The Midnight Estate
by Charity Wilkie
Silas had Mrs Ristevra call him a cab and he went straight to the hospital. When he arrived he was quickly ushered from the
reception area towards the intensive care ward, and with every step, his feet felt heavier.
“Is she very unwell?” he asked a nurse, who avoided his gaze and told him that the doctor would be with him shortly. He was
briefly alone in a brightly lit room with an oddly domestic air—the scent of coffee in the air from the pot, the hum of a
refrigerator, plush lounges with colorful cushions. Silas was too wound up to sit so he stood beside the coffeepot, shifting
his weight from one foot to the other. He was exhausted so the coffee called to him, but he knew caffeine would only make
his anxiety worse.
Dr Lomas entered the room, closing the door behind him. He had been the family’s doctor since Silas was a baby.
“Good to see you, son,” he said quietly, and he reached to shake Silas’s hand. “Can I get you coffee? Maybe juice or water—I
could have someone get you something to eat?”
The gentle, sympathetic tone the doctor employed only made Silas panic more.
He shoved his hands into his pockets but then his trousers felt too tight and so he pulled them out and wrapped them over his chest. It was suddenly hard to breathe, so he dropped his hands to his side.
Dr Lomas motioned for him to take a seat, but Silas shook his head.
“Please,” he said, voice strangled. “Please just tell me Maeve is okay.”
“We wanted to telegram you, Silas. No one could figure out where to reach you.”
“Maeve knew,” Silas croaked.
“That wasn’t much help to us when she was unconscious,” the doctor said, not unkindly. “She is very unwell, son. In a coma,
in fact.”
“A coma? From influenza?” Silas was baffled. What kind of monstrous strain of the flu had taken out his mother and his sister? The doctor’s expression softened.
“Your mother passed from the influenza, yes. But Maeve . . .”
For one terrifying moment, Silas thought the doctor was going to tell him that Maeve had harmed herself. That Silas’s absence
and the immense stress of everything that had happened with their mother had left her so mentally fragile that she just couldn’t
cope. It hit him at once—the grief, the exhaustion, the wild year he was living through.
He was trying not to think about it, but the truth was, even his relationship with Christine had been rocky of late. She was
unhappy and he knew she was unhappy and he knew it was his fault and yet he could not figure out how to fix it. He had broken
his family to follow Christine, only to break his family with Christine too.
Silas sank down onto the sofa and dropped his head into his hands. The doctor sat quietly opposite him.
“It was the diabetes, Silas,” Dr Lomas said, and Silas was surprised by this, but also relieved. He didn’t know much about diabetes except that it was treatable. Maeve would adjust in time, and of course, he could stay a while and help her get used to the insulin injections.
“Right,” Silas said. “It’s not great news, obviously, but she’s tough, and I’ll help her adjust. Can I see her?”
“Wait— No,” the doctor said, frowning. “Surely you knew? She was diagnosed five years ago.”
All of a sudden, Silas saw that last conversation he’d had with Maeve through a very different lens. He’d been away for six
months and he’d come back home to find his sister so drawn. So desperate to convince him to stay.
He had put all of this down to Maeve’s personality. But now, looking back through time, he felt so stupid. Maeve was bright
and emotional and vivacious, but she wasn’t needy. If anything, she was a woman who perpetually gave too much. She had begged
him to stay not because she resented him for living his own life but because she was dealing with a health crisis, and she
was scared to face it alone. He briefly wondered why Linda hadn’t told him, but then other memories rose in his mind. Linda
had been every bit as baffled over Maeve’s refusal to travel as Silas himself had been. Silas was immediately sure of it:
Maeve never told their mother. If she had, Linda would have told Silas right away.
“Maeve was unwell with the influenza when I saw her at your mother’s funeral,” Dr Lomas explained gently. “I sent her home
to rest but it can be very difficult to manage insulin during times of extreme stress and particularly when unwell. There
is no way of knowing exactly what happened to her—only that one of Maeve’s friends became concerned that she was not answering
the phone and went around check on her. Thank God she did because Maeve had gone into a hypoglycemic coma.”
“She didn’t take enough insulin?”
