The Perfect Family

by Samantha King

  “You mean I’m not just some kind of freak of nature.” I remember how Dom teased me all those years ago; I don’t remember him sitting at my hospital bedside.

  “Far from it. A high proportion of patients who experience unconsciousness report that they remember a great deal about what took place around them during that time. They also indicate having had an emotional response to those occurrences. Think about a person with visual impairment, for instance. Their hearing often becomes acute. When consciousness is impaired, as in coma, the unconscious mind sometimes comes into a life of its own. The human brain is a beautiful creation.” His eyes light up as he talks about what is clearly his life’s work.

  “But I bet it looks freaky as hell. No wonder Dom has stayed away.”

  “Grown-ups can find hospital visits as upsetting as children, of course. My nurse told me that she found your husband trying to shake you awake. Poor man. In some ways coma is harder for the relatives, you see. You are asleep, but they have to stand by helplessly watching you.”

  “He’s coming back, though?”

  “He hasn’t returned since that first visit, which I must confess is pretty normal. As I say, these situations can be distressing. But we’ve kept him in touch with your progress, and I’ve contacted him personally to let him know you’re awake.” His dark eyes are alert to my responses, flicking watchfully over my face and body as he pushes back his chair and stands up, hovering calmly at my bedside, a white-coated guardian angel.

  I close my eyes, imagining Dom trying to shake me awake, and I remember hands squeezing my neck, twisting my wedding ring, fingers digging into my collarbone. Was that actually Dom trying to wake me up? I thought I was dreaming.

  “Will you call him? And ask him to bring Aidan to see me?” I feel a tear roll down my face. “I miss him so much. I miss my daughter.” As I say the word, my voice cracks and I half squeak, half sob, the worry burning in my chest. “Aidan must be so lonely, so devastated.” Tears roll freely now, and my breath comes in choking gasps.

  “I do understand, Mrs. Castle. I know that to imagine a child’s pain is the hardest thing for any parent. Or any doctor,” he adds. “Looking after children is one of the most rewarding but also one of the toughest parts of my job. Sadly, it’s often a relief when pain stops and they are at peace. Death is devastating, but it brings relief from suffering.”

  “Then I wish I hadn’t been so lucky. I wish I’d died too.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Please don’t upset yourself, Mrs. Castle. I don’t want anything to cause you more stress. Your body and mind have endured a tremendous ordeal. You must take your time. Try to stay calm. Don’t rush to grasp everything at once.” The doctor sits back down next to me, taking hold of my hand. “I’m right here and I’m not going anywhere.”

  I do as he asks and force myself to relax, let the pain of my grief subside. As I feel calmer, I try to make sense of everything he’s told me—that I’ve been dreaming this whole time; that I haven’t been at home, watching my husband, my surviving child—that I’ve just been locked in my memories, reliving the past, imagining that what was happening was real when actually I’ve just been some kind of ghost in my own life.

  I haven’t just walked into a living dream; I’m emerging from one...

  But even as my mind protests that it’s crazy, that the doctor is wrong and doesn’t know what he’s talking about, tiny details click into place. The way I’ve been sitting in one room but then seem to end up in another, without any memory of moving; the way I would think about a subject or a conversation and then suddenly Dom and Lucy and Aidan would appear and start talking about it—school, the park, Aidan’s swimming trophy . . .

  “But I saw them. Right next to me. I heard them.”

  “As I say, our unconscious mind absorbs far more than we know. It’s possible you overheard your family talking around you when they visited you in ITU at the West Mid,” the doctor says, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

  “Lucy and Dom in the kitchen.” I close my eyes, remembering listening to them talk from my hiding place on the stairs.

  “Sorry?”

  “I heard them. My husband and my best friend. But I thought they were at home. So was that real or a memory?” I ask, shaking my head, struggling to grasp that I wasn’t even there; that I was here the whole time.

  “Perhaps a bit of both. Maybe you heard them talking at your bedside after the surgery. Your brain then transplanted what it was hearing to a more familiar context. Such as your kitchen table,” he says with a quick smile. “It would be logical.”

