by Eva Woods
Adam smiled. “You didn’t spot it?”
“Spot what?”
“The name. Over the door. I’m the boss, Daisy—I own the place.”
“Oh! God, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch on at all. It’s a brilliant café, I...I’ll tell everyone to come and buy your cakes.”
“Daisy?” He was scratching his head awkwardly.
“Yeah?”
“I know this isn’t really the time, in fact it’s the worst possible time really, but if you ever need to talk, maybe you can give me a call sometime? Or maybe we can meet up?”
“Oh? Er...”
“As soon as you walked in here the other day, I wanted to ask you out. A walk and a pint maybe. Or coffee, even though I spend the whole day making coffee and I can’t even look at it outside of work or I want to throw up. Anything, really. I work here about twenty hours a day but maybe we can find some time. Three in the morning or something. When I do the market run. No pressure. I just... I want to know what happens. How you are.”
For a moment, she teetered on the edge. On the one hand, being single again, moving out of the house, finding somewhere to live. Maybe having to stay in a nasty flat like Rosie’s. No wedding, no house in Guildford with a garage and three bedrooms. Canceling everything, having to tell her friends. The future wiped out. Life would be changed forever. Her mother would be devastated.
But, then on the other hand, she’d probably get over it.
“The thing, is, Adam...” Absently, she pushed back her hair with her left hand, the one with the sparkling ring, and he clocked it.
His face changed. “Oh my God. I didn’t notice. I’m so sorry.”
“What? Oh, no, no...”
“What a numpty, eh? I thought maybe you were...but I got it wrong. Jesus. Sorry.”
“Adam, you didn’t get it wrong. I am engaged, yes. Though maybe not for much longer. I have some things to sort out.”
“I haven’t got it totally wrong?”
“Not...totally, no.”
“Oh.” The air had lightened between them. But...she still had to sort things out with Gary! Her sister was still in a coma! Now was not the time for this. “Um, do you mind if I just...let you know? See how things go?”
“Of course! God, terrible timing I know. I was just worried you’d step out the door and I’d never see you again. I only seem to meet people when their lives are falling apart, you see.”
“I have a feeling mine might be falling apart for a while yet. In a good way, if there is such a thing.”
“So...”
Just then, Daisy’s phone rang. She pulled it out absently, not thinking about hospitals and medicines and death, but about the smell of coffee and the icing on cupcakes and the smile on Adam’s face, which he was doing his best to suppress but not quite managing it. “Mum? Mum, slow down, I can’t...”
Daisy listened to what she was saying. She straightened up so quickly she knocked against a table and the cups on it almost fell. “I’m coming. I’m not far.” She began hunting for her purse.
“What is it?” Adam was at her elbow, helping while she groped her arms into her coat.
“It’s my sister, she, she, I don’t know but something’s happened. Some kind of crash. How much do I...?”
“It’s fine, Daisy. Just go!”
Rosie
The room again. But it was a different room, with brighter lights right above her, blinding like when you step into the spotlight on a stage. Her happy place, as she’d always thought of it. Where she could be herself by being someone else. This wasn’t a stage, but it was a kind of theatre. Here there was a smell of disinfectant and the noise of people coming and going, voices in the shadows around her. She could feel things happening to her body, something being rolled onto her legs—tights?—and a cap onto her hair, and then someone’s gentle hand picking up hers and a voice saying, “Rosie? I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can you’ll feel a small prick now.” How kind, to talk to her like she was still awake and functioning. The anesthetist. The last one to touch you before you went under, sinking in the dark waters. And she felt it, quick and sharp, into her hand. “If you can, Rosie, start to count.”
Other voices. “She’s been nonresponsive for ten minutes now.”
“We better get in there and see what’s happening. There may be a bleed.”
“...George assisting?”
“...in my parking space, really unacceptable...”
Rosie clung terrified to these scraps of the world, knowing she was about to be wiped out. She might die in this surgery, whatever it was, and never be able to say sorry to her mother or Daisy and all the people she’d ever loved, and Luke, oh Luke, are we over? Will I never see you again?
She felt a small hand in hers, and knew it was not real. “Petey,” she croaked. There he was, her brother, in the same clothes he’d worn that day he’d drowned in the river. In a few inches of water, on a bright sunny day, because she’d taken her eyes off him just for a minute. They hadn’t even known he could toddle so fast. Petey didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He just looked at her, with his calm blue eyes, and squeezed her hand tight. He’d be where she was going. She knew that. “Please...look after me?”
Everything was fading, breaking up. The world which had hurt her so much, the beautiful life she’d kicked to pieces, and how ironic, she could see now how good it had been, standing up on dusty stages, drinking coffee in her bed in the mornings, lying on the grass on sunny days, the faces of the people she loved, her sister, her parents, her friends, and Luke, always Luke. So this is how it feels. If only I’d known.
But no one can ever know until it happens. Otherwise we’d never get a thing done, poleaxed every minute by how beautiful our lives are, and how very short.
“I love you. I love you!” She forced the words through her dry lips, even though no sound came out, right before the anesthetic kicked in and Rosie Cooke was switched off like a light bulb.
