by Phil Earle
“Can I help you?”
Dad appeared quickly over her shoulder and ushered me through the double doors, before folding me into the biggest hug imaginable. I had no idea if it was for my benefit or his.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, though I had no idea what for, not this time.
“I’m just glad you called.” I smiled sadly, looking for a sign on his face that things weren’t as bad as he’d made out.
“How could I do anything else? I waited as long as I could, but the doctors have said it won’t…” It was like the words were actually causing him pain. It wasn’t like I wanted to hear them either.
“Have you told Mom I’m coming?”
He shook his head, cheeks burning.
“I didn’t know how to. How to stop either of you from being hurt any more than you already are.”
“It’s all right,” I offered. And it was, sort of. He didn’t know how she’d react; I understood that. Now more than ever. “We’ll tell her together, okay?”
We rushed through the corridors in silence, neither of us daring to form any kind of plan. We were going to have to wing it.
As we reached Dora’s room, Dad peered through the glass and paused, hand shaking on the panel. Carefully, I moved him to one side. I was all waited out, couldn’t put the moment off any longer.
The room was darker than any hospital ward I’d ever seen, the only lights coming from a host of machines that flashed and whirred around the bed. When you added the tubes and wires that draped across Dora, you had a scene of purest science fiction. I couldn’t believe that none of the technology had the simple ability to bring her back to us.
I walked slowly. Mom was leaning forward, forehead resting on Dora’s twiglike hand. Neither of them was moving.
I’d never experienced anything like this, never had to give the idea any kind of headspace or thought. And now it threatened to drown me. It was only a supportive, guiding hand from Dad that allowed me to go any farther.
My eyes fell on Dora, the pads attached to her chest and temples threatening to dent her already fragile skin. She looked smaller than ever, like the mattress was claiming her inch by inch, sucking her down toward the floor. I looked for any kind of pain but couldn’t see any.
The only sign of life was coming from the machine’s pulse rather than her own.
I searched for the right words to let Mom know I was there—but they hid from me. Instead, I kept walking until I reached the bed, crouching as I took Dora’s other hand in mine.
At first Mom didn’t move, probably thinking I was a nurse, but after a while her eyes traced up my hand to my arm, to my shoulder, then my face. It wasn’t until she’d stared through me for a good few seconds that she realized who she was staring at, and that her secret had collapsed around her.
This was it. There was no going back. For any of us.
She said nothing at first, too shocked and appalled at seeing me there, in her private world. As soon as she saw a fearful Dad, she thought she knew everything she needed to.
“You told Charlie?” she whispered, her voice quiet but laced with bullets. “He shouldn’t be here, not now.”
Dad made a movement forward as his words formed, but I leapt in first.
“I found out.” I said the words forcefully, so there was no doubt. “Dad told me nothing. Not until I made him.”
It was like I’d spoken in another language. There was no acknowledgment or response; her gaze stayed fixed on Dad, eyes narrowing as she softly laid Dora’s hand on the bed.
The movement was gentle and precise, her body language anything but.
“How could you?” she hissed hysterically, stalking around the bed toward him. “I thought you understood. Why I didn’t want anyone to know. Do you really think Charlie needs to see this? To see what I’ve done?”
I tried to squeeze between them and break her focus, but as always, she wouldn’t bend at all.
“You need to listen to me, Mom. It wasn’t Dad who told me. It was a nurse on the phone. She thought I was you, and Dad only filled in the rest because I forced him to, because I said I’d go straight to you. He was trying to protect you.”
She finally heard me, eyes widening further as the story fell into place. Taking a slow step backward, she lifted her hands to her face, like she was too scarred or evil to be seen.
I followed her as she backed away, trying to ease her arms downward, but her elbows were locked and fingers rigid.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Really it is. Dad told me what happened.”
“I bet he did.” Her voice was still clear from behind her hands. “Told you it wasn’t my fault, I suppose. Said it could’ve happened to anyone.” She let her hands creep away from her face, revealing the pain screaming from every wrinkle, every tear. “But it didn’t, did it? It happened to me.”
I thought she was going to go on, that the anger and volume would only increase, but as soon as the last word left her, she bit her lip, catching a raking sob as it threatened her whole body. “It happened to my sister.”
“And it’s not your fault, Mom. It was just an accident. You must know that.”
“An accident? Is that what you think this is? An accident is smashing a glass or backing your car into a lamppost. Look at Dora and tell me it’s the same thing. Look at all these machines and tell me how it wasn’t my fault.”
But I didn’t have time to, because as Mom stopped speaking, Dora’s machines took over, their electronic screams clawing at our ears, forcing each of us closer to her bed in panic.
I looked at Dora’s face for any sign of pain, but there was none. Her eyelids lay closed, her lips pursed gently beneath the oxygen mask. The machine was the only evidence that inside everything else was failing.
There was a commotion behind us as medical staff raced in, scattering us like ninepins as they assessed and prodded and touched. I felt an urge to pull them away or tell them to be gentle, but instead held on to Mom, whose limbs seemed to be failing in the same way as her sister’s. The staff pressed buttons, changed drips, and shot injections, but nothing gave us my aunt back.