  “Logical. It all sounds crazy to me.”

  “Dreams can take us to the most unexpected places. The mind is incredibly powerful; the unconscious mind equally so. It processes thoughts and feelings without you even being aware of it, often contextualizing them in unexpected ways. You might, for instance, dream of running for a train. Perhaps that is an incident from your daily life, or perhaps it is your brain’s way of encapsulating tension you’re experiencing. A feeling of stress. Being unable to keep up.”

  “But it was all so real. So ordinary. Just my everyday life, my family.” Again I have that sensation of having stepped out of a dream into a parallel universe, and the sensation is disorienting.

  “Nothing was different? Peculiar or unexpected?”

  No one ever looked at me, or noticed me; my son has been ignoring me.

  He wasn’t ignoring me; I wasn’t even there, I realize. I had vanished completely.

  I feel more tears trickling out of the corners of my eyes, rolling towards my mouth. I taste saltiness and it’s the first physical sensation I can remember in a long time. No, that’s not true: lately I’ve been becoming more aware of my bodily senses. I’ve been waking up, I realize. The doctor said my brain activity had become agitated—because I was starting to remember more, I realize. As memories returned, my brain was kick-starting itself back to life. Back to my family.

  Aidan—my darling boy. Mummy’s here now!

  I close my eyes and think it through slowly, step by step, trying once again to fix the details in my mind. I have been in a coma, and my unconscious mind has incorporated all the noises and conversations happening around me into scenes from my own life, at the same time conjuring up real memories and trying to process them, trying to make sense of what’s happened to me.

  What has happened to me?

  “You said . . .” I clear my throat and try again. “You said I’ve been . . . that I’ve been shot. I don’t understand . . .”

  “Your case notes indicate that your injuries were not insignificant,” he says in a quiet, steady voice, sitting back and looking around for his clipboard. “But as I say, my team and I are extremely pleased with your progress.” He reaches out and squeezes my hand as if in congratulation, but I’ve done nothing good; I deserve no praise.

  “But there was only one gunshot.” My head aches, partly with shock at speaking the raw, violent word aloud, partly with panic: I feel frightened and confused as horrific shadowy images suddenly rise up to surround me in the bright, white room. I turn my face into the pillow, trying to hide from them and also find some relief from the throbbing in my temples. When I open my eyes again, the doctor is still watching me.

  “One bullet is generally enough.” A dark eyebrow lifts quizzically. I remember clawing my way through the rose bushes, my hands tangling in my daughter’s hair, my whole body soaked in her blood . . . so much blood.

  It was my blood too, I suddenly realize.

  “Unless you’re lucky,” I say bitterly, wishing it was Annabel lying here in this hospital bed, not me.

  “In surgical terms, there is indeed much to be thankful for. The fact that the bullet penetrated the very tip of your right frontal lobe, towards the forehead, meant that only minor clinical damage was caused. Your surgeon could explain this in more detail, but the essence of your good fortune is that the bullet passed through no vital brain tissue,
nor any vascular structures. There was a perforating wound, of course, but that is healing nicely.”

  “I was shot in the head. And I didn’t die.” My thoughts drift away from me like clouds.

  “It feels like a miracle, yes?”

  “It feels wrong. Unjust,” I say forcefully. “I deserved to be the one to die. It should have been me,” I say, and my throat feels raw; my whole body aches as if crushed beneath a heavy weight. I close my eyes against a sudden image of Annabel lying deathly still beneath the roses, white petals floating on a crimson pool.

  “There we must disagree. No crime deserves such retribution. And I’m sure you’ve committed no crime, in any case. You’re not under arrest, are you? You were brought here for recuperation, not punishment,” he says gently.

  “But who . . . ? Why?” The words stick in my dry throat, and the doctor helps me to take more small sips of water.

