The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “Why?” my father asked, calm and focused, his lawyer voice. “What’s happening, exactly?”

  “The brain damage from the hemorrhage is making his blood pressure unstable. We’re giving him drugs for that, but we’ve had to up the dosage several times already, and one of the side effects is heart arrhythmia. That’s what happened in there. We’ve shocked him out of it for now, but if he has multiple episodes, there’s really nothing for us to do.”

  “Why didn’t you drain the blood?” Susanna demanded, sharply enough that I jumped. “From the hemorrhage?”

  The doctor barely glanced at her. “We’re doing everything that’s appropriate.”

  “Standard procedure is to drain the blood right away, to relieve the pressure on the brain. Why didn’t you—”

  “For Doctor Google, maybe.” A half smile, but it was animal and tooth-baring, a warning. “But when your uncle came in, his prognosis wasn’t good. We don’t know how long he’d been down before he was found; it could have been anything up to twenty minutes. We managed to get him breathing again, but there’s no way to know how much damage was done in the meantime. And that’s on top of his pre-existing terminal condition. Even if the hemorrhage resolves, there’s a high probability he’ll be left in a permanent vegetative state.”

  Susanna said, “He’s old and he’s dying anyway and he came in from police custody, so he wasn’t worth the hassle and resources of surgery.”

  The doctor’s eyes slid away like she bored him. He said, “You’ll just have to accept that everything we’ve done has been within best-practice guidelines,” which sounded strange to me, like I had heard it somewhere before; for a second there his voice even sounded different, everything sideslipping— But then he turned his shoulder to Susanna and said in his own voice, to my father and Oliver and especially Phil: “We need to decide what to do the next time his heart goes into arrhythmia. Do we shock him again? Give CPR? Or do we leave it?”

  “‘The next time,’” my father said. “You think it’s going to happen again.”

  “There’s no way to be sure. But almost definitely, yes.”

  “And you don’t think there’s any chance he’ll wake up. If you keep stabilizing his heart, I mean, to give the hemorrhage time to resolve.”

  “Not with any quality of life, no. We’ve all heard the stories about people coming out of comas after ten years, but that’s not going to happen here.”

  Silence. Leon looked like he might throw up. Then:

  “Leave it,” Phil said. My father nodded, one small jerk of his head. Susanna took a breath and then let it out again.

  “We’ll keep him comfortable,” the doctor said, almost gently. “You can go in and see him now.”

  We went in and out, one by one, two by two. I knew we were supposed to say our good-byes and any final messages, but there was nothing I could find to say that wouldn’t have been either idiotic or dangerous—Rafferty, stubbled and eyebagged by now, back in his chair—or both. Hugo, I said in the end, into his ear. He smelled musty and medical, nothing like himself. It’s Toby. Thank you for everything. And I’m so sorry. There was something crusted at the corners of his lips; Susanna found a wipe in her bag and cleaned it off, gently, telling him some long story too low and close for me to hear.

  Everyone phoning, texting. Oliver pacing the waiting area with his phone pressed to one ear and his finger in the other, talking fast and harshly. Tom bustling in babbling about childcare arrangements to anyone who would listen, which was no one. My mother, Louisa, Miriam with tears pouring down her face as she cast about for someone to hug and the rest of us looked away.

  And there we all were, waiting. Far below the window, traffic jammed up in the rain: streaks of light glistening on wet tarmac, pedestrians scurrying, umbrellas flapping wildly.

  “They could be wrong,” Leon said, at my shoulder. “Doctors make mistakes all the time.”

  He looked awful, pinched and peaky, with a greasy sheen to his face. “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “He could wake up. I don’t like that doctor, the way he bullied our dads into—”

  “Even if he does wake up, he’ll still have cancer. We’ll just have to do this all over again in a few weeks. And he’s not going to wake up.”

