Run, Hide, Repeat by Pauline Dakin

Author:Pauline Dakin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

THERE IS AN image I cannot forget, of a mother as she learns of the death of her adult child. It was captured by a television news crew at an airport in the Philippines, where anxious families were waiting for word of survivors after a plane crash. When the official confirmation comes—no survivors—it is like a body blow from an unseen force. The mother falls down, physically overwhelmed by the shock and sudden weight of grief. As she falls, her features are twisted with pain, her eyes no longer seeing.

It is terrifying to see the moment a life is forever changed. Or hear it.

Mom had already gone to bed. I was awake, reading, and rushed to the phone in the kitchen when it rang, well after eleven.

“Hello?” My voice was sleepy.

“Is your mother there?” It was Stan, but he sounded strange, frantic, wild. “I need to talk to her. Is she there?”

“She’s asleep. Are you okay?”

“No. Michael is dead.”

The anger, the raw pain, the bewilderment, reached me like shock waves across the phone line. I was horrified by the irreversibility of what had happened, and the way it was undoing Stan, whom I could hear now was breathing as though he couldn’t catch his breath.

“Just a minute, I’m going to get her.” I felt frantic as I rushed down the stairs to wake Mom.

Michael was Stan and Sybil’s younger son. He was thirty and lived in British Columbia with his girlfriend and their new baby. I’d only met him a few times, but remembered a quiet, slim man, his long dark bangs spilling across his forehead and into his eyes, his smile shy but warm.

Michael’s girlfriend had come home from work that day to find him dead in their bathtub, their infant daughter in a baby seat beside the tub. He’d been dead for some hours, apparently drowned.

I stood outside Mom’s room listening to her voice murmuring as she spoke to Stan, an ageless cadence of comforting sounds. “Oh Stan, I’m so sorry, so, so sorry.” And then, “I know, I know.” She was crying, and I remembered her saying the worst thing that could happen to any parent was losing a child.

I thought about the baby, crying and no one responding, unaware that her father would never come to her again. I began to cry too.

In the days that followed I was unable to look at our bathtub without imagining Michael sightless and floating. If the shower curtain was closed, I would fearfully pull it back, unable to stand not seeing that it was, of course, empty. I felt ashamed that I was reducing the tragedy of his death to this creepiness, but for a couple of years I could not enter a bathroom without looking over at the tub.

There was an autopsy. The medical examiner determined Michael had had an epileptic seizure while in the tub and drowned.

Sybil seemed to accept the loss more easily than Stan. She was sad but her grief was not angry. Stan’s sorrow was sometimes sharp with fury.

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