reception at the ICU, waiting to see him; a surge of something goes right up my backbone, a rush of something that I cannot explain and for a couple of seconds, I get a glimpse of myself as that child again. The one who was held back from returning home to see his mother. The one who tried to run away, my passport still in the breast pocket of my school blazer, hitched a lift as far as Leeds before someone reported me and the master had come to fetch me back.
You’re
the
only
pupil in the history of this illustrious school to ever do a runner, Lowerby,
he’d mourned. I’d thought I’d be in deepest trouble, only it turned out in the end that I wasn’t. They’d learned that night that she was dead, my mother. She’d died that same night I tried to get to her and after that ... what else was there left that anybody could do to me that would ever hurt as much?
Nothing. Because I was never going to let anyone in that close again, was I?
At least, that was what I had for a long time believed.
My Dad kept me away from her last moments, and I’ve carried such an unspoken rage against him for it for so many years. Until last night, I have never really forgiven him. Until yesterday evening, I never really saw
why
he’d done it. He’d done it because he thought that was the best way of sparing me the pain, hadn’t he? I’d never
chosen
that way; it had been foisted upon me, but then yesterday evening, when I thought of how I’d almost disowned my own son, I saw it all again anew.
Dad had only ever wanted to spare me the pain. He’d done what he thought was the right thing, even though clearly it had not been.
And I’d been trying to do the same when I agreed to go with Lourdes to the Hermosa clinic, I see that now. Trying in some stupid, desperate and ineffectual way to spare myself the pain.
The moments tick by, the nurse does not return, and for a few dark aeons, I am left wondering if I am, after all, too late?
To let him know.
That I have loved him. I’ve always loved him, even when he sent me away to Hillstones when Mum got sick and he never let me see her at the end. Even when he chose the path of his career over being there for what remained of his family, Rob and me, after she died. Even when he insisted that I stay on to get my exams when I wanted so badly to go back to Spain to the bosom of
Abuela
and my Spanish family who’d have loved me in place of her, loved me
demonstrably
, in a way that he never could. Even when I grew to manhood and our paths diverged and we saw far too little of each other for so many months and years, him doing his sterling work for the WHO and me building my career and doing my pro bono facial reconstruction work for the children of Africa,
even then
, when he must have thought I’d forgotten him ... I still loved him. I see it now; I know it now even though for such a long time I’ve never said it and I’ve never shown it.
Am I too late?
‘Wrong ward!’ The nurse is back, and she’s got a look of urgency on her face. She’s pushing me out the door by my arm, and now we’re running,
flying
up another flight of steps—
nearer to heaven,
he’d have joked in his saturnine way—and then we’re at his door and she’s pushed it open for me and there he is. ‘
Still hanging on
,’ she mouths at me. ‘I’ll leave you in peace with your father.’
She closes the door and suddenly, all my urgency drains out of me. All the things I had thought I was going to say.
‘Hey, it’s me.’ I clear my throat. ‘Charlie-boy. I’m here.’ I move in a little closer, lean over his still body, and I wonder if he will ever hear me now. If he could. There’s this strange blue light coming off the monitors. He’s a big man, still. A proud man, striking with his shock of still-black hair, his Roman nose. ‘I made it. I wanted to say ... that I
do
love you, Dad.’ My voice is little more than a whisper. Should I say it to him louder? Should I say it again? How still he seems. He could be nothing more than asleep. The wheeze and hiss of the ventilator, breathing for him, is like a sigh in response. I sit down right on the edge of his bed, take hold of his hand.
‘I got it wrong,’ I admit to him. ‘All those teenage years...’ I clear my throat. ‘And then the later years when I held onto ... being angry with you, at not letting me come home.’ In the stillness, the dark shadows in my father’s room expand and contract, my heart feeling hollowed out, somehow scratched and sore. Before, waiting to come in, my hands were feeling strangely useless, itching to do something, for there to be something that I could do, but I see that there is nothing. Now that I am holding his still white hand in mine, I feel comforted, though. Holding his hand, I fancy he hears me somehow, so I keep on.
