Page 32 of The Girlfriend

T HE JOURNEY TO WALES WAS AGONIZING. EVERY TRAFFIC LIGHT, EVERY car hogging the fast lane, not getting out of their way, every time the autocratic highway speed signs flashed at them to slow to sixty, then forty miles an hour, she would move restlessly, angrily in her seat.

The physical pull to be next to Daniel was so strong, if they weren’t going as fast as possible, her body started to move itself, as if to make up for it.

All the while, Howard sat beside her, driving, a pained expression on his face.

She’d had to call him on the golf course, and to his credit, he answered immediately—she never rang, preferring to leave him to it, knowing she was all but excluded from that side of his life—so perhaps he’d known something was wrong.

While he was driving back to her, she threw a few essentials (toothpaste, change of clothes for them both) into a bag, then sat in the hall chair when she wasn’t pacing in frustration.

She rushed out as soon as she heard the car pull up outside and he didn’t even have time to switch off the engine before they were back on the road.

The first few minutes of the journey were spent repeating over and over what the nurse had told her, which was very little.

“Your son is unconscious after falling from a raft in a white-water-rafting accident.” He was currently “in surgery,” but she couldn’t or, more likely, wouldn’t give any details on why or what, but instead asked them to get there “as soon as they safely could.” When Laura had pressed for details, anything to try to make sense of it all, Nurse Hadley always answered with the same thing: “It’s better that you speak to a doctor when you get here.

” Although Laura understood why, she felt a deep hatred for her at one point, so desperate was she for clarity and reassurance.

“He’s obviously hit his head,” said Howard.

“You think so?” said Laura, although deep down she also believed the same thing, she just didn’t want to admit it.

He nodded.

“And the surgery?” Laura’s voice trembled.

Howard didn’t say anything at first, as they both knew that whichever way you looked at it, this was bad. “We don’t know yet,” he said gently.

Laura saw him glance at the GPS again and shared his anxiety at the time.

Two hours to go, with an estimated arrival of 5:07 p.m. She looked at her watch, where two hours on registered 5:05; she could be with Daniel a whole two minutes earlier, she thought, before realizing what a ridiculous notion that was.

Two hours was two hours, her watch was just a bit slow.

They said the accident had happened at 10:15 a.m., and so Daniel would have been almost the entire day without his family by the time they arrived.

Thinking this made her almost shake with a sense of neglect.

What if he was waiting for her, for someone to hold his hand?

What if the presence of her or Howard at the hospital would make a difference to his surgery?

Howard, in a rare moment of tenderness, rested a hand on hers.

“He’s in the best place and they’ll be looking after him. And they’ll call. They’ll call,” he emphasized, meaning with good or bad news. Anything significant.

It was at this point that Laura realized he wasn’t dressed in his golf clothes, meaning that he’d either changed after she’d called, which seemed highly unlikely considering the urgency, or he hadn’t been at golf at all. She didn’t answer, just squeezed his thumb, an acknowledgment she’d heard.

* * *

They were led into a small room, a consultation room that Laura sensed had been used to tell a lot of people bad news, to ask them to make difficult decisions, maybe occasionally to impart something joyful.

It felt like a room that had a burden to it.

She and Howard stared at the walls, the safety posters, the help lines, and the vase of surprisingly real, fresh flowers on the table.

They were waiting in silence for the doctor to come and speak to them, having exhausted what little they could squeeze out of what they already knew.

There had been no sign of Cherry.

The door opened and Laura started. In walked two doctors. Laura urgently scanned the face of the one who led—a kindly, bright Asian woman—trying to read it for news.

“Mr. and Mrs. Cavendish,” the doctor said, indicating the chairs, “thank you for coming so quickly.”

Neither sat. “Where is he? Can we see him?” asked Laura.

“Very soon, of course. And I know you’re anxious to.” She indicated the chairs again and they lowered themselves into them, as did the doctors.

“I’m Dr. Raina, the neurosurgeon, and this is Dr. Kennedy, the anesthetist.” She indicated the man on her right, a gangly redhead who smiled at her.

“We’ve been looking after your son since he came into hospital this morning.

Daniel suffered a head injury when he was white-water rafting this morning.

After investigation, we found it had led to a subdural hematoma, which is a bleed on his brain.

We took him into surgery immediately and successfully removed the buildup of fluid. ”

Laura was trying very hard to concentrate, but her mind kept lurching at the mention of certain words: “bleed,” “immediately,” “successfully.” She was grasping for meaning, an understanding of the seriousness of what they were telling her, so she could arrive at a point where she could stop thinking the worst.

“He’s now recovering in intensive care—”

“So he’s okay?” blurted out Laura.

Dr. Raina smiled kindly. “The operation was a success. He’s stable and now we give him time to recover. In order to help him do this, we are keeping him anesthetized, so that his brain can have a better chance of healing.”

“ Healing? So it’s . . . damaged?”

“I was referring to the fact it’s taken a knock and he’s been in surgery. In terms of brain damage, the scans do not indicate that this is the case.”

She almost cried with relief. “Can I see him?”

“Yes, of course. We’ll take you and your husband there now.

Remember, he won’t be awake and he’s going to look a bit different from the last time you saw him.

