Authors: A. L. Bird
The Good Mother (21 page)
Suze
He leads me from Cara’s room, along the corridor. I feel like an invalid walking outside for the first time. Or Bambi when he’s taking his first steps. Before he loses his mother. Oh if only it were that way round. But at least there’s a comforting familiarity about the territory now that I understand where I am. This corridor that I was frogmarched along to the bathroom so many times when I was ‘kidnapped’ felt so alien. And the only attraction of it was the hope that I might find Cara in it. There is no hope left here now. Just blank gaps where now-remembered family photos used to be.
Thank you, mind, for the brief respite.
Thank you, Paul, for sheltering me? I don’t know. Do you thank a husband who keeps you a prisoner in your own home? Do you heap him with gratitude for putting you in fear for your life? For threatening visitors’ lives – Craig, and Marge?
For keeping your daughter’s death from you?
It’s not the sort of thank you message that Hallmark cards were designed for. Or for which I’d bake a cake.
After the blank corridor, the living room. Yes, there has been life in here. The sofa, the fireplace, the curtains, all familiar. But there’s a lack. It’s on the photo frame on the mantelpiece. Paul, Cara and I. When Cara was younger. When we were all happy. When we were all, importantly, alive.
Paul sits me down on the sofa.
‘Are you sure you’re ready for this, Suze?’ he asks.
I look at him. I can see love there. Nervousness. The moistness of the eyes, the wringing of the hands. I must reassure him if he is to give me what I need. I keep my eyes in his and nod repeatedly.
‘I’m ready,’ I tell him.
He seems unsure, so I go further. I put out one of my hands and squeeze one of his.
‘And Paul?’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
His shoulders slump in relief. He squeezes my hand back. The moisture in his eyes escapes down his cheeks. Words don’t seem possible for him immediately. He swallows a lot and bites his lower lip. Then he rediscovers his tongue.
‘It’s all because I love you, Suze. It’s been tough, you know, lying to everyone.’
Sure, it’s been tough for him. Me, I’ve had a walk in the park.
He continues. ‘I was just so determined to keep you here. With me. For your benefit, of course,’ he adds, hurriedly. ‘After Cara … I just couldn’t lose you too.’
‘I know,’ I tell him. Although I’m not sure I do. The bathroom approach, for instance? Why? We never went to the toilet in front of each other before; we’re not that sort of couple. Did he need such emotional brutality?
‘You understand, then?’ he asks me.
I pause. Do I say ‘yes’ so we can get on to what is actually interesting to me? On to the thing that is making my heartache. To my beautiful, beautiful Cara. Or do I call him on the cruelty? The complete falling into the role of the kidnapper?
He seems to grasp the meaning of my silence. ‘It was all for love, Suze. I know some of my methods were a little – I don’t know, tough love. But I couldn’t risk breaking your phantasy. You weren’t ready. I hadn’t fed you the medication for long enough; it would have damaged you and you wouldn’t have believed me. I only risked a new, increased dose that time in your coffee, when I thought you could handle a bit of drowsiness if it brought you back. And I never actually hurt you, did I? I kept you clean, and safe, and fed, didn’t I?’
He looks so desperate for my approval that I know we won’t be able to move on unless I give it. And there is a sense in what he is saying. He didn’t drug toast and water; he drugged cupcakes and coffee. I had fresh fluffy towels. I wasn’t left to kill myself with mirror shards or strangle myself with a shower cord. Acts of love then, not brutality?
I nod and smile, because that’s what’s needed. ‘You did. Of course you did.’
‘And work, I ignored so many calls, I must be blacklisted by now. Didn’t dare take on jobs, leaving you alone here. Plus our families, I had to lie to them about everything. Said you needed some alone time, went away, to Spain. For some sun. They bought it, at first. But you’ve no idea how hard it was. Some of them didn’t believe me. My bloody sister came nosing around – trust Marge to play detective. Craig, too. He didn’t believe me. And he kept threatening me, threatening to tell the police, threatening to take you from me, wanted money for his silence, kept threatening to reveal—’ he stops himself, then continues ‘—things.’
‘What sort of things?’
He pauses. ‘Let’s get on with it, shall we? I’ve got some clippings about … it.’
I nod. I try to smile. To show my pleasure at being about to come face to face with my daughter’s death.
