Coming Home

‘Can you fetch the carrier?’ His voice was firm with a no-nonsense edge to it, yet something about it made me pause. ‘I’ll take her back to the farm before she does any more harm.’

I reached out and stroked the cat gently, my fingers brushing close to his hand. ‘I don’t think the cat’s to blame; it was Jadie who got her out of the cage. There’s no harm done.’

‘No harm?’ echoed Tara, coming round the corner into the sitting room, dragging a tearful Jadie in her wake. ‘Do you realise what could have happened if she’d had a really bad attack while the roads are closed like this? We wouldn’t be able to get her to a hospital and no ambulance could get through the snow drifts—’

‘Tara, she didn’t have an attack,’ Vincent interrupted wearily. ‘Maybe she isn’t even allergic to cats. Just because Amber…’ he trailed off.

‘Amber said the cat wouldn’t hurt me.’ Jadie was standing defiantly with her arms crossed. ‘Can we keep her?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Tara snapped. She rounded on Adam. ‘For goodness’ sake take that thing away!’

‘I’ll go get the box.’ I retreated back towards the boot room, glad to leave the tension behind me. We soon had the cat stowed safely away and Adam pulled his boots back on before turning to leave. I was strangely reluctant to part with the cat, but I handed the carrier over to Adam, who promised to take care of her until I was ready to collect her. Jadie had given up demanding and was trying tears instead.

‘Maybe you could come and visit her,’ Adam offered kindly as he headed for the door.

‘Over my dead body,’ murmured Tara. ‘Even if she appears not to be allergic to cats, think of all the other animals at your place that could bring on an asthma attack.’

Adam ignored her and turned to me. ‘You are welcome to visit your cat whenever you like. The phone lines are down over Becket’s Wood, but I’m sure the phone company will fix it as soon as the snow clears a bit. Then you can give me a ring—or else just pop over.’

‘Th-thank you.’ What was it about him that made me feel so tongue-tied?

Vincent gave a start, suddenly remembering his manners, and saw his neighbour to the door. ‘I’m sorry you had a wasted journey over here.’ He watched as Adam set off into the snow, his dog leading the way. ‘We’ll be in touch when things get back to normal.’

Rubbing my hands together as the door closed on the cold and snow, I wondered how long it would be before anything got back to normal for me. I wasn’t sure what normal was, anyway.

Pushing away a nagging worry that my memory might never return of its own accord, I found myself wondering what the protocol was in such cases. Would I have to go to a hospital once the roads were clear and suffer lots of probing and questioning? Would I end up on a psychiatric ward enduring endless tests? The idea didn’t appeal, but I knew from the look on Tara’s face that my welcome in this house was wearing decidedly thin.

Chapter Nine (#ulink_cf5c8f5b-6cbe-564b-b5f2-76e46fa2a2c6)

After Adam left I spent the rest of the morning playing Monopoly with Jadie while Tara cooked and cleaned and fussed over Jadie’s medication. The child appeared to need endless feeding, and Tara brought her fudge brownies and milk shakes mid-morning, then produced a huge meal at lunchtime with which Jadie had to take extra vitamins. I tried to offer my help but Tara was adamant that this was her job and that I was a guest.

Vincent had returned to his study to catch up on his paperwork. It seemed that being cut off from the rest of the world didn’t stop him working.

After lunch, which Vincent took in his study, Jadie lounged on the sofa watching children’s TV and I insisted on helping Tara clear the kitchen. ‘Please,’ I entreated, ‘I won’t get in your way. Just tell me where things go and I’ll get on with it.’

Tara was standing at the sink with her back to me and I thought she was going to refuse again, but to my relief, she told me to fetch a tea towel and dry the things that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. Standing next to her I was able to gaze out of the window at the garden with the snowman still standing where Jadie and I had left him. Despite the sunshine it was obviously still cold enough to prevent him from melting.

