The Ties That Bind

by Lexi Landsman

  Jade couldn’t digest what he had told her. She pictured him running blindly through the forest, his arms reaching in front of him, ash coating his helmet, the fear of death taking hold. Her heart felt swollen, overflowing with gratitude. ‘Thank you, Adam,’ she whispered. ‘I would have died that night. I can’t fathom that you risked your life for mine. For a stranger.’ She realised in that moment that she would do anything for him. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

  He rested his hand on her knee. ‘I don’t want thanks. I didn’t tell you so I could get a pat on the back. I did what I could that night. We all did. And there was a lot we couldn’t do that still haunts me.’

  She buried her head against his chest and could feel his breath against her skin, his heart tapping faster than before. She took in his smell: sandalwood, spicy cologne, red wine and sweat. A man’s smell. He put his arm around her and they held each other, knowing in the silence that they would always be bound to each other in that shared experience. She felt unwaveringly content in his arms. She could have told herself it was the effects of the alcohol but her wineglass was still full and what she felt was too all-consuming to be fleeting. She was caught in Adam’s spell, a willing participant.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ he whispered, ‘but I’d go back into the firestorm again and again if it meant it would take me to you.’

  28

  WARD 14 felt like a film set, a construction that couldn’t possibly be real. Everyone did their best to smile and pretend that life was normal. Except that it was an illusion, a screen that did little to hide the map of veins, the disintegration of cells, the loudly beating hearts, the constant fear. Despite the nurses’ and doctors’ best efforts to maintain a happy atmosphere in the children’s oncology and blood-disorder ward, the unknown lingered in the air, heavy and thick, suffocating.

  Courtney’s son was now one of them. One of sixteen children confined to a hospital bed while they endured life-saving treatment. To get the tick of life, they had to suffer unbearable pain and skim dangerously close to death.

  Matthew was starting chemotherapy. It was hard to digest the speed at which everything was happening. In some ways, it was better. She didn’t have time to pore over the leaflets of side effects he might endure from the treatment.

  They inserted a central line under the skin of his chest into a large vein just below his collarbone. He squeezed her hand and looked up at her as though searching for a reason for the pain. ‘It’s okay to cry, my baby,’ she soothed him, rubbing his back. But he didn’t let himself cry, rather it was her own tears she could feel stinging like the prick of the syringe under his flesh.

  The chemotherapy was to be administered intravenously every day for six days on and then two days off during the month-long induction phase of treatment. He’d also need to have spinal taps to put the chemotherapy right into the cerebrospinal fluid to try to prevent cancer from spreading to his central nervous system.

  ‘Isn’t it great that you’re going home?’ Courtney heard a nurse say to a young girl, whose bed was positioned by the window. The girl had piercing hazel eyes and small red lips. She looked no older than eight, except the expression she wore was that of an adult. She stared out the window, her gaze fixed on the busy streets below.

  ‘I know,’ the girl replied, still staring out. ‘But I’ll be back.’

  Courtney turned to her beautiful son with his golden hair. She looked around the room and noticed that all the children were either bald, hiding their scalp with a bandana, or had large chunks of hair missing. There was one child whose bedsheets covered a missing limb, another’s whose curtains were drawn, and one girl a little older than Matthew whose eyes bore down on them, her gaze unflinching.

  ‘Matthew, sweetheart,’ Courtney said, as he squeezed her hand tighter, ‘I know it seems scary now but these children will be your friends soon. You’ll keep each other busy.’

  ‘I don’t want new friends. I wish I was with Dean,’ Matthew said, studying the poles of his hospital bed. ‘He would still think that bruises were something to be proud of.’ He looked around the room and drew his breath. ‘They’re not, are they, Mom?’

  Courtney shook her head. ‘No, sweetheart, they’re not.’

  When the chemotherapy started to filter through his son’s body, David felt physical pain; his chest burned and his head was heavy. It was as if he were willing his body to take his son’s pain away.

  At the start of the treatment, Matthew was working on a papier-mâché planet for his school project that he was determined to finish. He had his soccer ball by his feet, his astronomy book on the table.

  But it didn’t take long before he became so nauseated and sick he wasn’t able to lift his fingers. He had tried to remain stoic but within a matter of hours he gave in and cried for his mother. He asked repeatedly how much longer the sickness would last, what it would take to get better, how soon he could go home and go back to being a normal boy. David wondered if every parent of a sick kid felt like he did watching the drugs filter through their child’s body. Guilty. As if they were in some way responsible.

  When Matthew suffered, it was David who ached. When his son vomited, David felt bile rise in his throat. When Matthew cried, David felt his son’s tears like acid on his own skin.

  But David forced himself to smile so his son wouldn’t see how much he wanted to cry.

  He made jokes to distract Matthew even though it felt like nothing would ever be funny again. He told animated stories to Matthew of the boy’s childhood that he was too young to remember. How Courtney would give him a paintbrush and a bucket of water when he was four and he would happily paint the fence for hours, over and over again. How on their first trip to the zoo when he was three, he tried to steal a penguin because it looked cold. How he used to climb the trees in the garden at Courtney’s parents’ home and pretend he was a monkey when he reached the top. How David felt when Matthew’s first soccer coach told him the boy was gifted. ‘And that’s what you are, our gift,’ David told him, as he rubbed his son’s back.

