Page 87 of A Good Mother
By all accounts, and much to my glee, a female vicar and her young family are now in residence and have brought much-needed life back to St Mary’s and the village.
I haven’t spoken to Edmund since the day we argued at the kitchen table. I doubt I ever will. I don’t know if he suspects Arty and me of being together, now or in the past, that his arrogance presumes his brother is merely providing safe haven. In truth, I really don’t care what Edmund thinks anymore.
Cris, of course is deliriously happy that me and his sister are here, on the same continent as him and he’s visited us many times. He knows the truth and hasn’t batted an eyelid, in fact, he said he’s always suspected Arty was in love with me and admitted that in another world, he’d have happily swapped dads. No surprise there.
Which brings me to Gina and Babs. Gina and Jimmy are well into developing the Young Farm and she’s loving life, both professionally and personally with a new baby on the way, plus a host of new clients she fits between motherhood and mood boards. Gina forgave me instantly for whisking Willow away once she understood Nate’s plans. She Facetimes us regularly, keeping her best-friends-forever promise like I knew she would.
And Granny Babs. Where should I begin? In a nutshell her family are fine and in between Easy Jetting back and forth whenever the fancy takes her, she works with Tom and Cris, running their cruise boat business. She’s so very happy and lives in an apartment overlooking the beach, bought by money-bags Bridie, who had a big win on the lottery. Babs is a wonderful granny and adores her grandson Erling, named after a footballer, apparently! She’s even been to visit her old schoolfriend, Lynda.
Demi is settling into university and goes to see her mum during the holidays, as do Sasha and Isaac who miraculously got over the shock of their mother leaving. Even Pete managed to survive and, according to Babs, is dating a woman he met at a pool match.
See, life really does go on, even when none of us could ever imagine changing the one we had. I’m proof of that.
And what about my Willow? Well, as I said, Arty arranged everything. Unlike Edmund who was prepared to use the bank of mum and dad to incarcerate her, Arty used his inheritance to do the opposite.
He found a wonderful doctor, Professor Barerra, who has taken her under his wing. They’ve made magnificent progress using a combination of new treatments, for example sending magnetic impulses to the brain. The change in her is remarkable and it’s given us all hope for the future.
Willow leads a much more independent life now. Still living with us, but by day she is here at the convent. It’s part of the hospital, where she works as a volunteer, helping the sisters, a nursing order of nuns. Willow helps in the garden, or in the kitchen and is a favourite with the little ones. That’s what she’s doing now, playing catch with the children from the ward, running barefoot on the grass just like she did in her dream.
She takes great comfort from being around the sisters. The nuns have infinite patience and seem to radiate something, signals of love, kindness, whatever. Willow receives them loud and clear.
She also loves to sit in church and listen to the incantations and prayers, finding great peace in her surroundings and amongst those she calls angels here on earth. Who am I to doubt that? She’s thriving and that’s all I care about. Perhaps she will convert and if she does I will support her because I’ve always known her place is beside the God she believes in. Imagine Edmund’s face if he found out his child had become a Catholic!
And me?
I keep my faith deep inside. I’ll always have my demons but with Arty to fight them off, I think I’ll be okay. Nobody, apart from him will ever know what I planned to do that day at the vicarage. I tore the letters up and threw them into the Channel as we crossed on the ferry but when we got here, I had to tell Arty the truth.
I couldn’t start a new life with the man I love without him knowing who I was. It would have eaten me alive, keeping that secret and I would’ve understood if he’d been so appalled he turned against me, but he didn’t.
Arty is adamant that it was a result of deep trauma. And it does make sense because ever since Maya died, I’d put Willow first and I’d not properly mourned her loss. I refused counselling. Put my grief to one side and bottled it up. I focused on Willow instead. And when faced with having another precious child taken away the shock and fear of losing Willow pushed me over the edge.
Caring for Willow had kept me going. That innate mother’s love that places their child before them muffled the scream in my head when I remembered the day we lost Maya. When Edmund and Nate said they were taking Willow away, the void opened and I was once again bereft, before the event, after the event, and it was too much. The balance of my mind drove me to act that way, nothing else.
Yes, I was prepared to sacrifice my life to help Willow and pay the ultimate price a mother can for their child, an act borne from love, not malice and certainly not evil. And when I worry that God will punish me, for the thoughts I had that day, for the thing I almost did, I remember that the angels came just at the right time.
Perhaps they didn’t just come to save Willow; maybe they came to save me, as well.
Did Willow simply wake from a vivid dream? Or was it her angel?
I suppose I will never know, or maybe, one day I will.
What I do know is this.
That the love a mother has for her child is infinite, and the sacrifices we make, the wrong turns and mistakes, the good days and the bad are all part of the things we do, for love.
There’s no right or wrong way to be a mother. We learn on the job and that terrible day when I almost got it very wrong, it somehow turned out right.
My beautiful Willow was trapped inside her head, locked in a cage, no escape in sight but just look at her now, smiling in the sun, laughing. The days of torment are behind her. The future looks bright because in the end, and perhaps with the help of the angels, I found a way.
I set her free. My little bird.
THE END