Now
The tree is pretty in sugar-almond pink and I suppose it should lift my mood along with the jam jar of wild flowers – foxgloves, bluebells, clover – that Daisy brought yesterday.
‘There are daisies all over our lawn now,’ she said, and she held out a long, long chain she’d made for me to inspect.
I did turn to look at it, I did try to force my mouth into an approximation of a smile, but still she hesitated before coming close enough to hang it around my neck.
And it hurt to see that hesitation and to know that I’d caused it, along with Joe’s anger and Sam’s despair.
My children have learned to manage without me, without this silent shell who adds nothing to their lives.
And who can blame them?
When Daisy was small, we used to walk up to the common most days, and when spring arrived we’d solemnly inspect the grass for the first signs of buttercups and daisies.
She loved the fact that she was named after this prolific wild flower, although I’m not sure she was really; it was just the name we liked most at the time.
And as she grew, it suited her more and more, with her wild and generous nature, the girl who loves to dangle upside down from trees and wade barefoot in the world’s coldest stream.
My family visit me most days now, preparing me, I think, for my departure, which is coming very soon.
Sam gives me information updates in the bright, breezy voice he always uses, dropping in psychiatric terminology as if he’s discussing the weekly shop.
Spinach, eggs, milk.
Trauma, psychosis, mutism.
‘We’ll need some help to begin with because we don’t know how it will be for you fitting back into normal life with your mutism.
So Liv is going to take some time off and then my mum is coming.
’
He pauses here and I think how the old Sam and I would have laughed at this.
His mother and me, confined together in a house, day after day?
No way, I would have said.
Over my dead body. But when you are still alive, breathing, eating, sleeping, only acting like you’re dead, no touching, no talking, decisions like this are forced upon you.
You make one choice at the expense of many others, it seems to me.
It’s a strange kind of freedom in this glass house of mine.
For now Sam seems to shy away from the exact moment of ‘trauma’, but he cites other events that led up to it, even the one I dread the most. He is careful and kind when he mentions Jack’s name; he will hold my hand, squeezing it hard, though I never respond.
He tells me that they will be bringing up what happened with Jack in my next cognitive therapy session; he asks me if I’d like him to be there.
‘They know you’re not ready to talk, Catherine,’ he says.
‘It’s more that they want to help you find ways of lessening your anxiety when you think about it.
’
More bloody breathing techniques, I suppose.
There’s only one thing that could help and that is the chance to say sorry.
And if I couldn’t find the words then I’d beam them to you from my eyes and you would understand; you’d catch the letters as they fell through the air.
It’s all right, you’d say.
I forgive you, you’d say.
Let’s start again. When all you have is your dreams, why can’t you recreate the perfect end?