by Dani Atkins
Alex reached for his car keys on the kitchen counter, only to discover Barbara was both faster and stronger than he’d imagined a woman of her age to be.
‘And where do you think you’re dashing off to?’ she challenged.
For a moment Alex was concerned she might not be up to the task of looking after Connor. Had she forgotten they’d just this minute been talking about him going to the hospital?
Barbara was shaking her head in castigation. ‘You’re not going anywhere, young man, without a good hot meal inside you first.’
Alex, who currently felt closer to Barbara’s age than his own, still managed to muster up a smile at being called ‘young man’. For a woman who’d never been a mother or a grandmother, Barbara had taken to both roles as though they’d always been hers.
Alex’s attention was fixed on the oven, as if by staring at the shepherd’s pie he might somehow help it heat faster. As much as he hated hospitals, he was anxious to get back.
In the meantime Barbara had made herself at home, busily setting the table for their meal before joining Alex. She laid a hand gently on his forearm. ‘I’m sure Molly will be fine. She’s a fighter, that girl, and she has Mac with her now.’
Alex blinked, wondering if he was the one who’d been blind instead of the man who was now at Molly’s bedside. ‘I was quite surprised how badly shaken up Mac was when he arrived at the hospital,’ he said carefully.
‘Were you?’ Two words, so gently spoken, yet they pierced through Alex’s armour. He turned his head slowly towards Barbara.
‘Have I misjudged him? Have I read Mac wrong?’
‘Only you know that, Alex, my dear,’ Barbara said with the kind of wisdom Alex doubted he’d ever achieve. ‘Mac is a quiet one, not a heart on his sleeve person, like you,’ Barbara said.
‘It’s just he always seemed to be holding back and I never really understood why.’ Barbara’s blue eyes were fixed on his, as she waited for him to join up his own dots. ‘I think I might have been wrong… not just about Mac, but about a great many things.’
Barbara reached for Alex’s hand and squeezed it warmly. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Alex. You’ve been through a lot.’
The guilt felt like a boulder someone had placed in the middle of his chest.
‘We all have,’ he said sadly.
*
The bed was empty. Alex rocked on his feet, the rubber of his soles squeaking on the linoleum floor. He glanced around, trying not to let panic fill the gaps. This was definitely the right unit, wasn’t it? Yes, he remembered that cork noticeboard filled with photographs of patients and thank you cards. This was the right place, but the bed Molly had occupied only three hours earlier was now stripped of its covers. Did it mean…? Had she…? It was an impossible thought to finish.
The swish of the door opening made him turn so fast, he felt dizzy.
‘Excuse me, the young woman who was in this bed – Molly Kendall – can you tell me where she is?’
The nurse seemed momentarily fazed, and when Alex caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the basin in the corner, he understood why. He looked like a crazy person. He deliberately slowed his speech and his breathing. The racing heart remained totally outside of his control.
‘Earlier today Molly Kendall was in this bed – and now it’s empty. Do you know where she is?’
The nurse looked apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve only just come on duty. Let me find out for you. Please wait here.’
Alex knew exactly why he’d been told to remain in the now empty room. That’s what they did in places like this, when bad news was about to be delivered. He gave an involuntary shiver. He was right to have spent his whole life hating hospitals, because nothing good ever happened in them.
The nurse’s face was maddeningly unreadable when she returned.
‘Molly Kendall has been moved to another room on the unit.’
‘Why?’
The nurse finally smiled. ‘Because she’s showing signs of improvement. She came round a little while ago and although she’s still very weak, the doctors are encouraged by her initial response to the medication. I can take you to her if you like?’
He followed her down the corridor, his smile so impossibly wide, he probably still appeared unbalanced.
‘It’s the door at the end,’ the nurse informed him, turning away with an apology when summoned by a colleague.
From within the room, Alex could hear the soft rumble of a voice he recognised as Mac’s. He paused by the entrance, hidden from view by the open door. His hand was fisted to knock on the frame, but before it connected, he froze. Although he couldn’t hear what Mac was saying, he could hear the tone. It was intimate; it was confessional; and it was… nothing to do with him.