‘I was
wrong
, Dad. You meant it for the best; I didn’t see that. And you ... you were wrong, too. You didn’t see that I could never get over her loss if I was sent away to be so far from home.’ I lean in a little closer, needing to feel his heart beating even though I can still see the blip going on the screen. ‘I could never heal by just ... by being sent away to forget about her.’
I sit up as the door goes softly behind me. The young nursing assistant who’s just tiptoed in has a cup of hot beverage in her hands.
‘They tell me you’ve come a long way, tonight,’ she whispers. I watch her put the cup down on the bedside unit, glad of her thoughtfulness and her kindness. ‘If you’d prefer a cup of water ...’
‘Whatever you’ve got there.’ I stop her with a shake of my head. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’
She turns as if to go and then she looks back, hesitantly. ‘I hope you don’t mind, I brought his grandson’s photograph down with him.’ She indicates towards the foot of Dad’s bed and to my surprise, I see now that someone has sellotaped Hadyn’s photo and his drawing that I left with Dad last time, onto the end. She looks at me a little guiltily.
‘They told us at nursing college that it sometimes helps if a patient comes round to see a photo or something familiar at the end of their bed. I got to accompany your father down in the ambulance tonight. He was lucid for a bit when we brought him away, you know. He told me that his grandson’s name was Hadyn.’
‘Did he?’ I look at her with interest. He knew him, then? And he had been lucid for a bit, she says. I envy her that, having those last few moments with him. Possibly the last anyone may now get. ‘Did he ... say anything else?’
‘He asked me to look after his art, so I took the little one’s drawing down to bring it with him. I hope you don’t mind. I couldn’t see anything else that qualified.’ Her eyelids flutter a little. ‘I thought you should know, just in case ...’
Just in case. My heart tightens.
‘That’s okay. Thanks for letting me know,’ I say thickly. I go to take the picture down—and then I don’t. I leave it there, just in case.
‘Hadyn’s yours?’ she asks me now.
I nod, feeling my stomach flip. He’s mine; of course he is, just like his mother said he was, all along.
‘And he drew that?’ Her lips curve into an unexpected dimpled smile. ‘Hadyn Lowerby, two-and-a-half?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her tightly. Shouldn’t she be ... seeing to some other important tasks elsewhere right now? I’m grateful for the drink, but hasn’t she got anywhere else to be?
‘I was in paediatrics, before, and they don’t normally do those kind of squiggles before they get quite a bit older. Your son has got exceptional pencil control,’ she tells me.
‘His father and his grandfather are both surgeons,’ I tell her, doing a motion with my fingers—
steady hands.
‘He’ll be following in your footsteps then, maybe?’ she smiles lightly.
Maybe. I break eye contact now, look back towards my dad. Maybe.
‘We need to take Hadyn away to a clinic in the US very soon,’ I tell her quietly. I don’t even know why I say it. Is it because I have nothing else left that I need to say to Dad and the room is too quiet, too sad without any other human contact here tonight?
Rob
—I feel a swathe of regret wash over me—
he’s not going to make it, is he
?
‘The U.S. That’s a long way from home,’ she murmurs. ‘As long as Mum and Dad are there, though ...’
It is a long way, a long, long way from home. And while Julia and I will be there, we won’t be allowed to have contact with him at every stage in the program. Pippa Killman’s warning from earlier this afternoon slides back into my head now. ‘It makes the program far too painful if doting parents are constantly getting in the way,’ she’d said to me, thrusting the papers into my hands for me to sign, before I’d come away to Yorkshire tonight. I’d given my consent because I had believed it was the best thing I could do for my son. Send him away. Somewhere far away, till someone else did the job of healing him.
It isn’t sounding like quite such a good idea to my mind now, though.
It isn’t such a good idea, is it, Dad?
The nurse has come over to the head of the bed. Her fingers untwist a slight kink in the nutrient loop. She’s still looking at Hadyn’s photo. ‘Poor little soul. Will they be able to fix him?’ She turns to look at me now. ‘Whatever’s wrong?’
Now that this stranger has asked me the question, I find I have no ready answer tonight.
‘I don’t know,’ I tell her truthfully. ‘I am not sure.’ I’m not so sure about anything anymore. Not after tonight. In the semi-darkness, we have one more moment of silence before the alarms kick off. Another massive myocardial infarction. I can see it from here.
‘
Dad...’
