I'll Leave You With This
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Synopsis
A totally heartbreaking but uplifting story about family, loss and second chances.
Three years after Daniel was killed by a senseless act of violence, all his sisters have left of him are their memories - and responsibility for Daniel's mischievous dachshund John Thomas. Daniel donated his organs, his death facilitating life-saving miracles for other families, while his own loved ones struggle to come to terms with their devastating loss, each at a crossroads of her own:
It's been twelve years since film director Bridie had a hit, and while she's still invited to glitzy media events, nowadays it is as her successful actor husband's plus one.
Clare and her wife Sophie have been through four rounds of IVF and while Clare remains hopeful to keep trying, it may be at the cost of her marriage . . .
Conscientious Allison looks after everyone. Her younger siblings, her children and the many patients she treats in her job as Chief Obstetrician at a big teaching hospital. But who's looking out for Allison?
Emma is looking for love, but isn't having much luck on dates. And there's something she can't tell anyone, whether romantic prospect or even her family, about the real reason she quietly abandoned a musical career that she loved . . .
When Clare suggests that they try to make contact with the recipients of Daniel's organs to honour their brother, not everyone thinks it's a good idea. It's a heart-wrenching process, but will meeting those that their brother saved help to bring the sisters back together, or will old tensions and surfacing secrets splinter the fragile family ties forever?
(P) 2022 Penguin Random House Australia
Release date: February 2, 2023
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 320
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I'll Leave You With This
Kylie Ladd
I’ll Leave You With This is my sixth published novel, but for quite a few years I didn’t think I was going to make it past five. With sincere and enormous gratitude to those who helped me get it over the line:
Beverley Cousins at Penguin Random House for having such a belief in the work, for giving me one of the kindest structural edits I’ve ever had, and for being so easy and delightful to deal with. Similarly, Amanda Martin for further edits and unstinting enthusiasm – you’ve both been fabulous. Thank you!
Pippa Masson, my agent, who has had my back for seven books and over fifteen years now. Thank you, P, for always supporting and championing me, for answering my emails so promptly, and for your transparency and honesty in all our dealings. I lucked out when you picked me up off the slush pile in 2006!
I received very helpful feedback on an early draft of this novel from the wonderful Julia Stiles as part of an Australian Society of Authors (ASA) mentorship I was awarded in 2021. Thank you both – the mentorship awards change writing lives. So too does Varuna, the National Writers’ House. I completed final edits on I’ll Leave You With This there as the recipient of a Residential Fellowship in 2022 and couldn’t have had a happier or more productive two weeks. Much gratitude to both the ASA and Varuna for your support of Australian writing.
Madeline Bowmer, previously of the NSW Organ and Tissue Donation Service, who answered lots of my questions while researching this book. Any errors or literary licence are mine, not hers.
Peter Walsh, the first hand transplant recipient in the southern hemisphere and his wife, Marg, for not only agreeing to meet with me but for being so friendly and so helpful and for answering all my nosy questions. I have used some of Peter’s medical details in the book with permission, but the rest of the character of Patrick Webster is fiction. Also Barb who put me in touch with them after my internet sleuthing. Thanks!
One of my oldest friends and noted producer Anna McLeish answered questions about the film industry for me, while on Twitter Sonja Louise set me straight about Christian dating sites. Joel Becker, OAM and ex-CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, entered a Love Your Bookshop Day raffle to have a character in one of my books named after him at Fairfield Bookshop back in 2019 and will probably be very surprised to see it finally eventuate. Ongoing thanks to Heather and Dick at Fairfield Books for all your support across the years, too.
