by Sarah Moss
Looking at, I would have said, as much as after, although in hospital it is probably the same thing. Looking at every contraction of her heart muscle, reading every pull of her lungs. She was still wheezing intermittently, mostly at night, and sometimes her oxygen saturation fell to levels that brought the tapping steps of the doctor when it wasn’t ward rounds. More nebs, they said, and someone would put a mask on Mimi’s face and fill it with a hissing mist, the smell of it, almost floral, flitting briefly on the air.
So this is not toddler time, because the reason you are here is that Miriam’s breathing stopped, and plainly it is expected to stop again. You are not going to get the fish out of the freezer or change the lightbulb in the hall and you have cancelled the plumber’s visit to service the boiler and your meeting with a PhD student writing about women in the Arts and Crafts movement. Everything is paused, except that Rose still needs to go to school and to eat her meals, and the laundry must still be done and the bathroom cleaned, somehow, from the High Dependency Unit of a city fifteen miles from home. The monitors’ bleeping fills the nights and days the way your own breathing fills the nights and days, because the norm, the beating of the heart, is not to be trusted. Silence is no longer natural, or perhaps, what is natural is no longer silent, no longer to be taken for granted. Fear hammers along your veins, in your ears, behind your eyes, and fear, it turns out, gives meaning to time. Because the real fear is that time, Miriam’s time, will run out.
I stayed the first two nights, lying on the fold-out chair at Miriam’s bedside, in closer physical proximity than we had lain since she stopped coming into Emma’s and my bed on weekend mornings. We need to swap, Emma said, it’s my turn, Rose needs you and Mimi needs me too. Mimi doesn’t need you the way she needs me, I thought, I’m the one who’s always with her, I’m the one who saw her first steps and sat through every Nativity play, I’m the one they called. Yes, I said, I know, you’re right, OK.
We were talking in the corridor, aligned so that we could see Miriam, in case we had to rush in, press the red button, in case I had to call for help while Emma began CPR, which is not resuscitation at all but only slowing down the rate at which cells die in hope that someone will bring adrenaline and a defibrillator and use them before the heart and the brain lose the ability to communicate with each other. We had ten minutes, before I needed to say goodbye to Miriam and go to collect Rose from school, take her home to change and eat something, pick up whatever Miriam wanted from her bedroom and then bring Rose back to see her sister. Emma, I wanted to say, tell me all the possibilities, let me in to your fear, to all the stories your expertise offers you, but also go away, don’t infect me with horrors that may, after all, recede and fall away as if in a rear-view mirror, don’t tell me a word that isn’t twenty-four-carat truth. I’ll go to Sainsbury’s, I said instead, if I have time I’ll make a batch of dhal, leave it in the fridge. I think Rose might have a school trip this week. Our eyes met for the first time in the conversation: no. No, Rose doesn’t go anywhere, not now we know that a healthy child can drop dying for no reason, not now we know that being well at any given moment is no indication that the next moment will not bring sudden death. I’ll check, I said, there’s no reason she shouldn’t go if she wants to, not really, it’s not as if she’s any less safe on a trip than in the classroom, the distraction would probably be good for her. Yes, Emma said, I know, I know that. Behind her, Miriam was watching television with her eyes and writing on her phone with her fingers.
In forty-eight hours on the children’s ward, the smell of the wind and the thought of driving a car become exotic. I wanted to leave, to have my share of outside air and fast roads, and I was afraid of what might happen when I left. As if my presence made any difference to what happened.
How was Rose at school yesterday, I asked, anything I need to know?
Emma shrugged. In the absence of the children, I could see her shrink and sag as if something in her back and neck and shoulders was deflating. I knew why she was planning to pick up some morning shifts again next week. Not, as I had allowed myself to allege in my head, because even now her commitment to her patients and to the NHS came before her commitment to us, but because she didn’t dare to stop, to find herself one morning alone in a house that should be expecting four people and is expecting three. To find herself tidying the bedroom of a child who is not there and may not return.
‘Mrs Wasley says she seems OK. A little subdued, maybe, but of course she’s tired.’
Rose is not subdued when tired.
‘At home? Has she said anything?’
Emma rubbed her neck and turned her head from side to side. Her neck gets stiff, bent always at the same concerned and sympathetic angle towards patients sitting always on her left. ‘She keeps asking what’s wrong with Mimi and when she’s coming back. I keep telling her that Mim fainted and needed help to wake up again and she’ll have to stay in hospital until we know why.’ She looked up at me. ‘It’s not much good, is it?’
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Come here.’ I turned her around and pressed my thumbs, dry from all the hospital disinfectant gel, into the warm muscle above her pale grey neckline. Cashmere, that jumper. Hand wash. I moved closer; the smell of her brought a momentary comfort.