We’ve had to shave off some of his hair so we could complete the surgical procedure, and he’s going to be attached to a lot of machines that are helping monitor him while he recovers. He’s also on a ventilator.”

“So he’s not breathing?”

“Not independently. We’ll keep him like this for a couple of days and then work to get him off ventilation.”

Suddenly to Laura, what had seemed horrific, but manageable, was a whole lot worse. The gangly redhead shifted forward in his seat. “He can’t breathe independently because he’s sedated to a level that the brain is resting.”

“Did you have any questions before we take you up to the unit?”

Laura looked bleak and Howard took her hand. “Not at the moment. We’d just like to see our son.”

Dr. Raina smiled. “I’ll take you to him now.”

They followed her to a unit with busy nurses full of low-key banter and practicality, too upbeat, too normal, for the seriousness of the situation.

Then they were introduced to Daniel’s nurse, a woman who received them with a quiet, unfazed confidence as if she dealt with loved ones’ serious head injuries every day, which, of course, she did.

Laura braced herself just before the nurse pulled back the white divider curtain that separated Daniel from the other beds on the unit.

She could hear the beeps that foretold of her son’s presence and knew it was going to be bad, but the sight of him still hit her like a concrete brick against her chest. Machines held on to him, the wires and tubes entering his body like a plague of alien parasites.

It was difficult to see where he ended and they began; they were one mass of flesh and plastic.

One side of his head had been shaved completely, the exposed skin deathly white.

His face was pale, almost grayish in color, and swollen as if he’d been in a fight, but without the bruising.

The ventilator was fixed into his mouth, making his tongue protrude grotesquely; the plastic and bands that held the ventilator in place cut lines across his cheeks.

Across his forehead was a red welt. He lay still, his eyes shut; and after a moment’s shocked hesitation, she ran to him and tentatively took his limp hand, touching him the way she would a fragile newborn.

She tried to speak, to say his name and let him know she was there, to reassure him, but her voice cracked and she had to stop, not wanting him to know she was losing it.

She just let silent tears roll down her face.

“Can he hear us?” Howard asked the nurse.

“We’ve got no reason to believe he can’t,” said the nurse. “In fact, we encourage you to talk to him, offer him comfort, even though he can’t communicate back.”

“I’m okay now, I’m okay,” said Laura, through deep breaths, as she pulled up a chair without letting go of Daniel’s hand. She sat, without taking her eyes off him.

Howard took a chair on the other side of the bed.

“I’ll leave you alone for a while,” said the nurse, and she drew the metal rings around the rail until they were enclosed, the three of them in a white, beeping bubble.

After a few seconds, Laura heard a stifled choking sound; she looked up to see Howard crying, his hand in a fist and pressed against his mouth, trying to suppress the noise. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes between finger and thumb as he wiped away the tears.

* * *

The last time she’d seen him cry was the night Daniel had been born.

He’d finally come into the world at six in the morning after twenty-four hours of excruciating labor, complicated when Daniel’s heart rate had dramatically dropped, which had resulted in an emergency caesarean.

She’d lain exhausted, dazed, and Howard, sitting in the chair by her bed, held tiny Daniel while tears suddenly streamed down his face.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, embarrassed, as he hurriedly tried to wipe them away, but they kept on coming. “I thought . . . I thought you were going to die, or he . . .”

Laura had known what he’d meant. It couldn’t happen again.

“Hush, we’re fine now,” she’d said, and it had been a moment of closeness, of the three of them, Howard at his most raw. It was a Howard that she knew only she would see, and that no one could take away from her.

“I’m just so happy,” he’d managed to spill through his tears and she’d smiled, full of love for him.

* * *

“Are you okay?” she said softly over the bed.

He nodded. “Sorry.”

She wished she could once again tell him it was all going to be fine.

The nurse came back in and started to check Daniel’s IV fluids and Laura watched silently.

They’d been told the nurse stayed with him all the time, and she was grateful.

After a moment, she turned to Daniel and started telling him about her day.

Awkwardly, at first, for she was unused to his bleeps, his silent responses.

When she faltered, Howard came in. After a while, they got up a good rhythm, each supporting the other.

After a couple of hours of keeping up a cheerful run of nonsense, the exhaustion started to set in.

It was then that another nurse subtly drew back the curtains and spoke the words Laura had been waiting to hear:

“Someone’s outside who would like to see Daniel. Cherry?”

Laura stiffened. “No,” she blurted out. “I don’t want her here.”

Howard glanced at her, but she refused to budge. “I’ll go and see her,” he said.

“Tell her we want his things.”

Howard nodded and left the cubicle. Laura held her son’s hand tighter and silently vowed to stay at his side all night and all the next day if it kept Cherry away from him.

Something that she knew was unfeasible, but what she could do, as next of kin, was stop Cherry from visiting.

She burned with a deep emotional rage when she thought about her, about her stupid little plan of one-upmanship, and how in order to score a point, she’d ended up putting Daniel in the hospital.

She wanted to know what had happened, but she couldn’t stand to see her.

Whenever she pictured Cherry’s face, Laura felt such a blind anger, she lost all rationality.

Laura knew that if she was in the same room, she’d not trust herself. Howard would find out.