A Sky Full of Stars

by Dani Atkins

The nurse slowed his pace and placed one hand – which was roughly the size of a bear’s paw – on Alex’s shoulder. ‘The doctors will need to explain the full extent of your wife’s injuries,’ he said, his eyes unconsciously flicking left and right along the empty corridor, as though hoping someone better equipped to answer Alex’s questions might miraculously appear.

  ‘Lisa has sustained multiple injuries,’ the man began, speaking slowly, as if he already knew that Alex would struggle to comprehend his words. ‘We understand she was in one of the front carriages, which were the worst affected by the impact.’

  The newsreel looped through Alex’s mind and he saw again the crushed and broken carriages beside the train tracks. Unable to cope with the sympathy on the nurse’s face, his eyes dropped to the man’s bench-press-sculpted chest and focused on the nametag pinned there. Declan O’Keefe, he read, realising he hadn’t even noticed his thick Irish accent. He heard it now as he continued to speak.

  ‘The reason your wife has been transferred to this ward is because of the injuries to her head.’

  Alex swayed, and the nurse’s hand was now needed more for support than for comfort. Head injuries? Suddenly they were in a whole new nightmare.

  ‘Before I take you to her, I need to prepare you for the machinery and monitors she’s hooked up to currently. People can get a little freaked out if they’re not expecting it and—’

  ‘But she’s going to be okay, isn’t she? She’s going to get better?’ Alex’s interruption bordered on angry accusation, but Declan’s shoulders were broad and experienced enough to take it. Alex suspected he’d been here a great many times before.

  ‘Lisa’s doctors are the ones you need to talk to next. As soon as I’ve taken you to her, I’ll see if I can get someone to come and see you.’ His face wore a rueful apology. ‘As you can imagine, things have been a little crazy around here today.’

  Alex’s teeth were gritted, probably forcefully enough to damage the enamel. Through them he managed to beg. ‘Please, can you just take me to her. She must be so scared being here all alone.’

  He’d been warned. Declan had done his best to prepare him, and yet even words like ‘head injury’, and ‘monitors’ hadn’t equipped Alex for the stomach-lurching terror he felt when he was ushered into the small side room where his wife lay waiting for him. He faltered at the doorway, and when he did manage to step forward, it was as though he’d stepped into a lift shaft only to find there was no carriage waiting inside it.

  He turned to Declan. ‘She’s not breathing by herself? She’s on a ventilator?’

  Declan nodded slowly.

  On legs that had never felt less able to support him, Alex crossed to the bed, where the only woman he had ever loved lay immobile. It was the stillness of her that shook him the most. Lisa was never still; even in sleep she was an irrepressible stealer of the duvet and hogger of the pillows. Seeing her now, looking like a waxwork model of herself, felt beyond unreal. There was an ugly dark bruise along her jaw, but far more shocking was the plastic breathing tube protruding from between the lips he’d kissed only hours earlier. With mounting concern he allowed his gaze to travel up to the enormous bandage swathing her head. It was so thick it gave her head a strangely misshapen look.

  ‘Lisa, baby, I’m here. It’s me, Alex.’ He bent down to kiss her cheek, his gaze fixed on her closed eyelids, which were as still as a porcelain doll’s. He reached for her hand, weaving his own past the snaking wires and tubes that attached her to God only knew how many machines and monitors. Lisa would probably have been able to tell him what each one was called. She was an avid viewer of TV hospital dramas, but Alex had never cared for them. He was completely ill-equipped, in every way imaginable, for finding himself dropped right into the middle of one.

  Lisa’s hand was still as he threaded his fingers between hers, and even when he tightened his grip, there was no familiar responding squeeze. Tentatively, with fingers that were visibly trembling, he reached to touch the smooth skin of her cheek.

  ‘Can she… Can she hear me? Has she been conscious at all since she got here?’

  Declan looked torn, unwilling to lie but equally reluctant to sever the strands of hope that Alex was clinging to like a man drowning. ‘She’s been like this since she was brought here,’ he replied, each word carefully chosen. ‘But you should definitely keep talking to her.’