Her breathing faded like a dwindling echo; it was as if her bed was on wheels, inching farther and farther away from us.
I went back to the bed and gingerly took Dora’s hand, resisting the urge to talk for fear of sapping the last life from her body. I just hoped she knew I was there: that for once, a first and last time, we all were, all her family.
“I’m afraid I don’t have good news,” came a voice from behind me. We spun to see a doctor, round-shouldered and stooped, weighed down by years of conversations that started the exact same way.
“The results from the CT scan aren’t positive. As feared, Dora’s last stroke resulted in a massive cranial bleed. You can see that her body is simply not coping with the trauma.
“We can make her comfortable and minimize the pain, but aside from that, there’s little we…”
I didn’t hear the rest.
I knew what was coming, had known from the second I walked into the room, but somehow it still overwhelmed me, sending my mouth into overdrive and my legs into a realm of their own. Mom caught me on the way down, hushing me as another cry escaped.
I had no idea I had that kind of emotion in me. Maybe it was the final snap after all the lies, or the sickening realization that Dora was way more broken than I’d ever realized, but it terrified me that I had the potential to love someone so ferociously when I barely knew them at all. What scared me even more was how I would even start to replace her.
I felt five years old again, and looked to Mom, just as I had then. How she was still on her feet I had no idea, but somehow, and with an awful lot of leaning, we stopped each other from crumpling to the floor.
We waited.
And I realized, as the light dimmed around us, that this was the end of a very long wait for Mom. Twenty years of knowing it was coming, of building up to the moment in her mind, all of it wrapped up in her ow
n guilt.
It was too much to get my head around.
In some stupid, naive way, I hadn’t considered that Dora might die. Why would I, when all I knew was the gnarled little baby bird that laughed in all the wrong places and charmed everyone she met? She had more life in her than any of the kids at school.
It was then that the memory of my plan hit me, the stupid, reckless idea to use her simply to serve my own selfish needs.
What would have happened if she’d had the stroke on the way to Skatefest, or in the middle of the crowd? What would I have said to Mom then?
Look on the bright side, Ma. You may have caused the accident, but it was me who actually put her in the ground….
The thought left me cold, the only warmth radiating from Dora’s brittle fingers, which I held as Mom busied herself plumping up pillows and smoothing her sister’s hair. Doing, I supposed, the same things she had done for the past two decades. Only doing them at twice the speed, trying to cram as much love into whatever time she had left.
Which didn’t add up to much.
We saw midnight come and go in silence, all of us with questions to ask each other. We held them in, though: right now they didn’t matter. The only words spoken were to Dora. She was all that mattered.
Are you comfy? Can you hear us?
I knew we were asking the questions for our own comfort rather than hers, desperately hoping that, wherever she was, she could sense that we were all there. That she could slip away knowing that, if nothing else.
And when she did finally leave us? It wasn’t peaceful or poignant. It wasn’t like it is on TV or in a book. There were no eyelids fluttering open briefly, no final smile or profound last words. We only knew she’d gone because the machine told us so with its emotionless wail.
What should have been a final moment of holding her hands tighter, and begging her to come back, was replaced by doctors breaking our grasps, urging us to give them space.
I did as I was told, and stumbled into Dad. Mom did no such thing. She hung grimly on, tears clinging to her cheeks, no matter how many people came. She didn’t let go or take her eyes off her sister, not even when the doctors finally silenced the whine of the machine, and the room fell quiet. She sat there, the same way I guessed she always had.
Except now there was silence.
A silence that none of us felt we would ever fill again.
We were told to go home and rest, yet only Dad and I made our way home in a cab, the darkness masking our tears. Mom stayed behind: made it clear there were still things to be done, things she wasn’t prepared to wait until morning to tackle.
“She’s still my sister,” she’d snapped when Dad tried to persuade her to leave, “so I still have to do this properly. She deserves that.”
He didn’t argue. Of course he didn’t. He knew one more word would start an avalanche, so after a lingering embrace he backed away.
It was a night of firsts, and this was a strange moment for me. I couldn’t remember the last time they’d shown each other that kind of affection. Dad was married to the kitchen, not to Mom—and as for her? Well, I knew now where her affections had been directed all this time.
There would be changes ahead. There had to be, though what they were and how each of us was going to cope with them seemed too much to take in.
“You all right, son?” Dad’s hand, although gravel rough, was somehow comforting on mine.
“Is she going to be angry?” I asked, unaware that the question had even been on my mind. “Tomorrow, when she gets home and it all sinks in?”
His shadow sagged into the chair.
“I have no idea how she’ll be, whether she’ll react at all. She might be angry, she might be embarrassed that we hid it like we did, that it took someone else to tell you. I just don’t know, pal.”
It wasn’t like there was a lot of comfort in his words, barely a crumb to seize on, but it was an honest answer, at least, one that beat his stock She’s your mom response. I couldn’t help but hope I wouldn’t hear that line again.
