Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “Yes.”

  36

  Another oven-baked day, the sky a sadistic cloudless blue.

  I return to my ward.

  The windows are open but there’s no breeze, heat from outside seeping in. Nurses are sweating, wisps of hair sticking to their foreheads.

  No sign of Dr. Bailstrom’s clicking red heels, and I’m grateful that I won’t be distracted by fashion in what should surely be a serious, high-minded moment.

  I take a last look at shiny linoleum and nasty metal lockers and ugly curtains. We twenty-first-century people really don’t know how to do death properly at all. I remember the ending of the film about J. M. Barrie, when he wheeled his dying lover into a magical Peter Pan set he’d secretly constructed in the garden. No brown geometric curtains for her. But they’ll have to do.

  I fight my way back into my body, through layers of flesh and muscle and bone, until I am inside.

  I am trapped, as I knew I would be, under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor. My eyelids welded shut; my eardrums broken; my vocal cords snapped off.

  Pitch-black and silent and so heavy in here, a mile of dark water above me.

  All I can do is breathe.

  I remember that the Latin word for breath and spirit is the same.

  ——

  I hold my breath.

  When Jenny faced her death in that chapel and looked for a heaven, I faced mine too. Properly. Fully. I told you then that I wouldn’t let her die.

  I knew that my child staying alive trumps everything. Adam’s grief. And yours. My fear. Everything.

  I must not breathe.

  But I still hoped it would be someone else. Somebody else’s mother and daughter and wife. Someone else’s life.

  My hope was desperate and corrosive and futile. Because it was never really going to be someone else. And maybe that’s fair. We keep our child but lose me. A balance.

  I must not breathe.

  But she’s an adult, not a child, and I know that now, a lesson learned.

  I think, underneath, I knew it already. I was just afraid that when she was an adult, she wouldn’t need me anymore.

  I was afraid she wouldn’t love me so much.

  Not realizing that she’d already grown up. That she still loves me so much.

  ——

  I must not breathe.

  Instinct is fighting back, a riptide of selfish desire for life against every pulse of energy in me. But I have become far stronger over the last few days. And although it wasn’t the reason I left the hospital’s protective skin, it does mean I have the stamina to do this.

  I must not breathe.

  When I was twenty weeks pregnant with Jenny, I found out that her ovaries were already formed. Inside our unborn baby daughter were our potential grandchildren (or at least the part of us that would be a part of them). I felt the future curled up inside me, my body a Russian doll of time.

  I must not breathe.

  I think of Adam far above me, up there on the surface in his inflatable lifeboat made out of other people’s breath.

  I think of Jenny reaching the shore of adulthood.

  I think that the fear of my children drowning showed me how I could do this.

  So little air in my lungs now.

  Will you read Addie “The Little Mermaid”? It’s in his Stories for Six-Year-Olds on the bottom shelf of his bookcase. He’ll say he hasn’t read those stories for years, Dad, and in any case it’s too girly, but you’ll insist. You’ll put your arm around him, and he’ll turn the pages for you.

  You’ll read to him about the pain the little mermaid felt when she left the water, walking on knives, because she loved her prince so. Because I want him to know that when I left my body in the hospital, when I went too far away for their scans, I was walking on knives because I couldn’t bear for him to be accused of this terrible crime. Because I believed in him. Because I love him. Tell him that the hardest thing in this world is leaving him.

  I don’t have to try to hold my breath anymore.

  I slip out of the wrecked ship of my body into the mile-deep dark ocean.

  You told me once that the last of the senses to go is hearing. But you’re wrong. The last of the senses to go is love.

  I am floating up to the surface, and with no effort I am slipping out of my body.

  An alarm is going off, shuddering the air, and a doctor is running towards me.

  A trolley loaded with equipment is being speeded across the lino, as if it’s on skates, a frightened nurse at the helm.

  My heart has stopped.

  I hear clicking red heels.

  Dr. Bailstrom says there’s a DNR order.

  They talk of transplant.

  They will keep my body functioning until my heart can be given to Jenny.

  ——

  I watch their machinery as my inert body has oxygen artificially pumped through it. You are ushered hurriedly into a room to sign a consent form.

  I shouldn’t really be here, surely, hanging around like this. Shouldn’t I be going to the next place now? A guest still at the table when the hosts are washing up in the kitchen.

  And I’m still talking to you!

  Last weekend, sitting at our kitchen table in our old life, I read in the paper about “sticky air.” A futurologist predicts that people will be able to leave messages for each other suspended in the ether. So you never know, but maybe, one day, you’ll hear what I’ve been saying to you. Because surely as I talked to you the molecules in the air around me were changed, the air charged with words.

  It must be when my heart is taken out and the machinery switched off that I will finally leave.

  I remember that at the end of “The Little Mermaid” she doesn’t get a prince but a soul.

  I go to the ICU where Jenny is being prepared for the transplant. She’s watching herself, Sarah bending over her body. I was jealous of Sarah’s closeness to Jenny once, but I’m now outrageously grateful.