And finally, I’ll Leave You With This was started during the second of Melbourne’s many Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 and finished in the sixth, a time that also coincided with my daughter having to do most of her Year 12 online. Dark days! Abundant thanks to the people who got me through it, who were always there for a chat or a whine or a virtual wine: Kerri Sackville, mainly and often; Cam, who talked me through some plot points, which almost made up for her taking over my study; Laddy for trying to make coffee quietly for the year that I worked at the kitchen table (thank you xxxx); my dad, John, who also helped me talk through the book as we walked around and around our 5 km radii; Katrina Gow, who always gets it; GJ (go the Bunnies!); Dec, for the photos; early readers Sally Hepworth, Meredith Jaffe, Fleur McDonald, Maggie MacKellar and Joanna Nell; my wonderful writing network, particularly Darren Groth, Fiona Higgins, Graeme Simsion, Lisa Ireland, Nicole Hayes, Meg Dunley, Tess Woods, Bension O’Reilly, Michelle Barraclough (who also does amazing websites), Eliza Henry-Jones and the rest of the Botches (where would I be without you?) – Kylie Orr, Lisa Joy, Katelin Farnsworth, Caroline Gilpin and Charlotte Callander – and, when we were allowed back in them, the Shepparton, Northcote, Balwyn and Ivanhoe pools, where much plotting was done. Also Taco. Always Taco, devoted companion of the longest lockdown in the world. John Thomas is for you.
Allison
September 2018
By the time Allison arrives home she can smell herself. The sweat is crusted in her hair and under her arms; the blouse she put on fresh that morning – a lifetime ago now – is stuck to her back and clings damply around her neck. She could have had a shower at the hospital, but she’d forgotten to replace the fresh change of clothes she usually kept in her office and didn’t want to go home in scrubs. There had to be a boundary. The hospital needed to stay the hospital, her home, her home. Blurring the lines between them was sloppy, dangerous. It meant she could never truly leave one or the other, and each needed her total focus, no distractions, when she was there.
As she climbs out of the car she notices blood on one of her shoes and winces, stooping with a hastily wetted index finger to rub it off. Blood is part of the job, inevitable, especially in the sort of scenario she’s just dealt with, and somehow it gets everywhere, no matter how much protective gear she wears. It doesn’t bother her, but she doesn’t want the boys to see it. Eliot particularly is squeamish, goes white if she has to remove a splinter or he stubs his toe. Allison has little patience with it, not with the trauma she witnesses on a daily basis, not after all she’s lost, and she’s noticed he turns to Jason now, who clucks and coos like a woman when he takes his son in his arms.
She sighs. Too bad. It was good, she reminds herself, that she and Jason refused to let their genders define them. It was important that the boys saw that daddies could give kisses and cuddles and tuck them into bed every night while mummies did the work and earned the money. It wasn’t how she’d been brought up, but the world had changed, was still changing. And boy, did this mummy work.
Jason turns from the stove to greet her as she comes into the kitchen. ‘You’re late,’ he says, but without judgement or rancour. ‘Big day?’
He is wearing an apron, she notices, a frilly, flowery affair that Marty bought her earlier in the year from the Mother’s Day stall at school. When she’d opened it she’d had to fight the impulse to laugh and Marty had noticed, but wasn’t offended.
‘It was that or soap,’ he’d said, shrugging. ‘And the soap smelled disgusting.’
She had laughed then and hugged him, proclaiming it the best apron ever while already mentally consigning it to the back of the linen press.
Now here it was around her husband’s still-trim waist. ‘Nice apron,’ she says, arching one eyebrow, longing, despite all her gender-neutral self-talk, to tear it off him and make him a man again.
Jason turns back to the stove. ‘Yeah, well, the sausages were splattering oil everywhere. Eliot suggested it. He didn’t want me to get my clothes dirty.’
‘You could have turned the gas down,’ she says, ‘or done them under the grill.’
He gives her a back off look and smiles, though not with his eyes. ‘Let’s start again, shall we? Big day?’
Allison swallows and pushes it all down: the fear, the fatigue, the adrenaline, the ridiculous spurt of repulsion that had gone through her when she’d seen the apron. ‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘A very big day. Touch and go in a delivery this afternoon. Uterine rupture.’
