Me Without You (32 page)

‘When did you arrive?’ I asked Ed.

‘This morning. We only just made it in time for the service. I tried to call you to make sure this Alan character wasn’t a lunatic before I got on the plane, but your phone was off.’

‘I don’t even know where it is,’ I admitted. How strange to be so totally off-line and not to realise it. ‘It’s probably been flat for weeks.’

‘We figured even if Alan was a lunatic, we’d better check on you,’ Will said wryly. ‘So we rang your office and eventually someone put us through to Karl.’

‘And he at least knew who Lilah was, so from there we were able to connect the dots,’ Ed murmured.

‘And how long are you here for?’ I asked my brothers.

‘As long as you need us,’ Ed said. ‘There’s nowhere else in the world we need to be.’

E
d and Will
wandered the house and garden with me in near silence over the following days. They cooked for me and made sure I ate and got out of bed and showered when I might not have done otherwise. When the weekend was over, they helped me pack up my things. We really didn’t speak all that much. Of course there were bursts of conversation here and there, mostly about meaningless details—what particular plants were, what size the property was, was something edible. It didn’t matter what we talked about or even if we talked at all. If they hadn’t been there, I would have been alone. I just don’t know how I would have been able to bear it.

When the time came to leave, Will loaded my bag into the boot and I did one last sweep of the house. I knew, at last, it was time to say goodbye—I didn’t intend a return visit and I needed to be sure I had all of my belongings.

I hesitated at the door to our bedroom. Ed had packed my toiletries and clothing up, somehow understanding without an explanation my reluctance to enter the spaces where she’d last been.

As I stepped into the room at last, I
saw
her in the imprint on the bed, and pictured in rapid-fire images the fade of her vitality so fast over those last few weeks. I quickly reviewed the surfaces, confirmed there was nothing out of place, and then when I was almost ready to leave, saw the blinking light on her laptop.

‘Oh, hell.’ I remembered her awkward lean across me to shut it as I carried her to the deck. As I opened the lid to shut it down, her email client filled the screen.

It was only natural for me to be curious. There was an email stuck in the outbox, maybe because the Internet at the farm was so unpredictable, but maybe because she’d shut the damn lid too quickly. I clicked on it.

T
here was a large attachment
, far too large to successfully send on an email, and my hand shook as I opened it. When I did, her face filled the screen.

The physical pain I felt at the sight of her was overwhelming. I sank into the stool under the desk as I touched the image with my forefinger. If I could have crawled into the damn screen, I would have.

‘Hi,’ she whispered. To my shock, I realised the shape under the blankets behind her on the recording was me. ‘I’m Saoirse Delilah MacDonald and the person on the bed behind me is the love of my life, Callum Roberts.’

She inched back to the bed, painfully, coughing every few shuffles, clearly very sick. Once she’d slipped back into bed she shook me violently.

‘I need a mandarin.’

I suddenly understood what I was watching, and it very nearly undid me. There was the conversation between Lilah and I, before I left to go to the orchard. As soon as I did, Lilah rose from the bed and shuffled back to the desk, and as I watched the video, I began to sob.

‘I am Saoirse Delilah Macdonald. I am dying of Huntington’s disease. Ahead of me is a long road of undignified suffering and the current laws of this nation do not allow me to circumvent that.’

She withdrew a small, unmarked vial from the desk below the webcam she was recording on and withdrew a handful of small pills. Her eyes had filled with tears.

‘This is sodium pentobarbital. I obtained it illegally in Mexico more than five years ago, and within my hand at the moment is more than the accepted dose to end human life. I take these steps alone, without the knowledge of those present on this property at the time. It’s my hope and plan they will be with me as I pass, but they will believe it is the course of pneumonia taking my life, as opposed to my own decision to end my life before I lose my very self.’ Lilah’s beautiful face contorted. ‘If I had more time, I’d have fought for the right to do this. But it’s too late; my mind and my thought processes and my memories are sliding already, and I
refuse
to fade away. I will go out on my own terms, with the presence of mind to know what it is I’m doing. And one last time—my companions, Peta MacDonald and Callum Roberts, have absolutely no knowledge of that which I’m doing. Namaste.’

