While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  Ryan shook his head. He didn’t speak, although his body language was positively screaming out for me not to ask him that question.

  ‘Ryan. Look at me. What is today’s date?’

  He didn’t meet my eyes when he answered. Perhaps that was just too much for him to bear. ‘It’s the tenth of August,’ he replied brokenly.

  Seven weeks – seven and a half, to be entirely accurate. How was that possible? How could I have lost the last fifty-two days of my life? I could now remember the day of the accident, every last detail, it had all come back. But the weeks I had lost lying in this hospital bed were gone, forever. As completely and totally as the child I’d been carrying.

  Panic and confusion raced through me as I stared blindly around the impersonal hospital room, looking for something – anything – to dispute a truth that I could no longer avoid. This, at least, explained Ryan’s absence from my bedside, and that of my parents. The vigil he and my family must have lived through immediately following the accident, was now many weeks in the past.

  ‘My parents? Are they okay? Have they been told that I’m awake?’

  Ryan nodded, although the grim look still lingered around his eyes, making him appear oddly older. ‘They were phoned before I was. I spoke to your dad before I left. He’s going to get here as soon as he can.’

  The omission was too obvious to go unnoticed. ‘He’s coming alone?’

  Ryan spoke slowly, as though carefully selecting and discarding certain words before formulating his reply. ‘Your mum has had a bit of a . . . setback . . . since your accident,’ he eventually supplied, tightening his grip on my hands as though to protect me from the guilt he knew I would feel. But I felt it anyway. As weak and tired as I was, I still recognised a euphemism when I heard one.

  ‘How much of a setback? What happened? Is she all right?’

  ‘I’ll let your dad explain it properly,’ Ryan said, glancing anxiously towards the door, as though anticipating an interruption. It was only then that I realised he was clearly hoping there would be one. For a man who wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, he seemed suddenly very anxious in my company.

  ‘Is there something else, Ryan? Something you’re not telling me? Has it got anything to do with my injuries?’

  He shook his head, but he was a poor liar. He always had been.

  ‘No, nothing,’ he said, although his jaw looked inexplicably tight. ‘You know I should probably let you get some rest now. They warned me I wouldn’t be allowed to stay for long. They have tests they need to run now you’re . . . back.’

  He made it sound as though I’d been on a journey. Perhaps the seven-week absence felt that way to him, but to me it was just the next morning.

  ‘I’d rather you stayed with me. Can’t you stay?’ I sounded like a frightened child on their first day at school.

  I tried to tell myself I didn’t notice him hesitate, but of course I did. I knew his face almost as well as the one that stared back at me in the mirror each morning. I had always been able to read him. I’d even known he was going to propose on the night when he did, at least half an hour before he finally managed to get the words out. So I didn’t need to ask him how tough the past seven weeks had been for him, the answer was etched on his face, in the small grooves fanning out from his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘For a while,’ he said, lifting our joined hands to his lips and gently kissing my knuckles. That was when it first occurred to me that he’d not kissed me, not once, since the moment he had entered my room.

  After weeks spent in darkness, the August sun felt uncomfortably bright to my eyes as it streamed through the glass. Ryan had gone to the window, and had his back to me as he worked on untangling the knotted cord of the blinds, with far more concentration than the task probably required. Suddenly he turned back to face me, and I was shocked to see that once again he was close to tears.

  ‘I’ve missed you so much, Maddie.’

  My heart ached, for the pain he’d been through because of me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m back now.’

  He nodded, but said nothing, and all at once I felt like I was missing something. Something important. He released the blind and it fell with a noisy clatter down to the sill, plunging us both back into the shadows. Ryan crossed back to the bed, walking stiffly in small jerky steps. This time he ignored the visitor’s chair, and perched instead on the edge of the mattress. Very gently, he reached out his hand for a tendril of my hair that had escaped from the plait, and wound it around his finger. He’d always loved my long dark hair, teasing me that when I slept with it splayed out on his pillows, I looked like Sleeping Beauty. How ironic those words had turned out to be. He studied the dark strand which he’d wound around his wedding finger like a ring. ‘I missed doing this.’ Suddenly I was crying too, and I had no idea why. I had a dreadful premonition that he was about to say something I really didn’t want to hear.

