by Dani Atkins
‘How are they both?’ I asked, my voice sounding both hushed and awed.
Ryan smiled and bent to lift his daughter from her plastic crib. He didn’t look entirely natural with her yet, spending a great deal of time settling his large hands beneath her head and bottom before daring to lift her up from the mattress. I wasn’t even aware I was holding my breath, until I heard him exhale slowly in relief at exactly the same time.
‘The midwives keep telling me I won’t drop her . . . but I’m not so sure.’
‘I’m certain you’re doing just fine,’ I said watching as he slowly and carefully settled his newborn baby more securely in the crook of his arm, cradling her against the warmth of his body. She looked perfectly content to be there. ‘The good thing about babies is that they haven’t read the books we have,’ I joked. ‘They don’t know when you’re doing it wrong.’
Ryan smiled, but his eyes were on the infant in his arms and not on me. If a man could be mesmerised by his own child, then that’s what I was witnessing right there in that quiet hospital room. Ryan was falling even more deeply in love with his daughter, right before my eyes. I wished with all my heart that Maddie could see this. This was their moment, not mine. I glanced over towards her, but she looked exactly the same as ever. Minus the enormous bump, of course.
‘I’m so glad everything went well with the delivery.’
Ryan nodded, and this time he did look away from his daughter’s face, towards Maddie. ‘Everything went as they’d hoped. Except . . .’ his voice trailed off, and I knew the end of that sentence, because it hadn’t been just his deepest wish. It had been what everyone in the hospital had been hoping for: one more miracle.
‘Except Maddie didn’t wake up,’ I completed sadly.
He nodded, and neither of us spoke for several minutes. Ryan filled his staring deeply into his daughter’s face. I spent mine looking around the room, wondering why I’d failed to notice its recent transformation to a miniature florist’s. The window ledge, the bedside cabinet – practically every surface – was covered with bouquets, huge teddy bears, or bright pink helium balloons.
‘You must have had loads of visitors,’ I observed.
Ryan’s expression was rueful. ‘Just family and a few close friends.’ He nodded to indicate the flowers, gifts and cards. ‘Most of these are from total strangers. People have been very generous. There were so many I had to ask the nurses to distribute them to some of the other wards.’
‘I guess everyone is interested in Hope,’ I said, looking down at the tiny scrap in her white towelling babygro, who was falling asleep as I watched.
Ryan lifted his gaze from his daughter and there was a sudden softness blurring the new lines around his eyes when he looked at me. ‘Except you.’ For a moment I thought he was criticising me, and I could feel my pulse racing as I wondered what it was I’d done wrong. ‘When you came in here today, you didn’t go straight to the baby, the way every other visitor has done. You went to Maddie; you congratulated her; you even kissed her.’ I could feel the flush burning my cheeks, despite the over-warm room. I knew that kiss had been a step too far.
But instead of censure, there was only admiration in Ryan’s eyes. ‘You treated Maddie the same way you would treat any other new mum. That meant more than you can possibly know, Chloe. She deserves that.’
I was still wondering how to respond to his unexpected praise, when thankfully I didn’t have to, for the door opened behind me and the soft fall of footsteps sounded in the room. I turned around and recognised Maddie’s parents. Her father paused when he saw me, and I could see him trying to place me. Her mother walked past me as though I was invisible, her eyes only on her daughter and the child in Ryan’s arms.
‘Hello,’ greeted Bill politely, his bushy brows joining together for a moment to form one long grey caterpillar. ‘It’s . . . Chloe, isn’t it?’
I smiled back at him, suddenly feeling very much like the one person in the room who didn’t belong there. ‘Yes, it is,’ I said, extending my hand, which he shook formally. ‘I just popped in to see your lovely new granddaughter,’ I explained, my words tumbling out in a guilty rush, and I had no idea why.
Bill’s eyes became misty as they looked over at his own child, his own baby, lying in her hospital bed. This scene should be so very different, I thought sadly.
