But there was no reply.
“Mum?” Coralie said later.
“Mmm.”
“Don’t you think it’s unfair?”
“What?”
Coralie gestured around the room. “All this.”
The words were spoken; they were in the air. They hung there. With no one to catch them, they drifted away, lost.
•••
Soon after,Jeromecame with the wheelchair. “Judith, your chariot.”
They all piled into a car for the short journey. It was just a regular car, without hospital branding. Was it Jerome’s? There was nothing of Mum to put the seatbelt over. She was two-dimensional, like a T-shirt drying on the line.
Outside the hospital café, a willowy Aboriginal woman pulled down one side of her colorful sundress to breastfeed a roly-poly baby. The baby’s hand rose and waved. The mother looked down and the baby cupped her chin. The mother kissed the baby’s palm.
Coralie looked away.
“Judith,” Jerome said at the hospice, “you were a wonderful patient.”
Coralie wondered if the past tense struck a wrong note. But their mother gave a gracious tilt of the head, a celeb importuned by a fan.
•••
That night,Danwent on a longer run than usual, and the next day, when Coralie got up early, she saw Jerome in her mother’s living room putting on his backpack and tiptoeing out the door.
•••
Back in London,the stuff from storage had been redelivered, a surprise to the builders and Adam (and to Coralie, who’d forgotten). Oneal sent her a picture of the newly painted sitting room, filled to chest height with box after box of books, all jumbled with boxes of kitchen things. The sofa was, for some reason, on its side. The person who had packed those boxes, herself of four months earlier, no longer seemed to exist.
When Stefan sent her gossip from the office, she couldn’t quite picture the scene.
I wish I could be with you!Adam emailed every day.CYK, CYK, CYK.Hecouldbe with her. By getting on a plane. Oh well.
Her mother hadn’t eaten since being transferred to the hospice, and neither, Coralie suddenly realized after a week, had she.
She sat by the bed reading Rachel Cusk, feeling as blank as the narrator inOutline. When her mother woke, she put the book down. “Mum? Did you say something? Do you need me?”
Her mother’s face contorted. She was repelled. “No!”
Dan went in at night, jogging along the Dripstone Cliffs. Coralie came in early each morning to relieve him. He was broken, his face a mask of horror. “She gets so scared. She’s terrified, lying therealone in the dark. Sometimes she’s calling for me: ‘Dan, Dan.’ She doesn’t realize—I’m right there holding her hand.”
•••
One morning,she woke to a question from human resources. How much longer would she be “on leave”? On leave? They made it sound like a holiday.
At the hospice, she poked her head around the door to the manager’s office. She was at her desk, eating bircher muesli and watching highlights of Formula 1. Coralie suddenly understood the meaning of the phrase “in rude health.” “Katherine? How much longer does my mum have?”
“She’s not drinking much?”
“Not really.”
“I’d say we’re in the home straight.”
