‘But Charlotte, you can’t drive,’ I say quietly. Jack turns to me, his eyes golden, their colour accentuated by the force of his realisation.
‘She always says she can’t drive but that’s not true, is it, Mum?’ His gaze shifts from me to Charlotte and it’s like a flame that was burning, hovering over my skin has at last been snuffed out.
‘It’s not that you can’t drive, it’s that you don’t. Dad always drove you everywhere. Then you had that accident after he died. I was in the car, it scared you shitless and you never drove again. Until that night.’
My veins grip under my skin, as if they’ve been pulled taut, like puppet strings. Charlotte starts shaking her head, as though Jack’s words can’t settle so long as she keeps moving. Jack doesn’t take his eyes off Charlotte as at last her head slowly stills. Her eyes are glazed, as though a transparent film has developed over her irises and she’s watching back the scenes from that night.
‘She was going to see him. She was doing to you, Jack, what Mike did to me and I couldn’t … I couldn’t let her. Not after everything we’ve been though, Jack, not after all this time. I was going to walk home, but it was icy, dangerous in my heels. So I went back to the cottage. That’s when I realised she’d gone. She’d left you. So I drove after her. I wanted to stop her, that’s all, to make her change her mind; but she started running when she saw the car. She must have thought I was you, Jack. She was running away from you. She had a bag with her, just like Mike. It was like she was throwing everything back at us, all the love and care we’d shown her. Mike wanted to run away too. I told him not to try and leave, that I wouldn’t let him. It was easy to swap the heart tablets in his medicine bottles for aspirin. They were almost identical, little white pills. I thought if he had a scare, he’d know how much he needed me. How much he needed us. I wanted to scare Cassie too, so she’d know how much she needed you, Jack … I thought they’d both come home.’
I want to run away suddenly, but the very air seems to have weight, stopping me from moving. I want to force the world back to a place where I admire the way Charlotte loves, a world where Frank is getting better.
Jack’s body is rigid, trying to absorb the shock of the demolition as his whole life crumbles to ruin with each one of his mother’s words.
But we’re not finished, not yet. There’s still more I have to know.
‘Frank was getting better, Charlotte,’ I say, my own voice foreign in this new world.
Charlotte doesn’t take her eyes off Jack. I feel the walls start to move in out, in out, as if the hospital itself is breathing as she says, ‘I only turned his machine down a little. I thought he’d pass out … forget what he heard. That’s all. He thought it was Jack.’ She pauses before she says to Jack, ‘I had to protect you. You’ll understand when you’re a parent yourself.’ She looks at me, and her face twists. ‘They didn’t tell us he was getting better. It’s their fault. They should have told us he could hear.’
The walls keep pulsing, faster now, in time with the beating in my chest. I’m too winded to say anything.
Jack shakes his head at the woman he has trusted, unquestioningly, all his life. ‘Don’t say “us”,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m nothing like you.’
Charlotte moves towards him again, but he takes another step back, away from her.
‘Please, Jack, don’t be like that.’
In my peripheral vision, the breathing walls seem to tremble; like the whole hospital, everything I know is going to disintegrate and we’re all going to turn to dust with it. Jack feels it too. I watch as his composure dissolves. He sways on his feet. He falls to his knees. I see the life behind his eyes splintered as a dropped mirror. He frowns at his mother, as though his vision is distorted and he can’t see her any more. Charlotte drops to her knees opposite him; she’s saying his name, shaking his shoulders, begging him, over and over: ‘Jack, oh Jack, please, Jack.’
And as I turn away from them, the musical soprano of an ambulance siren shrills the air, on their way to another tragedy, away from here, and even though the violent noise hurts my ears, I’m grateful to it for drowning out Jack’s screams.
26
Cassie
She doesn’t remember walking out here, so far out on the rocks; the sea waters slosh, guttural and thick fifty feet below, as the waves wash in and out. Come to think of it, she can’t even remember how she came here at all, but then she looks up, and how she got here doesn’t matter any more because the sunset is so gorgeous, the sky full of pink and orange as if it’s flushed with embarrassment at its own beauty.
Her feet have gotten used to the pitted, sharp volcanic rock and she keeps clambering to the end of the crop, where she can see her mum, waiting for her. Her mum’s wearing a bright-blue swimsuit, facing out to sea, her hands on her hips, her hair thick and her cheeks full, flushed with life. She’s well again. A crab scuttles scared across her path, making Cassie yelp. The noise makes her mum turn around, and Cassie sees her whole face is glowing, laughing in joy like she used to.
‘Come on, Cas!’ she calls to her daughter. ‘Look, it’s the most amazing sunset!’
Cassie’s close to her now. In just a couple of seconds she’ll reach out and touch her, she thinks, but then, without a sound, her mum leaps off the edge of the cliff and a moment later there’s a splash as the sea swallows her mum whole. Cassie’s at the edge now, where her mum just stood, and she calls, ‘Mum?’, but there’s just a wedding dress of white foamy water where her mum jumped. Panic grips Cassie before her mum’s head pops out right in the middle, a watery bride. She whoops and laughs and twists in the water, agile as a dolphin.
‘The water’s perfect,’ she calls up to her daughter. ‘Jump in! It’s even more amazing from here!’ Cassie knows her mum sees her hesitate, and she calls again, ‘Come on, Cas! It’s totally safe.’
Her toes shuffle shyly to the edge of the rock. She looks up again; the calm sea stretches weird as mercury all the way to the horizon where it meets the sky in a blaze of colour. She can almost see the curvature of the world; she imagines it rolling on and on, an occasional cloud puffing across the view like forgotten pieces of blowsy cotton. The water is dark as an oil slick, but the waves seem calmer suddenly; she hears it gulping on the rocks below, like something thick and delicious mixing in a huge bowl. Her mum’s on her back now, swimming like a happy otter. She’s humming, her eyes shut. Cassie wants to hold her hand, swim next to her, but she’s frightened of the fall and, looking around, she can see no way of getting out once she’s in. Typical of her mum not to think about anything practical.
The man startles her so much she almost leaps off the edge in surprise.