by Dani Atkins
Hope’s bedroom was far safer territory. Decorated in pastel shades, it was a proper little girl’s paradise, and I spent several moments taking it all in. Painted cartoon characters and cheerful woodland animals covered the walls; not quite good enough to be the work of a professional artist, but far too good to have been done by Ryan, whose drawing skills peaked at stick men with oversized heads. Chloe had created a true fairy-tale room for Hope to play, sleep and dream in, and though I tried my best to swallow it down, I could taste the bitter tang of jealousy, like bile, at the back of my throat. This was the room I would have created for her, if only her other mummy hadn’t done it before me.
Hope raced over to the bookcase in the corner of her room and plucked a book for me to read. I was rather glad she hadn’t asked for the next excerpt from her Harry Potter book, because I didn’t think I’d be able to say Hagrid’s name without visualising Mitch for some time to come. Damn Ryan and his stupid little jibe.
I read until my throat was dry and Hope’s eyes were struggling to stay open. I would happily have read to her until dawn, or at least until I heard her parents’ key in the front door. Having her snuggled against my side, smelling the clean fragrance of her freshly washed hair, feeling the alien yet weirdly familiar sensation of having her body once again nestled against mine, was the best feeling I’d experienced in a very long time.
Even when I knew she was asleep, I continued to sit on the edge of her bed, mesmerised by the simple pleasure of watching her chest rise and fall. Eventually I forced myself to my feet, carefully levering off the mattress, not wanting to wake her, and yet half hoping that she would. I tiptoed across the oasis of pink carpet and back out into the hallway.
I took one last wistful glance back at Hope’s door before heading for the stairs, and almost managed to wake her up after all as my hip collided with a small table positioned against the wall. I reached out to right a silver-framed photograph that had fallen when I’d bumped into the table. Thankfully it wasn’t damaged, because frankly there was no way they’d ever have believed I hadn’t done that deliberately. I carried it to the top of the stairs, where the light was brighter, and sank slowly down onto the top step, holding the frame away from my body, as if I was carrying dynamite.
Chloe’s wedding dress was very different from the one I had chosen. Hers was a simple ivory sheath, full-length but with no embellishments or decoration. Her hair was worn loose, held back from her face by a single slide entwined with gypsophila, or Baby’s Breath as it was more commonly known. My mouth twisted in irony.
Ryan looked handsome in a grey suit and tie, although more aged than perhaps he should have done. I traced the outline of his face beneath the glass with my fingertip, looking for . . . I’m not sure what . . . a sign that he wasn’t entirely happy? That the bride beside him wasn’t the one he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with? A single tear trickled down my cheek and landed, somewhat poetically, upon his smiling face, which showed no sign of any such emotion. He looked as ecstatically happy as any groom should on his wedding day. His face was tilted towards the smiling bride beside him, and the look of love that shone from his eyes tore the skin from my heart in long jagged rips. Ryan had one arm around Chloe, and in the other he held our daughter. Was it unreasonable to feel hurt that she’d been a flower girl at their wedding? Or that this was how I had discovered that fact, sitting alone at the top of their staircase, crying over a stupid photograph.
I was about to put the frame back where it belonged, when I noticed a face at the back of the crowd of people standing behind the newlyweds on the registry office steps. Half obscured by a tall, broad-shouldered stranger and a woman in a big floppy hat, was a face I knew well and seeing it there felt much more than a shock, it felt like a betrayal. How many more pieces of my life had Chloe silently pilfered from me? The list seemed never-ending: my fiancé, my baby, my own parents and now, unbelievably, standing at the back of the crowd of wedding guests was Ellen, the friend it would appear we also shared.
‘I thought you knew.’
‘How could I possibly have known?’
Ellen spent longer than necessary meticulously tearing open a small sachet of sugar and stirring it into her coffee. ‘I thought that someone might have mentioned it.’
‘Perhaps you should have mentioned it,’ I said, hurt making my voice small and tight.
