77
Lisa
My body melts into the memory-foam mattress, a sigh of relief slipping from my lips. Strange how foam can hold on to memories
when some people can’t.
I roll over carefully, savoring the quiet. No beeping machines, no nurses waking me at odd hours to check my vitals. Just
the comfort of my own bed. Frank is afraid he might bump me, so he’s sleeping in the spare room until I heal.
Will I ever truly heal? Inside me is a piece of the man who betrayed me. His kidney keeps me alive and haunts me at the same
time.
I swallow two pills. Ironic, that I’m on drugs to keep my body from rejecting him like he rejected me.
Frank ducks his head under the doorway, the light from the window catching his hair. “Can I get you anything, hon? A cuppa,
maybe?”
“That’d be lovely, thanks. And my charger, please. I forgot to plug my phone in last night, and it’s dead.”
“Sure. Feel like you could stomach something too?”
“I’m kind of craving Anzac biscuits!” Truth be told, I crave my mother, but her biscuits are the next best thing. They feel
like love.
“Of course, I’ll even double-check the oven for any garbage bags first.”
Frank winks, and I poke out my tongue at him. “You have a recipe?” he asks.
“Not one that’s written down. Seems to be the one thing that sticks in my head. Grab a pen, and I’ll dictate it.” Frank plugs in my phone then scrawls the recipe out on a notepad and gets to work.
I fall into a deep sleep, woken when my mobile springs to life on the bedside table. Two missed calls from Griff; I never
deleted his number after his phone was supposedly disconnected when he went into care.
“Are you okay?” Frank enters with a mug of tea and some freshly made Anzacs. He glances at the notifications on my screen.
“Lis? I know it’s not my place to say, and I can’t imagine what you are going through, but he is your brother. And he has just given you his kidney.”
The biscuit in my mouth turns bitter. I swallow it.
“Sweetheart . . . you know why he did it, right?”
I roll over to face the wall. “I need another nap.”
“Okay.” Frank kisses my head then leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Of course I know why. I didn’t give Griff a chance to spell it out, but he didn’t have to. Beau was always his reason. Never
me. And as much as I understand that—really, truly understand it, and in some strange way am even moved by it—I’m still furious.
Not because he loved Beau that much to do something so astonishingly selfless and selfish, but because he didn’t spare a single
thought for me. He never has. He could have been civil to my dad; he could have saved our mum. I was always an afterthought,
if a thought at all. Why doesn’t he love me?
The next forty-eight hours pass in a blur. Maybe it’s the back-to-back painkillers, ones I don’t technically need but take
anyway, craving numbness. I drift in and out of consciousness. I dream of grown-ups shouting. Of hiding under the bed. Griff
rings again and again, but I don’t answer. Frank comes and goes, leaving water, tea, cookies. Helen visits with flowers and
lasagna.
I glance at my phone. Four more missed calls from Griff. My guilt reflects back at me from the screen as a message pops up.
Lisa, I don’t expect you to forgive me, but please let me explain. I’m coming out of hospital today. Please call me back.
Lifting up my nightgown, I study the dressing on my tummy. His kidney should have gone to Mum, not me. My heart skips a beat:
if he had donated to Mum, he couldn’t have donated to me. I swallow my guilt and flick my phone to aeroplane mode. If only my brain had that setting, where nothing could get through.
I’ve said goodbye to too many people. Let someone else take a turn. I grieved Mum alone. I grieved Beau alone, while Griff
sat there, silent and blank.
I pull out the order of service I made for Beau’s funeral from my bedside drawer. His face stares up at me, mid-laugh, holding
the viola in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Shirt rumpled. Collar askew. Hair too long. God, he was beautiful.
I run my thumb along the corner over a faint blur where my tears had landed. There was a reading from Winnie-the-Pooh—he always said children’s books told the truth better than most adults ever could. A string quartet played songs he had composed.
Even though Beau had no living relatives, the sunflower-laden chapel had been bursting at the seams with his community of
found family dressed in all the colors of the rainbow. His friends, students, colleagues, neighbors. Two couples had even
flown in from New Zealand.
But there was one person missing. I hadn’t brought Griff, because the nurses advised against it, saying it might confuse or
distress him. So I’d left him behind.
It lands in my chest like a boulder. Griff was lucid. He felt every moment. He grieved Beau in full, brutal color, in that
awful nursing-home room, even more alone than me.