Daisy
She reached the room as Rosie was being wheeled out, gasping for breath, having raced up five flights of stairs to the ward. Rosie was pale and floppy on the bed, the doctors pushing her to the lift and one running with her IV. “What happened?”
“There’s something wrong with her brain.” Her mother was wringing her hands. “It’s swelling or bleeding or something in her skull, and she’s not getting any air. They have to operate! Cutting into her brain! Oh God.”
“Will she be...?” The word okay stuck in her throat. You weren’t okay by very definition if you were being wheeled off for brain surgery, and the nurses and doctors were actually running with you, clearing the corridors and heading for the lifts up to the operating rooms.
“It’s very bad, Daisy. I just wish... I wish she could have woken up, even for a moment, so I could tell her I love her!” And their mother burst into loud, undignified tears.
Daisy watched for a moment, awkward. Then she went to her bag—she was the kind of person who always had tissues, of course. “Here, Mum.”
Her mother pressed the balsam tissue to her face, shoulders shaking. “It’s my fault. I didn’t even call her to see was she okay. I was just so angry with her, and now look. I’m a terrible mother. It wasn’t her fault what happened, not at all. She was only little. It was my fault, all mine. Oh Rosie.”
Daisy reached around to pat her mother’s shoulder. There was a lot to unpack in that. Where to start? “Come on, Mum, don’t cry.”
Just then they heard the sound of running feet in the corridor, and a man burst into the room. Fair-haired, in a navy knitted jumper, his eyes wild and staring. “Oh! I’m sorry, I was looking for Rosie Cooke.” He took in the tears, the empty space where the bed had been. Daisy saw it in his eyes as clearly as if he’d spoken: she’s dead.
He stumbled back. “Oh God. Am I...?”
“Oh my God,�
�� she said. “You’re Luke.”
Rosie
Awake. Somewhere. Not hospital. Not the world, maybe. Somewhere...beyond. In between.
Rosie was aware only of a bright white light, so harsh and pure it hurt her eyes. She could see nothing, hear nothing. But suddenly she could remember...everything.
24 October 2017 (Two days ago)
Mel. Angie. Serge. Dave. Caz. Ingrid. Mum. Daisy. Dad. Carole. Mr. Malcolm. Ella. Luke.
Rosie stared at the list she’d been up all night writing. A lot of names. A lot of people she’d wronged, that she needed to say sorry to. In the weeks since she’d quit her job and that disastrous visit to Luke’s house, she’d at first spent a lot of time sitting in the flat feeling sorry for herself. Wishing she could speak to her family, too proud to call them first. Brooding over her life—all the turning points, all the wrong choices, all the places things had gone wrong. Falling out with Caz, and Angie, and Ingrid. Letting Luke go—time after time. Screaming at her mother and sister. Sleeping with a married man. Messing up, again and again.
She hadn’t been sleeping. All night she would lie awake listening to voices and traffic from the road outside, until the window behind her cheap gauzy curtains lightened to gray and the birds started up. The doctor had given her pills, but she’d stopped taking them, hating the feeling of wading through treacle. So they’d stockpiled. The silver packet was sitting on the table in front of her alongside the piece of paper with the names on it.
Rosie’s head felt strangely clear, as if the insomnia had filled her bones with clean white fire. None of it mattered. What mattered now was the rest of her life. If there was to be one. On the one hand, there was the mess she’d made of everything. Petey, Luke, Caz, her career, everything. The pills seemed to call to her from their shiny packet, the peace of it all. To just sleep, and not wake up. It was dangerous, how much she thought about it. On the other, how could she do that? To her parents, who’d already lost a child? To everyone who knew her? Would they care? There was only one way to find out. She’d contact them all. She’d say sorry. And then she’d decide what to do next.
She started with the easier ones, knowing she’d need to work up the courage. First, Caz did not pick up—understandable, perhaps. Ingrid, who she knew would be at her desk, did not reply to the email. They hadn’t talked in years, of course. Understandable. Normal. Same with Angie, who was most likely doing the school run: Rosie knew from Facebook she had kids. But then her mother didn’t answer the phone—her mother, who never went anywhere! Did she have caller ID, was she screening her own daughter?—and her father didn’t either. Daisy had been a shock. She’d actually rejected the call, sending it to voicemail. Rosie’s little sister, always so eager to please, so easy to win round with a hug or a Toffo, did not want to speak to her. The damage between them must lie deeper than Rosie had even thought. Mr. Malcolm and Melissa, they were dead, the guilt of that lying heavy on her. Of being too late. Ella—she was too afraid to contact her. And then, aware that it was make or break, that everything was hanging on this, she’d called up an old email account, trying to remember the password with various failed attempts, resetting it. The long hours of the night over, watching a pink dawn break. Staring at that packet, the silver winking in the sun from the window, illuminating all the dust and mess of Rosie’s flat. Of her life. After that night in the hotel, she’d done her best to forget him, changing her own email address so his wouldn’t be stored in there, deleting his number off her phone. But that morning, throwing caution to the wind with both hands, she’d opened the email account and there they were. Messages from Luke, sent every day since she’d run from his door. Sending his number. Asking her to call, to get in touch. To come and meet him at their old spot. That he’d go there each day hoping to see her; that he understood sometimes you couldn’t say these things in an email or over the phone, but only standing opposite each other in flesh and blood.
