The Horse Dreamer

by Marc Secchia

A SECONDARY INFECTION, coupled with an operation to re-correct her left elbow which she had wrenched in the bath, kept Zaranna abed all that week. When Alex visited, she was weak and dopey following the surgery, and managed to throw up all over her hospital gown two minutes after he arrived. Alex chatted to her parents for what seemed forever. Zaranna limited her contributions to muddled and evidently amusing interjections.

  The following week, she moved down to an open ward in Rehab and began the teeth-gritting process of physical therapy and learning to do everything afresh. Driving a wheelchair was fun, at least for the first couple of days. But trying to take herself to the toilet on her own reduced her to tears. Fetching food from the canteen was an ordeal. Learning that everything was positioned for able-bodied persons capable of reaching over counters, educated her in the joys of constantly having to ask for help. Getting dressed on her own defeated her seventeen times running.

  Thankfully, the weird dreams did not recur. Alex, however, did recur, in the form of a message stating he would visit again on Saturday evening.

  “Chin up, lass,” she muttered, scowling at her empty ward. Oh – no longer empty. A young girl occupied the bed next to hers. She smiled shyly.

  “Hey.” Zaranna twirled her wheels, scooting down the ward. “Just arrived?”

  She supposed she was a sight, for the elfin girl’s eyes did not waver from the blanket folded across her lap and the obvious lack of calves and feet dangling from the seat. Zaranna tried not to feel narked.

  She held out her hand. “Zaranna.”

  They shook, probably both feeling awkward at the formality. The girl said, “Mihret.”

  “Mihret? Did I say it right? What does it mean?”

  “Mercy. It’s Ethiopian.” Again, the shy smile made its appearance, accentuating the beauty of her fine-boned features. “I’m here for fitting. Prosthesis, left foot.”

  “Your English is very good.”

  “So is yours.”

  Zaranna winced and apologised. What a mortifyingly stupid thing to say. “So … er, our car was hit by a train. That’s how I lost my legs. What happened to you?”

  “Hyena bite.”

  “Yowch.”

  Without prompting, the girl told her story. Last year, Mihret had been visiting relatives in a remote, rural part of northern Ethiopia near Mekele, when she had been attacked by a hyena outside their hut at dusk. Bungled treatment by a local ‘healer’ soon resulted in raging sepsis. Her family travelled thirty-seven hours, first by horse-cart, then by bus and car, to reach the Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa. By then, the foot could not be saved and her life had hung by a thread, but an amputation and high doses of antibiotics had eventually carried the day. Later, relatives in England offered to bring her over and pay for the fitting of an artificial foot. Her visa application had taken nine months and four rejections, before a mission had become involved and made the necessary connections.

  Mihret was just eleven.

  Telling her own story had Zaranna wondering again at the incongruities. The car roof flying off – did she remember that detail correctly? And what about the Bible burned by non-existent fire? Mihret’s courage in the face of her suffering held up a mirror to Zaranna’s own experience. Imagine having your foot crushed by a hyena’s powerful jaws, and being dragged off into the bush while still conscious?

  Before long, she found herself promising to help Mihret with her measuring and casting, scheduled for first thing on Monday morning.

  Nurse MacIver brought a message. Alex had been delayed attending a multi-car pileup in fog. He would try to come in the morning. Zaranna accepted the nurse’s help to climb into bed, determined to show a brave face.

  The year was meandering into autumn.

  She had just picked up a book with a distinct lack of enthusiasm when she heard voices approaching along the hall – familiar voices. Her school friends were making an absolute racket. A minute later, they found her ward and it was a scream, ‘Hey, Zoomer!’ from Holly and a sharp salute from neat-as-a-pin Dan, wearing his usual yellow bowtie, bright ‘hellos’ from the Indian twins Anaya and Aditi, and a laconic wave from ultra-introvert, blonde Byron. They shot a barrage of questions at her, plied Mihret with chocolates and generally made an enormous, cheering fuss and kafuffle about everything. Aditi and Anaya convinced Mihret to teach them how to braid hair in the intricate Ethiopian shuruba style, a time-consuming art-form in its own right. Byron emerged briefly from his habitual impression of an unsociable hermit crab to declaim his latest poetic composition to raucous applause from all, and Dan apologetically produced a huge rucksack stuffed with catch-up homework.

