Epilogue
The pain in his chest had been sudden when it came, but he recognized it instantly, like a familiar face in a crowd. Its markers etched in his mind, despite the years since medical school. A sensation not unlike heartburn. Pain spreading out to his neck and jaw. A feeling of impending doom.
Now, as he lies on his kitchen floor, spilled coffee seeping into his sleeve, he bears the pain, holding steady, ready to observe the symptoms that will usher him toward the end.
But then comes the flash of Cora’s face.
His own hands, not shaking and useless as he’d believed them to be, but solid, brutal things.
Pushing, pounding, the pain in his chest now doing the same.
He tries to summon his patients, the people he’d once helped, though can conjure them only fleetingly before it’s Cora’s bruised face again.
His daughter not meeting his eye. The wails of his infant son.
And this is the truth of it. The people he was meant to love, he has only hurt.
He cries out then, a guttural sound. Because it’s so clear.
He had one life. And he could have spent it differently.
He will not find peace; his final realization is too fresh, too stark, to be smoothed away. But still, he snatches at a moment, plucks it from the air. A time when he could have set them on separate paths.
As his last breath escapes him, he is walking through Embankment Gardens with Cora.
She wears a surgical boot on one foot, but his own feet are bare.
He can almost feel the grass around his toes.
They reach the gates on Villiers Street and an odd sensation travels through him, like seawater permeating his skin and rushing in.
They slow. He likes her, yes. But this time, he lets her hand drop.
They say a few words, and then she smiles, turns, and walks away.
He watches her reach the end of the road, watches as she fails to become familiar to him, watches as she rounds the corner and disappears from his view.
As his body cools, the air quivers with unspent possibilities of how else their fates might have become untied, what other paths their lives might have taken.
There is a child. She stands outside a church hall beside her mother, who studies a noticeboard, ads pinned behind the glass.
There is a ballet class on a Tuesday afternoon or Irish step dancing on a Saturday morning.
The mother weighs it up and decides it would be a rush to get to ballet straight from school.
She looks down at the child, who is wrapping the stem of a dandelion around her finger, and begins to explain what step is, tells her about the special shoes they’ll need to buy.
The girl lets her dream of wearing ballet slippers fall from her grasp with the picked flower, and a few years later, she drops step too, more interested in working alongside her dad as he tends his vegetable patch.
There is a young man. Just starting out, in his first year as a qualified GP.
He listens as a salesman talks up a gleaming new car with a pop-up sunroof, cassette-tape stereo, ABS.
But before he can explain the anti-skid system, something causes them to look up.
That’s when the young man catches sight of a soft-top two-seater in the corner of the forecourt.
That’s for sale? he asks, already walking over, taking in the character and refinement of the older, classic design.
Six months later, in heavy rain, its brakes fail.
The young man’s father is performing surgery in the same hospital when, two floors down, they call the time of death.
There is a girl. On the cusp of fourteen, when a new boy joins her class.
He has long hair, flared jeans. Lips like the singer from the Rolling Stones.
From the bus, they walk the same ribbon of tarmac, their houses a quarter of a mile apart.
With each day, their pace slows to eke out their time together.
I’ll come to the end of your track, he offers.
But when they reach her gate, fingers smudged with blackberries, they’re not ready to part, so they wander back toward the road again.
And somewhere in the gentle to-and-fro of these days, the trappings of girlhood—ballet, cartwheels, plaiting her best friend’s hair—fall away. Almost unnoticed.
There is a boy. Ten years old. He glides along hospital corridors at his father’s side, seeing the way people defer to him, the way his colleagues appear anxious not to drain the precious resource of his time.
Later, when he’s dispatched to the canteen, he imagines himself bathed in his father’s glow, as though he, too, might one day be a surgeon, might command that same respect.
Until, coming up behind two white coats, he overhears their conversation.
Sees the man he’s always revered through someone else’s eyes.
He retreats to a toilet cubicle, locks himself inside, burning with shame.
And then emerges, determined to be nothing like him.
There is a woman. She pushes a pram, her nine-year-old daughter at her side.
They go into a building, leaving a wind-torn street behind.
When the registrar looks up and asks what the woman would like to call her child, she hesitates.
Then finds herself saying her late father’s name, Hugh.
She doesn’t know where the idea comes from.
She hadn’t thought of it before. But the moment the word is out of her mouth, it feels right.