“She took too much. Most likely she miscalculated her dose and because she was so unwell, she didn’t recognize the signs of her sugar dropping too low. Her body—her brain—was starved of the glucose it needed to function.”
“And now she is . . .”
“That’s right, she’s in a coma, son. I’m so sorry.”
“Can’t you just give her more sugar, or more insulin, or—”
“If we’d caught her right away, yes, glucose would have solved the problem. But we don’t know how long she was there before
she was found. It’s possible—maybe even likely—that she has suffered some degree of brain damage. We won’t know until she
wakes up.” Lomas paused, then added very gently, “If she wakes up.”
Dr Lomas walked Silas down the hall and left him alone in the room with his sister. Maeve looked like she was asleep, lying
flat on her back with her arms straight down beside her torso, on top of the stiff, starchy hospital blankets. Silas sat beside
her and took her cold hand in his and he started to cry.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
But he already suspected the answer to that question. She had given him plenty of clues that something was wrong—he had just
been so caught up in that first flush of love for Christine that he missed them.
Silas sat down and wrote Christine a letter.
I know you’re not happy and this is an awful time for me to be away. And I am so sorry I can’t say when I’ll be home, but
Maeve is unwell and she needs me right now. Please know that I love you and Ernest more than anything. I will be back with
you as soon as I can and we can still fix things. I know we can.
When he left, Silas had promised Christine he would only be gone a week or two.
His wife was kind and loving and supportive, but she she had been trying to force him to talk through their issues for some time by then.
Just a few days before the telegram came from Maeve, Christine had moved out of their home.
Of course he’d heard her whenever she said “we need to talk,” but his work consumed him, always, and so at first he simply
did not notice the intensity of her tone, and even once he did, his natural inclination was to hide from it. One of the things
that most surprised him about married life was the way that parts of Christine’s psyche forever remained a mystery to him—moods
that seemed to come and go without warning, motivations and desires he could never quite unpack. He’d imagined that once a
person met their soulmate, it would all be easy from there. Books about people falling in love often ended at the wedding
day—everything that happened from there was simply an epilogue, so how difficult or important could the detail be?
Very important, as it turned out.
When Christine announced she was leaving, he’d assumed she meant she was leaving to go shopping or to spend time with a friend. When he finally realized how serious the situation was, that she was leaving
with their son to live with her mother, he panicked and they quarreled and Ernest cried and then Christine said they needed
“time apart to cool down.”
Silas spent two days working like a maniac, taking breaks only to try to convince himself that Christine was about to waltz
through the door any second now. Then the telegram arrived from Maeve, and what was already a bad situation became so much
worse.
Silas knew he should have booked an international call to explain the delay to Christine the minute he realized he’d be in America longer than they anticipated, but he still did not quite understand what was broken in their marriage and he had not yet figured out how to fix it.
And he had the sense that the second he heard her lovely, soft voice, he would dissolve into a fit of humiliating tears.
The letter would have to suffice for now. At least until he got Maeve back on her feet.
He posted the letter and then settled in, ready to do what it took to get his sister back to full health. He visited the home
he’d purchased for his mother but everything about that space spoke of a grief he had not yet even begun to process, and he
left within a few minutes. His mother would understand. He would grieve her properly when Maeve was back on her feet.
So he went to stay at his old childhood home. Maeve had such a knack for decorating—the house looked so beautiful, inside
and out. He admired the new gardens she’d planted and the lamps she’d placed in each room and the little knick-knacks she’d
arranged on just about every surface. He did his best to water her plentiful indoor plants. He cleaned out her fridge, and
he answered the phone calls from her friends.
So many phone calls from so many friends.
Maeve always collected friends and Silas soon discovered she had amassed an exhausting number of them. The hospital limited ICU visiting hours for anyone outside of immediate family to a narrow window between
1:00 and 2:00 p.m., and only ever one guest at a time. It was not uncommon for there to be people waiting in the hall to see
Maeve, like she was hosting a celebrity meet and greet.
Silas heard all kinds of stories about his sister’s life sitting in that hallway. Most were about the people she helped or encouraged or inspired.
“Hardly anyone knew about the diabetes,” one of her city hall colleagues told him softly. “She told me, but only after my son was diagnosed and I was so worried for him—she wanted me to know he was going to be okay, you know?