Loop - Megan

"Megan!"

Her voice echoed through the halls.

Megan had probably gone out. It wasn't as though she could really ground her any more. Sometimes she was tempted, but since Megan had become the breadwinner for the family, it had always felt awkward chastising her.

She shuffled into the kitchen, and made a cup of tea. There was a postet in Megan's handwriting on the kettle.

Gone to work, back six-ish.

Will get milk and sugar on way home - please do not leave house. Will talk later.

Love,

Megan.

She put the note back down on the counter, and sat down with her tea.

Megan always wanted her to go outside, to confront the crowds that had taken everything from her, and see that it wasn't as bad as she feared. Every note, every day, highlighted something worth seeing if only she would venture beyond the front door.

 It was six years today.

She looked again at the note.

The underline of the 'not' was so heavy that it had gone through the paper. There was a line on the pad where Megan had written it.

Six times three hundred and sixty five. Plus two for the leap years.

Two thousand, one hundred and ninety two days.

Two thousand, one hundred and seventy-six notes begging her to go outside.

One note telling her not to.

Megan had given up on her.

She understood why; it wasn't difficult to see it. It didn't matter how well her daughter had coped having to go from a dependant teenager with a part-time job at the hospice to the fatherless carer of an emotionally crippled mother. It didn't matter that she'd been patient as her mother couldn't even go through the door for the funeral. It didn't matter how many therapists she'd brought to the house at great personal expense, or how her love-life had deteriorated under the pressure of an ever-present and time-consuming live-in patient, but never once led her to show the albatross her mother had turned into.

As for her, she had refused to respond to anything Megan had done for her. As though she was still at home waiting for that call from the hospital. She looked down at the slippers she'd worn six years ago as she clutched the arm of the chair and stared at the phone for six hours.

When Megan came home that evening, she'd told her that there had been no news. That hadn't been true, and on some level Megan had known it back then, even before the funeral director had called and Megan picked up. But on some level, she'd believed her own lie, and here, now, six years later, she was waiting for someone to call and tell her that her husband wasn't dead.

The last thing he'd ever said to her - perhaps the last thing he'd ever said - was that he'd see her at home. He hadn't liked her worrying, hadn't liked Megan being on her own. And she'd gone home, trusting in his certainty that everything would go well, and it hadn't. The anaesthetist had medicated him, the surgeon had opened him up, but nothing could be done to fix him.

And after six years of dwelling on it, she'd forced the last person who still cared about her to stop caring.

She would go to the supermarket. She would buy milk and sugar. She'd walk there across the hospice gardens and see how it had changed.

She peeled her most recent debit card off the letter it had come with, and spent twelve minutes looking for a purse to put it in. She started getting dressed, and thought she ought to shower, but realised that she was putting it off.

She wasn't planning on hugging anyone. She'd brush her teeth, and then she'd go.

Fifteen minutes later, her hand reached cautiously for the door handle. It was difficult, touching it again after so many years. It brought back memories, which was strange.

It was locked. Which, fortunately, reminded her that she needed her keys.

She found his keys while she was looking, and cried for a few minutes. It might be easier tomorrow - or, she reminded herself, it would be just as hard.

She put his keys in her bag, and walked up to the front door. She let muscle memory guide her through unlocking it and opening it, and before she knew it she was walking down the steps and onto the street.

She hurried back up the steps to check that she'd locked the door - she had. Things were familiar, and strange, and somehow wonderful in a way that they hadn't been for the six years they'd been separated by her trusty guardian of wood and brick.

This wouldn't take long.

***

"I'm home," Megan called, "Sorry I'm later than I said - I stocked up on a few items while I was at the shop - Mum?"

The lights were off. She walked through the house. All the lights were off.

Seven bedrooms from which lodgers had gradually become alienated stood empty. The cellar - once a source of dread - was devoid of all life except woodlice and assorted spiders.

It isn't difficult to tell when a house is empty. There's a feeling, even when they haven't made a noise, that someone else is around.

Megan was not getting that feeling.

She went out into the garden. Her mother hadn't gone out of that door, either, for five years, but it seemed like it would be the shallow end.

More woodlice and assorted spiders in the shed.

Megan felt a panic rising in her chest, and sat down at the table. There was the better end of a cup of tea here,  stone cold and with a film on top.

Her note was next to it. She could have smacked herself.

She shouldn't have said anything about leaving the house. She wasn't going to - it was a generally safe assumption that nothing could coerce her mother into the daylight - but it had seemed as though, just in case, she ought to make a note.

If she hadn't been running late, she would have written more, she would have explained that there had been disturbances in the city since last night, and there seemed to be some involvement of drugs or disease.

But she had been late, and after years of staying indoors it hadn't even crossed her mind that her mother would even contemplate leave the house. She'd said not to, just to cover all bases, but instead -

She'd tried reverse psychology once, after about eight months of her mother's seclusion when her social life had begun to evaporate. It hadn't worked; her mother had seen through it and couldn't speak to her for days without weeping. She'd barely been able to coax her out of her bedroom for months afterwards, and the guilt of the attempted manipulation had stayed with her for even longer. 

Her mother had taken the old shopping bag from behind the shoe-rack. Megan's heart seemed to stop inside her chest when she realised where her mother would have gone; the note, in refraining from challenging her, had provided her with an opportunity to prove herself.

She knew which way her mother would walk to the high-street - she'd get to the cathedral through the garden of the old hospice, where Megan had been working the last time her mother had left the house. It took a couple of minutes longer than the streets, but it was usually quieter.

Not lately, though. She'd spent the day working out of a mobile hospital at the mouth of the hospice's cul-de-sac, while the police tried to peacefully prevent a wave of savage violence perpetrated by people who had been at deaths door just days previously.

Odd things had been happening. The doctors were saying that Sylvia Addrey's condition hadn't been as unique as had once been claimed; the papers spoke of immortality and infection in equal measure.

And her mother had walked through the hospice.

Megan was not, as a habit, a ditherer. She hadn't had the time since the accident which had killed her father and emotionally incapacitated her mother, leaving her as the only earner in the household. She called the police to notify them of her mother's disappearance while she found the number for the shop.

The manager had known her mother quite well before her enclosure, and confirmed that she had been in four hours previously, when she had seemed shaken and bought milk and sugar.

Four hours. Megan called the police to pass on the information, and then called work. They'd look out for her mother. She double-checked that she was signed off for the next three days; she wasn't expected back until Friday.

She felt her throat tighten, and paused to take a puff from her inhaler. She hadn't needed it in years, not even with everything that had happened over these last few weeks, but today -

She leant against the refrigerator, and took a second puff before stowing it back in her bag. She'd put it in there for the first time in two years this morning, and now, for the first time in years, she'd needed it. If she'd believed in fate, she'd have thought it cruel.

Megan phoned friends and acquaintances that lived close to her mother's old route to the shop. Rose Tillier lived just beyond the hospice, and had seen her mother passing by after the police cordon had moved. Things seemed to have settled down, Rose said. Megan's mother had seemed a little panicked, but otherwise alright. She'd been heading home, about four hours ago.

Nobody else had seen her.

Megan opted to look for her, but lingered by the front door. It wasn't that she was afraid of what she might find; she knew from experience that she could cope. She also knew from experience that a lot of missing persons headed home. Someone should be present.

She bit her lip until it bled. It felt like cowardice. She told herself that it was just sensible, but even though she knew it was true, she felt like a traitor.