The Life We Almost Had

by Amelia Henley

  Nell opened an article titled, ‘Is it all over for the once brilliant Chapman?’ Whilst I read, a sick feeling spread through me.

  Oliver had lied.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Oliver

  Oliver remembered it so clearly, the day everything changed. There had been a charity gala over on the mainland. Oliver was supposed to go but he had been so wrapped up in his consciousness research, so wrapped up in finding a way to connect to patients with Parkinson’s dementia like his uncle. As he had wandered into the bedroom to change, Clem had sensed his reluctance to leave the project. She had been sitting at the dressing table, sweeping blusher over her cheeks but underneath the rose pink, Oliver knew how pale she was. She had been overdoing it lately.

  She had caught his eye in the mirror. ‘You stay and work.’

  ‘No. I want to come with you.’

  She widened her eyes and they had both laughed.

  ‘Okay, maybe “want” is a bit strong but…’

  ‘No buts.’ She had stood and draped a shawl around the shoulders he wanted to kiss. Her black dress hung loose. She had lost weight lately. This weekend he would cook her favourite meal: rack of lamb and creamy mashed potatoes.

  ‘You catch up on your workload. I’m so proud of you. Your uncle would be too. Don’t lose sight of that,’ she had said, knowing his progress was painfully slow.

  ‘I know. It’s just that… all those people who would benefit if I could just break through.’

  ‘And that’s why I love you. You’re not driven by ego but a desire to help. Now get back to it. I’ll get the schmoozing out of the way and then we’ll both have the weekend free to spend some quality time together.’

  ‘Ooh! Quality time!’ Oliver had waggled his eyebrows as he looped his arms around her waist, pulling her to him.

  ‘Maybe we’ll start our quality time when I get home.’ She had played with a button on his shirt. ‘Do wait up.’

  He had leaned in to kiss her before he had second thoughts.

  ‘I don’t want to ruin your make-up. You’re beautiful, you know.’

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself.’

  ‘Even if I’m socially inept.’

  ‘Especially because you’re socially inept. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’m shattered so it won’t be a late one.’

  Oliver had watched from the window as she climbed into the taxi. She pressed a finger to her lips and Oliver nodded once. It was the last time he had seen her without her diagnosis hanging over them. She’d collapsed that night and been rushed to hospital.

  ‘It’s cancer,’ the doctor had said after a series of tests.

  Oliver had felt like he was falling. He had gripped her hand while he asked what the treatment plan was.

  The doctor’s gaze had shifted briefly to the floor before looking at Oliver once more and he had known the forthcoming news wasn’t good.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s stage four so, while there are things we can put in place to—’

  ‘It can’t be. She hasn’t had any symptoms…’ But even as Oliver had said the words, he knew that they were a lie. Her constant exhaustion. Her weight loss. Her stomach aches. The lack of colour in her cheeks. He had put it down to her busy lifestyle. Let her reassure him that she didn’t need to see a doctor, she was fine, she had said.

  Fine.

  She was dying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she had said as if she’d let him down when it was the other way around. He worked in medicine, for God’s sake. How could he not have known? Still, he hadn’t quite believed it, was sure a miracle would somehow occur.

  But it didn’t.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ he would whisper while she slept.

  It was frightening how quickly she had faded away. In a matter of weeks he was sitting by her bed, sleeping by her bed, while she drifted in and out of consciousness. Delirious with pain and medication. It tortured him that he didn’t know what she was thinking, feeling. Did she blame him? He blamed himself. An earlier diagnosis might have made all the difference. He had been too wrapped up in his research to notice. What sort of husband was he? He didn’t deserve her love. He didn’t know if he still had it.

  His guilt had grown, stretching his skin, pushing into his bones until his whole body ached with the pressure of feeling.

  ‘Clem.’ He said her name frequently, as though by keeping it alive he could keep her alive.

  He couldn’t.

