by Lissa Del
Clare is still sobbing, clutching a soaked tissue. She looks frail and isolated and I step closer to her, putting my arm around her shoulders.
“He won’t wake up,” Bruce says, speaking frankly and holding it together for Ellen’s sake. For all of our sakes. “His organs are shutting down and there’s zero brain activity. The only thing keeping him alive is the machines.”
Without warning, my chest heaves. I turn away from Clare, trying to stop it, but my stomach purges itself of what little contents remain inside it. A nurse is beside me in an instant, holding a wad of tissues. I take them from her, wiping my mouth and trying not to be sick again. This isn’t happening.
“I want to see him,” I whimper, averting my eyes from the pool of vomit on the floor.
“Of course,” Bruce gently pulls away from Ellen and she gives him a nod. Clare has fallen silent, her eyes watching me with a haunted expression as I follow Bruce to Leo’s room.
Leo could be sleeping. The shadows under his eyes are darker and his lips are dry, parted around the breathing tube, but he looks like he could open his eyes at any moment. The bandage has been replaced and I wonder if they tried to save him - if they operated again - or if they simply didn’t have time.
“We’ll give you a few minutes alone with him,” Bruce says. I don’t respond and a second later I hear the door close. All is silent, save for the faint hum of the machinery surrounding Leo’s bed.
I don’t even realise I’ve moved until I’m standing beside him. His hand is warm, just like I remember, and in my imagination I can feel a pulse. Or it might just be the machines. I lift the blanket and squeeze up onto the bed next to him, the place where I lay last night when we laughed and kissed and made plans for our future. Leo can’t shuffle aside now so there’s not much room, but I manage it, draping my leg over his and curling myself into the nook below his shoulder, with my head resting on his chest. I’m not afraid of disrupting the tubes and sensors affixed to his body. I ignore them, choosing to see only Leo. In this moment we are alone, somewhere far from here.
“Leo,” I say, willing the sound of my voice to bring him back to me. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
I squeeze his hand, his lifeless, unresponsive hand. Less than twelve hours ago he was squeezing mine back, his crooked smile teasing me, his eyes reflecting endless possibilities.
“Please don’t leave me,” I whisper, tracing the line of his jaw. “Open your eyes, Leo, please. Open your eyes.” His eyes – the incredible blue that defies genetics – stay shut, and it dawns on me that I will never see those eyes again. I’ll never see the crooked grin or feel the power of his arms around me, keeping me safe. My chest constricts with pain, a shooting, heart-wrenching agony that sucks the breath from my lungs and sends my body into spasm. The tears that I cry are infinite, a never-ending stream that soaks us both, but which only I can feel.
I lie that way for a long time, a montage of images playing in my mind: Leo’s eyes in the mirror, his hands on my bare skin, Leo playing Charades, the sight of his broad shoulders as he walked away. Hunched over Jess’s lifeless body, standing between me and a youth holding a knife. The crystals in his hair in the Rasul, his lips warm and wet on my skin. Leo in the library, Leo in the shower, Leo in my bed, naked and glorious and mine. Leo holding up a piece of paper: Only six more minutes.
“It’s not fair,” I murmur, kissing his shoulder, tasting the salt of my own tears. “This was the beginning, Leo, not the end.”
CHAPTER 38
As a doctor Leo had been vehemently against artificially sustaining life. His paperwork was all in order and the hospital had every right to terminate his life-support without consent. Out of respect, however, they called Clare into a private meeting to discuss it. I sit slumped in a chair in the compassionate room, Ellen, Bruce and Leo’s sister, Trisha, opposite me. Trisha had arrived a few minutes after I had said my goodbyes to Leo, clinging to the arm of her husband. She hadn’t spoken a word to me but I took no offence. Save for a short conversation with Ellen when she arrived, she hadn’t spoken since.
I am surrounded by Leo’s family but I can’t bring myself to leave. I have nowhere to go – no place on earth will shelter me from the storm that is coming. I can feel the madness, the depression lingering just beyond my comprehension and I know that, when I leave this place, it will engulf me; so, terrified and heartbroken, I wait.