  Holding up the nearest wastepaper basket, Holly ordered, “File that lot over here, boyfriend!”

  Zaranna arched an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?”

  Dan developed a pair of pink spots on his cheeks. “Um,” he managed.

  “Oh, really?” Zaranna’s tone converted his ears into twin red flags. “Holly, I do hope you were planning to tell me at some point?”

  “All the gossip on tap, darling. Ask and I shall spout.” Holly wagged a manicured eyebrow. “However, I hadn’t pegged you as the gossip-loving sort. Say, who is Alex? And why has he sent you this beautiful bouquet of roses?”

  “Um, roses?”

  Wonderful. She sounded as guilty as a child caught with a mouthful of marshmallows. Zaranna had been too distracted to notice a new bouquet, fresh from Interflora, adorning her windowsill. Red roses. A dozen perfect, deep red roses, and a card in Holly’s hand.

  Holly crowed, “Apologies for standing you up on our date?”

  “Holly!” Zaranna yelped, making a swipe for the card. “You give that back!”

  “I don’t think so.” Her brunette friend affected a dramatic pose, which was pure Holly. Life was a constant drama for her. “I see it all now. This hospital lark is just a front for a secret social life which you’ve been hiding from your friends.” She pulled a comical face. “Now, who could the mysterious Alex be? Surely not Alex Gladstone in Grade Eleven?”

  Zaranna made a face. “Ew. Give me some credit.”

  “Alex Coombe?” Dan suggested.

  “No, far too arrogant for our gentle Zaranna,” Holly mused. “Though, I was starting to wonder if the Zoomer was interested in boys at all. No, this is a mystery.”

  Nurse MacIver called from the ward’s doorway, “Visiting hours ended fifteen minutes ago, kids. I don’t want to get into trouble.”

  Saved! Zaranna laughed at Holly’s drawn-out groan, which preceded threats of unspecified punishments if certain revelations were not made forthwith. She deflected Holly’s questions by saying goodbye to them one by one, and thanking them for the visit, for if Holly learned any detail, it would be all over the school ten minutes before the bell on Monday morning.

  Eventually, Dan dragged Holly off. The last she saw of her friends was Holly waving her fist in mock-outrage, protesting, “Details, Inglewood! I expect a text before I leave this hospital.”

  Handily, she had no earthly clue where her phone might be. Pop that on the list for her parents.

  Zaranna fell asleep and dreamed of Alex.

  * * * *

  By the time visiting hours ended, eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, Alex was the newly-minted owner of Zaranna’s personal doghouse. No message. No appearance. Her only ray of hope was those flowers. Surely they meant something? She should not think badly of him. He might have crashed on his way to the hospital. Perhaps he’d overslept? Been abducted by aliens? Men that handsome could not possibly harbour any desire to call upon girls in wheelchairs. Not even ones who had brushed and curled their hair especially that morning.

  Dispirited, she headed for the canteen. Coffee. Coffee and a chat with Mrs Dundee, the lovely matron who ran the place. She’d be sympathetic.

  Zaranna had worked out she could wheel along one-handed if she cradled her immobilised left arm on her lap and alternated pushing on each side with her right. It was uncomfortable, but given
a certain innate obstinacy and a tank of irate self-pity sufficient to launch a rocket into orbit, she worked up a decent clip on the long corridor to the adjacent wing, where the elevators were situated. She heard a soft ding of someone arriving on her floor. She tried to slow down. Positioning her left hand, however, was not as straightforward as she had hoped. Glancing up, she saw Alex. Soaking wet Alex, making a puddle on the floor. Alex, who could never resemble a drowned rat despite appearing to have swum across an ocean en route to visiting one Miss Inglewood.

  Just then, she discovered the small ramp joining one building to the other.

  The wheelchair gathered pace. Zaranna slapped the wheels unevenly in a doomed attempt to slow down, slewed, and began to topple.

  “Zaranna!”

  Alex slipped in the wet and sprawled like a goalkeeper spreading himself to deny a striker a clean shot at goal. Zaranna landed heavily on her left shoulder, skidded across the floor and head-butted Alex firmly in the ribs.

  “Oof!” Air exploded out of his lungs.

  For a few breaths, they simply lay there, stunned. Breathing. Figuring out what belonged to whom.