Through the gap between the door and the jamb he saw the two people Lisa had unwittingly brought together. Mac was pulled up as close as he could get to Molly’s bed. His voice was hoarse, barely recognisable, and it was obvious he was fighting back the tears. As Alex watched, a pale white hand, with a cannula and tubes attached, came into view. Very slowly the hand reached up to rest against Mac’s cheek.
Alex paused for a long moment, imagining that in some distant place Lisa was smiling gently in approval. Silently he turned around and walked away.
38
Alex
Connor’s cry was loud enough to carry to every room in the house. The box of cat biscuits Alex had been tipping into a bowl, slipped from his fingers. Tiny triangles of kitty kibble rained like hailstones onto the checkerboard tiles.
‘Connor, what’s wrong?’ cried Alex already crunching cat food beneath his feet as he ran into the hallway. The answer was a second wail of anguish.
Alex thundered up the stairs to Connor’s bedroom, already fearing the worst. Had he fallen and hurt his arm? They’d had an appointment at the Fracture Clinic that afternoon and the doctors had assured him that Connor’s injury was healing well. But that didn’t stop Alex from worrying about the long list of complications he’d been foolish enough to look up online.
It was early evening and the upstairs hall was in darkness, but Alex didn’t pause to turn on the lights. For one crazy moment he thought there’d been a break-in. Connor’s room was in disarray. Books had been thrown from the shelves and were scattered across the carpet as if flung by a poltergeist. Alex quickly stepped over them to reach Connor, who was standing sorrowfully beside the window. His sobs were now at the breath-hitching, inarticulate stage.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Alex asked, his eyes darting inexpertly over his son’s body for signs of injury. There was none to be seen. ‘It’s okay. I’m here now,’ Alex said. ‘Calm down and tell me what’s wrong.’
He crouched down before Connor, the way he’d seen Lisa do a thousand times before. He could imagine his son falling willingly into her outstretched arms, but in Alex’s embrace he felt like a tiny, sad mannequin. Connor’s face was wet with tears and Alex fruitlessly searched his pockets for a tissue that he didn’t expect to locate.
‘I can’t find it,’ Connor said between hiccupping sobs. ‘I’ve looked and looked but I can’t find it anywhere.’
Alex’s panic began to drop like mercury in a barometer. ‘What is it you’ve lost?’ he asked, scanning the room as though it was a crime scene. ‘Tell me what it is, and we’ll look for it together. I’m good at finding things.’ That was a blatant lie, and one that would doubtless have amused Lisa, who’d been the household retriever of all things that had gone astray.
‘The red star. The one with the funny name. Mummy used to show me how to find it, but I can’t remember how to do it on my own.’
Alex’s stomach plummeted. ‘It’s okay. Don’t get upset. I’ll help you find it,’ he said with a confidence he was far from feeling.
‘But you don’t know about the stars like Mummy does.’
Alex’s throat tightened uncomfortably. ‘I know this was something you and Mummy did together, but I can help
you. I really can. Mummy taught me lots over the years.’
Connor’s eyes were full of doubt as Alex pushed aside the curtains and threw open the bedroom window. It was a clear and cloudless night, which Alex knew was good for stargazing. Which was about all he did know, if truth be told. He surveyed the world Lisa had so comfortably inhabited and felt so far from her that the distance could be measured in light years.
‘Do we need Mummy’s telescope to see this red star?’ Alex asked, already panicking that he was halfway to failure before he’d even begun.
‘No. Mummy just showed me where to find it in the sky. But I don’t know where to look for it without her. I don’t know anything without Mummy.’
This was so much more than Alex’s ability to locate some weirdly named star, he realised, as he helplessly scanned the night skies. This was about not letting Connor down. Again.
