Another Mother's Life

by Rowan Coleman

  “I haven’t got a phone,” Leo said, looking bewildered and frightened.

  Jimmy threw his mobile at Leo’s feet, where it landed in the dirt. “Here, use mine, call them now. Do it now, Leo!”

  He turned back to Dominic and took a breath, sensing that each precious second that passed was irretrievable.

  “Right.” Jimmy closed his eyes. Last summer the school had sent him on a first aid course. All teachers had to know CPR. It was school policy. He knew what to do, he knew CPR, he just had to focus and think, and eventually it would come back to him. He took a breath and thought of Alison sitting in the café, talking about her son. He saw his own daughters lying there. Imagining in an instant their faces white and still. He couldn’t afford to get this wrong.

  “Recovery position first,” Jimmy spoke aloud as he carefully tilted Dom’s head back to keep his airway open. He was dimly aware of Leo in the background trying to explain where they were. He peered inside Dom’s mouth: it was blocked with vomit, which must have been why he’d stopped breathing. He’d been choking. Jimmy cleared it away with his fingers, wiping them clean on the grass, hoping that suddenly Dom would take a deep breath, cough, and splutter into life. But the boy remained still.

  “Rescue breathing, create a seal,” Jimmy whispered to himself. He pinched Dominic’s nose with one hand and held his mouth open with the other. He took a deep breath and blew it into Dominic’s mouth, watching the boy’s chest rise with each of the breaths he gave him. That meant he was doing it right; if the chest rose, that meant the air was going into the lungs.

  What next? Jimmy thought as he continued to breathe, counting to ten. Wait and watch. You were supposed to give them ten breaths and then wait to see if they would start breathing on their own. He sat back on his heels and watched Dominic intently, holding his own breath, willing the boy’s chest to rise. Dominic was perfectly still. But there was no time to panic, no time to think or worry about what the next minute or even the next second would bring. All Jimmy knew was that he had to keep him breathing, he had to keep oxygen going to his brain and hope that would be enough.

  Circulation, he remembered, the C of the ABC during the set of ten breaths.

  “Compressions. I haven’t done compressions.” Jimmy waited, watching Dominic again; his rib cage remained immobile. Hesitantly he placed the heels of his hands over Dominic’s breastbone; was this the right thing to do?

  “They’re coming,” Leo told him. “They said they’d be ten minutes. What are you doing?”

  “Compressions … no, wait.” Jimmy looked at his hands on Dominic’s chest and then snatched them away. “No, no—his heart is beating, compressions could make it worse. I just need to keep breathing for him. Ten breaths and see if he starts on his own. Then ten more breaths. That’s right. That’s right. I just need to keep on breathing for him. Go and stand by the bridge, Leo, keep an eye out for them. You’ll need to show them where we are.”

  “You’re doing well, son,” Leo said as he headed off, but Jimmy didn’t hear him.

  It seemed like an age before the ambulance crew arrived. They had to park a few hundred yards away and run the rest of the way. By the time the first paramedic sat down beside Jimmy and took over resuscitation, Jimmy’s knees had gone numb, his legs had cramped, and he felt heady from the deep breathing. But he didn’t notice any of those things. In those ten minutes his whole world had become about counting ten breaths, watching the rise and fall of Dom’s chest, and hoping. But not once did Dominic breathe on his own.

  “Can I have a word, sir,” the second paramedic asked him as her colleague worked on Dom.

  “His heart is beating,” Jimmy told her. “I’ve been breathing for him, but he hasn’t done it on his own yet.”

  “Do you know how long he’d stopped breathing for?” she asked him.

  Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t know. We found him in the bushes, me and Leo. He was white and cold, and he’d been drinking.” Jimmy nodded toward the empty bottle. “He’d been sick, I don’t know when … I teach him guitar. Maybe he came to see me to talk to me, but I wasn’t here last night. I’d gone up the canal to see my mum. Maybe he was waiting for me and I wasn’t here …”

  “You’ve done all you can,” the paramedic told him.

