Before I Let You Go(10)
“I can’t go home.” I shake my head. “I need to stay with her.”
“You have to take care of yourself first, Lexie.”
“Well, I’ve tried that too now, and that approach appears to have been the worst failure of all,” I snap again, and I rise and throw my half-empty coffee cup into the trash. It splashes up the sides of the bin and to the wall beside it, as Sam watches in silence. When I turn to him, I’m not embarrassed anymore, I’m only angry. How can he not see how impossible this situation is? She needs me. “But you should go,” I add curtly. “Get some sleep.”
“I’m not going without you. Come on.”
“No.” The word echoes all around us in the otherwise silent cafeteria, and its edges are hard and fierce—it’s jarring. Sam’s gaze doesn’t waver.
“Everything is going to feel better after some sleep, I promise you.”
“But I’m supposed to look after Annie—I promised Dad, and I’ve let her down, and I’ve let him down—and I just can’t fix it if I’m not here.”
“You haven’t let anyone down, Lex. Your sister is sick, and she has made some bad decisions.” He speaks firmly to me again, and I want to crumble and sink into the comfort of the arms he opens toward me, but I can’t. I step away from him, and the backs of my thighs collide with a chair. Sam sighs and exhales then runs his hands through his hair. We stand there in that frustrated silence until I see his expression soften. “If you don’t want to leave, we can go sleep in one of the residents’ bunk rooms. We’ll let the staff know where to find us if anything goes wrong. We could be back in Maternity in two minutes if she needs us.”
It’s a compromise—a good one and a sensible one. I can see Sam would much rather go home, and I don’t blame him—we won’t sleep well here, and we’re both exhausted. Still, there is no way I’m leaving this hospital until I’m sure Annie and the baby are fine, so Sam’s suggestion is the only way either of us are getting any rest tonight.
I nod. Sam steps back toward me and wraps his arms around my shoulders. I move into his embrace and press my face into his neck.
“You’re a good sister, Lexie. She’s lucky to have you.”
“She’s a mess. You should have known her before. She was amazing.”
“Maybe this is rock bottom. Maybe this baby is the chance she needs to be that person again.”
As we walk back toward Maternity, I try to cling to Sam’s words as if they are a lifeline. I want to believe he’s right, but my hope feels fragile—hollow almost, because we’ve hit so many rocky bottoms before, and Annie always manages to find further depths.
4
ANNIE
Luke,
You keep telling me I need to connect with my pain, and I do understand the logic of that—although I’m not even sure yet that I’ll ever let you read that I wrote that down, and I’d rather die than admit it aloud.
I’m going to start from the day after I got the notebook because that’s when it started—the glacial slide from when my life was worth something to the mess I’m in now. I woke up excited that day. I came down the stairs with my notebook in my hands and I was a ball of pure anticipation about the summer break.
Then I saw Mom and Lexie at the kitchen table, and the excitement turned into shock, and the shock turned into dread. They were sitting opposite one another, a pile of crumpled tissues on the table between them. Captain Edwards was at the end of the table. They were all crying.
No one ever told me my dad was dead. They didn’t have to. Their tears told me, and their silence told me; even the slump in my mother’s shoulders told me that life was never going to be the same. Later, I’d piece together fragments—he’d been at a fire, and just when they thought the building was clear, someone thought they heard a cry from inside. It was too hot and too dangerous by that stage and Dad wouldn’t let his team go back in, so he went in himself to do another sweep, and while he was inside the roof collapsed.
I never saw his body, and I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, and so it was a long time before I really believed he was dead. Instead, to me, he was just gone—he had simply left—and I knew that was my fault. Dad had swapped shifts that day so that he could be at the assembly for me. He should never have been at that fire.
It rained the morning of his funeral. Lexie and I had to wait at home with one of Mom’s elderly aunts, but we didn’t know her at all and she terrified us. She wore strange clothes and wouldn’t let us watch TV, so as soon as the drizzle stopped, Lexie and I hid outside away from her. The wake was at our house, so after the service, dozens of people arrived to make their way up the path to the front door.
Lexie and I didn’t talk much. We sat in the echoing shock of our grief, watching strangers as they went inside our house to mourn our father, as if we were the onlookers to their tragedy, rather than the other way around. When the procession finally slowed down, Lexie hugged me, and she told me things were going to be okay—but I was sure she was lying and so I finally started to sob. The guilt and the grief and the shock and the pain were just too much to bear.
When her hugs failed to console me, Lexie did the only naughty thing I can ever remember her doing. She walked the length of the path that ran from the street to our front door, and she made a basket with her skirt, and she picked flowers from the agapanthus that bordered the walkway. There were two straight rows of alternating white and purple plants—and Lexie methodically stripped every single petal, until they were overflowing from her skirt and she was struggling to juggle it all.