by Zoe Sharp
Because that’s all it was, just asleep. I was not – was not – paralysed. I shut my eyes and focused all my will on moving my right arm. How the hell do you do that consciously? I’d never had to think about it before. The idea of reaching out for something had always just formed in my mind and, before I knew it, my hand was already acting on that impulse, in every sense.
Only now it wasn’t.
Eventually, with a sluggish reluctance, my arm began to obey me. Movement, however small, sent a rippling ache up through my shoulder into my back. There was a blunted feel to the discomfort – the effects of the morphine most likely.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, taking a perverse pleasure in the fiery stab in my ribs that it caused. Pain meant feeling, at least, and for that I welcomed it. It felt like someone had got me on the ground and kicked me around a good deal while I was there. The drugs hadn’t taken the pain away, just coated it with a sullen protective layer. It would account for the slight nausea as well. The thought of actually throwing up brought me out in a cold sweat.
From somewhere at the foot of the bed I heard the rustle of paper, then quiet steps, and a man walked round into my field of view. Good dark blue suit, impeccably cut, tailored shirt, silk tie.
‘Ah, Charlotte,’ my father said, unsmiling. ‘You’re back with us, I see.’
I pulled the mask down away from my face, clumsily, with my left hand. There was a butterfly taped to the back of my hand, and an IV line disappeared off out of my field of view. I was careful that I didn’t snag it.
‘Shit, things must have been bad if you’re here,’ I said, my voice clogged and my throat raw. ‘Where is here, by the way?’
My father frowned. He was holding what was probably my chart and he peered at me over the top of his thin gold-framed reading glasses, but whether his disapproval was at the profanity or the flippancy, it was hard to tell. I’d never been very good at reading him.
‘You are at the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine,’ he told me. ‘How much do you remember?’
I swallowed, ‘I remember being hit,’ I said. And seeing my principal die in front of me…but I wasn’t going to admit to that.
‘And after that?’
I concentrated hard, but any recall slipped away, elusive as smoke. The harder I chased it, the faster it escaped me.
‘No…nothing. How long have I been here?’
He hesitated, as if telling me might make a difference to something. ‘Four days,’ he said.
‘Four days?’ Instinct made my limbs start to paddle, like someone suddenly told their alarm clock had failed to go off and they’d slept in late for work. My brain was filled with cotton wool.
I was treated to that look over the glasses again and it was that, as much as the hand he’d placed on my shoulder, which stilled me.
‘Charlotte,’ he said in that clipped, slightly acidic tone I knew so well. ‘Please bear in mind that you have been shot – twice. The first bullet missed the femoral artery in your leg by millimetres. If it hadn’t, you would have undoubtedly bled out at the scene. The second bullet hit your scapula and deflected through your right lung. The fact that you have survived at all is a testament both to the skill of the emergency medical technicians who attended you at the scene, and that of the surgical team once you arrived here.’
Of course, I should have realised that my continued presence on this earth would be due to members of his own profession and nothing to do with my own will.
He paused a moment, letting the import of that sink in before he hit me with the next volley. ‘Attempting to do anything without express medical approval could – and will – result in an increase in the severity of your injuries and delay your recovery. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes,’ I muttered, battered and defenceless. I closed my eyes again so he wouldn’t see the tears forming in them. ‘Perfectly.’
I opened my eyes again after what seemed like no more than a slow blink, and found it was now dark outside, and my father’s shirt had changed colour although his suit remained the same. The oxygen mask had gone, but the IV line had not. There was a bank of monitors to my left, turned away from me so I couldn’t see the readouts.
‘Have they told you when I can think about moving around?’ I said, continuing the train of thought where I’d left off.
I thought I caught the barest flicker of a smile cross his thin lips.
‘Not long,’ he said. ‘You’ll know when you’re ready, Charlotte. I wouldn’t be in any hurry, if I were you.’
He nodded towards my torso and I discovered, looking down, that I had a tube coming out of the side wall of my chest and disappearing over the edge of the bed. My God, how much morphine was I on not to have noticed that before?
‘What the hell is that?’ I said weakly.
‘A thoracostomy tube,’ he said. ‘It’s keeping your lung inflated and taking care of any residual bleeding. It will remain there until the lung’s healed,’ he added, like a warning. Until then, you’re tethered to your bed.
I took a shallow breath and channelled a lot of effort into keeping my voice casual enough to ask, ‘Is Mother here, also?’
I saw the uncharacteristic hesitation and didn’t need his answer. No, of course not. ‘She didn’t—’
‘What’s happened to Ella?’
He frowned at my interruption. ‘The child? She’s with her grandparents.’
Her grandparents…Lucas and Rosalind.
A picture of Lucas’s face flashed into my head, holding Ella in front of his chest, using her for his own protection, and before I knew it my father had crossed to the bed in two short strides and was holding me down again.
‘Calm yourself,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll have you sedated.’
I abandoned my feeble struggles. ‘You don’t have the authority,’ I said, gasping for breath, aware of the childishness of the comment even as I said it.
