Tom couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Instead, he nodded, swallowing back tears as Maggie slipped her hand into his.
“The best thing you can do right now is take your son home,” the doctor suggested gently. “There’s nothing more you can do for Ally now – we have an excellent medical team here, we’ll take care of her.”
Tom nodded again, clearing his throat. Suddenly, all he wanted was to hold his son in his arms.
“Doc – Jack and Callum, do they know about Ally?”
“Yes, they know. I’ve just had this same conversation with both of them.”
Tom’s heart sank. “Can we see them now?”
“Of course,” the doctor said, getting to her feet. “I’ll take you to them myself.”
Jane and Maggie stood with her, clinging to each other.
“Can we see Ally too?” Jane sniffed.
“She’s in the ICU tonight, but yes, you can see her, briefly. Like I said, we’re keeping her sedated until surgery tomorrow. She’ll remain sedated for a day or so post-op, but when she starts to regain consciousness she’ll need you – all of you. So it’s probably best that you try and get some sleep tonight. The next few days might be rough.”
The last thing on Tom’s mind was sleep. This was a parent’s worst nightmare. Something that you couldn’t fix – something that no one could fix.
Maggie snaked her arm around Tom’s waist and he returned the embrace automatically. He glanced over at Jane, tears streaming down her face, and held his other arm out to her. She immediately obliged, burying her face in his chest and sobbing uncontrollably.
He stood with two sobbing women in his arms, feeling utterly useless.
Jack had lain awake most of the night. Tossing and turning, unable to turn off his brain, he had gotten up a little after two. He shuffled into the kitchen in boxers and a t-shirt, bare feet padding against the cold hardwood floor. He stared into the fridge, with food still stacked neatly inside, and wondered if his father’s death had been some kind of dream. It seemed such a normal thing: food in the fridge. How could something so normal belong here?
He sighed, closing the fridge door and pouring himself a drink of water. As he leant back against the kitchen counter, his attention was once again drawn to the note that Father David had left for him on the dining room table. It included details of the funeral arrangements that had been made, and he was grateful – it wasn’t something he thought he was capable of organising himself. What concerned him was the eulogy that the priest had assumed he would deliver.
Delivering a eulogy was an honour, and one he felt he didn’t deserve. Moreover, the thought of standing up in front of his father’s friends, colleagues and neighbours – not to mention Ally and Callum – made his blood run cold.
He took a sip of water, his gaze wandering around the kitchen.
He could see his father sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. He saw him standing inside the back door, taking his boots off and hanging up his coat. He could hear the match strike and smell the cigar smoke as his father relaxed in his armchair after work in the evening. He saw his mother standing at the kitchen counter, her hands white with flour, wearing an apron with tiny blue and green flowers on it.
His father had told him once that he had only kept a few of his mother’s things. He wondered absently if that apron was one of those things. He missed her. He knew his Dad had missed her, too. He seemed to be just a shadow of himself in the years after she died. Jack shivered involuntarily.
At the age of thirty-one, he was an orphan. Worse than that, he was alone. He had felt lonely and adrift over the past few years, but never alone, not with his father on the other end of the phone.
Memories tumbled over one another as he padded through to the living room and sank into the couch. He looked over at his father’s armchair, and he could see him sitting there, TV remote in one hand, cigar in the other. He glanced at the table beside the chair and noticed for the first time the book his father had been reading, a worn leather bookmark poking out from between the pages, reading glasses perched casually on top. It was as if he wasn’t really gone – merely not here at this moment. He could come back at any time and pick up where he had left off.
Jack leaned forward and bent his arms over his knees. The heartache poured out of him, an unforgiving combination of grief and remorse. Callum’s words swam around inside his head until he felt physically ill. Rocking backwards and forwards, he sobbed until his throat was raw and his body numb.