While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  He opened the door to my room and then stood in the frame, unmoving, as though what he saw was too incredible to take in. His lips moved soundlessly for a moment before the words came out.

  ‘Hello, Maddie, it’s Dad here.’

  Did he think he’d changed so much that I wouldn’t recognise him? His laugh was raw and sounded embarrassed, and revealed how close he was to tears. ‘I’m sorry. Force of habit. They told us to always let you know who we were when we walked in to your room.’

  I nodded vigorously, because words would have been impossible. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever. He must have waited for this moment every day since the accident, and yet now it was here, he was like an actor who’d forgotten the lines he’d rehearsed. I imagined no one had told him how to handle this moment, probably because no one had ever expected it would come.

  ‘Daddy?’ the childhood name came up from my buried memory banks, and suddenly there was a kaleidoscope of images. He was pushing me on a swing; running behind my bicycle when the trainer wheels came off; beside me in the water when frantic splashing turned into doggy-paddle. His arms were my protection, and he ran across the distance between us and I fell into them like a child. He held me with a fierce strength that belied his years, as we clung together surfing a tidal wave of emotions.

  Eventually he drew back, his hands – so much more wrinkled than I recalled – gently cupping my face. ‘You came back,’ he whispered, his voice no longer steady. ‘You came back to us. I always knew that you would.’

  He dragged the visitor’s chair as close as it could go to my bed, before lowering himself onto it. He did so carefully, and I saw the wince he tried to hide as he settled back against the cracked vinyl upholstery. My family home was many hours’ drive away, and I very much doubted that he’d have bothered to stop for a break, or to stretch his legs on the way. It was a long journey for a man his age to drive by himself. And that was something I could no longer avoid asking.

  ‘You came alone?’ He nodded slowly, his eyes still firmly fixed on my face, as though he’d never get tired of seeing me awake. ‘Ryan mentioned something about Mum . . .’ My voice trailed away, as I struggled to remember his exact words.

  In answer my father reached for my hand, and clasped it firmly in both of his. ‘Your mum’s not been herself for a while now.’ The spectre of something painful flickered behind his watered-down blue eyes, hinting that it was a great deal worse than that. He glanced around the room, as though looking for support. ‘Ryan’s gone now, has he?’

  In every sense of the word, I thought sadly, and nodded.

  Something must have shown on my face, for his grip tightened on my hands. ‘I’m so sorry, Maddie, about Ryan.’

  I shook my head. ‘We can talk about that later. Right now I want to know about Mum. You wouldn’t have left her alone, so who’s at home with her?’

  There was an unexpected expression on my dad’s face, and it took me a moment to recognise and name it. Guilt. ‘She’s fine; she’s in good hands, but she’s not at home any more.’ His voice cracked slightly on the admission. ‘She needed more care than I was able to give her.’ The guilt he so clearly felt jumped from him to me, like a malevolent poltergeist looking for a host.

  ‘Was this because of my accident? Is that what caused it? Did what happened to me make her worse?’

  ‘No, Maddie. Absolutely not.’ His voice was suddenly much stronger and more authoritative, using a tone I’d probably not heard since my teenage years. ‘You are never, ever, to think that, or to blame yourself. Your mum was getting bad for a long time. Don’t you remember, even when you were planning your wedding, she couldn’t—’ He broke off, looking suddenly horrified.

  I squeezed his hand, no longer sure who was comforting who any more. ‘It’s okay, Dad. It’s all right to talk about it. I know about Ryan . . . and his wife. I’m going to have to learn to deal with it. For me, time has stood still, but I know things have changed for the rest of you while I’ve been in here.’

  Despite my brave reassurances, my father’s voice was still raw with remorse as he haltingly explained that caring for my mother had finally proved too much for him to cope with. The decision to place her in residential care must have broken his heart. ‘She seems happy there, more settled. And I go every day, and sit and talk to her – they let me stay as long as I like. Some days are better than others,’ he admitted with a revealing sigh. And when he wasn’t doing that, he would have been visiting me, I thought sadly. It was little wonder that he appeared to have aged so much in the six years.

