Postscript (P.S. I Love You #2)(28)

‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ Gabriel murmurs in my ear in the hospital, comforting warm whispers over and over again, in my ear, on my lips, showering my face, my body, with butterfly kisses, as I fall into the deepest of exhausted sleeps into the same dream that has been in replay mode.

I’m lying on the hard concrete, around me is shattered glass, a battered car, a twisted and mangled bicycle. I somehow manage to stand up and the glass crunches beneath my feet. I find a single trainer. The road is filled with empty cars. Where has everyone gone? I circle car after car with a single shoe in my hand, trying to find its matching pair. Over and over again I find the same single shoe. I’m exhausted; I’ve been doing this for hours. I search again, going round and round the cars, one after another; it is dizzying, the trainers I find are identical, always for the same foot. But I cannot match a single pair of shoes.

I wake up sweating and panting, heart pounding, confused by my surroundings. Mum is beside me and starts talking to me, calmly, softly, but my mind is still half-trapped in my recent nightmare. I look around, trying to orientate myself. I’m home. It’s my childhood home, where I grew up. I’m in my old bedroom, where I cried, and dreamed, plotted, planned and most of all waited, waited for school weeks to go by, for summers to begin, for boys to call me, for my life to begin. Mum and Dad had insisted I stay with them for a few nights after I was released from hospital.

‘Are you OK?’ Mum asks.

‘I thought I was dead.’

‘You’re safe, sweetheart,’ she says softly, gently brushing my hair back from my forehead, then her lips graze my skin.

‘For a moment, when the driver came over to me, and was asking me over and over again if I was OK, I kept my eyes closed, like I was pretending to be dead,’ I explain.

‘Oh love.’ She wraps her arms around me and I rest my head on her chest. There is only one way that I can lie in bed, with a cast on my broken ankle.

‘Possum,’ Dad says, out of nowhere.

I look up and see him standing at the door, with bedhead tousled hair that I haven’t seen for so very long. He’s wiping his glasses on the ends of his vest, before placing them over his sleepy eyes that get larger as soon as they’re behind the lenses. He steps into the room and sits at the end of the bed. My parents, back at the same scene where they settled my childhood nightmares. There is something comforting about this, that no matter how much the world changes, no matter how much our relationships with others alter, they still are who they are to me and always will be.

‘Playing possum, or apparent death, is a behaviour in which animals take on the appearance of being dead,’ Dad goes on. ‘It’s a form of animal deception also known as tonic immobility, whereby animals become apparently temporarily paralysed and unresponsive. It occurs during an extreme threat such as being captured by a predator. The same thing can occur in humans undergoing intense trauma, whereby they freeze in response to life-threatening situations. I watched a documentary about it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Frank,’ Mum says, annoyed by his response.

‘What? It’s perfectly natural, is all I’m saying,’ he says.

‘Well then why don’t you just say that? I don’t think she needs to be listening to a lecture on possums at a time like this.’

‘All right, all right,’ he says, hands up in defence.

I smile, then laugh, laying back on the pillow as I listen to them bicker.

But Dad might be on to something.

Even though I want to go straight back to work, Ciara gives me the week off. I’m a little woozy from the painkillers and as Gabriel has to work, Mum and Dad insist I stay on with them until the pain in my leg has lessened, I get to grips with my crutches, and my fear has subsided. I lie in bed some days, daydreaming, watching daytime TV. Other days I move to the couch to do the same. I spend time with my family: a painting session with my mum, watching nature and history documentaries with my dad, who narrates the entire thing, listening to Declan’s new documentary ideas with time to guide and listen and advise, overseeing planting in Mum and Dad’s garden with Richard, interrogating my nieces and nephews about their lives, playing Snap with Jack, being comforted by Gabriel.

I seek solace, I seek solitude, I seek company, I search for me. I long to go for a cycle and realise how much I had used movement and doing as a way to not think. I was the friend I avoided because I didn’t like the topic of conversation; too close to the bone. It may have been necessary for a spell, to get myself out of my head, but for now I have to get inside my head, make myself comfortable. There are thoughts to be processed, actions to analyse and decisions to be made. For once, I can’t run from me.

I descend the stairs on my bum on a Thursday morning, which since Dad has retired feels very much like a weekend in my parents’ home. I reach for my crutches at the bottom of the staircase, and swing my way into the kitchen. They’re both sitting at the kitchen table. Mum is wiping her teary eyes, but she’s smiling, and Dad’s face is a picture of emotion.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Mum puts on her reassuring voice and pulls out a chair. ‘Come sit with us. Your dad found something.’

I sit with them and notice an open shoebox on the table. Piles of folded pieces of paper fill each one.

‘What are these?’