The Mother

Maddie snatched it up and buried her face in it.

Lucas touched her shoulder. ‘Darling, don’t. You’ll just make it worse.’

She raised her head. ‘How?’ she said dully. ‘How could it be worse?’

Shrugging him away, she drifted through the silent house, roaming from room to room, randomly picking things up and putting them down as if she’d never seen them before. Nothing seemed familiar. Lucas followed her, but didn’t try to comfort her again.

‘Don’t,’ he repeated, as she reached the foot of the stairs.

She ignored him, heading upstairs to Noah’s nursery. ‘You can turn this room back into your office, if you like,’ she said over her shoulder as he followed her. ‘I know how much you’ve hated having to share the downstairs study with me.’

‘Maddie …’

‘Or we could make this into a spare room. It’s a bit small, but you can fit a single bed in here and a dresser, once we get rid of Noah’s changing table. And the rocking chair,’ she added, her voice suddenly bitter. ‘I want that chair out of the house.’

She yanked open the little blue chest of drawers and grabbed a neat pile of Babygros and threw them on the floor and then opened a second drawer and started emptying that too.

Lucas shut the drawer. ‘Leave this.’

‘You can take the stair-gate down, now. Noah’s never going to need it, and it makes getting up and down the stairs so awkward when your arms are full of clean washing.’

‘You’re in shock, Maddie. Please, come back downstairs.’

‘The world doesn’t just stop because Noah died. Things still need to get done. Someone has to sort them out.’

She wrenched the drawers open again and emptied their contents onto the floor. She didn’t know if it was shock, like Lucas said, or the medication they’d given her, but she was completely, blessedly, numb. She had to get rid of Noah’s clothes and toys, she had to erase every sign he’d ever existed, now, while she still could. She didn’t know if she would survive the pain of walking into Noah’s nursery, of seeing all his things still here, once that numbness wore off.

She crouched down and began to pull sheets and blankets and towels off the shelf beneath Noah’s changing table, until Lucas knelt beside her and put his hands on hers.

‘Maddie, please. You have to stop.’

Maddie stilled. ‘I’m afraid to stop,’ she whispered.

‘I know.’

‘If I stop, I might have time to think.’

‘I know,’ he said again.

‘How can he be gone, Lucas?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘How can this have happened?’

‘I thought we were safe now,’ Lucas said thickly. ‘I thought, we’ve had our share of grief and tragedy. That’s it now. I lost both my parents; you lost Benjamin. I thought at least that meant we were owed some good luck. At least it meant the children would be safe.’

She had no room for pity. She knew that when the drugs wore off, the pain would return. It was actual, physical, as if her chest had been sliced open and her heart smashed into a thousand pieces. Heartbroken was no longer a metaphor but a description.

‘How do we survive this?’ she whispered. ‘How do we even get up tomorrow morning?’

‘We get up tomorrow because we don’t have a choice. Emily and Jacob need us.’

She extricated herself from his arms and stood up stiffly. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how to tell their children that their brother had died. She rested her hands on the rail of Noah’s cot, staring at the mattress as if she could still see him there. ‘I was the one looking after him. I was the one who let him down. You weren’t even here.’

‘I should have been!’ Lucas shouted suddenly. ‘I should have been here!’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’

‘How do you know?’

She looked at him. ‘Are you saying there’s something you could have done, that I didn’t?’

His shoulders sagged, the fight suddenly leaving him. ‘No,’ he said wretchedly. ‘No, of course not.’

‘We can’t keep doing this, Lucas. It’s going to tear us apart.’

Even as she said the words, she wondered if it was already too late. You were born alone and you died alone. And now she realised you grieved alone, too.

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