While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  ‘I hate to be the one to tell you this,’ she hissed, in a huge faux whisper, leaning even further into the space the books had left, ‘but you don’t actually work here today.’

  I smiled into the empty space as Sally scooted around the library bookshelf. ‘I just popped in to pick up a couple of books on my way to the hospital,’ I explained, gathering up the pile from the table. Sally glanced down at the topmost book, which showed a pair of hands lovingly cradling a hugely swollen abdomen. Her eyebrows rose expressively.

  ‘Something you want to share with me?’ She cast a quick glance at the other titles, which all covered the same topic.

  ‘These aren’t for me,’ I replied. ‘They’re for Maddie.’

  For a second Sally looked almost as concerned by my reply as if I had been the one in need of the pregnancy manuals. ‘Weren’t you at the hospital only yesterday?’

  I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like a naughty school child called into the headteacher’s office. ‘So?’ I said, playing a hand of cards I was never going to win.

  ‘So, I’m concerned that you might be getting a tad overinvolved with this one particular patient, that’s all.’ She softened her words with a gentle squeeze of my shoulder. ‘You do seem to spend most of your free time there these days.’ I shrugged, but the innocent dart had found its target. ‘Just ignore me. It’s none of my business,’ Sally said with a smile that didn’t quite find its way to her eyes. ‘I’m probably just jealous that you’ve gone and got yourself a new best friend.’

  I reached out for humour, and threw it over our conversation like a fire blanket. ‘Well she’s certainly not as nosy as you are,’ I said, heading towards the desk to scan my own books. ‘And pretty good at keeping secrets,’ I added, giving my sometimes less-than-discreet friend a cheeky grin.

  It was just after lunchtime and the library was practically deserted; the morning browsers and newspaper-readers had long gone, and the after-school children and parents were yet to arrive. I could have done with a few customers around for distraction, I thought as I loaded the books into a sturdy jute bag, aware of Sally’s watchful gaze upon me.

  ‘What does her husband think about you reading her books about babies and childbirth?’ she asked, with all the finesse of someone poking a rattlesnake with a long stick.

  ‘Fiancé,’ I corrected automatically, and then inwardly cursed, because I was sure Sally knew perfectly well that Maddie and Ryan weren’t married. ‘Actually, I’ve no idea what he thinks. I haven’t run it by him. Our paths rarely cross at the hospital. That’s the whole reason why I’m there; to sit with her when no one else can.’

  Sally nodded, but said nothing, at least not with her voice. Her eyes however, they had plenty to say. ‘Just be careful, hon, that’s all. I know how upset you were when your OAP friend passed away. I’m worried that you’re getting too attached to someone who may not—’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I interrupted, not wanting to hear the end of that sentence, not even wanting to think about it. The possibility of Maddie or her baby not surviving filled me with the kind of dread they’d specifically warned volunteers about. But it was too late. I was involved; way over-my-head involved. And yet still I tried to hide it.

  ‘If I was the one who was pregnant, I’d want to read every book ever written on the subject. I’d have a thousand questions. Wouldn’t you?’ I countered.

  ‘If I was pregnant,’ Sally said, deciding the conversation was in dire need of some levity, ‘the only question I’d be asking is: What happened to that damn condom?’

  It started with Maddie’s Kindle, and grew from there.

  ‘What kind of books does she like to read?’ I’d asked Ryan before my first visit.

  He’d looked from me to his motionless fiancée, as if expecting her to open her eyes – just for a moment – to help him out. ‘Do you know, I have absolutely no idea. That’s pretty awful to admit, isn’t it?’

  If that was his only area of negligence, it was an easy one to forgive. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘I’m sure I’ll find something she likes. And it’s not like she’s going to tell you if she doesn’t, a silent voice whispered in my head. ‘But if she happens to have a Kindle or something similar, it might give me a clue.’

  When I knocked lightly on the door of Maddie’s room a few days later, pausing for an invitation to enter that would never come, the Kindle was sitting on her bedside cabinet, waiting for me. I’d introduced myself clumsily as I crossed the room, still feeling self-conscious as I conducted our one-way conversation. ‘I’ll get better at this, I promise,’ I assured her. Do it fast I imagined her replying. My lips curled. Imaginary Maddie had quite the sense of humour.

