Set In Stone Read online

  Chapter

  16

  Human touch

  Lou sat beside her mother’s bed and watched the little machine that went ping. She felt like she’d been caught in a cyclone. First of all, the meeting. Then Jack’s assault on Piper, and realising exactly what variety of devil Lou had helped her father strike a deal with to screw over Stone Mountain. And that had been followed closely by Piper’s questions, finally bringing it all to the surface. Lou hadn’t told Piper all the details, just a basic outline, but she shouldn’t even have done that. She had been goaded by grief and bitterness and the unfairness of Piper asking whether she had killed her sister. But she was still kicking herself. Especially since Skye had arrived.

  And then there was that: Skye, swaying into her arms, looking so much like a dead woman walking that Lou couldn’t work out how she hadn’t noticed how sick her mother was until that moment. She yelled for help and suddenly they were surrounded by medical people who all seemed to know Skye and her story, and who were yelling ‘crash’ and other words that scared Lou to her core.

  Now here Skye was, breathing evenly, but looking so still and sick, so thoroughly un-Skye-like, that it shook Lou in ways she had never imagined it could. Skye’s cheekbones, always so prominent in her striking face, stuck out, contorting her features. The new pixie cut made her seem ethereal and childlike against the white pillow. And there were tubes attached to her arms and chest, feeding in and out of the thin green gown that Lou just knew Skye would hate with a passion.

  She was no longer under any delusion as to how sick Skye had become.

  She was just waiting for Dr O’Brien to try to make sense of the sudden deterioration. While she waited, she reached over and took her mother’s thin hand in hers. What was it about your mother’s hands? It doesn’t matter how much time has passed since you’ve seen her, it doesn’t matter how you feel about her, or what she has done to you, you still recognise those hands, in the part of you that was once a child bathed and tended by them. They are the first hands you ever knew.

  Lou dragged her chair closer, lifted the hand and placed it against her cheek. Skye hadn’t always been out of control. Lou had loved her with a starry-eyed devotion when she had been tiny, following her around and wishing with all her heart that she could be tall, blonde, vivacious and beautiful. Just like Skye. She could see the way everyone loved her – men, sure, but women too. Skye was brilliant and uncontainable. And there had been times – a lot of times when Lou was growing up – when Skye managed to get things under control for a few months, sometimes six months or so. Okay, so she didn’t exactly qualify for mother of the year during those times, but at least Lou didn’t feel always afraid, waiting for the next disaster. But as time had gone on, after Hannah came along and Skye realised she was alone again, things had slid downhill at a frightening pace. Sometimes, when she was older, Lou had wondered whether her mother had suffered from postnatal depression. It was hard to know; Skye had never had predictable moods, not since Lou could remember. The thing is, what’s charming and exciting when you’re a small child, is scary, embarrassing and hard work when you’re growing up. And even more so once another child comes into the house and you realise that even though you didn’t create it, you’re going to have to care for it.

  It hurt so much, pressing her mother’s hand against her face and trying to work out what was worse: the sadness for little Lou, who had tried so hard and wanted so much, but never been able to quite make her mother okay; or bitterness for the teenage Lou, who had worked so hard to take responsibility where her mother took none; or the clawing, aching loss for the baby they had both loved so dearly and lost; or the raw, brittle edge of bitterness that Skye could have kept her word and taken care of the little girl that night, just that one night? Maybe it was the fear that this woman, this fragile, flawed human inundated by tubes – her mother – was going to die, and that she might do it before they had a chance to talk. She knew one thing she wanted to make sure her mother knew: Lou had not been deliberately running her down to Piper. She had never done that, never would. But what else? Right now, and for the first time ever, Lou desperately wanted her mother to wake up so she could talk to her about what happened. It would hurt to talk – it would hurt like fuck – but Lou was ready to do it.

  A soft noise from the doorway disturbed Lou’s musings and she stood, but then she didn’t know what to do next. Dr O’Brien held her arms out to Lou, who stepped into them. They had shared such an intimate moment tonight at the meeting, and now there was this. As Martha wrapped Lou in her capable arms, Lou moved dangerously close to the edge of her self-control. It felt so good to be held with understanding and without judgement, but she knew if she stayed there too long it would all boil over. She would start to sob, and then who knew where such a thing might end? She began to pull away. Martha resisted, trying to keep her wrapped up safely a little longer, but Lou murmured, ‘No, I need to keep it together.’