He tried innumerable google searches, and even flipped through the astronomy books Connor had thrown on the floor in frustration. ‘It’s got to be here somewhere,’ he muttered more to himself than Connor. ‘Are you sure you can’t remember what it was called?’
Connor, who had wordlessly retreated into a corner of the room with Lunar in his arms, shook his head sorrowfully. Alex disappeared into the upstairs office he’d shared with Lisa and returned with an armful of her astronomy textbooks, but they were pitched at a level so far above his head, they were almost as unreachable as the stars themselves. Doggedly Alex ploughed through them, dashing at intervals to the window with an open book or internet page in hand for reference. Each time Connor would glance up hopefully, only to turn away with a dejected look when Alex once again failed to locate the mysterious star with the ‘funny’ name.
‘I’ll find it, Connor, I will,’ he promised, his voice sounded oddly scratchy, as though his throat was lined with barbed wire. It took the drip of a single tear falling onto the page he was trying to decipher for him to realise he was crying.
From the corner of the room Connor yawned noisily and when Alex glanced at his watch he was shocked to discover it was almost Connor’s bedtime and he still hadn’t prepared their dinner. He was failing on so many levels as a parent, it was getting hard to keep count.
‘I’m really sorry, champ,’ he said, his knees cracking in protest as he got up from the bedroom floor. ‘This might take me a little longer than I first thought. But I will find it.’
Connor rose fluidly from his cross-legged position in the corner. ‘Mummy will know,’ he said, still sounding forlorn. ‘I’ll get her to show me again when she comes back. It doesn’t matter.’
Except to Alex it did. It mattered a lot.
It mattered as he threw together a hasty meal of pasta and something tomatoey from a jar for their dinner. It mattered as he ran Connor’s bath, and tucked him up in bed with yet another apology. It mattered so much that halfway through a TV car show, a programme he usually enjoyed, he switched off the set and climbed determinedly back up the stairs.
He looked in briefly on Connor who was sleeping soundly beneath a spiralling projection of stars from the night light he still wouldn’t put away. Alex stared at the galaxy on the ceiling and then returned to Lisa’s textbooks which he’d piled back on her desk.
He found what he’d been searching for in the pages of well-thumbed book Lisa must have had since her university days. His pulse had quickened at the sight of her handwriting on the inside cover. He’d run his fingers over the faded ink of the name she’d had before she’d taken his, and as he glanced at the book’s index a single word seemed to leap off the page at him.
‘Betelgeuse,’ he said, his voice caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob. ‘The star with the funny name.’
He flipped to the page, which didn’t show Beetlejuice the poltergeist from the Hollywood film, but instead a fiery red star which was apparently a thousand times larger than the sun. He scanned the paragraph as relief thumped heavily in his chest.
It took a while for his untrained eyes to search the night sky and locate Venus, which was his first reference point. But as though she was still there, still helping him, Alex remembered asking Lisa how to locate the planet named after the goddess of love on one of their first dates. She’d laughed and teased him for being corny, and he had simply shrugged and kissed her, falling more in love with her with every passing second.
Connor was too soundly asleep for him to disturb with his discovery. It could wait. Alex cast a solitary shadow as he stood at the open window, a smile gently curving his lips as he successfully located the glowing red dot in the sky. A cool breeze ruffled Alex’s hair and for a just a moment it didn’t feel as though he was standing there alone.
39
Molly
‘Do you think it’s more of a nice dress thing, or a pair of jeans and shirt kind of thing?’ I asked, turning from my wardrobe with a hanger in each hand.
His smile was slow. ‘You might be asking the wrong person here. My vote would probably go for what you’re wearing right now.’
The bedroom mirror caught my smile, as well as my current outfit. The pink lacy bra and matching briefs were sheer, sexy, and made no pretence at being practical. My relationship with Mac was still very much at the Victoria’s Secret rather than the Bridget Jones undies stage.
‘In fact,’ he added, rising from the bed and coming up behind me to circle his arms around my waist, ‘if anything, I think you might be a little overdressed.’ He glanced at the clock on my bedside table. ‘Do you think we have time to do anything about that?’