  Alex chuckled, “Well, nice to run into a fellow member of the crazy biker’s club.”

  “Sorry.” Zaranna shifted and groaned. “Alex, my left hand … it’s stuck. And, oh, jam doughnuts, it hurts like the blazes!”

  He rolled up to his knees, took one look, and whistled. “Boy oh boy. It’s Emergency for you. Jam doughnuts and all.”

  They spent their much-delayed date discovering she had added a fractured collarbone to her tally of hurts, and that the angle created by the cast on her left elbow had led to her fingers becoming tangled in the wheel spokes as she fell. Two broken fingers, splinted and bandaged. Nothing better to make her feel like the perfect prune, except that she only enjoyed the undivided attention of the most gorgeous man since the days of Adam and Eve, give or take.

  Whom she had just run over with a flying wheelchair.

  Zaranna wanted to find a nice hard wall and beat her head against it a thousand times.

  Three hours later, as Alex wheeled her out of Emergency and over to the canteen in search of a belated lunch, she remembered to ask what had kept him. Gentleness? She winced at the edge that crept into her voice.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask,” he sighed.

  “I felt a prize wallflower, stood up two days in a row,” Zaranna admitted. “Forgive me?”

  “Hence the attempted assassination by wheelchair?” he chuckled. “No, the only chump around here is yours truly. Last night, I went out for a quick drink with a few colleagues from work. I left my keys, phone and wallet in my jacket hung over the back of my chair. When I came back from the toilet, it was to find my jacket missing and ditto my motorbike. Suffice to say, this morning the police rang my flat to say they’d found my bike in Holyhead.”

  “Holyhead? That’s the ferry to Ireland, right?”

  Alex puffed out his cheeks. “Aye. It’ll be back in a few days, but I don’t want to know what it’ll cost. So I came by bus. Except that I forgot my umbrella and happened to tangle with a small cloudburst on the way from the bus stop to the hospital.”

  He propelled her along a covered walkway toward the canteen. The rain outside fell in steady, uncompromising iron sheets. Zaranna indulged in pleasant daydreams about the lean, muscled length of Alex’s legs outlined in damp, shrink-wrapped denim. Not too lean. Just right. And that way he had of meeting her gaze, confident yet receptive. He had the kind of swimmable eyes Holly always extolled. Trustworthy eyes. Her own eyes were rather less trustworthy, tending to linger unbidden on every detail that summed up Alex.

  She said, “Poor you. So, is this bike of yours worth stealing, Alex? Should I be worried?”

  “It’s a Kawasaki Ninja H2.” Zaranna gave a small shrug; Alex answered with a snort of exasperation. “You haven’t a clue, have you?”

  “I hate to disappoint you, but in a nutshell, no.”

  Adopting a patently fake sneer, he said, “I wouldn’t expect anything less of a girl. May I serve you? Will it be spaghetti or the cottage pie? With a side dish of forgiveness for my inexcusable absence both last night and this morning?”

  Mrs Dundee had an especial twinkle in her eye for them, she noticed, as the matron bustled along nearby, tidying the food counters. There would be an interrogation later, of that she could be certain!

  Zaranna smiled up over her shoulder. “Forgiven, if you’ll allow me to ask one weird question.”

  “As long as it’s not up to the standard of last-week’s-weird, we’re good. Ma’am, may I pay you?”

  “Go seat ye and yer lassie,” said Mrs Dundee, waving at the mostly empty canteen. “I’ll be along with a receipt in a tick.”

  Plastic chairs. Plastic tables. Fluorescent lights and hospital-issue neutral colours. Zaranna sat opposite Alex and tried not to think how a hospital canteen in Leeds was not exactly the romantic centre of the universe. Yet, there he was. Mister Smoulders-like-a-Volcano. Grinning over his plastic tray. And she planned to demonstrate her kookiness in one fell swoop.

  Best throw it out there for the crows. “Did they find my feet?” she asked. “Uh – I mean, I know it sounds creepy, but it’s my body and I sort of miss those bits. I just wondered what might have happened to … them?”

  Alex laid down his fork. “Great, Zee. Quite the appetiser there.”