Jason nods as if he understands exactly what such an event has demanded of her. ‘But it was all okay? The mother survived?’
Allison exhales. ‘She did. And the baby. We were lucky. It could have been bad.’ The expectant father’s face as they worked to resuscitate his wife suddenly comes back to her, his incomprehension morphing into terror. The breath she draws in is shuddery.
‘Hey,’ Jason says, setting down the spatula. ‘Hey. That sounds awful.’ He pulls her into his arms and she sinks against him gratefully, closing her eyes. ‘Drink, or a shower first? Dinner’s almost ready, but it can wait.’
‘Drink,’ she mutters, then changes her mind. ‘No, shower. I stink. Thank you.’
Eliot looks up from where he is seated at the kitchen table with his iPad, seemingly only just aware that she is home. The Bluey theme music rings tinnily from his device.
‘Mummy!’ he exclaims. ‘Can we go to the park now?’
Her face must betray her, for his own immediately contorts in disappointment.
‘You promised!’ he whines.
‘I did?’ She genuinely can’t remember.
‘You did!’ Eliot insists. ‘Yesterday, at dinner. You said you’d take us to the park when you got home from work.’
Maybe she had, but that was yesterday, she wanted to tell him. She thought she’d be home by three, not six; she didn’t know she’d be literally wiping off another woman’s blood as she walked in. Her hands clench into fists, the car keys that she has yet to put down biting into her flesh. Run. The impulse surges through her. Get back in the car. Drive. Escape.
‘Mummy’s pretty tired, mate,’ Jason intervenes. ‘What about tomorrow?’
Tears well in Eliot’s pale blue eyes. Jason glances at Allison nervously, as if anticipating a scene, and their expressions make her immediately contrite.
‘Maybe a quick trip after dinner. It should still be light enough. But only if you eat all your peas.’ She can’t resist making her surrender conditional. There has to be something in it for her.
‘I will,’ Eliot declares earnestly, as if he were in court. ‘Every single one. I promise.’
He jumps from his chair to rush to his twin with news of the victory.
Jason drops a kiss on her forehead and murmurs, ‘Good on you,’ before returning to the sausages.
Yes, Allison thinks, trudging up the stairs towards her ensuite, the pile of laundry that had been left at the bottom in one arm, the files she still has to write up tonight under the other, good on her. She is a good sport. She is a good girl. Good, good, good. She is the classic oldest child who always does what is asked of her, but the thought brings her only a sort of hollow pride, no real satisfaction, no joy.
She turns the shower on, deliberately making it a little too hot, all the better to wash the afternoon away. Her patient today was a relatively young woman, Maya. She already had two children. Two boys, like Allison. Maybe this third pregnancy had been an attempt at a girl. Who knew? Allison hadn’t had a chance to talk with her, had only been paged when the tear had been discovered and Maya was already unconscious, haemorrhaging life. Allison had stepped into the delivery suite and, as if on cue, Maya’s monitor had flatlined. ‘We’re losing her,’ someone had cried at the same time as a nurse announced, ‘I can’t get a foetal heartbeat.’ Every eye had turned towards Allison.
She winces as she recalls it, and makes the shower even hotter. They’d all looked to her to tell them what to do, to fix things, to make it all better. And she’d pulled it off. But if she hadn’t? Those two little boys would have no mother tonight. That husband would have no wife. Maya’s parents would have lost their daughter, lost a grandchild. There would be a rend in that family that could never be repaired, and it would have been her fault. Not entirely – there was bad luck too, the roll of the dice – but her failure would have played a part. She’d pulled it off, but only just. Only just. Allison reaches for the shampoo, and bursts into tears.
Dinner eaten, she checks her watch while herding the boys into the car for the trip to the park. There is only an hour of light left, which at least limits how long she’ll have to stay. The thought prompts both relief and guilt. This is her only real alone time with her sons all day. Can’t she at least embrace that, be present for it, not wishing it gone? Lean in. That’s what all the self-help books advise, or is it the parenting ones? She wonders vaguely if she’s even read a book since she was pregnant.
