The Girlfriend

by Sarah Naughton

  The hospital walls are crowded with bad art. Tasteless collages and insipid watercolors, metal twisted into the shapes of fish and birds. I pass a door marked Room for Reflection and through the half-open blinds make out empty plastic chairs facing a table with a wooden cross.

  A bed clatters by. On it, an old lady is curled like a chrysalis. Beneath her translucent paper skin, dark veins pulse, as if there’s something beautiful and new ready to squirm out. She is yellow with liver failure. Perhaps our mother looks like this now. Perhaps she is already dead.

  I pass through the door marked ICU. It opens on a small reception area where a nurse frowns at a computer screen. Behind her is a set of double doors that must lead to the beds. A wave of guilt washes through me. I could easily have afforded to put Abe on my medical insurance policy. Then he would have had his own room.

  “I’m Mary Mackenzie. My brother Abraham is here.”

  The fat nurse doesn’t reply, just holds up her hand: wait.

  Bristling, I step away from the desk and stare blindly at the huge painting of a peony on the wall. Surely, all those blood reds and flesh pinks are inappropriate here. The whole place stinks of piss and disinfectant, that British-hospital smell that screams of underpaid cleaners, harassed nurses, and patients left to stew in their own filth. And then, abruptly, absurdly, tears spring to my eyes. The peony blurs, becoming an open wound.

  As unobtrusively as possible, I blink them away and breathe deeply. I’m not crying for Abe. I’m crying for myself. Stuck here in this shitty hospital, in this shitty country, away from my friends, my job, the warmth of a Vegas autumn. I will have to wait for him to die. Damn it, I almost feel like calling Daniel, but a good lay doesn’t buy you the right to snivel on someone’s shoulder.

  “Miss Mackenzie?”

  I blink to clear my eyes and turn.

  “Your brother’s fiancée is with him at the moment. I can ask her to give you some time alone with him.”

  For some reason, I don’t want this nurse knowing that we are such a dysfunctional family that I’ve never even met my brother’s fiancée.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “Just take me to him, please.”

  Despite the beeps and wheezes of the machinery, the sensation I feel when the doors swing shut behind me is of a heavy, suffocating hush. For a moment, I can’t take a step. Every nerve in my body is tensed to stop me bolting, and I stand rigid as the nurse waddles up the room to disappear behind a blue curtain on the left.

  There are six beds in all, each separated by a curtain, though most of them are open. The occupants lie on their backs, motionless, pale as wax, everything that makes them human concealed or distorted by tubes and masks and colored stickers. Most of them are old, sparse white hair slicked across crepe paper foreheads, gnarled fingers resting on the sheets like the shed husks of spiders.

  A wave of nausea reminds me how much I drank last night.

  I can’t be sick here. It would be the ultimate insult.

  There are low voices, and a moment later, the nurse emerges, gives me a tight smile, and passes back out through the doors.

  The fiancée is waiting for me.

  My heels click across the linoleum, and the rings clatter loudly when I pull back the curtain.

  The girl—and she is just a girl—sits on a plastic chair pulled very close to the bed. She raises her head and attempts a smile. Older than I first thought, in her late twenties perhaps, but her manner is that of a child: shrunken shoulders, nervous eyes that cannot hold my gaze. In appearance, she is like my brother in negative: the same birdlike build, an elfin face with a high forehead, large eyes, a small rosebud mouth. But where Abe is dark, she is shockingly fair, almost albino, with eyes the color of dishwater.

  For a moment, I’m disappointed. I suppose I had hoped for someone like me. Someone I could talk to. I can tell immediately that all conversation with this girl will be punctuated by weeping. I will have to reassure her endlessly that it wasn’t her fault and ply her with cups of tea and tissues.

  She gets to her feet unsteadily. “I’m Jody,” she says, then adds, “I’m so sorry,” and her face crumples.

  Swallowing a sigh, I wait patiently while she composes herself, then extend my hand. “Mags.” Her handshake is predictably limp, and she inhales when I squeeze her knuckles.

  Finally, I look down at my brother.

  At least I assume the swollen, blackened lump of flesh and bone on the pillow is my brother.

  The top of his head is swathed in bandages that various lines pass into. Another bandage covers his nose and cheeks, and a neck brace compresses the lower part of his face. Only his eyes and mouth are visible, the lips purple with swelling. He is naked to the waist, and his body bristles with tubes leading to bags and bottles of clear liquid.

  I breathe slowly and steadily, feeling Jody’s eyes on me.

  Finally, I’m ready to speak. “So, can you tell me what happened?”

  But before she can answer, a nurse comes over and begins checking the monitors. I take Jody gently but firmly by the elbow. “Let’s talk about it over a cup of tea.”

  I buy us drinks from the vending machine and lead her out into a small garden that looks over the main road. A brass plaque on the wall of the empty fountain announces that this is the Queen Mother Memorial Garden.

  Jody takes the lid off her tea, and the steam curls up into the damp air. The garden is slightly below ground level, and the air is leaden with cold. The sun is too weak to melt the night frost, and the blades of grass are stiff and white as icicles. I sip the scalding black water that advertised itself as Americano. It is so far from American, I want to weep.