  The doctor considered her, and nodded. ‘You want an update?’

  Lou took the chair Martha motioned towards, and the doctor fussed around for a few moments, checking machines, charts and tubes, before coming to sit beside her.

  She didn’t pull any punches. ‘Louise,’ she began, taking Lou’s hand, ‘I told you last week that your mother was very sick. It’s hard to predict the course of a disease like this, especially when she’s not hospitalised, and we’re not monitoring her.’ She raised an eyebrow at Lou to check she was following. Lou nodded.

  ‘From the initial tests we’ve done tonight, it seems your mum has taken a really bad turn. Without treatment, her prognosis looks very dim.’ She patted Lou’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry, honey.’

  Lou swallowed and tried to form the words to ask exactly what the doctor meant.

  It was like Martha could read her mind. ‘I mean, that, unless treated, your mother will live for a few weeks to a few months.’ She looked carefully at Lou, as though assessing her capacity to take this in. She must have seen what she needed, because she went on: ‘My best guess would be weeks. In some ways, your mother is fit, and strong. But her body has –’ She cleared her throat. ‘It’s taken a bit of a beating. The drugs, and alcohol. Her natural defences aren’t what we’d like them to be.’ She patted Lou again. ‘Do you want me to talk now about what this means, or do you want to wait and talk later?’ She put an arm around Lou’s shoulder. ‘I know it can be a lot to take in, all at once.’

  Lou sighed. ‘No, tell me. Please.’

  ‘Well,’ the doctor continued. ‘Normally at this time, we would recommend at the very least hospice care. It’s what we call palliative, do you know what that means?’

  Lou nodded. End-of-days care.

  ‘But your ma has been clear that she doesn’t want it. She and Bo have told me they want her to stay at Sunset Downs. We can get nursing care in there, if we can get her well enough to get her home. She’ll need it, soon enough, just to keep the pain at bay and manage her personal care needs.’

  Lou swallowed, hard. ‘I understand,’ she said. She looked at Skye, her strapping, sexy mother, lying thin and wasted on the bed. ‘What happens now? Will she – when does she wake up?’

  The doctor chewed her lip. ‘She passed out, and then we gave her some help with the pain, and to let her body process the latest assault on her system. She should come to soon. What are you going to do? Tonight?’

  Lou was confused by the question, then understanding dawned. ‘I’m staying,’ she said with a certainty so solid she almost growled it. ‘I’m staying until she wakes up.’

  Martha nodded, and a small smile formed on her lips. ‘Good thinking,’ she said, standing up to do another lap of Skye’s bed, fiddling with all the paraphernalia of sickness. Once she appeared satisfied, she came back to Lou’s side. ‘Can I get you anything, honey?’ Those bright blue eyes were so understanding and wise, Lou wished she could crawl inside them and rest awhile.

  She considered the doctor’s question. What did she
need?

  Only one thing: Sharni.

  But she needed to talk to Skye alone first.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Skye was moving her head slowly from side to side and muttering something under her breath as Lou inched closer. Her mother’s eyes opened, staring unseeingly ahead before closing and opening several times.

  Lou waited a few minutes before trying again. She got up and poured a glass from the jug on the little stand by the bed. ‘Water?’

  Skye’s head finally turned towards Lou, and the look in her eyes was one Lou had never seen there. Lou was used to feeling that Skye wanted more from her – that she thought her daughter didn’t quite measure up, in one way or another. But tonight there was a plea in her mother’s eyes that Lou just didn’t recognise. Skye seemed sad, scared, diminished. And seeing her like that, Lou’s hands shook as she gripped the water glass. Her mother was bolder and braver and ballsier than anyone Lou knew.

  ‘I’m different now, you know,’ Skye said, gesturing to Lou to bring the glass closer. As she tried to sit up to take the glass, she didn’t quite make it, and fell back against the pillows, licking her cracked lips.