To be fair, when she raised her head, Ellen didn’t deny it, but merely nodded sadly. ‘You’re right, Maddie. I should have told you. But I didn’t want to hurt you, any more than you’d already been hurt.’
She looked awkward, her freckles standing out like blemishes against her suddenly pale cheeks. ‘During those first three years Ryan was at the hospital every single day.’ Ellen smiled fleetingly. ‘I think I probably saw more of your fiancé than I did of my own at that time. And he began to feel more like a work colleague than a visiting relative – not just to me, but to everyone on the ward,’ she explained.
I nodded. Hearing how devoted Ryan had once been had become a double-edged sword, because now I also knew that it hadn’t lasted.
‘He became a friend,’ Ellen said simply.
‘A good enough friend to invite you to his wedding?’
There was a fleeting look of guilt on Ellen’s face, and suddenly I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever it was she was about to say. ‘Maddie, Ryan wasn’t the one who invited me to the wedding. It was Chloe.’
‘Chloe?’ My voice was an incredulous whisper. I was the one they’d thought was as good as dead, but she was a living ghost, haunting me at every turn. ‘You knew her before she married Ryan?’ It felt as if everything was spinning. Up was now down, friend was now foe and truth . . . well, truth didn’t seem to exist any more.
‘I’ve known Chloe for years,’ Ellen admitted. ‘She’d worked at the hospital even longer than I had.’
‘Chloe was a nurse?’ I asked, genuinely confused. ‘I thought she worked in a library?’
Ellen shook her head and took a bite out of her toasted sandwich. My own was growing unappealingly cold on the plate before me. Not surprisingly, I seemed to have lost my appetite.
‘Chloe did work in a library, but she was also a part-time hospital volunteer.’
Something cold crept into my stomach and squirmed there. ‘A volunteer? Doing what?’
‘Reading to the patients. She worked mainly on the geriatric ward, but also . . .’ Her voice trailed away, as if only now did she realise that she was about to say something that might change everything.
‘Go on,’ I urged, my voice low and thick. ‘Where else did Chloe work?’
‘On our ward. She was asked by the family to work with one specific patient. She sat with them several times a week, reading, chatting, playing music . . . that kind of thing.’
A waitress came to clear away our plates and it seemed like an agonisingly long wait before I could ask the question I already knew the answer to.
‘This patient . . .’ I began. Ellen looked at me and slowly nodded. But somehow it still wouldn’t be real until I’d heard the words spoken out loud.
‘The patient was me, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, Maddie, it was.’
Chapter 15
Chloe
I flopped back onto the airplane seat and waited for my heart to stop feeling as if it was about to explode out of my chest. My breathing was ragged as I turned to look over the top of Hope’s head, and met Ryan’s eyes. We were lucky to have caught the flight, and if we’d missed it there would have been no one to blame but me. I still couldn’t believe that I’d managed to misread the gate number on the boarding pass, and directed us off in completely the wrong direction, with only minutes left until the gate closed.
‘Still think you don’t need glasses?’ Ryan had teased, collapsing onto his own seat with visible relief. I’d smiled, because he thought it was a simple mistake, and I didn’t want to ruin the start of our holiday by telling him that the instances of blurred vision
in my right eye seemed to be increasing.
Equally worrying was the thought that I might have subconsciously tried to make us miss the plane, to answer the guilt I felt for taking Hope so far away from Maddie, on what would have been their first Christmas together.
‘Even if we hadn’t booked this holiday months before Maddie woke up from her coma, would we really have asked her to join us for Christmas day? Don’t you think that would have been weird?’ Ryan had reasoned.
‘Everything about this is weird,’ I’d countered. ‘But Christmas is about family, and I don’t like the idea of anyone spending it alone.’
‘I’m sure she’ll end up changing her mind and spending it with Bill and Faye,’ Ryan had assured me, sliding his arms around my waist and whispering into the curve of my neck. ‘I love you for caring, but Maddie’s not your responsibility,’ he’d reminded me gently.
