Chapter 21
AUDREY
Nobody tells you about the weightlessness of loss.
Isn’t it Fraser who is supposed to be having the out-of-body experience? Why does it feel like it’s me floating near the ceiling of this hospital room with a bird’s-eye view of my crisis?
From this angle, it doesn’t even resemble panic. He looks asleep on the bed while I just stand there, staring at him, the way a parent watches over a slumbering child.
No urgency. No rush. Nothing to be thought or said or done. Just me. Detached from him. From everything. An actor frozen onstage in the last moments of the final scene before the lights go down.
If I float further out from this epicentre, I see we are the only two motionless figures in the tableau.
Beyond the stillness of our bubble, the hospital bursts with chaotic energy, on fire with the emergency of life.
Desperate attempts to salvage the air in people’s lungs, to extend the beats in their hearts and give them moments, hours … years.
Don’t they realise how transient it all is? How fragile? How close everyone is to where we are. This cliff from which people just slip.
But then, BAM. I’m sucked back into my body in a rush, blood coursing through veins, heart splintering into minuscule pieces that shatter and evaporate, and I realise there is nothing calm about this picture at all.
I am not standing here, watching him silently.
I am screaming. Lunging at him. Lunging at us.
Shaking his lifeless form, clutching his shoulders, pulling him into my chest while I yell at him to stay here.
‘Don’t you dare do this, Fraser!’
I am trapped. Trapped between an all-encompassing, desperate wish to be dead and the natural urge to fight to the surface. To burst through these suffocating depths and claw at my life.
The violence of this is going to kill me …
Somewhere, in the near hyperventilation, I draw a breath.
And on that breath, his scent.
I kiss his cheek, salt on my tongue from my own gushing tears, which have sprung from the future somehow. From all the missing moments from the fifty years that he promised.
‘Don’t do this.’ I whisper this time. ‘Please, Fraser. I’m begging you.’
His silence horrifies me. Gaping silence.
‘FRASER!’ I shout. ‘Wake UP.’
There isn’t enough hope in the world to turn this around. He won’t move. He is not here. I am yelling, redundantly, at just the unresponsive shape of him—nothing left inside it for me to reach.
Gradually, his lack of life stills me, until a flimsy acceptance starts to land and I ease his shoulders, slowly, back down on the bed, my head coming to rest on the bruised chest that they pounded relentlessly between the impact and the moment they checked the clock and called it. So brutal. It must hurt.
No.
I am the one hurting. It’s my chest that feels like it’s received hundreds of compressions. My heart that aches with five thousand futile attempts to bring him back.
And now I’m backtracking to the decision I made not to have children.
The pieces of him that I could have had now and don’t.
The alternative future that I would bargain for now, because if we’d gone down that path, or any different path, every moment of today would have been different.
This is what happens when a thousand innocent, inconsequential actions end up shattering it all, the week of our wedding—when the flowering of everything, so much joy and light and life to come … is dashed.
Never in my life have I felt so desperately alone. While he is so perfectly still. So serene and untortured. So safe from this unbearable agony.