  Matthew peered up at him from his hospital bed, his forehead damp with sweat, his eyes a chalk blue. Circles of red flushed his cheeks, which stood out jarringly against his grey skin.

  ‘But, Dad,’ he whispered in a strained voice, ‘aren’t gifts supposed to make you happy?’

  David swallowed hard. ‘Don’t be silly, buddy, you’re the only thing that makes us so happy. That’s why we just want you to get better.’

  Matthew licked his dry lips. ‘But what if I don’t?’

  29

  WHEN Courtney took biology at the start of high school, they did a semester on genetics. She found biology classes interesting some of the time but when she went home to study for exams, none of it ever made sense. She put it down to the fact that she was not scientifically minded.

  In one of the classes, they were going through recessive and dominant genes. When it came to eye colour, a student asked if it was possible for parents who both had blue eyes to have a child with brown eyes. Courtney was intrigued to learn that because blue eyes are the product of two recessive blue genes from both sides, there was almost no way they could carry the gene for brown eyes. Courtney remembered how they’d all suddenly looked around the classroom, scouting out the brown-eyed kids and jokingly questioning their parents’ eye colour.

  Courtney also remembered going home and animatedly telling her mother about it and how it was a sure way to catch a cheating parent. She was fourteen at the time, yet she could still recall with clarity the exact moment Emma’s demeanour changed. Her mother had her oven mitts on, she was cooking dinner, and the smell of corn, roasting vegetables and chicken wafted in the air. Moments earlier, she had been humming while she cooked but, in that moment, she turned to face the window, away from Courtney.

  It was dark outside and Courtney caught her mother’s expression in the glass before the steam from the boiling pot fogged it up. She immediately thought perhaps Emma had had an
affair, even though Courtney’s blue eyes and her mother’s brown eyes made her genetics perfectly normal. She had no idea that the secret her mother would reveal would be far greater than anything she imagined.

  That night her parents told Courtney she was not their biological child, and she cried herself to sleep feeling as if the two people she trusted most had committed the ultimate betrayal. It seemed as if her entire existence had been a lie. She questioned every small detail after that. It was only months later, as she started to understand her mother’s infertility struggle and how desperately they wanted her – and how deeply they loved her – that the anger eventually fell away.

  Courtney knew of adopted children who searched their whole lives for their biological family. She imagined that, for some of them, it was borne of discontent with their adoptive parents, for others maybe from a sense of lost identity or mere curiosity. But not for Courtney. She was never one of them.

  She remembered being told countless times by friends at school that if she had no interest or desire to discover or learn about her birth parents, there was something wrong with her. Even her parents seemed to be waiting for the day she would come home crying, holding a letter from her birth parents in one hand and her packed suitcase in the other.

  But the day never came. She never grew curious. She never had the desire. She felt whole. She felt loved. She felt lucky. That was enough for her.

  Through some twisted logic, Courtney had always believed that seeking out her birth parents would be a symbolic gesture of ingratitude.

  Now she finally experienced that curiosity. But it was not under the circumstances she ever imagined. She wasn’t having an identity crisis. She wasn’t seeking love or something more. She wasn’t a teenager dreaming of another life.

  She was desperate.

  And so for the first time in her life, she thought long and hard about her biological parents, because if a donor wasn’t found, the people who gave her life might be the only ones who could save her son’s.

  It was an agonising wait for the test results from David’s extended family who fit the stem-cell donor criteria. Courtney had pinned the list of his relatives on the inside door of their kitchen cupboard. As each result came back, David watched as she crossed another name off with a red marker.

  He looked at the adjusted list: from twenty-two, they were down to eight.

  They had been sitting by the phone all day. It didn’t seem like an inanimate object anymore, but a living, breathing symbol of their dread. Soon, it would deliver their son’s fate.

  ‘What do you think the rest of the results will be?’ Courtney asked David again. They had this conversation three times in the past hour, but Courtney persisted in asking the same question as if a different inflection on a word could elicit a better answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ David said again. He’d missed the warning signs in his own son, so he wasn’t about to pretend that he had any answers now.

  Courtney was pacing up and down the kitchen. She’d already wiped down the marble bench four times. ‘Do you think Belinda will ring soon?’

  David was trying to read the newspaper, but he couldn’t get past the first paragraph of any article without his mind drifting off. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated.

  ‘Well, should I ring her?’

  ‘You’ve already rung twice today and she didn’t have the results.’

  ‘Maybe they’re sitting at the reception desk and she doesn’t know they’re in yet.’

  David was silent. He was just as anxious as his wife but he was adept at keeping his emotions bottled up inside.

  Finally the phone rang; Courtney answered in seconds, her fingers trembling as she curled them around the cord.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? What if the sample wasn’t big enough? What if they gave another sample to test again?’ Her voice started to break. ‘It won’t? Okay.’

