After the End(18)

I’m cleaning Dylan’s teeth. He has fourteen of them, and right at the back, at the bottom, I can feel a set of molars pushing their way through the gums. Dylan looks at me, his eyes big and glassy.

“Are your teeth hurting, baby?” I wish he would say something. I wish he’d make a sound—any sound.

“He hadn’t had an attack in ages,” Nikki says. “But when they got to breakfast club Liam suddenly remembered he didn’t have it, and he got quite upset.”

“Poor thing.” I move the soft bristles gently across Dylan’s teeth. He’s been tube-fed for months, but his teeth are still cleaned three times a day to make sure bacteria doesn’t build up that might make him ill. I wonder how long it will be before I’ll be making food for him again; I wonder if he’ll still love banana porridge when he comes home, or if it’ll be something else. Pancakes, maybe, or French toast.

“Connor was late, and—well, I guess he didn’t think it was a big deal . . . like I said, Liam hadn’t had an attack for months.” Nikki’s tone is defensive. “And then . . .”—her voice wobbles—“the school rang to say they’d called an ambulance.”

“You must have been beside yourself.” I finish Dylan’s teeth and put his toothbrush in the drawer, crossing the room to tip out the water I used.

“They’re supposed to have an emergency inhaler, but it hadn’t been replaced. I keep thinking: if only Liam hadn’t had that new rucksack, if only Connor had gone back . . .”

If only. The mantra of the PICU parent. If only we’d gone to the doctor sooner, if only we’d listened, if only we’d thought, if only . . .

“I knew.” I take the clean pyjamas I’ve brought from home, and put them in Dylan’s cupboard for tomorrow. “I knew there was something wrong with Dylan. I just knew.” We went on holiday, the three of us, in May last year. A little apartment in Gran Canaria, where we ate chorizo and goats’ cheese and sticky honey, and swam in a sea so blue it hurt our eyes. Dylan had found the flight hard. The cabin pressure hurt his ears and he cried the whole way there, and even the following day he was out of sorts.

“Look at this place,” I said, waving an arm across the bay. “I thought he’d be racing around, wildly overexcited.” Dylan was in the buggy, dozy and grizzling. Later, I watched him fall over as he explored our apartment. “He falls over a lot, doesn’t he?”

“He’s two.”

“But more than an average two-year-old, don’t you think?”

Max gave me the same look he gave me before Dylan was crawling, when I’d convinced myself he had developmental delays; the same look he gave when I wondered aloud if Dylan might be lactose intolerant, because he’d twice vomited up his bedtime milk.

“OK, OK!” I held up my hands. “So I’m a paranoid mum. Guilty as charged.”

“We found out later that the brain tumour had caused hydrocephalus,” I tell Nikki now. “A buildup of fluid on the brain. It causes headaches, blurred vision, clumsiness. The cabin pressure on takeoff would have been twice as bad for Dylan as for a child without hydrocephalus.” I swallow. If only.

“You couldn’t have known,” Nikki says.

Only I did know. A little bit of me knew. A mother always knows.

We’re silent for a while, lost in our own thoughts, our own if onlys. It was a whole month before I took Dylan to the doctor. If only . . . I scrutinise my son’s face, looking for the child he was, for the child he will become. He looks the same and yet . . . there is a vacancy about his face, a blankness in his eyes that scares me. He lies meekly where he is put, occasionally moving an arm or leg, but mostly remaining still. Staring.

“He’s not a bad man, you know. My Connor.” It comes out of nowhere.

“I’m sure he isn’t,” I say automatically, although I can still hear the venom in his voice as Connor turned on Tom and Alistair, on Dr. Khalili.

“I don’t even think he meant all that stuff he said. He was frightened, and ashamed that he never went back for Liam’s inhaler.” Nikki rests her hands on the edge of Liam’s bed. “He looks after us all really well. They’re not his, the other kids—only Liam is—but you’d never know. He loves them all so much, and he’s much stronger than I am—he’s a coper, you know? Not like me.”

“He was crying,” Max said, when he told me about meeting Connor on the bench. We’d driven home and Max was packing for another work trip. “There he was, this big, angry man, with tears running down his face.” I tried to picture it, then I tried to imagine the situation reversed—Max crying, Connor reaching out to him—and found that I couldn’t see Max that way.

“I know,” I say now to Nikki. If Connor doesn’t want his wife to know he’s struggling, it’s not my place to tell her.

“When’s Dylan’s scan?”

I’m glad of the change of subject. I’m glad to be married to a Max, not a Connor. Relieved my husband focuses on solutions, not problems; on the future, not the past. We couldn’t afford for both of us to crumble. “Sometime this afternoon. Isn’t it, Aaron?”

The nurse nods. “I’ll see if I can pin them down, but you know what it’s like.”