Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  The next day your sister sent me a bouquet of roses with Gypsophila, known as “baby’s breath,” sprays of pretty white flowers. But a newborn baby’s breath is finer than a single parachute from a blown dandelion clock.

  You told me once that when you lose consciousness, the last of the senses to go is hearing. In the darkness I thought I heard Jenny take a dandelion-clock breath.

  3

  I told you already what happened when I woke up—that I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor.

  That I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the dark ocean and swam upwards towards the daylight.

  That I saw the body part of “me” in a hospital bed.

  That I felt afraid and, as I felt fear, I remembered.

  Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.

  Jenny.

  I ran from the room to find her. Do you think I should have tried to go back into my body? But what if I was trapped, uselessly, inside again, but this time couldn’t get out? How would I find her then?

  In the burning school, I had searched for her in darkness and smoke. Now I was in brightly lit white corridors, but the desperation to find her was the same. Panicking, I forgot about the me in the hospital bed and I went up to a doctor, asking where she was: “Jennifer Covey. Seventeen years old. My daughter. She was in a fire.” The doctor turned away. I went after him, shouting, “Where’s my daughter?” He still walked away from me.

  I interrupted two nurses. “Where’s my daughter? She was in a fire. Jenny Covey.”

  They carried on talking to each other.

  Again and again I was ignored.

  I started screaming, loud as I could, screaming the house down, but everyone around me was deaf and blind.

  Then I remembered that it was me who was mute and invisible.

  No one would help me find her.

  I ran down a corridor, away from the ward where my body was and into other wards, and then on again, frantically searching.

  “I can’t believe you’ve lost her!” said the nanny who lives in my head. She arrived just before I gave birth to Jenny, her critical voice replacing my teachers’ praise. “You’re never going to find her like this, are you?”

  She was right. Fear had turned me into a Brownian motion molecule, darting hither and thither, with no logic or clear direction.

  I thought of you, what you would do, and made myself slow down.

  You would start on the bottom floor, far left, like you do at home when something is lost for good, and then you’d work your way to the far right, then up to the next floor, methodically doing a sweep and finding the missing mobile phone/earring/number 8 Beast Quest book.

  Thinking about Beast Quest books and missing earrings, because the tiny details of our lives helped to root me, calmed me a little.

  So I went more slowly along the corridors, although desperate to run, trying to read signs rather than race past them. There were signs to elevator banks, and Oncology and Outpatients and Pediatrics—a mini-kingdom of wards and clinics and operating theaters and support services.

  A sign to the mortuary tore into my vision and lodged there, but I wouldn’t go to the mortuary. Wouldn’t even consider it.

  I saw a sign to Accident & Emergency. Maybe she hadn’t been transferred to a ward yet. I ran as fast as I could towards it.

  I went in. A woman on a trolley was pushed past, bleeding. A doctor was running, his stethoscope flapping against his stomach; the doors to the ambulance bay swung open and a screeching siren filled the white corridor, panic bouncing off the walls. A place of urgency and tension and pain.

  I looked into cubicle after cubicle, flimsy blue curtains dividing intense scenes from separate dramas. In one cubicle was Rowena, barely conscious. Maisie was sobbing next to her, but I only paused long enough to see that it wasn’t Jenny and then I moved on.

  At the end of the corridor was a room rather than a cubicle.

  I’d noticed doctors going in, and none coming out.

  I went in.

  There was someone appallingly hurt on the bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by doctors.

  I didn’t know it was her.

  I had known her baby’s cry from any other baby’s almost the moment she was born; her calling for Mummy had sounded unique, unmistakable among other toddlers; I could find her face immediately, however crowded the stage. I knew her more intimately than I knew myself.

  As a baby I knew every square centimeter of her, each hair in her eyebrows. I’d watched them being drawn, pencil stroke by pencil stroke, in the first days after birth. For months, I’d stared down at her for hour after hour, day after day, as I fed her from my breasts. It was dark the February she was born, and as spring turned to summer it brought increased clarity in how I knew her.

  For nine months, I’d had her heart beating inside my body, two heartbeats for every one of mine.

  How could I not know it was her?

  I turned to leave the room.

  I saw sandals on the appallingly damaged person on the bed. The sandals with sparkly gems that I’d bought her from Russell & Bromley as an absurdly early and out-of-season Christmas present.

  Lots of people have those kind of sandals, lots and lots; they must manufacture thousands of them. It doesn’t mean it’s Jenny. It can’t mean it’s Jenny. Please.

  Her blond glinting hair was charred, her face swollen and horribly burnt. Two doctors were talking about percentage of BSA, and I realized they were discussing the percentage of her body that was burnt. Twenty-five percent.

  “Jenny?” I shouted. But she didn’t open her eyes. Was she deaf to me too? Or was she unconscious? I hoped that she was, because her pain would be unbearable.

  I left the room, just for a moment. A drowning person coming up for one gulp of air before going back into that depth of compassion as I looked at her. I stood in the corridor and closed my eyes.

  “Mum?”

  I’d know her voice anywhere.

