The Friend

by Teresa Driscoll

It was probably what I liked about her most: this knack of leaving you nowhere to hide. She had a way of looking at you ever so directly and asking the questions that mattered, peeling back your layers and exposing the core that you normally managed to keep from people.

She told me, quite matter-of-factly, that for the first two years after her husband’s heart attack, she relived finding him time and time again until she knew every beat of the scene; as if she needed to be sure of every single gasp of pain and every second of what had happened in order to accept it and learn to live with it. ‘People tell you to try not to think about it. Your own instinct is not to think about it. But that doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘The trick is to learn to cope with thinking about it. To accept how truly awful it was. Am I making any sense?’

But a child without a mother has this unbearable ache in their eyes; this way of reaching deep inside you and squeezing so very tight that you cannot breathe. And in the end I was the one Theo spoke to first. And it was into my bed he climbed in the early hours of the morning, trembling and holding on.

I went on a website for adoptive parents once, and it said this – that some children are grown in their mummy’s tummies. And some are grown in their hearts.

For only now do I understand, through Nathan, about the bird. Poor Theo set that robin free; he watched it fly and he sent his little heart with it. He drew it secretly on his arm, and at night he dreamt of it flying free and safe because that’s what he needed himself.

I really thought on that terrible train journey home that the biggest shock and most important lesson was realising what other people are truly capable of. But – turns out there is a much greater and more chilling shock. Learning – in the face of evil and in the name of love – what you are capable of yourself.