Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Rachel
Meghan came in as Claire was leaving, tossing Nathan’s dirty clothes towards the washer with an alarmingly wet splat.
With a sigh Rachel picked them up and shoved them in. “Couldn’t you have put them in the washer?”
“Close enough,” Meghan answered breezily. “What did Claire West want?”
“She made us a meal.”
“A meal?” Meghan raised her eyebrows. “Are we her charity, then?”
“Actually, I think she was just being nice.” Which had felt kind of strange—and nice. Rachel hadn’t had much experience of Claire West taking care of or looking out for her. “Come on,” she said to Meghan. “We need to get going. Mum’s waiting.”
They drove to the hospital in silence, the four of them crammed into the hatchback, Nathan in his car seat behind Rachel, kicking his legs against the back of her seat. Meghan angled the rearview mirror away from Rachel to do her lipstick.
“Seriously, Meghan? I’m driving.”
“Use your wing mirrors. That’s what they’re for.”
“When can I get driving lessons?” Lily asked from the back.
Driving lessons cost about two hundred quid. “I’ll teach you,” Rachel said, and Meghan guffawed.
“Just like you taught me? You lasted all of two lessons.”
“You were impossible.”
“So were you. You grabbed the wheel from me to do a right turn and we ended up on the curb.”
“You practically stripped the gears changing from second to third.”
“I was learning.”
Rachel angled the rearview mirror back towards her. “I’ll teach you, Lily,” she said. “Promise.” Lily didn’t reply, and no one spoke until they’d reached the hospital.
“Why do hospitals always smell?” Meghan asked as they walked through the sliding glass doors.
“Because they’re hospitals,” Rachel answered tartly.
It had taken her twenty minutes to find a parking space, and she’d ended up on a grassy verge.
She was worried about what the doctors were going to say about her mother and what the prognosis was.
She didn’t think she could cope with her mother being even more bedridden and ill.
And she was starting to feel bad about not being nicer to Claire this morning.
“I know they do,” Meghan said, “but what is that smell? Cleaning fluid? Medicine? Flesh rotting?”
“All three,” Lily answered, and let out a nervous laugh.
Rachel knew they were all tense about their mother, not knowing how to act, what to feel.
Last night had been a blur of fear and helplessness; when Lily had come out of the house, her face so pale and shocked, Rachel had run inside, stopping short to see her mother collapsed on the floor of the sitting room, her limbs at weird, awkward angles, her face contorted in a grimace of pain.
Rachel had stood there, frozen for a few seconds, until Andrew came in behind her, calmly took out his phone, and dialed 999.
“I can do that,” Rachel had protested, her voice rising in panic and anger, and Andrew hadn’t bothered to reply.
She had crouched by her mother, wiping a few lank strands of gray hair away from her face. “Mum? Mum, can you hear me?”
Janice had blinked up at her and then tried to speak, but only an animal-sounding groan came out.
Fear had clutched at Rachel hard, so she couldn’t speak either.
She couldn’t believe this was happening, and just after she’d resigned herself to her mother having thirty or forty years of bedridden existence ahead.
She’d been practically wishing her mother dead, and now this. . . .
“An ambulance is coming,” Andrew had said.
Rachel had taken her mother’s limp hand in hers. “I don’t think we should move her.”
“Probably not. They’ll be here soon, and they can put her directly onto a stretcher.
” He’d sound so calm and reasonable, as if he saw grossly overweight women sprawled on floors every day of the week.
Rachel noticed that her mother’s old nightgown had rucked up to her thighs, showing the pasty, dimpled flesh, and she’d gently pulled it down again.
“Is she going to be all right?” Lily had asked in a whisper. She was standing in the doorway of the sitting room, her face as pale as Janice’s, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
“Yes, of course she is,” Rachel had said with far more conviction than she felt.
“She’ll be fine.” She looked around the room, taking in the dirty dishes on the coffee table, the TV still on, a din of canned laughter and corny music she hadn’t even registered.
Andrew found the remote control and switched the TV off.
“Where’s Meghan? And Nathan?” They should have been there; Rachel had asked Meghan to stay with Janice while they went hiking. They all knew Janice couldn’t be left alone. “Lily?” She glanced back at her sister, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Do you know where Meghan is?”
“No. She wasn’t here when I came in.” In the distance they heard the wail of the ambulance’s siren.
The paramedics were briskly efficient, unmoved by the sight of Janice Campbell sprawled on the floor in a worn and stained nightgown; four of them were needed to load Janice onto a stretcher and then into the ambulance.
Andrew had offered to drive Rachel and Lily to the hospital, since they weren’t allowed in the ambulance, and numbly Rachel had refused.
“I can drive. . . .”
“I don’t think you’re in a condition to drive,” Andrew had said firmly. “And I don’t mind driving you.”
And so she had accepted, because she did feel dazed and weird, and she didn’t want to handle this alone. She didn’t think she could. They’d gotten back into his Lexus and driven in silence to the hospital.
The next few hours had passed in a terrible blur of doctors and waiting; an hour in Meghan had phoned, panicked, and Rachel had yelled at her.
“Where the bloody hell were you, Meghan? Mum fell. They think she’s had a stroke, and you just left her alone—”
Andrew had removed the phone from Rachel’s hand, and she stared at him in shock.
“We’re at West Cumberland,” he said into the phone.
