Page 12 of The Perfect Son
I nod and feel a single tear roll down my cheek. All I can think about is the scrunched-up frown on Jamie’s face when he looks at me. Seven-year-old boys shouldn’t have to worry about anything other than winning at tag and having friends. They especially shouldn’t have to worry about their mums.
I focus on picking at the flake of skin hanging from the edge of my thumbnail. “He said I’m depressed. He gave me antidepressants, but... I don’t feel depressed. I wanted something to help me sleep.”
“Nightmares?”
My eyes shoot up. Shelley’s smile is gone but her eyes are still sparkling. I wonder how she knows. “Just one nightmare. I’m... I’m in an airplane. I don’t know where I’m going, but the plane isn’t flying, it’s sort of tumbling and spinning downward, and I know it’s going to crash. There’s smoke everywhere. Thick gray smoke coming from somewhere and it’s stinging my eyes and hurting my lungs. There’s luggage from the overhead compartments flying all over the cabin, and I’m trying to protect my head from the suitcases, even though I know the plane is about to hit the ground. Then I wake up and I swear I can still taste the smoke.”
I gasp for air and feel something wild surging through me. It’s the same heart-pounding, hopeless fear that I feel every time I wake up. And every time I remember you’re gone.
“I lit a bonfire in the garden the day Mark died,” I tell Shelley. “I didn’t know Mark had died until later, but I guess the two are stuck together now—the bonfire and Mark’s death.”
I wait for Shelley to squeeze my hand and tell me that the nightmares will pass. Instead she stands. “Do you mind if I put the kettle on? I’m desperate for a cup of tea.”
I almost don’t hear her next question over the purr of water boiling in the kettle and the banging of one cupboard, then another as Shelley locates the mugs and the tea bags. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“Did you hear about the airplane, the one that crashed last month?”
“Oh God, the suicide by pilot? Of course I heard about it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know the details.”
The wild something morphs into anger, thrashing out of me before I can stop it. “Why does everyone keep calling it that? It wasn’t suicide. It was murder.” The kettle has stopped boiling and my voice carries loud and angry in the silence. “That pilot destroyed my family. No one else on that plane chose to die. It... it was a mass killing. Murder.”
“You’re right,” she says, opening the fridge and pulling out a bottle of milk. Her voice is even, controlled, next to mine. When she closes the fridge her fingers rest on a photo of Jamie—the magnet of his school photo taken before we moved, when his school uniform was bright red and his hair short, the curls stuck down with the gel I’d smeared on that morning. Shelley stares at the photo for a long second.
“This is your son.” She says it like a statement, more of a comment to herself than to me.
“Yes. Jamie.” I nod and feel the anger shrink back into its cave.
All of a sudden my throat feels as though it’s being squeezed by aninvisible hand and tears blur my vision. “Does it make a difference how? Would I be feeling any less... broken if it had been a heart attack behind the wheel?”
Shelley touches my shoulder as she places a cup of tea on the table in front of me. “I guess not,” she says, sitting down again. “We had a son—Dylan. He was perfect in every way. A beautiful smiling baby, an energetic toddler. We always thought Dylan would be a footballer. He was kicking a ball before he could walk properly. Or a swimmer. He loved the water.” She draws in a breath and fiddles with the locket around her neck before she continues. “He was two years old when he was diagnosed with a rare leukemia and four when he died. It was long and drawn-out. We’d spent half his life in and out of hospital. We knew he was dying, but it didn’t make the hurt any less when it happened.”
“Oh God.” My hand flies to my mouth. “I’m so sorry,” I mumble, feeling shitty again. Shitty because losing a child is worse than losing a husband. Even in my current state I know this. I would be nothing without Jamie.
“Thank you,” she says. Our eyes meet and I feel something pass between us—some kind of shared knowledge of the rawness of grief. That’s how Shelley knew about my nightmares. I wonder if she still has hers.
“It was four years ago this summer,” Shelley continues. “I had lots of people who helped me through the grief in those early days. My sister moved in with us and took care of everything. She forced Tim and me—that’s my husband—to eat and to get out of the house. It’s why I started volunteering for the charity, and why I took a course and qualified as a grief counselor. I run my own private practice from a room in my home. The thought of going through something likethat without my friends and family, I just don’t know if I’d have survived.”
A silence settles over us. Shelley blows on the top of her mug, changing the direction of the steam and reminding me of the bonfire. I can feel the scratch of the smoke in the back of my throat just thinking of that day.
“Do you have any family nearby?” she asks.
“My mum is an hour away. She lives on the seafront in Westcliff. She has arthritis and is very frail. She stayed here for a few weeks but the stairs were too much and I couldn’t... I couldn’t look after her on top of everything else. She calls me most days, but I don’t always pick up. It’s hard to tell her how I’m feeling when I know it’ll only worry her, so I lie, or more often than not, I let the answerphone get it.”
“What about brothers and sisters?”
“One older brother, Sam. He lives in Sheffield with his boyfriend, Finn. They’re both hospital doctors and work all hours. Sam would come if I asked him, but I can’t bring myself to. He’s worked so hard to get where he is, and anyway, I don’t know how it would help.
“Mark’s brother lives nearby in Ipswich. He stopped by earlier to check on me—”
“That’s good.”
I pull a face. “Not really. We’ve never got on. I always got the impression he wasn’t interested in me and Jamie. He isn’t married and doesn’t have children, and it’s like he couldn’t understand why Mark did want those things. Mark said I was worrying over nothing. He thought I was trying to compare Ian to my brother, Sam, and that the two weren’t comparable. He thought the only reason Ian was cool toward us was because I was cool toward him.”
“Ah. Maybe not the best person to go to for support then.”
“Probably not.”
“How about friends locally? Neighbors you can turn to?”