She then, with obvious difficulty, swallowed several white pills one by one, before hobbling away from the webcam and back into bed.

I watched, my fingers still resting against the screen, as she lay in the bed waiting for me, and then as I brought that stupid mandarin back to her, and then when I left the room to wake Peta, I saw her sneak out of bed and stop recording. I knew too well what happened next.

There was no way to send the video, even if I’d wanted to. If she’d known to, she could have adjusted the settings on the recording so that it was a lower resolution, and the file would have been small enough to slip through her mail server without me ever knowing. Instead, I unplugged her laptop and carried it with me. I couldn’t think about its contents yet. It was too much, and it was too soon. I filed the knowledge away somewhere in my mind and forced myself to leave the house.

‘
W
hat are your plans
?’ I asked Peta. My brothers and I had stopped to drop off the perishables from the house and to check in on her on our way back to my place in the city.

Peta was in surprisingly good spirits—she seemed at peace.

‘I’ve never wanted to live at the farm,’ Peta admitted. ‘But now that she’s gone… well… I don’t know. I’m thinking about moving my business back there; maybe I could add a studio in the garden for my students. I just want to feel near her.’

‘And the garden?’ It was vitally important that the garden continued. Lilah had never said as much, but she didn’t need to.

‘Oh, shit Cal, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. No, Leon and Nancy can have that till they die, then I’ll give it over to some hippy charity.’ Peta smiled, the first humour I’d seen in her face since Lilah had passed. ‘Make sure you’re at the reading, won’t you?’

‘What reading?’

‘The will.’

I grimaced.

‘Peta, I don’t need to be there. If there’s anything I need to do, just give me a call.’

‘No, Callum.’ She was firm. ‘Lilah will have made mention of you in the will. You need to make sure you’re there.’

‘I don’t—’

‘I doubt she’s left you her secret collection of Picasso paintings, but I also will be very surprised if she hasn’t left you at least something special to hold on to.’ Again, those pleading blue eyes, so achingly familiar. I sighed.

‘Okay.’

We embraced one last time and I kissed her on the cheek. Then I climbed back into my car and Will turned it towards the city.

‘You okay?’ He asked.

I looked out the window to the passing trees and waterways that Lilah had so delighted in.

‘It’s going to take some time, but I will be.’

B
oth Ed
and Will flew out the following day. I drove them to the airport. Will’s flight was earliest, and I shook his hand as he went to board.

‘I can’t thank you enough, Will.’

‘I’m only sorry we were only here after, Cal. Please keep in touch. I know it’s easy not to, but do it.’

I nodded and then pulled him close for an embrace.

‘I’ll do better, I promise.’

Ed’s flight was a few hours later so we had lunch in the domestic airport before I travelled with him across to the international terminal. After he checked his baggage, I realised we were still much too early for his flight.

‘I can wait with you a while.’

‘Nah, I’ll go through and do some duty-free shopping for Suzette. She’s—’ he paused. ‘You’re going to come visit us soon, aren’t you, Cal?’

I’d been aware of the differences between the twins and I for their entire lives, but the weekend of quiet companionship and support had finally shown me our similarities. I knew I didn’t need them—I’d functioned very successfully as an adult without them forever. Never in a million years had it ever occurred to me that my tough, strong, close-knit brothers might actually need
me
. But there was a colour to Ed’s voice—eagerness, a hope, a desperation. Maybe it had always been there, but I recognised it now because I finally felt my aloneness.

‘I’ll come,’ I promised.

‘This year?’

‘Absolutely, Ed.’

‘It wasn’t the right time to tell you… I wasn’t sure how to, and even now...’

