While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  Before the doctor had a chance to answer me – and who knows whether he would have told me the truth – Ryan had returned, with something tucked firmly beneath his arm. He approached the bed, and the closer he got, the less certain he began to look. But he’d gone too far down this particular road to be able to divert from it now.

  Carefully, as though he was handling something explosive – which in a way he was – he removed the daily newspaper from beneath his arm, and placed it before me on the bed.

  The front cover held a full-page photograph of a man I recognised from the media. He looked a little chubbier than the last photograph I’d seen of him, his colour was ruddy, and his hairline was receding. But that wasn’t what was shocking. The thing that made me gasp, and then look up at Ryan with an expression of incredulous humour, was the headline: President argues his case to Congress.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked, running my finger beneath the bold black letters. ‘Is this one of those joke, mock-up newspapers?’

  ‘Don’t we all wish that it was!’ muttered the doctor, still looking annoyed at whatever road Ryan had decided to take us down.

  ‘That’s today’s edition,’ said Ryan resolutely.

  ‘But . . . but . . . it can’t be. That’s not the President of the United States. That’s—’

  ‘Forget who the damn president is,’ interrupted Ryan, sounding almost angry with me. ‘That’s not why I’m showing you the newspaper.’

  ‘Then why?’ I began, my voice hesitant and unsure, because suddenly I knew something very important was happening here, and although I had no idea what it was, I already knew I wasn’t going to like it.

  ‘Look at the date,’ said Ryan, sounding as though he was in pain.

  My eyes went up to the top of the newspaper. ‘August the tenth,’ I said, looking at the words and then back at my fiancé. ‘Like you told me earlier.’

  His eyes closed, and I believe now that was because he couldn’t bear to be looking at me as his words exploded my world to smithereens. ‘Not the month, the year,’ he commanded.

  ‘Twenty . . .’ I looked up, my face full of fear. ‘Is this a misprint? Or a sick kind of joke?’

  ‘It’s neither,’ said Ryan, broken.

  ‘But it’s not possible. It can’t be. It just can’t.’ I looked back down at the line of black print, and my head was shaking even while a part of me knew that it was all horribly and incredibly true.

  ‘Twenty eighteen? Twenty eighteen?’

  Both the doctor and Ryan nodded slowly in perfect unison.

  ‘Are you saying that the accident wasn’t weeks ago . . . it was, it was . . .’ It was too terrible. It was worse than that; it was a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from.

  Ryan’s eyes were bright with tears as he looked at me with a sadness I had never seen on his face before.

  ‘It was six years ago, Maddie. You’ve been in a coma for six years.’

  Chapter 3

  The doctor left. I didn’t hear him go, or the closing of the door behind him. There was nothing he could do for me right then. Even Ryan, whose arms had encircled me like two steel bands, was powerless to protect me as the awful truth hit me, then receded, and then hit me again, like a relentless tide.

  I felt as if I was tumbling; as though I’d taken a step only to find the final tread on the staircase was no longer there. Crying was beyond me, although I could hear from the catch in his voice that Ryan was struggling to hold back his own emotions.

  ‘How is this possible? Why didn’t I wake up for all those years?’

  Very gently, Ryan lowered his arms and reached for my hands, which were tightly clenched, imprisoning bunched handfuls of hospital blanket within them. He prised open my fingers with careful persistence, entwining them with his until they formed a complicated origami of digits.

  ‘No one knew,’ he explained sadly. ‘They tried everything they could. To begin with, the doctors were hopeful; they kept telling us your injuries had been traumatic, so we should expect that it might take time. Then eventually, their voices started to change when they spoke to us. And then the weeks became months, and the months became years, and they didn’t sound hopeful any more. In fact, they made it pretty clear that the longer you remained in the coma, the less chance we had of you ever waking up.’

  His smile was bittersweet and full of six years of remorse. ‘What the doctors are asking themselves today isn’t why you were in a coma for so long; it’s how come you’ve woken up at all. They’re calling it a miracle, you know.’