  When I picked up her Kindle and switched it on, it felt like a passport allowing me entry into a foreign country. I reached for a chair and pulled it up close to the bed, asking its silent occupant if it was okay for me to sit down. She seemed to have no objection, so I sat and began to scan through the library on her device. Maddie’s choice of books was as distinctive and as personal as a fingerprint. My smile grew broader as I went down the list of titles, surprised by how many were also to be found on my own bookshelf. We might lead completely different lives, but this we had in common. It cemented a foundation between us that I could build on.

  ‘I couldn’t finish that one either,’ I confessed, lightly touching her hand as though to gain her straying attention. I searched her exquisite face for the smallest sign of acknowledgement. How did her family and Ryan continue to remain so positive about her recovery, when there was so little evidence that there was anything left beyond a beautiful shell that was once Madeline Chambers.

  Well, if they could do it, then so could I, I told myself firmly. I’d seen enough to decide what books to bring next time, and was about to switch off the reader when I noticed a book that was probably one of Maddie’s last purchases; a compendium of baby names. The row of grey dots beneath its title told me she’d never started reading it. I stared at the Kindle sadly, knowing why.

  The decision was easily made, and felt fully formed and satisfying, almost as though the idea hadn’t even been mine. Perhaps Maddie couldn’t hear me; perhaps she was so deeply lost that no voice could penetrate the silence. But perhaps not.

  I clicked to open the book, and settled back more comfortably in my chair. ‘Okay, Maddie, we’ll start with the As today and then work our way through the alphabet.’ She said nothing, which I took as her unspoken agreement. I often held the hands of the patients I visited, but it felt different when the skin brushing mine wasn’t paper-dry or wrinkled. I slid my hand around hers. Her nails were neater than mine, her skin softer and about three shades paler. ‘If I get to one you really like, try to give my hand a squeeze,’ I said as I began to slowly read out names for her unborn daughter.

  It was the second week of October and we had now reached the Ls in the alphabet. Maddie was making medical history, a fact she remained blissfully unaware of. She’d been in a coma for fifteen weeks, and was now thirty-one weeks pregnant. She was probably the only person on the sixth floor of the hospital who didn’t find those two facts both miraculous and astounding.

  ‘Laura, Laurel, Laverne—’ I screwed up my nose, ‘Don’t call her Laverne.’ I looked down at the hand held in mine. It remained motionless, as it had done for the first half of the alphabet, which we’d systematically covered over the last five weeks.

  ‘Leanne, Lesley, Letitia—’

  ‘That has to be the most boring book ever written!’

  The Kindle slipped from my fingers and landed on the floor with a dull thud. I hadn’t heard the opening of the door, much less anyone entering the room. I automatically glanced at my watch. It was almost four in the afternoon.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I questioned the man who had every right to visit his comatose fiancée at any time of the day or night. Ryan’s unexpected arrival had startled me. Fortunately he didn’t appear to take offence at my slightly confr
ontational greeting. He smiled warmly at Maddie, and perhaps at me too, it was hard to tell. He crossed over to the bed and ran his finger lightly over one ivory cheek. ‘Hello, sweetheart.’

  I swooped down to retrieve Maddie’s Kindle, which meant I heard rather than saw the kiss he pressed upon her unmoving lips. I got to my feet, and immediately began looking around the room for my bag and coat.

  ‘There’s no need for you to rush away,’ Ryan said easily, shrugging off his suit jacket and reaching up to loosen and then pull off his tie. ‘I had a meeting over on this side of town and it wound up earlier than I was expecting. So I thought I’d surprise my girls by getting here earlier.’

  I swallowed so loudly it sounded deafening to my ears. I’d been surprised when he’d walked in, but to hear myself referred to as one of Ryan’s ‘girls’ was nothing short of a shock. I was still trying to work out how I felt about it, when I saw his hand go to the waffle blanket covering Maddie and then come to rest on the mound beneath it, which seemed to be growing almost daily.