Ellen emerges from the private meeting within ten minutes her hand pressed against her mouth, her skin so alabaster white she looks like a walking corpse. To my utter astonishment she heads straight for me and I stumble to my feet.
“They want to turn off the machines.” Her voice quavers, “I didn’t want to agree until I heard what you think.”
“Me?”
“You love him just as much I do.” The use of present tense jars us both and we cling to each other, drawing comfort from the one person in the world who understands how we feel. “Besides,” Clare draws in a shaky breath, “he loved you. He chose you. He would’ve wanted you to decide.”
I agree, of course. It was Leo’s wish, after all, and as the Doctor explained, there was no chance of recovery. Not even one percent. Clare and I stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, as they slowly switch off the machines keeping Leo alive, and then we wait, hand in hand, as he leaves this world – as he leaves us both.
Leo Russell left a gaping hole in my life – an empty space where there should have been love and laughter, marriage and babies and sunsets and art. Light. Space. Beauty. I allowed myself to mourn him. The anguish that I had feared won me over for a time, but I surrounded myself with friends and family, letting them help me heal, help me get up and face a world without him. I cried every night for a month and then I cried every time I thought of him, and whenever I caught a glimpse of the Porsche parked outside.
And then, one day, I found myself smiling. Tom cracked what would later be referred to by Jess as the stupidest joke in the history of mankind, and, without realising it, my lips curved upward for the first time in forever. The smell of him faded from the pillow on my bed and the world kept turning, despite the fact that my own universe had imploded.
I didn’t keep in contact with Clare. Our grief had brought us together, briefly, in the hospital that day, but ultimately we were two very different women who had fallen in love with two very different men. Unbeknown to me, Leo had done more than secure me a job with Burke & Duke. He had also changed his will before his surgery, leaving Clare the home they had shared and all of their mutual possessions. To me he had left his apartment, his savings and the Porsche.
It is remarkable how one tragedy can impact on the lives of so many and set on course a sequence of events beyond the control of the unwilling participants, but that is exactly what happened, for Leo and for me… and for everyone else caught up in the journey that changed the course of our lives forever.
In the summer, two weeks before I was scheduled to start working at Burke & Duke, I made the trip to London on my own. Jess had offered to come with me, but it was something I had to do alone. That journey was the start of my healing. I absorbed everything, lifting my face to the sun and letting the beauty of life wash over me. At night I wrote it all down, every experience, every moment that mattered. It was my ode to him. I know it sounds crazy, but I wasn’t alone. He was there with me the whole way, right up until the moment I returned home and realised I would survive this.
Losing Leo was like losing light, losing space, losing beauty, but I couldn’t let that be his legacy. And so, instead, I poured those things into my work. His legacy became the modern lines of a strong building made softly rosy in the dawn light, the clean, arching curve of a bridge. I sensed his spirit and his lust for life in the shapes and forms of strong, unique structures which stood apart in a sea of similarity, and through these, Leo lived. Through them, I lived.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTES
This book is based on the remarkable real-life tragedy of
Phineas P. Gage; an American construction worker who was impaled through the head with a metal rod. The rod destroyed much of the left frontal lobe of Phineas’s brain, the part of the brain responsible for personality. Miraculously Phineas survived, but the reported effects of his injury were such that his character and behaviour changed so profoundly that people who knew him no longer saw him as “Gage”.
I read about Gage’s case in my first year Psychology studies and it stayed with me throughout the duration of my degree, prompting me to continue with my studies in psychopathology. Both Rainfall and Riven were borne of this fascination. It is important to note, however, that I have dramatised and romanticised the injury and its effects for the sake of contemporary fiction, and that the possibility of this happening in a real-life scenario is improbable, if not impossible. The effects of left frontal-lobe damage, however, are real.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lissa Del is the author of a range of contemporary women’s fiction titles and the pseudonym for award-winning author, Melissa Delport. She graduated from the University of South Africa with a degree in English Literature and now lives with her husband and three children in Hillcrest, KZN.
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