“Can you drive here? No, actually, let me come and get you.” He’d disconnected the call and handed the phone back to Rachel; she’d stared at the dark screen in disbelief.
“What was that?”
“Getting angry at your sister serves no purpose,” Andrew had said calmly. “I’ll go fetch her. I’m sure she wants to be here.”
Rachel had sat back in her seat, her arms folded, feeling both furious and chastised. Maybe she shouldn’t have yelled at Meghan, but it wasn’t up to Andrew West to tell her so. And yet with a rush of guilt, she knew he’d done the right thing. It didn’t mean she had to be grateful, though.
“Do you think she’ll be all right?” Lily asked. She’d asked the same question at least a dozen times since they’d first seen Janice on the sitting room floor, and Rachel still had no answers.
“We’ll see, Lil,” she had said tiredly, and put an arm around her sister’s shoulders. Lily had pressed her face against Rachel’s arm.
Twenty minutes later Andrew had returned with Meghan, who’d looked dazed and pale, Nathan clinging to her, his thumb stuck firmly in his mouth, his eyes huge and unblinking.
“Where were you?” Rachel had asked, her tone level.
“I went out with Nathan for a bit.” Rachel saw her sister’s eyes were red, and she realized Meghan had been crying.
She’d never seen her sister cry, not when Mum had fallen or Dad had left.
Not when Nathan had gotten croup when he was four months old and had had to be hospitalized.
Meghan always presented a breezy front. Rachel had come to depend on it, even as it exasperated her.
“Just for a little while, to the beach,” she whispered.
“He’d been climbing the walls all day, and even Mum was getting fed up.
” Meghan’s voice was pleading, so unlike her usual stroppy sass.
“It’s okay, Meghan.” Rachel had taken a deep breath and gestured to the seat next to her, hard and plastic. Meghan had sniffed and sat down. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
Finally a doctor told them their mother was stable; she’d almost certainly had a thrombotic stroke and would have a battery of tests the next day, to determine the extent of damage to her body, her brain.
She was sleeping so they couldn’t talk to her, and eventually they’d all trooped home, exhausted and overwhelmed.
Andrew had walked her to the door, almost like it was a bizarre, awful date. “I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. Meghan and Lily had already gone inside.
“You don’t need to be sorry. You didn’t do anything. Thank you for all your help.” She spoke stiffly, the way she would to a stranger at the supermarket who had fetched something for her from a high shelf. “You’ve been very kind.”
“Let me know if there’s something I can do. I could drive you tomorrow. . . .”
“We have a car,” Rachel said. “Thank you, Andrew, but we don’t need any more help.
” She’d gone inside without looking at him, shutting the door with him still standing on the stoop, because she didn’t trust herself not to throw herself into his arms and ask him to stay, to help, to take over.
For a moment she wanted to be like Claire, letting other people do the heavy lifting. Letting other people do everything.
Now she, Meghan, Nathan, and Lily all sat in the consultant’s office and waited to hear their mother’s prognosis.
They’d seen Janice, who had been dopey with painkillers but had managed a weird rictus of a smile; the consultant had said the left side of her face and body were paralyzed, perhaps temporarily. Perhaps not.
The consultant, Mr. Greaves, looked up from his notes with a conciliatory smile that made Rachel dig her fingernails into her palms. This wasn’t going to be good news.
“Your mother’s health is very compromised,” he began. “I’m afraid her lack of mobility, along with her smoking, has contributed to her suffering from a thrombotic stroke.” Which was what he’d told them last night.
“What’s the outlook?” Rachel asked bluntly. She didn’t care about the medical details. She needed to know how things were going to change. How they were all going to cope.
“It will take some time to assess the full damage,” Mr. Greaves said carefully.
“She’ll be in the hospital for several weeks, undergoing tests and beginning rehabilitation.
When we feel she can be released, she’ll be able to go home, but she’ll have to attend a rehabilitation clinic several times a week. ”
And how on earth was that going to happen? Rachel would have to drive her. She took a steadying breath. “Okay.”
Mr. Greaves looked back down at his notes. “I understand your mother’s mobility was already limited, due to her back injury.”
“Yes . . .”
“We’ll do our best to work within the limitations of her condition. But . . .” He hesitated, and Rachel felt all four of them go tense as they waited for what felt like a verdict. “You should be prepared for the probability that she will not make a full or even partial recovery.”
“Even partial?” Rachel repeated, her voice hoarse. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, considering your mother’s prestroke condition, it seems unlikely she will recover much mobility.”
“She didn’t have much mobility in the first place,” Rachel said. “What about her speech and . . . cognitive function?”
“That remains to be determined.”
Half an hour later they were back outside in the car park, all of them dazed and unspeaking.
Rachel yanked the parking ticket stuck beneath the windshield.
“Seventy pounds for parking on the grass, when there were no bloody parking spaces.” She ripped up the ticket and let the pieces flutter to the ground while Lily and Meghan watched, mouths open.
“Won’t you get in trouble for that?” Lily asked.
“I don’t care.” She unlocked the car and got in, staring straight ahead as Meghan buckled Nathan into his car seat and Lily got in the back.
“Are you going to start the car?” Meghan asked after a moment. Rachel realized she’d just been sitting there, her hands clenched on the steering wheel, for several minutes.
Wordlessly, she jammed the key into the ignition and reversed off the verge, scraping the muffler with a screeching sound as she came off the curb. Meghan winced. Rachel cursed. And kept driving.