  “I can’t think,” Leon said. “I’ve been so fucking tense, for so long, my brain won’t . . .” He shoved his hair out of his face with the back of his wrist. “Listen. About the other night.”

  “I was a prick to you,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK. I’ve probably been a prick to you too, the last while.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I think that’s what she was aiming for, you know that? She kept telling me to chill out, like, ‘What’s the big panic, they can’t even prove he was murdered,’ but then she’d turn around and be all, ‘Keep your mouth shut around Toby, you can’t trust him . . .’”

  “Susanna?”

  “‘He didn’t have your back when Dominic was giving you shit, and now he’s all fucked up we don’t know what he might do, just watch yourself around him . . .’ Was she doing it to you too? About me?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. I couldn’t even be angry. Whatever Susanna’s game had been, she had in fact been right about me: I had been frantically flailing for ways to dump the whole thing on her and Leon. It was nice that at least one person had had a clear sense of what was going on here.

  “‘Just trust me, I know what I’m doing . . .’ Look how that turned out.” Leon drew zigzags in the condensation on the glass. “At least it should be over now. Shouldn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “If Hugo confessed. That’s the end of that. They’re not going to keep hassling us.”

  “Probably not,” I said. I had no idea—whether Hugo had been convincing enough to fool Rafferty, or what Rafferty could do about it if he hadn’t, or what I was going to do either way. I knew I had to come up with some kind of plan, fast, but—in that place, with every remaining brain cell taken up by listening for the alarm—I could no more have done it than I could have flapped my wings and flown away.

  Holding up crossed fingers, both hands: “God, I hope. I can’t take much more of him.” A violent back-flick of Leon’s head, towards THE BELLS and Hugo’s room. “I can’t believe he’s actually hanging around here. We’re in with Hugo, saying good-bye, and he’s sitting there listening to every—” His voice cracked. “I really need a smoke,” he said. “Do you want to come for a smoke?”

  “No,” I said. The hospital seemed to have sent my body into some kind of unnatural suspended state; I hadn’t wanted anything to eat or drink since I got there, never mind a cigarette.

  “I should have got a vape,” Leon said, “or those patches, or— Ring me if anything happens,” and he was out the door at a fast scuttle, already fumbling for his smokes. I kept staring out the window. A cyclist had got into a yelling match with some suit in a Range Rover; the suit was out of his car and they were making sweeping arm gestures at each other. Another cyclist was about to flatten the pair of them.

  A swelling, shameful part of me was screaming for this to be over. My father leaning against a wall with his face white and strained, staring at nothing, his hand tense in my mother’s: I wasn’t sure how much longer he could take. I wasn’t sure how much longer any of us could take, come to that. All my circuits were so overloaded with suppressed fight-or-flight that I was practically locked in spasm. My leg was wobbling and I wanted to shift my weight to the other one, but it was like the thought couldn’t reach my muscles, nothing happened.

  Rain on the window. Nurses coming and going, incomprehensible color-coded scrubs, brisk soft slip-slap of their shoes. The heat had dried out my eyes till I could barely blink.

  “Is Melissa coming in?” my mother asked. She had
a bunch of cups of coffee in a complicated cardboard holder.

  “She’s back at her place,” I said. My lips felt numb. “It’s a long story.”

  For an awful moment I thought my mother was going to go off into some spiel, Oh no Toby what happened?! are you two OK? you’re so wonderful together I know whatever happened you can work it out you’ve both been under so much stress, or even worse try and hug me. Instead she said, after a second’s pause, “Here. Have one of these. It’s not the horrible stuff from the machine; I went out for it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Maybe in a minute.” We stood there in silence, side by side. Susanna sang a lullaby, very quietly, into her phone.