“I won’t know what to say, though. How to bring the whole thing up without upsetting her. Or me,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’m allowed to be mad at her anymore. Not now that Dora’s dead.” I closed my eyes, hoping it might stop the jumble of confusion, but it didn’t. Instead, my head started to spin like it had when Sinus and I experimented with his mom’s liquor cabinet.
“You can feel however you want to, Charlie. You can’t hide anything now. There’s been too much of that already, and look where it’s gotten us.”
“But you saw her when we left the hospital. How would she cope if I made the situation even worse?”
“Then bottle it up all you like. Hide it all away and say it’s fine, just to protect her. But by doing that, all you’re doing is overprotecting her the same way she did you. In the end, all that anger will still come out, even if it’s in another twenty years’ time. And if you think it’s messy now, well…”
He didn’t bother finishing. His logic was already fighting with all the other stuff my brain couldn’t cope with.
All I could do was sit and let the thoughts bounce around, trying to ignore as much of it as I could, hoping that a few hours’ sleep might squash some of the paranoia.
But my brain wouldn’t rest. I slept, but my head didn’t switch off for a second. Instead, it took me off in the trippiest of directions. I skated on a board made from Dora’s life-support machine, a priest offering me last rites before pushing me off the top of the ramp. Mom now had tattoos of her sister covering her body; Dad replaced the takeout with a funeral home, except the only coffin he stocked was my size, my shape, and with my name etched on a brass plate.
I tried to wake myself, but the dream just laughed and carried on, Dad tipping me into the coffin, cackling as he hammered the nails into the lid.
I woke with a howl, my entire body slicked with sweat.
The banging continued. It was the door downstairs, another unhappy customer, begging for a bag of prawn crackers.
Except it was only nine-fifteen. Eight hours before Dad usually flipped the sign on the door. I didn’t like it, not after yesterday. So I hauled myself down the stairs, whacking myself (as always) on the safety gate.
I didn’t know who to expect at the door. My head rampaged on, telling me it would be a police officer with more bad news, but instead, I found Sinus, arms behind his back, wearing a look of genuine concern.
His mouth opened as I let him in, but no words came out.
He looked awkward, fearful almost of what to say, so I saved him the trouble and told him the obvious.
“Dora’s dead,” I said, recognizing how blunt and emotionless it sounded. She deserved a better word than that, something longer that explained how brave she’d been.
But if that word existed I had no idea what it was, which sent another wave of sadness surging to every corner of my body.
I didn’t think I had any tears left, but I was wrong. Didn’t think I’d ever show that kind of emotion in front of Sinus, but I wasn’t in control of that either.
Instead of shifting uncomfortably, though, he did a strange and alien thing. He paced forward and took one hand from behind his back, placing it on my shoulder. With his head cocked slightly to one side, and a sad supportive smile on his face, he did the unthinkable, and said the word I’d never heard him say before, a word I didn’t think he knew existed.
“Sorry,” he said. “Dude, I am so, so sorry.” He pulled me into him, accepting every tear and racking sob I owned.
We sat in the living room, only moving when the bowl needed more prawn crackers.
“What do they put in these things?” Sinus laughed goofily, a snowstorm of crumbs covering his T-shirt. “Drugs?”
I laughed, then felt guilty. “You should ask Bunion about that. He’s the expert these days.”
“True, but I’d happily give him a run for his money.”
It felt good to be talking about someth
ing stupid, something that didn’t set the whine of Dora’s life-support machine scratching at my ears again.
And anyway, we’d covered all that already: Sinus prodding gently, me giving him every bit of detail I could manage without crumpling into a ball again.
“It’ll get easier,” he said, though his eyes didn’t show any kind of authority.
Would it? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find a bit of my brain big enough to hide all my emotions. Not when they ranged from anger to regret to downright filthy bitterness at what I’d missed out on.
“What you need to do is keep busy. My mom thinks that when her dad died it was throwing herself into other things that kept her sane. Gave her a purpose.”
I thought of his mom, of the wall of makeup plastered to her skin, and wondered if that was her grieving mechanism.
It made me shudder a bit. No matter how many tips I earned, I couldn’t imagine I’d ever earn enough to feed a habit as big as hers.
“And that’s where you’re lucky, Charlie,” he went on, the smile looking more confident. “Because you’ve got everything you need to move on.” He reached down the side of the couch and with a flourish pulled my board into view. His smile dazzled on full beam, distracting me from what he clearly wanted me to look at.
I’d forgotten he had the board, to be honest. For the first time in weeks, Skatefest had slipped from my mind, and even with such an obvious prompt it still didn’t feel important.
“I would’ve liked more time,” he said, looking at the underside of the board, still hidden from me, “you know, to finesse the design, but I think you’re still going to like it.
“It’s a limited edition, one of one.” Gripping each end of the board with the palms of his hands, he spun it until the underside faced me, and finally he had my attention. All of it.
I’d never seen anything to match it. The base shone so brightly that it could’ve been on fire, the colors so vivid it was like he’d invented new ones of his own. My hands reached forward as if I were hypnotized, and I drank as much of it in as I could without burning my eyes.