‘It’s okay,’ I frowned. ‘Is everything all right?’

He nodded slowly.

‘She’s pregnant, actually. It didn’t seem right to say it in an email, and we never seem to call each other anymore, and this is the last chance I have to see you face-to-face, so as much as I feel like a shit for telling you now, I guess I had to.’

I pictured his wife, Suzette; I’d seen a photo once and I was pretty sure she was a brunette. I imagined her heavily pregnant and then radiant beside Ed with their child. A happy family. The circle of life: Lilah was gone and someone new was arriving. I realised that I was actually jealous, but mostly I was thrilled for my brother—I couldn’t
not
be when he was standing there beside me glowing with pride. I allowed myself to smile, a genuine smile.

‘That’s fantastic, Ed.’

‘In a couple of months you’ll be an uncle,’ he pointed out. ‘So visit us. Come whenever you want to. If you come during the season, I’ll take you to training and my games, and if you come on the off season, we can travel or something. Just come.’

We embraced, and then he left. I stood and watched until he was out of sight and I was finally alone.

I
'm not
the type to rage. Growing up, my brothers would stir each other to the point of furious sparring, but that just wasn't me. If Ed or Will tried to get a rise out of me, I was likely to fling out a lazy barb and walk away, back to whatever activity I was enthralled in at the time. I let go of anger quickly, and it never threatened to rule me, so I suppose I never learnt to control it.

I'd been home for a few days when the surge began. It was a king tide, seeping in slowly, and I didn't realise the heights it'd achieve until I was drowning. Where grief had been, there was now black, thunderous rage. I could handle Lilah being taken from me—just, just barely handle it—but she wasn't taken; she left, and she didn't even tell me she was going.

I was sitting on my couch one morning, trying to tune out with breakfast television, when it suddenly struck me how many chances she’d had to tell me. She'd had the drug since Mexico—long before we met. So many days and nights and weeks and months where she could have mentioned it, or hinted at it. Didn't she trust me? Didn't she realise that I'd have understood? I could have been prepared. I could have supported her.

I don't remember throwing my mug through the television, but that's apparently what I did. I remember only the groan, and the sensation of being overwhelmed by emotions which I had no chance of controlling and which I simply couldn’t bear. I surfaced maybe seconds, maybe moments later, to find shards of ceramic all over my lounge room and the punctured LCD sounding ominous bursts of static.

It happened again and again over the early weeks. I couldn't bring myself to go near the beach, because there was no way to avoid the sight of her building, so I'd walk away from it instead. But often while I was out walking along the suburban streets, I'd miss her, and then I’d miss the sand and the brine air; my aloneness would seem insurmountable for a brief moment, until anger would replace it. And then, for a time, that was all that there was. I'd disappear into the rage and emerge later, my lungs burning and my legs throbbing, at the other end of the suburb, soaked in sweat. Or I'd be at the supermarket or a cafe, and all it would take would be the sight of a couple in love, and such a blind fury would strike me that I'd abandon my trolley or my table and walk away, blood thundering through my ears.

I was angry with Lilah and angry with myself. How could I not have known? Lynn had told me what her passing would be like, and it sounded violent and uncomfortable—why didn’t alarm bells ring when she simply fell asleep and didn’t wake up? Had Lilah given me clues that I’d missed? Had she not trusted me enough to let on to me… at all?

My internal chaos gradually passed. I was learning that everything passes. The emotion gave way, little by little, to the logic, which argued the reasons for her decision, and pleaded the case for her to find peace in her own way. And when the king tide of anger had faded, what was left in its place was a strange community of well-wishers.

Colleagues were sending me emails and texts, just letting me know they were thinking about me and offering condolences. Karl visited a few times and then bullied me into meeting him at the office for lunch twice a week. Leon and Nancy seemed to ‘happen by my neighbourhood’ every few days with a box of fresh fruit or vegetables.