  With a magician’s dexterity, he swept up a plastic chair and positioned it behind Alex’s knees. ‘Sit down,’ he urged, pressing Alex gently onto the chair. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  Alex dragged the chair even closer to the head of the bed, as though those precious extra inches would make all the difference.

  ‘Hey, baby. It’s time to wake up now.’ The words he roused Lisa with each morning felt wrong; they belonged to the quiet haven of their bed, whispered beneath the duvet, not in a hospital room, against a background of beeping machines. But maybe they were the key to the door behind which his wife was trapped. ‘Please, hon. Open your eyes now. Let me know you’re all right, that everything’s going to be okay.’

  His tears splashed down on their joined hands. He tasted the salt of them on her wrist when he buried his face against the pulse point there and took comfort in the steady throb beating rhythmically against his lips.

  The sound of hurried footsteps jolted him upright and he jerked around, uncaring about the tears staining his cheeks. His body thrummed with tension as he braced himself for the sight of a white coat in the doorway, but the only thing white about the man who entered the room was his face. It was the colour of bleached bone.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Oh fuck.’ Todd was neither religious nor given to profanity, so his gasped exclamation confirmed that things looked every bit as bad as Alex had feared.

  Todd approached the bed with hesitant steps, his eyes flashing between his sister-in-law and his brother, who appeared to have aged twenty years in the time it had taken him to park the car. ‘How is she?’

  The fear had lodged in Alex’s throat, choking his airway and allowing only a helpless, inarticulate sound to escape. It took three attempts before he found his voice. ‘I’ve not seen a doctor yet. They said someone’s coming to talk to me.’

  Todd nodded and came to stand beside him, his eyes taking in the machines, the unconscious woman in the bed, and the lack of medical activity. He was a logical man, as befitted someone in his profession, but now he found himself praying that he’d misinterpreted what he was looking at.

  5

  Molly

  There were three texts from her on my phone. They were all incredibly long, which meant they must have taken her ages to write. For some reason my mother had never managed to master the art of using her thumbs when texting. Maybe it was a generation thing. The messages were perfectly punctuated, with paragraphs, indents and even a semi-colon or two – all used correctly. Once a librarian, always a librarian, I thought with a smile.

  I took the phone out to my postage-stamp of a garden, where the reception was better. The wooden bench, positioned in a corner suntrap, felt comfortingly warm against my back as I waited for her to pick up.

  ‘Molly.’ I had no idea how it was possible to infuse that much concern into simply saying my name, but my mum managed to do it anyway. ‘Why are you using your phone to call me?’

  ‘Because that’s why the nice people at Apple invented them?’ I replied. Going for humour had always been my default setting. Sometimes I forgot Mum didn’t always appreciate it.

  She made a ‘tsk’ sound, the kind I imagined Victorian dowagers used to favour. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. You should be messaging so that other calls – like important calls from the hospital – can still get through.’

  ‘Mum, I’m sure if anyone needs to get hold of me that urgently, they won’t just give up if I’m on another call.’

  ‘There’s no point taking unnecessary chances.’

  I sighed softly. It was futile to disagree with her. There
was no use telling her to calm down, and not to worry about me. ‘I’m your mother; it’s my job to worry.’ She’d repeated those words so often, they were starting to sound like a mission statement. She was certainly devoting all her energy to the task, and had been doing so for the last eighteen months, ever since my diagnosis.

  At seventy years of age, she should have been out trouncing her pals at bridge and whist, or playing bowls or finally taking that cruise she’d been promising herself. Instead, she’d been thrust back about twenty years in time, to a period when her priority was to look after her little girl. The fact that the ‘little girl’ had recently celebrated her thirty-first birthday appeared to be completely irrelevant.

  ‘How was your last day?’

  ‘Sad, touching and emotional.’ A lump I hadn’t been expecting had formed in my throat. ‘It was harder than I thought it would be, Mum.’

  ‘I’m sure it was, sweetheart.’ I’d opened a door, so I couldn’t really blame her for trying to squeeze through it. ‘Perhaps it’s time I came to stay with you – just for a little while, to keep your spirits up.’