I nodded, and zipped up the case I was packing for our much-anticipated Christmas trip to Lapland. But my ears were ringing with the unspoken end to that sentence, as clearly as if he’d said the words out loud: She’s mine.
During our six-night stay, we experienced everything the tour brochure had promised us, and more. Bundled up warmly against the sub-zero temperature, each day felt as if we were stepping straight into a quintessential Christmas card. Not surprisingly, Hope fell in love with the reindeers pulling our sleigh, even if disappointingly they couldn’t actually fly, and then lost her heart to the team of huskies who drove us through a snowy landscape, which was lit by flaming lanterns flickering like beacons in the snow. While the highlight of her stay was the visit to Santa’s cabin, my own took place on the final night of our holiday, when Hope was fast asleep in bed.
Ryan and I were snuggled together on the deep comfortable settee before a crackling open fire. Two empty brandy glasses were on the table beside us, the warmth from the alcohol warming us almost as much as the blazing logs. It would have been easy to have drifted off to sleep, limbs entwined around each other, but thankfully we didn’t.
Just before midnight, Ryan leapt to his feet, so unexpectedly that I collapsed into the space he’d left behind. ‘The lights!’ he exclaimed, reaching for my hand and pulling me up beside him. Once upright, he spun me around to face the huge window, where a vague greenish streak was staining the black of the sky. We struggled into our outer clothes so fast that jumpers went on backwards, or inside out, and somehow I managed to put my snow boots on the wrong feet, wasting several precious minutes having to sort them out.
‘Hurry,’ urged Ryan as he waited by the door, his face wearing an identical expression of excitement to the one I’d seen hours earlier on Hope’s, when she’d met Santa Claus.
I was worried we’d taken too long, that the lights in the sky would have grown impatient and cut short their spectacular show, but they were still there, as if they’d been waiting for us. Hand in hand we ran towards the lake and then turned back to stare at the sky above our darkened cabin, to see something so incredible, I knew the memory of it would stay with me for the rest of my life.
Neither of us spoke as we stood awestruck watching the dancing green curtain of the aurora borealis undulate and ripple above us. The night was silent, and there was something special in the air, and it wasn’t just the northern lights. Without either of us saying a word, I knew we were both remembering another night sky two and a half years earlier.
It was the night of the meteor shower, and it was also the night when everything had first begun to change. Ryan and I were in his garden on that warm summer evening, a blanket spread upon the lawn, so we’d get the best view of the night sky. I never could decide if the glowing streaks painting the velvet blackness above us made it happen, or whether it was destined to have happened anyway; as unstoppable as a comet.
We watched for hours, speaking in hushed whispers, as though terrified of breaking the spell. And when Ryan’s hand had hesitantly crossed the expanse of blanket between us to reach for mine, my fingers were unfurled, waiting for him. It would be weeks before we kissed, even longer before he finally took me to his bed, but for both of us, that was the night when we realised that something we’d never engineered or planned had happened. We had fallen in love.
Maddie
I hadn’t expected to spend Christmas with my landlord; in fact there was probably something written in my tenancy agreement specifically advising against it. But then a lot of things happening in my life lately weren’t exactly what I’d planned or expected either. I was learning to go with the flow.
I’d had other options for Christmas. I could have spent it with my parents at the care home, or with Ellen at the hospital, but I’d turned them both down as tactfully as I could. ‘I’m looking forward to spending the day in my pyjamas, watching White Christmas on the telly and chilling out,’ I’d told my father.
With Ellen, I’d been more honest. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ I’d said, hugging her tightly as we said goodbye on the pavement outside the café where we’d met for lunch. ‘But I’ve spent more than enough Christmases at the hospital, so I might just pass on joining you, if you don’t mind.’
‘Okay,’ she’d replied, scrutinising me carefully; more nurse than friend, I suspected, by the concerned look in her eyes. ‘But if you change your mind, promise you’ll let me know.’ She hugged me fiercely one last time and whispered the words she used to say every single time she left my hospital room. ‘You stay awake now, Miracle Girl.’
