Page 5 of We Were Never Lovers
Harris asked his questions, and Sean responded like a normal person, he was pretty sure, but two years, he’d lost two years. Almost to the day. And somewhere in there he’d clearly lost his mind because it sounded like him and Jack were friends.Friends. It was ludicrous. He wanted to demand Jack tell him what he’d done to get Sean to concede to that. Did he have something on him? Except as the sun rose beyond the nurse’s station and filled the floor with spring sunshine, Jack never came back.
2
Between the tests andvisitors, Sean slept. In the days since it’d been revealed he’d lost his memories, Jack didn’t reappear during the day, but he was there every night, curled up in the uncomfortable chair, sleeping or reading something on his phone. Sean would wake, disorientated, mutter, roll his head to the side, and there Jack would be, breathing softly as he slept or meeting Sean’s eyes tentatively, his smile careful, his face lit up by the glow of his phone. Sean would frown because he wasn’t sure what else to do with him.
He’d had bloods, a CT scan, been run through multiple questionnaires, become increasingly agitated and, though he’d never admit it, fearful as more information came in that he didn’t understand and people told him things he didn’t know.
‘Trauma induced amnesia,’ was the diagnosis. ‘Memories should come back in a few days.’
Sean held onto that. But when he woke, groggy and thirsty in the early hours of the morning, the world still pitch-blackbeyond the hospital walls, and saw Jack smiling carefully yet hopefully over at him, Sean felt nothing but irritation.
Jack’s face shuttered and Sean recognised the polite mask, the neutral tone in his voice when he whispered, “Something to drink?”
Sean closed his eyes; if he went back to sleep, he’d either wake up back in his world where everything made sense or in this future where nothing did, but at least he’d know how he’d ended up here.
He was out of the ICU and on a ward a week later, and the shifty expressions Harris, the consultant and the registrars, Ben and all the nursing staff were giving him let him know the temporary state of his amnesia was becoming a bigger question mark. The bigger question for this meeting around his hospital bed was where he was going to go now that he was ready to be discharged. With proper care at home, there was no need to stay.
Jack had deigned to regale everyone with his presence in the daylight for this discussion.
“You’ll go with Jack,” Ben was saying again, but at least he’d stopped saying it like this was the most obvious solution in the world to saying it like he wasn’t sure either.
Sean decided to finally rip off the Band-Aid. It’d made no sense she wasn’t here, that she hadn’t called and his brother hadn’t mentioned anything—but why would he if he thought Sean already knew? She’d had a cough; the last thing Sean remembered was her promising to get it checked out, telling him it was probably nothing, the fear he couldn’t shake that she was wrong.
“Why can’t I go home and—”
“Sean, you’ve got to have someone take care of you…” the doctors, nurses, Ben, but not Jack, chimed in. Sean noticed Jack waited for him to finish his sentence—he was watching him like he always waited for Sean to finish his sentence, like if Sean was talking then that meant something important was being said. Sean flushed a little.
“My mum,” he said and it wasn’t the silence that told him what happened; it was Jack’s face.
“No,” Sean said and even though he’d been prepared, he clearly hadn’t been because the heart shattering on Jack’s face was actually breaking in his chest. “No.”
“I’m so sorry, Sean,” Jack said softly.
“Fuck you, no,” Sean snapped.
Jack winced, but miraculously, unlike everyone else in the room, proceeded to calmly tell him what happened. “Nine months ago, lung cancer, stage four by the time she got it checked out. She died three months later. You—” Jack broke off and looked at his feet.
“I what? I fuckin’ what?” Sean said, through tears brimming in his eyes.
“You took care of her,” Jack finished. “Brought her down to live with you. It was—” Jack flicked his eyes up and swallowed, “it was good, in the end. You took her home for sorry business, after. You were good.”
The tears fell silently down his cheeks as he stared at Jack. What did that mean? What did Jack know about him being good? About sorry business? He was about to snap something awful about Jack having no idea about anything when he remembered Jack’s parents had died too. It’d been all over the news—the catamaran lost in a tropical cyclone, his parents pronounced missing then dead in absentia when the remains of the boat washed up on Komodo Island. Sean had seen the photosof Jack outside the cemetery in the news, disbelief and pain etched on his nineteen-year-old face. Sean had wanted to call him, to text, but he hadn’t.
“Alright,” the consultant said, professional but careful. “Your memories are going to come back, any day now, but in the meantime, it’s best not to have such big life events dropped on you, okay, Sean?”
“He shouldn’t know about his mum?” Jack asked, as incredulous as Sean felt and he never thought he’d be wanting to thank Jack for something, but he wanted to thank him for that—like, what the fuck?
“No, I agree, it’s come up and he needs to know. What I mean is, not everything all at once. It’s also better if things can come back to you on your own, Sean. Which they will,” she said reassuringly. “Any day now.”
“Right,” said Harris smoothly, clapping his big hands together. “In the meantime, I’m happy to discharge you into Jack’s care.”
Sean still couldn’t believe it, but they’d been saying it since they’d been talking about discharging him: “Into Jack’s care.”
He looked at Jack. Jack was looking at Harris, but Sean knew he could feel his gaze on the side of his head. This wasn’t unusual—in the year they’d been playing together, he knew Jack could feel his gaze on him; Jack reacted to it like a kangaroo who’d just become aware she was being hunted and was debating whether to remain still or flee. This reaction had always given Sean a weird thrill. It gave him that weird thrill now.
“Of course,” Jack said evenly as the consultant and Harris talked, his hand reaching up to rub the back of his neck.
“So, what? You’re gonna stay with me at my place?” Sean asked. He wondered if he had a guest room set up. As far as he knew, he rented a place with Ben and they had an open-door policy with all the other blackfellas on the team. It was a good set-up, aside from the wistful feeling Sean sometimes got whenhe saw Ben and his girlfriend, Lara, curled up together on the couch. But apparently Ben and Lara had gotten married—Sean had been his best man—and Sean had bought a place by himself in North Fremantle, which didn’t sound like him at all, but then he was friends with Jack so who knew what brain damage he’d endured in the years he was missing.