  “Ah, there I can’t help you, I’m afraid. Perhaps it’s best you save those questions for the detective, yes? He should be here at some point tomorrow, or the day after. As he requested, we’ve kept him fully in touch with your progress.” He stands up now and moves round to the other side of my bed, checking the monitors one last time. “Try not to dwell on things too much till then, OK?”

  There is a clipped edge to his voice now—the no-nonsense manner of a consultant in charge. I feel tiny hairs prickle in a shiver of relief up my arms. He makes me feel safe, and my mind relaxes. I want to sleep; I’m so very tired.

  “I’ll come back in a little while,” he says, clicking his pen and tucking it in the breast pocket of his white coat. “Your vital signs are much stronger this morning, but we still need to be cautious. There’s no rush. Recovery takes as long as it takes. The most important thing is that you allow yourself to heal. Everything else must wait. There’s time enough for more talking. For now, rest. Understand?”

  He glides around me again like a velvet curtain, pausing only to readjust my pillows. I smell antiseptic on his hands; a tangy acidic aroma I know I’ve smelled before. Was it his hands I remember stroking my hair? A touch so gentle—it can’t have been my husband. And Dom has only visited me once. Just one time in all these weeks.

  Why hasn’t he come back yet? Has he abandoned me here?

  * * *

  As the doctor closes the curtains, dims the lights and shuts the door softly behind him, panic suddenly tingles through my body. I have been alone in the darkness—no, it wasn’t dark, I think; it was blinding bright . . . I’ve been trapped in that bright-dark for such a long time, but it’s only now that I realize exactly how alone I was—how lonely and adrift, and how scared. I feel safe now, but only when I hear this doctor’s voice next to me, anchoring me. Everything is so confusing. I have so many questions but I don’t even know where to start . . .

  I try to calm myself down by thinking through what I do know. I understand that the bullet that killed Annabel must somehow have injured me too, and that I have been in a coma, and that Dom has been too distressed to visit me. I know that this doctor has been at my bedside for weeks, and that the bright light in my home was in fact the lamp angled over this bed, or perhaps the beam of the doctor’s torch examining my eyes; that it was his needle flooding me with numbness, calming my panic when I became too distressed . . .

  I have been on a journey through my unconscious mind, and Professor Hernandez—along with his whiteboard—has been my silent companion. I thought his notes were my notes, and so they were, in a way. I understand that as I began to surface from my comatose state, my senses were alert to flashes of the outside world—and, just as in dreams we incorporate a sudden noise or the voices of people around us, so too the hospital and everything around me became part of my inner world.

  I feel tearful with relief to know that I have finally left behind that cold, fractured place that was so dark yet also blindingly bright. But I am also afraid. Everything I thought I had seen, all that I had unraveled about my life, my family, turns out to have been an illusion—a trick of my shattered mind. Which means that I may be recovering physically, but I am still lost. In the bright-dark, I believed I was beginning to piece together everything that led up to the morning of the twins’ tenth birthday: the day I lost Annabel. In the true light of day, I realize the picture is still just a handful of fragments. I cannot trust my own mind—so what, or whom, can I trust?

  As my mind and body finally surrender to exhaustion, I battle to hold on to one thought, repeating it over and over in my mind: I need to see my son . . .

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Please, please try to contact my husband again. Did you call his mobile as well as the landline? I just want to see Aidan—I need to see my son.”

  “I know; I do understand. I’ll try both his numbers again, I promise.”

  Carol speaks patiently, even though I’ve asked her the same question—growing increasingly frantic—a hundred times already today. She fusses efficiently around my bed, encouraging me to eat a tiny bit of my early supper before giving me one last sympathetic smile and bustling out of the room to continue her rounds.

  I know she thinks she’s leaving me to rest, as Professor Hernandez instructed, but I’m not getting much sleep. I managed to nap fitfully during the day yesterday, my mind turning over my conversations with the doctor, but I lay awake most of the night. It’s not the hospital environment that’s bothering me—the glaring artificial light, the sporadic nocturnal activity and random sounds. They’re all strangely familiar; my brain seems to recognize and accept them as normal. After all, as I’ve finally reconciled myself to, it’s been filtering them for three months.