  Two fat tears formed in readiness at the corners of my eyes. I blinked, and they were set free to run lazily down my cheeks. ‘I’ve lost six years of my life – that doesn’t sound miraculous to me. My God, that makes me, what . . . thirty-four now?’

  Ryan gave a small sad nod.

  ‘I got old,’ I cried forlornly. ‘I missed my thirtieth birthday.’

  Ryan leant over and wiped the tears from my face with his thumb. ‘We had a cake,’ he said consolingly, ‘with candles.’

  ‘But I wasn’t there to blow them out, was I?’

  There was more in his eyes than I could cope with at that moment. ‘No, Maddie. You weren’t there.’ And there was something terribly final in those words, almost as though he blamed me for not waking up.

  ‘I must look different now after six years. Can you find me a mirror. I want to see.’

  Ryan was clearly reluctant to leave me, and was back so quickly he must surely have mugged the first person who happened to be walking past, carrying a handbag. He held out the small compact to me, and then had to retrieve it again only a minute later, as my fingers were too uncoordinated to open the tiny clasp.

  My hand was trembling as I held the mirror up to my face, terrified it would reveal some awful Rip Van Winkle version of how I used to look. But thirty-four doesn’t look that much different from twenty-eight apparently, and although my face was gaunt and my cheekbones had never before been so prominent, basically it was still me. It was only as I looked closer that I took in the sallow complexion and the huge panda-like dark circles beneath my eyes, which was the last thing you’d expect to find on someone who’d been asleep for almost seventy-five months.

  ‘You don’t look any older,’ Ryan said loyally.

  ‘You’re only saying that because you love me,’ I replied, still looking at my reflection in the two circular disks of glass, which meant I only caught the fleeting tail-end of his troubled expression. I lowered the mirror and looked at him carefully, seeing the passage of years not on my face, but on his. Now that I was looking for it, I wondered how I could possibly have missed it.

  ‘We said we’d grow old together,’ I said, with a sad little laugh. ‘But then I went and fell asleep and left you to do it alone.’ His mouth tightened and twisted slightly, as he once again took my hand. ‘It must have been so hard for you. To keep waiting and waiting for me to come back to you.’

  ‘It was even harder for your parents,’ Ryan said carefully. ‘Especially for your dad. To see your only daughter like that . . .’ his voice trailed away, and I was surprised by the empathy in his tone.

  ‘I can’t wait to see him, and Mum too, of course.’

  Ryan looked away for a long minute, and there was something about his posture or the stiffness of his spine that concerned me. Keeping his eyes fixed on absolutely nothing at all beyond my hospital window, he continued in a low confessional tone. ‘They never stopped believing, you know. Particularly your dad. When everyone else gave up, when everyone else said you were gone, he never once – not even for a minute – gave up hope.’ Very slowly, as though he was a similar age to the man he was speaking of, Ryan turned back to face me. ‘He was the only one who still believed.’

  There was a pause, a long one. The words that were waiting to fill it hung in the air like stars. Eventually I reached up to pull them down.

  ‘Except you, of course. You still believed.’

  If I had slipped a knife between
his ribs, I don’t think he could have looked in greater pain. ‘You stopped believing? You didn’t think I would ever wake up?’

  This was the moment. It was finally here, and suddenly I wanted to run. Except my body was too weak and wouldn’t let me. The truth was getting closer, I could hear the roar of its engine, much like the van which had mown me down.

  Ryan’s hands were still holding mine. The hands that all day had felt odd, and weirdly wrong. My fingers turned under his, my index finger moving slowly down across the palm of his left hand and up his fingers. I felt it straight away, of course I did. Because now I knew what I was looking for. Yet still I checked and checked again, torturing both of us and prolonging the agony. Here it was, beneath the sensitive pad of my fingertip, the reason why his hand had felt strange. On the second finger of his left hand, a shallow but perceptible ridge was grooved into the flesh. It was the place where he wore his wedding ring.

