Page 84 of A Part of Me and You
Juliette
I am drifting.
I am sailing along on what feels like a big fluffy cloud and it is taking me somewhere but I don’t know where to. I see faces in the distance, familiar faces, waving to me, smiling and urging me to come to them, to keep sailing. They are like a magnetic force, pulling me along invisible rails on a one-way system and I feel that there is no going back. There is a woman, holding a little girl and their smiles warm my heart and make me go faster towards them.
‘Mum!’
I hear Rosie behind me, calling me back. I try to turn back but I can’t.
‘Mum!’ she calls again, louder this time and the faces in front of me fade away. When I slowly open my heavy, tired eyes, the room that was so bright and breezy when Shelley was here earlier is now dark and cosy and I see Rosie’s face in the glow of my bedside lamp.
‘Rosie, darling,’ I say softly. ‘You’re here. Where’s Dan?’
‘He’s fine, he’s asleep,’ she tells me. ‘Aunty Helen is asleep on the armchair. She only left you moments ago, to be with Nan and Grandpa but I didn’t want you to be alone in here.’
The worry on her face crushes my heart.
‘You don’t have to sit in a vigil for me,’ I say to my only daughter. ‘Did they sit for long? I didn’t even know Nan and Grandpa had arrived.’
‘They sat for a few hours. They talked to you but you couldn’t hear them.’
‘I must have been in a very deep sleep,’ I whisper. ‘I’m very tired, Rosie. You need to get some sleep too.’
‘I tried and tried but I can’t, Mummy’ she says to me. ‘I can’t sleep because I’m frightened. I don’t want to leave you alone. I don’t want to be alone.’
Mummy.
She called me ‘Mummy’. She hasn’t called me that since she was about three years old, she hasn’t woken me up frightened in the night since she reached double figures and my heart breaks for her.
I pat the bed beside me, just as I used to back then when she was so little and dependent and she crawls in beside me under the covers. She drapes her warm arms around me and I inhale her familiarity, my safe haven, my first true love. My daughter.
I think of Shelley and what she told me earlier about Matt and I wonder if it was all a dream. How can I even bring up what I now know to Rosie? I don’t think I can right now. It would be too much for her to handle.
‘Tell me what you were dreaming of,’ says Rosie, taking me by surprise. ‘You were almost singing in your sleep like you were having a really fun time. I shouldn’t have woke you, I’m sorry.’
I close my eyes and in my mind I try to go back to the bright yellow glow and the safety of the drifting cloud but I can’t. I can’t place the faces I saw anymore. The feeling I had has subsided and even though I remember how good it felt at the time, nothing compares to lying here with my baby girl in my arms.
‘I don’t know where I was in my dreams, darling,’ I say to Rosie. ‘But I want you to promise me something when and if you ever get scared again at night, maybe when I’m no longer here to soothe you.’
‘No, Mum,’ she says, but I need her to know this. ‘I can’t think of you not being here.’
‘I want you to remember something, darling,’ I say to her. ‘I want you to remember the day we spent on the beach horse-riding. I want you to picture my face and how I was so scared yet I did it, I totally did it and when I did I realised that I had nothing to be afraid of after all. ‘
‘I said you were a superstar and I will always believe you are,’ she whispers to me. ‘I will always remember you as a superstar, my hero, my brave, beautiful mother.’
‘And the songs we danced to here a few nights ago, I want you to turn them up in your head and when fear overcomes you, sing them out loud and remember how we laughed and danced and sang together,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll be dancing beside you. Dancing and singing. You won’t see me but you’ll know I’m there.’
She snuggles closer to me and I can tell by her breathing that her fear is beginning to subside.
‘I had no idea what I was going to do when you were born, you know,’ I whisper into her hair. ‘You were a fiery little bundle of energy and I was very alone and very afraid, yet as well as me teaching you the ways of the world in the best way I could for fifteen wonderful years, you taught me even more than I ever taught you, Rosie. You taught me the power of unconditional love, of the extremes that we will go to for the people we really love. Never let anything stand in the way of love, my darling. Always be kind, always be positive and always choose love.’
My voice is tired and I can feel myself drifting off to sleep again, just as Rosie is in my arms. She feels so peaceful beside me and I cherish this moment of silence and bliss, with only the sound of the clock ticking away my time and her breathing as she lies in my arms, clinging to me like she will never let go.
‘I will never let you go, Rosie,’ I whisper. ‘You will never be alone. I will always watch over you.’
I see the faces again, calling to me, urging me to come their way to a place free of pain and worry, where no heartache or fear exists and I don’t think I’ll be able to turn back this time. The woman and the little girl, waving at me to keep going, another much older couple wrapped in each other’s arms reassure me to come closer. A small crowd gathers and they do the same, faces from my past, faces that I know so well.
My eyes open and the pale yellow of the bedroom in this sweet little cottage blurs into the deep yellow of the light that is calling me in the distance. I am safe, I am happy, I am at peace.
