‘Well, you go and do what you have to do in your favourite place in the world, sister,’ she tells me. ‘I will always be right behind you and I’ll still be here if it all goes tits up. Now, let’s go upstairs and I’ll help you pack for your trip down memory lane you absolute …’
I don’t wait around for her to finish her sentence. I am already on my way up the stairs.
I agree to meet Dan at my favourite coffee shop, just around the corner from our family home, and when I see him walk past the window my stomach gives a leap. My hands are shaking as I lift my cup, and I take a small sip just to give myself something to do. I don’t want a coffee and I certainly don’t want to be telling Dan what I am going to have to eventually.
‘I got you an americano,’ I say to him when he sits down opposite me. He is ashen with worry and his blue eyes look exhausted. This is exactly why I needed to give him some space from all my sickness and darkness. He hasn’t been coping and when he can’t cope, it makes all my problems multiply.
‘You always know what’s best for me,’ he says. And I know I do. It’s exactly why I had to ask him to leave,.
‘You look tired,’ I say to him, my maternal instinct and concern kicking in as usual. ‘Have you been sleeping and eating okay?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘I’ve been in better places,’ he says. ‘My sister’s spare room is very comfortable but it’s not home. Please tell me you brought me here to say you’ve changed your mind.’
I can’t change my mind though. I need to stay strong and protect him from any more pain. If I create distance now, it might help in the long run when he has to deal with things after I go.
‘I’m taking Rosie away for a few days,’ I tell him, and his face falls.
‘A holiday?’ he asks and I hear the words in his head that follow – without me?
‘Well, kind of,’ I reply. He reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine, his coffee sits untouched. ‘Quality time, just the two of us. I think it will be good for her and for me, to just get away from here for a short while.’
He looks out the window and puts his hand to his face, then breathes out in an obvious release of heartache and pain.
‘That will be good for you both, yes,’ he says to me, still looking away. ‘It’s your birthday today after all so you deserve to treat yourself.’
I stare at my coffee cup, unable to watch as his world comes crashing down. We both know why it has to be this way. His drinking lately has just been too hard to handle. It has been like having another child tugging and pulling at me, tearing me apart when I need him to be strong and deal with what’s happening. Tough love, you might call it and believe me, it’s tough on me too because I want nothing more than to wrap my arms around him and tell him to come home.
‘This time out will be good for you too, Dan,’ I whisper and at last our eyes meet. ‘Make it work for you, make it work for us.’
‘How can I do that? I’ll do whatever it takes if you just tell me, Juliette.’ He looks so desperate.
‘I need you, Dan, just not like this and you know it,’ I say to him firmly. ‘I need the man I married and the man I love and I want to be by your side till death us do part, just like we promised when we took our vows. But we can’t do that while you’re the way you have been, I want you to be the man I know you can be again. I need you to put down the bottle and be there for me and Rosie, Dan. And I need you to do that now, more than ever.’
He breathes out again, then his face brightens up and my heart lights up
‘I am going to do this, Juliette. I am going to be the man I want to be for you, I promise you and Rosie,’ he says to me and I close my eyes and inhale his words. ‘I am going to be with you the way you need me to be.’
I want to pull him close and hold him so tight so that our love squeezes all of this pain and illness away, and if only it was as simple as that. This is complicated. We are complicated, but somehow I believe him. I believe that soon I will have my husband back and it’s what I want so, so badly.
Shelley
SATURDAY
My Saturday, the day that would have been Lily’s sixth birthday, starts off just as I’d dreaded it would. I wake up to be faced all over again with another day to stumble through, another day of dodging people and their sympathetic smiles and well-meaning ways, another day of being at work where I will try my best to muster up some enthusiasm for the business I built up for so long with such energy and passion. And on top of that, Matt has gone away for a week but perhaps that’s a good thing.
I have drawn a solid line down my life and it helps me to deal with it all. There was my life when I had Lily and my life after I lost her – the lives of two very different people. No matter how much counselling or therapy I get, I just can’t find that person I was before anymore.
On the outside I look more or less the same as I did before; a bit thinner, a few more lines and wrinkles and more gaunt in the face, but still the same Shelley physically. But inside I am screaming. Inside, I am so different that I don’t recognise myself anymore. I am stone cold inside and if not for Matt, who tries to keep me sane and who sometimes manages to melt just a tiny corner of that ice-cold heart, I wouldn’t believe that I have a heart left at all.
I feel very little emotion these days and it’s a horrible existence. I am nothing more than an empty vessel lost at sea, just bobbing along and never to find any real direction. I am killing time. I sometimes wonder why I am still alive at all.
‘You’re like a boho princess,’ one well-meaning customer told me yesterday as she admired the way I had matched up my long flowing dress with a headscarf, a chunky necklace and a long messy plait. ‘You’re the perfect advertisement for this shop. It’s a real treasure trove. You must be so proud of it.’
And I used to be so proud of my business. If only I could get just a little spark of that energy and passion back that other people still can see in me.
I talk to Lily sometimes and it helps, it makes me smile. I close my eyes and I hear her little voice and I smell her skin and feel her hair on my face and I wonder where she is now. I hope and pray that she has found my own mother to look after her in heaven. I wonder what she would have looked like now, aged six in her blue school uniform. I wonder, would she still be friends with little Teigan from playgroup and would she have loved to read books and dance just like I used to do, and would she love to draw houses and big buildings like her daddy does?
‘Mum, please look after her up there,’ I whisper into the emptiness of my bedroom and a tear falls onto my pillow at the thought of the two of them together in heaven, at peace, happy. I really hope they are.
I need to get up and face the day.
So I do that; I cry as I brush my teeth, I cry as I fix my hair and I cry when I try and do my make-up. Eventually, I give up and lie on the sofa and let my exhausted body heave and shake and howl out noises in this giant, quiet empty house. I want my mother so badly.
‘Why did you have to go too?’ I plead at her photo that sits on the white marble mantelpiece across from me. It’s the only photo I have kept on display in this house. All the pictures of me, Matt and Lily were packed away when I decided I wanted to move away from here and never come back – a decision I never followed through with because Matt managed to change my mind. ‘Why is this house so sterile and cold and why did my baby have to die? I hate you God! Why did you take my baby and my mother so soon? I hate all of this!’
I