  The silence stretched on forever, daring one of us to break it. Ryan eventually got to his feet and walked to the window. I watched him silhouetted against the glass, the man who was mine when I had closed my eyes, and someone else’s by the time I opened them again.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, my voice bitter. ‘Who is she?’

  Ryan leant his arms against the window frame, as if he was trying to push it out of the wall. His shirt, the one I’d never seen before, was perfectly ironed. Ryan was rubbish at removing the creases whenever he did them, so I guessed she was the one responsible for its immaculate finish. And that small act of intimacy was what started me crying. Because she was the one who now picked up the socks that never quite made it into the laundry basket. I’d moaned about that a thousand times; I’d moaned about it only yesterday morning, or so it seemed to me. But I would never get to do so again. Nothing about Ryan or his life was mine any more. And yet all I had done was close my eyes.

  He turned his head, and looked at me over his shoulder. ‘I loved you. I loved you more than you will ever know.’ His voice was hoarse and raw, as though the words were a wound he was ripping open. But the tense he used told me everything I needed to know.

  ‘How long?’ I asked, my voice small, yet surprisingly steady, despite the falling tears that I didn’t even attempt to wipe away.

  ‘We were married two years ago.’ The pronoun he used cut me like a sabre. The thought that he was now a ‘we’ with someone other than me, seemed like a cruel and sadistic joke. I turned my face into the pillow, it was already damp, but not as much as I suspected it would be by morning. ‘But I’ve actually known her for longer than that.’

  My head twisted on the pillow as I turned it towards him. ‘While we were together? Did you know her then?’ Was this woman, this unknown thief of my future, also part of my past? Had I known her? It was small consolation that Ryan looked genuinely horrified by my question.

  ‘No. Of course not. We met after your accident. It was a time when I . . . when I really needed someone to lean on.’

  Me, I cried silently. I was the one you should have leant on. But I could never say those words out loud, and they weren’t the right ones anyway, because what I really wanted to say was: You should have waited for me, because I would have waited for you. Even if it took every day until the end of my life . . . I would have waited for you.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  Ryan looked at me for a very long moment. Why are you doing this? his eyes asked.

  Because I have to know. I have to know it all, mine replied.

  ‘Chloe. Her name is Chloe.’ And just like that she became real, not because of her name, but because of the warm sound of it as it fell from his lips. He loved her, I knew that without any shadow of a doubt, because the way he said her name was exactly how he used to say mine.

  ‘They said you’d never wake up,’ Ryan said, his voice a whisper. ‘The doctors told us it had been too long, that we should say our goodbyes, and to remember you the way you’d been.’

  He walked back to my bedside, and my eyes drank him in. Would I ever see him again after today? Would she let him? If I was in her place, I knew I wouldn’t.

  ‘For three years I sat at your bedside and wished night and day for a miracle.’

  My laugh was bitter and there was no humour in it. ‘Well, you know what they say, you should be careful what you wish for—’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he begged, reaching for my hand, but I snatched it away. He had no right holding my hand, when it was hers that wore his ring.

  ‘When the phone went in the middle of the night, when I finally got the call I’d waited six years to receive, all I could feel was indescribable joy that you were back.’ His words sounded completely sincere, but when I closed my eyes and imagined that moment, I saw a woman’s arm in a darkened room, sleepily laying a hand on his naked shoulder. I saw her kneeling up behind him on their bed, asking him who was calling at this hour. I saw him getting to his feet, grabbing for his clothes, while she sank back upon their mattress. I saw it all as clearly as if I’d been right there beside them.

  ‘I think you should leave now,’ I said, my voice trembling with the effort of holding back my need to scream out at the unfairness of it all. Why bring me back into this world? Why wake me up, only to have me realise that everything that was once mine now belonged to someone else?

  ‘Maddie, we still need to talk—’

  ‘No. Not now. There’s only so much I can take in one day. I’m done, Ryan. Please just go.’ I was going to fall apart, I could feel the seams stretching and beginning to rip open. What happened next would be ugly and noisy, and I wanted no witnesses to it.