  It’s not the world around me, and it’s not even the aches and pains of my body. It’s just that I can’t rest until I know what’s happening with Dom and Aidan—where they are; how they are. What they are thinking; how they are coping without me, without Annabel. It’s all I care about. More than getting better, more than seeing the detective and finding out the answers to all my questions, I just want Aidan.

  I’m in a constant state of jittery panic and Professor Hernandez has begun to anticipate my first question each time he enters my room. Each time he’s simply shaken his head with a small frown. I can’t tell if he’s cross or apologetic; he’s so serene and unflappable, his presence almost soporific. This morning, I pressed him more urgently, waiting until he’d worked systematically through his tests and observations before telling him that if no one could bring my son to me, I would discharge myself and drag myself home on my hands and knees, if that’s what it would take.

  * * *

  “Well,” he said slowly, regarding me steadily, “I think we’ll give it a go unhooking you from these charmers this morning”—he pointed at the machines with his ballpoint pen—“cut the electronic apron strings, as it were, and see how you fare. But I’d recommend at least a couple of physio sessions before you attempt to crawl back to London on your hands and knees.” He smiled. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, though. We will keep trying your husband, Mrs. Castle,” he said more seriously.

  “I just don’t understand why he hasn’t come to see me yet.” I let him help me sit up in bed so he could start carefully disconnecting wires and removing sensor pads.

  But even as I said the words I realized I did know.

  Our daughter was dead, Dom blamed me for it, and he couldn’t bear to see me.

  There could be no other explanation. I might have been scared of Dom, but he despised me, and he had absolutely no intention of coming to see me. The hospital could ring as many times as they liked; Dom wasn’t coming back.

  “I do recall he mentioned his work: something about too many irons in the fire. But we’ve left several messages now,” the doctor said, pausing to look at me. “We’ve even written and emailed.”

  “Could he have . . . ? Maybe he’s taken Aidan to stay somewhere else? Or moved house, do you think?” I asked, clinging to any shred of hope. “No, of course not. What a stupid idea,
he’d never do that,” I said, talking more to myself than to the doctor, who carried on pushing buttons and taking notes, clicking, unclipping wires, lifting first my left arm, then my right. I felt like a child being dressed for their first day at school. I watched him blankly, conflicting thoughts chasing round my mind: Dom had moved house, unable to live any longer where Annabel died, and he didn’t know I was awake. Either that or he’d abandoned me in disgust.

  “We haven’t received any notification of an alternative address. But, look, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Maybe he’s gone away. For a business trip, or perhaps a short holiday to take a break from the stress and worry. I can’t imagine he would stay away for no good reason.”

  He pressed his hand reassuringly on mine, saying he would be back again after he’d checked on his other patients. Selfishly, I wished there weren’t any. From the second he left the room, I was anxious for him to return; I didn’t want to be left alone with thoughts of exactly why Dom might have decided to abandon me and withhold our son.

  No good reason.

  There was one very good reason, I realized. Annabel. And it was pure torture lying there alone, agonizing over the thought that Dom might never come back. How would I ever get to see my son again?

  * * *

  It’s the only explanation that fits, I think now. I doubt very much that Dom’s absence has anything to do with a holiday. He never takes time off work. Two weeks in Cornwall each summer is the most he’s ever agreed to, and even then he’s always timed it around his clients’ priorities and has remained glued to his phone the whole time we’re away. He’s always talked of finding a business partner to share the load, but he’s rejected every potential candidate over the years as not up to his standards.

  No one ever lives up to his expectations. I guessed long ago that it’s an issue of control, and that his parents’ deaths probably hold the key to this. The suddenness, the randomness of their cancer . . . I suspect it left him desperate to retain more power, more control over his own destiny. I asked him about it once. Annoyed that I was trying to psychoanalyze him, as he called it, his furious reaction taught me not to ask a second time.