Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
She goes where she is told to; the larger hospital three towns over.
Flags down a cab and gets in with her embellished dress so showy, so ludicrous.
Sun, so bright through the windows. She doesn’t see it.
Didn’t. Looks ahead, the whole of her frozen and on fire as she counts down the thirty-seven-minute drive.
How, goes the thump of her heart. When.
His tiredness. Headaches.
Flashes of anger, so appropriate, so reasonable, that it had felt reflective of her own mind twisting to figure things out, in recent weeks.
The cab parks, and she pays. Sliding doors, green signs to a specialist unit where she heads for the woman at the desk.
A woman who looks at her in her wedding dress, and Nora sees her face change, puzzled to pitying.
Ironic, how this dress was meant to call for no fanfare and no fuss and yet it is the fussiest thing she could be wearing in a place like this, a place neither of them should be, not today, not ever.
The woman takes a long time looking at her computer after Nora gives her Robin’s name. So long that Nora has to say look, she was called, she was told to come here, her partner had a headache, as if by saying this and not the words that had then been used, that that’s all there is to worry about.
If you could sit down, the receptionist says, I’ll let them know you’re here.
Okay, Nora says, thank you. But, she says again, like I said, they called me. So maybe I could just go through?
The woman looks at her for a moment longer, as if bracing herself – bracing Nora – for what she’s about to share.
He went to A and E this morning, she says. And had to have a CT scan, for severe head pain.
Nora cannot absorb this. Says okay?
Then they brought him straight here, the woman says, for emergency surgery.
Nora stares at her.
Surgery, she repeats, the word alien in her mouth, and the woman nods.
Says when she has any further information, she will pass it along.
That Nora should sit down, for now. And somehow, Nora does.
Somehow, there is a slow motion that takes over what she is hearing, and she has heard a lot, these past two days, Josie revealing a big secret and Bren breaking down and she should not have cared, she should have been here, facing what matters, because what matters is what she’d never seen coming.
A bleed on the brain.
Emergency surgery.
Those hard truths, pressing against her own skull.
_
Milk, salt, rennet. The name of an art show they saw in Paris, the dates they’d met, moved in, bought their sofa.
A joke he’d told about his own socks that she can’t even recall but they refer to, daily, the relevance of it now lost but it doesn’t matter, it’s in their lore, I look at you and I’m home.
She reads all of these things she’s embroidered into her dress.
Reads them until her vision blurs, and has to blink, look up.
There is one other woman in the waiting room, with a baby on her knee.
The mother is talking to the infant about the colours on the walls.
Pointing out the specks on the floor, dots and triangles, which blur as well when Nora tries to focus, as she feels herself frozen or fading.
Like time has stopped, like time won’t finish, like she will forever be in this waiting room and that’s why they’re called what they are, because she will be waiting like this for the rest of time, as punishment for making him wait, maybe; she is sickness, she is fear, how is there Easter bunting taped to the wall and foiled chocolate eggs in a basket beneath posters that outline FAST and MHA, and then her phone rings, and it is Bren.
It keeps on ringing, and the mother with the baby looks at her.
And because she is trying to stay calm, because she is alone, because she doesn’t know what else to do and she thinks she might die of fear but she can’t think about the word die or what she is most afraid of, Nora slides to accept the call.
You picked up, Bren says, and he sounds as surprised as she is. I thought I’d be leaving you a voicemail.
She has no words to respond with. No concept of what she would say.
I’m at the airport, Bren tells her, and when she still doesn’t say a word, he goes on: I’m flying back to Queenstown. Thought I’d phone you directly, this time. Just in case.
There’s a lightness to his voice, but it’s not funny. Has anything ever been? She can hear airport noises in the background, echoes and wheels and a hum of voices; her own still lost in her throat.
Mum said you were getting married today, Bren says.
Blurred eyes, blurred thoughts; blurred triangles on the hospital floor.
So … Bren says, and it’s awkward; all so far away. I wanted to say congratulations, he says, as well as goodbye.
Nora opens her mouth, but what can she say.
What if saying it would make it more real.
Nora? Bren tries, and there’s a tension to his voice, now, a note of impatience. Are you married now, then? Or are you –
But she hangs up, because she can’t answer, can’t say no, we’re not, because this, so she stands up and goes back to the desk and before she can ask the receptionist assures her that she’s been in touch with the doctors, that they know she is here.
If they know I’m here then why am I still waiting, Nora asks, and it’s rude of her but she can’t help it, the panic is sucking from her like a leech and they called me, she tells her, again.
The surgeon will come through when he’s done, she is told. I’m sorry, Miss Harper, I know it’s difficult, but try to wait. Can you call someone to come sit with you?
But the person she would call is in surgery – emergency brain surgery – so Nora just nods, turns away.