  She hung up the phone, her eyes moist. She looked at David and shook her head.

  David felt hollowness settle in his throat. He followed her to the kitchen. She opened the cupboard door and crossed four more names off the list.

  David and Courtney were sitting in Doctor Anderson’s office. Courtney was watching the doctor speak, but his words were barely registering. She kept trying to pull herself back to reality.

  ‘Belinda has passed on all the test results to me. And sadly, none of your relatives are compatible. Your best option is to wait and see how you go with the bone marrow registry.’

  ‘And until then?’ David asked.

  ‘Until then,’ the doctor frowned, ‘we get Matthew into remission. If he hasn’t found a donor by that stage, we continue into the second and third phase of treatment. We do everything else we can to buy time.’

  Courtney couldn’t accept that the doctor had put their son’s chances of survival down to luck and waiting. She had never been good at waiting. All her life she had been a doer, proactive, determined.

  David stared numbly as the doctor continued to reassure them that they would do everything they could to avoid Matthew going into relapse after treatment.

  As Courtney listened, a plan formed in her mind. While they waited for an unrelated donor from worldwide registries, she would track down her biological family. No matter whom she found – her mother or father – she would get them tested.

  Courtney would do whatever it took to find her son a donor match. Even if it meant that she had to leave him in order to save him.

  30

  JADE had spent all day working as part of a clean-up crew – clearing burned fences and wire, emptying driveways and removing debris. It was early evening when she returned to the pub, exhausted. She sat on a ladder and watched as the car park at the back was transformed into something of a hardware store. Now it housed a tent, ten shipping containers holding donated goods and sections for material that could be left outdoors. They had a coolroom to store packages of donated fruit and anything freshly baked. Tower lights were being installed because they were working into the night. Every day, they were adding to their growing stockpile of goods and services.

  ‘Evening, Jade.’ She turned her head to see the pub’s owner Jimbo looking on as the lights were installed. ‘I never thought I’d see my car park so full. People never used to drive when they came to my pub,’ he joked.

  Jade smiled softly. ‘There are a lot of things I thought I’d never see that I have in the past two weeks.’

  Jimbo was in his early sixties and was bald at the front and top of his head, leaving thin grey hair on the sides. He was one of those people who always had a smile on his face and seemed to know everyone by name. He’d owned the pub for as long as Jade could remember and he hadn’t spoken a word of complaint about his business being transformed into a relief centre. He leaned against the ladder and they both stared ahead as the lights flickered. ‘The night Pam asked me if she could start bringing some donated clothes from the station over here, I never thought the donations would build and build to what they are now. It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘It’s all thanks to you, Jimbo. If you hadn’t let us use the space, we would have had nowhere to grow from.’

  ‘It’s the least I could do. It’s you and Pam who need the thanks; you’ve made this happen. Your mother would be proud of you.’

  Jade kept her eyes staring ahead so he wouldn’t see her flinch at the mention of her mother. People spoke to her as if Asha was dead. And in some ways, Jade preferred to think she was. It was easier than knowing she had left their lives voluntarily.

  By the time Jade got to the cabin, her feet were aching, her arms hurt, all she wanted to do was collapse into a comfortable bed. The lights in the cabin were out and her father’s and grandmother’s doors were closed. She lay on the couch and stared at the round moon as it threw silver shadows into the room. Her mother always told her full moons made people do crazy things. Where in the world was Asha right now? Was she looking up at the silver flares of the moon too? Was she thinki
ng of the daughter she had abandoned over and over again? Did she know that her home had burned to the ground, that the olive groves were gone, that her precious roses had been incinerated? Or was she thinking only of herself?

  Jade closed her eyes hoping that sleep would come easily, but her mind was active and her thoughts kept returning to Adam. He was going back to Melbourne the following day. The thought of him leaving formed a lump in her throat. He’d come past the pub briefly that morning on his way to the station but he was working till midnight, so they hadn’t been able to spend more time together.

  She tossed and turned on the couch, wondering what would happen after he left. Would they make plans to see each other and have something of a long-distance relationship, or was she the only one who wanted something more? Maybe this was just a fling for him.

  From nowhere a maddening, irreconcilable force pulsed through her body. She had to see him. Jade sat up. If she drove to him, switching the ute’s engine on would wake her father and grandmother, and then questions would fly. She resolved to walk, but it was 1 am and the forest was shrouded in black shadows. She should have been afraid to venture into its inky depths but she wasn’t. That was the thing about coming so close to death – she could recognise its face in a dark room, she could feel its breath on her skin. Fear was no longer a force that held her back.

  So, Jade took a torch and headed into the bush towards the green house.

  Never fall in love. She had to fight her mother’s voice from clouding her judgements.

  When she reached the clearing and could see the small cottage, uncertainty rose within her. Would he think she was crazy showing up in the middle of the night?

  She tapped lightly on his window. Nothing. She tapped again and then a light went on. She stood in the darkness, suddenly embarrassed. The curtains drew back and he peered out at her. Her breath quickened as she saw him, his chest bare, his face flushed with sleep. He smiled and closed the curtain. The light went off.