‘Tell me about Jadie’s illness,’ I said as I dried a large stainless steel pan. ‘How come she eats so much? She looks as if a gust of wind would blow her away.’

‘That’s the nature of CF.’ Tara bent to scrub an ovenproof dish, her elbows darting back and forth with the effort. ‘Her body has trouble digesting food. She has a poor appetite and would hardly eat at all if I didn’t keep offering her snacks like the chocolate brownies. It’s a constant battle to keep her weight up because her pancreas has impaired function. Most of what she does eat doesn’t get absorbed.’

‘What causes cystic fibrosis?’ I asked, pausing in my drying to watch a squirrel run across the snow-covered lawn.

‘It’s hereditary.’ Tara blew soap suds from her wrists as she scrubbed. ‘But both parents have to be carriers for a child to be born with it. Even then, there’s only a twenty-five per cent chance of a child actually having the disease.’

‘Surely if Amber was diagnosed with it there must have been some sort of test during pregnancy to check whether Jadie had it too?’

Tara fell silent and I glanced sideways at her. ‘Amber was late being diagnosed with it,’ she said at last. ‘Apparently she seemed fine as a baby, a bit wheezy now and then and prone to getting colds, but her digestion wasn’t such a problem as it is with Jadie. She was over a year old when Vincent and Cheryl took her to the doctors and CF was diagnosed. Cheryl was already pregnant with Jadie by then and she wouldn’t have the baby tested in case she miscarried. They asked me to come and work for them so that Cheryl could concentrate on the baby and get plenty of rest.’ Tara paused, holding the scourer in mid-air. ‘I don’t think either of them realised how bad CF could be and how ill Amber was going to get. If they had, well…’

‘If it’s hereditary,’ I puzzled, ‘why didn’t Vincent or his wife know they’d got it? Surely someone else in the family must have had it?’

‘One in twenty-five people are symptomless carriers,’ Tara explained. ‘They live their whole lives without knowing they’re carrying it and it’s only when two carriers produce a child with CF that they find out it exists in their families.’

We continued in silence, both lost in our own thoughts.

‘You’re very protective of her,’ I ventured. ‘It’s almost as if she’s your own child.’

‘I’m all she’s got.’ Tara wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. ‘And I’ve grown very fond of her.’

‘But she’s got her father, and there’s a grandmother too, isn’t there?’

‘One’s a workaholic and the other is…well, you don’t want to know.’

I remembered the gin bottle I’d found in my room. I took the last dish from the draining board and dried it to a shine. ‘Where does this go?’

Once the kitchen was spotlessly tidy she turned to put the kettle on. When she’d made the tea, she took a cup down the passage to Vincent and then returned to sit at the kitchen table with me.

‘It’s not that Vincent doesn’t love Jadie,’ she said, taking a sip of the hot tea and staring at me as if willing me to understand. ‘I think he loves her too much and can’t bear the thought of losing her. After Amber…and then Cheryl going, he became more distant. He’s a good employer, don’t get me wrong, but he leaves everything to me and sometimes the responsibility is enormous.’ She gave me a rare half-smile. ‘That’s why I overreact a bit sometimes, I suppose. I’m sorry for getting so angry at you over the cat.’

I smiled back. ‘Don’t worry about it. If I was in charge of Jadie’s health I’d be wary of anything that could hurt her too.’

We spent the afternoon making tissue-paper flowers as Jadie had tired of Monopoly when she’d started to lose. Jadie was a dab hand at folding the tissues and tying thin green garden wire round the middle, then peeling the layers apart to make very realistic-looking carnations.

‘We learned how to do this at school,’ she told us as we struggled with bits of tissue and Tara found vases for our creations. ‘I like school, but it’s fun being off today. Usually if I’m at home it’s because I’m not well and then I don’t feel like doing anything.’