  As she stares at the dead fountain, I wonder how far her thought process has progressed. Has she yet faced up to the prospect that Abe will die? If not immediately, then at some point in the future when the time comes to turn him off. No one gets up from a fall like that.

  “It’s my fault,” she says.

  I wait for her to continue. Her irises are so pale that, seen from profile, they are no more than water surrounding the pupil, large in the gloom of the garden.

  “I should have seen the signs. He was working too hard. Sometimes, he wouldn’t get in until nine or ten. And it’s such a stressful job, being a caregiver.”

  I try not to look disappointed at the revelation that my brother cleared up piss and shit for a living; microwaved frozen meals, changed incontinence pants, baby-talked sponge-brained geriatrics. I don’t know what I was expecting—advertising? graphic design?—something like me, I suppose. God, what a narcissist.

  “There was never enough time to get anything done, to do a good enough job, and you know how much of a perfectionist Abe is.”

  I nod, knowing.

  “And how kind he is. He couldn’t bear leaving people when he knew he was the only company they would have for days. He would stay and make sure they were all right, which would make him late for the next appointment. Sometimes, he had to miss one entirely. They wouldn’t pay him for traveling time, and we were hoping to get married next year, so of course, money worries just added to the pressure. It was really getting to him. I could see it. We barely saw each other.” She twists the ring on her engagement finger.

  “That must have been difficult.”

  “I understood, of course. But I hated to see him so stressed.”

  “Tell me what happened the night he fell,” I say as gently as possible, laying my hand on hers in a gesture I hope will be reassuring and encouraging. Her skin is rough, chapped from the cold, the nails bitten ragged. I hold it there as long as I can bear, then release it into her lap.

  “I wanted to try to cheer him up,” she says, looking away across the garden to the city beyond. “One of his patients had been taken into a nursing home, and she was very upset about it. So I booked a table in Cosmo—that’s our favorite restaurant. He was
quiet during the meal, but I thought he was just tired, so I suggested skipping dessert and having an early night. I should have known. I should have guessed there was something wrong.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “We should never have had that second glass of wine. He always gets sad when he’s had a drink or two. On the way home, he didn’t say a word, just held my hand really tightly. We came in and started going up to his flat.”

  “You don’t live together, then?”

  “We’ve asked the housing association for a bigger place, but we thought we’d keep both flats on in the meantime. When we got to the third floor, Abe said he couldn’t remember if he had closed the security door properly. Sometimes it sticks, and there have been break-ins. He told me to go ahead, so I did. I wanted to get the heating on and light a few candles to try to help him relax.”

  The ghost-gray irises swim with tears.

  “If I had known how bad he was… I’m s-sorry.” Her voice rises tremulously. If she starts to sob, I’ll never get any more out of her.

  “Then what happened?” I say firmly, as if facing an overwrought witness.

  “I opened the door of the flat and went into the hall and then I heard this…”

  This time, I can’t bring myself to make her go on.

  “It was such a horrible noise.” Her voice goes up again, on the way to a wail. “It was so loud. Like there wasn’t anything soft about him. Like he was a piece of wood or something.”

  I close my eyes.

  “I ran out of the flat and…”

  A truck trundles by, its tarpaulin billowing in the wind. She waits for the roar of its engine to subside, and in those few moments, all the life seems to have been sucked out of her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says as the normal traffic noise resumes.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say again.

  Eventually, the doctor graces us with his presence. It’s twenty past five, and I’m so on edge that every thick, shuddering breath Jody takes is making me want to grab her by the hair and smash her head into the wall. At least the weeping wives who show up in court to plead ignorance of their husband’s misdemeanors are faking it. Beneath the act, they’re hard-nosed businesswomen, doing their utmost to prevent the IRS from discovering the little offshore hoards in their names. Jody is something else. She holds my brother’s hand the entire time, gazing into his pulped face, occasionally brushing the tube that protrudes from his mouth with her lips. The sight, along with the alcohol tang of disinfection, intensifies my nausea.

  I pace to the window and back, trying not to look at the other cadavers, wondering what on earth the point is of spending all this money and effort to keep them in this parody of life. Presumably, my brother, if he wakes at all, will be a drooling, infantilized wreck. Jody will lovingly feed him with purees and porridge, wiping the goop from his slimy chin. At least Alzheimer’s or dementia patients have the decency to be old. Abe could go on like that for decades.

  Dr. Bonville is very young, shorter than me, with the floppy-haired arrogance born out of the British private school system. He takes us to a shabby little room with a blue sofa so small that Jody and I must sit hip to hip.

  “Well,” he says and gives that pressed-lipped smile people use to express empathy. “The swelling has gone down.”

  Jody turns to me, and I can almost feel her itching to squeeze my hand. I keep looking at the doctor. I know what’s coming.

  “So we’ve been able to assess the damage to Abe’s brain.”

  He pauses then, rustling the papers on his lap. He doesn’t sit behind the table but in a chair opposite us, a more informal, human position that can only mean the worst.

