My Life in Shambles(88)

She just nods, pressing her lips together. She looks around the room, trying not to cry.

Oh dear God. Please don’t let her cry. I will lose it. My body is just looking for another excuse to let the tears fall.

“Mom,” I say to her. “It’s okay. I don’t hate you. I love you.” I get up and sit beside her, putting her arm around her. “I love you. You just need to stop being shitty.”

“I blame myself,” she cries out. “I blame myself for what happened to you.”

“It wasn’t your fault. If anything it was mine,” I say, trying to console her. “I’m the one who ran into the road.”

“You were just a child, Valerie. I was watching you and then Angie distracted me and the next thing I knew I heard the squeal of the tires and your scream and … I knew. I knew what happened.” She sniffs into my shoulder. “I saw you lying there on the road and I … I almost died right there. I thought I lost you. It changed me. It changed me inside, as much as it changed you. Sweetheart, I was so afraid after that. So afraid.”

She looks up at me and the pain on her face makes me ache inside. For all the shit my mom says, this is the first time I’ve realized how broken she is inside.

“I pushed you away,” she says, voice cracking. “And I am so sorry. I was just … so afraid that I could lose you again, that I was a bad mom for letting this happen. And your weight … your beauty. I felt so bad that you had to learn to walk, that you were bullied, that you were in pain. I just thought if you were perfect in every other way then you could have the life you were always meant to have.”

A tear rolls down my cheek as I give her a gentle smile. “But mom. I do have the life I’m meant to have. I’m living it right now. And no matter the heartache, no matter the fighting, no matter the ups and downs … it’s beautiful.” I kiss the top of her head. “Just like you. I love you mom. We may not fit flush with each other but it’s close enough.”

“Thank you,” she whispers to me and I hug her some more, letting her cry out all the tears she never let herself cry.

Then, after she was gone, I ate all the cookies.





23





Padraig





I’m woken up by someone slapping me across the face.

I jerk awake, my eyes wide open, my heart pumping, and see Nan standing beside my bed, a rolled-up newspaper in her hand.

“That’s what ye get for being a bloody eejit,” she says, a hand on her hip. “But I think you’re too thick to get it. Perhaps I better get the spoon.”

She disappears and I’m left in bed trying to figure out just what the fuck is going on?

Before I can get my brain working, she comes back, brandishing that large wooden spoon in her hand. The sight of it makes me shudder.

I put my hand out to stop her. “What is wrong with ye? Have you gone mad?”

She comes to the side of the bed, this eerie determination in her eyes and I quickly roll over and get up on the other side, my muscles aching from being atrophied.

“I haven’t gone mad,” she says. “I’m just trying to knock some sense into ye. It at least got ye out of bed, didn’t it?”

“The doctor said it’s good for me to rest as much as I need,” I protest. Though I have to say, now that I’m on my feet, I don’t feel half bad.

“That was a week ago,” she says, slowly walking around the bed with the spoon in her hand, calmly slapping her palm with it like some villain in an old movie. “And I know ye need to rest but ye also need to try and get on with your life. He said that too, didn’t he?”

I keep watching the spoon. “He said a lot of things. My mind is a bit fuzzy, you know.”

“So, then what have you done to try and move on with your life? Because as far as I’ve seen, you’ve only moped about. And before you blame your disease for it, perhaps you should take a moment to think about the real reason you’re sleeping all day and night long and not eating a single thing I’ve cooked ye. Because you’re heartbroken.”

I don’t say anything to that.

I can’t. Not really. Not except to say that heartbroken is an understatement.

My heart is completely shattered into smithereens, into a million tiny pieces that are too small to see, let alone pick up and put back together again.

I lost the love of my life and it’s all my fault.

I pushed her away.

I did what I thought was the best thing to do but I also did something that I can’t quite understand. How I could say those things to her? How I could be so cruel? It’s like it wasn’t even me in that hospital bed.

It was the personification of fear.

And now she’s gone and this loss is overshadowing all others at the moment. It’s something I feel with every passing second of the day, the fact that I hurt the woman I loved, the fact that I did this to myself, that I made myself bleed to prevent future bleeding that may never have happened to begin with.

“You’re heartbroken and yet you can fix it,” she says sternly, stopping in front of me. “Have ye contacted her at all this week? Have ye called her or sent a text or an email or one of them messages?”

I swallow down my shame. “No.”