The words were poignant, and my smile couldn’t entirely dispel the memory of those early terrifying weeks, when the doctors weren’t able to assure me that I wouldn’t slip back into a coma. How could they, when there’d never been a case like mine before?
‘Always,’ I assured her, the reply falling from my lips like the chorus of a familiar song. It was what I always said.
There were things I’d obviously forgotten during the six years I’d been in a coma, and the fact that supermarket shopping on Christmas Eve is always a bad idea was clearly one of them. The lack of trolleys should have warned me it was going to be busy, but I continued into the store anyway, carried on a tide of fellow shoppers.
Noddy Holder was screeching out from the overhead speakers, informing me (in case I hadn’t figured it out for myself) ‘It’s Christmaaaaas’. I paused inside the doorway and smiled. It was my first Christmas for seven years, and it was good to know that some things hadn’t changed.
Like a salmon making its way upstream, I negotiated my way to the frozen goods aisle, past shoppers with trolleys loaded so high they could scarcely see over the top of them. I was leaning into a deep freezer cabinet, trying to haul out the only remaining frozen turkey that wasn’t the size of a small emu, when someone’s trolley collided into my legs and I felt my feet lift off the floor. In the brief seconds before Mitch pulled me back, I was already visualising the headlines: Coma girl breaks neck after freak freezer accident. Fortunately the timely arrival of my landlord saved me from featuring once again in the local newspaper.
The five bruises I felt sure I would find where his fingers had bitten into my shoulder and saved me from falling, were a small price to pay for retaining my dignity. Being unexpectedly inverted into a freezer had brought twin spots of colour to my cheeks, which stayed there as I repeatedly thanked Mitch.
‘No problem,’ he said easily, glaring at the offender who’d barged into me and who was already at the other end of the aisle, presumably looking for new shoppers to mow down.
‘I wasn’t expecting it to be so busy,’ I said, flustered. ‘I guess this is what happens when you leave your shopping to the last minute.’
‘I’m a man, I know no other way,’ said Mitch with a smile.
I laughed, noticing for the first time his loaded trolley which held not only food but also a remote-control car and several hi-tech toys.
‘Looks like Sam’s going to have a great Christmas,’ I said with a smile.
Mitch gave a disarming shrug, and for a second he
looked more like a kid than a father himself. Admittedly, a very big kid. ‘I hope so. But I’m not actually seeing him tomorrow. It’s not my turn this year.’
Was that what made the offer jump straight to my lips, totally bypassing my brain for a quick censor before being voiced? There were surely thousands of parents in similar situations all over the world, but the common ground Mitch and I stood on seemed to suddenly have constructed a bridge between us.
‘I’m sure you probably have something arranged, but if you don’t, do you feel like spending Christmas day with me?’
I hadn’t planned on inviting him, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to say yes, but somehow both of those things happened, and by the time I left the supermarket and headed back home, my plans for a solitary Christmas day had been totally rewritten.
For two people who didn’t know each other particularly well, we spent a remarkably comfortable day together. He’d arrived on time, bringing wine, more food than we could possibly manage to eat, and an enormous bunch of out-of-season sunflowers. ‘A friend of mine owns a nursery; he grows them in greenhouses all year round for hotels and weddings, that kind of thing. I thought if we’re having a non-traditional Christmas, I should bring non-traditional flowers.’
I smiled at the blooms, whose cheerfulness always seemed like an instant antidote to gloom or despondency. I couldn’t think of a better flower for him to have brought. He found a vase in his grandmother’s kitchen when I couldn’t locate one, and while I arranged the sunflowers in the tall crystal container my curiosity got the better of me.
‘Is it weird for you, seeing me here in this flat, instead of your grandmother?’
Mitch was putting the cheeses he’d brought into the fridge, and perhaps his reply was a bit slow in coming, and when it did his voice was slightly gruff. Oh God, I was like cyanide to this man; if I wasn’t making him blush furiously, I was choking him with emotion.