Me Without You (30 page)

Lynn took some sharp breaths and swatted at her face with her hands, turning away from me for a few moments, pulling it all together before she faced me again.

‘It never gets any easier, trying to treat the untreatable,’ she murmured. ‘It’s not a nice way to die, untreated pneumonia. She will probably be feverish for long periods, and eventually she’ll lose consciousness. Her breathing will become more laboured, her respiration rate might increase and decrease, it might sound like she’s gasping for air or like her chest is rattling… but these are just reflexes, and part of the process. Just keep the morphine up so she’s not in pain; the device won’t allow her to overdose. Once she passes, call an ambulance as soon as you can and explain the situation.’

I suppose I knew that we were at that point, but seeing the finality on Lynn’s face and in her words, I suddenly crumbled.

‘Is there—what can we do to keep her comfortable?’ I couldn’t resist Lilah’s will, not after watching her decline. How could I insist she stay with us, knowing she would slip away anyway, leaving only indignity? My arrogance, my confidence—it was all gone. I would be compliant to Lilah’s wishes now. I had seen enough.

‘I’ll arrange some oxygen,’ Lynn promised. ‘And I will drop everything and come here if you need me.’ She reached for her pocket and withdrew a piece of paper with a phone number already scrawled upon it. ‘This is my home number and my personal mobile. I’m willing to be here at any time, day or night.’

‘Thank you.’

I took the paper and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans. The ocean continued to roll in below us, and I heard the inevitability of the waves and wondered where the bigger picture of all of the comings and goings of the universe fit into the pain that lay before me. Lynn suddenly took my hand.

‘You didn’t sign up for this, Callum. If it’s too much, go home. Peta has done this before, and she will cope.’

I wiped at my face and shook my head.

‘I want a part of every breath she has, until the end, whatever that looks like.’

Lynn nodded and then left, but I took a few minutes on the deck before I dared take myself back into our bedroom, where my so deeply loved Lilah seemed to be teetering on the very edge of leaving me forever.

P
eta
and I were spending a lot of time sitting in Lilah’s room. I suppose we were keeping vigil, but it felt like we were nursing a child.

We took turns on the bed, lying beside Lilah while she rested. She slept a lot; even when a fever took hold and she sweated and fidgeted, she slept. We spoke things to her that were so intimate and private that I could never repeat them. Peta spoke as a mother who’d had carriage and adoration of this human for forty years, but I spoke as a lover who wanted nothing more than forty
more
years with her. A web of privacy formed, the triangle between us so tight that we could each say anything and know that it was okay.

Such an awful situation only brings out the best in humanity. Peta and I are obscenely self-absorbed personalities—that day was entirely about Lilah, and pushing words of comfort and love through whatever delirium she might be experiencing.

I thought Lilah seemed better by the next day. She was lucid enough to eat tiny bites of scrambled egg here and there, and we had some light conversation as the afternoon progressed. Best of all, her coughs seemed to ease, and I wondered if this wasn’t actually going to be her final war, but just another battle that her body would fight.

‘I don’t want to see that local doctor today,’ she announced out of the blue at midday. Peta frowned.

‘Lilah, is that wise?’

‘What’s it going to do, kill me?’ Her grim humour felt flat. She shook her head. ‘No, Mum. This isn’t the time for strangers, and he can’t do anything for me.’

‘I can ask Lynn to come again?’ I offered, and Lilah shook her head.

‘No. I just want to be with you two now. The GP can come back tomorrow.’

Peta gave me a helpless shrug, and I sighed and rose to make the phone call to cancel his visit. Lilah had us read to her from a few of her favourite books and listened to some music as she rested. As darkness fell, Peta retreated for a break, and Lilah cuddled up against me.

‘Are you in pain now?’ I asked her. She hadn’t used the morphine pump in a while, or so I thought, but maybe I’d missed it.

‘I’m okay,’ she whispered. Her voice was still hoarse. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Callum. I know this is awful for you.’

‘The thing is,’ I said, my voice deceptively strong, ‘I have no idea what happens after you go, but it will be better because I knew you.’

