Free City Lives by Patricia Scanlan

solace every time she opened it. She lit a scented candle, put on some soft music and
tried to find calmness and peace in the depths of her being. She knew that she was going to need all her inner strength and resources to face what lay ahead.
    Richard sat looking at his waxen-faced mother. In the hospital bed attached to monitors and hooked up to drips she looked very frail and small. Shrivelled, almost. Her face,
without her false teeth, was pinched and puckered like a walnut shell. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who had taken him to task so sternly that morning.
    She’d been fine when he’d left her, just hours ago. Angry, certainly. But there’d been nothing wrong with her physically, he assured himself.
    Whatever had happened to her had happened when she’d gone to see Caroline. Mrs Gleeson had phoned him, panic-stricken, to say that she’d collapsed in the car on the way home from
visiting his wife and had been taken into the Mater in an ambulance. When he’d quizzed her about why she’d gone to see Caroline, the housekeeper had informed him that she hadn’t a
clue but that she’d been very agitated before she went and twice as agitated when she got back in the car after the visit.
    It was a bad heart attack. If she had another one within the next seventy-two hours she wouldn’t survive it. The doctor seemed to have no doubts on that score. If she made it through the
next few days she’d need bypass surgery. However, her constitution was strong, she was fit and thin and that was in her favour, the doctor had informed him kindly.
    He couldn’t go and put the firm up for sale on Monday now. Not the way things were. Unless, of course, she died. She wouldn’t give a damn then. Or would she come back and haunt
him?
    Richard buried his head in his hands. Only this morning he’d wished death on her and now it was hovering, ready to take her. He felt deeply, deeply guilty. Why did she have to have a
bloody heart attack? He never had any luck, he thought sorrowfully. If she died he’d feel guilty for the rest of his life. If she didn’t, he was stuck here. There was no way he could
take off to America if she was going to have a bypass. Even if she recovered from that he wouldn’t be able to leave. The fear of her having another attack would always be there. Damn Caroline
for whatever she’d said. She must have caused a hell of a scene to get Sarah so worked up. It was all this weird New Age codology that Caroline was into now. All those strangely titled books.
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway; Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; Anatomy of the Spirit.
She always had her nose stuck in a book these days and she was getting very peculiar
ideas.
    God knows what she’d said to his mother. Caroline wouldn’t be at all happy when she heard that he was putting off selling the firm. He knew she was anxious to have things settled
between them. But what could he do? He was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Surely Caroline would be able to see his dilemma. She’d just have to have patience. Everything hinged on
whether his mother lived or died. It was out of his hands now.
    Caroline heard the ping of the lift bell and knew Richard was in the foyer waiting for the lift to descend. It was twelve thirty p.m. She’d been lying in bed unable to
sleep, waiting for him to come home. Would he knock on her door and come in to her? She’d deliberately left the door ajar so that he could see that the light was still on. Would he be
confrontational and abusive, or cold and sulky? Or by some miracle would he have calmed down and seen sense?
    Her fingers curled tightly in her palms in an unconscious act of tension. She almost held her breath as she heard Richard open the front door. She listened as he locked the door behind him and
walked into the kitchen. She heard him open the fridge door and a cupboard. Moments later he switched off the light and she heard him walking down the hall. Her