Desire was a low, lazy serpent that slowly uncoiled inside me at his suggestion. I too glanced at the clock, and shook my head.
Mac’s sigh echoed my own disappointment. ‘Later then,’ he whispered into my ear, gently pulling away from me.
I resisted the temptation to wriggle back against the firm contours of his body.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he said, heading towards the doorway and stopping only to add with a grin, ‘A cold one, I think.’
I was smiling as I sat down at my dressing table to fix my hair and make-up. It was only seven weeks since that day in the hospital when everything changed between us. I’d spent most of that time in a state of amazement at how something so new could already feel so settled, and so right.
His was the first face I saw when I came round at the hospital, and as sappy as it was to admit, I knew in that moment it was the face I wanted to see every single time I opened my eyes to start a new day.
‘Don’t ever scare me like that again,’ he said, and I was shocked to see tears shining brightly in his eyes.
‘Right now the only thing I want you to concentrate on is getting better again. But I want you to know this isn’t going away – I’m not going away.’
And he’d been true to his word. He was at every visiting session throughout my five-day stay in hospital. He was the first one through the doors when they opened, and the last to be evicted at the end of every evening.
On the second day, when I was starting to feel more like me again, he took my hand, now free of its drip, and held it gently between his.
‘That old song is wrong, you know. A kiss isn’t just a kiss; sometimes it’s a wake-up call to something you’ve been too scared to admit.’ He lifted my hand to his lips, grazing the knuckles with the gentlest of kisses. ‘Ever since New Year’s Eve, I’ve been trying to keep my distance, trying to give you some space.’
‘I know,’ I said sadly. ‘I assumed it was because you regretted what happened on the balcony.’
He shook his head slowly, but I still needed to hear the actual words.
‘I tried to convince myself there was nothing between us, but I knew all along I was lying to myself,’ he said.
‘I thought you saw me as just a friend,’ I admitted, too hesitant to be the first to jump off the diving board.
‘Friends don’t feel the way I feel about you,’ he replied, his remarkable blue eyes staring deeply into mine. ‘For far
too long, I’ve spent my days rationalising away what I feel, telling myself I should stand aside because of Alex. I’ve been going to sleep at night with it all squared away in my mind, but in the morning…’ His voice trailed away, and I suddenly found it much harder to breathe. ‘But in the morning I always wake up loving you again.’
‘You… You love me?’ I asked incredulously.
Mac shifted position to perch on the edge of the bed, leaning close enough to probably send every monitor I was attached to into overdrive. Any minute now someone was likely to come racing into the room pushing a crash cart.
‘I’m falling in love with you, Molly Kendall. I have been falling in love with you from the first day I met you, and I know I’m going to keep on doing that every single day of my life. What I feel for you is so strong, I can’t imagine a time when it will ever stop growing.’
He looked at me and everything he’d just said was there on his face. And yet I still couldn’t take it in.
‘It’s okay if you don’t feel the same – or even if you never feel this way.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Although I really hope that one day you will.’
He paused, his heart and soul open to me.
Very slowly, I smiled and nodded. ‘I already do,’ I whispered. ‘Have we got to the bit where you kiss me yet?’
‘We have,’ he said, leaning in.
And just like that, everything changed for the better.
*
‘Very nice,’ Mac said approvingly as I came down the stairs forty minutes later in a pair of indigo jeans and a tailored white shirt. I’d left the top three buttons undone, revealing the scar I no longer felt the need to hide. Now whenever I saw it, I remembered only Mac’s tender gaze the first time I’d laid naked in his arms. His head had bent to the long red line and he’d kissed it, almost reverently. ‘Without this, there would be no you,’ he’d said huskily. ‘It’s a constant reminder of how lucky I am.’
It had been the moment to finally voice my fears. ‘You do know that the doctors can’t tell me how much time this new heart has given me. If I’m lucky then it might be as much as twenty-five years—’