  I smiled wryly. By now I should have been better at avoiding the conversational landmines, but I’d walked right into that one. ‘We’ve been over this a hundred times, Mum. I don’t want you putting your whole life on hold because of me.’

  ‘My life won’t mean much to me if you’re not in it any more.’

  I hadn’t seen that one coming. Just when I thought I’d got everything sorted in my head, when I’d made peace with the hand I’d been dealt, an unseen dagger slipped straight through my ribs and found my heart. My failing heart.

  ‘Come on now, Mum. We agreed – we’ve got to stay positive. Everything’s going to be fine. And I don’t need anyone to look after me.’ At least not yet, I added silently. ‘Besides, what would Bertie do if you came to stay with me?’ I wasn’t playing fair, but I knew how much she loved her little West Highland terrier. After my father’s death five years ago, I’d bought her the feisty little dog for companionship, never imagining that he’d become the new love of her life. It was no secret that nothing Bertie ate came from the pet-food aisle in the supermarket and that he slept on top of the duvet, on what was once Dad’s half of the bed. Not that I could blame her for that. I knew from experience how that vacant half of a double bed could take a while to get used to.

  ‘Well, I’ve got my suitcase all packed and ready. Just to be on the safe side.’

  I thought of my own bag, also packed and waiting at the bottom of the coat cupboard. Statistically it was likely to gather a whole lot of dust before I ever needed to pull it out of there.

  ‘It could be years, Mum,’ I reminded her gently. We’d read the same literature; she knew this as well as I did.

  ‘Or it could be five minutes,’ she batted right back.

  *

  I opened the freezer door and stared with tepid interest at the array of ready meals stacked neatly on its shelves. It was hard to summon up enthusiasm for something I would struggle to identify after it came out of the microwave. There was a time, not that long ago, when cooking had been my favourite pastime. I’d spend hours poring over recipe books and enjoyed the whole process of planning, shopping, and then preparing and cooking.

  ‘You do know you’re gradually turning into a fifties housewife,’ Kyra had teasingly observed as she’d watched me snip recipes from a magazine in the school staffroom.

  ‘I find it really satisfying making something home-cooked and wholesome from scratch. And besides, Tom really appreciates it.’

  ‘I bet he does. He’s definitely struck gold with you, my friend. If that man has got even half a brain, he’ll never let you go.’

  But in the end he had. Or I’d let him go. I was never quite sure which.

  My desire to cook had disappeared right along with my appetite and my flagging energy. The plus side was that my waist had never been so small. The downside – there was no longer an arm sliding around it to notice.

  6

  Alex

  To Alex, it seemed like several hours before anyone came to talk to them. But Todd knew that it was actually fifty-six minutes before the doctor arrived. He’d watched every single one of them jerk forward on the clock face on the wall.

  ‘Mr Stevens.’

  Both men turned at the sound of their name. The doctor was tall, with dark hair and thick eyebrows that joined above his nose. There was a covering of bristle on his jawline that was several hours past a five o’clock shadow. He looked like a man who hadn’t seen his own bed for a worryingly long time.

  From the degree of despair on their faces, it must have been easy for him to work out which Mr Stevens was married to the woman in the bed. The doctor crossed to Alex, extending his hand in a formal greeting.

  ‘Mr Stevens. I’m Dr Lloyd-Gordon, the physician leading the team who’ve been caring for your wife today.’

  Alex bit down on the retort that apart from Declan, who’d been in and out of the hospital room several times, there had been no one attending to Lisa.

  ‘I’m sorry we’ve kept you waiting for so long. I realise how anxious you must be.’

  Alex’s aversion to the medical profession tended to manifest itself in a variety of ways, including through anger. ‘Why aren’t they doing something for her?’ he’d fumed to Todd earlier as they’d waited for someone to come and speak to them. ‘Shouldn’t she be in surgery or getting treatment?’