  “Abe’s cerebral cortex has suffered major trauma. The cortex is responsible for thinking and action. For this reason, when we take him out of the coma, I’m afraid Abe will be in a vegetative state.”

  As he waits to let the news sink in, I can hear ambulances pulling in and out, their sirens gradually diminishing to be absorbed in the traffic.

  The material of the sofa is loosely woven, like slack skin, and the arm is blotched with watermarks. How many tears, I wonder, have been shed here? My fingers are hypersensitive, as if I can feel the microscopic granules of salt beneath their tips.

  “Will it heal by itself?” Jody asks, her voice clumsy in the silence, making me wince.

  “Of course not,” I say.

  “No,” says Dr. Bonville. “I’m afraid that can’t happen. I’m afraid you have to face the possibility that, in the very unlikely event that Abe ever regains consciousness, he will be quite different from the man you knew.”

  “He blinked,” Jody says. “I saw his eyelids move.”

  “Abe’s lower brain stem is intact, so reflexes like breathing, swallowing, reacting to pain, even blinking, can still be present. Abe might even—”

  “Stop saying his name.”

  He turns his surprised gaze on me.

  “Stop saying his name because you think it gives you the human touch.”

  He looks at me steadily. “I understand that you must be very upset,” he says quietly. “Let me give you a minute.”

  He goes to get up, but I get up faster. “Talk to her,” I say. “I’ve heard enough. Just tell me when it’s time to turn him off.”

  I walk out of the room and, without a glance at the doors of the ICU, stride down the corridor that leads to the exit. It seems to take years, and when I finally emerge into the grimy London air, I gulp it down like water from an Alpine stream.

  The traffic roars past, and I’m buffeted by blank-faced office workers rushing to get home. It’s at times like this that the anonymity of a city is a blessing. Nobody knows I have just walked out on a doctor trying to tell me whether my brother is going to live or die. Nobody cares.

  With a glance back at the hospital to confirm Jody isn’t coming after me, I join the flow of people heading for the Tube.

  It feels like a year has passed when I finally arrive back at the hotel. I go for another swim, try—and fail—to read my book, pick at my room service order: a very poor imitation of a club sandwich. At six, I hit the minibar.

  The room darkens.

  On the pretext of a work chat, I call Jackson, and when he picks up, I can hear the hubbub of a restaurant behind him. I want to ask where he is, but it might sound like an accusation. I imagine them at Ginelli’s down in Paradise, drinking cold beers on the veranda with the smell of the desert on the wind. My heart aches.

  “Let me go somewhere quieter,” he says.

  “No, it’s fine,” I say, desperate for the sounds of home. “It’s just to check in, really. How’s Antonio?”

  “We made the plea bargain, and they’re thinking it through. I told him they’ll probably go for it.”

  “Great. Send him my love.”

  Jackson laughs. “He’ll be jerking off all night over that one.” He kills the laugh and asks, “How’s your brother?”

  I exhale. “Not great. Brain-dead, it looks like. A botched suicide attempt.”

  The muted TV at the end of the bed strobes images of a war zone—old women and children crying, gray corpses rotting in the road, an abandoned teddy bear.

  Jackson tells me he’s sorry. Then, after a seemly pause, asks me, “Do you think…dying will happen…naturally?”

  I know what he’s really asking. When will you be back at work?

  “Potentially. But it might come down to turning the machines off, and it’s a bit early to think about that.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “I’d be happy to leave any decision to his girlfriend, but as next of kin, I’m supposed to have the final say.”

  There’s silence on the other end of the line, and I can almost hear Jackson trying to frame the words.

  “How long will you…er…w
ait?”

  Suppressing the flash of irritation, I keep my tone light. “It’ll depend on the doctors.”

  “Take as long as you need, Mags.”

  “Thanks. Listen, go and enjoy your lunch. What are you having?”

  He clears his throat. “Lobster thermidor.”

  I groan with envy.

  “There’s one with your name on it when you get back.”

  “Send me a photo. I’ll choose him myself. You can put a deposit down.”

  “Will do. Take care, Mags. Lots of love.”

  I hang up, then open the minibar. Three gin and tonics later, I’m sitting on the bed with the TV blaring to try to numb my head. Constable Derbyshire was right—not all tragedies are crimes—but I’m a lawyer, so all I can think of are questions.

  Why haven’t they checked the CCTV?

  Why did Abe take his coat off?

  Did someone get in through the door that he was going down to check?

  With such a plainly devoted girlfriend, why on earth would he decide to kill himself?

  And if he did, didn’t she deserve a note?

  _____________________

  She gazes out at the gnarled faces of the trees. They are like people, stretching their arms toward the car to pluck her from the backseat and spirit her away into the darkness. But the car is moving too fast: twigs rattle vainly against the windows as the headlights sweep relentlessly onward. She twists her head to watch them recede. For a moment, each trunk is washed in red before falling away to blackness.

  They have made this journey before. She knows that the forest bordering the road will end abruptly, the land flattening out to fields. An occasional house will dot the landscape, its windows butter yellow. But the house they are heading for cannot be seen from the road, and its lights are the cold glare of fluorescent strips. All the better to see you with, my dear.