I collected one plastic bag with Miriam’s laundry in it and one with mine, the bag with my toothbrush, towel, and the tracksuit in which I’d been sleeping – you need to wear something in which you can talk confidently to medical staff in the middle of the night – and the bag of books and magazines and art supplies that Miriam didn’t want. Miriam stopped watching a documentary about mountain gorillas long enough to make eye contact and allow me to kiss her hair, which I took, under the circumstances, as some provisional kind of good sign.
I left the High Dependency Unit, averting my eyes from the opposite bed in which a three-year-old with cerebral palsy was in such difficulties that the nurses kept the screens closed and spoke to the mother with terrible harmonies in their voices. Until I hear those notes, I thought, I’ll know that they don’t think Miriam’s going to die. Not here and now, anyway.
I walked past the nurses’ station, where one was on the computer and another, the smiley dark-haired one who seemed to have been on duty for at least thirty-six hours, holding a cup of tea in both hands and gazing out of the window, as if in temporary defeat. I passed the tank of bubbles and tropical fish and a toddler wearing only a nappy banging on the glass while his mother sat on a plastic chair and communed with her phone. I pressed the buzzer and simultaneously turned the high door handle to get through the first doors, paused in the no-man’s-land of posters about hand hygiene and how to sneeze while I readjusted the plastic bags so I could turn both handles of the second door. I walked down the slanting corridor. I would like to know who chooses the pictures for hospital walls and if there is some reason why he or she thinks patients and visitors wish to be reminded that there are or were at the end of the nineteenth century lives in which people danced beside the Seine by candle-lanterns and lost themselves amid women in feathered hats in contemplation of steam trains bound for Venice and Seville. I passed a bed and a drip being wheeled the other way, its occupant a half-conscious man, bare-chested above the sheets, a man who should have been wearing a suit and offering a strong handshake. I overtook an elderly man pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair with a pink blanket over her knees. I sped up. I passed the newsagent by the entrance where I had thought I might go to buy magazines and sweets for Miriam and had not gone because it would mean being away from her too long, because there would be time for her to die while I tried to remember if she preferred mint to orange in her chocolate, and then I was out, in the air, wholly unable to remember where in the outlying fields of tarmac Emma had left the car. I had to call her, in the end, to be reminded, and then after I had paid an outrageous sum for parking on my card because I had no cash and negotiated the maze of barriers, mini-roundabouts and one-way lanes to the exit I took a wrong turn and fo
und myself in a housing estate of smug detached executive homes designed around bin sheds and parking spaces, a few caged saplings and squares of grass commemorating the green fields it had replaced. I turned around in the drive of a house that had what Emma’s mother calls ‘French knicker blinds’ at all the windows and made my way back to the main road, and it wasn’t until I’d joined the dual carriageway and started to overtake lorries that I found myself in tears.
hours over the sea
The house was a mess, of course. Emma has no gift for these things at the best of times, leaves clothes she intends to wear again stuffed over the towel rail in our bathroom, usually for days, until I wash them or put them away. She opens her post and then leaves it, pushed back into torn envelopes, on top of the shoe-cupboard in the hall (yes, the standard issue Swedish white shoe-cupboard found in all urban middle-class family homes since our generation discovered that life is easier and pleasanter when the tracking of dog shit and Saturday-night pavement-vomit is limited to the hall. Emma’s parents, accustomed to larger and more secluded habitats, both disapprove, and separately make great drama of the hardship of removing shoes at their age; I remark that ageing seems to be less debilitating in both Japan and the Nordic countries, interestingly connected by the proscription of street shoes indoors – who knows, perhaps the frequent removing of shoes in fact slows ageing by maintaining flexibility? No, really I do not remark, not out loud, or at least not until they have gone away and I can tell Emma at no doubt tedious length what I would have said had I said it).
There were three cards from the Post Office saying that they’d tried to deliver parcels addressed to Miriam. Parcels from our friends, the friends I’d texted and emailed from the High Dependency Unit that first day when I still thought someone was going to come and tell us what had happened, give us a story and maybe some pills to make it all go away. Tomorrow, I would be able to take Miriam presents, offer her affection in material form.
