Drawn Away by Holly Bennett

Author:Holly Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459812543
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2016-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

The phone rang the next morning just as I was getting into the shower. I stuck my head out the door until I was sure my mother had picked up and it wasn’t for me. I was mostly dressed when she tapped on my door and came in.

“What’s up?” I noticed her bathrobe and her bedhead hair before I took in the look on her face. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

She eased herself down on my bed. “That was the hospital in Ottawa. They said…Lucy, I’m afraid your grandfather Shamus has died.”

My eyes were burning with tears before her words had fully sunk in, like my body understood faster than my mind. “Oh God—how?” But I was hardly listening to the words pneumonia, complications, underlying lung disease. I was flashing back to when my dad died, and how one of the many things I’d been angry about was that my mother had stopped visiting his father, my Grampa Shamus. I loved my grampa and had yelled at Mom about how he was lonely and sad too. “Lucy, I just can’t,” she’d said and left the room. I’d wanted to see my grampa because I thought it would be a bit like seeing my dad. Now I realized my mother hadn’t felt able to for the same reason.

She’d started visiting again in the past year, though, and we’d made the three-hour drive to Ottawa every few months. But I looked at her now and saw guilt as well as sorrow.

“He didn’t even tell me he was sick,” she murmured. Then she straightened her back, sighed and looked at me straight on. “Lucy, I have to go down there and organize things. There’s no one else.”

“Uncle Steve?”

“They’re trying to get a message to Stephen. He’s overseas again—in Syria, I think.” My dad’s brother was a Doctors Without Borders staffer with an apparent compulsion to serve in the most dangerous and difficult conditions possible. My father had spoken of him with equal parts pride and exasperation, and I’d overheard him remark once that Steve’s brief marriage had died of absenteeism.

“I guess, now that I think of it, he’s not likely to be much help.”

Mom shook her head. “We’ll be lucky if he makes it to the funeral.”

“I’ll go with you.” The words tumbled out of my mouth without forethought, but they felt right. She needed me.

“Oh, Lucy.” Now my mom was teary, but she sniffed it back. “Thank you. It means the world to me that you offered. But you don’t have to.” She ran a hand through her hair in a vain attempt to smooth it down and turned to face me, her eyes direct and serious. “I know you carried too much when your dad died. You took on things no kid should have to, and I’m sorry for that.” I didn’t see the point of denying it, not now, so I just nodded. “But you don’t have to do it again. When Daniel died, I lost the love of my life. I’m

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