by Dani Atkins
Something bitter and bile-like rose in my throat, and for just a second I felt myself staggering on the edge of that familiar abyss. I bit hard on my lower lip, and pulled myself back, yet still I noticed the tremor in my hand as I held out one of the Styrofoam cups towards her.
‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t remember how you take it. It’s . . . it’s been a while,’ I said hesitantly.
Very slowly, her hand came up and relieved me of the cup. ‘Thank you,’ she said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. I thought it was because she didn’t want to be beholden to me for anything, not even a cup of caffeine and hot water, but it wasn’t that.
‘The doctors want to talk to you. A nurse came looking for you a little while ago.’
I felt the blood drain from my face – you hear about that all the time in books, but it was the first time I’d ever experienced it. My cheeks felt suddenly cold and then my neck. It was there in my hands too, an inching creeping chill that ran through my fingers despite the fact they were wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee. Within me, I knew blood was racing to preserve internal organs, coursing at speed through capillaries and arteries to reach my heart. In a way that David’s was suddenly incapable of doing.
I sat down heavily on one of the uncomfortable chairs. ‘Did they say . . . ? Is David . . . ? Has something happened?’ No clarification or translation of those garbled half sentences was required, at least not by Ally. On this one night we were able linguists, who spoke exactly the same language.
‘No. I don’t think it was that.’ She saw my panic, or heard the small sound I couldn’t prevent from escaping. ‘It wasn’t that,’ she amended. ‘They just needed to talk to you.’
I got to my feet swaying slightly, and hoped there was still enough blood pumping to my legs to get me out of the door.
‘Look, just stay here. I’ll go and find the nurse for you,’ offered Ally.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll go.’ It was as instinctive in me as breathing, the need to separate her from anything to do with David. As it turned out, neither of us had to leave the room. We both jumped as the door opened and a nurse I didn’t recognise walked in, followed by two doctors.
‘Oh good, you’re back,’ said the nurse with relief. I glanced briefly in her direction without registering anything at all about her. She was just a metre from me, and I wouldn’t have been able to identify her again if my life depended on it. My attention was fixed wholly on the two doctors, both of whom were also unfamiliar. My heart sank a little. I wanted continuity; I wanted one heroic doctor, stoically staying at David’s bedside until he was well again. I wanted a physician with the Hippocratic oath tattooed on his soul, not an ever-changing carousel of medics who jumped in and out of the fight.
‘Mrs Williams,’ began one of the white-coated men, ‘could we have a word?’ He gestured towards the door. I had a horrible certainty that outside this room there waited only terrible news.
‘Tell me what’s happened. It’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘We’d like to update you on your husband’s condition. Would you come with us, please.’ His smile was like a waxwork’s: the right shape, in the right place, but there was no humanity behind it.
‘No,’ I said, startling everyone in the room with my refusal. The doctors exchanged a meaningful look, while the nurse suddenly found the toes of her sensible black shoes absolutely riveting.
I swallowed, trying to stop the panic from rising up in my throat and choking me. ‘Whatever it is you have to tell me, you can tell me now. Here.’
One of the doctors took a small step forward and laid his hand gently on my forearm. He must have been able to feel the thrum of nervous tension vibrating through me, beneath his palm. ‘I know this is very difficult for you—’ He broke off, and his eyes flashed towards Ally, who was standing, statue-still, at the edge of the room. ‘Perhaps it might be better if we spoke in private?’
‘Charlotte, it’s okay. I’ll step out,’ Ally said, and I don’t know what sounded more weird, my name on her tongue or the odd tremor in her voice.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, watching Ally’s steps falter as she came to a stop near me. I turned to the doctors, anxious to get the Band-Aid pulled off the wound as fast as possible. ‘Just tell me.’
The doctor nodded slowly before speaking. ‘We are growing increasingly concerned about your husband’s condition. Despite our best efforts he is still showing very little sign of improvement, which we would have hoped to see by now. So far he doesn’t appear to be responding to any measures we have employed. His condition remains grave.’