Eliot, still small at seven, insists on buckling himself into his car seat, but the minute it’s done, remembers he’s forgotten his football.
‘I’ll go get it, Mum,’ he says, working carefully to undo the harness he’s just done up.
‘Do you have to?’ Allison sighs. ‘Can’t you just . . . run around or something instead?’ But he is already gone, hurrying up the path towards the house. His gait isn’t quite right. Allison leans forward in her seat, watching him now with a clinician’s eye. Is he limping?
‘Marty,’ she says, ‘did Eliot fall over at school or something today?’
He shrugs. ‘Dunno. Can I get my footy too?’
She shakes her head. ‘One’s enough.’ At this rate they won’t even get out of the driveway before it is dark. The front door opens, but instead of Eliot, Jason emerges, a squirming dachshund under his arm. He’d offered to come with them, but she’d selflessly refused. This was her duty – and hopefully he’d clean up while she was gone. One less task for her before she got to the files.
‘Can you take John Thomas?’ Jason asks. ‘Sorry. I haven’t had a chance to walk him today.’ He opens the door of the Volvo and hands the dog to Martin without waiting for her answer.
‘Seriously?’ she mutters but is drowned out by the dog’s excited barking. Jason only works half days in his physio practice, spending the rest of the time running their household, getting the twins to and from school, doing the shopping and the laundry, making the beds and the lunches and then dinner. Yes, it is a great arrangement – her friends and colleagues constantly remind her of that – but it’s what they’d agreed on. He had the flexibility, she had the income. It made sense. And it worked well. But he could have walked the bloody dog.
‘Ready!’ Eliot has reappeared, brandishing his beloved red and green football.
‘Is your leg okay, El?’ Allison asks as he does battle once more with the car seat.
‘Yes?’ he says, pausing as if it is a trick question. Eliot aims to please. ‘I think so?’
‘You looked as if you were limping when you went inside just then,’ Allison says, reversing into the street. She catches a glimpse of grey roots among her sandy hair as she checks the rear-vision mirror. God. So soon? Six weeks came around so quickly!
‘It sometimes does that,’ Eliot says, reaching across the back seat to rub John Thomas’s ears. ‘It’s like it has a mind of its own.’
Despite everything, despite her day and the rupture and the work still waiting for her at home, the park trip is a success. Eliot and Martin are thrilled to have her to themselves and show off excitedly, hanging from the monkey bars, scrambling up the big slide, incessantly imploring her to watch, Mummy, watch. She showers them with praise, relieved not to have been made to join in some sort of kicking drill, while John Thomas trots beneath the swings, wagging his tail and trying to eat discarded cigarette butts. The dog would eat anything. How many lollipop sticks and chip packets had she had to pull out of his ever-ravenous maw on previous park trips, how many times had she found him with his head in one of the boys’ discarded school bags, scarfing down a forgotten banana or half a ham sandwich? Bananas, for God’s sake. He ate them with the skin on.
‘You crazy mutt,’ she says when he approaches her bench, sniffing furiously, and he looks up and practically smiles at her, mouth agape, tail a black blur. Her heart lurches. This is all she has left of Daniel. Allison scoops him onto her lap and buries her nose in his velvety fur, his body warm against hers like a newborn. ‘Crazy, crazy, crazy,’ she mutters as he squirms with delight. A dog hadn’t been part of the plan when he’d first come to them, almost two years ago, when the boys were still in preschool and she’d just been made head of the department. They’d had their hands full, but Sophie, Clare’s partner – Clare’s wife, she reminds herself, the idea that her sister was married to a woman still a little surprising to her – was allergic and they couldn’t have him anymore.
‘It’s getting worse,’ Sophie had said, sniffling, when she and Clare had handed John Thomas over. ‘My eyes, my nose – everything runs. It’s awful. I feel so bad about it.’ She’d glanced across at Clare, who was teary but bit her lip and attempted to smile.
