by Dani Atkins
I turned my head in the direction of the nurse’s voice. What the hell was she going on about? Clearly she either didn’t see, or chose to ignore, the look on my face that clearly said she was an idiot, for she continued:
“That’s what Dr. Tulloch is here for now, to take off the bandages and check out your sutures.”
“But I didn’t hit my head,” I insisted to anyone who would listen. I felt my dad once more take hold of my hand.
“Hush now, Rachel, don’t get yourself upset. Things are bound to be a little fuzzy to begin with.”
“I think I’d remember if I hit my head,” I responded, more sharply than I intended. “It was the headache, you see,” I tried to explain. “It was absolutely excruciating.”
“You have a headache now?” inquired the doctor, with keen attention.
“Well, no,” I replied, realizing for the first time that although my head hurt, the pain was different from the splitting agony of the headaches I’d been experiencing. “It just feels kind of sore …”
“I’m sure it does. It will settle down in a day or so. As the nurse said, it really was a nasty fall.”
I would have protested further but I was aware of hands reaching behind my head and beginning to release me from the swaddling bandages. With each rotation the pressure against my head lessened and my anxiety increased. When I’d finally been freed of the mummy-like wrappings, disappointment coursed through me.
“I still can’t see anything. I’m still blind!”
“Just let me remove the gauze first before you go off and get a white stick, young lady.” The doctor’s voice had a slightly more impatient edge. Clearly he now had me pigeonholed as a major drama queen. “Nurse, if you please, the blinds.”
Deciding I didn’t like the man however much my father might disagree, I nevertheless turned my face toward his voice and allowed him to lift first one, then the other circular covering from my eyelids. I blinked for the first time, enjoying the unfettered freedom of the movement. The room had been darkened by the lowering of the blinds, but enough daylight fell through the half-shut venetians for me to make out the vague shapes of four people around my bed: the doctor, a white-coated young man standing beside him, the nurse, and, on the other side of the bed, my dad.
“I can see shapes,” I declared, my voice a strange mixture of joy and disbelief. “It’s cloudy but—”
“Give it a moment. Nurse, a little more light now, I believe.”
She obliged by a further twist on the corded blinds. Suddenly things began to grow clearer and I saw the white-haired senior doctor, the young bespectacled intern, the middle-aged nurse. I began to smile broadly, a reaction they all mirrored.
I turned to my dad, my grin wide, and then froze, the look on my face unreadable.
“Rachel, what’s wrong? Doctor! Doctor, what’s the matter?”
The consultant was beside me in an instant, shining a penlight in my eyes, checking my reactions, but I fought against him to look again at my dad.
“Rachel, can you tell me what’s wrong?” urged the doctor. “Are you in pain, is your vision disturbed in any way?”
Disturbed? Well, yes, I should say. But not in any way that he meant.
“No, I can see all right. Everything’s clear now.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“It’s my dad.”
“Me?” My father sounded totally confused. Well, join the club. I forced myself to look at him slowly and with greater concentration then. But what I saw made no sense.
“What about your father?” The doctor’s voice had adopted a tone I guessed he usually reserved for those with mental illnesses.
I couldn’t find my voice.
“Rachel honey, you’re scaring me. Can’t you just tell us what’s the matter?”
“Is there something wrong with your father, Rachel?”
I turned to the doctor to reply to his question and then back at my only parent. My newly empowered eyesight took in his plump cheeks, his bright eyes—albeit clouded now in concern—the small paunch he was always planning on joining a gym to lose. There was no sign of the haggard, prematurely aged, cancer-raddled man I had last seen three weeks ago.
“No! That’s what’s the matter. There’s nothing wrong with him at all!”
THEY SEDATED ME. I suppose they had to, although it seemed crazy waiting nearly two days for me to wake up only to put me straight back under again. And the more I struggled and begged my dad not to let them do it, the more panic and concern I could see mirrored in his eyes. As the consultant barked sharply worded instructions to the nurse to prepare the sedative, I was still pleading with my dad to explain how he had got well again so quickly, and when he wouldn’t reply, shaking his head helplessly in confusion, I only became more distressed. It was a relief when the drug they inserted into my IV flooded into my system and my lids fell closed.
My eyes flickered open sometime later, and although the room was darkened, it seemed to be full of people. I could hear hushed whispers from voices that were tantalizingly familiar. My eyelids felt leaden, too heavy to open more than the merest slit. I couldn’t really make out who was in the room, just four or more tall shapes, all darkly clothed, I thought, or perhaps they were all just in the shadows. Sleep reclaimed me.
I woke briefly for a second period sometime later that night. The group of people, whoever they had been, were now gone. I had no idea what time it was but the room was in total darkness except for the small pool of light illuminating a chair pulled up to my bedside, in which my father sat sleeping. There was an open book lying across his lap and an empty food tray on the unit beside me. I guessed he had not left my side all day. From his slightly open mouth a soft snore emitted with each indrawn breath. He looked tired and disheveled … and yet still, unbelievably and impossibly, completely well. I needed to speak to him; I was desperate to find out what was going on, as nothing made any sense, but the struggle to stay awake was too much. Sleep overtook me once more before I could call out his name.