Okay, I take it back, I thought, feeling like a small child who just wants to put her hands over her ears to shut out the truth. I don’t want to hear any of this after all.
‘Ideally he should be transferred to a specialist cardiac unit, but at the moment, given his current status, we feel it would be extremely unwise to move him.’
With every word the doctor was pushing me closer and closer to the edge of despair. I knew he was still standing there before me, I could hear him talking, but the words were muffled and seemed to be coming from far away, as though I was drowning beneath a raging torrent. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. My hand moved convulsively, flapping as though looking for a lifeline. And then found it. Ally’s fingers gripped mine so tightly I could feel the bite of her wedding band cutting into my palm.
‘What happens now? What can you do for him?’ That should so have been my question, but it came from her instead.
‘Obviously Mr Williams is being monitored continually, but the next twelve hours are going to be critical. In the meantime we have sent out an urgent call for a Cardiothoracic Surgeon and we will keep you updated as to when they get here. Unfortunately,’ his eyes went to the window and the raging snowstorm beyond, ‘we aren’t being helped by the severe adverse weather conditions. The snow.’
I followed his line of vision. Small drifts were beginning to build up at each corner of the outer window sill. The roads had been bad earlier, and if the storm continued like this they would only get worse. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me. Snow had brought David into my life, and now – if it prevented specialist medical care from reaching him in time – snow could take him away from me.
‘I want to see him.’
‘Of course. We’ll take you to him now. You’ll find him very drowsy, due to the medication, but he’s still awake.’
The doctor looked down at Ally’s hand, still firmly gripping mine. ‘I’m afraid we can only allow one visitor at a time at his bedside.’
Ally’s hand dropped away like a rag doll’s. ‘Of course . . . yes . . . obviously.’
During the short walk to David’s room I tried to conjure up an expression to paste over my trembling lips, so he wouldn’t be able to read how terrified I was feeling.
‘Charlotte.’ I spun around, just a few paces short of David’s open door. ‘Your bag,’ said Ally, holding out the leather tote that I had unthinkingly left on the floor of the Relatives’ Room.
‘Thank you,’ I said, taking the bag and slipping it over my shoulder. I saw Ally’s eyes travel beyond me. I saw them go to David, watched as a muscle tightened in her throat, and followed the passage of a single glistening tear drop as it gathered and then slipped slowly from her long sooty lashes. She turned on her heel, so abruptly that her hair swirled around her head like a matador’s cape, and went back up the corridor at a pace just short of a run.
Ally
I hurried to Joe’s room, like a poison victim in need of an antidote. I found it the minute I slipped through the open doorway. Even here, in these dreadful circumstances he had the power to soothe and calm me. He was the signpost in the dark when I was totally lost, the candle in the window, lighting my way home. I longed for him to open his warm caramel-coloured eyes, and wrap his strong arms around me. Only those eyes were now taped shut to protect them from drying, and his arms lay like branches of a felled tree, needles in veins, with tu
bes and wires hooked up to machinery.
The solitary nurse holding vigil in Joe’s room turned at the sound of my arrival. She smiled kindly. ‘I was just coming to get you, Mrs Taylor. You can sit with him now for a while, if you’d like.’
I nodded, my throat too tight with emotion to thank her, and then stopped midway between standing and sitting in the chair beside his bed, as the nurse continued. ‘See Joe, I told you she’d be here in a minute. I told you not to worry.’
‘Has he woken up?’ I asked in an explosion of hope. ‘Has he been asking for me?’ I might possibly never forget the expression of sympathy on her face as the nurse looked at me, and then softly crushed my burgeoning relief to smithereens beneath her sensible work shoes.
‘Well, not exactly. I’m the one doing all the talking.’ She touched Joe’s shoulder gently, and suddenly I was very glad that she was the person on duty in his room. ‘But he’s a good listener, and he’s been patiently letting me prattle on for long enough. I’m sure he’s more than ready to hear a voice he really cares about. Isn’t that so, Joe?’