‘I’ll miss him so much,’ Clare had said, ‘but I’m so glad he’s going to you, that he’ll still be in the family. Daniel would have liked that too.’
John Thomas had belonged to Daniel, her brother killed almost three years ago in a shooting in the city. Their brother – hers and Clare’s, and Bridie’s and Emma’s too – number four of the five of them, the lone son among all those daughters. It was still hard to think of him gone, so most of the time Allison pretended that he wasn’t. Daniel had bought John Thomas as a pup and treated him like a child, the dog spending his days at the studio napping at Daniel’s feet, sharing his sushi or attempting to get into the bin in the tiny kitchen. Clare had volunteered to have him that terrible October, once it was clear that Morgan, Daniel’s business partner, would be selling the studio and had no desire for his pet. Sophie’s allergies had declared themselves soon afterwards, but the couple had hung on for a year before asking Allison to take him.
Jason had been reluctant. ‘Why us?’ he’d asked. ‘We’re busy enough as it is. Can’t Bridie have him, or Emma?’
‘We’ve got a house, and kids. I guess that makes us the obvious choice,’ she’d replied, adding placatingly, ‘He won’t be much work. He’s such a little dog. How hard can it be?’
How hard, indeed. Allison sighs and sets him back down on the grass. Such a little dog, but one who seems to require constant maintenance. He is always devouring socks or needing walking or tracking dirt through the house after digging in the garden. Most of that work – all of it, in truth – falls to Jason, who has never warmed to John Thomas. He had been particularly frosty since a five-hundred-dollar trip to the vet’s for the removal of an avocado pit from the dachshund’s behind.
‘He ate an avocado?’ Clare had shrieked down the phone when Allison had told her. ‘A whole one?’
‘It wasn’t that big,’ Allison had said defensively. ‘The pit, anyway. I don’t know how he even got the avocado out of the fruit bowl. One of the boys probably fed it to him.’
‘Big enough to get stuck.’ Clare was laughing, snorting through her nose.
Allison had smiled despite herself, imagining Clare’s whole body shaking, her head rocking back and forth. Clare had such a vigorous laugh. ‘Yeah. We only noticed something was up because he was off his food, and John Thomas is never off his food.’
‘How did the vet get it out?’ Clare had asked between snorts.
‘I don’t know,’ Allison had said. ‘Jason took him. Vaseline and rubber gloves, I imagine,’ which had promptly set Clare off again.
‘Mum, will you come on the seesaw with us?’
Martin is tugging at her sleeve and she acquiesces, knees creaking as she rises from the bench. ‘You sit down one end and me and Eliot will go up the other.’
‘Eliot and I,’ she corrects automatically, gingerly lowering her spreading bottom onto the splintered wood. The fit is not flattering. ‘What now?’ she asks, anchored to the ground, knees awkwardly at the level of her chin. ‘How are you going to get on?’
‘We’ll climb,’ Marty declares, and the boys shimmy up the steep incline like twin monkeys, blond heads bobbing.
‘Be careful,’ she calls out. Was this safe? It was so rare to even find a seesaw at a park anymore, most having gone the way of the dinosaur, of the flying fox, of playing tennis on the road after school, as she and Bridie had done when they were girls. Other parents complain about the creeping infantilisation of children’s play areas, but she isn’t among them. The world is a risky place, she sees that every day. Why give it any more chances to kill you?
‘Push, Mummy!’ Eliot implores from the top of the seesaw, arms wrapped around Martin’s waist. She does as she is told, but remains stolidly earthbound.
‘Harder!’ Martin says. Allison tries again. Still the seesaw won’t budge.
‘I think she’s too heavy,’ Eliot tells Martin. ‘We need another kid up here.’
‘Yeah, or maybe Dad.’
‘I can hear you, you know,’ Allison calls back, tempted to stand up and let them both bump to the dirt. ‘It’s not going to work this way. Martin, you come down this end and just do it with Eliot. Slowly!’
