Page 67 of The Absence of You
“Where am I? What’s going on?” She mumbles, trying to sit herself up.
The nurse gently urges her to lie back down. “You’re okay, you’re in the hospital. You had an accident at a party.”
Dahlia looks at her, confused. “I don’t remember what happened.”
“That’s okay. It’s normal to be a bit confused after a head injury. Plus, the amount of alcohol you consumed probably isn’t helping. I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake, and he’ll come and talk to you. I won’t be long. I’ll leave you with your friend. He hasn’t left your side since you came in,” she tells Dahlia with a teasing smile on her face. Dahlia scans the room and her face creases with surprise when she spots me standing by the window, as the nurse slips out of the room.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was at Harry’s when you fell.”
“I remember being at Harry’s with Callie. But everything else is a blur.”
“You tripped at the side of his pool. You inhaled water and banged your head, so the ambulance brought you here to get checked out.” She gingerly touches the bump on her forehead. Despite the bruising and her hair being tangled and matted, she is still the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. It hurts to look at her, knowing how badly I screwed up. I stride over to the bed. “Dee was here earlier but she’s gone home to change, and I didn’t want you to be alone when you woke up so I told her I’d stay with you.”
At the mention of Dee, her eyes narrow before her expression changes from confusion to distress. She must have forgotten what she’d learnt and how it set in motion what happened last night, and now it’s all coming back to her.
“I-I can’t believe my dad’s in prison. I can’t believe what he did. It’s worse than anything I could have imagined.” A slow tear tracks down her cheek. “I-I don’t think I’m ready to talk to Dee. I can’t believe they kept this from me.” She lets out a strangled sob, and I hate myself all over again.
I wish I’d told her sooner, or at least made Dee tell her. The way she found out was awful. I’m about to apologise again when a middle-aged man walks into the room. He flips through the notes on his clipboard for a long minute, before eventually clearing his throat and looking up.
“I’m Dr Abraham. How are you feeling, Dahlia?”
“Sore,” she admits weakly. I drag a plastic chair over to the bed and sit down. I cover Dahlia’s hand with mine and lace our fingers together. She immediately tries to pull her hand away but I tighten my grip. I have no doubt she hates me right now, but I want her to know she isn’t alone. She needs a friend, and I need to start earning back her trust.
“You had a fall at a party. It seems you slipped by the pool and fell in. Alcohol and pool parties are not a good mix. Luckily, you weren’t underwater for very long. And this young man was quite the hero, I believe.” Dahlia’s eyes flit to mine. “You will likely have a cough for a little while from the water you inhaled. With any near drowning, there is a risk of lung infection, so you have been given some IV antibiotics and will be prescribed some precautionary antibiotics to take for the next seven days. You also have a nasty bump on your head and a mild concussion. I’d like you to wait here for a few more hours so we can observe you until your CT results come back, but if it all looks fine, you can go home this evening. There is a cut on your hairline, but it’s superficial. I’ve put a few dissolvable stitches in but it’s unlikely to leave a scar. For the next week you will need to take it easy, particularly so for the next forty-eight hours. I’ll ask one of the nurses to bring you a leaflet and a prescription for some more painkillers before you’re discharged.”
DAHLIA
My head is banging, I feel like I’m going to throw up, and I’m pretty sure neither of those things are related to my accident. I’m sitting up in my hospital bed, and Dee is in a chair next to me. She’d turned up minutes after one of the nurses had removed my drip and heart monitor. As soon as she’d arrived, Grayson had excused himself under the premise of getting coffees, but I’m sure it was to give us some space more than anything.
My grandmother was supposed to be a constant in my life. The embodiment of all that was good in the world, but in the last twenty-four hours, I feel like the world has shifted on its axis. She walked in here looking broken and genuinely worried about me, as though she hadn’t been lying to me for every goddamn minute of my life.
“I’m sorry your mum isn’t here for this conversation. This is as much her story as mine.”
“Well, it’s not like she hasn’t had plenty of opportunities.” I snipe.
“Neither of us wanted you to find out this way,” Dee’s voice trembles.
I don’t trust myself not to say something I’ll regret, so I wait for her to continue. I’m not going to make this easy for her, if that’s what she’s thinking. She dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief. Is this all an act as well?
“Your father did a bad thing, but he’s not a bad man.” Dee sits up straighter in her chair and clasps my hands, “But you should make up your own mind.”
And over the next hour, I finally hear the truth about what happened eighteen years ago. Dee tells me about my mum at my age, and about her son Joseph, my father. She tells me about their relationship, describing how much they loved each other. She describes the night of Joseph’s 18th birthday party, when he came home and found his father assaulting my mum. She tearfully tells me about the boy who had never been violent in his life; beating his own father until he stopped breathing, so he could never hurt my mum, or any other woman ever again.
When I read the file in Grayson’s car yesterday, I hadn’t stopped to imagine what had driven my father to do what he did. I was too blinded with hurt and rage that my family had kept it from me. But the more Dee tells me, the more my anger begins to fall away.
In all the years I’d tried to guess what had happened to my father, nothing I’d imagined had come close to this. My parents’ history is a tale of love and violence and tragedy, and it is utterly heartbreaking. I weep for the two teenagers whose lives were ruined by the evil act of one man, and I no longer question why Dee lied to me, alongside my mum, for all those years. Because how do you tell a child their grandfather was the perpetrator of multiple sickening sexual assaults against their mother? How do you tell a child that their father committed an horrific violent act in response? In theory, both crimes are abhorrent, but in reality, all my disgust is aimed firmly at my grandfather.
There is another overwhelming emotion I’m feeling. Relief. Relief that I’m finally hearing the truth.
Learning my mother is a victim of assault explains so much. For all these years, I had thought she was drinking because she was unhappy with her life, with the responsibility of looking after me alone, but…this makes sense. She was sad. And traumatised. She was self-medicating to forget, and who could blame her? I feel sick at the thought of what she’d gone through at my age. Niall Kellan had me on my knees in his flat and…what my mum went through… it could have been me. She must have been terrified. Her circumstances and living situation at the time were completely reliant on that man, and he took advantage of her in the most awful way possible.
I wish she’d been honest with me. I wish I hadn’t spent my entire childhood wrongly believing I wasn’t enough to keep my mum sober or enough to make my dad stay, but they were trying to protect me. Dr Jenson’s words echo in my mind.
Sometimes adults have to make hard decisions that can’t be explained to a young child. Often it isn’t because they are a bad person, or they made a bad choice. It can be because there are no good choices. There are only hard ones.
That’s what she had been trying to tell me that day. My mum didn’t keep this from me intending for it to impact me in the way it has. And who is to say how the truth would have impacted my childhood? There’s a good chance the truth would have fucked with my head just as much, or even more so.
