She rushed as quickly as she could pick her way through the sleeping bodies on the ground to my side to pour me a cup of water from the pitcher on the bedside table.
“Here you go, sweetie,” she said as she tipped it up to my lips for me.
I had a déjà vu moment, remembering her doing the same thing for me when I was first diagnosed with cancer as a kid.
When I was finished, I turned my face away and asked, “What are you doing here?”
Pain slashed across her features like a blade but she recovered admirably. Her hand shook slightly as she put the cup on the table and perched on the side of my bed without the mammoth man half on it.
“It kills me that my daughter has to ask why I would visit her in the hospital,” she admitted.
“It’s not something you’ve done much of before,” I reminded her. “And you recently told me that you’d never talk to me again.”
Her lips rolled under her teeth, a habit I realized with surprise, that we shared.
“I’m so sorry. I…The truth is I never knew what to do with you. You were born this beautiful, vibrant little girl with a personality that developed very quickly and it was one I didn’t understand. Then you got cancer and…” She brought her hand to her mouth and pressed at it as if that would stop the tears that coated her words. “I didn’t know what to do with a little girl with cancer. I was afraid to get close to you because you were so close to dying and then what would I do?”
I tried to remain unmoved by her speech and mostly it was easy because my heart was preoccupied with mourning Mute, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt because honestly, I didn’t really want to lose another person close to me.
“You’re supposed to love them anyway.”
She nodded empathetically. “I know, I know, and there’s no excuse but you can’t understand what it’s like to have a daughter who’s so sick. It feels like your fault. Maybe if I hadn’t eaten starch when I was pregnant with you or if I hadn’t let you get so close to the microwave when we cooked together or—”
I interrupted her with a snort. “We never cooked together, Phillipa.”
She flinched again at my use of her first name instead of “Mum”. “We did, sweetheart, and I’m so sorry you were too young to remember because I do and they were some of my favourite times. You always wanted to put candy in everything, gummies in the cookies and sour cherries in cakes. They were truly awful, but you loved them, so we made them.”
Something flickered at the back of my mind but I clamped down on it. “When did they stop?”
She knew that I knew the answer. “When you were seven, after you got shot in the horrible accident.”
I pulled Zeus’s hand closer onto my belly and stared at it, loving the coarse brown hairs on his arm and the way the feathers merged with his skin like they were part of him. My big, bad fallen angel had saved me back then and he’d saved me every day since just by existing.
“I don’t want to hear this, Mum. I want to wake up Zeus and the rest of my family and mourn my fallen friend with them,” I told her honestly.
She sucked in a breath but nodded. “I know. I’m so sorry, honey. He was… a sweet boy and I’m sorry I couldn’t move past my own worries to see that and get to know him better.”
Sorrow slammed into my throat and brought tears rushing to my eyes. They spilled over as I stared at her and shook my head. “I don’t get what you’re doing here. I’m sorry but I don’t have it in me to comfort you or make you one of your martinis.”
“I deserve that.” She nodded even though her voice was bruised from my words. “I just wanted to see you well and whole with my own eyes. They wouldn’t let me in at first but I’m your mother so I just waited in the main reception until it was late enough they were all asleep each night. Only a few of them have come and gone, honey. Most of them have been living here the eight days you’ve been unconscious.”
Her words were filled with wonder as she stared around the room at the scattered bikers, their rough faces and scraggly beards, their cuts and the weapons visible if you looked hard enough at the opening of their boots and the backs of their pockets.
She saw disgusting outlaws.
I saw brave knights in rebel colours.
“I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” my mum tried again and when I looked back at her face, I saw it was damp and crumpled like a used napkin. “I just wanted to say it with a small hope that you’d see I was being honest. I just wanted to tell you that if you’re willing, I’d like to be in your life again.”
“I don’t think so,” I said immediately and then regretted it.
She looked down at my hand where it rested on the bed and gently reached out to run the back of her pinky on the needle scars there. “So beautiful and so brave. I never deserved a daughter like you.”
My throat burned but I didn’t say anything as she stood up and hesitated.
“Even if you don’t want to have a relationship with me moving forward, I need you to know that there’s something… Very wrong with your father. I thought maybe I could talk to your, er, gentleman friend about it.”
My heart clenched. “You know something?”
She bit her lip. “He left some files on his desk when he left after I told him you’d been injured in a shooting again. I haven’t seen him since but I was curious so I read the papers.”
“Bring them here,” I told her instantly, struggling to sit up further so I could properly relay my intensity. “Go home and come straight back with them.”
“Okay,” she said with wide eyes. “Take care of your sister while I’m gone.”
“I always do,” I snapped and winced when my mum ducked her head and scurried out of the room.
I tipped my head back into the pillow and tried to take deep breaths.
Mute was dead.
Mum wanted reconciliation.
The world had gone fucked.
Zeus stirred beside me, his hand flexing in mine as he rolled out of his bend and into awareness. The second he hit upright, he opened his eyes and found mine staring at him.
“Loulou,” he rasped, and there was so much emotion in that one word that I’d thought I’d die from it.
Just my chosen name on the lips of the man fate had chosen for me at seven years old. It was the most beautiful and poignant thing I’d ever heard.
“Zeus,” I breathed back.
We stared at each other, his eyes devoting every inch of my face to memory. There was a panic to the way he searched me as if he couldn’t believe I was whole and real before him. It made my heart ache to think of what he must have gone through when he thought I might not wake up.
I was staring into his silver eyes, counting the rings of deeper grey radiating through the iris like rings in a tree so I watched as they went shiny then wet then as one tear welled up in the wedge of his lower lashes and spilled down his cheek into his beard.
He was crying.
“Lou,” he croaked, tears falling. “Fuck me, I thought you were gonna leave me. I really fuckin’ did.”
“I’d never leave you,” I promised turning our hands so I could link our pinkies and shake my thumb with his. “Fucking swear it.”