Page 59 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Fifty-Seven

‘Well.’ Dr Selena Gresch and I stand in the hospital corridor outside my father’s room, before Selena makes her rounds. ‘I suppose I ought to wish you good luck, though I do wish you’d hang around and let me study you.’

‘I know.’ I smile. ‘Well, if I’m still here tomorrow, you can, but then again, if I’m still here tomorrow, I doubt there is much worth studying about me.’

‘True,’ she replies, with a laugh. ‘I wish you the best of luck, Maia. Wherever you are tomorrow, just know I will be thinking of and wondering about you for the rest of my life.’

‘That you haven’t had me locked up in an institution is something I will always be grateful for,’ I tell her. ‘Thank you for believing me, or at least pretending to.’

‘Can we . . . ?’

‘Please . . .’

We hug briefly, and Selena shakes my hand.

‘Safe journey, Maia Borg.’

* * *

All my life, I’ve wanted my dad to greet me as if he loves me. Today, I am trying to find a way to do something I’ve done in a hundred ways over the years: to say goodbye. And I’m struggling to find the words.

‘Vanessa?’ I am a little surprised to find my dad’s fourth wife sitting next to his bed, packing my father’s things into a suitcase, but I’m relieved, too. Ness is a nice woman, kind and generous. She makes the room a kinder place, somehow: a place I can be brave enough to say the difficult things.

‘I told her not to come,’ Dad grumbles, more to himself than to me. ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself – I told her.’

‘Hello, Maia.’ Vanessa gets up in a cloud of floaty linen and gives me a kiss on each cheek. She smells of roses and lemon. ‘I had such high hopes for your trip. I’m so sorry it went wrong.’

‘I’m sorry I nearly killed your husband,’ I say. ‘Do you still get life-insurance payouts at his age?’

Vanessa chuckles and finishes the packing.

‘So, you’re leaving?’ I say, looking at the case. ‘They’ve given you the all-clear?’

‘Not the all-clear exactly,’ Vanessa says. ‘It’s more that your father insists on leaving.’

‘I’m being discharged into my wife’s care. We will fly home tomorrow,’ he says.

‘I’m going out to find something delicious for my dinner,’ Vanessa tells us. ‘I’ll leave you two to it.’

‘Will you bring me back something . . . edible?’ Dad calls after her. ‘Hospital food.’

‘Are you still in pain?’ I ask, when Vanessa has left.

‘Well, at my age, that’s a given,’ he replies. ‘Reminds you you’re still alive.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Look, for what it’s worth, Dad – that you even suggested this trip, it does mean a lot to me.’

‘It was Vanessa’s idea,’ Dad tells me, fixing me with his hooded eyes.

‘I know!’ I smile wanly. ‘But you went along with it when you didn’t have to, and that counts for something.

You wanted to try. That means a lot.’ I pause for a moment, trying to find exactly the right words for what I want to say.

‘I used to think that it was your fault, our terrible relationship,’ I tell him.

‘And then for a long time, I felt like it had to be my fault, like I wasn’t good enough or interesting enough . . .’

‘Maia . . .’ he begins.

‘No, let me finish.’ I sit down next to him, taking his hand.

‘It’s no one’s fault. We are both victims of circumstances that were outside our control.

We both lost our mums; we have both had to fend for ourselves.

It made us into people who found it hard to connect.

So, I just wanted to say: I’m sorry about the crash, and I forgive you for not being the ideal dad. I hope you can forgive me.’

‘For what?’ he asks.

‘For anything and everything,’ I say. ‘And please know that I do love you. As best I can.’

Our eyes meet, and we hold that gaze for a long time, so long that his age melts away from his face and it’s David I’m sitting opposite, his small hand that I hold in mine.

‘Why do I feel like you’re saying goodbye forever?’ Dad asks me, puzzled.

‘Because I am,’ I confess. ‘I’m leaving here, Dad, and I’m not planning on coming back. If things go the way I hope, you will probably never hear from me again.’ I laugh wryly. ‘But I do hope that you will have a life better than you could once have imagined. I really do.’

‘Maia.’ Dad leans towards me. ‘You’re not making any sense. You aren’t planning to do anything stupid, are you?’

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, I’m just planning to travel, to find myself – you know, the sort of hippy journey of discovery that Mum would have loved to have gone on.’

‘I did love your mother, you know, in my own way,’ Dad says. ‘When she died, I mourned her.’

‘I know,’ I say.

He doesn’t need to say more, I can feel everything in the slight squeeze of his hand and the look in the depths of his starlit eyes.

‘Goodbye, my girl,’ he says.

‘Goodbye, Dad,’ I say.

I get up to leave when he catches my hand.

‘Wait – I do have something for you,’ Dad says.

‘A parting gift?’ I laugh. What could he give me now when he never remembers my birthday?

‘In a way,’ he says. ‘A memory. It came to me in the night last night, as clear as if it happened just the day before and not eighty-three years ago.’

‘What memory?’ I ask.

‘You wanted to know why I named you Maia,’ Dad says.

‘Well, last night I remembered. It came back to me in a Technicolor rush, clear as Saturday-morning cinema. I was very small during the war, you see – so vulnerable, afraid most of the time, and often lost. Lost in this huge, grown-up thing that had nothing to do with me but that I couldn’t escape from. ’

Drawing in a slow breath, I hold it and wait.

‘But there was this girl, a woman about your age now. For some reason, this young woman noticed me and singled me out for kindness. She was brave; she was gentle. She was a shelter to that little boy.’

‘She sounds pretty neat,’ I say, my voice barely more than a whisper.

‘Yes,’ Dad says. ‘Yes, and her name was Maia Borg.’