Chapter 26 #2
Those are big words for an implausibly big day, Robin says, and she agrees. He strokes her hair as if she is the one who needs soothing, here. She lies in his arms and thinks he will soon slip into sleep, waits for his breathing to change.
Speaking of ladders, she whispers, and Robin says mm?
Do you remember that personality test, she says, with the ladder and the cube and the – horse, they say, in unison, yeah, Robin says, of course.
What was your ladder like, again?
Robin tilts his head on the pillow. He’s not even bandaged with gauze; looks normal, apart from the shaved patch on his skull.
It was a rope ladder, he says. Hanging through a hole in the ceiling.
Nora makes a light noise, an ah, yes.
What do you think that means?
That I’m a humble sort of chap, Robin says. Rickety, a bit bungling, maybe, on first meeting. But sturdier than I look.
Small laugh from her, then. Swell of love.
But I think the hole in the ceiling’s important, Robin says. It’s a ladder that reaches into another room. Beyond what we can see.
He keeps combing through her hair with his hand. Soft, repetitive. Like he’s hoping it might send her to sleep.
What’s in the other room, she asks him.
Guess we’ll find out, he says, his body warm and solid against hers.
They drift off, soon after, dreams flickering to the bleep of machines.
It is not how they’d envisioned spending their wedding night, although it is not really their wedding night, not yet, a ceremony has not happened, after all, but when they stir at four in the morning, Robin murmurs hey, Nora.
And he proposes something, right then. It is simple and they are alone and filled up with the heady sudden rightness of it and there is a hospital chapel down the hall and they are both dressed for the occasion, or at least, he is after she helps button his shirt.
Are you okay to walk, she asks him, and he says absolutely. That the doctor said motor function should be normal. See?
So they walk to the door. Their passports, which she’d had with her for the registry office, still stowed in her dress pockets.
Out the door, down the hall, Robin holding on to her arm.
Something old, she says, nodding at his brogues, which of course he had thought to put on the previous morning, even though he’d been in incomparable pain. Something new?
Your dress?
Great. And something borrowed, and blue?
You have your blue eye, Robin says, as they follow the signs for the chapel.
Daybreak through the window, burnt orange staining the cloud.
They turn a corner and pass a small waiting room, and the colour of the dawn is matched by the red of someone’s hair, a guy in a white T-shirt, cargo trousers and hiking boots, sitting on his phone at half four in the morning, a coffee cup, lidless, by his foot.
Robin sees him before Nora does. Stops walking, so that she glances up at him with concern, only for him to nod in Bren’s direction. And as she looks over, Bren looks up, too, and then he says oh. Hi.
I thought you went home, Nora says.
I came back, Bren says, with a shrug. In case you needed anything.
Oh, Nora says.
Bren puts his phone down on the chair beside him. He is looking at them both, not just Nora; acknowledging Robin, as well. His face is drawn with tiredness, his hair mussed from where he has tried and failed, presumably, to sleep on the foam leather chair.
Have you been discharged? he asks, and Nora looks at Robin, who tilts his head.
Not quite, Robin says. In fact. Could we borrow you, Bren?
_
And so Bren Ferguson is the sole witness as Nora and Robin are wed – or blessed – by the hospital chaplain.
He stands in the front pew in his hiking boots with his sleepless eyes and missed flight, his heart half numbed.
He only moves when the chaplain asks if they have rings, which they do not.
They were going to buy them afterwards, Nora says. And then. Well.
And then, Robin says, gesturing to his head.
And for a second Bren thinks about taking out his hoop earring and asking if that’ll do, for now, for the symbolism, or whatever, but it feels a step too far and this is far enough so instead he scratches his arm, swallows, hard, as Nora says who needs rings when you don’t have a marriage licence, and the chaplain seems enchanted by their good humour.
Most hospital blessings are probably for different, more devastating reasons, Bren muses, as he watches him false-marry them both.
Bedside ceremonies. Out of time. But this morning it’s just two people, deciding to share their life, because they can. Because they were always going to.
The chaplain riffs a little, says some things about love and commitment and faith.
There is a small stained-glass window behind them, a wooden cross on the wall, in the weirdest, most un-Nora-like scene he could imagine, which is why it works, in fact.
That and her patchwork dress, Robin in his silk shirt and smart shoes, a shaved patch on his head.
Bren has always known, in a part buried inside himself, that Nora – cold-swimming, tree-climbing, art-making Nora – was too special for normal, and this ceremony is anything but.
It is strangely brief. Bren thinks, as he watches them saying their vows, that he’ll feel something significant when it happens.
Like he’s been expecting to for months, each time he’s turned it over in his mind.
But just as he’d felt when summiting a mountain or landing somewhere new; just as when he’s walked a shore at twilight, pitched a tent above the cloud or paddled into a fjord; just as one thing has never brought him that full gratification, that wholeness he’s been looking for – he feels something merely evolve.
It is not nothing, but nor is it momentous.
Just the sense of one moment in his life sliding into another.
Ashes scattered. Feelings shared. I loved you, I loved you too. On we go.
And we’re done, the chaplain says, before he claps.
There is a pause in which Bren is slow to start clapping, too, makes a crowing noise like a lost boy because this moment seems to deserve more than four pat-a-cake palms, and Nora and Robin walk past him down the aisle, holding hands, bashful and cry-laughing and Bren gives them a minute alone, still clapping, before he follows behind.
_
Well, Nora says, back in the hospital hallway. Let’s get you to bed.
Nora! Robin says. Don’t be so forward in front of our wedding guests.
Guest, singular, Bren says.
Just the low-key wedding I wanted, Nora jokes, and they all stand there for a second, not knowing quite what to say.
