For the last twenty years, she had lived with a disease. A tumour had developed in her when she was just fourteen years old, and over time - and unseen by any of her doctors - it had grown in size and malignancy. Somewhere, deep inside her, the cancerous lesion was throbbing, and when it did it caused her the most unimaginable, unbearable pain that anybody could imagine. Yet nobody knew it was there.
No, nobody knew. To most people that met her – neighbours, co-workers, even her sister – Veronica Mitchell seemed perfectly healthy. She seemed beautiful, she seemed successful, and she seemed surrounded by a loving family. One might have called her cold, distant, even heartless – and people had indeed called her all of those things – but nobody could have guessed how much pain the cancer was causing her. Every day since the neoplasm had twisted the tumour into being, she had suffered. And she was suffering still, now worse than ever.
Ronnie could not keep her hands from fidgeting, as she sat in the waiting room. She dug her nails deep into the back of her wrist, in a fruitless attempt to distract herself from the pain. She was no longer crying, for there were no more tears left inside her to be shed. She was no longer sobbing, for she no longer had the energy. Instead, she waited. She waited for good news, she waited for bad news. She waited for a doctor to emerge and tell her something about Danielle.
As she sat, her mind periodically drifted back to events from the past nine months. She tried to remember when exactly Danielle had first arrived in Walford. When had this young girl first moved in across the street from her home? The most important person in her entire world had been in and out of her life for months now. How could she have known? How could anybody have expected her to know? Amy was dead. Her Amy had died thirteen years ago, so how could she walk around the Square so easily? How could a ghost have worked on a market stall without arousing the suspicions of any of her customers? How could the phantom vestige of a dead seven year old have got itself pregnant? How could that have happened?
After the abortion, Danielle had asked her about Amy.
"You said that having your baby was the biggest mistake of your life. Did you mean that?"
"Yeah, I meant it. My life would have been much better if I'd had an abortion."
How could she have known? She had felt sick after saying those words to Danielle. She felt sicker now, now that she knew she hadn't only betrayed the memory of a dead daughter - she'd broken the heart of a living one.
"Who would want a daughter like you?" she had asked Danielle earlier that evening. As she waited, Ronnie thought about the question. She thought about what kind of person would say something so cruel. She thought about what a person would need to have inside them to do something like that. As far as she knew at the time, Danielle was a disturbed and lonely girl who'd aborted her baby, become estranged from her father, and was desperately looking for someone to take care of her. What kind of person would say something so hurtful to someone like that? Who would want a mother like her?
Ronnie looked up from her own thoughts for a moment, and saw Stacey Slater sitting opposite her. Stacey's eyes were bloodshot, and there was a trail of watery mascara running down her cheeks.
Stacey was drunk. She was, after all, a drinker. Strong, loving, loyal (in some respects), but a drinker nonetheless. She had been drinking today, at the wedding. Drinking and shouting and puking. When Danielle had come to her, when her best friend had needed her, distraught, broken, this is the Stacey that she had met. Not the rock who would take care of her, who would shelter her from the volatile winds that seemed to be confined to that dank corner of East London. Instead, she got the lush. The alcoholic. The Stacey that had tried to entice Max Branning to her bed, once again, though their previous encounters had ruined both of their lives. This was the Stacey that had hurled a bucket of water over Ronnie Mitchell, leading her to shout at Danielle all those months ago.
As the mist of inebriation began to dissipate, slowly, Stacey thought about that night. She thought about all of the times that Ronnie had treated Danielle unfairly. She thought about how kind, and how sweet, and how harmless Danielle was, and she thought about how that family had treated her. And as she thought these thoughts, her own feelings of guilt were pushed to the background. As long as she thought about the callous indifference of the Mitchells, and of the one sitting nearest her in particular, she could avoid thinking about her own culpability. The mist of inebriation had indeed begun to dissipate, but it was still there in some measure.
"What are you doing here anyway?" she demanded. Ronnie looked up with a start. "You didn't wanna know her before!"
"Stacey, please!"
"Nah, this is for friends and family, and you ain't either!"
"I'm her mother!"
Stacey's outburst faltered for a moment when she heard Ronnie say this, though only for a moment. True, she was taken aback by the maternal passion in her adversary's voice, but she wasn't ready to go back to wallowing in her own remorse quite yet.
"You ain't her mother, her mum's dead. You're just some slapper who didn't wanna look after her kid."
"Stacey, you don't know what you're talking about!" Ronnie, too, began to realise that this was distracting her from her pain far more than fingernail marks in her wrist. "Stacey, you're drunk, and you don't know what you're talking about." The barb about her condition hit Stacey harder than Ronnie could have realised.
"Yeah, fair enough, I might be drunk, but that don't mean it ain't true," she reasoned, standing up to emphasise her point. "I wanted my baby so much, and they made me get rid of it. Just like you did with Danielle. Are you telling me that's what a mum does?" Ronnie blanched at this. The one thought that she had attempted to avoid, the one crime which stood out above her other misdemeanours, the one single horror that she had committed. She had told Danielle, persuaded her, to get rid of her child. For a brief moment, Ronnie slipped into a daydream – she was with Danielle in a hospital room, her arm draped around her daughter's shoulder, as she in turn held her own daughter in her arms.
"Why didn't she tell me, Stacey," Ronnie screamed, snapping out of her fantasy, and standing too. "Why didn't she just tell me?"
"Because of how you were with her, because of how horrible you were!"
"But if she'd just told me, it would have been different. I'd have been there for her. I'd have been everything she wanted me to be. If she'd just told me!"
"Yeah, well look at what happened when she did."
The last blow was too much for Ronnie, who crumpled back in her seat. Stacey felt a pang of guilt at the way she'd treated Ronnie, but – worse than that – her guilt over Danielle began to creep back to the fore of her mind. The momentary respite that the argument had given her was gone, and as she began to sober up, her guilt became more focused and sharper in image.
"Excuse me," said a nurse, "did you come in with Danielle Jones?" Stacey nodded, and both she and Ronnie stood. "She's okay, but we're going to need to keep her in for a while. Would you like to see her?"
As Ronnie made a move to go in with them, the nurse turned to her.
"I'm sorry, Ms Mitchell?" Ronnie nodded. "I'm afraid she's asked that you don't come in at the moment."
"But I'm her mother!" Ronnie cried. The nurse looked at her with surprise, this revelation clearly being news to her.
"I'm sorry Ms Mitchell, but she's expressly asked for this. You're more than welcome to wait out here, of course."
As she walked out of the waiting area, and towards Danielle's ward, Stacey turned and looked at Ronnie, defeated and broken in her seat. Whatever guilt was tormenting Stacey, she knew that she could be feeling a lot worse.
