Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [57]
When I get back to the cottage, Mum is in the garden in a borrowed kimono wrap, collecting eggs from underneath the rose bushes. She’s bare-legged but wearing her trademark spike heels, which keep sinking into the grass and giving her a lopsided, slightly unsteady look. Her long hair is loose and uncombed, and she’s singing to herself as she drifts about the garden.
My mum never sings. She looks up and stops in her tracks, smiling softly, as though she hasn’t seen me for a long, long time. Apart from last night, I guess she hasn’t.
‘Scarlett,’ she says. ‘Your dad rang. The baby’s had a good night, and the doctors have taken her off the ventilator. That’s great news, isn’t it?’
‘She’s OK?’ I gasp. ‘She’s out of special care?’
‘She’s fine,’ Mum confirms. ‘I think they’ll keep her in special care for a while, just to be on the safe side, but she’s out of danger. What a relief!’
I never thought she’d care.
‘Poor Clare,’ she says. ‘Poor Chris. If anything had happened to that baby…’ She slips an arm round my shoulders and we go inside, and I want to shout and sing and dance with relief because my new baby sister is going to be OK, after all.
I start with the shouting. ‘Holly!’ I yell. ‘Holly, wake up! The baby’s out of danger! Everything’s going to be fine!’
Holly pads down the stairs, bleary-eyed, still wearing yesterday’s crumpled clothes. I take her hands and waltz her round the kitchen until she’s wide awake and laughing, and we flop down at the kitchen table just as Mum sets down plates of scrambled eggs, baked beans, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes. It’s actually veggie. For once, my mum is paying attention.
She hacks into one of Clare’s granary loaves, producing a mound of crumbling brown bricks. She butters one and takes a bite. ‘Ugh,’ she groans. ‘What is that, wholemeal sawdust? Give me ciabatta any day.’
Just when I’m starting to think my mum has taken a crash course in full-on, earth-mother, knit-your-own-lentils sweetness and light, she comes over all snooty city girl.
I guess I kind of like her like that.
*
Mum stays on at the cottage for a fortnight, while Dad and Clare camp out at the hopsital, waiting for the moment the doctors will declare my new baby sister is well enough to come home.
Mum doesn’t moan about missing work, she just calls in and says it’s an emergency and that she’s owed a whole raft of holidays anyhow, might as well take them now. She helps Holly and me to decorate the sky-blue bedroom with sparkly stars and a crescent moon painted in silver acrylic paint. We paint a wide, arching rainbow that stretches from one corner of the room to another. When my new baby sister looks up from her cot, she’ll see stars to wish on, a moon to soothe her to sleep, a slice of rainbow to remind her that magic is always just round the corner.
I move my bed into Holly’s room, and hey, it’s not so bad. Seriously.
We finish the cot quilt, too, Mum and Holly and me. We add a border of red patches round Clare’s quilt, a jigsaw of scarlet, crimson and bright vermilion red, snipped from the remaining dresses in the attic. We all take turns at patching the pieces together, stitching them down, decorating the joins with zigzag or chain stitch or French knots in bright, contrasting threads. I’ve stitched my love into that quilt, my hopes and dreams for my new baby sister.
We take it along to the hospital and give it to Clare, who hugs us all, even Mum, and puts the quilt at the end of the baby’s incubator. My new baby sister kicks her legs and opens her eyes wide and when I put my hand in through the porthole in the side of the plastic cot, she takes my finger in her tiny fist and squeezes, and I know that she loves me and guess what, I love her back, now, always, forever, no questions asked.
Clare sits in a comfy chair in the visitors’ room beside the special care unit, watching the baby through the glass partition and leafing through a book on names.
‘I’d like a Gaelic name,’ Clare muses.