THE CLATTER OF a food trolley woke me the next morning. I blinked in protest at the surprisingly bright morning light falling into my hospital room.
“Good, you’re awake in time for breakfast,” my dad announced in an overly cheery tone. I was slow in turning my head toward him, hopeful that the strange episode of the previous day had just been imagined. He must have seen the look in my eyes as I once more took in his obvious good health, for his smile faltered a little. I felt a stab of absolute mortification. Had I actually been hoping to see my only parent still in the throes of his battle with a terrible disease? What sort of a person did that make me?
I tried to smile back.
“G’morning,” I mumbled. My mouth felt as though someone had stuffed it with cotton wool in the night.
“How are you this morning? Are you ready for something to eat?”
I shook my head, the thought of food making my stomach roll in horror.
“Tea,” I croaked, my throat as parched as my tongue. I tried again with more effort. “Just some tea, please, Dad.”
His eyes never left me as I raised the utilitarian white cup to my lips and didn’t lower it until it was emptied. He seemed pleased to see me performing such a mundane function without incident or outburst. Was that a measure of my sanity? Didn’t crazy people drink tea?
“Shall I see if the nurses can get you another one?”
I nodded, and was grateful when he left to pursue a second cup, as it gave me a minute or two to collect my thoughts. He was gone nowhere near long enough for me to even begin to have sorted out my bewilderment. I drained the second cup and felt, physically at least, a little revived.
“So how is your head this morning, sweetheart?”
“Better, I think. Dad, what’s going on here?”
He looked uncomfortable, before bouncing the question back to me:
“Going on here? What do you mean?”
“Stop it, Dad. I mean it. What’s happened to
you, and why haven’t you told me about it? Have they got you on some miracle drug or something? Are you in remission?”
The look on his face was tortured; he was clearly searching, and failing, to find the right answer to give me.
“Rachel love, I think you are still a little confused—”
I interrupted him, struggling to sit up more fully in bed and wincing in pain from what felt like a thousand bruises. I tried to speak slowly, articulating each word in a reasonable tone; the last thing I wanted was someone calling for me to be sedated again.
“Dad, I am not confused—well, I am, but not in the way you mean. Three weeks ago you looked … well, you looked absolutely terrible. The chemo had made you so sick and weak, and the weight you’d lost … well, just everything. And now … now it makes no sense, you look completely better.”
His dearly loved face looked troubled as he studied me, and his eyes began to well with tears.
“Rachel, I am completely well.”
“How can you have been cured so quickly?” This was all just too much to absorb. My father began to reach for the bell push above my bed.
“Perhaps we should ask if the doctor could come and see you again now.”
“No!” I shouted, my voice thick with the frustration I knew was on my face. Shaking his head sadly, my father lowered his arm from the emergency button and let his roughened fingers reach for and encompass my hand, patting it soothingly.
“I haven’t ‘been cured,’ Rachel, because I’ve never been ill in the first place. I don’t have cancer and I can’t imagine why you thought I did.”
THE NURSES CAME in then, one to remove the breakfast tray and another to help me to the bathroom. In truth I was glad to be taken away. For some reason my father was hiding from me what had happened to him. My sluggish mind, still addled from the sedative, couldn’t think of a single reason why he was keeping such a thing secret.
I was grateful for the nurse’s assistance in the sparse white-tiled bathroom. Thankfully, my IV had been removed sometime during the night, and although unencumbered by having to wheel a tripod around, I still couldn’t have managed either the short walk down the corridor or the removal of my hospital gown without assistance. With the ties undone, the nurse turned on the shower and, after establishing that I felt confident enough on my feet to be left alone to wash, she slipped out of the room.
Under the surprisingly forceful jets of water, I tried to clear my mind of its endless questioning, but it refused to be still. And even the innocuous act of washing myself threw up further unanswered puzzles. An unperfumed white bar sat in the soap dish, but it wasn’t until I began to revolve it slowly between my palms that I noticed the grazes upon them.
I washed off the suds and turned my hands thoughtfully this way and that under the spray. Both of them were equally grazed, as though I had fallen heavily and tried to save myself. But for the life of me I couldn’t remember when or how I had done this. I did remember falling to the ground beside Jimmy’s grave in the churchyard, but I had landed upon grass, not concrete. The only possibility I could come up with was that I must have grazed them against a headstone when I had finally collapsed. That thought left me wondering who it was who had found me in the cemetery and brought me to hospital. In the light of the larger, more puzzling questions, I was happy to let that one go.
I wished there had been a mirror in the small utilitarian washroom so I could see if my head or face bore any signs of injury, for as I soaped and rinsed the rest of my body, I found several other places that were both grazed and bruised. Again they all looked too raw and angry to have been sustained in anything less than a very hefty fall. I was covered in injuries where there should be none, while my father had an illness that had simply disappeared. I wondered if Alice had felt this confused when she had fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.