  It was mid-morning. Outside the sun was shining, the birds were singing. A lawnmower hummed in the distance. It was a fluffy white clouds and ice cream day. A possibility day. She had opened her eyes and focused on him. Properly focused on him. Oliver had felt a surge of hope. She was coming back to him.

  ‘Clem?’

  She didn’t speak. Oliver didn’t know if she wouldn’t or couldn’t. Instead, she had raised her finger and pressed it against her lips. It was her ‘I love you’. It was her goodbye. He had nodded, just once, his throat swelling with pain.

  She had slipped away but Oliver kept hold of her hand, kept speaking her name.

  She was gone.

  After Clem had died, Oliver couldn’t let his constant questions about consciousness go. What happened to someone if they could no longer communicate? Could they still think? Feel? Remember? Oliver didn’t want to think or feel or remember. He tried to dull his pain with whiskey but he couldn’t dull his thoughts. He rattled around their huge home, tumbler in his hand, unable to settle. Unable to sleep. What had Clem been thinking in those final weeks as she had drifted in and out of consciousness? How much easier would it have been if there had been a way they could have communicated? A way he could have understood the things in her mind. It wasn’t only for her benefit he wished this. He agonized over whether she had blamed him for not insisting she saw a doctor, whether she had stopped loving him. In those last few weeks when she was wracked with pain, was she full of love or hate? Did it bring her comfort, thoughts of him? Of them? Of their wedding day, barefoot on the beach, frothy waves rushing excitedly towards them as they declared until death do us part.

  The alcohol soured his breath, burned his throat.

  He clanked another empty bottle into the recycling bin and unscrewed the cap from a fresh one.

  ‘It must be so rewarding to know you’re making a difference,’ Clem had said the first night they met. ‘The world needs more people like you.’

  She’d be so sad if she could see him now.

  So ashamed.

  It was the newspaper article that did it. A photo of him in a crumpled, stained shirt. Hair wild and unbrushed. ‘Is it all over for the once brilliant Chapman?’ the reporter had asked.

  Could he make a difference? Be the man Clem wanted him to be? The man he had thought he was? It was too late for her, for him, but what if he could help others? He had previously researched consciousness. Should he carry on? Could he?

  ‘I’m so proud of you,’ her voice had echoed from the past.

  Instead of slugging whiskey into his glass, he had glugged it down the sink and stumbled into his office, waking mid-afternoon, a bitter taste on his tongue, his face pressed to his desk, papers stuck to his cheek. He vowed never to drink again. To continue to make Clem proud.

  Now, as he finished his orange juice, Oliver thought about the grief he had felt. Still felt. ‘I can’t imagine how you feel,’ he had told Anna but it was a lie. He knew how it felt to lose the person you love more than anyone else in the world. He had felt it too. He perhaps should have told her the truth.

  He wanted to bring Anna the answers, the comfort, he himself once craved.

  If only she would trust him.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Anna

  ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ Oliver had said to me when we met but he knew only too well. Why hadn’t he just been honest? Reading the article filled me with an overwhelming sorrow. His story was vastly different to mine and yet strikingly familiar. Love. Loss. The i
nconceivable pain of sitting beside someone’s bedside, willing them to come back to you. To recover. The helplessness. He had felt it too. All of it.

  Had he and Clem planned a family? I placed my hands gently over my cramping stomach. My nan was fond of saying ‘You can’t miss what you never had’, but oh, she was wrong. Oliver must grieve for the future they had planned. In my mind he made the leap from scientist to man. No longer coming across as odd, just incredibly sad. Now I understood why he was so driven in his research. A picture formed in my mind of him sitting with Clem in the hospice, her physically in front of him but her mind somewhere else entirely, Oliver pushing his glasses onto the bridge of his nose as he tried to read her face. Her thoughts. Unable to know what she was thinking.

  Feeling.

  Wanting.

  ‘They look so happy together, don’t they?’ In a photograph from their wedding day, Oliver was barely recognizable, not from his lack of beard but because of his beaming smile. The sea glistening behind them, the breeze ruffling Clem’s long hair.

