Shallow Breath

17

Rebecca




Rebecca is saddened by how wary Maya is as they sit in the kitchen. This is the same girl who spent hours here as a child, who would concentrate on her colouring at the kitchen table, unaware that her tongue was always testing the side of her mouth; or would tickle baby Caitlin’s tummy as she lay in her rocker, smiling adoringly at her. The girls had been drawn to one another despite the six-year age gap, neither having a sibling to call their own. Rebecca had always loved watching them together. Again, the surge of anger at Desi rises. Do you see what you’ve done? she thinks. Do you see how many lives you crashed into that day, aside from the one you were so keen to ruin?

Theo has taken the little animal into the spare bedroom, which he uses as a makeshift surgery when he’s not at the vet’s. Rebecca would like to see how it’s going, but doesn’t want to leave Maya alone. She pours two glasses of water, pushes one across to Maya and sits down at the table.



‘Tell me what happened,’ she says.

‘A friend of mine found him.’ Maya stares glumly at her fingers. ‘We kept him overnight – I thought I could do better … It’s harder than I imagined …’

‘It’s hard for all of us when we’re starting out,’ Rebecca reassures her. ‘And every case is different. What did you try?’

‘I put him in the esky with blankets and a hot-water bottle. I knew not to give him milk, so I tried to give him black tea – I’d seen Mum do that a couple of times – but I didn’t have the right bottle either …’

She trails off and stares at Rebecca in alarm, as though realising she has mentioned the unmentionable.

Rebecca holds tight to the cool glass, tips the water so it sways from side to side. ‘I’ve heard Desi is home,’ she says. ‘How is she?’

Maya shrugs. ‘I haven’t seen her properly yet.’ She won’t meet Rebecca’s eye.

Rebecca can see how miserable Maya is. She puts her hand on the teenager’s. ‘You haven’t forgiven her?’ she asks softly.

Maya looks down for a moment, then jerks her head up to meet Rebecca’s eyes. ‘Not really. So, how –’

She is interrupted by Theo appearing in the doorway.

‘I’ve put her on a drip,’ he says to them both. ‘She’s pretty weak. We’ll have to see.’

Maya’s face crumples. ‘It’s a she? I should have brought her here straight away,’ she says, her lip trembling. She presses her hands against her eyes, trying not to cry.

Before Rebecca can move, Theo goes across to Maya. ‘Hey,’ he says, patting her shoulder. ‘Chances are she’d be like this anyway. I heard what you told Bec. You’ve only had her a few hours, you did everything you could, and when you saw she was in trouble you brought her straight here. That must have taken some guts, Maya, in the circumstances.’

It’s at moments like these that Rebecca’s heart brims with love for Theo. That she thanks heaven she bucked the trend of marrying a man like her father and chose the exact opposite. She doesn’t know where she would be if she hadn’t had Theo these last few years.

She smiles gratefully at him before he disappears again, then turns to Maya. ‘Look, I’m having trouble forgiving your mum too. But, for what it’s worth, I still can’t credit her with being deliberately malicious. I believed her when she said she didn’t remember what happened.’

She pauses, considering how much to push, but her fervour for information overwhelms her sensibilities towards Maya. ‘Dad and Desi didn’t like one another, but I never imagined it would lead to this. Do you know if anything happened that day, or that week, that might have fuelled the fire in some way?’

Maya shakes her head vigorously. ‘No. I’ve wondered that myself, but I can’t think of anything. In the days before it happened, Mum didn’t seem any different than normal. She could be a bit quiet and distracted at times, but that’s just her. Even when she was like that, she was always kind to people … never violent.’

Rebecca sees Maya struggle with the emotion behind her words, and feels sorry for her. Perhaps she should have got in touch sooner to offer support, but it hadn’t felt appropriate. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that she has known Maya all her life, and that this young girl had been left alone when her mother went to prison.

Rebecca shifts uneasily in her seat. Had she made excuses to avoid getting involved, telling herself that Pete was there, and Jackson? Had she turned away because it had all been too hard?

She tries to think of any crumbs of comfort she might offer now. ‘According to our legal rep, your mum might not have gone to prison if my father hadn’t pursued it so zealously.’

Rick’s rage had been incandescent. He had sought justice vigorously, revelling in the psychiatric evaluation that appeared to imply Desi was lying. The prosecution had made sure the charge was bodily harm using a vehicle, and pushed for prison time. There was an uncomfortable irony in seeing Rick gloating at the sentence.

Rebecca still replayed that afternoon over and over. The way Rick stomped down the drive, and how, at the sight of him, Caitlin, always wary of her grandfather, had quickly put down her DS and sat up. She had been opening the door to get out for him, beginning to swing her legs round, when they had first heard Desi’s vehicle approach. There had only been milliseconds after that before one car met another with a sickening bang.

Rebecca hadn’t realised that Maya had witnessed everything until much later. She can’t imagine what Maya must have felt as she watched it all unfold and realised that her mother was responsible. It is only now, seeing Maya’s pale, thin face, that she is overtaken by compassion. She is about to tell Maya that she should come around more often now, and to apologise for the last few years, when Theo walks slowly into the room, wiping his hands, and sits down at the table. He looks at Maya, and Rebecca’s heart falls.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘We were a little bit too late with this one.’

Rebecca watches Maya turn her gaze down towards her lap, and close her eyes. She reaches out and strokes her arm. ‘It happens. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘We’ve missed you, Maya.’

It was what Rebecca had been going to say next, but the voice is smaller than hers. They all turn to see the girl leaning in the doorway. Caitlin is just out of bed, wearing shorts and a crumpled T-shirt.

Rebecca glances towards Maya, sees her straighten in her seat and bite her tears back. ‘Thanks, Caitlin,’ she says, and does a wonderful job of keeping her eyes on Caitlin’s face. But Rebecca is waiting for it, and notices the momentary flicker downwards to Caitlin’s left leg, a long, ugly scar running the length of it, where the bone had been fixed with a combination of plates, rods and screws.

Rebecca still tries to tell herself that they are lucky. If Caitlin had been any further out of the car, she would have been pinned between the vehicles. She might have lost her legs completely, even her life. The long-term prognosis is reasonably encouraging, but Caitlin will always have trouble dancing. How she misses the daughter who had whirled around the room, and through life, innocent and untroubled. A ten-year-old shouldn’t have to face such pain. When you saw it, close up, day after day, it was hard not to ask bigger, angry questions about karma.

Rebecca watches Maya’s head turning to follow Caitlin across the room as she limps over to the sink to get some water. When Maya catches Rebecca’s eye, she looks away quickly, as though she is the guilty one, not her mother. And now Rebecca finds a true reason that Caitlin is lucky – because she has had the consistency of a mother and father to love her through it all. Caitlin’s scars are on the outside, but she suspects Maya’s hidden ones are giving her just as much grief.