  ‘I’m sure the place you found for her is lovely, but doesn’t that kind of care cost an absolute fortune?’ I asked naively.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and bit his lip. I was slow to understand the expression on his face; the guilt was back, and with it was regret. Slowly the truth dawned on me. ‘Oh, Dad. You didn’t? You sold the house, didn’t you?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Maddie. I didn’t have a choice. I know how much you loved that house and how many happy memories we all had there. But it was too big for just me, and I was spending all my time with your mum anyway. Only now I realise I hadn’t thought it through properly. I hadn’t thought about what would happen when you woke up, and needed somewhere to go back to, somewhere you can get strong and well again.’

  I felt like a skittle that keeps getting knocked down every time it was set upright. Where I would go when I eventually left hospital hadn’t even occurred to me. Just a few hours earlier I would have said the answer was obvious: I would go wherever Ryan was; or failing that to my family home. Now neither option was open to me.

  I looked up at my father’s troubled face, and knew the concern upon it was greater than the uncertainty of where I would live. I realised then why the decision to sell might not have been quite as difficult as he had suggested; because despite everything he had said, perhaps he too had never really expected that I would wake up.

  Talking had exhausted me, and as much as I fought to stay in the present, in the moment, my eyes kept drifting shut.

  ‘You need to rest now, Maddie. You should try to get some sleep, my love.’

  My father got to his feet, pausing only when my hand groped across the blanket until it found his. ‘I’m scared, Dad,’ I whispered into the twilit room. ‘What if I don’t wake up again? Or what if I do, and another six years have passed?’

  The Adam’s apple in the wrinkled skin of his throat bobbed up and down convulsively for a moment, before he brought it under control. ‘Well, you’re just going to have to, because I’ve only booked the Travel Lodge for one night.’

  I smiled sleepily. ‘Always kidding around. Always making a joke.’

  My father leaned over and kissed me gently on the forehead. ‘Actually, I think that might be the first one I’ve cracked since they brought you in here.’

  I breathed in on a sigh, letting the familiar aroma of his aftershave surround me like a fragrant cloud. ‘Will you stay here for a while, just until I go to sleep?’ I asked. It was a child’s request, the kind you ask when you have a fever, or you wake up from a nightmare and need the comfort of a parent close-by. It wasn’t something a woman of my age would ever expect to ask.

  My father sat back down on the visitor’s chair and there was a battle of emotions on his face. But the one that won through with a landslide victory over the obvious concern, and the relief to have me back, was love. I carried the image with me as I slept. Should I never wake up, it was a good one to take with me, wherever I was going.

  But I did wake up. Hospitals are good for a great many things, but getting a peaceful night’s rest isn’t one of them. I began to realise how unique and astounding my awakening was by the extraordinary number of medical professionals who found a need to visit my room over the next twenty-four hours, or who could be seen lurking in the corridor outside my room.

  I remained attached to various monitors, which I’m sure were being closely observe
d and scrutinised. In addition, my vital signs were monitored what felt like continually throughout the night. It was as if the doctors themselves needed constant verification that their long-term comatose patient had suddenly, inexplicably, decided it was time to wake up. Eventually, Ellen had pulled down the venetian blinds on the internal window of my private room, to prevent some of the medical ‘rubber-neckers’ from gathering in the corridor. It didn’t help; I still felt like a freak at the circus.

  The sun had risen several hours before, but it was still early when I heard two familiar voices talking right outside my door. The slats on the venetian blinds allowed me only a shadowy outline of the pair, whose conversation was being conducted in infuriatingly low tones. But even if they had been totally silent, I would still have recognised them. For a single indulgent moment, I allowed myself to drift back six years. The wedding was only days away and when it came, the man on the left was going to take my arm and together we would walk down a petal-strewn aisle; then he’d remove my hand from the crook in his arm and gently place it in the waiting one of the much taller man on the right, who was preparing to share his life with me.