  Jenny sees me, and I take her hand. One more good-bye.

  “So much for becoming independent from me,” I say. “I’ll always be with you now.”

  “Mum, that’s macabre.”

  “Beating away.”

  “Please!”

  “Seriously,” I say, “it’s just a pump.”

  “Your pump.”

  “You have far more use for it.”

  We don’t know what to say. Neither of us has talked about whether she’ll remember this. Remember me.

  “You’ll get better,” Sarah says to Jenny, filling the silence. “And you’ll do a great job looking after Adam. But other people are going to look after him too.”

  I glimpse you coming out of the doctor’s office.

  “So be a girl, Jen, not a woman too early,” Sarah continues.

  “You’re bloody marvelous,” I say to Sarah, who, of course, can’t hear, but Jenny smiles.

  I tell Jenny it’s time to get back into her body now.

  She hugs me and I want to hug her longer, hang on to her, but I make myself pull back.

  “Ivo and Dad and Aunt Sarah and Adam are waiting for you,” I say, and she goes back into her body.

  Surely there should be a dramatic storm, the pent-up compressed heat of the last four days released into thunderous drenching rain.

  Through the window of the ward the sky remains relentlessly blue, a heat haze fuzzing the edges, but I feel cool.

  I see you coming towards Jenny’s bed.

  I remember dragging Jenny down the stairs and thinking of love as white and quiet and cold.

  You look at me. And in that moment you see me.

  This is what love looks like an uncountable number of words later.

  I go to you and kiss your face.

  I watch you go with Jenny as she is wheeled towards the operating theater. I think about angels. Not the fierce, strong Old Testament angels this time, but the angels of Fra Angelico, with their shining, jewel-colored robes, long wings
down their backs; Giotto’s hovering above Earth like larks, their shimmering gold halos pinpricks of light; Chagall’s blue angel with her sad pale face. I think of Raphael’s angels and Michelangelo’s and the angels of Hieronymus Bosch and Klee.

  I think that beneath each angel—just out of sight of the painting—are their children they were forced to leave behind.

  But the heavenly afterlife isn’t where I am, not yet.

  I am sitting on the bottom step of our stairs packing Adam’s bag with his uniform, which he’ll need to change into after sports. I am knotting his tie so that all he has to do is slip it on and pull the skinny part because he still hasn’t got the hang of tying his tie and I hope you know to do this for him.

  And I’m in the sitting room, searching for a Lego piece down the back of the sofa, and you come up to me and hug me. “Beautiful wife,” you say, and upstairs I hear Jenny on the phone to Ivo and Adam is reading on the rug and I am suffocated with need for you all.

  They are taking my heart out.

  All the light and color and warmth in my body is leaving it now and coming into me—into whatever I am.

  My soul is being born.

  And Jenny is right, it is beautiful, but I rage against this birth of light. I want to see my grandchildren or just touch you once more and call to Jenny, “Nearly supper, OK?”; or to Adam, “I’m coming!”; to everyone waiting for me in the car, “Two minutes, all right?”

  Just a little more life.

  But then the anger leaves, and I am left without fear or regrets.

  I am a sliver-thin light, diamond-sharp, that can slip through gaps in the world that we know. I will come into your dreams and speak soft words when you think of me.

  There is no happy ever after—but there is an afterwards.

  This isn’t our ending.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks go once again to the wonderful Christine Kopprasch at Crown, for her intelligent and sensitive editing, and to my English editor, the gifted Emma Beswetherick, who was so instrumental in shaping this book. I would also like to thank Molly Stern and Dyana Messina and the rest of the team at Crown for their commitment to this novel.

  I want to thank Felicity Blunt, an exceptional agent and valued friend, whose vivaciousness is the tonic I need while writing. My thanks also to Kate Cooper and Tally Garner, also at Curtis Brown.

  My friends and family again made writing this book possible. So thank you once more to my parents for their continuing support and to my sister, Tora Orde-Powlett, who is always my first and best reader. I also want to thank Sandra Leonard, who read the ending before I’d written the beginning and encouraged me to carry on; to Michele Matthews for her generosity of time; to Trixie Rawlinson, Kelly Martin, Livia Firth, and Lynne Gagliano, who saw me often while my head was buried in the story and were so practically supportive. And to my old friends whose e-mails kept me going—Anne-Marie Casey, Nina Calabresi, Katy Gardner, Katie London, Anna Joynt, Alison Clements, and Amanda Jobbins. Thank you to Karin Lewiston, for all her practical help since my novels were published. Combining motherhood and authorhood wouldn’t be possible without my friends and family.

  Thank you, Anne Calabresi, who told me that her parents were the roof that had sheltered her, which I used in this story.

  I’d like to thank Richard Betts and Nick Oram-Tooley and all the teachers like them, whose classrooms are safe, happy, and inspiring and where children can fly.

  Last, but most of all, to my husband, Martin, who says he doesn’t need thanking.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROSAMUND LUPTON, the author of Sister, worked for many years as a scriptwriter. She lives with her husband and two sons in London.