Picture of Innocence. TJ Stimson
drifted through the silent house, roaming from room to room, randomly picking things up and putting them down as if she’d never seen them before. Nothing seemed familiar. Lucas followed her, but didn’t try to comfort her again.
‘Don’t,’ he repeated, as she reached the foot of the stairs.
She ignored him, heading upstairs to Noah’s nursery. ‘You can turn this room back into your office, if you like,’ she said over her shoulder as he followed her. ‘I know how much you’ve hated having to share the downstairs study with me.’
‘Maddie …’
‘Or we could make this into a spare room. It’s a bit small, but you can fit a single bed in here and a dresser, once we get rid of Noah’s changing table. And the rocking chair,’ she added, her voice suddenly bitter. ‘I want that chair out of the house.’
She yanked open the little blue chest of drawers and grabbed a neat pile of Babygros and threw them on the floor and then opened a second drawer and started emptying that too.
Lucas shut the drawer. ‘Leave this.’
‘You can take the stair-gate down, now. Noah’s never going to need it, and it makes getting up and down the stairs so awkward when your arms are full of clean washing.’
‘You’re in shock, Maddie. Please, come back downstairs.’
‘The world doesn’t just stop because Noah died. Things still need to get done. Someone has to sort them out.’
She wrenched the drawers open again and emptied their contents onto the floor. She didn’t know if it was shock, like Lucas said, or the medication they’d given her, but she was completely, blessedly, numb. She had to get rid of Noah’s clothes and toys, she had to erase every sign he’d ever existed, now, while she still could. She didn’t know if she would survive the pain of walking into Noah’s nursery, of seeing all his things still here, once that numbness wore off.
She crouched down and began to pull sheets and blankets and towels off the shelf beneath Noah’s changing table, until Lucas knelt beside her and put his hands on hers.
‘Maddie, please. You have to stop.’
Maddie stilled. ‘I’m afraid to stop,’ she whispered.
‘I know.’
‘If I stop, I might have time to think.’
‘I know,’ he said again.
‘How can he be gone, Lucas?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘How can this have happened?’
‘I thought we were safe now,’ Lucas said thickly. ‘I thought, we’ve had our share of grief and tragedy. That’s it now. I lost both my parents; you lost Benjamin. I thought at least that meant we were owed some good luck. At least it meant the children would be safe.’
She had no room for pity. She knew that when the drugs wore off, the pain would return. It was actual, physical, as if her chest had been sliced open and her heart smashed into a thousand pieces. Heartbroken was no longer a metaphor but a description.
‘How do we survive this?’ she whispered. ‘How do we even get up tomorrow morning?’
‘We get up tomorrow because we don’t have a choice. Emily and Jacob need us.’
She extricated herself from his arms and stood up stiffly. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how to tell their children that their brother had died. She rested her hands on the rail of Noah’s cot, staring at the mattress as if she could still see him there. ‘I was the one looking after him. I was the one who let him down. You weren’t even here.’
‘I should have been!’ Lucas shouted suddenly. ‘I should have been here!’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘How do you know?’
She looked at him. ‘Are you saying there’s something you could have done, that I didn’t?’
His shoulders sagged, the fight suddenly leaving him. ‘No,’ he said wretchedly. ‘No, of course not.’
‘We can’t keep doing this, Lucas. It’s going to tear us apart.’
Even as she said the words, she wondered if it was already too late. You were born alone and you died alone. And now she realised you grieved alone, too.
Maddie opened her eyes, and for a few merciful moments, as she hovered between sleep and wakefulness, she’d forgotten. And then remembrance slammed into her like a freight train.
She hadn’t known how savagely physical grief was. Losing Benjamin had been bad, but it was nothing compared to this. Her body felt brutalised. She curled herself into a tight ball, hugging her knees to her chest, and pressed her pillow over her ears as if she could use it to block out her thoughts. If she could just get back to sleep, maybe she’d wake up again in her own life, instead of a nightmare that belonged to somebody else.
Her breasts were burning. It was time for Noah’s feed. Except Noah was dead.
She threw back the covers and ran into the bathroom, retching violently into the lavatory bowl. She hadn’t eaten in thirty-six hours; she was bringing up nothing but bile. She couldn’t block the image in her head of Noah lying cold and white and still in that hideous plastic crib. Try as she might, she couldn’t summon an image of her son alive.
She rocked back on her bare heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The phone was ringing, but she ignored it. She couldn’t imagine going to answer it. She couldn’t imagine leaving this bathroom at all.
The ringing stopped. She heard the muffled sound of Lucas’s voice as he spoke to someone, and moments later, he appeared in the bathroom doorway. He’d pulled on a pair of jeans and a cotton sweater, but he looked haggard and unkempt and at least twenty years older than yesterday. She’d never seen him unshaven, she thought irrelevantly. She hadn’t realised he was going so grey.
‘That was the hospital on the phone,’ he said.
She looked at him blankly.
He rubbed his hand over his stubble. ‘They said if we want to take Emily and Jacob in, we need to go today.’
‘What for?’
‘To see Noah,’ Lucas said bleakly. ‘We talked about this yesterday, Maddie. The children need to see him, so they can say goodbye. It’ll help them understand what’s happened and that he isn’t coming back.’
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