Chapter Thirty-five
‘Michael, it’s Mary Roberts, if you’ve got a minute?’
‘Of course. Fire away.’
‘I’ve been going over the shift in my mind again and again. And obviously we need to wait to see the medical records before we can determine what did or didn’t happen. But I just needed to ask, if I may, is it possible that Felix O’Keefe was the person who raised the issue?’
‘Uh …’
‘Perhaps you’re not in a position to tell me. That’s fine. But I just wanted to say that it would be interesting if it were, as Felix had nothing to do with the case whatsoever and has had a whole lot to do with my personal life. Anyway, I’ll leave it with you.’
When I got off the phone, I knew in my gut this had come from Felix – he was trying to frame me.
Whether it would work out how he’d hoped and I’d lose my opportunities in Hobart forever was yet to be determined.
Even if it turned out to be nothing, the whole episode would be a humiliating scar on my reputation. Probably just as he’d intended.
The next few days passed at a weird pace, stretching and rushing, in some no man’s land of waiting and hoping, without the stresses and demands of work, but with the grim anxiety of not knowing how Mum would recover.
On day three, she was still unconscious and intubated. I tried not to let my medical brain run away with the mortality implications of this. It was not good, though, and I couldn’t ignore that.
I didn’t study. The exam was in seven days – if I were to sit it. But in seven days I might be burying a parent.
I spent my time between Ebony’s house and Mum’s. Relishing the life force of Ebony’s children, those beautiful, youthful souls, and then meditating in the task of bringing Mum’s house and garden to a bright new gleam.
I was weeding the garden in the late afternoon when I had a call from the hospital that made my legs weak with relief and left me sitting on the concrete garden path, weeping.
Mum had woken.
When I arrived at the ICU, she was sleepy but awake. Her eyes fixed on me at her bedside and they were so sorrowful and remorseful, that any idea of anger I might have considered just dripped away.
‘Mary,’ she whispered. ‘My baby girl.’
I gripped her hand and she squeezed back, as hard as I knew she could. Her eyes filled with tears and I felt mine do the same.
‘I remember the day you were born, Mary. Your tiny fingers and your watery eyes.’ She wasn’t quite back to her body yet, in some halfway space between the world and a heaven or a salvation, a place of absolution from the torment of her brain.
I was sobbing as though I wasn’t standing in a public ward.
Sobbing and sobbing as she spoke to me from her ethereal place.
‘And I loved you so much, I thought that love could save me from anything. And you did, Mary. You saved me so many times. You and Ebony. But the demons kept coming and I couldn’t overcome them enough. I’m sorry.’
When people talk of their anger at people who suicide or cannot overcome addiction, I wonder if they’ve ever really been close to someone who has suffered in this way.
Perhaps they think these people truly have control over what they do.
That it’s a choice to be tormented by the brutality of their own minds.
But when I held my mother’s hand in that moment, I saw not the times in which she had failed or been unable to overcome her demons, but the times that she had triumphed.
The times that she had tried and persevered.
And while I wished things could have been different for my mum and for Ebony and for me, I knew, too, that she had done her best.
And for perhaps the first time I saw how I’d also done all that I could have. That I’d tried and made mistakes but I’d only ever strived for our happiness.
I gripped her hand and I let the daughter in me be soothed by the loving words of a mother.
I knew that even if this didn’t last, if I lost her again, now or in the future, that we’d done our best and that I’d been loved.
Not in a half-hearted way or a distracted way, but in as powerful and all-consuming a way as a mother could ever love her child.
And she’d done it through her darkest times, her loneliest and most harrowing times.
In that moment I felt impossibly humbled by the imperfections of humans, by the intention to try and to persist in overcoming them.
And the love that flowed out of my mother, directly from somewhere divine, flowed into me.
It wrapped around my heart, the little girl inside me, the woman inside me, and it filled me with gratitude, acceptance and hope.