‘You have to marry someone.’ Her voice was light, teasing again—and then in a heartbeat, deadly serious. ‘You have to find someone, Cal. You
have
to marry and have babies. You just have to.’

I shook my head and the tears threatened.

‘Saoirse, don’t talk about that now.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m minutes from death—don’t go pulling out my
in trouble
name now.’ It was a weak laugh, but it was a laugh, until she was serious again. ‘Promise me.’

‘I can’t promise that.’ That she was even asking me to seemed obscenely cruel. For a moment I wanted to rage at her.
Do you really dare to ask this of me? I have to find you, love you and watch you die—let you die—and in the midst of all of that you demand I think about moving on?

‘Of course you can. You met me, you cared for me, and now I’m dying. I need to know you’ll find someone else—I can see just by looking at you how much happier you are having someone to adore in your life.’

‘You’re a once-in-a-lifetime deal, Ly.’ Tears were threatening. She slapped my chest with real force and it stung.

‘Bullshit! And stop with the waterworks. We don’t do that “true love” rubbish, remember? You’ll find someone else, and when you do, I want you to be with her without guilt and marry her and make some beautiful babies with her, and be sickeningly happy for the rest of your sickeningly long life.’

How could I possibly answer that in any sensible way? We lay silent together, in the darkness of her room, for a very long time. Eventually she elbowed me weakly in the chest and I pretended that it hurt. She was weak now, exhausted from the conversation and her exertion in trying to beat me into bending to her will.

‘I promise,’ I whispered, although I couldn’t even begin to fathom how I would fulfil that. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe just making her think that I meant it was enough.

‘Good,’ she whispered back, and even though I felt her skin was beginning to burn up again, I felt her breathing was slowing as she relaxed.

I
t was not even
five a.m. when she woke me with another sharp elbow to my ribs.

‘I need a mandarin.’

Groggy and confused, I sat up.

‘What? What time is it?’ The digital clock beside our bed answered me when she didn’t.
4:48 a.m.

‘You need to get a torch and go to the mandarin tree,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, her breathing was laboured, and her skin against mine under the blanket was scorching hot.

‘It’s on the other side of the garden,’ I argued automatically.

‘Callum, there isn’t much time.
Go
.’

So, half asleep, I left the room and found the torch and went out into the garden. It was cold—winter was almost upon us—and I could see the frost of my breath as I walked. I knew the landscape like the back of my hand and I found the best tree easily even in the darkness, and spent only a moment or two finding the most ripe mandarin. As I walked back through the predawn night, I pictured her peeling it and enjoying the sweetness of each segment. Her abrupt waking only reminded me of that night when she’d awoken me with the same shock to invite me to the coast, and it seemed appropriate and fitting.

When I got back to the house, Peta was still asleep, and Lilah was sitting back on the bed. I assumed she’d been to the bathroom and was furious she’d attempted it without me. The lamp near the desk was shining, and the one beside the bed was also lit. She took the last step towards the bed and accepted the mandarin eagerly. Lilah ate it segment by segment without choking, as if it was some sinful delight to be savoured, some pleasure greater than her physical shortcomings.

‘So good,’ she whispered on the last bite. ‘Can you wake Mum up?’

‘It’s too early, Lilah.’

She took my hand and pressed it to her lips.

‘It’s time, Cal. You need to wake her up and carry me out to the deck.’

S
he talked
me into taking her out to watch the sunrise. The actual request wasn’t a big one, given that she was tiny and weak and, while I was in the orchard, had pulled out her IV—but I distinctly remember resisting hard, in case the icy cold air somehow did her more harm.

But those beautiful blue eyes were pleading. If she’d asked me to find a way to bite off my testicles, I’d eventually have done it, so the short walk out to the deck was no real ask. It was so, so cold outside—so I rugged her tiny, frail body in the doona, and I do remember as we passed her laptop on the desk she leant over, nearly unbalancing us both, and slammed it shut. As we walked through the living areas she hollered for her mum, and then I opened the French doors and sat her on the cane chair as if she were a baby bird. The darkness was giving in to frail rays of light from the sun right on the horizon, and she couldn’t stop smiling.

