These Words Are My Heart and Soul

“Loryn?” a small voice came from behind the door.

I pulled it back and saw a shaking and pale Cariad huddled on the floor. She was holding something in her shivering hand, and it was wrapped in tissue paper. She looked like she’d ran from where she was staying with Mikey all the way back home and collapsed on my doorstep.

Wrapping my arms round her waist and pulling her to her feet, I led her into the lounge. This was difficult for me, being six months pregnant. I sat on the armchair closest to her place on the sofa, caressing my bump before offering her a drink. She gratefully took me up on the offer, and I stood up in that awkward way that pregnant girls do so as not to injure themselves, and waddled into the kitchen.

Waiting those ten minutes and keeping my eyes in the living room to make sure Cariad didn’t do anything stupid, the kettle finally boiled and I made a cup of tea for her, and a cup of coffee for me. Nothing compared to Starbucks but nothing beats a decent cuppa.

“Here you go, sugar. Now, tell me what’s wrong?” I asked, subconsciously eyeing the thing in her hand.

“I’m… I’m…”

She couldn’t get her words out, so she just handed me the thing in the toilet paper. I put my coffee down and took it from her, unwrapping it. Just in case, I kept a bit still in toilet paper, which I held.

I saw the familiar back end, and turned it round. The familiar two blue lines; I knew what that meant.

“You’re…?”

“Yeah…”

“Is it…?”

“Yeah…”

“Are you…?”

“Yeah… I am…”

“How will…?”

“I dunno…”

“When…?”

“I dunno…”

No one outside our friendship would have understood this, but somehow, we did. I got up, in that awkward way, waddled over to the seat next to her and hugged her, my bump between us awkwardly.

“Do you feel like there’s something between us?” I joked, smiling slightly.

She laughed and buried her face in my shoulder. I knew how scared she was feeling. To be honest, I know how exactly she was feeling, because I felt the same way when I found out I was pregnant.

“I think Mikey would love to have a little Mikey or Cariad running round, honey. Especially by you.”

She laughed into my shoulder again and I laughed into her hair. I let go of her and ran into the kitchen, where she was left looking bemused and bewildered, and came back with a packet of Rolo’s.

I’d been on the internet (yes, me and Frank had internet, how wicked is that!?) and been talking to some fan girl from England, and she’d been going on about this candy. It was chocolate and caramel, in this little truffle looking thing, and apparently you give the last one to the one you love. (I’d ordered them somehow from the internet from some site I’ll never find again, but there you go J).

Seeing as Frank wasn’t there and I only had two left, I popped one into my mouth and gave Cariad my last one.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“A Rolo. My last one at that. You’re supposed to give your last one to someone special. Some English candy that I somehow ordered,” I smiled.

She beamed at me, knowing that she was special, and popped it into her mouth. I saw from her expression that she was drooling inwardly. Well, they were insanely delicious and I should buy another twenty pack, because I only had twelve packets left.

Cariad fell asleep whilst we were talking, with her hand on her belly and a smile on her face. I gave her one last hug and kissed her forehead lovingly (she was my bestestestest friend J) and wandered upstairs, slowly, cradling the little girlie in my womb as I made a slow, pregnant bee-line for my calling bed.

***
I woke up to the sound of a bleeping monitor. Paralysed with fear, I tried to sit up. The droplets of sweat on my forehead were cold, and yet I was still sweating.

“Mommy?” I whimpered.

There came no answer, just a squeeze to my hand. But I knew it wasn’t my mom. It was Cariad. I could smell, barely, past the tubes pumping oxygen and other gasses into my body keeping me alive.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You had a serious panic attack… you nearly died… your lungs kinda collapsed and your heart kinda… stopped. But I pounded it back to life,” she nervously laughed.

She’d saved my life. Wow. I squeezed her hand as best I could and she squeezed back. I nearly died? Jesus Christ, and she’d saved my life? I wanted to pull her into a hug or something, but something told me that sitting up would be a bad idea.

Cariad explained that I could be out of hospital in a few days, when my respiratory patterns went back to relatively normal. Me being the smartass I was, I understood what she was saying, even if she didn’t.

I asked about the business, and how long I’d been in the hospital.

“Well, some guy found you. Mikey, I think his name was. I dunno who he is. Alls I remember about him was that he was cute and geeky. But that’s beside the point. Me and Kayte have been holding the fort, and Jenah, Aymee and Stephy have shared your bulk out. You’re still getting some of the profits, like.”

Sighing, I tried sitting up. It hurt, God it did, but I shifted to a relatively comfortable sitting position. Lifting up my nightgown, and ignoring that I was baring naked skin, I inspected the slightly scarred tissue on my frontage. There was a small incision where my heart was. I looked at Cariad quizzically.

“They did a small op on your heart. They said they removed a blood clot from one of your… ventricles? And they had to clear an artery. All that smoking and junk food,” she laughed nervously.

I smiled weakly. At least I was okay now. Well, okay is as loose a term as you can get in the English language. Okay is a word you use when you don’t want to accept the truth, or you don’t want someone else to see the tears in your eyes, or to approve doing something you don’t actually want to do.

Okay was one of those words. The words like babe, or sorry. Words that cut deep, even if they were used sincerely. They were general words, casually thrown around in infantile conversation; those words meant nothing to me. The only thing they were invented for was hurt.

My heart stung, in more than one way. The pain from where they’d cut me open hurt like a bitch on crack, but that was nothing compared to the heartache I was feeling.

“What about my mom?”

Cariad went, if possible, paler. She squeezed my hand and opened her mouth to say something, and closed it. She opened it again, and closed it. She did this several times. Some might say she was even comparable to a fish. Not that she looks like a fish, just the way she was acting.

“Spit it out…”

“Loryn… your mom… uhm…”

“What? What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked hurriedly, worried something had happened.

“She shot herself…”

My eyes filled up and my heart broke. My heart rate sped up, and the beeping beside me grew even more annoying. I ripped off the patches that were connected to my chest, so it appeared that I’d flatlined, and leant forward, biting my lip through the pain. I put my head in my hands and sobbed. Sobbed like a baby.

“How? Why? When? What?”

I couldn’t get my head straight.

“Well, the police-”

“Police? Was it Mitch?”

“No, Lorz… she did it herself… she got one of his pistols and put it to her head…”

This wasn’t happening. My mom wouldn’t, no, couldn’t do that! She couldn’t commit suicide. I nearly choked on my next words.

“Who found her?”

“I did…” came a voice from the door.

I looked round, seeing a frightened and pale looking Gerard. Anger burned through me, and I got up, nearly falling at the weakness of my body. I ran over to him and started hitting him.

“You didn’t deserve to! You don’t get any part of me!”

And I collapsed on the floor, crying hard. I curled into a ball, and sang through vicious sobs and tears. A little lullaby my mom had sung to me. The one she’d sing when I was little, or those nights when I cried so much, missing my dad, that I couldn’t sleep, and those nights when life grew too much and I just wanted to kill myself.

“Little wee beauty,
Alone in her bed,
Close yer eyes dear,
Lay doon yer head.
Come of the morn,
You’ll be safe and sound,
Yer tears will be dew drops
On flowers, on ground.
Mammy will hold you,
Rock you to slumber,
I’ll be by yer side,
I’ll watch ‘til yer under.
Sleep through the rain,
There’s plenty life yet,
My little wee beauty,
Lay doon yer head…”

My beautiful mom was in a permanent slumber now. Forever and ever. How the hell was I going to survive?
***