Page 14 of I Would Die for You

“So, what’s going on with Mum?” she asks, avoiding eye contact by looking in the fridge for something she doesn’t need.

John makes a strange grunting sound and Nicole waits to see if it’s to stifle a sob or to clear his throat to speak.

“The doctor’s wrong” is all he says, before roughly pulling open the cutlery drawer, noisily collecting knives and forks and taking them through to the dining room.

Nicole waits a beat. “What did he say?”

She watches through the serving hatch as her father’s shoulders convulse, and she can’t help but let out a whimper that escapes from deep within her chest.

“He… he thinks she’s had enough,” says John. “He thinks she can’t take any more.”

Nicole swallows the implication.

“But he doesn’t know my Gigi,” he says, laying the table with increasing vigor, as if he’s attempting to power his wife’s resilience with his own hands. “He doesn’t know what she’s capable of—the strength of her mind, what her body can do…” His voice breaks and Nicole instinctively wants to go to him, but knows he would rather brush her off than show any vulnerability.

“So, what’s next?”

“We keep going,” he snaps, as if she shouldn’t need to ask. “We take the medicines. We do the treatments. We don’t give up, because one of them is going to work and when that day comes, these doctors will realize that they have no idea who they’re dealing with. Your mum’s going to show them that miracles really do exist.”

His jaw is set and his eyes are locked as he wills himself to believe his own sermon, but an unrelenting despair is etched into every crevice of his furrowed brow as the reality of losing his beloved wife bears down on him.

Nicole is grateful for the sound of the key in the front door, if only to bring him back from the brink of where she fears he’s going.

“Hey,” gushes Cassie, her curls bouncing as she runs to hug her sister. The sense of relief that she doesn’t have to manage her father alone tonight is palpable. But it only adds to the weight of responsibility on Nicole’s shoulders.

“You look like a stick of rock,” says Nicole, forcing a laugh as Cassie stands there in her work tabard and striped blouse. “I bet if we cut you open, you’d have ‘Woolworths’ running all the way through you.”

Cassie checks that their dad is still in the dining room. “It’d say ‘Secret Oktober,’” she whispers, with a wink.

Nicole rolls her eyes. Sometimes her little sister displays such levels of maturity that she forgets she’s only sixteen, but this whole obsession with a pop group, which seems to have ramped up a gear in recent months, makes her seem younger than her years. There’s a part of Nicole that gets it—to a degree. It’s a bond that she shares with their mother—an excuse to recall memories of a time gone by and an attempt to re-create them—and Nicole supposes that, right now, Cassie is looking to garner as much of that as she can. But to the detriment of everything else?

“I wouldn’t push it tonight,” she says.

“Why?” presses Cassie, seemingly oblivious to what’s going on. Nicole wishesshewas as blithely ignorant.

“It’s not a good time, as you well know…”

“Has something happened with Mum?” asks Cassie, her eyes widening.

Nicole blinks back the sting of tears. How will life ever be the same if anything happens to her? Who will Nicole turn to when her mother’s voice is the only one she heeds?

She would never have got through the past few months as unscathed as she was, if it weren’t for her mother’s unswerving support and heartfelt advice. While John was threatening to kill Nicole’s ex-boyfriend Aaron for daring to cheat, it was Gigi’s more measured approach that their daughter had harnessed.

“One day he’ll wake up and his heart will hurt, and he’ll not know why,” she’d said, stroking Nicole’s long hair as she lay on the sofa. “But eventually it will dawn on him that it’s because he lost the best thing that ever happened to him.”

It had only taken two weeks for the epiphany to present itself, but, thanks to her mother’s incessant determination to drill into her that she deserved better than Aaron, Nicole was more than ready when he came begging for forgiveness. And every time she’d beentempted to capitulate since, it was her mother who lifted her onto a pedestal so that her perspective wasn’t skewed by the empty promises he was throwing her way.

Nicole can’t stop a tear from falling. How will she hold herself up without her mother? And more important, how will she be able to keep Cassie’s head above water while she herself is drowning?

“There’s no change,” lies Nicole, under the guise of protecting her. “But Dad’s not in a good place, so I would advise you to tread lightly.”

The three of them sit at the dining table in silence, theNews at Tenpresenter the only voice in the room. The TV is on more often than not these days. In fact, it almost never gets turned off, as they attempt to fill the void of Gigi’s absence, even though she’s still upstairs.

“So, how was work?” John asks Cassie, as he pushes sausages around his plate with no intention of eating them.

“It was good,” she says, nodding enthusiastically. “They put me on pick ’n’ mix today.”

John does his best to feign interest. “What does that entail, then?”

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