  ‘You’ll never know how much I wish it had been me the van had hit, and not you. Because if it had been me, I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Madeline,’ said a nurse, speaking even before the door to my room was fully open. ‘We need to take you up to Neurology now.’

  I looked desperately at Ryan, urging him to finish whatever it was he’d been about to say. But his eyes were shuttered more securely than the blinds on the window. He got to his feet and stood back as the nurse and the orderly, who’d been right behind her, released my hospital bed from its bay. Together they performed the NHS equivalent of a three-point turn and positioned the bed in line with the doorway.

  ‘Can my fiancé come with us?’ I asked. Ryan was standing behind the bed, out of my field of vision, but I saw the nurse’s eyes go to him. No one spoke, but I felt as though there had been a silent conversation between them, which I hadn’t been a part of.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid that’s against the regulations. But you can see him later when we bring you back down.’

  Ryan leant over the side of the bed, his lips fleeting as they kissed the top of my head.

  ‘You won’t leave?’ I asked anxiously, reaching for his hand. His fingers squeezed mine reassuringly, and again there was something about the feel of his hand that bothered me.

  ‘I won’t leave yet, I promise.’

  I would have been so much happier I thought miserably, as the bed was trundled along a wide green corridor towards the waiting lift, if that last sentence hadn’t included the word yet.

  Tests. Scores and scores of tests. Some required my active participation; others required me to do nothing except lie there, completely immobile. They were the easy ones, because I’d had seven weeks of practice at those. Infuriatingly, the medical team carrying out the examinations told me nothing. I had no idea if the readings on their monitors relayed good news or bad.

  One of the worst moments had come when the nurse had eased back the bed covers to transfer me into a wheelchair. I’d looked down, genuinely horrified, at the two stick-thin legs protruding from my hospital gown, as though they belonged to someone else. All I could see was the vivid outline of the bones, and so much wasted muscle. Gingerly I’d reached down to touch my thigh, my hand recoiling in horror at how close the bone felt beneath the skin.

  ‘Don’t you go worrying about that, now,’ comforted the nurse kindly. ‘We’ll soon have you moaning that you can’t fit into your favourite skinny jeans.’ Despite the levity in her words, there was a depth of understanding in the way she laid her hand on my shoulder, and squeezed it gently. ‘You’ve been having some pretty full-on physiotherapy while you were . . . asleep, to keep everything working properly.’ My smile was small and twisted at her euphemism. ‘And that’s going to continue every day until we have you back on your feet again. Literally,’ she finished, with an encouraging smile. ‘For the time being, you’re just going to have to be patient.’

  I wondered if that was a little bit of hospital wordplay humour, but realised sadly that it probably wasn’t. That was the moment whe
n I first understood I was likely to have to remain in hospital for some time to come. My accident, and the weeks spent in a coma afterwards, were not the kind of thing a person springs back from quickly. The summer wedding Ryan and I had so carefully planned might now very well have to be a winter one, I acknowledged.

  ‘So how did I do?’ I asked the nurse, as we descended in the lift back to my own ward. ‘Those doctors were like poker players; I couldn’t tell if my answers or responses were right or wrong.’ The nurse took her hand off the bed frame and squeezed my fingers. My lack of strength as I attempted to return her grip, illustrated how wiped-out the tests had left me. Newborn kittens had more strength than I felt capable of summoning up.

  ‘There are no such things as right or wrong answers here, Madeline. No one is trying to trick you, or catch you out. All everyone wants is for you to get better as quickly as possible and go home. We’re all on the same team.’

  I smiled tiredly and looked up into her warm and open, freckled face. ‘It’s Maddie,’ I corrected softly. ‘That’s what my friends call me.’ Oddly, I knew without asking that this woman was deeply invested in me and my care. I wondered if it was possible to bond with someone, even if technically you were lost in the depths of a coma at the time. I certainly felt an inexplicable closeness to someone I’d only just met.