  ‘Hello, little girl. How are you today?’

  The baby. Of course the baby, I thought, feeling stupid and very, very, embarrassed. God, what if I’d said something? I could feel my cheeks growing warm at the thought.

  The hand resting on Maddie’s stomach gently caressed the child inside her. My eyes were fixed on its slow backward and forward motion, so I saw the sharp kick that jolted the blanket upward and brought an expression of pure joy onto Ryan’s face. He looked over at me with delight plastered all over his features.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  I nodded, unable to say anything beyond the huge lump that had mysteriously settled in my throat.

  The baby kicked again, so hard that Ryan’s hand was momentarily displaced. He shook his head in wonder, smiling as he looked down at Maddie’s unmoving face. ‘Can you feel that?’ he asked her. ‘You must be able to feel that.’ The disappointment that momentarily doused the joy in his eyes was so intense I could feel it like the blast from an explosion. I got to my feet, without knowing why. I can only think his need to share this moment with someone – anyone – was the reason why Ryan did what he did next.

  ‘Feel this,’ he urged, holding out his free hand for mine. I shook my head so vigorously that my dangling earrings slapped against my cheeks.

  ‘No. That’s okay, I’m fine,’ I replied stupidly, as though implying that I’d already felt my share of kicking infants that day, and couldn’t possibly manage another.

  More disappointment in his eyes, and this time I was the one who’d put it there. I saw the very human need he felt to share this moment with someone. With someone who was able to respond.

  I took a shaky step towards the bed. I saw my arm lifting and my hand stretching out towards his, almost as though it was doing so of its own volition. He reached for my hand, and his skin felt warm and something weird happened to my breathing. Very gently he placed my hand on Maddie’s belly. The room seemed to go unnaturally quiet. I could no longer hear the muted sounds from the hospital corridor. The chatter of nurses and doctors had all faded away. The only sound to be heard was the breathing of three people. Nothing happened, and after about twenty seconds I went to remove my hand, but Ryan placed his own directly on top of it, preventing me from doing so.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ he urged. ‘I think sometimes she just needs to hear a voice.’ He moved his hand gently backwards and forwards, taking mine with it. His action was a caress, but it wasn’t my hand he was caressing, even though my stupid heart clearly thought it was by the way it was racing. ‘Hey, baby girl. Daddy’s here,’ Ryan spoke gently. He was standing so close I could feel his breath ruffling my hair. And then suddenly it came, not just once, but twice. Fierce and unmistakable, two sharp little kicks fell squarely into the palm of my hand.

  My mouth dropped open in a small O of surprise and wonder. Was that the moment when I fell in love with Maddie’s baby? It might have been. I’d certainly never felt an emotion like it before in my entire life. I felt like I was standing on the edge of something so bright and beautiful that looking too closely would damage my eyes. Damage all of me. Inexplicably and embarrassingly, I burst into tears.

  It took about three weeks for me to stop jumping every time the door opened to Maddie’s room whenever I was with her. Each time it did, and a member of the medical team came in, I heaved a small sigh of relief which strangely left a lingering taste of disappointment on my tongue. I’d been hugely embarrassed by the fool I’d made of myself when the baby had kicked. And yet whenever I thought back to what had happened – which I did with excruciating regularity, it was the aftermath I remembered more vividly than the incident itself.

  Ryan had been so sweet and kind. Without a thought, his arm had come around my shoulders, and he’d pulled me to his side. I shouldn’t have gone there. Being held and comforted by him wasn’t a place where I belonged. That was Maddie’s position, even if she was currently unable to claim it. Yet Ryan clearly saw nothing wrong in offering comfort to someone in distress. Even if it was someone he didn’t know very well. Perhaps some men are like that, but none that I’d ever met before.

  That still didn’t excuse my actions, because instead of pulling away and apologising for being all kinds of stupid, I did something totally unforgivable and buried my face against his chest as I continued to cry. For a moment I felt him pause, stiffen awkwardly, and then his body relaxed and I felt his hand come up to pat my shoulder comfortingly. Perhaps that was when I realised how many lines I was stepping over. Too many to count.

