Chapter 22 #3
“His mum and his dad. She turned up at the hospital with his stepdad. His dad came into the room with us, but I got another room for his mum.” Len’s eyes slide from me to Daniel, and I realise he’s unsure what to say.
“Sean’s mum left his dad and married his dad’s brother, then went on to have two children with him.
Worse than that, she told Sean a lot of lies when he was growing up about his dad being abusive, which he never was.
Her new husband just didn’t want him being a part of Sean’s life.
It’s why they were constantly on the move as he was growing up,” I explain.
“Right. I’m not sure our researchers discovered that. There’s nothing in my notes,” Daniel says.
“Probably too busy trying to dig up shit on me and George,” Cam says.
“Touché,” Daniel replies with a smile and a wink. “And where were you when you found out?” he asks Cam.
“In my office, watching everything unfold on Sky News. I called Bailey. The first time I got hold of him, he told me it was bad. Said that Sean was only being kept alive for Georgia to say her goodbyes. That she’d lost her baby and was currently in surgery, and they were trying to save her.
He said he thought it would be kinder to let her go, that he didn’t think she’d want to live after such a loss. ”
“I thought the same,” Marley says. I watch as he closes his eyes and lets out a long exhale.
“I know, I know, it’s mental to think that I thought that now when you look at the woman she’s become, her life with Cam, the kids, and everything she’s achieved, but I’ll be one hundred percent honest with you right now, I honestly didn’t think she would ever recover from losing him. ”
I feel like I’m floating.
“How does that make you feel?” Daniel asks. “That your brothers thought that?”
I close my eyes and attempt to let my thoughts settle.
“From the moment I woke up from my surgery and was told what had happened, right up until Cam came back into my life, I thought the exact same way as my brothers.”
“Who was it who told you?” he asks.
“Marley.”
“Me,” Marley says at the same time. “It was me who introduced them. I thought it was only fair. Mum and Dad were a mess, and the girls…”
“He stepped up,” my dad says. “When none of us had it in us, he stepped up and delivered an unimaginable blow. Proud of you, boy.”
Marley sends a small, tight smile Dad’s way, then his eyes find mine. I decide then that I won’t make my brother relive what must, still to this day, be one of the worst moments of his life.
“When I came round from my surgery in the recovery room, I knew instantly I was no longer pregnant, but it took a minute for me to remember the accident. I asked the nurse, who kept checking my obs, if I could see my baby, if they knew how my husband was. She just kept telling me that a doctor would talk to me once I was back up in my room and on the ward. I thought maybe he’d had to go to special care because he was four weeks early.
I thought maybe Sean needed surgery because I had a vague recollection of seeing blood on the pavement by the side of his head.
And then they wheeled me back up to my room, and everyone was there, my entire family.
I thought that if I just kept my eyes closed, they’d all go home, but they didn’t.
They stayed and whispered amongst themselves, but I couldn’t hear what they said.
They cried, but I didn’t know what that meant, and that’s when I first started to think that Sean might’ve been badly hurt.
“I’d already wiggled all of my fingers and toes and knew all my limbs were working, so it wasn’t me. In the end, I opened my eyes, and Marley was sitting at the side of my bed.
“‘A car hit us,’ I told him like he didn’t know.
I was being pumped full of pain relief and was in full-on panic mode, but the drugs wouldn’t actually let me panic.
I wanted to ignore what had happened. No, not ignore.
I wanted to explain what had happened, so we didn’t have to talk about the consequences and why I was now in the hospital.
The drugs, morphine, or whatever it was I was hooked up to, removed my inhibitions, and as much as I didn’t want to know the answer, I asked the question.
I asked Marley where Sean was. I asked if he was with Beau.
I imagined him doing skin-on-skin time in the special care unit.
I knew that’s not where he was, but I imagined, and I hoped… ”
“She asked if she’d had a caesarean,” Marley says. “I told her she’d had to have surgery.”
“And I still thought he meant a C-section, so for a few brief seconds, the briefest amount of time, I felt relief. I thought we were good. I asked if the surgery was to get him out, and Marley said, ‘Yeah, but he didn’t make it. Beau didn’t make it.’”