  ‘Have you been my nurse the whole time I’ve been here?’

  ‘Goodness me no,’ she said. I’ve only been on this ward for—’ she broke off suddenly, and the cloud of freckles on her cheeks disappeared beneath a deep pink flush. She gave a small frown, as though working out a particularly tricky anagram. When she looked back at me there was a degree of carefulness in her reply. ‘I’ve been helping to look after you for a little while now.’

  The lift pinged, announcing we had reached our floor, and there was a definite expression of relief in her eyes as the doors slid open. ‘Let’s get you back to your room now,’ she said, straightening my already perfectly straight blankets, and twitching my pillow into place. ‘You need to get some rest.’ She was right, I did.

  Ryan wasn’t in my room when I returned from Neurology, and his absence bothered me far more than I cared to admit. I felt cut off and adrift without him. At my request the friendly nurse obligingly looked for both my bag and phone in the bedside locker, but neither could be found.

  ‘I imagine your parents or your fiancé took them home for safekeeping,’ she declared, pushing the door of the cabinet firmly closed.

  I flopped back on the starchy pillows, totally exhausted. It was a struggle to keep my eyes open, one which I suspected I would very soon lose.

  ‘I wish Ryan was here. I really need him now.’

  ‘I know you do,’ the nurse soothed, and the understanding note in her voice wrapped around me like a warm blanket, which I wore all the way back to unconsciousness.

  The blinds had been opened, and the sun was now much lower in the sky. The door to my room was also open, and I could see Ryan standing in the hallway beyond, deep in conversation with a white-coated doctor. I called out his name, and he turned around just a little too quickly to disguise the look of anxiety on his face. He was still rearranging his features as he strode quickly back into my room, the doctor two steps behind him.

  ‘You weren’t here,’ I said, my voice croaky and more pathetic than I was happy to hear.

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I was talking to the doctors, and I also spoke to your dad,’ he said. I felt like a sheep that had been effectively nudged in the right direction by an experienced border collie. ‘He’s run into some major delays on the road, but hopes to be here before too much longer.’

  And then you’re going to want to leave. I had no idea where that thought had come from. But it rang so loudly with the clamour of truth, that for a moment I thought I’d said the words out loud. But Ryan was still looking at me with an expression of tender concern, so I guessed that I hadn’t.

  ‘My phone isn’t here,’ I said, apropos of nothing. It was something I had noticed in the hours since I’d woken up. It was as though my brain had taken too much rest over the last seven weeks, and had forgotten the routes and pathways it should navigate in a conventional conversation.

  Surprisingly, Ryan threw back his head and laughed so heartily that the doctor looked on in bemusement. ‘I can’t believe I’d forgotten your obsession with your mobile phone. What were you planning on doing? Posting a quick tweet from your hospital bed?’

  I looked up at him, and for a fleeting moment it was like looking at someone I didn’t know. ‘I wanted it to phone you,’ I said, sounding hurt. ‘You weren’t here when they brought me back.’

  Instantly the humour on his face dried up. ‘I’m sorry, Maddie. I wasn’t far away.’ It wasn’t really a satisfactory answer, but apparently it was the only one I was going to get. I was still feeling vaguely unsettled and wrong-footed by his reaction. Was it because he had laughed at me? I honestly didn’t think that was the problem. One of the first things that had drawn us together had been our shared sense of humour. Laughter had always featured strongly in our relationship. So what was it that was bothering me? The answer came to me in a rush, like a carriage breaking free from a runaway train. It was the comment he’d made about my phone, about how he’d forgotten the way it was very much a part of who I was.

  ‘Your phone battery would be dead by now,’ Ryan said, his face sober. ‘And I think it was probably damaged in the accident anyway.’

  ‘Is it at your place with my other things? There was still quite a lot of cash left in my handbag.’