It should have been idyllic, sitting at the kitchen table with the sun streaming in and the garden stretching away white and bright outside the window, but for the frustrating fact that I didn’t know who I was or if there was another life waiting for me somewhere else. Maybe there was another family somewhere sitting in this same wintery sunshine, grieving because they didn’t know where I was or what had become of me. I was in limbo, waiting for something to happen, for my memory to return, the snow to melt or someone to come and claim me.

I glanced up to find Vincent leaning against the kitchen doorframe watching us, a smile playing upon his lips. I was about to return it, when I realised that Jadie and Tara had seen him too and were smiling up at him, on both their faces an expression of love. My heart sank. I was an interloper, an outsider who had no place here. Wrenching my gaze away, I concentrated on the half-made flowers on the table in front of me and vowed not to get involved. These weren’t my family, my problems or my home; I had no right to yearn for things that weren’t mine to hope for.

Soon it was time for Jadie to go to bed and for me to start getting ready to accompany Vincent to dinner next door. After managing to extract a new toothbrush from Tara’s store in the small room she used when she stayed over, I went up to the bathroom to take a shower.

For a while I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, trying to find something familiar in the face that looked back at me, but in the end, depressed, I gave up and stepped into the shower cubicle. It was a good feeling, letting the hot water cascade down over me. I found it was impossible to protect the butterfly plaster on my temple from getting wet, but the cut didn’t hurt much and I soon gave up trying to tilt my head to avoid it. All my negative emotions washed away with the running water, leaving me relaxed and tingling under the hot jets. I closed my eyes, daring myself to conjure up the feelings I’d felt with Vincent when he’d rescued me, but all I felt was a light-headedness, a strange sensation of disembodiment.

It was all too easy to pretend I didn’t exist, standing under the warm water as it trickled over my eyelids, ran down my nose, over my mouth and dripped off the end of my chin. I had just tipped my head back, luxuriating in the feel of it, when the water began to cool. In a few short seconds the water turned downright cold and I reached for the tap to turn it up, wondering if the hot tank was empty. It seemed stiff and I began to gasp as the jets of water falling over me became breath-takingly icy.

Squinting from under the deluge, I groped again for the tap, trying to turn it off, but the water stung my eyes so I closed them again quickly, wrenching at the tap with both hands. But the water kept pouring. Freezing cold water invaded my mouth and nostrils, filling my airways, and suddenly I could barely breathe. Gasping and choking, I held my head away from the cascading water, my fingers fumbling frantically for the tap again. It wouldn’t budge. I tried to push open the shower door to escape the icy torrent, but that too appeared jammed. With horror I found the shower cubicle was filling with dark water that was rising rapidly up around my ankles and legs, climbing swiftly up over my hips then under my raised and frantically flailing arms.

Pounding on the shower door with fists that were turning white with cold, I tried to call for help, but within seconds the water had risen up round my shoulders and was trying to force its way from the back of my neck over my upturned chin and into my mouth. I clamped my lips tightly together as the water lapped over my head and I took one last great gasping breath before I sunk beneath the murky blackness.

For a few more agonised moments I kicked impotently at the glass door with frozen feet and hands. I could feel my hair floating up round my head as my lungs burned with the desperate urge to breathe. Everything started to go black.

‘No!’ I screamed, the words erupting in a cascade of bubbles, which broke the surface over my head. ‘No!’

The last of my breath had been expelled with the scream and now I hung limply in the water. Any second my tortured lungs would take a last desperate, gasping breath and the water would flood me, claiming me for its own. As I prepared myself for the inevitable the shower door was yanked open. Water poured out in a great torrent and someone hauled me out of the shower onto the bathroom floor, where I lay fighting for breath.

I felt a warm towel being draped over my violently shaking body; dry hands tucking it securely round me. A second towel was placed under my head and I lay there for a moment, too weak to move.

‘You’re OK now.’ Tara’s voice was anxious. ‘Looks like you had the water turned up much too hot and you fainted. I’ll fetch another plaster for that cut of yours. Just lie still, you’ll be all right in a minute.’