He pulls a box-file from under the coffee table. A slight pause before he flicks open the lid.
And there we have it. The big black newspaper headline: ‘Girl killed in car smash’. Girl. Girl! My Cara. My own beautiful Cara. I’m not sure I can do this. I’m not sure I can see in black and white this news, that isn’t news at all. But Paul takes another newspaper out. Beneath it there are more. ‘We’ve lost our angel, says car death mum’. Did I say that? I don’t remember. It doesn’t seem enough. I can’t imagine having a long enough break between tears to say something like that. ‘I feel responsible, says car crash dad’.
I look up at Paul. Is that why I hated him when I thought he was the Captor? Why there’s something in my gut that still tells me to despise him? Because he was somehow to blame? He meets my gaze.
‘I was driving,’ he says. ‘You were busy with … your cupcakes.’
It’s like a kick in the stomach. Guilt-flavoured fondant. How could I have prioritised work over my daughter? What is the importance of teaching some banker’s wife how to frost when your daughter needs ferrying? My fault, then, not Paul’s? Not a blameless crash, but a mother’s failure?
I try not to dissolve. I guess there are tears on my cheeks but when are there not, now?
I continue.
The article tells me Paul was collecting Cara from school.
School? But I thought she was …
Oh, right. That was the Cara my mind invented for me, who I have to grieve too. The one whose letters I wrote to myself. Real Cara was being studious not hanging out with boys she’d met online.
And why wasn’t I there, picking her up? I should have been, shouldn’t I? That’s what I did. Why was Paul doing it? I shake my head. I don’t remember. As Paul says, I must have been busy with my cupcakes.
The blue Honda Civic crashed into a wall to avoid a head-on collision with another vehicle. Police are appealing for witnesses. The girl was taken to hospital in a critical condition. She never woke up.
I shut my eyes. Memories flood back. Yes, a bedside. Tubes, drips, bandages. Sitting, holding Cara’s hand. Praying for her to wake up. Please let my daughter be safe. Please let my daughter be safe. What do you mean? No. No. That’s just not possible, it’s not possible, you don’t understand—
‘You spent a week at the hospital,’ Paul tells me. ‘I don’t think you slept once. They wouldn’t let us both stay, so I went home at nights. I’d come back in the morning and you’d be raw with nervous exhaustion, hyper with hope if you’d seen her eyes flicker under her eyelids. I tried to get you to leave, but you wouldn’t.’
Of course I wouldn’t leave. How would I leave my daughter? How could I hold back doing anything that would keep her safe, keep her alive?
‘When the doctors finally confirmed that … she wasn’t coming back,’ Paul continues with his useless euphemism. Dead. Dead dead dead. ‘You just—you wouldn’t accept it at all. I guess the trauma, the lack of sleep, the grief, it just flipped you over the edge. Back to the old bad places.’
Of course. Bad brain. Bad mental networks. Bad failed resilience. History of poor mental health, susceptible to psychosis and depression. Not safe to be alone. I can hear what the doctors would have said.
‘So I looked after you,’ says Paul.
‘There was a funeral, though?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘I took you, but I’m not sure you were … there.’
I nod as well.
‘There’s a grave, then?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Over beyond the woods. It’s a nice walk.’ His voice is dull, flat. That explains his visits out, coming back smelling of mould. Woodland flavours released by rain.
An image of Cara’s name engraved in marble appears in my mind. I shake my head to clear it. No. I can’t do that. I can’t go there. Not yet. It’s one thing to accept reality. It’s another to see it carved on a headstone.
I continue reading the article. The reporters say we are grieving. That Paul wasn’t to blame. That Cara had great potential. Nothing surprising.
But wait. There is a surprise. Or rather an error. Because the paper says she was eight years old. So does the other one. And the other one. But my Cara was fifteen.
‘I don’t know who briefed them,’ I say to Paul. ‘But they’ve got her age wrong.’
He looks at me. There’s sorrow in his eyes. When he speaks, his voice is quiet.
‘No, Suze. They haven’t. She was eight when she died.’
Suze
I feel my brain slide. I’m emitting some sort of noise. ‘Wuuh uhhh,’ I can hear myself say, but it’s all I can do. I feel faint. I need to lie down. Now. Or everything will vanish, my mind will collapse.
‘Suze? Suze!’ Paul is saying. ‘What’s wrong?’