  Zaranna dropped her gaze. “Sorry.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. You’ve been through a great deal. I can’t imagine how it must feel. Your parents tell me you’re quite the equestrienne. Well, to quote, ‘Rather potty about horses, our Zara’.” He imitated her father accurately, making her laugh, but it was not the happiest sound. He frowned. “At risk of putting you off your lunch, Zara, my colleagues did find one foot in the wreck. They put it on ice in the hope that something might be salvaged. But it was too mangled … there, now I’ve made you cry.”

  She accepted a red checkered handkerchief large enough to double as a tablecloth, and dabbed her eyes. Who carried a handkerchief these days? And what was with her leakiness?

  “Only one foot?”

  Alex said, “Tell you what, I’ve a friend in the police force who I might ask. We’d have to inquire discreetly as the investigation’s still ongoing. Most likely, it was carried off by a fox. Sorry.”

  “Or a dragon,” she whispered. A slight wheeze of his breath told Zaranna she had just opened her mouth and firmly inserted a metaphorical foot, which was entirely as effective as the real thing. “Uh … I meant –”

  “Right, that was weird.”

  His half-teasing, half-serious comment fell flat. Zaranna backed up, thumped into a chair and hissed furiously between her teeth as she realised she could never blindly run away from anything again. Alex was around the table before she could blink. He grabbed her good arm.

  “Stop, Zars. Please. Look at me.”

  “No, no …”

  “Do we need to head back to your room?”

  “Investigation?” she asked woodenly. “What’s to investigate?”

  “Now’s hardly the time, when you’re so upset.”

  Exactly the wrong thing to say. Appalled, Zaranna watched herself, as if from a slight distance, dissolve into a ghastly puddle of emotions. She had no idea such a tornado had been bottled up inside of her. Alex, God bless him, stood squarely in its path. He weathered the blast. Supplied her with tissues after his handkerchief gave up an unequal battle. And he held her, not with that maddening back-patting, but with a solid, manly protectiveness. A girl could lay her head upon his shoulder and bawl for England, and know that he was there, oak-strong and as kind as the dawn.

  After a long while, he said, “What were those library books I saw by your bedside last week?”

  “Anne McCaffrey. Oh.”

  “Oh, indeed.” He quirked an eyebrow and, affecting a broad Scots brogue, added, “Classic choice, me lassie, but chock-full of wee scaly beasties. Nae the
wisest choice for a colleen with an overactive imagination, mind ye.”

  Zaranna punched his shoulder. “Enough, you beast.”

  That was the precise moment her parents and brother elected to descend upon the canteen in force.

  Her mother cried, “Peter, she’s been crying! Oh Zars, my darling peach …”

  Her dad made a wordless growl that communicated the impending obliteration of all surly young men who dared to trespass within a quarter-mile radius of his cherished daughter. And her brother Charles? Mathematician or none, he looked as steamed as a pressure-cooker neglected on the stove.

  With a deft spin of her wheels, Zaranna placed herself in the epicentre of the converging men and tried to protest Alex’s innocence. She might better have saved her breath. The men had scaled the genteel heights of pulverising kneecaps with sledgehammers when Susan waded in, windmilling her arms to clear the air.

  “Phew!” she smiled. “Too much testosterone blowing around these parts. Zara, eat your lunch. Charlie, simmer down. Better still, fetch me an orange juice. Peter, may I remind you who saved our daughter’s life?”

  “Yes ma’am!” said Alex, daring a cheeky grin. Susan’s glare wiped it off his lips instantly.

  Shortly, the family gathered in relative calm around the table, at least, for about as long as it took Zaranna to say, “So, I had a little wheelchair accident this morning.”

  Cue a second round of fussing. Soon, Alex was crowned a hero once more and Zaranna found herself banned from driving anything bar a toy car for the next twenty years. She tried to fold her arms crossly, but a cast up to her shoulder prevented that. Right. So they thought her a silly child without the common sense God gave a goldfish, did they? Could she not make a mistake? Despite knowing in her head that their behaviour stemmed from heightened concern for her, she fumed.

  Cutting through the conversation, Zaranna said, “Mom, Dad, Alex tells me there’s a police investigation. Why hadn’t you told me?”

  “Now, sweetie, you mustn’t …” Susan began.

  “Mom!”

  Her dad captured her hand. “Zars, there’s an insurance issue, damage to the train and the train driver’s still missing. They want to determine if your mother was driving negligently.”