The Wolf Border(86)

I feel terrible. I had no idea – none.

He puts his hand on her shoulder.

Come on. It’s not something you tell your folks. He will have worked very hard keeping it quiet. I know people who’ve gone decades before it came out.

Really?

Really.

She nods, but there’s little consolation in his assurances or such tales. That anyone could wall themselves away from loved ones and be privately, hellishly bound is tragic. She picks Charlie up from the play mat on the floor.

Do you want me to go to the hospital with you? Alexander asks. I can cancel clinic tonight.

No, no, you’ve already given up enough time.

What about Charlie?

I’ll have to take him along. It’ll be alright.

Lawrence comes downstairs, gingerly, his jeans unzipped and gaping, revealing a bulky patch of white gauze. His T-shirt hangs off him. Now that she knows, it seems abundantly obvious. The look of him; echoes over the past year. Charlie makes a sound of recognition. Lawrence glances at his nephew, his eyes watery and blown, and tries to smile, but is clearly struggling. Rachel gets a blanket from the back of the sofa, puts it over his shoulders. He walks barefoot to the car, refusing his boots, and she and Alexander install him in the passenger seat. She finds a couple of old plastic bags in the kitchen and hands them to him. Alexander waits by the car while she gets Charlie’s bag and secures him in the back. She promises to call later.

Go straight to Lancaster if you can, he says quietly across the roof of the car. They’ll just transfer you anyway at Kendal. He might need the ICU.

Thank you, she mouths.

On the drive Lawrence is sick in one of the bags. He apologises and opens the window. He keeps his eyes closed most of the way, lets the cold air blast against his face. Charlie bawls until she hands him a dummy, and then settles and is soon asleep.

The wait in A&E is relatively short – her brother is quickly assessed and taken through. She sits with Charlie in the kids’ toy corner while the examination is conducted. Lawrence is transferred to plastics. She moves to a different part of the hospital and sits in another waiting room. She reads to Charlie. He is getting bored and hungry and unruly. An hour later a junior doctor tells her they are keeping her brother overnight. The procedure will be done the following morning. There is no emergency; his leg is not at risk. She asks to visit him on the ward, but the baby is not allowed. Instead, she sends a message via the house officer. She’ll be back, first thing in the morning. She’ll call him later.

Give him my love, she says.

Leaving the hospital feels like a betrayal, as if she has abandoned him, but there’s nothing more she can do.

Lawrence is discharged and brought back to the cottage. The abscess has been drained and he is given the all-clear. A referral is made to a specialist treatment centre in Workington, where he will meet for counselling, but he has chosen not to sign up for replacement therapy. He will not use methadone as a crutch, he says, he knows it doesn’t work. On the drive back to Annerdale he looks shocked and tender, like someone who has passed through a wall of fire. They decide that he will stay on with Rachel for a few weeks, maybe longer. There are too many triggers in Leeds, too much history. Recuperation and isolation in the countryside is the subtext – the cottage will be a sanatorium. He keeps apologising; she keeps telling him everything is OK. She doesn’t push him on the details of his addiction, but over the next few days he will begin to tell her. Fifteen years on and off, which seems extraordinary. There have been whole periods when he was clean, he says – during law school, when he first met Emily, IVF. Despite the infection and its scarring he is relatively healthy – middle-class living has prevented the worst version of it. At night he sleeps poorly, she can hear his nightmares, then insomnia that has him walking the house.

In the coming weeks, there will be moments of temper, moods, and the ironclad choreography of well-being that will come to replace the habit itself, but this first morning back from hospital, he makes her a promise.

I don’t want it in my life any more, Rachel. I won’t do it, I swear. I know you’ll be worried about me being around Charlie –

It’s going to be fine, she says for the hundredth time.

She does trust him, or wants to. She must trust him if they are to make it work, and, though she cannot say when he might have been using in the past and whether Charlie was exposed, she never thought of him as a danger to the baby; and he never was. After he has eaten some toast, she brings Charlie into the room, bathed and dressed in clean clothes, pure-looking. Lawrence takes his nephew’s hand.

Hello, Bup, he says. You’re a sight for sore eyes.

She passes the baby into his arms.

Here. I could do with a bath.

Really?

I won’t be long. You know where everything is.

She leaves them. It is hard, but her brother has held the baby a hundred times. In the bath she thinks about all the occasions she let Lawrence down as a kid; she knew she was letting him down, even though there were no real solutions to offer. All he wanted was her kindness, her company, assurances that things would be OK. She did not give enough. Half an hour later, she finds them in the living room. Charlie is sitting like a juvenile king in the middle of the rug, lobbing the toy lion away, while Lawrence fetches it back obediently. We can do this, she thinks, the three of us.

He arranges personal leave from work. Emily, to Rachel’s surprise, agrees to send some of his things north, though for the last few weeks he has been staying with Sara and a lot of his possessions have been abandoned there.