Chapter 46
Present
The smoke was choking, filling her lungs and churning up her stomach.
Blythe heard the front door of the hotel blast open.
Even from here, standing across the street where they’d been pushed back to by the fire service, she could feel the flash of heat pouring out.
The crowd around her surged forward and for a moment, it felt as if she was going to drown between or beneath them, but somehow, she kept herself upright, pushed through to the very front.
‘Siggy?’ Her voice was more like a keening moan than her own. ‘Is that my Siggy?’ She wiped the tears from her eyes, she could hardly see, not that she’d noticed that a moment ago.
‘Danial, thank God, you are alive.’ Melissa Val pressed past Blythe, elegant even in these circumstances, then she noticed Kip following the woman, his arm steadying her, being the strength he had always been quietly in the background for Blythe.
‘Kip?’ To Blythe, suddenly the word sounded so small, as if it no longer fitted in with her voice.
Perhaps it never had. ‘Siggy.’ Because then, she saw the boy was carrying something.
Something heavy, covered over in what looked like a sheet.
Wet and clinging. Siggy? Blythe ducked under the cordon that had been set up to keep people back.
‘Mrs Carney, no.’ The local police sergeant tried to hold her back.
‘Siggy,’ she cried and she pushed past him. The boy had fallen on the road, dropped first to his knees to leave the sodden sheet and its contents safely on the ground. Then, he’d collapsed next to it.
It was Rae who moved the sheet back from Siggy’s face.
Blythe falling clumsily to her knees; it felt as if she’d been poured from a sack into a useless heap of insignificance on the road.
She reached out, touched her daughter’s face.
It felt waxy and warm; cold and dead all at once.
Next to them, the boy’s grandmother was bent over Danial, rubbing his arms, folding him over to get fresh air into his lungs, and he seemed to be reviving with the effort of it.
But Siggy was quite still.
Blythe was vaguely aware of others around her, Kip and Rae and a man who was carrying out a first aid scan of her daughter’s body, checking her breathing, checking her pulse.
It was all happening in a confused blur around Blythe, who just sat there, emitting a gentle moan that frightened her.
She couldn’t stop the sound coming from her, would she be stuck like this forever – suspended in something worse than purgatory.
The man, she recognised him now, another of Kip’s many friends. He was setting Siggy’s head at an angle, preparing, Blythe knew, to do CPR.
She had stopped breathing.
The knowledge of it came to Blythe just as the man began the first set of compressions on Siggy’s chest.
Another round.
Blythe had to remind herself to breathe, perhaps she could breathe for both herself and her daughter.
Another round of deep breaths. Again, a sequence of crushing compressions.
With each hammering, Blythe felt herself drown a little deeper.
This was her fault. All of it. Siggy lying in the street – half-alive, maybe already mostly dead.
Danial, a young man who should have his life before him – a brave and good young man, as it turned out.
Braver than any of the local boys, that was for sure.
The hotel, probably destroyed beyond saving. And Rae.
Blythe looked around her. Rae was knelt next to her. Her eyes pinned to Siggy’s face. If it was possible to love a child more than Blythe loved Siggy, she suspected that was what Rae felt for her niece.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Blythe whispered, but of course, no one heard her amid the chaos surrounding them. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She couldn’t live with herself if Siggy didn’t make it through this, Blythe knew that without any question.
And then, as if the whole world stood still, for one precious eternal and at the same time fleeting moment, she saw her daughter’s chest rise.
She’s breathing.
Someone said it. Blythe heard it like an extended sigh of relief. She’s breathing.
Thank God.
She’s breathing.
The district nurse, who must have just arrived, took over, working quickly, taking Siggy’s pulse, her blood pressure, placing an oxygen mask on her face.
She too, examined her for broken bones and other injuries, because then she was being slid onto a stretcher, by the local Order of Malta crew and swept up into the back of their ambulance.
Kip at her side, Blythe following.
‘I’m sorry. There’s only room for one person to travel with us,’ the driver said and Blythe tried to speak, but she knew she had no right to say a word.
‘I’m going.’ Kip said and for once, she couldn’t push him aside and have her own way. She had done this. All of it. She knew Kip knew it too.
Blythe backed away from the ambulance. Not sure what to do next, her heart breaking at the sound of the doors being banged shut. It was driving off, into the night, towards the air ambulance she could hear in the distance, her daughter being moved away from her.
She’d already lost her, though, Blythe knew that.
It was too late to undo the damage she had done.
‘Blythe, come on.’ It was Fiona, standing next to her now. How long had she been here? ‘I’ll take you to the hospital…’ she said, and she was dragging her across the square to where her car was parked and ready.
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Fiona looked at her with a perplexed expression. ‘I’ll take you to the hospital, I’ve called Finbar, he’ll meet us on the pier,’ she said slowly as if Blythe had some sort of hearing problem. ‘To be there when Siggy wakes up…’
‘But,’ Blythe had a feeling no one else would offer.
Why would they? At this moment, her legs were too jittery to even get her car into gear, much less organise a boat to take her across to the mainland and travel from there to the hospital thirty-odd miles beyond.
‘Fine,’ she said and then she looked back at the hotel.
It was ruined. The whole place was going to be destroyed at this point.
The fire had taken over; the first floor was completely alight.
The flames had risen, so now, she could see the upstairs rooms’ window drapes were already dancing with fire.
She stood for a moment, wrapped up in an eerie silence of her own making – watching as the Hope Square Hotel disappeared before her eyes.