Back in the chair, she takes long, steadying breaths and tries to think. She will have to cancel their pizza reservation, for lunch. Make him something soothing, instead. Soup. He has always loved soup, the simplicity and the comfort of it, she will make a fresh soup for him every day of his life.
His life.
Hers.
She sits and waits, thinks she might die – no, can’t think about dying – gets some water from the dispenser, hand shaking, sits back down.
The baby squawks.
The mother squints at her dress.
And when too much or no time at all has crawled by she goes back to the receptionist who has nothing new to say.
How, when it has been an hour, a year. She is wearing a locket and a lot of mascara and Nora is looking at it clagged on her lashes and trying to think of the right thing to say that is assertive but not rude like before and it is because of this, this mental dance she is doing between white-hot dread and social restraint taking up every cell of her whole self, that she does not feel him approach.
Nora, he says, but it is not the right voice. It is not Robin’s.
And she turns to see that Bren is there, in the hospital lobby. Wearing his expedition rucksack, his face serious. Everything slows for her, then, even more than before.
Bren is here. Not on a plane, but here.
But not only does she not care, now she is openly panicking.
How did you, she begins, and he holds up his phone, says he tracked her location.
And he’s not here to cause trouble – he sees her, in her dress, she’s in her dress – he’s here because she’s his best friend, always has been, and when she didn’t say a word earlier he knew that something was wrong, and when he looked and saw where she was he didn’t think about it, really – he just left the airport, he just … came.
The baby is crying now. The mother stands to shush him, walks in back-patting circles around the room but this only makes him cry louder, and Bren glances at them, then at the signs on the wall, the double doors to the specialist unit before he looks back at Nora.
Why, uh, he says. Why are we here?
Robin had a headache, Nora tells him.
Bren frowns.
He’s had a headache for a few days and he was going to meet me at the registry office, Nora says, and her voice is measured, somehow, robotic, but then they called me here.
Is he … all right?
I don’t know, she says. And then she says it again, less measured, this time: I don’t know.
Bren’s frown deepens. Please go, she is about to say, please, Robin cannot see you here, today of all days – but it is as she is about to say this that a doctor comes down the hall and her heart is in her mouth with her stomach, because his eyes are not the eyes of a person who has something good to share.
She floats out of her body as she decides this.
Out of her embroidered wedding dress.
There is a slow, illuminated moment as realisation dawns, as it had on Robin yesterday in their garden shed.
As he saw, finally, what she’d wanted him to see – but with eyes that have not been his own, these past few weeks, now that she thinks about it.
The way they’d look at her, sometimes, like he did not know her.
I don’t recognise you, Nora. Angry outbursts, you’re being a child, extreme exhaustion, he’s out cold.
But things have seemed hard and strange of late, weddings are hard, relationships are hard, and he is stressed and tired and she’s both these things too, and that’s normal, isn’t it, that’s life.
This is a blip. A story they will tell on their anniversaries, remember when you got a headache and it turned out to be a brain bleed, madness, total madness, I love you, d’you want the last dumpling, and the doctor looks at her as she thinks all of this and confirms her name, are you Nora, and then he clarifies Robin’s name, too.
He looks at her, this doctor. As he stands there in his surgical scrubs.
Looks at her and says that after the scans they took him straight into surgery, but there were complications, that the bleed on the brain was more significant than they had anticipated, and he is so very sorry, but that despite their best efforts, Robin has died.
There is a moment where nobody moves.
The baby cries. The mother soothes.
Bren touches her, on the elbow.
No, says Nora, shrugging him off. It was just a headache. He said he had a headache.
I am so very sorry, the doctor repeats.
No, she says, he was fine.
I understand this is a tremendous shock, the doctor says. Do you have someone I can call, or is your friend here – he glances at Bren – are you able to see her home? We can –
But we’re getting married, Nora tells the doctor.
She turns to Bren, who is white, and she says it to him, too, as if he needs reminding: we’re getting married.
There was a trauma, the doctor is saying, a trauma that must have occurred days, maybe even weeks ago?
It caused a chronic subdural haematoma. And they could have drained the bleed, they did try, it’s so rare, with a bleed that severe, that he was able to walk himself into A and E like he did, and do you know anything about that, Nora? What might have caused it?
No, Nora is saying, there was nothing, but the truth is she wasn’t paying attention when it mattered.
None of us do, she will realise later, when her world is not falling into the black hole of itself, and this all runs through her head, the reality of what could and might occur because while the small dramas unfold – the family arguments and passing comments and daily pressures of not-dones and what-ifs and maybe-tomorrows – while that all plays out, the big things, the unnamed storms, the unexpected rolling darkness could be hurtling your way and you wouldn’t even know it, wouldn’t ever – until that frozen, light-switch moment standing in a hospital, wearing your wedding dress beside the wrong person – see it coming.