Anouska Knight - Letting You Go

‘I don’t want to go for coffee, Jem.’ Alex called after her, ‘I want to be here on the ward, when she wakes up.’

‘Me too,’ Jem reassured. ‘There’s a family room just through here. We won’t be far.’ Jem began to edge along the corridor again but Alex stayed glued to the spot. She hadn’t come this far to hide out again. If her dad needed to sound off at someone then she could at least provide that for him.

Jem looked at her expectantly. Alex folded her arms and looked at her own feet like a stubborn child who didn’t want to go to school. ‘What did Malcolm Sinclair say, Jem? What happened in the churchyard? Has Mum been ill this weekend? I need to know what you and Dad know, Jem.’ Alex was already picturing it again. Her mum collapsed in the cemetery overcome with the sadness of another birthday denied to Dillon. The utter needlessness of so many years without him, and not even the luxury of someone to hate for it.

Jem retraced her steps back to Alex and let out a long sigh. Jem was being patient. It was gift she rarely shared with anyone else. She leant against the wall beside Alex.

‘Malcolm had to carry her in. He said Mum was agitated. She was mumbling about these bloody flowers,’ Jem shrugged, ‘ The evening flowers! The evening flowers! Something like that. She was still pretty worked up when me and Dad got here.’

‘About flowers ? Well, who normally sends flowers for Dill?’

‘Nobody, really. Us, Helen Fairbanks always does. Susannah Finn too.’ Finn’s mum had never stopped being kind to them, even Alex. After everything Finn had put up with because of her.

Finn was there in her head again. ‘Anyone else?’ Alex pressed.

‘Alex, hate to break it to you but I don’t actually have all the answers.’ Jem’s patience was starting to wear off. ‘There probably weren’t any evening flowers , Mum was very confused. What does it matter?’

‘It matters if it’s enough to upset Dad like that. I’ve only been here five minutes and I’ve already annoyed him.’

Jem looked at Alex and sighed again. ‘I’ve already told you, Al. He sounded off at me earlier too. I only asked if he thought we should go back to the church today in case anyone had dropped more flowers off for Dill and they needed tidying. He blew at that, too. He’s worried, and probably shattered. I know he didn’t sleep well, he went for a walk at 5.30 this morning for crying out loud. Probably chain-smoking.’

Alex nodded. That would be the next thing. Their dad was going to get lung cancer off the back of all the worrying he’d had to do. Alex was going to wipe them all out eventually while she was bound to live a long and healthy life with bags of time to think about how she’d set this nasty little trail of dominoes up.

A familiar knot tightened in Alex’s stomach. Her mum’s grief must be unbearable. People didn’t get over the loss of their children; it was a universal truth.

The question fell from Alex’s mouth. ‘What if it wasn’t a stroke?’

‘What do you mean?’

Surely it was their mum’s heart that had finally had enough. ‘Are they sure it wasn’t her heart, Jem?’

‘It was a stroke Alex. Not a heart attack.’

‘But what did Mal see?’

Jem shook her head and huffed. ‘Mal was … a bit sketchy actually. He said Mum looked unwell. I think he saw her in the churchyard and just went over to say hello, I guess.’

‘Did she look upset? Did he think Mum had been crying?’

‘What? No, I don’t think so. Alex, you’re as bad as Dad.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With the random questions! Dad practically interrogated Mal last night, What have you said to my wife? Are you responsible for this, Sinclair?’ Jem solemnly tucked her hair behind one ear and shook her head. ‘You should’ve heard him. Dad was really horrible to Mal, actually.’

‘Dad thought Malcolm had upset Mum?’

‘Apparently. I tried to tell him. Mal Sinclair couldn’t upset himself. Mal’s just like his dad was.’ Jem had been fond of Mal, once upon a time, and the mayor.

‘Sorry, Jem. I should’ve been here.’ Alex shrank back against the corridor wall.

‘Dad wanted to know what they’d been talking about. Mal said they hadn’t had a chance to talk about anything except the fluttering she was having and …’

‘Fluttering? Again? Jem, why didn’t you say that?’ Alex knew it would be her heart. ‘We need to tell the doctors, before it happens again!’ It was a miracle they hadn’t done her in before now, the fluttery palpitations her mum habitually played down since their sudden onset a decade ago.

One of the nurses at the desk was looking over at them. Jem blew her fringe from her eyes again. ‘I’m going to need coffee if we’re getting into all this, Al. It wasn’t her heart, OK? Will you please listen to me? If the fluttering business had bothered her that much, she’d have seen somebody about it before now.’

‘Do you really believe that, Jem?’

Blythe liked to make light of it. It was like a butterfly trapped in ajar that was all. You didn’t trouble the doctor over a butterfly heart. A stampeding herd of wildebeest in there, fair enough, but not butterflies.

Jem smiled sweetly down the corridor towards the nurses’ station. Alex slumped back against the wall next to her mother’s room. Whatever it was that was in her mother’s heart, wildebeest or butterflies, Alex knew why they were in there. Alex was staring at her shoes again when Jem gently kicked her own foot against Alex’s.

‘It was a stroke, Alex. Nothing anyone could’ve foreseen. Nothing anyone else is responsible for. Let it go.’

The door into Blythe’s room swept open. He might’ve looked older, but Ted was still a mountain of a man, tall and broad and handsome, as fathers should be.

Alex stood a little straighter. Her dad came to stand in front of her and scratched softly at the flop of grey-blond hair over his eyes.

‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you just now, Alex. I’m just a, er, a little …’ Alex watched him try to choose his words.

‘It’s OK, Dad.’

Ted managed a brief smile. Jem’s eyes bounced back and forth as if she were spectating at Wimbledon.

‘I didn’t think you’d wait to drive up here to your mother, you should’ve come to the house,’ he said. ‘I waited for you on the porch.’ He would’ve waited there longer for her too, had he not started thinking the same old thoughts, tying himself in knots until he’d found himself stalking angrily down to St Cuthbert’s.

‘It was early. I didn’t know if you’d be awake …’ But she knew it was a rubbish lie before she told it.

‘You’re my daughter. And it’s never too early in the day to see your child arrive safely home, Alexandra.’

‘Jem? Are you hungry yet? I think we should wait until Dad gets home. Shall one of us call him?’

Alex’s voice bounced up through the house as she sniffed the contents of the heavy casserole dish on the kitchen table. How Helen Fairbanks had managed to hoist all that cast iron and lamb hotpot up to the house and leave it on the porch deck without putting her back out was an enigma, but Mrs Fairbanks was one of those practical can-do women, cut from the same old-school cloth as Blythe and Susannah Finn. ‘Jem?’ Alex yelled again. Jem had regressed back to her early teens since they’d got back to the house. She’d been upstairs on the other side of a closed bedroom door while Alex had skulked around the kitchen in quiet contemplation. Someone had to keep the new puppy from chewing or piddling on anything else and Jem still seemed immune to all things cute and cuddly. Alex meandered back out from the hall. Their parents’ kitchen was still homely and vast as any of the other farmhouse kitchens along the track, it still smelled of the dried lavender Blythe had tied to the beams and the ashes in the Aga, despite the new addition to the household peeing with excitement every time Alex walked into the room.