  When the alarm finally went, it was me and my father in the room. I was past being able to come up with words but my father was leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, talking, a low even monologue, very calm. I don’t remember most of it—my mind was severing itself from all of this, I felt like I was bobbing somewhere near the ceiling and my body was some bizarrely shaped pouch full of wet sand that had nothing to do with me—but bits drifted across my mind: . . . let us eat dessert first, always apple crumble because Phil hated Christmas pudding, we’d sit under the tree and . . . followed the music downstairs and found them dancing together, cheek to cheek, I turned around very quietly and . . . And that boat, remember? the old man who would let us take it out every summer, and we would row to the middle of the lake and fish? Never caught anything because Oliver wouldn’t stop talking, but I still remember the light, the haze of it over the far edge of the lake, and the sound of the water against the side of the boat . . . When the alarm started howling, when my father jerked like he’d been electrocuted and Rafferty’s chair scraped back hard, it took me a moment to find my way back into my body and realize what was going on.

  Rafferty was up and out the door: getting the others, but he wasn’t fast enough. It was so quick, after all that waiting. “Hugo,” my father said, loudly, grabbing his shoulder. “Hugo.”

  More alarms, battering at me, taking my breath away. “Hugo,” I said, “can you hear me,” but his gray face didn’t change, he didn’t move, only the lines on the monitor scribbling out of control to give us a glimpse of what was going on in secret, in the dark inside him.

  The nurse was there. She turned the alarms off and stood back from the machines, hands cupped together loosely in front of her, in the sudden ringing silence.

  I swear, even though I know it can’t be true I swear he smiled at me, that old wonderful smile rich with love; I swear he winked one slitted eye. Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

  Eleven

  The house was freezing, a solid, all-pervading, damp cold like it had been empty for months instead of a couple of days. I hot-showered myself raw and threw everything I had been wearing into a boil-wash, but I couldn’t get the hospital stench out of my nose. Everything smelled of it: the water from the kitchen tap, my shampoo, the inside of my wardrobe. I kept catching the monotonous beeping of the monitors, somewhere just beyond the edge of my hearing.

  The only thing I wanted in the world was sleep, but I needed to let Melissa know. Hi Melissa, I know you don’t want to hear from me right now and I understand, but I’m afraid I have bad news. Hugo collapsed and was taken to hospital— It occurred to me that I should have texted her from the hospital, asked her to come in; maybe her voice would have made it through to Hugo. It had never even crossed my mind. —but there was nothing they could do. He died late last night—had it been late night? early morning? I need to thank you on behalf of all the family for your incredible kindness to him. It meant the world to him. He was enormously fond of you— It read like I was texting a stranger. I couldn’t find how to talk to her; she seemed like someone from another world, someone long lost. I hope to see you at the funeral, but please don’t feel obligated to come if you’d prefer not to. Love, Toby.

  I slept for fourteen hours straight, woke up long enough to eat something and went back to bed. That was how I spent most of the next few days, actually: sleeping as much as I could. Not that I got much rest. Over and over I dreamed that it wasn’t Dominic I had killed, it was Hugo: Hugo sprawled on the living-room floor while I stood over him bloody to the wrists, floundering desperately to remember why I had done this; Hugo’s skull splitting under the ax in my hands while I moaned No no no. Sometimes I was my adult self, sometimes I was a teenager or once even a little kid; often it was in my apartment and I had done it because I thought he was one of the burglars. I would wake sobbing and wander around the house—dark landings, pale blurs of windows, no way to tell whether it was dawn or dusk—till the dream faded enough that I could go back to bed.

  Because this was the thing I couldn’t stop coming back to, awake or asleep, poking at it like a rotten tooth: Hugo’s death was my fault, maybe not the fact that he had died but the way of it. If he hadn’t rung the detectives, he would have been at home in bed when the hemorrhage hit. He would have died there, with familiar smells and his own duvet, with dawn and birds starting outside the window. Instead he had died in that hellhole hospital, being mauled and probed like a cut of meat amid the reek of disinfectant and piss and other people’s deaths, because he had shielded me.