  ‘It’s hormones,’ I heard him say from somewhere far above my head, which was now beginning to realise it had no business being rested so closely against him that I could hear the thud of his heartbeat beneath my ear. ‘Pregnancy does things to people’s hormones,’ he declared.

  He’d found the right note to hit, so when I finally pulled back and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box he was offering, I was able to produce a sound that almost resembled a laugh. ‘I think it’s only the pregnant person’s hormones that are meant to go haywire,’ I said. I depleted Maddie’s box of tissues by blowing my nose repeatedly and then swabbing at my eyes. The black stains smeared on the tissues that I lobbed into the bin told me there was very little left of the mascara I’d applied that morning. I didn’t need to look in the small mirror positioned above the hand basin to know my cheeks would be red and blotchy, and my eyes puffy and swollen. Crying never looked good on me.

  ‘Ryan, I am so sorry. I have no idea why I reacted like that. It was totally unprofessional of me.’

  I looked down at my feet, so I didn’t see the compassion in his eyes, but I still heard it in his voice. ‘That’s what makes you exactly the right person to be with Maddie right now.’ I slowly lifted my head. ‘It’s because you’re not professional.’

  It was a damning thing to hear for someone who’d been a hospital volunteer for over two years. ‘You may have picked the wrong way to make me feel better,’ I said. Ryan responded with a throaty chuckle.

  ‘Maddie has a legion of doctors, nurses, physios, and God-only-knows-who-else to meet all of her medical needs. They’re doing a fantastic job, and yet they’re still failing her.’

  I stood up a little straighter, feeling I should come to the defence of my colleagues, but not wanting to contradict him.

  ‘What she needs,’ he continued, ‘is someone who’ll brush her hair when the nurses haven’t got time to do it; who’ll file her nails; who has a very questionable taste in music, but plays it to her anyway; who reads to her from books about pregnancy – when no one else had thought about doing that.’ I felt my already-hot cheeks go very, very, pink. I had no idea he knew about all of that. The nurses had clearly been talking.

  ‘But more than any of that, what Maddie really needs is someone with a big enough heart to cry the first time she feels our baby kick.’ I bit my lower lip, certain he was just being kind. ‘What Maddie needs most of all, Chloe Barnes,
is you. And thank God she has you.’

  I spent so long imagining my next encounter with Ryan at the hospital, that when our paths crossed again at my other place of work, I was totally unprepared.

  It was Friday afternoon, which was my favourite time of the week at the library. The staff happily swapped and changed roles and duties all the time, but the storytelling session was all mine. I was the one who decorated the walls of the cosy nook in the children’s section with collages and pictures of characters from favourite books. I set out the semi-circle of low bright-red plastic seats, even though I knew my fidgety audience would probably not stay on them for long. I picked the stories: sometimes new titles; and sometimes old favourites that I had loved as a child.

  I glanced out through the large plate-glass library windows. Rain was lashing viciously against them. The parks and playgrounds would hold no appeal this afternoon. I went back to the storytelling corner and added an extra row of seats. At just after three o’clock my excited audience started to arrive. There was always an element of herding cats as we tried to persuade the group of enthusiastic under-fives to stay in their seats until the session officially began. Today was no different, but I wasn’t worried. Once I sat down on the chair facing them and opened up today’s book, their brief attention span would be all mine – at least for half an hour.

  Although it wasn’t a requirement, most of the parents elected to stay, forming a solid barrier behind their listening offspring, which explains why I didn’t see Ryan straightaway. I was halfway through a story about a lost toy – a gripping suspenseful thriller, if you happen to be under five – when I looked over the top of the illustration I was holding up to show the children, and saw him. He was leaning against one of the bookcases, standing a little apart from the waiting parents, like a lone wolf watching the rest of the pack.

  His eye caught mine and he smiled, as though it was perfectly natural for him to be there, when nothing could be further from the truth. I turned the book back around, my connection with the story momentarily broken.