  I rubbed furiously at the self-pitying tears with the back of my hand, dragging the cannula embedded within it across my face. My cheeks were too red, but at least they were dry when my father knocked lightly on the door, before opening it just wide enough to pop his head through the gap.

  ‘Good morning, Maddie. You’re up.’ There was such joy in his voice it was practically infectious, and suddenly I found that I was smiling. My emotions were all over the place since waking from the coma. The natural divide between extreme high and plunging low was as thin as gossamer and kept ripping open.

  ‘Awake, not up,’ I corrected, looking beyond my father at the shape I could still see loitering on the other side of the blinds. ‘Why is Ryan here?’

  My father came all the way into the room and carefully closed the door behind him. ‘He was worried about you. He said he hadn’t been able to sleep last night and that he wanted to see how you were doing today.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘He can’t do that. He can’t be half in my life. That’s not fair to anyone: not to me; or him; or even to whatshername – his wife.’ I knew perfectly well the name of the woman my fiancé had married. It was engraved forever on the tombstone of my marriage, but I hid behind a feigned nonchalance for self-preservation.

  ‘Chloe, that’s her name,’ said my father, looking troubled as he leant down and kissed my cheek in greeting.

  I pulled back from him as far as the pillows would allow. ‘You know her name?’ He nodded, and there was a guilty embarrassment in the way his eyes would no longer meet mine. ‘Do you know her, Dad? Have you ever met her?’

  My father had always been a terrible liar, and he certainly hadn’t improved during my six-year hibernation. ‘Not that well. We’ve met a few times.’ Even without the tell-tale flush bleeding around the collar of his shirt, I realised he was being sparing with the truth. It was disquieting that he appeared to know the woman who had replaced me far better than he was letting on.

  He walked to the window and looked out at whatever was beyond it. It would be many weeks before I was able to do that, a fact it was probably just as well I didn’t realise right then.

  ‘Why, Dad?’

  ‘Why what?’ he asked. Now who was feigning nonchalance?

  I could feel a tension stretching between us, like a length of elastic. ‘Why did you meet Ryan’s new wife?’

  My dad turned back to me with a sad smile. ‘It would have been rude not to, especially after he’d asked my permission to marry her.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here. You should be at home with your family.’

  ‘You’re my family too.’ And with those words Ryan ran me down, even more effectively than the van had done.

  ‘No, I’m not. Don’t say that, because we both know it’s not true any more.’

  ‘I didn’t stop caring about what happened to you, just because I married someone else.’

  ‘Well you should have done,’ I said, my words deliberately sharp and pointed. ‘That’s how it goes when a relationship ends; you’re supposed to put away all those feelings before you move on to the next one.’

  ‘Except we never broke up. We never ended.’

  I looked up at him and felt the wall of stone I was trying to hide behind begin to crack. ‘Yes, we did. We ended when you married another woman. And what the hell were you doing involving my dad in your proposal?’ Ryan looked uncomfortable and glanced towards the door through which my father had recently disappeared, as though hoping for rescue. ‘You had no right putting him in that kind of impossible situation. What were you thinking of?’

  Ryan looked at me wordlessly for what felt like minutes. Several times he seemed about to say something, only for some internal censor to shut him down at the last second. Finally he replied: ‘We all grew very close in the months and years after your accident. We helped each other through an unimaginably difficult time.’ He looked down at his feet for a second, shuffling awkwardly, and I was right back on that porch on the day he was about to ask my father’s permission for my hand. This was why Ryan couldn’t be here. Every memory was just too close to the surface. It all hurt too much.

  ‘Your dad feels like my father-in-law,’ he confessed. ‘He feels like family.’