  I looked down at a girl crouched on the floor, her arms around her knees.

  The girl I’d recognize among a thousand faces.

  My second heartbeat.

  I put my arms around her.

  “What are we, Mum?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  It may seem strange, but I didn’t even really wonder. The fire had burnt away everything I once thought of as normal. Nothing made sense anymore.

  A trolley with Jenny’s body on it was wheeled past us, surrounded by medical staff. They’d covered her up using a sheet like a tent so the fabric wouldn’t touch her burns.

  Beside me I felt her flinch.

  “Did you see your body?” I asked. “Before they covered it, I mean.”

  I’d tried to let out the words delicately, but they fell with a clump on the floor, forming a boorish, brutal question.

  “Yeah, I did. ‘Return of the living dead’ kind of summarizes it, doesn’t it?”

  “Jen, sweetheart—”

  “This morning I was worried about blackheads on my nose. Blackheads. How ridiculous is that, Mum?”

  I tried to comfort her, but she shook her head. She wanted me to ignore her tears and believe the act she was putting on. Needed me to. The one where she is still funny, lively, buoyant Jenny.

  A doctor was talking to a nurse as they passed us.

  “The dad’s on his way, poor bloke.”

  We hurried to find you.

  4

  The large hospital atrium was crowded with press. Your TV fame from presenting the Hostile Environments series had attracted them. “Not fame, Gracie,” you’d corrected me once. “Familiarity. Like a tin of baked beans.”

  A smartly dressed man arrived, and the people who’d been buzzing around with cameras and microphones moved towards him. I wondered if Jenny also felt vulnerable and exposed in this swarm of people, but if she did, she gave no sign of it. She’s always shared your courage.

&nbs
p; “This will just be a brief statement,” the suited man said, looking annoyed at their presence. “Grace and Jennifer Covey were admitted at four fifteen this afternoon with serious injuries. They are now being treated for those injuries in our specialist units. Rowena White was also admitted suffering from minor burns and smoke inhalation. At this point we have no further information. I’d be grateful if you would now wait outside the hospital rather than here.”

  “How did the fire start?” a journalist asked the suited man.

  “That’s a question for the police, not us. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  They carried on shouting out their questions, but we were looking through the glass wall of the atrium for you. I’d been looking for our Prius, and it was Jenny who spotted you first.

  “He’s here.”

  You were getting out of an unfamiliar car. The BBC must have driven you in one of theirs.

  Sometimes looking at your face is like looking in the mirror—so familiar it’s become a part of me. But there was a mask of anxiety covering your usual face, making it strange. I hadn’t realized that you are nearly always smiling.

  You came into the hospital, and it was all wrong seeing you here in this hectic, frightening, sanitized place. You are in the kitchen getting a bottle of wine out of the fridge or in the garden waging a new offensive against snails, or driving out to dinner, me next to you, bemoaning traffic jams and praising the GPS. You belong next to me on the sofa and on the right-hand side of our bed, moving slowly in the night towards mine. Even your appearances on TV in a jungle on the other side of the world are watched by me and the children on our family squashy sofa, the foreign mediated through the familiar.

  You didn’t belong here.

  Jenny ran to you and put her arms around you, but you didn’t know she was there and hurried on, half running up to the reception desk, your stride jerky with shock.

  “My wife and daughter are here, Grace and Jenny Covey.”

  For a moment the receptionist reacted—she must have seen you on TV—and then she looked at you with sympathy.

  “I’ll beep Dr. Gawande, and he’ll come to get you straightaway.”

  Your fingers drummed on the counter, your eyes flicking around, a cornered animal.

  The journalists hadn’t yet spotted you. Maybe that mask over your old face had foxed them. Then Tara, my ghastly colleague at the Richmond Post, made a beeline towards you. As she reached you she smiled. Smiled.

  “Tara Connor. I know your wife.”

  You ignored her, scanning the room and seeing a young doctor hastening towards you.

  “Dr. Gawande?” you said.

  “Yes.”

  “How are they?” Your quiet voice was screaming.

  Other journalists had seen you now and were coming towards you.

  “The consultants will be able to give you a fuller picture,” Dr. Gawande said. “Your wife has been taken to have an MRI scan and will then return to our acute neurology ward. Your daughter has been taken to our burns unit.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Of course. I’ll take you to your daughter first. You can see your wife as soon as she’s finished her MRI, which will be in about twenty minutes.”

  As you left the foyer with the young doctor, journalists hung back a little, demonstrating unexpected compassion. But Tara brazenly followed.

  “What do you think about Silas Hyman?” she asked you.

  For one moment you turned to her, registering her question, and then you walked quickly on.

  The young doctor accompanied you swiftly past the outpatient clinics, which were deserted now, the lights off. But in one empty waiting room a television had been left on. You stopped for a moment.

  On the screen, a BBC News 24 interviewer was standing in front of the gates to the school. I used to tell Addie that it was a seaside house that had grown too big for the seafront and had to move inland. Now its pastel blue stuccoed façade was blackened and charred, its cream window frames burnt away to reveal pictures of the destruction inside. That gentle old building, so intricately associated with Adam’s warm hand holding mine at the beginning of the day and his running, relieved little face at the end of the day, had been brutally maimed.

