Crashed

I’m in a stupor the moment I cut the engine. The car park is awash with disused concrete, peeling in the sun. I grit my teeth. It shouldn’t be so sunny, not when I know what I know. The sun should not be shinning, not today.

I wipe my eyes and open the door. Slam it behind me. At my side, an ambulance roars through the gates, the driver stone-faced with a five o’ clock shadow as he pulls into A & E.

For a second, I fracture. I wonder if that’s her, blood pooling around her broken bones. I blink. Regain my composure. As a Farmer, I can’t afford to stand here, frozen in my own shock. Instead, I stalk across the hospital car park, edging over the cracks in the ground. Otherwise I’ll fall.

Inside the automatic doors, which seem to refuse to part for me, it’s a storm of white-washed walls. The receptionist, who’s sporting electric guitar earrings, sits at a desk cut from the sky. He smiles as I approach.

“Where is she?” I snap. It isn’t his fault – I know it isn’t – but my tongue is a javelin. I cannot control it. I’ve never had to control it around the Farm hands, or my ex-husband for that matter.

“Name please,” the Receptionist responds, not looking at me. He’s wearing a name tag that I cannot read. My arms itch to shake him.

“Wendy Stodd,” I say. “You brought my daughter in fifteen minutes ago”. Nodding, the Receptionist offers a tight smile. Continues to tap, tap away. Tapping away on his little computer. When he looks up, his smile is gone.

“Yes. Your daughter, I’m afraid, is in the ICU. If you’d like to sit in the waiting room, it’s just down that hallway on your left”. He fails to notice the way my body twitches. In fact, he returns to his computer completely unaware that waiting is the last thing I want to do right now. Instead, I thank him in a small, small voice before steadily walking through a set of double doors which are pinioned like wings to the wall. The hallway turns to a maze, but eventually, I find myself sitting on one of those semi-plastic chairs, the kind which are a disconcerting shade of blue, the kind of blue you’d associate with the bubonic plague.

I’m not alone for long.

He bursts in like a pustule, all jaundiced teeth beneath chapped lips. I turn away, pretend that I can’t see him. His eyes find me anyway. Hair smoothed, with his car salesman’s frown, the kind of frown he reserves for those who take the plum BMW on a test drive but decide not to buy it. Frantically, he glances about us, hoping that the seat next to me is occupied. I sigh. We both know he must face me.

“Where is she?” he asks. “Where is my daughter?” I scowl.

“Our daughter. Or have you forgotten? I’m not surprised. Always off in a different room, drinking yourself to death. You forget who Annie was raised by”.

“Don’t make me laugh,” scoffs my ex-husband. He storms toward me, but soon turns away. Breathing hard, he stares at the wall. I watch to see if it crumbles. I continue, ever the debater.

“You were never at the dinner table to help feed her in the highchair. You missed her football practice. You weren’t the one who gave her pocket money when she washed the car – your car. The car you took when you left, leaving me with no way to get to work,” I add. My ex-husband does not reply. Instead, he begins to pace the waiting room, his suede shoes clapping like twin sheets of flesh. I bite my lip, wondering if Annie screamed, wondering if she’s screaming right now. I clasp my hands together, hoping. Michael catches me and he chuckles; his smile is practically a wisp of smoke.

“You really think praying will help? If a God does exist, then why didn’t he stop my little girl from getting hurt in the first place?” I hide a snarl.

“You were the one who gave her a discount on that car”.

“How do you know she was driving? You always blamed her, Wendy. For everything. You should have been blaming yourself”. My lips snap shut. I think of the way he left without writing a note, the way he smiled in Court during the Custody Hearing, when he won, and I lost. The way Annie fought to visit me every weekend even though all I did was avoid her and put her to work on the farm. Perhaps, if I’d been more ardent, if I’d shed less tears, I would have won the case. Perhaps then, she’d be sitting at the farm right now, my Sheepdog Gizmo’s head in her lap and not here. Here with me, in my wellington boots slicked with mud, tracking mud all over this too-white floor.

“You haven’t changed,” I tell my ex-husband. Still the same passive voice, lacking passion, lacking everything. He only blames me because he doesn’t have the strength to blame himself. It takes two to ruin a marriage. We danced too close to the sun and years later, we’re still in flames.

“Neither have you,” says Michael. “You know, this would never have happened if you’d taken the time to understand what was going on in my daughter’s life, but you never understood her!”

“Our daughter,” I repeat.

“Our daughter was drowning!” Michael steps forward and, for a second, his mask slips. “Our daughter was drowning in our voices and we wouldn’t listen to her. Now look where we are”. He sighs, walks towards me. Sits down in the chair. His head hits the wall. Closing his eyes, he breaths out, long, and hard.

“Look at us,” I sigh. “Annie wouldn’t want us to fight like this. What did she used to tell us?”

“She used to tell us to act our age, even when she was six!” We chuckle, sinking further into the chairs.

“Maybe I wasn’t always the best Mum,” I admit softly.

“Me neither”. I choke a laugh.

“As Mothers go, Mike, you were terrible. But as Fathers go…” I reach for his hand; he lets me take it.

“You weren’t that bad at all”.

A silence shatters our smiles as we remember where we are, why we’re here. Neither of us speak. We’re both wondering how this happened, why this happened. Wondering who are daughter will be when we see her again. Praying, with all my might, that she won’t need a blood transfusion and, God Forbid, if she does, she’ll think of us and accept it. My Annie always lived so fast: Buddhism, to Hinduism to Transcendental Meditation to becoming the first Jehovah’s Witness in the family. I grit my teeth. If I hadn’t been so obsessed with the farm, none of this would have happened.

I don’t realise I’m crying until Michael’s grip on my hand strengthens. I look up to find him staring at me. His eyes are bottomless, but they are no longer like a shark’s.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he’s saying, even though I don’t believe him.

“It was mine.”

“Ours,” I echo.

And we sit in the waiting room, a room so aptly named, until our world finds the needle to sew itself back together.