  ‘Well, he’s not. Not yours, anyway. And I’m not sure how pleased your wife would be to hear you talk like this.’

  ‘Actually, she wouldn’t—’

  ‘Ryan, no. I can’t do this. I don’t want to hear any of this. You can’t be here. Not yet. You might be able to look at me with the fondness of an old love, but seeing you standing there, with half a room between us, is torturing me.’

  He went to take a step closer to my bed, but I raised a shaky hand as though stopping traffic. ‘No. Don’t come any nearer. Because I want you to hold me, and kiss me, and tell me that this has all been some dreadful nightmare, and that I’m going to wake up any minute now, and we’ll be right there in your bed, with your arms wound tightly around me.’

  If I’d taken a knife and thrown it at him, he couldn’t have looked more wounded. ‘Maddie—’

  ‘No. Don’t say another word, Ryan. I have to focus on getting well and getting out of here. My body is broken and it needs time to heal, and so does my heart.’

  He sounded choked as he picked up the jacket he had carelessly thrown over the chair when I’d finally told my father that I would speak to him. ‘You really don’t want to see me any more?’

  ‘I want to see you every day for the rest of my life . . . but we both know that I can’t,’ I said, in a confession that ripped its way free from me.

  ‘I’m not sure I can stay away,’ were his final words, spoken at the doorway of my room.

  But it turned out that he could, because it was almost three months before I saw him again.

  Chapter 4

  Three Months Later

  ‘My name is Heidi, and you are going to hate me.’ That was how she had introduced herself to me at our first session at the hospital, just days after waking up. ‘I’m going to be in charge of your physical therapy, and by the time winter gets here, you are going to be walking out of this hospital without a crutch, a stick, or even the hint of a limp. Capisce?’

  I remember staring at the short, compact, woman with her military-cropped white-blond hair, nose piercings and the totally incongruous name. A name like that belonged to a rosy-cheeked goatherd, or at least to a Julie Andrews lookalike, running over the Austrian mountainside, singing her heart out. My Heidi looked like a marine, and the regime she put me through over the months that followed my awakening gave me no reason to alter that initial impression. I had thought I was fairly fit before the accident. I’d certainly spent many months at the gym ensuring I was wedding-dress-ready, before the unexpected pregnancy had curtailed the spin classes and hardcore workouts.

  Apparently that level o
f fitness had stood me in good stead, although it was hard to appreciate that as I grunted my way through the programme Heidi had devised to reactivate my wasted muscles. ‘Your body wants this,’ she had a habit of shouting, whenever it looked like all I wanted to do was throw in the towel – which in those early days, had been at practically every session.

  But Heidi was nothing if not persistent. ‘I tell you what,’ she had urged on the day when she’d forced me to take a few faltering steps, leaning heavily upon the guiding handrails. ‘When you can make it to the end of this walkway without support, you have my full permission to slap me hard, right across the face.’ It had been a tempting carrot which she’d dangled in front of me for months. And yet, when I had finally managed to take those steps unaided, I had fallen into her arms and hugged her tightly, as we both cried. Heidi didn’t look like a woman who cried easily, so I knew then what an achievement it was.

  They had finally stopped calling my recovery a miracle, but that day it had certainly felt like one all over again.

  After a great deal of protest, I had finally persuaded my dad to cut down his visits to one a week. The winning argument which had eventually swung it was that I needed to concentrate on my therapy, and that worrying about him driving back and forth on the motorway every other day was distracting me. But the truth was far simpler than that; my mother’s need for him was greater than mine. As heartbreaking as it must have been for him on those days when she failed to remember his name, or the years they had spent together, he said she still looked to the door for him every morning, waiting for the arrival of the man who occasionally she still remembered she loved.

  By the start of October, I had progressed to walking with the aid of a frame. ‘Practise,’ Heidi had urged, parking the new piece of equipment beside my bed. ‘The more you practise, the quicker I can stop tormenting you every day.’