  “Let’s bag him and move him, this is about as stable as he’s going to get here,” her partner told her, and Jimmy watched as they expertly inserted a tube into the boy’s throat.

  “We’ve got to take him in now,” the paramedic told Jimmy. “You say you teach him, can you give us his parents’ names and phone numbers?”

  “Yes,” Jimmy said. “I can, I … I have a folder on the boat …” Jimmy stopped midsentence, staring at the place where Dominic had been.

  “Great, can you grab that and come to the hospital with him until we track down his parents?” the woman said.

  “Of course.” Jimmy didn’t hesitate. The boy needed him.

  Jimmy stood looking at the clock in the hospital waiting room. It seemed as if hours had passed since they’d arrived in the emergency room and he’d stood, watching as Dominic was rushed through swinging doors. He had been instructed to wait outside. He’d been staring at the clock. Hours seemed to pass but the hands on the clock barely moved. If Jimmy stared at the second hand for long enough it even seemed to go backward. If he could stop time, turn it back. If only he’d found Dom earlier, got to him before he stopped breathing. If he had been on the boat when Dom came looking for him. Had the boy been looking for him? They’d played together three times now, had a laugh, talked about chord structure. The last time Jimmy had seen him Dom had waited for everyone else to go and then hesitantly asked him to listen while he played through a song he’d been writing. The boy’s voice had trembled, caught somewhere between a child’s voice and a man’s voice, but it had been a good song. He’d told Dominic it was a good song. Dominic had smiled. Would that exchange have been enough for him to come and find Jimmy? Or had he been looking for a place off the beaten track where he could drink himself to death?

  “Mr. Ashley?” A young doctor approached him.

  “That’s me,” Jimmy said, holding his breath. “Is he okay?”

  “I’m Dr. Malik. We’ve had to ventilate Dominic, but we’re hopeful that that is a temporary measure. It looks like severe alcohol poisoning and respiratory failure caused by vomiting. Your actions probably saved his life.” She produced Jimmy’s folder of student contact details. “I’ve contacted his father. He’s on his way in.”

  Jimmy took the folder and nodded.

  “You say he’s going to be fine?” he asked her.

  The doctor didn’t reply right away. “We’re hopeful. You can go home now, if you like.”

  Jimmy thought of Catherine sitting at home, waiting for him with his daughters, and his heart and body ached to be near her. But he knew he couldn’t go.

  “I’ll wait until his parents get here,” he said.

  Catherine winced at the loud banging on the door that roused her from where she had been dozing on the sofa, her girls watching TV slumped on either side of her.

  “If that’s your dad, forgetting his key …” she grumbled happily, aware of how much she was looking forward to seeing Jimmy, to watching him as he cooked dinner, teasing him about his culinary skills, the two of them laughing together again. She pulled herself up and went to the front door.

  “Why didn’t you go round the back …” Catherine stopped in midsentence. Alison, Gemma, and Amy were standing on the doorstep.

  “Alison?” Catherine was confused. “Didn’t we say next Wednesday?”

  “Can you have the girls to play?” Alison’s voice was light and she was smiling, but Catherine could see something else in her eyes. “It’s just that silly old Dom has had an accident and he’s been taken to the hospital …” Her voice wavered on the last word, and she took a deep breath. “Jimmy’s with him, Marc’s on his way and I didn’t think I should take these two …”

&nb
sp; “Jimmy?” Catherine asked her, her heart suddenly pounding in her chest. “Is Jimmy hurt, what happened?”

  “Jimmy’s fine. He found Dom. Marc said he gave him mouth-to-mouth or something …”

  “Mouth-to-mouth?” Catherine looked down at the two girls.

  “In you go, you two. Eloise and Leila will be over the moon to see you!”

  The children were silent as their mother kissed them on the tops of their heads.

  “In you go, I’ll be back soon,” Alison said.

  “Is it bad?” Catherine asked her once the girls had gone in. Tears stood in Alison’s eyes. “I don’t know, he was drinking and he stopped breathing and I don’t know what else. I have to go. Say if it’s too much to ask. I didn’t know who else to go to.”