  ‘I don’t know, mate,’ Todd had replied, as much out of his depth as his brother. ‘Maybe they have to wait for her condition to stabilise or something?’ They were using vocabulary from a language that neither of them spoke, and the frustration of not knowing had fermented toxically during the long wait.

  ‘Can I suggest we go somewhere a little quieter to talk?’ Dr Lloyd-Gordon asked, glancing up with a brief nod of recognition as Declan once again slipped into the room.

  ‘No,’ Alex said, his voice low, like the growl of a cornered animal. He swallowed and dug deep to find his composure. ‘I really don’t want to leave Lisa alone.’ He looked at his unnaturally silent wife, the woman who was never still, never quiet. It seemed unlikely she’d even realise if he left the room, but still he didn’t want to go. Alex already knew what kind of news got delivered in rooms that were ‘a little quieter’. He was nowhere near ready to go there. ‘Can we please just talk in here?’

  The doctor responded with a single nod. His eyes went to Declan, who quietly closed the door. For a long moment the four men looked at each other. Dr Lloyd-Gordon cleared his throat, but Alex surprised himself by being the first to speak.

  ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’

  Dr Lloyd-Gordon sighed softly. Alex wondered if anyone else heard the thread of relief running through it. ‘Yes, Mr Stevens, I’m afraid it is. Your wife’s situation is extremely grave. I realise this is a lot for you to take in and—’

  ‘How bad?’ Alex interrupted. Whatever the doctor had to tell him, it surely couldn’t be worse than the torment of not knowing. Only it was.

  ‘In layman’s terms, Lisa sustained an acute and catastrophic trauma to her skull in the train crash.’

  Catastrophic. The word belonged in news reports about cyclones, earthquakes or tsunamis. It had no place being used in the context of a young wife and mother who’d been anticipating one of the best days of her professional life. How had they ended up here? How had this happened to them?

  ‘But you can fix her, can’t you?’ Alex asked, perfectly aware his desperation made it sound as if he was asking a mechanic to mend his car rather than restore the woman he loved to full health.

  ‘Lisa’s head injuries are extremely serious.’ The doctor paused as his words found the darkest place in Alex’s heart and settled there. ‘The paramedics and doctors on the scene worked to stabilise her condition and after being transferred here she was placed on a ventilator, which is now effectively breathing for her.’

  ‘And she can stay on that un
til she starts breathing for herself again?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, but you need to understand that Lisa will not recover from her injuries.’

  The world split open, pitching Alex into a bottomless crevasse with unscalable sides. ‘But there has to be something you can do? You can’t just give up on her.’ Despair and fear were rising in Alex’s throat, threatening to choke him. ‘We have a little boy. His name is Connor.’ Ridiculously, he could feel himself patting his pockets for his wallet, as though showing the doctor a photograph of their son would somehow change everything. ‘He’s only six. He still needs his mum,’ Alex added brokenly. ‘We both do.’

  He could hear crying, but when he swiped the back of his hand across his cheek, Alex was surprised to find it dry. More than anything the doctor had said, more than the evidence of his own eyes, it was the sound of Todd quietly weeping that made everything horribly real.

  ‘When Lisa arrived on the unit this morning, a senior colleague and myself performed a series of tests on her; tests that are designed to determine the level of her brain function.’

  Alex had no need to ask what the results were; his brilliant wife, who’d never failed a test in her entire life, had clearly failed this one.

  ‘We’d like to perform those tests again to confirm our findings.’

  *

  The room they were shown to was small and impersonal. It seemed like an eternity and yet also far too soon before a respectful knock on the door heralded the return of Dr Lloyd-Gordon, Declan and a woman they’d not seen before. No one needed to say the words; their body language spoke for them, exuding the truth like an airborne poison.

  ‘No, no, no.’ Alex’s head was shaking in denial. ‘But she’s still warm. She’s still breathing. I could feel her pulse.’

  ‘It’s just the machines,’ the doctor explained. His voice was different now: firm, allowing hope no foothold. ‘I’m very sorry to have to confirm that the tests we have carried out are conclusive. Lisa is dead. Her loss of brain function is irreversible. It can never come back.’