He didn’t come.
“We didn’t know if it was going to be worth boarding the dogs, you see. We couldn’t get anyone to stay at late notice. What will I tell him?”
Audrey closed her eyes. Her head hurt, her legs pained and itched with the pins and needles. It wasn’t the dogs. It was being an unmarried mother. She hadn’t seen her father since she’d told her parents she was pregnant. He was never going to forgive her. Never going to accept his granddaughter. He was a man of his word. He didn’t back down. He’d told Audrey she’d destroyed their relationship with her selfishness, her arrogance, and her willingness to put the life of a child at risk, but if her near death wasn’t enough to prompt a reconciliation, she didn’t expect to see her father until he was ensconced in a coffin, graveside.
His loss.
“It really is about the dogs. If you want your father to come I’ll tell him to. Don’t go to sleep. What shall I tell him about me coming home?”
She opened her eyes. This was classic Esther. Put upon. Martyred over next to nothing and pretending innocence and a lack of her own will. This was why it was easier if her mother wasn’t in her life. It had to be Esther’s way or not at all.
Audrey learned to distance herself growing up, using boarding school and the move to Sydney at seventeen as the primary tactics. But now, lying in a hospital bed, in a horrid hospital gown, open at the back, because her mother hadn’t thought to bring in one of her own, facing the woman who’d announced on her twelfth birthday that she’d never wanted children and Audrey had been a mistake, she thought disappointment might succeed in ki
lling her where meningitis had failed.
“I don’t care what you do.”
“That’s not very helpful, Audrey.”
“Where is Reece?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“Mia’s nanny.”
“Oh that man. I sent him away. We don’t want him.”
“I want him.”
“You can’t possibly. I have a theory. I think you were coming down with this disease when you hired him. You weren’t thinking straight. Why else would you hire a man to look after your child?”
“That’s not—”
“Merrill is perfectly happy with Mia. It’s practice for her. She’s taken holidays from work especially. She’s staying with me at the house. Her and Joe. It’s like a house party. A little bit of a holiday for me.”
A house party. A holiday. While Audrey was busy dying. “I’d like you to go.” Leave the room, leave Mia’s airspace, leave the house, leave the city. Vanish like a chip tossed to a seagull.
Esther had reacted to the pregnancy by saying Audrey had ruined her own life, by suggesting that there were ‘things’ a woman could do and when Audrey persisted with the ‘nonsense’, by ignoring the coming grandchild, and then taking the barest amount of interest in Mia, ‘out of respect for your father’.
Esther stood. “All right, yes, I’ll come back later. That was the plan anyway.” Audrey could interrupt and explain about the gobbled chip, but for the moment she might need Esther, if only to fetch supplies from home.
“I’m sure you’re tired. That man nurse with the punk hair and the awful deformity on his arm said you had a headache. Can’t they give you a pill for that? I’ll bring you flowers. Those ones you like.”
If there were flowers she liked especially, Esther was unlikely to know about them.
“Can you bring me a nightgown and my dressing gown? It’s hanging behind the door in the bedroom. I need my phone and my computer. I’ll make a list, but for now, just those things. And will you ask Merrill to bring Mia, please?”
“I wasn’t planning on returning to your place today before I came back. I was going to catch a movie while I’ve got the chance. I’ll bring you those things first thing tomorrow, all right. You don’t need them today. Merrill is out in the waiting room. I’ll ask her to come in.”
Audrey closed her eyes again so she didn’t have to watch her mother leave the room to window shop, to see a movie, to enjoy her holiday in Sydney. Every shopkeeper she met, every taxi driver, every waitress, they’d all be told how Esther’s daughter nearly died and how stressful that was, how this little bit of shopping, this respite for coffee was helping her take a break from the hideously draining experience.
She heard Mia before she entered the room, running. “Mum. Mum.”
She found the button to raise the head of the bed and was on her way to upright, her head spinning, the nausea revisiting with the speed and velocity of a bullet train, when Mia appeared in the doorway. She had the old tatty fairy dress, on over her clothes, her hair loose and flying all over her face. She stopped when she took in the bed, the room and her mother, who must’ve looked strange.
“You’re awake. Nanna is at our house. And Merrill and Joe. We had pizza. I want you to come home right now. You look funny, but you’re not sick any more. You’re better and you can be in your own bed, and I can be in mine, and Nanna can go away to her house and Reece can come back and we’ll all have a picnic.”
Merrill lifted Mia to the bed. “Oh Aud.” She was crying. “I’m so glad to see you.”