On the other side of the room I was aware of Ryan settling Hope into her grandmother’s waiting arms. It wasn’t my place to worry about whether that was a good idea, and it was definitely time for me to go before I voiced my concern, which would be the second inappropriate thing I’d done that day.
‘I have to be going now, but it was very nice meeting you again Mr and Mrs Chambers.’
‘That’s Bill and Faye,’ Maddie’s father corrected kindly. ‘You’re a friend of the family.’
Am I? I quietly asked myself as I ran lightly back down to the fourth floor to spend my afternoon with patients approaching the end of their days, rather than one at the beginning of hers. Somehow I seemed to have slipped out of the role I usually played, and into one I didn’t entirely recognise. Friend? Companion? Or something else altogether? Something that the board of administrators at the hospital would definitely never approve of. Maddie, Ryan, and now Hope had somehow become an important part of my life. And when they left the hospital, which inevitably they would soon do, a piece of me was going to go with them, whether I wanted it to or not.
Chapter 11
2012
I heard the crash first. Then came the voices – at least two of them – raised in anger, in a place where everyone walked softly and spoke in whispers. There was a long, loud scraping noise, as if the metal legs of a chair had travelled at speed over the linoleum floor of the corridor. Then came a loud thud and the sound of something breaking, I wasn’t sure what.
My steps faltered for a second and then quickened, hurrying towards the commotion, even though common sense was telling me I should be going in the opposite direction. I rounded the corner and came to a stop, so abruptly that I almost stumbled forward from my own momentum. It took several moments for me to process what I was seeing, because it all looked so improbable and out of place. It was like a scene from a movie. A violent movie.
Two plastic chairs that were usually positioned in the corridor outside Maddie’s room were now on their sides, skewed at weird angles down the wide passageway. One appeared to have collided with a small trolley, which was also on its side. But it wasn’t the displaced hospital furniture that caused my eyes to widen like saucers and my mouth to drop open. Two men were facing off in the corridor. Both were breathing heavily, and the fury and rage emanating from them pulsated through the air like a sound wave.
‘What the fuck were you doing?’ thundered Ryan, in a voice I’d never heard from him before. It was also the first time I’d ever heard him swear.
‘Get out of my way,’ yelled a greasy-haired man, trying to push past Ryan. Yeah, good luck with that, my friend, I thought, seeing the immovable wall of muscle, cemented with the type of fury that was scary to see. I was scared, and I still didn’t even know what had happened.
In the distance, beyond the two men, I could hear a voice which I thought might possibly be Ellen’s, shouting urgently into the telephone. ‘Security. I need Security up on Six straight away. We have an intruder.’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Ryan said, through gritted teeth, pushing the man back against the wall with the flat of his hand when it looked like he was about to escape.
‘That’s assault. You all saw that, didn’t you?’ the man yelled, his eyes going to me and then to the three nurses gathered around the desk, one of whom I could now see was definitely Ellen. He couldn’t have called upon a collection of more unreliable witnesses, if he was hoping to make that one stick.
‘Assault?’ roared Ryan. ‘I’ll give you assault. What were you doing in there, with your hands on my baby?’
Suddenly my feet had wings. I was running down the corri
dor towards the open door of Maddie’s room, my heart almost bursting out of my chest in terror. What had this man done?
I stepped over something that was broken in a great many pieces next to the doorway. Something that was clearly never going to function again. I dived into the room, ignoring the two men who were only a metre or so away from me. There was a large brown pool of something on the floor just inside Maddie’s room. I stepped in it, almost slipped, and then righted myself. I glanced down and saw the familiar logo of a well-known coffee chain on the dropped takeout cup. I was still moving at speed, yet a separate part of my brain was already piecing together the picture. Ryan had come into the room, carrying his drink, and had disturbed this man and whatever it was he was doing here.
My frantic glance went first to Hope in her crib, and then to Maddie. For a terrifying moment I thought the absolute worst, and then forced myself to look at each of them in turn, carefully. Two chests, both rising and falling in a regular and seemingly normal fashion. The only thing wrong about the room that I could see, apart from the pool of coffee on the floor, was that the blanket that should have been swaddled around Hope was now bunched down around her tiny feet.
