by Dani Atkins
‘Would you like to sit with your husband while they do the handover? It’s going to take ten to fifteen minutes. You could have a little time alone.’ I nodded gratefully, blinking in the bright lights as I followed her into Joe’s room.
‘Hey, I’m back,’ I said to his silent motionless body. The nurse bustled around the room, clearing away items that had been left discarded, sliding shut drawers and cupboards and restoring order to the room. She glanced with a practised eye at Joe’s chart and then spent several moments carefully studying the various displays on the multitude of machines my husband was hooked up to.
She positioned a chair beside the bed and gently pushed me down onto it. ‘Is anyone here with you?’ she asked kindly. ‘A family member, a friend?’ I thought of the woman I had just left behind in the Relatives’ Room and shook my head.
‘No. No one. I hadn’t wanted to phone anyone until I had something positive to tell them. My husband’s parents are old and I didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily.’
The nurse squeezed my shoulder, and I could see she was weighing up whether or not it was her place to say what was on her mind. ‘Perhaps it might be a good idea to give them a call, and let them know what’s happened,’ she suggested gently. I felt something – which I suspected was my heart – plummet within me. ‘And it would be good for you to have someone to lean on, too, a friend perhaps.’
She left the room in slow hushed steps, assuring me that she would be just outside if I should need her. But the person I really needed was the one right there in the room with me, if only he’d wake up.
I held his hand tightly in mine, hoping to magically or medically transfer whatever he needed to recover through our interwoven fingers. I wanted so very much to believe he was clasping my hand in return, but in reality I knew that only one of us was maintaining our grip. I kissed the too-pale fingers, and the work-roughened calloused surface of his palm. ‘Come back to me,’ I whispered into the skin that no longer smelled of Joe.
Ally – Eight Years Earlier
It’s hard to say when my friendship with Joe began to gently nudge the pain of losing David to one side. It happened in such tiny degrees, that at first it wasn’t even discernible – at least not to me. It was only looking back that I saw it come together and begin to blossom, as though our relationship had been captured in time-lapse photography.
At night, I still cried silently into my pillow, missing David in a way that was so visceral, it literally felt as though he had been bodily torn from me. Yet in the morning light, the weakness that had me reaching for my phone at three a.m. was gone. And as I descended the stairs, to the sound of Joe’s tuneful whistling against a backdrop of his saw drawing through wood, those feelings were as hard to hold on to as a half-remembered dream.
I learned a lot about Joe Taylor in the six weeks that he took to fit our kitchen. One of the things I didn’t learn until a great deal later, was that there was no way it should have taken even half as long as that to complete the job.
‘I like Joe, don’t get me wrong, and the standard of his work is terrific,’ my father had said over dinner one night, about three weeks after the kitchen renovations had begun. ‘But it’s just as well we agreed a price for the job up front, because if I had to pay him by the hour, I’d be bankrupt before he was done.’
I dropped my head to hide the pink flush I could feel warming my cheeks, as I dragged my spoon through the spaghetti sauce on my plate. I knew I was at least partly responsible for the slow completion of the project. I spent far too much time each day in the kitchen, idly chatting with Joe, and as a result neither my dissertation nor the cabinets were progressing as quickly as they should. Joe was just so easy to talk to, and despite his being six years older than me, we had so much in common. There was also a refreshing maturity in being with someone whose idea of a good night out wasn’t defined by how many tequila shots you could consume before the evening even began. And Joe was funny, really funny, with a quick-witted ready humour, that always took me by surprise. It made me sad to realise how little laughter there had been between David and me by the end. It was as though our constant bickering had eroded it all away, smile by smile, and laugh by laugh, and neither of us had even noticed it going.
I think that was when I knew that despite everything, I was going to be alright again, that I was going to get through this and come out whole on the other side – when I realised I still remembered how to laugh. And I had Joe to thank for that.