The doorway was slightly behind me on my left, and my view of it was partially blocked by one of the monitors. I’d tuned out the background noise of telephones and footsteps and the squeak of gurney wheels on the polished floor to the point where I didn’t hear anyone come in until he spoke.
‘Ah, the patient’s showing signs of fighting spirit, is she?’
‘Yes,’ my father said dryly. ‘A little too much of it for my taste.’
There came a rich chuckle and a man moved round the foot of the bed into my line of sight. He was tall and wide without being overweight, with a distinguished head of short grey hair that contrasted with the dark mahogany of his skin. I could just see a yellow bow tie above the collar of his coat. He had the unmistakable ultimate self-confidence of a surgeon.
‘You must be Richard Foxcroft,’ the man said, and I heard the respect in his voice as they shook hands, two equals weighing each other up. ‘Your work precedes you.’
My father inclined his head graciously. ‘Your work,’ he said, with a nod in my direction, ‘speaks for itself.’
The man laughed out loud, a deep belly laugh. ‘Yes, I suppose she does. Well now, young lady,’ he said to me, ‘and how are we feeling today?’
‘Like we’ve been shot,’ I said.
‘Well, nothing wrong with your recall, at least,’ he said, still smiling broadly. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that we successfully removed the bullet from your back.’
‘Can I see it?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well now, I do believe the police had first claim on it.’
I swallowed and said, ‘How far am I likely to be able to come back from this?’ It wasn’t the clearest wording, but he seemed to get the gist.
‘Your injuries were serious,’ he said, letting the smile slide for the first time. ‘We nearly lost you on the flight over here. You were bleeding internally and we had to give you around four units of blood to get you stabilised. You suffered a hemopneumothorax – that is to say, you bled into your chest wall and your right lung collapsed. You’re prob
ably aware that you still have the chest tube in there, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any infection. We should be able to remove the tube within the next few days.’
He moved around the bed and lifted the sheet to inspect my misshapen thigh, his fingers cool against my skin. After a moment he gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘The injury to your leg was more straightforward. We simply cleaned out the clothing debris and irrigated the wound with antibiotic solution. You had a drain tube in there for the first few days – which you possibly won’t remember – but it’s healing nicely now. All in all, you’ve been very lucky. That and the fact your treatment has been first-class, of course.’ He smiled again, magnificently. The man ought to have been advertising dental work. ‘There’s no reason why, given time and hard work on your part, you shouldn’t make a full recovery.’
‘I seem to be having some, ah, difficulty with my right arm,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That’s only to be expected,’ he said. ‘The bullet entered your back at an angle and gouged a nice lump out of your scapula before it headed off toward your lung. Along the way it did plenty of damage to the muscles in your shoulder. They’re swollen and that’s putting pressure on the nerves into your arm. And you’ve been through some tough surgery. Once the swelling subsides you should find things will improve.’
‘But, it will come back?’ I tried to keep the pathetic note of hope out of my voice and failed miserably.
‘Yes,’ he said, his expression kindly now, ‘we have every reason to think so.’
I closed my eyes briefly. ‘Thank you.’
‘You are entirely welcome,’ he said. ‘So, are you going to take pity on that young man outside?’
I opened my eyes again, flicked them to my father’s face and caught the faintest sliver of guilt about him.
‘What young man?’ I said sharply. At least, in my head I said it sharply, but I think by the time it reached my lips it was little more than a mumble.
The surgeon raised his eyebrows, glancing quickly between the two of us as if aware that he might have said the wrong thing. It only took a moment for his natural arrogance to step in and reassure him that wasn’t a possibility. ‘Why, the young man from England,’ he said. ‘He’s been sitting down the hall since the day after you were brought in here.’
‘Sean,’ I said and something broke inside me. I was suddenly filled with a relief so sharp it reduced me to tears. I felt them sliding sideways across my face, pooling between my cheek and the pillow. And now they’d hit the surface, I couldn’t seem to stem the flow. On and on I wept, trying to hold myself rigid through the sobbing and not succeeding, so the pain made me cry harder, and the crying caused only more pain.
‘I take it, then, that you do wish to see him?’
I could only nod, unable even to voice the words of bitter recrimination towards my father that, once again, he’d conspired to keep Sean away from me when I needed him the most.
The next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight. I raised my head a little way off the pillow and saw Sean sitting back in the easy chair by the bed. His head was resting on his fist, elbow propped on the arm of the chair, and he was fast asleep.
Even sleeping, he looked dangerous. If it hadn’t been for the expensive Breitling watch on his wrist – and someone with the obvious seniority of the surgeon granting him access – any member of the nursing staff who walked in and found him here would immediately call security.
For a moment I just lay there and watched him. He was wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt and he hadn’t shaved that morning. The haze of stubble lined his face, making his skin look almost pale above it and the dark eyelashes ridiculously long against his cheeks.
There had been a time, a long time before, when I’d been injured and frightened and ashamed, and I’d prayed every day that I’d wake in my bed in the military hospital and see this man waiting for me. But he’d never come. He hadn’t even known what had happened to me, not until long afterwards, and by then it was much too late.