‘I didn’t touch the kid, I just moved the blanket,’ the man answered aggressively from the corridor behind me.
There followed a heavy thudding noise, and suddenly I was terrified that something truly dreadful was about to happen. Uncaring of whether I was putting myself in any danger, I ran back out into the corridor.
‘They’re fine Ryan, they’re both fine. I checked.’ The fist he had raised stopped in mid-air, never completing its arc. It hung there at shoulder height, its line of trajectory putting it squarely in the middle of the other man’s face.
‘Mr Turner!’ shouted a new voice, coming from the direction of the bank of lifts. ‘Mr Turner, no!’ For a second I thought Ryan was so incensed he was going to take the swing anyway. ‘He’s not worth it, Mr Turner. Don’t do it,’ the security guard implored, still running towards the men. I recognised him. His name was Jerry, and he’d started at the hospital not long after I had. I seemed to remember him telling me once that he was a retired policeman. I just hoped whatever skills he’d learnt while he was on the force weren’t so far in the past that he couldn’t call on them when he needed to.
The intruder, clearly still feeling he was the victim here, turned towards the uniformed guard who had now reached the two men, and had laid his hand firmly upon Ryan’s upraised arm. ‘Leave him.’
The man, who was sweating profusely, nodded his head vehemently. ‘You should do as he says, mate,’ he said, his voice as oily as his hair.
‘Because I’m allowed to use reasonable restraint if he puts up a struggle . . . and I most certainly will,’ Jerry promised, his eyes glittering dangerously.
The man against the wall seemed to suddenly realise how little help he was going to get from the new arrival, and decided to take a different tack. He looked down at the collection of broken pieces scattered on the floor by his feet. ‘Do you know how much that camera cost? How am I meant to earn a living now? I’m going to bloody sue you for damages, you know,’ he threatened.
‘And I’m filing a charge against you for molesting a newborn baby,’ promised Ryan.
Finally the man seemed to comprehend exactly how much trouble he was in.
‘Mr Turner, I want you to walk away now. Leave him to me,’ urged Jerry. ‘Mr Turner . . . Ryan . . . please.’
Very slowly I saw Ryan lower his arm. It was still trembling. From beyond him I heard Ellen’s voice speaking in a tone that sounded a great deal calmer than it had done just a few minutes earlier. ‘Chloe, why don’t you take Ryan outside to cool off while we get this all sorted out?’
Ryan shook his head, but I could see that removing him from the scene was not only sensible, it was vital. Clearly, Ellen thought so too. ‘I’m going to go and sit with Maddie and Hope, and I won’t leave their room until you get back. You have my word on it.’
Her eyes went to mine, and I nodded determinedly and reached for Ryan’s elbow. For a moment I thought he was going to resist me, but then much to my surprise he allowed me to drag him away, towards the staircase.
Neither of us spoke on the six-flight descent to the ground floor. I don’t think Ryan was capable of speech, and I certainly had no idea what to say. By the time we had emerged into the cold December afternoon, I had pieced it all together. As terrifying as it must have been for Ryan to find someone leaning over his newborn daughter, with his hands in her crib, I was sure the intruder was nothing more than the gutter element of the press, whose basic humanity seemed easily forgotten when an exclusive ‘photo-op’ presented itself.
Reporters had been crowding around the hospital entrance for several days since Maddie’s story had been resurrected, following the birth of Hope. Ryan had imposed a strict no-interviews, no-photographs ruling, and I could only imagine that the man today had thought those rules didn’t apply to him. It had been a dangerous and costly mistake.
Ryan walked quickly along the hospital pathway, forcing me to trot just to keep up with him. His jaw looked tight and clenched, and when I glanced down at his hands I saw that they were both still fisted, as though the fight was still ongoing. From the expression on his face, I rather suspected that for him, it still was. When we came to a bench, and I reached out and grasped his sleeve to bring him to a stop. ‘Why don’t we sit down here for a minute?’