And then the room is flooded with light, so much light and sound, so many people hurrying in, running to check the instrumentation, running to check
him,
and then seeing the instructions that are printed so clearly at the end of his bed. DNR.
Do not resuscitate.
I stand up, the adrenaline surging through me at the sound because I am a professional, but as his son, it comes in on a tidal wave of sadness because I know that this is the end of it. The end of
him
, and I don’t know if he heard me, any of what I said to him; if he heard me when I said that I was sorry and I told him that I loved him.
And now I will never know.
36 - Julia
Have I really, honestly, gone and done this thing?
I’m in the baby-changing area with Hadyn above the motorway canteen just one hour out of Malaga airport when it finally hits me that we are back. I have done it, I have brought him back. Earlier this morning, I sat down at my computer and organised it. Like a woman in a trance, I booked a seat on the same flight as Naseem. I ordered a taxi and then I packed up a small bag for us both. I did it. I did not pick up the phone or text Charlie on his way to his father in the hospital to tell him. I did not let my mum know, or Alys know, or anyone else but Naseem. Still. The part of me I’ve inherited from my mum, looking on in quiet horror, staring back at me in the changing room mirror looking pale and sad about the eyes, goes,
Oh, Oh Julia, what have you done? Why on earth are you doing this? This is madness and you know it. You must turn around, before it is too late.
But I know that it is already too late.
It is too late because the only person whose disapproval could have stopped me doing this—Charlie—is already out of my life. It is too late because my son woke up crying in the night after Charlie left, the cold moonlight shining through the crack in the curtains. As he stood there, the tears rolling down his face, I’d tried to put my arms around him and he’d stiffened like some wild, untouchable thing and I’d felt so ... powerless to help him. I knew it then, that it was too late. That no one else but Her was ever going to be allowed to comfort him. That there was nothing left that I could give my son but this, to bring him to her. To hope ... that maybe she will be able to teach me some things that will make life easier for us now that he has given his heart to another. Because I am still his mother. I still love him even if he doesn’t love me.
And so we have come back.
‘You okay, Jules?’ Back downstairs in the canteen, Naseem’s bagged us a table overlooking the hot grey landscape beyond the road. From here, though we are ever so high up, you can spy the glint of silver on the sparkling sea beyond. The same sparkling sea that once did not claim my son, but spared him. The same sea that roars and rolls in my dreams at night, ever since I have had him back, unfolding the scene of some grotesque play that I never thought I would return to Spain with my son to enact.
And yet, we are back. I look at my friend without a word, unable to answer.
Am I okay?
But Naseem’s already got the map out, the one he bought at the petrol station just after we picked up the car, and he’s spread it out messily over the table. It’s twenty-four degrees out here today, feels hot, and there are flies buzzing unappetisingly around our food. I don’t want to eat anything, but Naseem’s not put off. I bought a large flat sugar biscuit for Hadyn earlier, some juice, stocked up on our water bottles.
‘I still have no idea where this LaPiedra place is.’ My mate’s poring over his map with a slight frown on his face. He’s a problem-solver by nature, is Naseem. To him, this is a puzzle that needs figuring out. We already know that it must have a solution. That Illusion must be somewhere. Our only task is to find out where.
The mystery of her whereabouts makes all this a little easier, somehow. Just like last night, focussing my mind on what I had to do, the steps that needed taking for the task that must be done, it made it all easier because my mind was occupied, too full to listen to my broken heart, no time to worry about feelings, but they’re just a damn bloody nuisance when all things are said and done; who wants them, who needs them? What are hearts even for, if not to get broken? Every other bugger around me—Charlie, Mum, Alys and Naseem—they all appear to get along just
fine,
without troubling too much about feelings. Lourdes is like this, isn’t she? I never saw it before, but she is one complete and utter schemer. And Charlie loved her once, nonetheless. Maybe I need to learn to be more like this, too? Maybe it would make my life so much easier. You do what you have to do, to get to where you need to get to. In this instance, to get to where Hadyn needs to get to. I am doing this for him. I will keep my own heart out of this.
‘Hey.’ Naseem’s leaning across the table, taking me in a little closer, noticing, maybe, that I am somewhat absent? ‘
You okay
, Jules?’ he says again. I pull him a smile that doesn’t even begin to reach my eyes.