  There was a genuine blank look on his face, as though the thousands of pounds that I’d withdrawn from our joint account on the day of the accident had been forgotten. I could only put his distraction down to the sombre conversation he and the doctor had been having in the hallway. It didn’t take a genius to work out that they had surely been discussing my condition.

  As if I had prompted an actor who’d forgotten his lines, the doctor began to speak: ‘Madeline, I’ve been going through the initial tests you underwent this morning, and I have to tell you the results are, quite frankly, nothing less than astonishing. To have gone from where you were to this highly responsive and cognitive state is, well . . .’ The doctor looked almost embarrassed by his own exuberance. ‘Well, to be honest, it’s like nothing anyone here has ever seen before. Obviously there’s still a very long road ahead to get you back to full strength, and we’re going to need to monitor you very closely, but I’m confident that with persistence, hard work, and patience’ – there was that word again – ‘we should be able to achieve what at one time we had thought would be truly impossible.’

  Impossible. The word frightened me. Had my life actually been hanging in the balance after the accident? Ryan was shifting a little uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I’d only ever seen him do that once before, on the night we had gone round to my parents’ house, shortly after he had proposed. ‘I should have asked him first, you know,’ he’d muttered as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder on my parents’ porch, waiting for the front door to be opened.

  ‘He’s not going to mind. He’ll just be glad you’re taking me off his hands. He probably thought they’d be lumbered with me for life.’

  ‘I’m sure he did, Miss Austen,’ Ryan quipped, giving me a brief kiss, as we heard the sound of approaching footsteps. ‘I’m only marrying you for your dowry, you know,’ he teased.

  ‘Boy, did you back the wrong horse,’ I joked, as my father eventually opened the door.

  I smiled a little sadly at the old memory, while behind the doctor my fiancé continued to fidget. Something was really bothering him. There was something he and the doctor had been discussing; something that, for reasons known only to them, they had decided I didn’t need to be told. Except that I did. Because I already suspected what it was.

  ‘Doctor, the baby I lost—’

  Ryan made a small sound, and I knew then how much losing our unborn child had aff
ected him. Perhaps he felt it even more deeply than me, because initially his excitement at the pregnancy had been so much greater than my own. I felt guilt twist through me. Was this my punishment? To have lost the baby that, to begin with, I hadn’t realised how much I wanted? But my reluctance had only been short-lived. I had quickly come around to the idea, and in the end we’d both been equally thrilled at the prospect of becoming parents.

  ‘I understand everything you’re saying about having to let my body recover from the accident and the coma. But can you tell us how long we need to wait before we try again?’

  ‘Maddie,’ there was an almost pleading note in Ryan’s voice.

  ‘Erm . . .’

  ‘Obviously, I know these things take time. But, well, I don’t want to wait too long. How long would you recommend that we leave it?’

  ‘Maddie, we really don’t need to talk about this right now.’

  I turned back to the doctor, who looked like a man desperate for his pager to go off and summon him somewhere else, right now.

  ‘A month? Two months?’ I persisted. The doctor looked awkwardly at Ryan and then back to me.

  ‘What? What is it that you’re not saying here? Everything is okay, isn’t it? I can still have children?’

  The doctor nodded slowly. ‘As far as we can tell, yes, you can. That should be perfectly possible.’

  The relief swept through me like a tidal wave. ‘Thank God for that. I was getting a little panicky then.’ I gave a small laugh, hoping that one of the two men in the room might join in. But neither did.

  ‘I suppose being in a coma for seven weeks must be an unusual complication. Will we need to take that into consideration before trying for another baby?’

  ‘I can’t do this,’ burst out Ryan. He ran his hand through his hair and looked at the doctor, as though seeking permission for something.

  ‘What?’ I cried. ‘Ryan, what is it? I don’t understand.’ But I was talking to his retreating back as he strode swiftly out of the room. ‘Where are you going?’ I cried out, struggling to sit up so that I could follow him. The doctor’s firm hand fell onto my shoulder, pinioning me back to the bed. I struggled beneath it. ‘Where has he gone? What were the two of you talking about before I woke up?’