Ryan looked like he might be about to disagree, but I knew that if we carried on at that pace I was either going to get the world’s worst stitch, or we’d end up halfway back to town. I sat down hurriedly, forcing him to join me. The icy-cold slats of the bench cut straight through the lightweight wool of my skirt. I thought longingly of my coat, scarf and gloves which I’d left up on the fourth floor.
Ryan sat down beside me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and put his head in his hands. I tried to think of something to say; considered about half a dozen possibilities, and ended up dismissing them all. Perhaps silence was the most calming thing I could offer here.
Eventually Ryan was the one who broke it. ‘I still can’t seem to stop shaking.’ It was true. I could see the tremors running through his frame as though he was in the throes of a raging fever. He allowed one hand to fall away from his face and turned to me with a twisted expression, which might have been an attempt at a smile. ‘It’s not very Bruce Willis, is it? Shaking like a leaf after a confrontation?’
‘I think it’s perfectly understandable. And I totally disagree. I think what you did up there was very heroic and protective.’
This time his smile looked slightly less weird. ‘As you can probably guess, I don’t really “do” violent. I don’t think I’ve been in a fight since I was sixteen years old, and that one was on a football pitch.’
‘Well, I’m not aggressive either, but if Jerry hadn’t come along when he did, I think I’d have decked that guy myself.’
Ryan’s hand reached across and briefly squeezed mine in a gesture of friendship. ‘The one he really would have had to worry about is Maddie. If she’d been awake . . . she would probably have torn his head off.’
I tried to imagine the ever-silent, ever-motionless, Maddie in a tearing temper or a fiery rage, and just couldn’t picture it.
‘I suppose I should have been expecting something like this,’ Ryan said sadly, running his fingers through his dark blond hair. ‘Somehow the reporters got hold of my mobile number, and every time I set foot outside the hospital they’re waiting to pounce, like a pack of hyenas.’
‘I knew the press were being a nuisance, but I’ve no idea how that guy managed to get into Maddie’s room without anyone stopping him.’
‘It won’t happen again,’ Ryan said darkly. I shivered, and this time it had nothing to do with the falling temperature or the biting wind. ‘The hospital tried to warn me about keeping Hope with Maddie,’ Ryan continued, and I could see that there was going to be an aw
ful lot of self-blame that he’d chosen not to listen to that advice. ‘They kept saying that the Maternity Unit was far more secure. You can’t just waltz up and gain access to anyone up there.’
‘You’re not meant to be able to do that anywhere in the hospital,’ I defended.
‘Well, that scumbag today proved all too easily that you can.’ Ryan sat up straighter and I could tell from the set of his spine that he’d finally stopped trembling, and something else was running through him, washing out the adrenalin that had pumped through his veins and replacing it with liquid steel.
‘Well, they’re not going to get a second chance. I’m getting her out of there.’
His words jolted me upright, like an electric shock. ‘Maddie? You’re taking Maddie out of the hospital?’
Ryan’s eyes looked unbelievably sad, and I cursed myself for not thinking before I opened my mouth. Of course he couldn’t take Maddie anywhere. ‘Oh, you mean Hope.’
He nodded, and I could see the bitterness on his face that he was being forced into separating mother and daughter. ‘I mean, I know I was going to have to do that eventually. It’s not like all three of us can permanently live at the hospital.’ He left his words dangling in the air, as though waiting for me to reach up and grab them and say something like, ‘Yes, you could.’ But I couldn’t say that, because I honestly didn’t believe it was what was best for Hope. Admittedly all my knowledge about babies was purely theoretical and had come from the books I’d read to Maddie, but they all seemed to agree that babies needed to have a stable routine. And keeping a perfectly healthy infant in hospital long after the time she should have gone home wasn’t something I imagined you’d find any book recommending. But in this, as in everything else he did, Ryan was trying to do what was best for Maddie. He still hoped their baby could do the one thing that so far he’d failed to achieve: that she’d be able to bring Maddie back.