  Lou crept forwards, placing the glass on the little tray table attached to the bed, and wrapping an arm around Skye’s shoulders to sit her up a little. Then, keeping her arm around her mother, she brought the glass to her lips. ‘Have some,’ she said quietly.

  Skye took a small sip, and then a few more, before leaning back and repeating her words. ‘It’s true,’ she said, reaching for Lou’s hand. Lou had pulled her chair closer so she could hear her mother, whose voice was thin and breathy. ‘I changed, after Hannah. And after you left. I would have been a better mum to you, if you’d stayed.’

  Lou tried to smile at her mother, but with hot tears pressing against the back of her eyes it was hard. ‘It didn’t matter, Mum,’ she said quietly, patting her mother’s hand. ‘It wasn’t about you; I didn’t leave because of you. I just couldn’t be here, not after it happened.’

  Skye nodded weakly. ‘I wish I could have left too.’

  Lou shrugged. Neither of them could leave it behind, not really. Lou knew, because she had tried.

  Skye spoke again, and her voice was so tiny Lou had to lean close. ‘What you did – you never should have had to do that.’

  Lou wondered exactly which bit Skye meant. There had been so much.

  ‘All the caring. You were more of a mother to her than I ever was; I know that, Lou. But then, that night as well. You shouldn’t have covered for me.’

  The hopelessness of that night settled over Lou again, as the machine beside her pinged. ‘It didn’t matter,’ Lou said, her voice flat and small. ‘What difference would it have made, if they’d taken you down for it?’ She closed her eyes, working hard not to see the little body, broken and bloody, lying motionless on the hospital bed.

  ‘It was what I deserved,’ Skye croaked. ‘No more than I deserved.’

  When they’d asked her where her mother was, Lou had explained that Skye was sick. And it was true, really. There’d always been a sickness in her that wouldn’t give her any peace, wouldn’t let her alone. No-one had seen, when the ambulance arrived. No-one had seen the house, with the bong and the pills and the uneaten spaghetti and the television blaring. And her mother, passed out and unable to be roused in the bedroom. With some random guy. Lou had waited out the front and gone with Hannah to the hospital. She’d known, though, the minute the paramedics had fluttered over the tiny girl and she’d seen the change in the intensity of their movements; she’d known it was all over. Panic, pure and light, had filled Lou up. She started screaming and beating at their backs. Even though she knew it wouldn’t matter.

  Hannah had been pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

  Lou stayed, and told them all that Skye was sick. They raised their eyebrows, but she didn’t care. She stayed with Hannah, holding her hand and smoothing her hair, whispering to her that she was sorry, so sorry. As she sat there, she felt a change inside her. All the warmth in her body – in the blood and flesh and cells – leeched away and she was transfused with something harder and colder. Where life had been, there was nothing but glass and concrete. Where she had been a person, now she was a construction, the apparatus of life, but soulless. And surely nothing good or sweet or lovely could ever reside in her again.

  Five hours later, she held Hannah in her arms one last time, then walked home. It was two kilometres, but she barely noticed, putting one foot in front of the other automatically. She arrived home as the sun was rising.

  Skye was beginning to move about in her room, and weak light filtered into the kitchen as Lou boxed up the spaghetti, disposed of the bongs and cleaned the kitchen and living room. When Skye emerged, tousled and bleary eyed with the new guy, she took one look at Lou and stumbled over to her.

  ‘What’s happened? Are you okay? Baby, are you okay?’

  Lou pointed to the guy. ‘Tell him to leave,’ she said, her voice breaking.

  And somehow, miraculously, Skye did.

  When she came back, Lou told her.

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ Skye screamed, her eyes wild as she ran into Hannah’s bedroom, calling and calling for her.

  Lou sat on the couch and shook her head, sobs assaulting her.

  Skye returned, tearing at her nightgown and throwing clothes on.

  ‘I tried,’ Lou said, tears streaming down her face. ‘I tried and I tried, but I needed to get her to the hospital.’ Lou knew she should hold out her arms to her mother, cling to her, and let Skye cling back. But she couldn’t do it. All she could do was stand in that kitchen and see the face of the little girl she had raised so diligently. Dead.