‘Do you have another kitchen to fit when you finish up here?’ I asked one day, looking around at the bank of new units which now lined our walls. To my layman’s eye his work here was almost done. I felt a strange pang at the thought that he would soon be gone, which was weird, but with Max away at college I could feel the loneliness waiting in the shadows like a hidden stalker.
‘Not exactly, but I’ve still got a fair bit to do here before I’m done.’
I suppose the surprise must have registered on my face, because he looked a little uncomfortable as he said, ‘Well, it’s mainly just finishing off stuff. But I’m a bit of a perfectionist.’ He said it as though it was almost something to be ashamed of.
‘Me too,’ I confessed. ‘If I get just one note wrong, I have to go right back to the start of the piece and play it again.’
‘I know,’ he said with a small grin.
‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘I guess you must be kind of fed up with Beethoven’s Sonatas by now.’
‘Not at all,’ he contradicted. ‘You’re broadening my horizons.’ We shared a mutual smile, and I instantly recalled the day when I’d looked up from my piano and seen him leaning against the doorframe watching me play with an expression on his face that had stayed with me long after he had climbed into his van and driven away that night.
I’d commandeered one end of the dining-room table with my laptop, notebooks and a dozen text books, yet I spent far more time than I should in the kitchen, carefully stepping over Joe’s tools and lengths of wood to make us both endless cups of tea and coffee. After a couple of days I invited him to join me at the pine kitchen table for lunch, rather than eating in the solitude of his van’s cab, and the pattern of our days had been set.
One morning I walked into the kitchen and found Joe busily absorbed in sketching out a design on a large sheet of paper at the table. I passed behind him, and tried not to notice the familiar clean fresh fragrance of the shower gel or shampoo that he always used. But my nose betrayed me, for it had already squirrelled the aroma away in the vaults of my memory, in a file clearly labelled ‘Joe’.
I looked over his shoulder at the sketch. It was of a kitchen, far larger than ours. I watched the swift strokes of his pencil adding small details to the drawing, lifting it with subtle shading into a miniature piece of art rather than just a diagram. Even to my untrained eye, I could see he had a real talent.
‘Is that your next project? Whose kitchen is that, it looks really nice.’
Joe straightened and laid down the pencil, turning to me with his slow easy smile. ‘It’s a long-term ongoing job actually, because the client keeps running out of money.’
‘That’s tough on you.’
‘Not really. I’m the client.’
My eyes flitted from his face back to the pencil sketch before him. ‘You are? But I thought you lived in a shared rental with friends?’
‘I do. Or rather, I did,’ Joe explained. ‘I bought this place a year ago, totally derelict, and I’ve been doing it up room by room, until it was habitable enough to move into. The kitchen is the next stage.’
I leaned down a little closer, to better study the drawing, and a swathe of my long dark hair fell forward, brushing against his cheek. I apologised hurriedly, and tossed it back over my shoulder. ‘It’s a great sized room. Can you actually cook, or is that all for show?’ I asked, pointing to the impressive old-fashioned range he had drawn nestled into the recess of a large fireplace.
‘I do alright,’ he said.
‘I have three or four dishes I can pull off without poisoning anyone. I’ll have to invite you round for a meal when it’s done, so you can judge for yourself.’
For some reason his innocent invitation – which I was certain he’d only made out of politeness – made me feel oddly jittery, so I dipped my head once more, not caring if my hair fell forward, welcoming the concealment. ‘You know what you should do? You should build an island in the centre of the room,’ I suggested, running my fingernail over the large vacant space in the middle of the drawing. ‘I think they look amazing in big kitchens – they really work well.’
He didn’t reply, and I wondered if he thought it was rather cheeky of me to be telling him what he should do with his own kitchen. After all, he was the expert here, not me. ‘Sorry. It’s nothing to do with me. Your design looks great just as it is,’ I back-pedalled.
He looked at me, and it was hard to properly read the expression on his face through the strands of my hair hanging between us. Wordlessly he picked up his pencil, and in just a dozen or so strokes an island unit suddenly appeared in the picture.