Thank yous. Touch of an arm, squeezed hands.
And when Nora turns to walk Robin back to his room, Bren wonders whether he should go, too, but instead, he sits back down on the chair from before.
Pulls his phone out, puts it away again. Taps his foot.
A nurse walks past, a doctor, and then when a second doctor passes he says excuse me and stands up.
She is middle-aged, has red hair, like his. Stern eyes.
Sorry, he says. D’you mind if I ask you something?
And the doctor doesn’t say yes or no but doesn’t keep walking, either, so he says years ago, my dad had this heart attack. And, he. He died.
The doctor’s eyes soften, somewhat, but before she can speak, Bren says I was there with him. I saw it happen. And I feel like.
He has to swallow, several times.
I’ve always felt like I could’ve done something, he says.
When I turned him over, he was looking up at me, and I should’ve helped.
But I didn’t know what to do, I just yelled, and freaked out, and stayed with him.
And when the medics came, they performed CPR for like …
over an hour. Just in front of me, and my mum, for so long.
And I can’t help but think if I’d done that, then maybe …
he wouldn’t have died. But he did. He died.
The doctor clears her throat and asks some questions. How old was he, had he had a history of heart problems, no. Had he vomited, yes. The doctor, nodding. Bren answering as if he’s far away, looking down at himself from elsewhere.
Sounds like a myocardial infarction, the doctor tells him. Sadly it’s more common than you’d think, in men in their fifties who seem otherwise healthy: sudden death caused by MI. Cardiac arrest.
Bren nods; this much he knew.
But sudden death is key, here, she says. The medics are trained to deliver CPR for a really long time in an otherwise young, healthy-seeming person, but in reality? There was nothing they – or you – could have done.
Bren looks at her like she’s the sun.
Sometimes, she says, these things just happen. And it’s nobody’s fault.
Yeah, he says. Thanks. Thank you.
She nods, again. And then she walks down the corridor without another word and he sits back down.
Feels his world moving into a new version of itself, just like it had in the chapel, before, and then not long afterwards Nora is back in front of him, looking as dishevelled and exhausted as Bren feels.
I’ve never been so shattered, she says as she sits down beside him. And at the same time, so unbelievably awake.
How’s he doing, Bren asks, and Nora says amazingly. The doctor says he can’t work for a while, he’ll need to take six to eight weeks to rest, but most people make a full recovery. And he seems himself, I think. More himself than he’s seemed in weeks.
Bren says that’s great. They sit in silence for a while, Bren thinking of the doctor, and the long-ago past; Nora thinking of the present or the more recent past, presumably, because of what she says next.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? she says. That we were all so caught up in other things that we didn’t see what was so … obvious.
It wasn’t that obvious, though, Bren says. I’ve been googling it. So many people do the same thing, with this. Fall while they’re skiing, or on a night out, drunk, then pin the symptoms on other stuff. Heatstroke. Bad colds. Being new parents, not getting enough sleep.
Worrying your wife is gonna leave you before the wedding, Nora says.
Yeah, Bren says, and they sit in more silence with that word, wife, as the hospital wakes up around them. A telephone rings. Doors are pushed open, swing closed.
Thank you for not getting on that plane, Nora says.
It wasn’t a big deal, Bren says, but she says that it was. And he can’t take it, this gratitude of hers. Looking at him with such understanding and love, as she so often does; as he so often hasn’t deserved.
I dated this psychologist once, he tells her. A beat, between them.
I thought you didn’t date?
Took her as a lover, then, he says, and they both snort, as another nurse walks by with a clipboard.
She told me about this thing, he says, called Counterfactual Curiosity.
Which I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately.
Like how your life could’ve gone a different way, if you’d boarded a different boat.
Nora does not move. Just looks at him.
I would’ve married you, Nora, Bren tells her. If I’d boarded a different boat.
Long look, between them, then. A long, indefinable something like relief; but a relief that also hurts, if pain can be sweet, somehow, a comfort.
And Nora stands up, her dress rustling around her and then around him because she drops herself into his lap, wraps her arms around his neck and leaves a hard kiss on the top of his head.
She smells of hospitals and linen and citrus.
Says his name, and he can’t see her face but he can feel her warmth, feel the solid soft Nora of her, pressing him close.
I love you, she says. You’ll always be. Well. We’ll always be us.
Yeah, he says.
Which is something nobody else could come close to, she says. I chose my boat. But it doesn’t mean I unchose you. You know?
And he does.
For so long, I wanted to be the person that could take your pain away, she says, into his hair, or give you what you wanted. But I didn’t know what that looked like.
How could you, Bren says, when I didn’t, either.
This shared truth binds them, like a rope; or something stronger, more invisible, like spider silk. Then she kisses his head again and gets up. Stands there, looking at him, in her wedding dress. Covered in stories he does not know.
I know it’s waiting for you, she tells him. Whatever it is. A person, or a calling, that’ll make you feel most like yourself. And then you won’t need to keep looking.
He nods. Once. And she does, too, in the direction of Robin’s room.
I’m gonna, she says, and he says yeah.
Changes, he calls after her. By 2Pac.
She turns, as she’s pushing open the swing door.
My karaoke song, he says. Tell Robin for me?
Her smile, then, over her shoulder, that perfect shoulder he’d not noticed years before, and she’s gone.
And it is as he’s leaving the hospital, typing a message to his mother to say he’ll be back for breakfast, that Nora’s text comes through in reply, and for once he isn’t hoping for anything, isn’t hoping for a change of heart or an answer to a question as she says: Historically, Bren?
Looks like you do the right thing.