Page 13 of Friends with Benefits

I guess we’re going to New York. I don’t like the fact Jake will be paying, but I’m not complaining about going. I mean, sure, I don’t want to be caught up in his melodrama – Jake can be a little dramatic – but I would never have refused to go with him. Not for long, anyway. He would have ground me down eventually. I’m incapable of saying no to him. Maybe it’s that charm of his. Perhaps it’s the fact he made me remember how to smile again. Or it could be that he’s the best man I have ever known. Well, with the exception of my parents. And right there is the biggest reason I had to say yes. My dad.

I don’t remember much about my dad. I’m grateful to my mum that she shielded her nine-year-old daughter from the darkest days as much as she could. She tried to ease my heartache. I don’t blame her for not being able to, for the fact my heart is still broken now, when I’m thirty years old, or that I wake up each day and think about him, and her. That my heart will never be truly whole. She was my protector, my armor. But I still saw some things that I can never forget.

I remember standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom as my mum bathed the sores on my dad’s arms and legs that developed as a result of his being bed-bound for weeks.

I can still see the fluorescence of the hospital lights, illuminating the cold corridors, through the gray of day, and the dark of night, because nothing was bright any more. The smell of cheap food, mingled with what I now believe was death, comes to me sometimes, as if I’m right there.

Sometimes, when I dream, I am back in his hospital room, watching as his organs failed and he slowly began to drown in his own mucus, only to be pulled back to life by nurses draining his lungs. I still remember holding my own breath as I watched him, feeling like I was sliding under water. It hits me when I least expect it, like when I’m watching a game of rugby and the players pile into a tackle. I can feel the fight for air of the player on the bottom of the pile. In those moments, I am nine years old. And I am helpless.

When I’m alone, if I don’t stay busy, I have moments between conscious thoughts when I hear the last words my parents spoke to each other. They come to me clearly, as if my parents are right beside me, saying the words in real time.

My mum bent over his naked torso, which was not frail and skinny like you might expect in a man who had spent months fighting disease. He was large and bloated from the lethal cocktail of pain medication and steroids being pumped through his veins.

‘You can’t leave me.’ My mum’s voice broke and she began to sob. ‘I don’t know how to be here without you.’

My dad opened his eyes, unrelenting, even at the bitter end. For long seconds, I recall only hearing the ominous beeps of machines, counting down, counting him out of this world. Nurses shuffled in the corridor behind me and someone closed the door to give us privacy.

Eventually, my dad found his breath. He told her, ‘You need to look after Jess. You promised me. As long as you have her, you have me.’

‘No. I can’t. I can’t do it without you.’

She cried the words, as if she was oblivious to my presence in the room. I remember how the ground shifted beneath my feet as my dad dragged air into his lungs for the last time and almost sighed it out. As if he were resigned to letting death take him. As if he were relieved to be going to a better place. As if he were at peace.

What struck me then and has always stayed with me, is how a calm settled over me as I watched the pain and grayness leave my dad’s face, as if it were draining from him as his soul left his broken body. Around me, nurses moved to take wires from his arms and end the one long, continuous bleep of the machine that no longer showed a beat but one flat line of color. His still heart.

A lady who had been supporting my mum in the recent days caught her and held her up, lifting her arms from my dad’s lifeless body.

I remember distinctly that I just watched, keeping my eyes open when they wanted to close. I didn’t cry. Not because I didn’t understand that I would never see my dad in the same way again, but because I got the sense that he was still with me. He was in the room. His words, his heart, his soul still existed, just on another plane.

In the months after he died, my mum yearned for him desperately. She cried herself to sleep, his name on her lips and his photograph in her hands.

We were inseparable for eighteen months after that. Mum tried to keep her promise to stay on Earth for me. But even as I turned ten, then eleven, I could sense how much she wanted to be with him.

We always talked about him. We talked about the time he built me a trampoline in the garden and broke his arm being the first person to try it out for safety. We would smile about the breakfast pancakes he used to make with smiley blueberry faces. He didn’t want his pancakes to be like everyone else’s pancakes. He cooked the smile into the batter so my pancakes were actually smiling at me as I ate them. I often thought about the hours we spent watching movies at Christmas and how Dad promised that one day, we would go to New York and run the path Macaulay Culkin ran to get away from the Wet Bandits, from the toy shop, down Fifth Avenue and through a hotel. How he said we could one day go to Central Park in search of the bird woman. His time came to an end before we ever made it. But I’ll do it for us both.

I smile at the thought of Jake running with me. I think my dad would have liked him. He would have thought he was a cheeky little swine, for sure, but a loveable rogue, just like I do.

When Mum got sick after my dad died, eighteen months to the day, people used words and phrases like awful coincidence and tragedy. I understood why people might think that but I knew, somehow, on some level, my mum had wanted so desperately to be with my dad, she’d willed her illness, made a deal with the Devil to see my dad again.

I’m not an idiot. I appreciate how crazy that might sound. But the thing is, you didn’t know my parents. You didn’t see and feel how much they loved each other. It was tangible. Like a presence in the room whenever they were together. It wasn’t just the looks, the touches, the kisses my dad planted on my mum’s cheek every time he left the house, or the way my mum smiled unconsciously when she was watching my dad do nothing but just be.

He was her soulmate.

They shared the kind of love people lie awake at night and dream of experiencing. Their bond was unbreakable.

My mum cried on her death bed, told me she had failed him. That she had broken her promise to look after me. But I said, ‘He won’t care, Mum. He’ll be so happy to have you back. Sometimes, we break promises. We do and say things that hurt each other. But we only make real promises and only have the ability to hurt when it’s someone we really care about. He won’t care because you’re with him. You’re leaving me to be with him every day.’

She tried to raise her hand from her bed and reach out to me but she couldn’t. The end was too close. I took hold of her hand and stroked her bare head, which had once been covered in long dark hair, like my own. And I said, ‘You were broken, Mum. You’ve been broken for too long. Go to him now. Let him fix you.’

A silent tear rolled down her cheek. ‘You are so brave and beautiful. I’m proud of you, Jessica.’

I squeezed her hand and sat by her bedside until she fell asleep. My dad’s name was the last thing to leave her, as a whisper.

I knew then that she was going. She could see him and she was leaving me to go to him.

Those were the last words my mum ever spoke to me and his name was the very last thing she said.

I cried when she died. I cried because I longed to have both my parents back. Because by the time Mum died, I was only thirteen years old and I had to live with an aunt and uncle I’d hardly ever met. But I knew then and I know now, some things are bigger than you, or me, or this world. Some things have to be and will be and will last forever. Some things are more powerful than heaven and earth. Some things are timeless and will forever live on, in some form.

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