He straightened in his seat and looked at me, a thoughtful expression in his eyes. ‘Something like that?’
I nodded, suddenly overcome with a peculiar sensation, which for some strange reason was making my heart beat a little faster. ‘Yes, that looks perfect.’
Ally
The nurse was apologetic when she knocked discreetly on the door before entering the room ten minutes later. ‘I’m sorry, but the doctors need to run some more tests, so I’m going to have to ask you to step outside again.’ It was too soon, far too soon. I hadn’t had the chance yet to tell Joe that I would have to call his parents. And there were other things I hadn’t told him: one of which was that the woman I’d hoped never to see again was sharing the waiting-room with me, and the man he hoped I’d never see again was right down the corridor, fighting his very own battle to survive. I got shakily to my feet feeling guilty, as though I was hiding secrets.
‘You’ll come and get me, as soon as I can come back?’ I asked the nurse urgently, as she shepherded me through the door. We both looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps as a cluster of white-coated figures headed our way.
‘The very minute they’re done,’ she promised.
‘I’m sorry, Ally. I don’t think I understand what you’re saying. You’re telling me Joe fell on some ice?’
The mobile line was clear enough, and I knew that wasn’t the reason why my mother-in-law hadn’t grasped the situation. It was, after all, well outside of the boundaries of normal.
‘No Kaye, he fell through some ice. On a frozen pond.’
‘How? Why? What was he doing there?’
‘I don’t know. The police couldn’t tell me.’ I heard her gasp and knew immediately I’d said the wrong thing.
‘The police? Who called the police? Was there a crime? Was Joe attacked and thrown onto the ice?’
I took a breath and tried to steady my voice. Joe’s mother was a natural panicker. Every winter cold was the flu, every headache a lurking brain tumour, every unexplained pain the forerunner of something incurable. Each black fear and prediction she had made over the years had thankfully proved to be groundless. But now, on this night, she had her first genuine reason to worry about her only son, and I had no way of reassuring her.
‘No one else was involved,’ I replied with careful patience, before realising that I had no idea if that was even true. I was still none the wiser myself. ‘The police came to the house to tell me.’
‘Oh no. Then it has to be bad. Really bad.’ I knew I should be trying to calm her down, to lessen her anxiety, it was what Joe would want me to do, but it was virtually impossible when her words were exactly echoing my own fears and terror. ‘Let me just tell Frank,’ she said and there was a loud clatter which I knew meant that she had simply dropped the phone to the floor and gone in search of her husband. I was doing this very badly, and if I wasn’t careful I would end up being solely responsible for giving both of them a stroke or a heart attack, or both.
‘Ally Which hospital are you at?’ My father-in-law’s voice was overly brusque, which I knew was his way of hiding his emotion. He’d spoken in just those tones the very first time I had placed Jake in his arms as a baby, with the words ‘And here is your grandson.’
‘We’re at St Elizabeth’s, but—’ I began.
‘Right. Well, we’ll . . . um . . . well if we leave right now, we should get there in five hours or so.’
I felt a hard knot of anxiety rise in my throat like bile, turning my voice into a squawk of dismay. ‘Frank, no. You can’t drive here in this blizzard. It’s far too dangerous.’ I hesitated and then stepped clean over the daughter-in-law boundary by adding, ‘And besides, it’s not safe, you’ve not driven in years. It’s a terrible idea.’
I was being harsh, but only because I knew Joe would be apoplectic if he had any idea of what his father was considering. He’d been insisting for ages that they should sell their old car. ‘If it’s not there, he won’t be tempted to jump into it one day, if there’s some sort of emergency,’ he had said, never for a moment realising how prophetic his words would be, nor that he might be the very emergency that he was worrying about.