  You looked so shocked, and I knew what you were thinking because I’d felt the same when the rug was melting in my hands and masonry was falling around me—if fire can do this to bricks and plaster, what damage must it do to a living girl?

  “How did we get out of there?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  On the TV, a reporter was giving the facts but, shocked by the image on screen, I caught only fragments of what he was saying. I don’t think you were listening at all, just staring at the school’s cadaver.

  “… private school in London … cause at the moment unknown. Fortunately most children were at sports day. Otherwise the injuries and death toll … Emergency services were prevented from reaching the scene as desperate parents … One thing as yet to be explained is the arrival of press before the fire services …”

  Then Mrs. Healey came onto the screen, and the camera focused on her, mercifully blocking out most of the school in the background.

  “An hour ago,” the reporter said, “I spoke to Sally Healey, the headmistress of Sidley House Preparatory School.”

  You went on with the young doctor, but Jenny and I stayed for a little while longer watching Sally Healey. She was immaculate in pink linen shirt and cream trousers with manicured nails occasionally coming into view. I noticed her makeup was flawless; she must have retouched it.

  “Were there any children in the school when the fire started?” the reporter asked her.

  “Yes. But not one child at the school was hurt. I’d like to emphasize that.”

  “I can’t believe she put on makeup,” Jenny said.

  “She’s like one of those French MPs,” I said. “You know, with the lipgloss next to the state papers? Makeup in the face of adversity.”

  Jenny smiled; sweet, brave girl.

  “There was a reception class of twenty children in the school at the time of the fire,” Sally Healey continued. “Their classroom is on the ground floor.”

  She was using her assembly voice, commanding but approachable.

  “Like all our children, our reception class had rehearsed an evacuation in the event of fire. They were evacuated in less than three minutes. Fortunately, our other reception class was at an end-of-term outing to the zoo.”

  “But there were serious casualties?” asked the interviewer.

  “I cannot comment on that, I’m sorry.”

  I was glad that she wasn’t going to talk about Jenny and me. I wasn’t sure if she honestly didn’t know, if she was being discreet on our behalf, or if she was just trying to maintain a pink-linen façade that everything went according to plan.

  “Have you any idea yet how the fire started?” the reporter asked.

  “No. Not yet. But I can reassure you that we had every fire precaution in place. Our heat detectors and smoke detectors are connected directly to the fire station and—”

  The reporter interrupted. “But the fire engines couldn’t get to the school?”

  “I am not aware of the logistics of them getting to the school; I just know that the alarm went immediately through to the fire station. Two weeks ago some of the same firefighters came to give a talk to our year-one children and let them look at their fire engine. We never dreamt, any of us, that …”

  She trailed off. The lipgloss and assembly voice wasn’t working. Under that carefully put-together frontage she was starting to fall apart. I liked her for it. As the camera panned away from her and back to the blackened school it paused on the undamaged bronze statue of a child.

  We caught up with you in the corridor that leads to the burns unit. I could see you tense, trying to ready yourself for this, but I knew nothing could prepare you for what you’d see inside. Next to me I felt Jenny draw back.

 
“I don’t want to go in.”

  “Of course. That’s fine.”

  You went through the swing doors into the burns unit with the young doctor.

  “You should be with Dad,” Jenny said.

  “But—”

  “At some level he’ll know you’re with him.”

  “I don’t want to leave you on your own.”

  “I don’t need babysitting, really. I am a babysitter nowadays, remember? Besides, I need you to keep me updated on my progress. Or lack of.”

  “All right. But I won’t be long. Don’t go anywhere.” I couldn’t bear to have to search for her again.

  “OK,” she said. “And I won’t talk to strangers. Promise.”

  I joined you as you were taken into a small office, grateful that they were doing this by degrees. A doctor held out his hand to you. I thought he looked almost indecently healthy, his brown skin glowing against the white walls of his office, his dark eyes shining.

  “My name’s Dr. Sandhu. I am the consultant in charge of your daughter’s care.”

  I noticed that as he shook your hand his other hand patted your arm, and I knew he must be a parent too.

  “Come in, please. Take a seat, take a seat …”

  You didn’t sit down, but stood, as you always do when you are tense. You’d told me once it’s an atavistic, animal thing, meaning you are ready for immediate flight or fight. I hadn’t understood until now. But where could we run to and who could we fight? Not Dr. Sandhu with his shining eyes and softly authoritative voice.

  “I’d like to start on the positives,” he said, and you nodded in vehement agreement; the man was talking your kind of talk. “However tough the environment,” you say in the middle of some godforsaken place, “you can always find strategies to survive.”

  You hadn’t seen her yet, but I had, and I suspected that “starting with the positives” was putting a few cushions at the bottom of the cliff before pushing us off it.

  “Your daughter has achieved the hardest thing there is,” continued Dr. Sandhu. “Which is to come out of that intensity of fire alive. She must have huge strength of character and spirit.”