Chapter 20
FRASER
We’re an hour into another insufferable faculty meeting when a sharp rap on the boardroom door is followed by my colleague, Keith—an unpleasant and officious man at the best of times—phone in his hand, looking harassed.
He scans the room. Somehow I already know he’s looking for me. I’ve been overcome with what I can only describe as an inexplicable urge to slam the brakes on time and stop whatever is about to unfold.
‘Fraser,’ he says, waving me over urgently, manhandling me into the corridor. ‘I’m sorry. I think the office missed several calls from your daughter’s school. It doesn’t sound good.’
He passes me the phone as if it’s a poisoned chalice. There’s more humanity in these few seconds than he’s demonstrated in the full six years that we’ve worked together, which must be a very, very bad sign.
‘My name is Abbey,’ a voice says. ‘I’m with the ACT Ambulance Service …’
And by the time Keith has rushed me to his car and driven like mad through the roadworks on Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, flown through two red lights, and dropped me at the entrance to emergency, all I catch is the blur of blue scrubs as she is whisked from the ambulance through swinging doors.
Someone has clambered on top, pumping her chest as she disappears from sight, and I’m restrained, helplessly, every molecule wanting to leave my body and trade places while they work on her …
AUDREY
I didn’t let the paramedic finish. Perhaps on some primal, instinctive, awful level, I knew. The incident didn’t happen inside the school, with Parker. It happened to Fraser as he belted there. Because they couldn’t reach me …
FRASER
It should be me in that OR. The school had tried me several times. It’s my daughter she was rushing towards …
AUDREY
‘Are you his wife?’
Yes. Almost.
FRASER
‘Does she have any allergies?’
Not to medication.
AUDREY
‘Medications?’
Antidepressants.
FRASER
I got her sacked once. Over penguins.
AUDREY
It was the way he looked at me, over his glasses …
FRASER
We’re alive here and we’re dead somewhere else along the timeline.
AUDREY
‘We’re losing him.’ It hits so hard, so sharp, so deep, so loud I can’t survive it. I’m desperate, desperate, for this to be the other way around.
FRASER
A bolt of agony shoots along the length of the corridor, slicing me in half, along with time and space, opening some new black hole into which we’re all imploding …
AUDREY
… tumbling. Can’t catch my breath. There’s not enough oxygen on this earth for two. Is it me losing my life here? Is it? Or is it Fraser losing his?
FRASER
And she is beside me. Passing through this corridor. Passing through my life, in some inexplicable transformation that my atheist mind will forever fight to unravel as she slips into some parallel world, where this nightmare isn’t mine at all.
It’s hers.