The load of laundry that I had left washing while I went running before – well, before it happened – was still wet in the machine and now smelt fishy. The dishwasher was full of clean plates and cutlery, and the dirty ones, not many and not really dirty, as if Emma had been feeding Rose mostly on toast and apples and not eating herself, were piled on the counter. I’d been late, after all, to collect Rose, had had to apologise to her teacher, to mutter about the hospital and the traffic, but at least had avoided the gaze of curious parents who had heard what had happened, couldn’t imagine what we must be going through and if there’s anything they could do, anything. How was school, I’d said, the usual cue for the usual stream of detail about what Molly and Samira had said and who’d come top in spelling, a flow of information entirely compatible with our wholesale ignorance of events that to the adult mind appear more important. It says in the newsletter, I’d said a couple of Fridays ago, that cooking club is cancelled until the fire damage is repaired. Oh yes, she said, the fire brigade came, I think it was Tuesday, that was my class, actually, but anyway as I was saying Mrs Wasley says that if Phoebe doesn’t stop playing with Fatima’s hair she’s going to move Phoebe but it’s not fair because Fatima— Wait, I said, you set the kitchen on fire? Yes, she said, but Fatima’s a crybaby and she’s always telling—
So I didn’t listen much. Our house is cheap modern in-fill, built with ten others on land that was the orchard of a real house like the one where Emma grew up, but it’s in one of those Victorian suburbs with wide roads and mature trees, the manifestation in red brick and horse-chestnut of a century and a half of the English bourgeoisie, and so despite living in a town, because of living in a town, we are intimate with the changing of the seasons. Nothing was different from before Miriam’s incident. Her cardiac event. The lime leaves were still the colour of brown envelopes and falling from the sky like leaflets from a plane. The pavements were still lumpy with broken chestnuts, their auburn skulls smashed and the white matter crushed on the paving slabs, and the survivors still gleamed waxy from inside their grass-green carapaces. The day was neither bright nor rainy, only English grey, the sky pressing on the treetops, and I kept my hand on my phone in my pocket as if answering it fast would change anything. Emergency, I was in a state of emergency, except that there was nothing I could do.
Rose didn’t ask about her sister. I sent her upstairs to change while I took a few things out of the washing machine, Miriam’s T-shirts and jeans from the weekend. I sniffed their mouldy smell and put them back in, set the machine to run again on a higher temperature. She would come back and wear them again. Yes she would. I started to empty the dishwasher and then remembered that there was an alternative to my thoughts and turned on the radio. There had been more bombs in the places where there are bombs. Children had died. No-one had started CPR and called an ambulance, no-one had rushed to them with adrenaline and oxygen and a defibrillator, no-one was piecing together what had happened. There had been bombs and children had died.
The wind rustled through the trees outside. I called to Rose to come down for a snack. She gets beguiled by toys and drawing and forgets that she is hungry until her blood-sugar level is so low that she is unable to decide whether to start with the apple or the biscuit, although on this occasion, I found, there were no apples, in fact no fruit at all, and I tried to summon the energy to persuade her to eat carrot sticks instead, to persuade myself to take out the chopping board and the knife. She needed normality. Dietary rules, after all, are there to give us the illusion of order and control, although I doubted that even an eight-year-old would find the imposition of carrot sticks any kind of counterweight to the discovery of sudden death. I was about to call Rose down again when my mind tripped over the word ‘unresponsive’ and I ran up the stairs to find her.
Emma, I supposed, would have called me if anything had happened. If Miriam’s condition had deteriorated. Her not calling probably meant that things were no worse than I already knew.
I tested Rose on her six times table while I started to cook supper. The chicken I’d been planning to cook on Tuesday was now five days out of date and smelt unappetising, so with my ancestors chuntering in my ear I threw it away. The peppers were the kind that come sealed in plastic and last for a disturbingly long time so I fried them with onions, garlic and ginger and then added a tin of tomatoes and half a bag of red lentils and called it a kind of curry. Rose was using my laptop to watch a children’s programme in which a foolhardy Australian elicits violent reactions from carnivores in intemperate climates, but behind his excitable tones, behind the rustle of onions in the pan a size smaller than the one I’d usually use, behind the digestive noises of the washing machine, the house lay in silence around the absence on the top floor. It’s not that she’s always here, I reminded myself, it’s not as if Rose and I are not often alone here with Emma at work and Mimi out with her friends or at drama or art club, but it was different.
I tried to talk to Rose at bedtime, after I’d insisted on washing her hair, taken turns reading paragraphs of a book about a boy on enviable terms with the classical gods, replaced her water glass and promised her overdue clean sheets in the morning. I’m going back to the hospital in the morning, I said, it will be Mum picking you up tomorrow because she’s going in to work on Saturday, but she’ll bring you over to see Mimi straight after school, maybe bring some dinner so we can all eat together on the ward, OK? She turned over, so I could see only her damp hair on the pillow and her shoulders in the pyjamas that Miriam also wore, for years, before she turned righteously against pink. Through the skylight over Rose’s bed, the night was muffled with cloud and streetlights. No, she said, actually I’d rather stay here, actually I don’t like that hospital. There was a plane crossing the sky, coming in to land. People up there looking down, picking out the motorway and the shopping centre, finding landmarks after hours over the sea.
I rested my hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t like the hospital either. I don’t think even Mum likes it and she used to work in one. But we do like
Mimi, and she’s stuck there and I want to see her. And she wants to see you.’
Rose shrugged off my hand. ‘I’d just rather stay here, that’s all.’
I took a deep breath. Mostly, I think, the girls get on well, for sisters either side of puberty. I don’t have siblings so I have no real comparison, but there was more conflict between me and the two other boys at Bryher Farm than there is between Miriam and Rose. They had been playing companionably enough on Emma’s iPad when Emma had brought Rose to the HDU on the evening of – that evening.