When You Are Gone

Chapter 8

We don't always get the things we want and more often than not, life never goes the way we want it to but like Father Thames always says, life is a rollercoaster, it has its many ups and downs, regardless, we are still strapped tightly onto the rollercoaster so no matter how low we get, we never fall. I used whatever faith I had left in me based on these words on the belief that Francie would make it. And she did. 

My mother received the call from Francie's parents that evening. It was a Sunday, she and I had spent the whole afternoon rearranging her potted plants. We removed the dying ones and we replaced then with fresh ones as well as changing the soil and then applying the necessary pesticides and fertilizers – a Bate family ritual. We even had special pots reserved for parsley, cicely and mint plants – all the edible ones. There are over twenty thousand species of orchids in the world. We grew only seven but we closely guarded them with our lives taking care of them like we were supposed to: making sure the dendrobium received enough sunlight and at the same time the temperature doesn't get too high for the cymbidiums. The jewel orchids were my personal favorites because they defied all the set parameters of orchids. Instead of having wide petals and short stems, they grew tall with small, bunched petals, standing out from the crowd, unafraid to be different. Gardening was my mother's passion for as long as I could remember. She said she liked watching things grow and transform, it took her to that happy place. It was an unmistakable bliss for her watching the calla lilies bloom only twice a year in the summer, never missing the moment. It is also probably the reason why she became a primary school teacher, it gave her the same kind of joy. A classroom full of mischievous, anxious pre-teens was her piece of heaven. Even with a P.H.D in English Literature which had cost her her life to acquire, she retired from lecturing at the college to join the primary school.

I had to wait a whole day before I could see Francie because I had started writing my A level exams. Monday afternoon after school, I had just written my major Physics paper and I was amazed that my head was still in one place. I took a detour bus uptown and made for the hospital which was a thirty minute ride from the station. I took the quiet time on the bus to brainstorm ideas for my art project. There was a storm in my head battling whether my grand blue on blue painting would be enough to earn me the A that I so yearned for in art or was I supposed to come up with a fresh, unique idea. When I showed my art teacher, Mrs. Brawn, she seemed pleased and assured me an A but something inside me wasn't quite convinced, I felt like something was missing every time I looked at the painting. It was almost six when I got to St Angelo but because of the summer weather, the sun was only beginning to set.

There was a team of paramedics in the hallway, rushing a stretcher bed with a man, almost burnt to death fighting for his life. The nurse told me that he almost died trying to save his little girl who was trapped in a flame before the fire department arrived. She died in his arms, she explained. The whole catastrophe was a great pity, was her final comment. There was a helpless looking woman in her early thirties holding onto the stretcher bed with disarrayed golden hair falling just below her ears yelling to God and cussing, blaming Him for taking her daughter and now her husband. I found everything wrong with the way she behaved. But who was I to judge. Father Thames once preached that as long as you know you are a sinner, you have no right to judge another sinner. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by the way she kept hollering, shouting, "Richard, come back to me." Calling God thief, and then it occurred to me that perhaps all this while I was playing the widowed wife, blaming God for all my misfortunes, including the accident and Francie was my dying Richard who I was acting a fool for all in the name of love and turning a blind eye to all the morals that had taken me a lifelong to master and for my mother to teach.

I could see her sitting up on her bed, they had moved her from ICU to another ward in the recovery wing. She looked frail but still engaged in conversations with her over lustrous parents and another woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Mrs. Stanford except she was shorter, leaner and she much looked younger and had long dark hair, like Francie's, falling over her shoulders. I kept looking through the glass doors taking it all in, wondering whether it was not just another dream of her – which were very common of late since she was the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep, the first person I thought about when I woke up and the same person that ran through my mind all day. Her eyes met mine, she was just as stunned as I was. I remember her star-struck expression as she stared blankly in my direction. Having noticed this, Francie's parents and the lady all turned to look at the door, I felt exposed and vulnerable.