‘He can hear us?’ I asked, my eyes going from the nurse to the immobile face of my husband. There was no sign at all of acknowledgement, no indication that our words were reaching him. He still looked so far away.
‘Well, we believe that hearing is the last of the senses to go, and there are literally hundreds of reports of people who recall having heard things from the depths of a coma.’ She squeezed my shoulder encouragingly. ‘It’s got to be worth a try.’
I nodded, and attempted a grateful smile, but my wobbling lower lip made that impossible. The nurse, breaking I am sure at least a thousand rules of protocol, put her arm around my shoulders. ‘Just hearing your voice might help him find his way back.’ She passed the box of tissues from Joe’s nightstand, knowing instinctively her words would make me need them.
‘But what should I talk about?’ I asked.
‘Well, if it was me,’ said the nurse gently, ‘if it was my husband,’ I saw a brief flare of thankfulness on her face that it was not, ‘then I’d remind him of the special moments we’ve shared over the years, the important times . . . our very best memories.’ There was an unexpected mistiness in her eyes as she spoke. ‘Remind him of those, because if I was lost, trying to find my way back to the people I love, then those are the words I would want to hear.’
‘Me too,’ I agreed quietly.
Ally – Eight Years Earlier
I often think that Joe and I did everything backwards. I moved in with him, and then we fell in love; I had Jake, and then we got married. In those early weeks, after my parents’ kitchen was finally installed, I didn’t even realise how much I missed having him around to talk to on a daily basis, how much of a gap he had left behind, until suddenly he wasn’t there any more. Mind you, it was hard to miss him that much, because scarcely a week went by without him calling around to ‘fix’ something that had been bothering him about the kitchen. He changed all the cupboard handles – twice – after informing us they’d been recalled as faulty by the manufacturer. He came back to refit what looked to us to be a perfectly affixed trim on the worktops. He also spent some considerable time confessing that he still ‘wasn’t happy’ with several of the wall cabinets.
After one visit, my father thoughtfully closed the front door and returned to the kitchen, giving my mum a meaningful look. ‘While I’m delighted Joe’s such a conscientious craftsman, I can’t help thinking that his hopes of running his own business are never going to get off the ground, if he devotes this much after-care to each of his jobs.’
I looked up from the detailed tutor notes I had received by email that morning, as my mother replied with a gentle laugh. ‘Somehow I don’t think the drawer runners were the only thing that pulled Joe back today.’
I frowned, absently waving my pen through the air as though it was a conductor’s baton. ‘What do you mean?’
Her smile widened, and from the open door of the fridge I heard my father quietly chuckle. I swivelled in my chair and saw his shoulders were shaking gently.
‘What? What are you both going on about?’ My mum’s pale blue eyes were silently eloquent. ‘Me?’ I asked, my voice much more of a squeak than I’d intended. ‘You think that’s why he keeps coming back? That he’s coming to see me?’
A timeless smile curved my mother’s lips, making her suddenly look decades younger, and incredibly pretty. It was the face my father had first fallen in love with. ‘Isn’t it obvious, Ally? Why else would he keep calling round?’ she asked.
‘Er . . . how about to make sure you’re happy with the kitchen you just spent a fortune on?’ I said, for some reason beginning to panic that I had somehow disastrously misread my new friendship. I liked Joe, really liked him. But not in that way. Not in the way my parents were thinking. Joe was a new friend, perhaps one day he’d prove to be a loyal and good one. But as for anything else . . . well, forget it. My parents should know better than to hint at it being anything else. Especially now.
I wasn’t healed yet. I wasn’t even close. Memories of David weren’t going to be planed away like wood shavings by this charming, attractive carpenter who had just happened into my life. Maybe, if things had been different . . . ? I gave myself a mental shake. Things were the way they were. I knew it, and my parents knew it. Or at least I thought they did.
The wounds might be starting to heal, but the scars were going to take a whole lot longer to fade away. And until they did, I was in no position to even consider starting a new relationship with anyone. I bent my head, staring at the typed notes which had inexplicably blurred together into squiggly black tadpoles wriggling across the page, and waited for them to turn back into letters.