  Nell scrolled down further. There was a picture of Clem’s funeral. Oliver was one of the pallbearers. Her coffin balanced on his left shoulder, devastation crumpling his face.

  ‘I think he might genuinely want to help,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. I’m going to google that Japanese neuroscientist.’

  Nell found an article about his work. She read far quicker than my tired eyes could.

  ‘God, it’s like something out of a film. There’s something that can actually decipher the images in someone’s mind. It’s crazy to think all this stuff goes on and people like you and I have no idea. It sounds so futuristic.’

  ‘I don’t think Dr Acevedo believes that there’s anything going on inside of Adam’s mind. I don’t think he believes Adam will ever wake up. He’s hardly the most positive of people.’

  Nell opened YouTube and typed in ‘miracle waking from a coma’ and was flooded with results.

  ‘Look, Dr Acevedo doesn’t know everything.’

  There were videos of patients waking after two years, twelve years, twenty years. We watched clip after clip. Patients who had defied the boundaries of medical theories by relaying they could hear everything going on, they could think, dream, hope. Dr Acevedo might not know everything, but Oliver…

  ‘I can’t stop watching.’ Nell blinked back tears. ‘So many people who were written off. They’ve all come back.’

  I wouldn’t let Adam be written off, not without a fight. ‘I want to visit the Chapman Institute. Find out more. Will you come with me?’

  ‘Try and stop me.’

  I reached for the apartment phone.

  ‘Wait.’ Nell pulled a new mobile from her bag. ‘This is for you. I picked it up at the airport. I’ve keyed in some numbers, including Josh’s.’

  ‘He’ll be heartbroken when I tell him.’

  ‘Do you want me to call him so you don’t have to keep going over it?’

  ‘No – I can’t keep putting everything off.’

  ‘We also need to find another hotel. While the kitchen was making our lunch, I talked to reception about extending your stay but they’re fully booked next week.’

  ‘Shit.’ Without travel insurance, my accommodation wouldn’t be covered. We had some savings left but I didn’t know how long they would last. My mind flitted to the videos we’d just watched: two years, twelve years, twenty years. How long might Adam be in hospital?

  ‘We’ll get you both home,’ Nell said.

  ‘I’m not sure how without insurance. The few thousand pounds in our bank account won’t nearly cover it. Mum doesn’t have any money; Dad didn’t have life insurance. That’s why Adam and I made sure we’re both covered.’

  ‘It might be worth speaking to them? Some policies have a critical illness pay-out.’

  ‘We don’t.’ I didn’t think this was a critical illness anyway. They’d say there’s hope of a complete recovery.

  ‘Never mind. I could start a JustGiving page. A “Get Adam Home” campaign?’

  Home. One word. But those four letters brought such comfort.

  ‘If, and it’s a big if, we let Oliver get involved, he promised me a place a stay and to cover our travel afterwards.’

  ‘Let me call him. I want to sound him out.’ While Nell arranged for us to visit The Chapman Institute the next day, I washed down two painkillers with water.

  ‘Are you in a lot of discomfort?’ Nell asked when she’d hung up.

  ‘I feel…’ My fingers strayed to my stomach. Lost. Empty. Bereft. It was too hard to articulate. ‘I think I’ll go and have a bath. Why don’t you ring Chris and see how the kids are?’

  ‘I’ll unpack and do it later.’

  ‘Nell… Call him now.’

  There wasn’t always a later.

  Several times in the bath I had almost fallen asleep but afterwards I sat on the sofa in clean shorts and T-shirt, damp hair dripping cool water down my back, my mind hopping from anxious thought to anxious thought.

  ‘What if Oliver is a crackpot?’ I tried not to pin my hopes on him. ‘What if the trial is dangerous? What—’

  ‘What if you tried to relax for just a little while?’

