Page 8 of We Live Here Now

7

Emily

The bathroom wall is cold behind my back, the January night seeping in through the stone, but I embrace the chill, needing it to help me calm down. Eventually, when my breathing is steady, I peel the tissue away and carefully study the cut on my foot. It barely hurts now, and the bleeding has stopped. Maybe it wasn’t so deep after all. Still, I add more antiseptic before taping it up with a plaster. I’ll need to keep an eye on it. Just in case.

Just in case.

Just in case of sepsis, of coma, of death.

Again.

Death is cold. Empty. Nothing. Death came before the coma, that’s what they tell me. When they were battling the sepsis. I remember fever. Fear. A sense of being elsewhere. Of thinking, This is it, oh god this is it, how can a broken leg kill me? After that there was nothing. Even when they jolted me back to life, minutes after I’d stopped breathing, I didn’t know anything about it. The long sleep of the coma lasted three months, hanging between the light and the void, holding on to life by a gossamer thread until, finally, I opened my eyes again.

Death trails me though, and I’m still trying to shake him off. It’ll pass , they say. It’ll pass. But they don’t know everything. They don’t know what haunts me. I glance down at my foot again. Was the nail rusty?

“You okay?”

Freddie’s in the doorway, confused to see me on the floor, my foot plastered and a bottle of antiseptic beside me.

“Yes.” I hold out a hand, and our eyes meet for a moment, both thinking of my accident, before he grips it tightly, too tightly, and pulls me to my feet. “There was a bird trapped downstairs. I let it out but then I trod on a nail coming back to bed.”

“I wondered what the hell was going on when I saw the footprints. Do you need me to do anything?”

His arm feels good around my waist, handsome face full of concern. He’s boyish in the pale light, almost like he was when we met. I’ve missed it. That all-encompassing love. I’ve missed him. I stand on my plastered cut and there’s no pain. It’s a relief. “Pull the nail up tomorrow. And what footprints?”

In the hallway I see them for myself. Ashy black marks—six or seven of them—leading to our bedroom door.

I glance over the banister but there aren’t any on the stairs. How strange.

“Is this the nail?” Freddie’s crouched. “How did it get in upside down?”

The sharp metal tip shines under the overhead light, but it seems smaller now and has only a couple of drops of rusty red around it. I was sure that my foot had spurted blood everywhere. Has it seeped under the floorboards through the tiny hole?

“I’ll get that up in the morning. I promise.”

“I don’t know how the soot got there.” I’m still looking at the footprints. “My feet are clean.” I look back at the clean bathroom floor.

“Has to be you. Who else could it be? Did you wash your cut?”

“Well, yes…”

“There you go.” He shrugs. “You washed it off. Get back to bed while I wipe it up. It’s freezing out here.”

I can’t shake the image of some unknown faceless figure creeping around the house while I was panicking in the bathroom and Freddie slept, and when he gets in beside me I roll onto my good side and slip an arm over him. His skin is cold, but as the warmth of the duvet envelops us he turns to face me, kissing me in the dark, and it’s been so long that when we have sex it’s almost like the first time all over again. We’re breathless, tugging at each other’s pajamas, and I forget about the awful scars up one leg and pretend my skin is smooth and firm. We’re like we used to be as we have fast and urgent sex, and I cling to him as my mind empties of sepsis and hospitals and the accident and what I did for the promotion, and I lose myself in feeling alive. When we’re finished, Freddie’s like a hot-water bottle beside me, and I listen to his breathing as it slows into sleep.

I lie there awake for a while longer, once again alert for any sign of fever in case my foot gets infected, teased by thoughts of those sooty footprints, of a stranger’s movements in our house. It isn’t possible, of course. They had to be mine. It’s the only explanation. My brain isn’t to be trusted. Post-sepsis syndrome, that’s what they call it, that’s what I have to look out for. Downstairs there are several leaflets on it.

Fatigue, difficulty sleeping, muscle and joint pain, difficulty breathing, reduced organ function are among a few of the joyful physical symptoms, and then there are the mental and emotional ones: hallucinations, panic attacks, mood swings, nightmares, brain fog, memory loss, PTSD .

Hallucinations. Brain fog. I didn’t realize my feet were dirty, that’s all there is to it. As I finally drift into sleep the strange creaking comes again, quietly distant, from somewhere out in the corridor. I pull tighter to Freddie. Larkin Lodge is an old house with bad windows , I tell myself as I sink into unconsciousness. That’s all.

Outside, a raven croaks, its coarse cry barking into the night sky, and it sounds like laughter.