nixsight

At lunchtime the weather was fine, but now it looks like there’s a storm coming.

The fact is that it hasn’t been the same since the hospital.
She still fetches the kids, smiles as she tells them stories about being grown up, or settles them in front of the telly while she does the dishes, to make it easier for mum to do dinner when she gets in.
Dad still comes home around the same time as mum, but he always wants to get in the shower first thing, wash off the garage before anyone has to kiss him, so there’s still the half hour of chatting at the kitchen table, the two women of the house, before he swoops down the stairs and fills the house with his booming laugh.
She still shares a quiet smile with mum as the sounds of the kids laughing at dad comes from the front room, before he bursts in and sweeps them both off their feet. Mum pretends to be irritated, but that’s just what mums do. Dad asks about college; she answers as best she can.

 After dinner, she goes out with friends, or sits in with family. They laugh. They drink. There are boys. There are always boys, but not as many as for some of her friends… her parents’ biggest gift to her has been a sense of what she’s worth, so she only gives the boys what she wants to get from them, and she never regrets anything. She’s always fair and careful.

Except, some nights, that’s another thing that has changed. Some nights, the hospital preys on her mind more than others, and there doesn’t seem quite so much point to caution. Fun doesn’t seem so easy to come by. You have to chase it harder. You have to take the corners that little bit faster. And coming off the road is always a regret.

Most of the time, she’s fighting to keep the despair out of that shared smile with mum, and dad, with his trustworthy smile and his big protecting arms; she just wants to scream at him: “You let me down! You were the one who told me life should be an adventure! That it was worth something! You said you’d always protect me! You LIED to me!”

Since the hospital, her glass always feels two-thirds empty. The big joke is on her, with her best foot forward and her rock-solid belief in karma.

It’s not like she even wanted a kid.
The guy wasn’t in the picture any more, and she hadn’t pined for him… she’s never been the kind of girl who mistakes a few weeks for endless love. She’d been dreading the idea of having to decide whether to tell him or not.

The morning before the endless afternoon of the emergency room, she’d been weighing up the pros and cons of a termination. The debate hadn’t touched her much deeper than a stack of practical “fors”, against the all pervading “againsts” of her abject fear of doctors and a deeper distaste for what she saw in herself as a failure to take responsibility.

Then the bleeding started.

She was in town when it happened, and didn’t get a chance to think about what to do; she passed out in a shop changing room, clutching a pair or lacy red knickers she was thinking about buying, and by the time she’d come to, she was already in an ambulance on her way to the local General.

She pretends to forget about the next few hours; likes to imagine that nothing happened between the last squeeze the paramedic gave her hand, and the journey home in dad’s car, the knickers that no-one had had the heart to take back crumpled in a tiny ball in the bottom of her college bag, put there by a well-meaning nurse. But it doesn’t matter how convincing she makes the fun stories about being a grown up; she can’t bring herself to believe in karma any more, and things just aren’t the same.

These days, she can’t watch mum and dad share a cuddle over the chopping board like she used to. She looks out of the window, more so she doesn’t have to see than anything else.

The sky’s already dark with clouds, bringing on an early, ugly sunset.