Eventually I managed to persuade my in-laws to abandon the idea of driving themselves to the hospital, by assuring them I would arrange for someone to collect them and bring them to their son. I broke the phone connection and leaned back against the exterior wall, looking out bleakly over the hospital car park. All of the cars now wore thick white fluffy blankets of snow, several centimetres deep. No one should be on the road in these conditions, and especially not anyone who was past pensionable age, so that ruled out my own parents or my kindly next-door neighbours. I had no idea how to find a taxi that would be willing to undertake the journey, and the pressure of yet another thing to worry about threatened to buckle me.
I don’t know why it took me so long to work out who to ask for help. He was the one person who would know what to do, who wouldn’t panic, who had my back and who loved Joe almost as much as I did. The ringtone sounded different, but then transatlantic ones always do.
‘Max Fellows,’ he trilled in my ear, his voice now bearing even more of a New York twang than the last time we had spoken. He had a lazy ear that picked up accents easily, it was probably the only idle part of his entire body.
‘Maxi, it’s me. Ally. Something awful has happened.’
Every emotion I’d been careful not to reveal in my conversation with Kaye and Frank broke through the poorly erected dam I had shored in place. It took several false starts before I was capable of responding to Max’s rapidly fired ‘What’s wrong?’ Stumbling over my words I eventually managed to explain what had happened to Joe. It was almost impossible to get to the end of each sentence without crying.
‘Who’s there with you at the hospital?’ Max asked, his concern – as ever – directed at me. ‘And who’s looking after my godson?’
‘Jake’s at home, with our neighbours. He’s . . .’ I had to draw in a really long breath to finish what I was trying to say, ‘He’s waiting for me to bring his daddy home. And Maxi, I’m so scared that’s not going to happen; I don’t know if Joe’s going to come out of this.’
‘Of course he will,’ Max asserted firmly, and I wanted more than anything to believe him, but memories of the looks on the doctors’ faces and in the eyes of the nurse told me something else. ‘Don’t you give up on that man,’ Max sounded almost angry with me, and perhaps that was just what I needed. ‘Joe is strong and healthy. And more to the point he would walk through fire and flames to be with you and Jakey. He won’t leave you alone. He couldn’t.’ Max’s own voice shook a little as he pressed on. ‘So, are you by yourself at the hospital?’
A small humphing sound whistled through my lips. ‘If only,’ I said, unable to suppress the running stitch of hysteria threading through my words. ‘David and Charlotte are here t
oo.’
The line cracked for several moments against my ear before Max’s voice cut through the interference. ‘Sorry Ally, the line broke up. For a moment I thought you said David and Charlotte were there.’
‘I did. They are.’
‘You called your ex and his wife to sit with you?’ Max’s voice had risen a good two octaves in incredulity.
My responding laugh was cyanide bitter. ‘No. But by some billion-to-one coincidence David’s also a patient here. Charlotte and I are sharing the waiting-room.’
‘Fuck me.’
I heard muttering in the background and knew that Max must be hurriedly summarising the situation to Justin, his partner.
‘Give us a second, sweetie,’ Max requested. I closed my eyes on the snowstorm and the car park and imagined my old friend sitting in one of his oddly shaped designer chairs, looking out of the large floor-to-ceiling window in his loft apartment. All of New York would be laid out hundreds of feet below him; cars and buses would be trundling along the grid-patterned streets like miniature pieces in a toytown set. I could almost imagine the early afternoon sun slanting in through the glass, bisecting the gleaming wooden floor in glowing chevrons.
‘Okay,’ said Max, his voice relocating me back across the dividing ocean to the snow-covered hospital car park. ‘One problem at a time. Give me the address of Joe’s parents. There’s a car service we use in the UK, who won’t say no if we call them up, whatever the weather.’ That was the benefit of having a successful friend; he knew how to make things happen. Since moving to America Max’s career in fashion design had soared like a rocket, but his partner Justin was already way ahead of him. Together they were a formidable combination. I’d never asked Max for help before – even though it had been offered several times. But tonight, for Joe, I’d have dealt with the devil himself, struck just about any bargain imaginable, to fix things.
