Heather
Heather didn’t see Napoleon’s tears as they did tai chi.
She was remembering something that had happened last week, after a long, exhausting night shift when she’d helped to deliver two baby boys.
It was impossible not to think of Zach every time she held another newborn baby boy and stared into those sad wise eyes. All babies had that same wise look, as if they’d just come from another realm where they’d learned some beautiful truth they couldn’t share. Every day brought an endless stream of new life.
Heather had gone to get her coffee from the hospital cafe after her shift and run into a familiar face from the past. There was no time to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen. She recognised her instantly. One of the soccer mums. Before Zach gave it up. Lisa Somebody. A friendly, bubbly lady. It had been years. Lisa Somebody’s face lit up when she saw Heather. Oh, I know you! And then, as so often happened, a moment later her face fell, as she remembered what she’d heard on the grapevine. You could virtually read her thoughts: Oh fuck, she’s that mother, but no time to look away!
Some people crossed the street to get away from her. She’d seen them do it. Some people recoiled. They literally recoiled, as if what had happened to Heather’s family was vile and shameful. This woman was one of the brave ones. She didn’t duck or hide or pretend.
‘I was so sorry to hear about Zach,’ she said. She even said his name without lowering her voice.
‘Thank you,’ said Heather, longing for coffee. She looked at the boy standing next to her on crutches. ‘This must be . . . Justin?’ The name came to her on a flood of memories of shivering Saturday mornings on the soccer field, and suddenly, without warning, the anger exploded in her chest, and this kid, this living, stupid kid, was her target.
‘I remember you,’ she hissed at him. ‘You were the kid who never passed to Zach!’
He stared at her with blank, slack-jawed horror.
‘You never passed to Zach! Why didn’t you pass?’ Heather turned to Lisa. ‘You should have made him pass!’ Her voice rose beyond the bounds of what was acceptable in a public place.
Most people would have made their excuses and scurried away. Some people might have retaliated. Your dead son doesn’t give you the right to be rude. But this Lisa, this woman Heather barely knew, a woman who (Heather now remembered) had once taken Zoe home to her place and fed her lunch after Zach had an asthma attack on the field, just looked at Heather steadily and sadly and said, ‘You’re right, Heather, I should have made him pass.’
And then Justin, who had been nine years old when he played with Zach, had spoken up in his deep young man’s voice and said, ‘Zach was a great striker, Mrs Marconi. I should have passed to him more. I used to be really bad at passing the ball.’
The generosity, the kindness, the maturity that young man showed that day. Heather had looked at his face – the freckles on his nose, the tiny black whiskers around his young boy’s mouth – and seen the grotesque face of her son on the last day of his life.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she’d said, weak and trembling with regret, and she’d left without making further eye contact with either of them, without picking up her coffee. Yet again she’d turned the anger that should have been directed only at herself on someone else.
‘Snake creeps through the grass,’ said Yao.
She saw herself sitting alone in Zach’s room, her hand opening the drawer of his bedside cabinet. Heather was the snake that crept through the grass.