There is a maze of the mundane going on – speaking to the insurance company, looking at transport, figuring out the day-to-day issues. I even found him reading customer reviews on wheelchair ramps, as though obsessing with the practical details is somehow protecting him from the trauma of the big picture.
He has told Harry’s work colleagues, and various gifts have arrived – fruit baskets and flowers and giant silver helium balloons that float, semi-inflated and inappropriate, in the corners of the room, bobbing like metallic spirits of the underworld every time the door opens.
Linda has been spending every waking moment at her son’s side, as well as her sleeping ones, contorted into a chair and footstool. She looks terrible – thin and damaged, a fragment of her former self. She is a woman in her fifties, but as she reaches out to caress his face, the skin on the back of her hands is taut and pale, waxy like a piece of jaundiced fruit.
‘Why don’t you two go and have a rest?’ I suggest, as I have done frequently over the last few days.
Linda is about to refuse again, and I add, ‘Please. You need a break. I’ll stay with him. Tomorrow, when he’s awake again, he’ll need the company more than he does now. Go and eat. Go for a walk. This might be the last chance you get for a while.’
John nods, and says firmly, ‘You’re right, Elena. Come on, love – we’ll go to the canteen. Take a stroll. He’ll be fine for half an hour.’
Linda still looks as though she might argue, but in the end she folds. Her will isn’t strong enough to fight right now.
She fusses around brushing her hair and ‘doing her face’, as she calls it, and asks me several times if I’m sure. When they finally leave it feels like a relief to have that grief and pain and stress taken away. I have plenty of my own, but theirs is so tangible I could slice it like pie. They are his parents, and their love for this man is different from mine. It is primal in its intensity.
‘Alone at last,’ I say, gazing down at Harry. At his still features and his floppy hair and his cocooned body. I push back his fringe and lean forward to kiss him quickly on the lips.
It is still so strange, seeing him like this. Trying to understand what has happened – what might happen. Days ago I was coming to the difficult decision that it was all over between us. Now, looking at him so still and vulnerable, I feel confused. It is hard to untangle love from sympathy, to decipher how much I want to protect him from how much I actually still feel for him as a partner.
This, I think, is the last time he will be at peace. The last time he will be unaware of what the world has done to him. The last time that his mind and body are able to rest, oblivious to anything other than functioning and healing.
I take his flaccid hand in mine, and say, ‘Hi, Harry. It’s me, Elena. I have been here, honest – just not as chatty as your mum. Your mum loves you so much, Harry – she’s like a tired lioness, exhausted but still protecting her cub.
‘Anyway. Tomorrow, they’re going to wake you up. We’ll be able to talk for real. None of us has any idea what’s going to happen next, but I hope it’ll be all right. In the end. So … before you are awake, there’s something I have to tell you. Something I’m not sure I’ll tell you again, depending on how things work out.’
I scan his face, see no response. The doctors have assured us that he is resting, that technically he cannot hear or respond. Linda has found anecdotal evidence on the internet about people who say they could hear, who felt like they were looking down on their own bodies.
The internet, of course, isn’t that reliable. There isn’t even the flicker of an eye beneath his blue-tinged lids.
I take a deep breath and continue. ‘I found out, a few days ago, Harry, that I was pregnant. That I was carrying our baby.’
Saying the words out loud is surprisingly hard. I have talked to Alex about it, and I have thought about it, but telling Harry – even an unconscious Harry – is more emotional than I expected. I accidentally created a baby with this man, no matter how complex our relationship was becoming.
‘I lost the baby. Probably during the earthquake. Miscarriages are common. I keep telling myself that, as though something being common makes it less awful … whatever the reason – I lost our baby. We hadn’t planned one, not yet, and maybe we never would have, who knows? Things were a bit up in the air between us, weren’t they, if we’re honest? Things were changing.
‘But that doesn’t matter. We lost a baby, and I’m so sad about it, Harry. I lie awake at night, and imagine what he or she would have looked like. Somehow I think it was a boy. I wonder if he would have my eyes, or your sense of humour, what we might have called him.
‘I imagine holding a tiny baby, safe in my arms, and I … I love him so much. It feels like nothing I’ve ever experienced. And then I remember – then I remember that he’s gone. That our baby is gone, and will never come back. That I didn’t keep him safe. That I’ll never know what he would have been like – never get the answers to all those questions, all those wonderings. He’s gone, and it’s over, and I need to deal with that.’
I scrunch up my T-shirt to wipe away tears, and look down at him. Still silent, still at peace. I feel unreasonably jealous of that peace, and try to ignore a surge of anger. I can’t be angry at a man lying in a medically induced coma.
‘I wanted to tell you now,’ I say, ‘because I’m not sure when I’ll get to tell you later. You’ll have so much to deal with already. There’s already been too much loss, too much suffering. I don’t know if you’ll be able to bear any more, if it would be fair of me to add to your pain. Maybe I will tell you. Or maybe this is one for me to carry on your behalf. I just don’t know yet. I’m so sorry, Harry. For everything that’s happened. Everything that is to come.’
I lean back in the chair, falling silent. I can hear the traffic outside, and occasional low-level chatter in the hallway. I can hear the beep of his heart monitor, and the sound of my own moist breath.
I close my eyes and switch off my mind. I mute my thoughts, and put myself into my own equivalent of a medically induced coma. I have become skilled at this – at compartmentalising, at burying pain, at finding a way to function even though every emotion I have tells me to curl up in a ball and sob.
Less than half an hour has passed before Linda and John return, Linda dashing over to touch her son immediately, as though she can reassure him that she’s back now. That Mummy is back and everything will be fine.
I stand up and look at John. He pulls a face, and says, ‘Couldn’t keep her away for long. Said she didn’t like the music …’
That actually makes me smile. The music in the canteen is terrible – at least to our ears. Muzaky Spanish-speaking covers of pop music hits by the likes of Dolly Parton and Duran Duran and the Spice Girls.
‘I don’t blame her,’ I reply, glancing back at Linda, and her maternal communion with a more-than-sleeping son. ‘I’m going to get some rest myself. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Thank you, Elena,’ he says, sounding uncharacteristically emotional. ‘For this. For staying. I know you could have gone home by now, if you’d really wanted to. I know this isn’t easy. Thank you for … standing by him.’
Tammy Wynette, my brain points out. ‘Stand By Your Man’. One of the other songs I heard in the canteen.
