Chapter 22
FRASER
‘Isn’t it incredible,’ she said to me once over dinner, ‘I have access to the same twelve notes as Mozart or the Beatles or Madonna or Adele but if I arrange them my way, I can create something no human has ever heard! It’s not just the order of the notes, Fraser, it’s the spaces in between.
It’s the sounds I leave out. It’s the pace and rhythm and volume and colour and the way you can take dots and squiggles and make them lift off the page like alchemy. ’
‘You know you would have been burnt at the stake?’ I replied. Really, I was basking in the rapturous way she spoke about her creativity. She didn’t just hear music. She saw it and tasted it. It was always a full-blown synaesthetic explosion of sensory stimulation that I envied.
And now there is no rise and fall of her chest. No explosion of colour and sound and light in her mind. No sweet and sour. No spice. No crescendos and diminuendos. No spaces in between …
It’s nothing but space. It’s all silence.
The lost potential is so crushing I can barely breathe. Not just the potential between us and Parker, for our family’s future. Her potential. Her whole life.
There’s no coming back to music now. Not for one single note.
And now I’m angry at the impostor syndrome.
The self-doubt. The consuming fear that means all that unwritten music has died inside her.
We’ve lost pieces that were never played, and the world will always be less colourful.
And I am furious at my brother and Ridges for what they took from her.
‘I can’t survive this,’ I hear myself whisper.
I won’t make it. Depression has slammed into a wall of grief that has crashed in to overpower me.
This loss is incompatible with life. It will see me out.
Worse, I want it to. This feels like the last few frantic, desperate beats of my heart before it turns to stone and I have no choice but to join her.
My phone beeps with a message. Parker. She’s with Maggie, who rushed to the school when I called her earlier. She doesn’t really know that there was an accident. We’ve been able to shield Parker from Audrey’s fate.
Daddy, are you coming after work? What is happening?
My heart thuds at the innocence. What’s happening is that my need to be here for my daughter is at war with a stronger longing not to be here at all. I’ve never known such miserable purgatory …
‘You’re in shock,’ someone says, in pink scrubs. ‘The way you’re feeling is normal. You will survive this, Fraser.’
I can think of nothing worse than surviving this.
From somewhere I find the courage to ask this next thing. ‘Did she suffer?’
What I mean is, did she suffer at the end? I know she was in pain earlier. I’ll never forget the inhuman wailing I heard over the phone at the scene until they could sedate her.
‘She’s not suffering now,’ she says.
I’m gripped by an intense longing to twist fate and swap places with Audrey. Women are built to withstand pain.
I want it to be me who is dead. Me who is no longer suffering.
Selfishly, I want Audrey to be here with this nurse, hearing this news in reverse. I wish it were her being forced to pick up her phone and call Parker and say the impossible words: Daddy’s gone. Because what use will I be to Parker, like this?
Audrey would push through this misery to the other side and into the future I know she would embrace. She would drag herself through these initial steps of agony and make all the music she held back.
She would appreciate that life is short. I’m certain she would. All I know is that it’s unbearable. And all I can think about is how this would all unfold if that mess of missed calls from the school had landed the other way.
If this whole thing were the other way around …