I have forgiven Eadie. It’s not her fault that the adoption was blocked. And she must have her reasons for not telling me who did it. I do believe she is a good person; she wouldn’t have done that to me if she could have helped it. I shouldn’t have been so hard on her.
It’s Saturday so I decide to go to my morning meeting with her. My usual time is 10 a.m. but I head over now at quarter to as sometimes she finishes early with the kid before me, so I get to have more than half an hour.
The hospital smells different to all the other buildings in the Homes. The church smells of dust and damp, the big hall smells of sweaty boys, who often have games there, but the hospital smells like disinfectant.
I head up the first flight of stairs towards her office. Her door is shut, so I sit outside. Sometimes if she is somewhere else in the building the room is locked and I just wait; she’s never too late.
I sit and read the notices on the wall. At twenty past she still hasn’t arrived and I start to get a little worried. She never doesn’t show up. I wait another hour, and still nothing.
There’s no note on the door. A couple of grown-ups walk past and I ask them if they’ve seen her and they say no.
At half-past eleven I decide to go looking for one of the nurses. When I find one, she says that Eadie won’t be coming back. I ask her why and she says she couldn’t say.
I am annoyed that she won’t tell me why Eadie is away but also glad that there is a reason she isn’t here; I was worried that something had happened to her. It seems to be how my mind works now.
Although I’ve skipped a few meetings because I was annoyed with Eadie, I never meant for it to be for so long. Now I know that I need my time with her each week – I rely on it. I sit back down and try to work out why she has gone, work through the avenues that might explain it. My immediate reaction was that she’d been killed, but I need to train myself like Detective Walker said; think through all the possibilities. If she had known she was going to leave she would have told me, she would have told all of us, so she must have left suddenly without knowing beforehand.
I remember that Glenda sees Eadie too, so I run over to her cottage. She’s hanging around with her little crew. I nod at her and she nods back, then I flick my head to the side, to mean, Come this way. She starts walking with me and her friends come too. She stops and looks at them and shakes her head, and that’s all it takes for them to stop where they are. She has such control over her friends it’s amazing.
‘Whit’s goin’ on?’ she says.
‘You seen Eadie?’
‘Aye, Thursday. Why, whit’s happened?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone? How so?’
‘Gone. Nurse says she’s no coming back.’
Her face looks how I feel. ‘She cannae be gone.’
‘She is so, no message for us, no nothing.’
‘Tha’s no fair,’ she says. Glenda doesn’t look angry, just hurt. ‘Someone has to have got rid of her. She’s too nice to run oot on us.’
‘I know, but who?’
‘Bastard Super, that’s who.’
‘No.’
‘Aye, he never liked her, I can tell.’
‘Aye, but not enough to get rid of her.’
We’ve reached the edge of the woods and stop.
‘Whit we gonnae do?’ she asks.
‘We’re gonnae find out who knows why Eadie’s gone, then we’re gonnae find out why she’s gone, then we’re gonnae get her back.’
‘Aye right,’ says Glenda, nodding.
‘Right,’ I say.
She walks back to her cottage and I walk back to mine.
That bastard Super, I think. He must know, for sure.