  Somewhere in there my mother came over, to pick out clothes for Hugo to wear and to bring me my black suit, which she had collected from my apartment. I got the vague impression of intense activity going on out there, among the rest of the family: Phil was in charge of the arrangements, Susanna was picking out the music and she was sure Hugo had liked Scarlatti, did that sound right? did I want to do a reading? because my father was organizing those, and he thought maybe I would—

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.”

  We were in Hugo’s room, which I hadn’t gone into since the hospital. It was a nice room, mismatched old wooden furniture, a huge teetering stack of books beside the bed and a faded photo on the wall of my great-grandparents in front of the house. It smelled like him, a faint comforting scent of wet wool and dusty old books and smoky tea. On the mantelpiece was a vase of yellow freesias that Melissa had brought home, on a day that felt much too long ago for them to still be alive.

  “OK. It’s up to you.” My mother was going through shirts in Hugo’s wardrobe. She was doing it gently, but still, the casual invasion of it set my teeth on edge. “You’ll be a pallbearer, though, won’t you? Your dad and your uncles, and you and Leon and Tom. You’re OK for that?”

  What with your leg and all. “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  “It won’t be swarming with reporters, anyway, or at least it shouldn’t be. His name hasn’t been in the papers.”

  It took me a moment to figure out what she was talking about—I had been asleep when she knocked on the door. “Right,” I said. “Good.”

  “So far, anyway.” She unhooked a white shirt and examined it, turning it to the light. “I don’t know if the Guards are just being considerate, letting us get the funeral out of the way—”

  “I don’t think they do considerate,” I said. “If they’re keeping quiet, it’s because it suits them.”

  “You could be right. Maybe they just don’t want to have to show up and keep photographers and gawkers away from the graveside. Either way, I’ll take it.”

  That—graveside—pulled something out of the foggy tangle in my brain. “He wanted to be cremated,” I said.

  My mother turned sharply from the wardrobe, shirt dangling from her hand. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. He said it, back in—” I couldn’t remember how long it had been. “A few weeks back. He wants his ashes to go in the garden.”

  “Shit. I don’t think Phi
l knows that. He was talking about your grandparents’ cemetery plot—I’ll have to ring him.” She turned back to the wardrobe, in more of a hurry now. “This tie? Or this one?”

  “No,” I said suddenly. “No tie. And not that shirt. That one, the striped one”—a faded flannel thing that Hugo had worn around the house—“and the dark green jumper, and the brown cords.” Hugo had always hated suits; at Susanna’s wedding, grimacing, running a finger under his collar— This much at least I could do.

  “Oliver won’t be happy. He said the blue suit—” My mother narrowed her eyes at the shirt and tie in her hands. “You know what, Oliver can get lost. You’re right. You pick out whatever you think; I’ll ring Phil about the cremation thing.”

  She went out on the landing to do it. Going by the careful soothing note in her voice, Phil was up to ninety. “I know, I know, but we can ring them and . . . Because it didn’t occur to him till now. He probably thought you knew— Yes, he’s positive . . . No, Phil. He’s not. What, out of nowhere? He’s not . . .”

  Her voice faded down the stairs. Bleak autumn sunlight fell across the floorboards. After a while I went over to the wardrobe and started taking out clothes and picking off lint and arranging them, very neatly, on the bed.

  * * *

  The day of the funeral was gray and cold, wind blowing long sheets of rain back and forth in the street. My black suit was baggy on me; in the mirror I looked ridiculous, lost in some stranger’s clothes and some stranger’s very bad day. Someone had organized long black Mafia-looking cars to ferry us from place to place, funeral home, church, crematorium, all of them out in unfamiliar bits of west Dublin, in no time I had lost my bearings completely and had no idea where I was.

  “Where’s Melissa?” Leon asked, in the car on the way to the funeral home. His rush-bought suit was too long in the sleeves so that he looked like a schoolkid, and he smelled faintly but unmistakably of hash. Our parents either hadn’t noticed or had decided not to.