  Her mother was momentarily silent. ‘Oh Lou,’ she said, after a while. ‘I did this; this was me.’ She was panting, clawing at her chest. ‘I need to get down there.’

  ‘I told them you were sick,’ Lou said, willing her mother to understand. ‘That you ate something bad. And I’ve cleaned up here. If they came here, if they saw what it was like here, last night …’

  And then Lou saw that Skye got it. In that instant, her mother crumpled. She stopped the crying and the panting, and she shrivelled.

  ‘I need to get down there,’ she repeated, looking around like she was trying to decide if she needed to take anything. Her eyes settled on Lou. ‘Are you coming?’

  Lou shook her head.

  As Skye shut the front door, Lou stumbled into her mother’s room. Ignoring the messed-up sheets and overflowing ashtrays, she flung open her wardrobe doors and pulled down Skye’s battered brown suitcase. Then she took it into her own room and started to fill it. It didn’t take long. Finally, she peeled off the beautiful red dress she was still wearing, and walked down the back stairs, clad only in her bra and knickers. She stuffed the dress deep into the garbage bin. When she was done, she collected the bankbook for the little nest egg she had been stashing away for Hannah, and got the phonebook. She rang two hotels and the bus company. She wrote a note for her mother, another for Sharni, and one for her father. She told them she would be in touch, eventually, and that she had somewhere to stay.

  And to please not try to make contact.

  ‘I still can’t believe that you never came back. Not for twenty years. You didn’t even come to the funeral.’ Skye’s voice was not accusatory, just perplexed. ‘You loved her so much.’

  Lou nodded. ‘I’d already said goodbye to her,’ she said, shutting her eyes against the memory again.

  ‘And then we never talked about it,’ Skye said, shaking her head.

  ‘What was there to say?’ Pain prickled Lou’s skin. She blamed her mother, sure she did, even though she blamed herself more. She had known Skye was unpredictable, but she had still gone – gone to dance and drink and screw Gage Westin.

  ‘Sorry,’ her mother whispered. ‘I could have said sorry.’

  ‘You never did,’ Lou said, and it was a fact, not an accusation
.

  ‘I didn’t know how,’ Skye whimpered, worrying the edge of the sheet with thin fingers. ‘But, oh, Lou.’ She turned huge blue eyes on her daughter. ‘I was. I was sorry. I’ve been sorry every moment, every damned second, since you told me.’ Tears splashed down her face. ‘I’ve wanted to scream and rail and just end it, but it seemed too easy. This –’ She gestured at herself. ‘This life seemed a better punishment. This nothingness.’ She grimaced. ‘And now cancer. I don’t feel cheated, I don’t feel angry. I’m glad. I’m so fucking glad I’m gonna die, and that it’s gonna be hard and ugly. It’s not penance, not nearly penance enough.’ She swallowed. ‘But I’ll take it.’

  As Skye said the words, something at the centre of Lou shifted. She knew, quickly and utterly, that she didn’t want Skye to die; and that if she had to die, she didn’t want her to die feeling like this. Lou knew what twenty years of hell felt like, and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone, not even the mother who had caused it. Skye was flawed and selfish – or the Skye Lou had known twenty years ago was – but she was Lou’s mother. And she had been Hannah’s mother; at least one of them.

  Lou reached out and pulled Skye into her arms.

  At first, Skye resisted, like she couldn’t bear for Lou to give her comfort, her body stiff and unwieldy in her arms. But then she melted, dissolving against Lou and giving in to the tears as she did. And then Lou was crying too, great racking sobs of yowling pain for all they had both lost – the daughter, the mother, and all those fucking years. Her chest shook as she clung to Skye, and Skye howled against her in return.

  There were no words, only pain.

  It wasn’t that Lou forgave Skye, or understood her.

  It wasn’t some great moment of working out or working through, as Dr O’Brien had said. It was just being with her, just as they both were, with all their flaws.

  It felt, finally, like coming home.

  When the doctor came by an hour later, Skye had drifted back off to sleep and Lou was gently patting her hair. It was time. It was time to be gentle with her mother, who was coming to her own end. Lou had no illusions about how she might be judged when her own came, but it wasn’t her job to judge her mother.