The involvement between us then had been clandestine, forbidden. He was one of my training instructors and any hint of a relationship between us would have been disastrous for both our careers. After the brutal assault on me but before the farce of the court-martial and my eventual disgrace – when I still thought, foolishly, that I had some kind of a future in the army – I hadn’t dared ask for him.
I sometimes wondered what difference it would have made if I had.
It was strange, now, to lie there in circumstances so similar yet so different, to wake and find Sean sitting alongside me. I was profoundly grateful that he was here, without doubt. As soon as the doctor had spoken I’d been aware only of a lifting of the total weight of responsibility that had been pressing on my chest far more heavily than a collapsed lung could ever have done.
But on top of that alleviation, guilt had come chasing hard. Guilt that I had been trusted to do a job and I’d failed in the most basic way possible. Guilt that I was alive, and Simone was not. And as for Ella…
No, best not to think about what Ella’s going through.
My thoughts must have provoked some small change in my breathing because at that moment Sean’s eyes twitched beneath his lids and then snapped open, instantly alert.
He saw me watching him and he smiled, without hesitation.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said softly. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Oh, great,’ I said weakly. ‘But you’ll forgive me if I don’t come out dancing tonight.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You dance?’
‘Only when I’m very drunk.’
‘In that case,’ he said, igniting one of those slowburn smiles, ‘remind me to ply you with cheap booze at the first available opportunity.’
We both paused, our repertoire of inconsequential small-talk exhausted.
‘So,’ he said, shifting so he was leaning forwards in his chair with his forearms resting on his knees, ‘do you feel up to a debrief?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, not bothering to hide my reluctance. ‘I daresay this has caused a real mess all round.’
‘We’ve had worse,’ he said with a tired smile. ‘The police have been clamouring to talk to you about what happened, by the way, but your father’s been as good at keeping them away as he was with me.’
‘I didn’t know you were here until the surgeon told me,’ I said, suddenly defensive.
‘That’s OK. I didn’t think it was a good idea to punch out your dear papa in the corridor. At least this way they let me wait just down the hallway instead of in the car park.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘You and I both know there’s no love lost there.’
I went through a brief summary of events between my last phone conversation with Sean and the moment I was shot, keeping it as impersonal and objective as I was able to.
Sean interrupted rarely, preferring that I work through the story in my own way, gently pushing me when I faltered. Forcing my mind to concentrate and hold on to the thread of the story required an almost physical effort. I was aware of gaps and pauses where seconds and maybe even whole minutes slipped by before I could bring myself back on track. By the time I was done I was sweating and shivering and I had a bitch of a headache thumping away behind my left eye. The pain in the bottom of my right lung was like a stone, pulling down on it.
When I was spent he sat there for a time, eyes fixed on a point on the bed frame, frowning.
‘Tell me again what Simone said, when you walked in on her at the house,’ he said.
‘She said that he’d killed him and she’d seen him do it. That she’d loved him. Then she called him a fucking bastard and that’s when Lucas did a runner.’
‘So, she—’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ My father’s voice, from the doorway, was cold even for him. Damn, I really must get them to shift some of this bloody equipment so
people can’t creep up on me like this.
Sean got to his feet automatically. ‘We were talking,’ he said, in that blankly respectful voice he’d always used to disguise his intense dislike.
My father moved round to the side of the bed where I could see him, eyes sweeping over my face. He clearly didn’t care for what he saw there.
‘She needs rest and no emotional upset,’ he said tightly.
‘Shame you didn’t always feel that way,’ Sean murmured.
My father’s face paled beneath his tan. They faced off, almost toe-to-toe. Sean was taller and wider and exuded the kind of menace that made people leave seats vacant next to him in crowded bars. But my father had been at the top of a tough profession for more than thirty years and along the way he’d acquired the ruthless superiority of a despot. Until someone threw the first punch, I would have said they were fairly evenly matched.
‘Say, is this a private party, or can anybody join in?’
The new voice from behind me had what was by now a familiar New England twang to it, and the heavy cynicism that could only have belonged to a cop.
‘The more the merrier,’ I said wearily, closing my eyes. ‘Did you bring a bottle?’
There was a grunt of laughter. ‘Round here, ma’am, the bottles seem to be mostly full of the kind of liquids you wouldn’t want to drink.’
‘Charlotte, you’re not up to this,’ my father said. I opened my eyes and found him watching me intently.
‘Probably not,’ I said, mustering a shallow smile, ‘but I’ve got to talk to the police sometime.’
He hesitated. ‘Just see that they don’t over-tire you.’
‘If they do that, I’ll just fall asleep on them,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think they’re allowed to beat up witnesses anymore.’
‘They won’t bully her,’ Sean said, and the cold certainty in his tone earned him a sharp glance.
After a moment my father nodded slowly, as if reluctant to find himself in any kind of agreement with Sean. ‘No,’ he said with the wisp of a smile, ‘I daresay they won’t.’ And with that he turned and left. He didn’t even make it seem like a retreat – just that he simply had somewhere more important to be.