  But somehow I must have known there was one more bullet left in the chamber, waiting to wound me. I could have said nothing, I could have watched him walk out of my hospital room and left the question unasked, and yet I didn’t. One more spin of the barrel, one last round of Russian roulette before he left me and went back home to her.

  ‘What about children, Ryan. Do you have any?’

  His hand was already on the doorknob, but it froze at my words. He didn’t turn around to answer me, so I never saw the look on his face when he replied. I imagined it might be regret, or even embarrassment. He addressed his words to the wood of the door frame.

  ‘Yes, we do. We have a little girl.’ And then, without another word, Ryan left and slipped out into the corridor.

  I thought nothing could hurt me more than the pain I was already feeling, I thought I was already at my limit. I thought wrong.

  The nurses left me alone for a while, and for that I was thankful, because some types of pain are beyond even the most experienced medical professionals. I needed that time to grieve and mourn – because while everyone else was looking at my awakening as a rebirth, to me it felt like thousands of tiny deaths, one for each day I had lost. Of course I was grateful that my life had been returned to me, but I wanted it all back, just the way it had been, not some new and inferior version of it.

  ‘Enough, enough now,’ I told myself.

  And so, when the freckled-face nurse stuck her head around the edge of my door, I forced my mouth into something that could almost be called a smile, although the sympathy on her face almost set me off again. These people had been in charge of my care for a very long time, and had probably known about all the changes in my life far longer than I had. What else did they know that I didn’t, I wondered.

  ‘Is there anything I can get for you, Maddie? Anything you want?’

  ‘Can you make it 2012 again,’ I asked. The jaunty reply had sounded more amusing in my head than it did when it came out of my mouth.

  ‘I wish I could turn back time for you,’ said the nurse, whose name I later learnt was Ellen. ‘But you know what it’s like, there’ve been so many NHS cutbacks lately—’

  I laughed, and was pleased to discover it felt way better than crying had done. Ellen busied herself with filling my water glass and dropping in a straw, but I could see her watching me carefully from the corne
r of her eye. I doubted she would be the only healthcare official concerned about my state of mind. As she held the glass while I sipped, I had a sudden flashback of Ryan standing with a drink in hand after every bout of morning sickness. My bottom lip trembled against the plastic straw.

  ‘I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible this must all seem right now. But if you’re going to get better – and you most definitely are going to get better,’ she added in a feisty, fighting-talk tone, ‘I think you’re going to have to learn to forgive the people in your life for moving on.’ I looked up at her kind and caring face. ‘He never left your side for the longest time,’ she said softly.

  ‘And then he did,’ I finished sorrowfully.

  Perhaps I wasn’t being fair on him; after all, I had no idea how much Ryan had suffered, but that didn’t stop the swell of anger and jealousy from overwhelming me every time I imagined him with her . . . with Chloe. My life had been smashed into pieces, and it seemed to me as though this woman had come across it lying discarded at the edge of the road, had picked it up, and decided to take it for her own.

  ‘My fiancé—’ I stopped and drew in a breath before correcting myself. ‘My former fiancé, told me today that he’s a husband and a father now.’ Ellen’s eyes were steady but held no judgement; she was going to remain resolutely Switzerland. ‘We were pregnant, Ryan and me. I wasn’t very far along, but we were going to have a baby.’

  Ellen’s eyes softened and she laid one hand on my arm in sympathy. ‘I know, Maddie. It’s in your medical records. I’m so sorry; this is such a lot for you to have to cope with. Would you like something to help you sleep?’

  I shook my head, Ryan had said my dad was on his way, and after all this time I should at least be awake when he arrived.

  The setting sun was painting my room in an artist’s palette of orange and gold when I saw my father for the first time in six years. He looked so much older than I had been expecting. The salt-and-pepper speckling on his hair was now gone – as was most of his hair, come to that. What remained had crept further and further back, and had become the colour of snow recently turned to slush.