‘This is perfect,’ she whispered against the muscles of my upper arm, as I hadn’t dared release her since I sat her down on the chair. She was feverish but, compared to the day before, didn’t even seem all that sick. Certainly her breathing had improved, even in the icy air. This wasn’t what Lynn had described.

‘Perfect for what?’ I asked. I was confused by the contradiction of her words and her very vibrant, mandarin-scented breath in my face, and, most of all, the fact that she was lucid and seemingly quite comfortable.

Peta chose that moment to step out onto the icy deck in the darkness.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked. She was so groggy that her words slurred and she sounded just like Lilah.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered when Lilah let the sound of the waves breaking on the shore below fill the gap after the question.

‘I’m going soon, Mum,’ Lilah whispered eventually—and just like that the entire tone of the morning changed for me.

‘You can’t know that,’ I said automatically, and my muscles contracted around her. She shook her head weakly against my shoulder.

‘I know it, Cal.’

Peta took the tiny space on the other side of Lilah, and I felt her arms snake around her.

‘Goodbye, my beautiful baby,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so proud that you’ve done this your way.’

And then we all fell into silence. Mine was a tortured, confused, half-asleep silence—until I realised that Lilah’s breaths were gradually slowing, the gaps between exhale and inhale increasing with each cycle. Right within my arms, the one thing I’d wanted to hold on to in my life was slipping away. I held her closer and pressed my face into her hair.

‘Please, Lilah,’ I whispered. For the first time, I was actually weeping in front of her—these weren’t a few leaky tears; I had altogether lost control. She woke again as the first rays of the sunrise were breaking the horizon, only enough to look up at me and manage a smile.

‘It was worth it, Cal. It was worth sticking around a few extra years just to meet you.’

Her voice was so weak, and when her eyes fluttered closed again, I shook her. Peta squeezed my arm—hard. Over the top of Lilah’s head, her mother shot me a glance that silenced me.

This was happening, and there was nothing I could or should do about it.

‘I love you,’ I said. Maybe I shouted it, I don’t know. Her sleepy face registered the faintest smile only one more time, and then the distance between her shallow breaths increased exponentially. They slowed from then, until every few seconds. I was sure she was gone.

I waited again and again for the next breath, as the sun breached the horizon. We were sitting in silence now, and just as the sun was halfway up into the day, I found myself holding my own breath and waiting for her to give another one, but her next breath would never come. Eventually the air left my lungs in a rush and with a wail that would stain my ears for months to come.

Lilah, my sweet, unique Lilah, had gone with the sunrise.

W
hen I could move again
I carried Lilah’s tiny body back to lay her on the bed, and it registered that she somehow felt even lighter than when I’d carried her out there only half an hour before.

There was a numbness that settled over me. It was probably shock, but at the time there was a whirling turmoil of loss—and then there was just peace. I lay her on the grey sheets, crinkled and ever-so-slightly sweat-stained from that last, unsettled night. I gently straightened her limbs. She was still wearing a light-blue dressing gown over cotton pyjamas, and she was pale of course, but Lilah was always pale. I left her only long enough to find a clean washer and wet it with warm water, and then I sat beside her on the bed. I ran the washer over her forehead, smoothing the hair that had frizzed during the night, and then over her face so gently, and then over each hand. Then I waited, as if she might open her eyes and laugh that I’d fallen for her prank, or jerk suddenly because she’d only fallen asleep.

When I heard the door to the deck close and realised that Peta had at last joined us inside, I finally called the ambulance.

Peta went straight to the couch in the living room, and I while I waited beside Lilah, she began weeping as if her heart had left her body. While I sat holding Lilah’s hand, I thought about Peta and all of her flaws, and the fact that she was surviving this for a second time. Lynn was probably right, Peta would cope somehow—but for now she was just an empty shell like Lilah, and like me.

W
hen the ambulance came
, I met them at the door and the two officers followed me inside. There was paperwork to do, and we did it quietly at the breakfast bar to a soundtrack of Peta’s continued sobbing, and then I led them into the bedroom and lifted Lilah onto their stretcher myself. The officers are blurred shadows in my memory, but I remember being almost overcome with gratefulness at how they treated her with such dignity.