‘Jules,’ Naz is badgering me now. ‘I know you told me on the flight over about you and Charlie having something of an argument last night ...’ He shoots me a glance and I look away.
Something of an argument. Did I really downplay it that much?
I hadn’t gone into too much detail and Naz has never been one to pry, but something’s bugging him now, isn’t it?
Does he imagine I’ve brought Hadyn out here as a reaction to that bust-up? Because I was angry with Charlie? Nothing could be further from the truth.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t rung Charlie yet, that’s all,’ he says mildly. ‘To see how he’s getting on.’
I bite my lip.
‘He went up to Yorkshire to see his dad yesterday evening, didn’t you say? The old man’s sick?’
‘His father is more than sick,’ I say, a lump suddenly in my throat. I saw how crushed Charlie was when he left the house last night. ‘He won’t walk away from this one, I think.’
‘Ah.’ My friend’s face relaxes as if he’s suddenly understood something. ‘His father is dying,’ Naseem observes quietly. ‘This is why you’re both upset.’
‘It’s why Charlie’s had to go up to see him, despite our massive row ...
our break-up
,’ I correct. But it’s not the reason why we fought. And Naseem is right; ordinarily, I would have been in touch with Charlie long before now, even if we hadn’t just travelled abroad.
‘
Ring him
,’ Naseem cajoles. He remains unconvinced about the break-up part, obviously. ‘You two need to act as a team now, whatever stresses you’re both under. He can’t ring you, can he, so use my phone if you need it and let him at least know that you’re thinking of him.’
‘Of course I’m thinking of him.’ I swallow some water from my bottle, wipe my mouth. I’ve been thinking of him all day, pretty much, little threads and memories of what transpired last night coming back repeatedly into my mind. Charlie had bought me those flowers, hadn’t he? Such a pretty bouquet of pink roses for our anniversary. He’d put them by my side of the bed. When had he done that? Had he bought them before he’d heard that he needed to go up to his father? When he’d come back into the house, he must have been feeling so desperately anxious about his dad, mustn’t he? He must have been hoping for a bit of support from me. He hadn’t known then what I’d learned that afternoon.
Is something the matter
, he’d asked, and I’d thrown the whole blooming vase at him, flowers and all. I’d been so mad, I’d wanted to ... I’d wanted to tear him limb from limb for hurting me so much. How could he have done that to me,
how could he?
He hadn’t known then what had been on my mind, and I hadn’t appreciated everything that had been on his.
Afterwards, he’d stood in the hallway, needing to go and yet clearly so gutted, so
desperate
not to leave us like that and I’d been clattering around in the kitchen, deliberating ignoring him when he said goodbye, just wanting him to get out,
just go,
but the minute the front door had closed, I’d got that same empty-right-to-the-bottom feeling, that grief at losing him that I’d known I’d feel.
‘So ...’ Naseem prompts. I look at my friend desperately, shake my head. No. I won’t be ringing Charlie. I’m going to have to fill Naz in on the whole story now, aren’t I; how what happened last night was a whole lot more serious than he thinks. How I haven’t let him know the score beforehand because I’ve been trying so desperately hard myself to put it out of my mind because I know ... that if I hold Charlie in my mind today, I’ll never accomplish what I came here to do. I put the bottle down and lean in towards him, my voice going hoarse.
‘Look, what happened with me and Charlie yesterday, you should know—it’s not something there’s going to be any coming back from,’ I tell Naz at last.
He stops eating. He puts down his fork but he doesn’t say anything, just does a gesture with his shoulders—
what happened?
—and I glance out the window at the shining dot of the sea so very far away, and it’s like what happened yesterday: a nebulous, shimmering, cold place that hardly feels as if it could be real at all. But I know that it is real.
‘When I met with Lourdes yesterday, she ...’ I clear my throat, pull a pained smile at him now. ‘She was kind enough to draw to my attention to the fact that the two of them had been trying for a baby.’ I hear his intake of breath at that, see his face fill with disbelief.
‘No!’
‘She confirmed to me that they went to some fertility clinic or some such, while Charlie and I were apart.’