Once the boys are established she goes to round up John Thomas. The shadows are lengthening; it is time to go home. She lingers, though, in the dusk and considers her own shadow, distinctly fuller than it was ten years ago. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? She’d had twins; she is Chief Obstetrician at a major teaching hospital, with no time to exercise. Some days it feels as if she barely has time to urinate. In the last year or two she’d become a regular blood donor at the centre up on level four, claiming it was to inspire her staff and other employees to do the same. But really it was just so she could lie down for an hour without looking lazy. Her hands sneak to her stomach. Still relatively flat, and her boobs are in good nick, but there is no doubt she’s getting heavier through her hips and arse, the Irish peasant genes that her father had been so proud of well and truly asserting themselves. Menopause isn’t going to be pretty.
They are almost home when Allison realises that John Thomas, who yaps enthusiastically throughout any car trip, is unusually quiet.
‘JT’s in the back with you boys, isn’t he?’ she asks. ‘We didn’t leave him at the park?’
‘Yeah,’ Martin says.
‘He’s right under your seat,’ Eliot adds, the helpful one. ‘I think he’s chewing on something.’
Allison goes cold. ‘Can you see what it is?’ A cheese stick, she prays. A muesli bar. The boys were always leaving snack foods in their wake.
Eliot leans forward. ‘It’s a box. A shoebox? He’s chewed right through it. Naughty John Thomas!’
Allison pulls to the side of the road without signalling and slams on the brakes, but by the time she has undone her belt and twisted around to extract the dog it is already too late.
His muzzle is grey and flaky; he sneezes as she thrusts him at Martin, admonishing her son to hold on tightly and not let go. Then, taking a deep breath, she climbs out of the car, opens Eliot’s door and bends to inspect the damage. The cardboard box has indeed been chewed through. So too has the wooden lid on the eco-friendly urn inside, scattering all that was left of Jason’s elderly aunt across the black carpet of the footwell.
‘Fuck!’ she exclaims.
‘You owe twenty cents to the swear jar,’ Eliot tells her, while Martin cranes forward.
‘What’s that?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ Allison says, trying to sweep the ashes back into the urn with her hand. They are fine and gritty, like dirty sand, though now she looks more closely she can see bone fragments among the dusty powder, pearlescent and jagged. Her airway narrows. She fights the impulse to gag or to cry. Death, again, always in her face. She was so tired of death.
‘That’s not going to work, Mummy,’ Eliot tells her. ‘You’ll need a vacuum.’
The image saves her, hauling her back from hysteria. She could call in at a service station before they got home, she thinks, starting to giggle. Jason would never have to know. It was his fault, anyway. He’d left the box there, in the back seat of the family car, what – three, four months ago, after the funeral home had contacted him to collect it? Jason hadn’t been close to Aunt Tanya, had barely known her in truth, but he was her oldest living relative and thus bequeathed with her remains. Afterwards, he and Allison had made desultory plans to scatter them somewhere, and then promptly forgot, swept along by her work, by his work, by the boys, by the dog, by the house, by his practice, by the lawn that needed mowing and the weekly swimming lessons, by the endless stream of school newsletters and CPD seminars and supermarket runs. Life had overtaken them, and the box had been forgotten. It must have fallen beneath the seat, out of sight and out of mind. It was a wonder John Thomas hadn’t got to it before now. Sorry, Aunt Tanya.
Shame wrestles with exhaustion, but exhaustion wins. They were always so busy, too busy. It was why they never had sex, that and things like the apron. She straightens up, goes back to her seat and starts the car. Jason can deal with it later. She has had enough of looking after people for one day, living or dead. She just wants to go to sleep.
Allison
1998
When Allison was twenty-six, her mother fell over. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but her mother was only forty-seven and this was the third time. Allison had missed the first two, had only found out about them when she asked about the bruising, but there was no missing this: one moment her mother was carrying in groceries from the weekly. . .
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