  “Its fine,” Catherine said. She reached out and touched Alison’s arm. “Just let me know what happens. Now go.”

  The first thing Jimmy knew was the skull-splitting, searing pain that shot through his head. The second thing was finding himself on the floor outside the emergency room. Then he realized Marc James had punched him.

  “What did you do to my son?” Marc demanded, standing over Jimmy, his fists clenched.

  “Nothing.” Jimmy clambered up, tasting blood on his tongue, fighting to control the surge of adrenaline that made him want to hit Marc back very hard. “I found him. He’d probably been out there all night. There was an empty bottle of whiskey next to him. I don’t know what happened. I know you’re worried and scared. That’s the only reason I’m not hitting you back. But seriously, if you want to do something useful you should be in there finding out how your son is and not out here throwing punches at the man who tried to help him.”

  Gingerly Jimmy touched his jaw; it was sore, but it had been a glancing blow that had taken him by surprise, rather than a knockout punch.

  Marc shook his head, his lips tight. “I can’t,” he said.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Jimmy exclaimed.

  “This is my fault,” Marc told him. “I made this happen. We argued, he ran out of the house and didn’t come back. If I could talk to him, if I could be a father to him … this is all my fault.”

  “Yes,” Jimmy said. “Yes, it is all your fault. But you still have to go in there. You still have to talk to the doctors and find out what’s happening. You don’t get to run away. You’re his father.”

  “What if he’s not okay?” Marc said, looking into the room.

  “You still have to go in,” Jimmy told him. “If you are any kind of father—if you are any kind of man, you still have to go in. You don’t have a choice.”

  “He’s never tried to understand me,” Marc said, and Jimmy guessed he was talking about his son. “He made up his mind about me, and the conclusion he’s come to is that I’m a terrible person. I know what he thinks of me. So I try and stay out of his way. I try not to let his windups get to me. If I let him get under my skin I lose it with him. I don’t mean to, because I love the boy. And I know I don’t have any right to get angry with him, but I do. And now this happened because he doesn’t try to see how difficult things are for me. There is nothing I can do.”

  “Bollocks,” Jimmy said simply.

  “What did you say?” Marc asked, looking confused.

  “Listen, you’re not talking to a chick now,” Jimmy told him. “Don’t try all your touchy-feely-nobody-understands-me crap out on me. We’re both men. We know the score. You’ve been busy with work and quite possibly a woman other than your wife and maybe even mine. You’re caught up in your own midlife crisis, wondering how you ended up with a lovely wife and three great kids—something that I find hard to believe too, as it happens. You’re so involved with you and what everything means to you that you don’t have time for your son. Your little girls are cute and adoring so you give them your attention whenever you’re around, but he”—Jimmy hooked his thumb toward the entrance of the emergency room—“he can see right through, and he’s angry and prickly and difficult to handle, and on your long list of priorities that mainly reads ‘me, me, me’ you’ve put him at the bottom because that’s the kind of fucked-up selfish prick you are.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Marc threatened, advancing a step toward Jimmy.

  “Next time you raise a fist to me I’ll knock you out,” Jimmy replied, squaring his shoulders. “For Christ’s sake, think about what you’re doing here. The question is, Marc, do you want to do the right thing? Or do you want to run away from the mess you’ve made yet again? Do you want to fuck up some more lives and then just disappear? I’m a father and I know that no matter what happened I could never walk away from my children for even one second. If you don’t go in there now, then you might as well leave for good because you won’t ever be able to come back.”

  Marc stared at him with those dark eyes, cold and hard.

  “Is this about me and your ex-wife?” he asked Jimmy.

  “There is no you and my wife, and she’s still my wife. We’re still married. And anyway listen to yourself, man, you’re here because your son, your fifteen-year-old son is seriously ill in the hospital and you want to talk about me and Catherine?” Jimmy shook his head. “What kind of man are you?”

  Marc dropped his shoulders, staring hard at the floor before looking back up at Jimmy.