  I tucked my legs under me on the sofa and rested my head on Nell’s shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘That’s okay. I only wish we were back here under different circumstances, but who knows, Adam could wake up any second. We could all be on the beach tomorrow sipping cocktails.’

  Her fingers threaded through mine and for the first time in days I felt a glimmer of positivity, which lasted until the phone rang.

  It was the hospital.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Oliver

  Oliver had been surprised to receive a phone call from Nell yesterday afternoon.

  ‘Anna’s told me everything.’ Her tone had been hard, almost confrontational. For a split second, Oliver had thought she was ringing to tell him to stay away from Anna and Adam.

  ‘It sounds barmy but we’ve checked out your website and looked at the breakthrough that Japanese neuroscientist has achieved.’

  ‘I can talk it all through with—’

  ‘All this research into consciousness. This progress. How come most people don’t know about it?’

  ‘It isn’t a secret. Most things are out there on the web. If you’re not interested in science you don’t look for it—’

  ‘It’s fascinating,’ Nell said. ‘I can’t stop googling. Did you know that in one study it was found that 70 per cent of the participants who were in a locked-in state and doctors believed had no awareness, could actually communicate when the right equipment was used?’

  ‘Umm, yes. I know.’

  ‘If you train an algorithm to translate brain activity, we can see the images from inside someone’s mind.’

  ‘Yes. We’ve progressed that several steps further—’

  ‘And there are loads, literally loads of people on YouTube waking from comas after being given a sleeping tablet. Is this something you’d try?’

  ‘No. I think—’

  ‘Also—’

  ‘Nell. Would you and Anna like to come and have a look around? See the work we’re doing.’ Oliver’s palm was clammy with nerves, the phone slippery in his hand.

  ‘We’re not committing to anything.’

  ‘Of course not. Just a chat.’

  ‘Even if we agree, there will be conditions.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And… and if you hurt Adam, I will hunt you down. I’ve got—’

  ‘Skills?’ Oliver cut in. ‘Look, this isn’t a Liam Neeson movie. This is real life. Adam and Anna’s lives and I don’t take that lightly. I’ve been… I have some degree of understanding of what Anna is feeling right now.’

  It took a second for Nell to reply. ‘We read about your wife. I’m sorry. It’s just that…’ Nell’s voice wobbled.

  ‘The people you love are in a terrible situation and you don�
��t know how to help them. I get it. Look, all I can say is come and meet me. Nobody is going to force Anna into anything. I promise.’

  ‘Okay. Tomorrow at ten.’

  They were late. He hoped they were still coming. He prayed Adam’s condition hadn’t changed. Immediately Oliver berated himself. He’d be glad if Adam had woken up, of course, but there was always the other possibility.

  That Adam might have died.

  He checked his watch again. It was nearly eleven.

  Where were they?

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Anna

  Me and Nell tumbled from the taxi, horribly late for our appointment with Oliver. We hadn’t rung to explain but I was sure he would understand.

  Given the circumstances.

  The Institute was a sprawling white building at the very tip of the island, the only clue to its identity a small, discreet silver sign bearing its name and logo. Behind it lay a glistening sea and a sky so blue it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The heat was relentless. It built and built and now it was approaching midday, it was insufferable to be outside, but still I loitered hesitantly, knowing if I stepped inside, I would be on a path I couldn’t turn back from.

  ‘It’s just a chat,’ Nell reassured me.

  ‘I know but…’ I couldn’t put into words how scared I was that I might agree to the trial and it would work, only to discover that there was nothing going on inside Adam’s mind, or that there was but not a single thought was about me. ‘I don’t think I can go in.’ I sat on the low wall, my head in my hands, taking deep breaths while Nell rubbed my back.

  ‘Mrs Curtis?’

  I looked up to see a woman of around forty wearing a crisp, white short-sleeved dress. ‘I’m Sofia. Are you okay?’ It was only then I noticed the discreet CCTV cameras positioned high in the corners of the building. I was flustered that I’d been observed.