Three weeks later I was standing in the High Street, staring into a shop window when I saw the reflection of a familiar van pull into one of the parking bays behind me. In the plate glass of the window Joe looked even taller and broader than I remembered. It was, I realised, the first time I had ever seen him outside of the confines of our home.
I had less than a moment to check my own image in the glass as he locked his vehicle and began to walk in my direction. It was an uncommonly warm day at the end of March, and I’d come out dressed only in a long fluffy soft-knit jumper, that clung to my curves a little more revealingly than I’d have liked, worn over black leggings tucked into my new sheepskin boots.
I don’t know why I didn’t turn around to greet him. I don’t know why I kept studying the shop window with such intensity, you’d have been forgiven for thinking I was planning a smash and grab on the place. Actually, that’s a lie. I knew precisely why I didn’t turn around. But when he called my name, I had no choice. I turned, my smile of greeting fluttering a little at the edges, like a flag in the breeze.
‘Ally What a nice surprise. How are you?’
I hadn’t seen him for several weeks, not since the visit when my parents had made me question our friendship, so perhaps that was why my heart began to beat a little faster as he stood before me on the pavement. His eyes dropped for just a moment, and although it wasn’t an invasive appraisal, it still made me slightly anxious. Although to be fair, my own eyes had done pretty much the same thing, noting the black jeans and the dove-grey casual shirt. They weren’t what he usually wore to work, and I would know, and as it was approaching lunchtime I wondered if perhaps he was on his way to meet someone. Maybe he had a date? A feeling I had no business owning squirmed within me at the thought, and I realised with surprise that I was suddenly incredibly nervous.
‘I’m very well, thank you.’
‘You look good . . . I mean, you look well . . .’ he said, sounding unusually flustered. The fact that he too was nervous was as puzzling as it was interesting.
‘So what prised you away from your piano and laptop today? Have you finished your dissertation already?’
I loved the way he had taken such an interest in my university degree, even though it was a totally different path
from the one he had chosen to follow. ‘Now, wouldn’t that be great?’ I said, smiling widely. ‘No, I haven’t, but then it’s not due until the end of May – the dissertation, that is.’ I was stumbling awkwardly over even the simplest of sentences and I truly had no idea why. Thankfully he changed the subject and turned to look at the window display I’d been studying so intently when he pulled up.
‘So, what are you thinking of buying, or are you just window shopping?’
‘I think most of this is slightly outside of my student price bracket,’ I joked, nodding towards the cards in the estate agent window, displaying some of the most expensive properties our town boasted. ‘Actually, it was the rentals I was looking at,’ I confided, pointing towards the display on the far side of the window.
‘Really?’ Joe asked, turning away from the window to look at me. There was genuine surprise on his face. ‘You’re moving out of your parents’ home? Now?’ I bristled a little at what I thought he meant. ‘Before you’ve finished your degree?’
I relaxed and felt the tension slide off me, as he stood with his head angled quizzically, waiting for my reply. ‘I don’t think there’s ever an easy time to finally fly out of the nest,’ I replied, repeating the same words I’d said to my parents only days earlier. Thankfully Joe didn’t look distraught or burst into tears, as my concerned parents had done. But I couldn’t entirely blame them for their reactions. It was natural for them to want to protect me, when life had thrown me up against the buffers. But that didn’t mean I was acting irrationally, or that I hadn’t properly thought things through. Because that was pretty much all I had done for the last few months. I was officially all ‘thought out’.
‘I think many people find it hard after uni to move back home,’ I admitted. ‘You’re used to living your own life, coming and going as you please, making your own decisions, and then suddenly that’s all gone and you’re back home again, as if the last three years had never been.’ Except that wasn’t the case in my own situation. I wasn’t the same person I’d been before I’d packed up all my belongings and thrown myself into student life. And a lot of that was due to David, but even more of it was due to me.