  “I don’t know anymore,” he said, looking as if he had been defeated by his own anger. “He used to think I was a god, that I was the greatest. And I loved that, you know. I’d never had a dad myself, but I thought this is what it’s all about. Father and son. I never had that. I need to get this right somehow, but I keep getting it wrong and now … now he’s in there and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “You have to be there for him,” Jimmy said. “He’s a good kid, your son. He’s funny and smart. He’s got real musical talent. He loves his mum and his sisters. You can’t be that faultless, perfect man for him anymore but you can still be his dad, if you try. You’re the parent. It’s up to you to make the first move. If you spend all your time waiting for him to forgive you, you’ll never work things out. But if you ask him to forgive you, then he will because he loves you. And if you do, then you have to be certain that you will never let him down again, because you can only ever ask someone to forgive you once and mean it.”

  “What’s happening?” Alison arrived suddenly, breathless, her face pink. “I couldn’t find anywhere to park and then I didn’t have any change and … why are you out here? How is he? Is he okay?”

  “I’ve just arrived,” Marc told her. “I was just about to go in.”

  “You haven’t seen him yet?” Alison asked. “You’ve known for nearly half an hour.”

  “I had the same problems as you—parking, change,” Marc said, his effortless lies running off his shoulders like water. He avoided looking at Jimmy.

  Alison looked at Jimmy, her face pinched and tight with fear. “Thank you for being there for him,” she said.

  “I just did what anybody would have,” Jimmy said.

  “No, not anybody,” Alison replied, pointedly looking at her husband. “Are you coming in?”

  “I’m coming,” Marc said.

  Jimmy stood for a moment watching as Dominic’s parents disappeared down a corridor. Marc had always figured so large in his life, even before he’d met him. He was this mythical man, the man Catherine had loved, the memory he had never been able to compete with. And when he’d arrived in the flesh, with all his money and confidence, Jimmy had been even more frightened by Marc. But not anymore.

  As Jimmy began to make his way back home to his wife and kids, he knew. He knew that whatever happened next, he was ten times the man Marc James would ever be.

  Twenty-five

  It took Catherine and Jimmy quite a while to settle the four girls down to sleep. Alison had phoned about an hour after Jimmy got back and told them that Dominic had finally begun breathing on his own.

  “It was frightening at first, I didn’t know what wa
s happening,” Alison explained, her voice trembling. “We were sitting there with him and suddenly he started spluttering and choking on the tube. The doctors came and took it out and he’s been breathing on his own ever since. He’s still weak and he’s not really conscious yet. The doctor …” Her voice broke and she paused for a moment, then continued. “The doctor said its likely he’s damaged his liver permanently. But he’s young and strong. They think he’ll make a good recovery. They said that Jimmy saved his life.”

  “Really?” Catherine glanced over at Jimmy sitting on the sofa, playing Beatles numbers for the girls to sing along to, a half-smile on his face as he and the girls rewrote the lyrics. She recalled the few microseconds when she had believed that Jimmy had been hurt too and how frightened she’d been. He’d saved a boy’s life today and yet here he was playing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “If Jimmy hadn’t found Dominic when he did, then …” Catherine heard the break in Alison’s voice and tore her eyes away from her husband.

  “He’s going to be okay,” she reassured Alison. “Just focus on that and not what could have been.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay about keeping the girls tonight?” Alison asked.

  “Of course,” Catherine reassured her. “We’ll cobble together some uniforms for tomorrow and take them to school. They’ll be fine here.”

  “If I hadn’t spent last night with you,” Alison said, “then this wouldn’t have happened, but I did and … you’ve been very kind to me.”

  “Anyone would have helped you out,” Catherine said.

  “I know,” Alison told her, “but I am so glad that it’s you.”

  When Jimmy came down from reading the girls their final story he found Catherine lying on her back on the sofa, a cushion over her face.

  “I’m sorry you ended up having to cook after all,” he told her, a smile in his voice. “Not to mention get lumbered with house-guests.”