Читать книгу The Mother - Tess Stimson - Страница 19

Fear and loss seeped like moisture from the room’s neat beige walls. This was where they brought you when there was nothing more they could do. Maddie stared at a cork board covered with leaflets. What To Do After Someone Dies. Living With Grief. After Suicide: A Guide For Survivors. Coping With A Terminal Diagnosis. Palliative Care: What You Need to Know.

She turned away, her stomach churning. So much pain and misery in the world. How had she ever thought she’d be lucky enough to escape?

She felt strangely disconnected from everything, as if she was moving underwater, or trapped behind a thick glass wall. She knew her baby was dead. She could still feel his chilling weight in her arms, and yet she couldn’t take it in. The reality was so monstrous, her mind refused to accept it.

She’d known Noah was gone the second she’d seen his arm dangling through the bars of his cot, his body strangely still. If she lived to be a hundred, she would never forget the thousand years it’d taken her to rush to his cot and pull the blanket away from his cheek. His face had been waxy and deathly pale, his lips a deep mottled blue. When she’d touched his cheek, he’d been cold.

She had no memory of rushing to the window and screaming down at Lucas, though she supposed she must have done. Her throat was still raw. She didn’t remember scooping her baby out of his cot, either, but she would remember forever the cold, dead weight of him in her arms. She could feel it still. The back of his head, where she had always put a steadying hand, like a ball of stone. Her precious, warm, milky son, now a stiff, cool statue, a porcelain doll. Already she couldn’t remember what he looked like alive. When she tried to picture him, all she could see was his face, deadly white but for his indigo lips and the purple blotches on his skin where the blood had settled.

She supposed Lucas had called the ambulance and her mother. She didn’t know how long it’d taken for the paramedics to get there. She hadn’t wanted to let Noah go, refusing to let anyone take him from her arms. It was Sarah who’d finally persuaded her. Maddie had handed Noah’s cold little body to her mother, watching as the paramedics briefly examined him and then wrapped him tenderly back in his blanket. She’d felt the emptiness of her arms and had known instinctively the feeling wasn’t ever going to go away.

‘Maddie, stop that. You don’t take sugar. Maddie! Stop!’

She jumped and glanced up. She was standing at a counter at the side of the room, spooning sugar into an empty coffee mug. It was already a quarter full; she must have added at least six spoonfuls without even knowing what she was doing.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, dropping the spoon so that it clattered onto the counter. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’

She sat on the tan leather sofa, pinning her hands under her thighs to stop herself from plucking at her clothes. It didn’t matter what anyone said. It was her fault Noah was dead. She’d wished him gone. She hadn’t meant it, of course, but she’d got exactly what she’d asked for. Maybe, deep down, in a corner of her mind too dark for her to see clearly, this was what she wanted.

Maybe she’d even made it happen.

‘He kept crying,’ she burst out suddenly. ‘No matter what I did, I couldn’t make it stop.’

‘He had colic, Maddie,’ Lucas said hoarsely. ‘He couldn’t help it.’

She stared down at her lap. Her legs were jiggling, but she seemed powerless to stop them. ‘I could hear it in my head, all the time. The non-stop screaming, on and on. Sometimes I didn’t know if it was him crying, or me. I tried to be patient, I did my best for him, but nothing made him happy. No matter what I tried, it didn’t make any difference. He never stopped screaming.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Maddie.’

‘I couldn’t make him better. I’d feed him and change him and cuddle him and nothing helped. I couldn’t stand it anymore.’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘I just wanted it to stop.’

When Lucas spoke again, he sounded wary. ‘Maddie, what are you trying to say?’

‘I wished he hadn’t been born,’ she said bleakly. ‘I wished he wasn’t here. Sometimes … sometimes I even prayed he’d just disappear. That someone would just … take him.’

‘Maddie—’

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she cried wildly. ‘I wanted someone to take my baby! What kind of mother would fantasise about something like that?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Lucas said again, but his voice sounded less certain.

He sat next to her and put his arm around her, and she leaned into the familiar bulwark of his shoulder, but it no longer seemed comforting or safe. He was like an oak that had been hollowed out, as vulnerable as she to the coming storm.