Naseem swallows, and I see his whole face whiten perceptibly. ‘They ...
he
did that to you?’ He’s shocked. Of course he’s shocked, just as I’d known he would be. Suddenly this lover’s tiff is something else, a much more serious transgression in Naseem’s eyes.
‘Charlie wouldn’t have, surely?’ He’s shaking his head, still not believing it. ‘Why would he have ... really? You’re telling me ... that while you were still busy looking for Hadyn,
they
were out trying to make another child?’
I nod silently.
‘Is it even
true
, though?’ Naseem comes back. ‘Lourdes says this. But has Charlie admitted to it, himself?’
I nod again briefly, hanging my head. That they went to the clinic together, yes. That he’s ashamed and sorrowful over what he did, yes.
‘They did visit the Hermosa clinic.’ I clear my throat again, trying to swallow my feelings at the memory but they come back anyway, this time on a floodtide of anger and frustration. I have been like this ever since it happened, one moment in touch with the deepest sadness and the next moment seeing red.
‘Charlie tried to claim they hadn’t been trying for a baby but ...’ I spread my hands.
Do I have to spell it out
? ‘What else would they have been doing there?’
‘Well ... what else did he
say
he was?’ Naz insists.
‘I don’t know, do I?’ I lift my head suddenly. ‘We didn’t get time to speak about it. I hadn’t wanted to listen to him tell me any more pathetic excuses and anyway ... whatever he was doing there, I
know
he felt guilty as sin about it, Naseem.’ I’d seen that in his eyes, the memory comes back now, and it fuels my certainty. Charlie had looked so cowed, hadn’t he, sitting there on our bed with the broken flowers all around him, looking at that Hermosa appointment card, so shocked and horrified when he realised that I knew,
that I’d found out
and then he’d made out that he’d meant to tell me before, that he’d been meaning to tell me that night at the bistro before Mum called,
tell me what, though
, if not the facts that his ex had already confirmed to me?
Oh, I don’t care,
I don’t even care anymore
. Whatever it was, it was something bad. I know that because I had seen he’d felt so
ashamed
.
My friend draws in a breath through his teeth. He looks really gutted for me. For once, he has no real consolation to offer.
‘This is bad, Jules. Very bad.’ He shoots me a sideways glance, his hands playing with his water bottle on the table, laying it down and propping it up repeatedly as if the solution will lie there, in looking at the thing from a different angle.
‘You think maybe Charlie still has feelings for her, then?’
I give a snort. Should I even care anymore? If he does, then he is welcome to her. Let me go and stop messing me about. I’ve been through enough; why lie to me about his intentions like that? Why ask me to marry him again? What the hell was that all about? I’d ripped up the registry papers and thrown them in his face, hadn’t I?
And yet ... when he came in last night, Charlie had been full of so many other things too: tender about our anniversary, full of sadness about his dad, and so excited and happy because he thought he’d made some breakthrough for Hadyn, secured that Atlanta placement. When I showed him that Hermosa card, he’d looked guilty, yes, but also bewildered. And still the fact remains...
‘If he really had no feelings left over for Lourdes, why would they even have
gone
to that clinic together, whatever they were up to?’ I point out. ‘She even implied when we met yesterday that Charlie was only with me instead of her because I’d been the one to give him his baby,’ I admit.
‘Bull
shit
,’ Naseem splutters. ‘Sounds like classic jealous woman tactics. She can’t have him, so she wants to ruin whatever
you’ve
got.’
‘Maybe.’ I rub at the side of my head, which is aching. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I don’t want to think about this. Charlie may be out of my life now, but he still won’t be out of Hadyn’s, and I’ve got to
focus
.
I’ve still got to do this thing for our son.
‘And all this comes out
just before
he goes off to see his dying father?’ Naseem is still shaking his head disbelievingly. ‘Some bloody timing, eh?’
I nod, unable to speak. Of course he’d had to go. I knew he’d have some reason to go, the perfect, unassailable get-out clause. Charlie always does, and you can never blame him.
His father is dying—how could I be such a bitch as to blame him for leaving us just then, when he clearly had to?
I can’t. I don’t. But neither should Charlie have left us like this. The memory chokes me now. He should have let us come with him, kept the family together, even if he didn’t feel like it, even if he felt he needed some private time with his father.