She didn’t even stop to reply. She just picked up her phone and ran. If she’d been thinking straight—if she’d slept much at all in the past few weeks—she might have paused, answered, washed her hair, got dressed. As it was, she just went to him.
“My phone.” She remembered, now, alone in the bright white. It had been in her hand, and she’d been frantically typing out a message to him, saying she’d meet him there, she was on her way. Ready to say all the things she should have said to him years ago. That she’d always loved him, from the moment she’d seen him on that beach, all the way to Marrakesh, the years between seeing him in the pub, all those miserable snatched times together, then more years apart. She’d loved him for every second of every day she’d known him. And she was here, still, if he wanted her. She’d dropped the phone in her haste to get to him, knocked the battery out. Pieced it back together, half walking, half jogging over the bridge. The date and time had wiped themselves, as they always did when you took the battery out of her old, cheap phone, so error messages were coming up, and impatient, she’d tried to reset it as she hurried along. The dial. The numbers. Not time travel, nothing like that. Simply the last thing she had seen before the bus plowed into her—numbers, a gray background, noise and light in the background. That could have been it for Rosie Cooke. She could have been killed. Instead she’d been granted this extra time to come back to the world, a world she’d left messy and hurt, to her own body that was screaming in pain, to understand all the mistakes she’d made along the way. She had not been trying to kill herself. She had been trying to live.
“But I couldn’t change it! I couldn’t make a difference.” Rosie could see nothing, but she understood, somehow, she was not alone after all. People were here with her. Grandma. Darryl. Mr. Malcolm. Melissa. And Petey. She would not be alone here, even if she could not come back to her life again. The dark is hugging you.
But her mother, her father. Daisy. Luke. Oh Luke. If only she could have spoken to them one last time. If only love was enough, to bring you back.
Daisy
Luke—she couldn’t get over how handsome he was; really, he had a sort of glow about him—sat in the waiting room, head in his hands. “I’m too late.”
“We don’t know that. It’s just...they’ve taken her for surgery.” Emergency brain surgery. That wasn’t good. But for some reason Daisy felt she had to be optimistic for this man she’d never met before. Who her sister loved. “So... Ella called you?”
“Yeah. She’s...she’s not a bad person. She and I, we just didn’t work.” Daisy was very aware of her mother in the background, looking puzzled. How to explain what she’d found out, who Ella was?
Daisy said, “Can you tell us what happened that day? You asked Rosie to meet you?” That was where her sister had been going, why she was up so early on that bright day. Luke had emailed her—to an old account, not the one linked to her phone—to say please come. Please come and meet me now, we have to talk. She would have been rushing, half-dressed, in her eagerness to see him. Not looking as she stepped into the road. Thinking only of him. Daisy had found the text message in the drafts folder of Rosie’s phone, where she hadn’t thought to look before. She must have been writing it as the bus hit, knocking the phone from her hand, slamming into Rosie and changing her life, and all of their lives, forever.
“I thought she just hadn’t turned up again,” he explained. “I messaged her for days. She never replied. Why would she, after what I did? Letting her run off that day, not chasing after her... I was ashamed. I should never have married Ella, but there was the kid, you see. Well, he’s not actually mine, as it turns out, but...he is, if you see what I mean. I couldn’t just leave him. So I did what Rosie said. Tried again with Ella. But it’s over now. I’ll still be in Charlie’s life, of course, but Ella and me... I wanted to contact Rosie, to tell her that, but she’d obviously changed her number and email. So I thought that was her answer. Not replying, not being there any day I went. I thought she’d decided I was no good after all.�
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“But she was coming.” Daisy could picture it all now. Rosie, her phone in her hand, trying to find the location or even maybe text to say she was coming, please wait. Not looking where she was going. Stepping out, in expectation of seeing Luke again, and then the speed of the bus. Daisy suddenly realized—“She wasn’t trying to...it was an accident. Mum, it was an accident!”
Her mother’s face was set in hard lines. “Daisy. Darling. It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see?”
And Daisy understood. Even if Rosie hadn’t been trying to kill herself, if she’d stepped out by accident, not looking, rushing to meet Luke, then it didn’t make a difference. She was going into surgery right now and they were opening up her brain. She might die anyway.
“Oh God.” Suddenly she understood. Rosie might die. Rosie was in the operating room right now, fighting for her life.
Rosie
“What’s happening to me now?” she said, to the empty bright air.
“They’re about to operate on you, dearie.” Grandma’s voice. “Your brain is bleeding, swelling up in your head, see.”
Mr. Malcolm. “They have to cut out a piece of your skull so it has somewhere to go. You’re just slipping under now.”
“My—my skull?”
“No worries, mate.” Darryl. “They do it all the time. They can close it up again, no bother. Let go, Rosie. Let them work.”
“We’ll be right there with you,” said Melissa, sounding cheerful. Rosie didn’t know why. They were cutting into her skull so her brain could come out, that didn’t sound like much to be cheerful about.