“The sound she made was like nothing I’ve ever heard,” Jimmie says.
“It’s not a sound a human should ever have to make, and it’s definitely not a sound a mother ever wants to hear her child make. Not when there’s worse to come and there’s nothing you can do to protect them from it,” my mum says, emotion so very apparent in her voice.
“And then she asked where he was, where Beau was, and if Sean was with him, but before I could answer, a doctor and nurse came in and were explaining what had happened, what had gone wrong. It was obvious George wasn’t taking any of it in, though.
She’d been hit by a fucking car and thrown up in the air like a rag doll at eight months pregnant.
Her placenta had ruptured and detached, her baby had died within minutes of the accident, and she’d nearly bled to death.
They’d had to perform a partial hysterectomy to save her life.
“We all heard what they were saying, but George? George was just nodding, blank, numb, nothing. And then they asked if she wanted to see him, and she said…” My brother breaks.
He sobs, and tears stream down his cheeks, dripping from his jaw.
He draws in a few deep breaths then slowly releases them.
“She sounded just like she did when she was a little girl. Like when our mum told us to mind our manners. They asked if she wanted to see Beau, and she said, ‘Yes, please,’ so fucking politely. They were bringing her dead baby to her, and George remembered her manners and said, ‘Yes, please. I’d like to see him.’ I don’t know why, but it broke me.
It broke me then, and remembering it now, it’s doing the same. ” Marley wipes away his tears.
Cam tops up his empty glass.
Marley takes a sip of his drink and continues.
“The nurse left, and by then George had worked out Maca wasn’t with the baby, and she asked me again where he was, but I just couldn’t get my words out.
Straight away, she knew. She looked at me and said, ‘Please. Please don’t make it bad,’ and I had to.
There was nothing I could do to make it better.
“She’s my little sister. I’d spent my entire life protecting her, and then I had to rip her life apart in the most brutal fucking way, and she was telling Dad to make me stop.
She was saying, ‘Daddy, tell him not to make it bad.’ She’d grown up with four men protecting her her entire life—five when Maca came along when she was eleven.
One was dead, and there was absolutely nothing the rest of us could do to protect her from her loss or change a single thing about it. ”
I try, like I’ve tried so many other times, to recall how I felt. I remember the words, know exactly what he told me, but I have zero recollection of how it made me feel.
“So, I told her,” Marley starts, and then he says the words that punched a hole right through my existence. “‘He has a machine breathing for him, but he’s never gonna wake up.’”
“And you know what was more terrifying?” Ashley asks. “The silence. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even cry. The door opened to her room, and a nurse came through it with Beau swaddled in a blanket, but you could see his hair.”
That’s when a loud sob escapes me.
Cam pulls me in and kisses the top of my head.
I can’t see Ashley, but I can hear her voice, and I know that she’s crying.
“You could see this mop of dark hair sticking out from this tiny little bundle, and Bern… Bern stood up to go to him, and her legs just gave out. Frank had to catch her, and we, all of us, were sobbing and crying. But George? She just very calmly asked us all to leave.”
“Marley refused to go,” my dad says, his voice thick and gruff. “She didn’t argue, Georgia. I don’t think she had any fight left in her, so she let him stay, and together, they bathed and dressed my grandson.” My dad pauses, and I watch him struggle.
His lips purse as he clenches his jaw in an attempt to stop it from trembling. He’s old school, my dad—a boomer. He wasn’t raised to show his tears, to cry in public, or anywhere, ever.
“Marley stayed to do what his best mate, his band mate, his brother couldn’t be there to do. He stayed because he didn’t want his little sister doing it on her own. And Georgia, my girl, my princess…. Fuck me, I do not know where that daughter of mine gets her strength from.”
I love that it’s Harry who reaches across and gives my dad a one-armed squeeze. They might not be related by blood, but they’re as thick as thieves those two, both loving to golf and clay shoot together.
“We bathed him, we dressed him, and then we took him to meet his dad,” Marley says.
The room falls silent until I decide to speak.