I pitch sideways so that my upper half is flat on the sofa. I bring my legs up and I curl as tight as I can into a little ball. If I could get back into the womb I would. Or Cara back into my womb.
Because this is …
It’s …
Hideous.
I could just about accept that I wrote letters to myself from Cara. Some comfort, some escape to a parallel reality, where there was some explanation for our separation other than her death, that I could somehow keep her with me.
But to have written them from a fifteen-year-old Cara, when she was only eight?
Ohhh … I just …
How do you even … ?
But no, Paul is wrong. He must be wrong.
‘Her date of birth,’ I tell him. ‘Her date of birth was 10 August 1999. You don’t forget your daughter’s birthday!’
He is shaking his head.
‘I’ll prove it!’ I shout at him. ‘We’ve got her birth certificate. I’ll find it, I’ll show you, you’ll see!’
I’m on my feet now, about to head off down the corridor. Idiot Paul. What trick is he trying to pull?
But then he speaks again.
‘Suze, that wasn’t Cara’s birthday. That was Belle’s … not-birth day.’
Belle.
Belle.
Belle.
Oh my God.
I feel my hand at my mouth, holding back the retching.
This is Belle.
This is about Belle.
Beautiful, tiny Belle. Belle who didn’t make it past seven months inside me, but who came out anyway.
Little blue Belle. Stillbirth – the phrase that so horribly and yet so inadequately sums up the experience.
Fifteen years ago, my first little girl, dead before she’d even taken her first breath.
Please, just let me be with my daughter. Let me hold her close. So close I can almost hear her breathe. Almost, but not quite.
I still hoped I could love her to life. If I just held her enough. If they just let me hug her one more time, I could succeed where all the oxygen masks had failed.
Shh, little baby, don’t you die, Mummy’s going to sing you a lullaby.
But I couldn’t.
So, me, back then. Broken, shocked, grieving. Rampantly grieving. Grieving more than Craig with his facile little brain could understand. So one-dimensional – a security guard, made good, but not as good as I originally thought. Working for a ‘security enforcement company’. Everything black and white in his thuggish brutal mind. Couldn’t understand why I wanted to cradle her, take her home, why I was so upset when they rushed her away for analysis –
my baby, my baby, what have you done with my baby?
– couldn’t understand why I could hear my baby crying when she ‘wasn’t there’. But she was there for me. Some nights I could have reached out and touched the source of those cries, they seemed so real. Why did I have to give up the idea of her so quickly? Why was I supposed to focus on the positives, look to the future, have a nice shower, plan for another baby? Why did I have to be in an institution designed to suppress, repress, cancel out her life and my own natural inclinations? Because I was ill. Of course. Ill. Not unhappy. Not distressed. Not pushed beyond my level of endurance. Ill. A risk to myself. Maybe even others. So they decided, with Craig. So I was ‘treated’.
And now … this … They must have been right, then, mustn’t they?
Craig must have been right.
Because what I have done is, I have done it again. Except more so. I’ve made Belle and Cara real together.
And neither of them is real.
And this creation was never real.
It means I’ve really lost her then, haven’t I?
Cara.
Because if that’s what I’ve made her, this Cara of Belle’s age, then I don’t remember Cara. The real her. I don’t have her most recent actual self in my mind at all. I might as well have invented her ever having existed.
All that I held dear as I was writing those letters, it was all a fiction? All about the boys, the shopping trips, the mother–daughter intimacy – all of it was untrue? I was reliving memories that weren’t real?
‘She’s gone,’ I manage. ‘She’s completely gone.’
And how mad am I? Did she die seven years ago? Have I made up the difference, counting her lost years? I snatch at the newspaper. It’s this year’s date. At least I think it is. Have I been here, in this false mental state for so long that I don’t even know what year it is, how old I am?
‘Paul, did she die this year?’
He nods.
So. I’ve just made up this life. Oh, poor horrible sad brain – to prolong Cara’s life in that way. To give her the chances she missed. The boys she would have kissed. And to resuscitate Belle at the same time, the way she couldn’t, I remember, oh God, how painfully I remember, she couldn’t be resuscitated at the time of her non-birth. Brain, your motives were pure. Paul, your motives were pure. But I’m sick. I’m ill. I need treating. Call an ambulance!