Still trying to resolve the irresolvable, I hit upon one idea suddenly as I dried myself briskly on the rough hospital towel. Perhaps the reason my father wouldn’t admit to his illness was because his treatment hadn’t been legal. I almost threw the idea out as preposterous. He was so honest I couldn’t even remember him getting so much as a parking fine in his entire life. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made—in a totally nonsensical way. Maybe he was paying privately for some unlicensed medication or treatment forbidden in the UK. And if that was the case, well then, he’d probably have to lie in order to protect whatever secret trial or doctor had helped him.
As I waited for the nurse to return with a clean gown, I felt happier to have found a workable solution to the mystery. Very probably, when away from the confines of the hospital, he would confess it all, when it was safe to betray his secret without others hearing. And as for secrets, I had been hiding a pretty big one of my own from him too: the recurring headaches. I just hoped I would be able to find the time to speak to the doctor in private about the symptoms that had precipitated my collapse by the church.
As she took my arm to help me back to my room, the nurse supplied another surprising piece of information.
“I’d better warn you that you have a police officer waiting in your room to talk to you now that you’re awake.”
I stopped mid-step and turned to the young nurse in consternation.
“A policeman? Why? Whatever for?”
She gave me a curious look.
“Well, they obviously need to get all the details about what happened by the church the other night.”
I looked back at her dumbly. What happened by the church? Were the police really so light on crime in this area that they had sent someone to question me about trespassing in the churchyard late at night? Was that really even a crime at all? It wasn’t as though I’d been vandalizing the graves. Surely I wasn’t going to be charged with some petty misdemeanor? How much weirder was this day going to get?
In my wildest of dreams, I could never have guessed.
The policeman was seated half out of sight behind the door of my room. Dad had clearly been talking about me, judging by the way he shut up like a clam as soon as I appeared at the threshold. In my peripheral vision I took in a dark uniform as the policeman rose to his feet.
“Rachel, hon, the police need some information from you, but don’t look worried … look who they sent.” He sounded as triumphant as a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, and I turned for the first time to look at the officer.
The room swayed; I knew my face must have drained of all color. I reached out blindly for the doorframe, knowing it wasn’t going to be any use. As I crumpled to the floor, in a swoon worthy of any Victorian gentlewoman, I had time to say just one word:
“Jimmy!”
THE GOOD THING about fainting in a hospital is that they know what to do with you right away. It was only a moment or two before I once again became aware of where I was. Seated on the chair that my father had occupied the night before, with my head stuck securely between my knees, I could feel the comforting hand of the nurse holding a cold compress against the back of my neck. I struggled to sit up.
“Don’t go rushing to get up yet, Rachel. Take a moment or two.” Then, presumably directing the next comment to my dad, “She may have been under the hot shower a wee bit too long, she’ll be fine in a moment.” I very much doubted that. I strained against her hand and sat up.
I didn’t scream or shout out or even faint again, I just stared, totally transfixed, at the face that had been missing from my life for five dreadful years. He smiled but something in my scrutiny caused it to waver and the greeting was rearranged into a look of deep concern.
“Rachel?” His voice was hesitant.
I asked the only question that came into my mind.
“Am I in heaven?”
“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody call an NHS hospital that before!” The nurse clearly found this quite amusing.
I ignored her.
“Is this heaven? Are we all dead?” That shut the nurse up. I saw the loo
k my dad flashed to Jimmy. See? it said, as plainly as if he had spoken the words out loud. I told you she was acting strangely.
The nurse had regained enough composure to switch back into her briskly professional role.
“Come along, back to bed now, Rachel. I think you need to have a little lie-down.” She was definitely annoying me now. Disregarding her once more, I directed my question only at Jimmy.
“Did I die in the churchyard beside the grave?”
I guess his policeman’s training was the reason he answered such a bizarre question so calmly.
“No, Rachel, you did not die in the churchyard. And beside whose grave?”
My next answer, not surprisingly, took the polish off his professional demeanor.
“Yours, of course.”
I don’t know who pushed the emergency button this time. It could have been any one of the three of them. Hell, it could even have been me. I think we all needed some medical intervention at that point.
A young doctor I hadn’t seen before came speedily into the room. There was a rapid flurry of conversation. I caught the words “delusional” and “sedative” and “tests.” They all meant nothing. I could only stare at Jimmy as they laid me back on the bed, swabbed briefly at my arm, and slid the hypodermic into my vein.
It was a much milder sedative than the day before. I guess they couldn’t risk pumping someone with a head injury with too much sedation. Although my limbs were relaxed as though I were floating on a buoyant bed of feathers, my brain was still working. My eyes had closed, but I was still awake. It was a pleasantly drunk feeling, without the room-spinning element.
“Did she really mean that? Did she actually think I was dead?”
“I don’t know, son, who knows.” My father’s voice sounded broken, “She thought I was dying of cancer.”
There was a long silence.
“She must have hit her head harder than anyone realized. She’s not going to be answering any questions today. Nothing she tells you right now will help you catch the bastard who mugged her.”
“I realize that.”