her surprise at the sight of her husband. He looked even worse than he had yesterday, a blue tinge to his lips, his skin horribly mottled. His breathing was ragged, a new machine next to him now pumping in oxygen.
Melissa went to him and kissed his face. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here, darling, I’m so sorry.’
As she looked at him, she realised she really could lose him . . . and if she did, one of their kids could be put away for his murder.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sunday 21st April, 2019
10.45 a.m.
Dad nearly died. That would have made me a murderer.
A murderer!
That’s all I can think when I look at him now. Mum made us come visit him. She said Dad still might not make it. That he has an infection. She didn’t even sugar-coat it. I think she was just too tired. Too scared too. None of us tried to even push back. We knew we had to go, no excuses. So here we are, and I can’t get a grip on how I feel. All I know is that Dad isn’t Dad any more. I mean, we’ve kind of been saying that for the last few weeks anyway, how we don’t see him the same way we used to. But to see him lying in that bed with all those tubes coming out of him and the way his head’s all been shaved. Yeah, we all agreed it when Mum just went to the loo and left us alone with him. Dad totally isn’t Dad any more.
It’s like what Maddy said once about her parents splitting up. How they became different people in her eyes. Together, they were a unit, ‘Mum and Dad’, ‘my parents’. But when they split up, they made different shapes in her mind. Even at just five, she could see it. Her dad got all withdrawn, quiet, and sort of turned his back on society again. But it was actually her mum who changed the most. The way she chopped off her hair and started going crazy for the gym. Maddy always says it’s like she was thrown into a completely different life with different people.
I suppose that’s the way it’s been for us too with Dad, ever since we overheard that argument with Ryan last month. Our parents are different people than what we thought, more fragile and brittle, and it feels like we’ve been living a lie all this time. And now we’re thrown into this new life Maddy talks about, except our new life is full of blood and lies and tubes, like the ones right there in front of us.
I put my head on the bed and the other two crowd around me, putting their arms around me and trying to shut me up before Mum gets in because I’m saying sorry, sorry, sorry over and over.
I took it too far. I know that now. But what choice did I have, in that moment? And now the whole village wants to kill me, see me hanged, according to that stupid community meeting. I wish we’d just said the truth from the start. But we’re too far gone now, and we have to think about Mum, don’t we?
Mum walks back in and comes straight to me, putting her arms around me. ‘It’ll be alright,’ she whispers. ‘It’ll be alright.’
I think of that drawing of the oak tree with her hiding in it. I think of her arms like the bark, her scent like the smell of the forest.
Familiar. Safe. Protective.
But for how long?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Monday 22nd April, 2019
12.45 p.m.
Melissa dragged herself out of her car, putting her hand to her mouth and yawning. She’d spent most of the past thirty-two hours with Patrick in hospital, bar the time she went back to Rosemary and Bill’s to collect the kids to see him the day before.
It had been strange seeing the kids at the hospital together, staring at their dad like he was a stranger. It made her heart break and all she wanted to do now was see them. They’d spent the night at Daphne’s, Melissa not wishing to leave them alone, as Bill and Rosemary wanted to spend as much time as they could at the hospital.
Melissa had taken it in turns with them the night before, watching over Patrick. When it wasn’t her turn, she’d tried to sleep on a battered leather chair in Patrick’s hospital room. But every rasp of his breath, every tiny little movement from a patient or nurse