St Matthew's Passion: A Medical Romance (18 page)

But Fin wasn’t destined to die yet.

He might die. There was in fact a strong chance that he would. But it wasn’t inevitable. And if Melissa could do anything to prevent his death - if there was anything within the realm of human endeavour that she could do to keep him alive - she would make sure she did it.

Her hand reached out, found his under the covers of the bed. She gripped it, astonished by its coolness, wanting to warm and comfort it like a baby. Distressingly, Fin’s hand didn’t respond, didn’t squeeze hers back.

Heedless of anyone who might be watching, Melissa leaned in close, bringing her face close to his. Even in his comatose state, Fin’s aura met hers, interacted with it, drawing her ever closer.

Her lips, parted and gently moving, pressed against his, which were dry and cool. They lingered for long seconds.

She raised her head, staring at his closed eyes. A tear ran down his cheek, tracing a thin seam. It took her a moment to understand that the tear was her own.

‘Fin. I love you,’ she breathed. ‘You’re not going to die.’

I love you...

***

‘Take this.’

Melissa swam up through layers of fog. She hadn’t been asleep, quite, but had been as close to it as made no difference. An aroma bit through the confusion: coffee.

She became acutely aware of a knot of pain in her neck, a twinge in her back. Blinking, peering about her, she grasped that she was seated in an armchair, and had been slumped forwards with her forehead resting on the edge of the bed in front of her.

Melissa looked up blearily, sweeping aside the unkempt strands of hair that hung vine-like in front of her face. A few inches above her face was a steaming polystyrene cup. Beyond, she saw Deborah, her arm extended.

Sitting upright, Melissa took the cup.

‘Thanks.’

She sipped gingerly, relishing the heat as well as the flavour and the caffeine kick. Despite the time that had passed, Melissa still felt the cold of the river in her bones.

She became aware of Deborah standing there still and glanced up at her. The nurse was gazing at her, not Fin. Her expression was difficult to read.

‘You need to get some sleep.’

Melissa shook her head. ‘Not until he wakes up.’

‘It might be a long time.’

‘Then I’ll just have to wait.’ What the nursing sister meant, Melissa knew, was:
he might never wake up
.

Silence followed, apart from the relentless sounds of the ventilator and the monitors. Melissa glanced at the digital clock above the bed. Its green display told her it was 05:20. How long had she been sitting there? Ten hours? Twelve?

Deborah murmured, ‘Mind if I sit down?’

Startled, Melissa nodded. ‘Pull up a chair. Um...’

The nurse didn’t waste time looking for another armchair; instead she pulled over a footstool and perched on it, half-turned towards Melissa.

‘You really love him.’

Melissa wasn’t in the mood for another fight, for yet another round of warnings and innuendoes and threats. On the other hand, she wasn’t in the mood to fight her corner either. She lifted her head and looked at Fin’s motionless profile and said, simply: ‘Yes.’

‘That’s good.’

Melissa continued her study of Fin’s face for several moments before she became aware of what she’d just heard. She turned her head, wincing at the twinge in her neck.

‘What did you say?’

Deborah was watching her levelly. Her expression was one Melissa had never seen her wear before. There was a softness there, which she’d shown traces of before; but more than that, there was compassion.

‘I said it’s good.’

For a second the two women gazed at one another. Then Deborah folded her hands under her chin and said, ‘It was never about you at all, Melissa. Never about you.’

Melissa felt in her exhausted, befuddled state that this was a riddle too far. She was about to protest when Deborah went on.

‘I know what you thought. You believed I had it in for you. That I disliked you personally. You thought I was jealous of you and Fin, of what you felt for one another and of what was clearly developing between the two of you. That I had designs on Fin myself.’ Deborah watched Melissa for a moment and must have seen it in her face, the evidence that she was right, because she nodded a fraction. ‘None of that’s true. Please believe me.’

After a pause Melissa said, ‘Then… why?’

‘I wanted to protect the department, as I said. An office romance between two people so crucial to the running of our service, so essential to the survival of our patients, is always going to have an impact on the quality of the work those two people are able to deliver. It’s happening already, as we’ve discussed before. Attention wanders. Mistakes get made.’

Fin’s monitor skipped a beat or two and both women glanced over at his still form, the only movement the rise and fall of his chest beneath the cover as the ventilator breathed for him. The monitor returned to its steady beeping.

‘But more than the department,’ Deborah continued, ‘I wanted to protect Fin.’

‘Fin? Why would he need protecting?’

‘Because he’s my friend. He’s been deeply hurt, and I didn’t want to see it happen again.’

Melissa had started to warm towards the other woman, but now she felt the old anger coming back. Deborah’s words sounded like a lyric from a cheesy love song. ‘Oh, come on. Fin’s a grown man. So he’s been unlucky in love before. Who hasn’t? It doesn’t make him some fragile flower that needs to be kept sheltered from the world. He can make his own choices about his emotional life. You’ve no right to decide what he ought to do, what’s best for him.’

Even more gently than before, Deborah said, ‘It’s a lot more complicated than you realise.’

And Melissa listened as Deborah told her everything: how Fin’s wife hadn’t divorced him but had been killed by a hit-and-run driver, how Fin had tried and failed to save her, how ever since he’d carried around the burden of his guilt like a cross on his back.

‘Ever since then, he’s believed he isn’t good enough,’ said Deborah. ‘He drives himself to crazy heights, out of a sense of failure. He believes that if he’d been a good enough doctor he would have saved Catherine. The fact that he let her die, as he believes he did, means he’s lacking in some fundamental way. And his life since then has been a continuous struggle to undo the past, which of course is impossible.’

Melissa listened in silence, a painful blend of feelings growing within her: increasing respect for this woman’s wisdom and above all her compassion, and an almost unbearable yearning to take Fin in her arms, kiss him awake, tell him that she understood, that he was good enough, the finest person she’d ever met, and that she loved him.

‘I suppose in a way I was trying to protect you, too, Melissa,’ said Deborah. ‘Fin had already let you get closer to him than any other woman since Catherine. He never talks about such things, but I
know
. Sooner or later he’d have had to make the decision whether or not to allow you into his life. And I believe at that point he’d decide he couldn’t do it, that it would be a betrayal of his late wife and of his vow to atone for her death by living for his work, and he’d have broken things off with you. It would have been agony for both of you. Neither of you might have recovered. So I felt it was better that it was nipped in the bud, in order to limit the damage.’

Melissa couldn’t speak for a few seconds. Then she said, her voice barely more than a whisper: ‘Why are you telling me this now?’

Deborah took her hand. ‘Because you have a right to know. You love him – it isn’t mere infatuation, I can see that – and he may not…’ She swallowed, and continued in an even quieter voice. ‘He may not wake up again.’

Tears sprang into Melissa’s eyes. She didn’t try to suppress them, didn’t turn away; she just let them burst forth and course down her cheeks. She began to sob, great shuddering breaths wracking her body. Deborah’s arm slid around her shoulders and Melissa leaned against the other woman.

Don’t do this, Fin. Don’t leave.

When her shaking had run its course, when the tears stopped coming and she was wiping her face with tissue paper Deborah had handed her and blowing her nose, she shook her head, avoiding eye contact.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ said the nurse, giving her shoulders another squeeze.

The two women sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Fin, the quiet clinical noises around them somehow reassuring. After a while Melissa said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Something a bit personal.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Did you and Fin – I mean were you ever…?’ Melissa let the question tail off, too embarrassed to complete it and wishing immediately that she hadn’t asked it. She glanced nervously at Deborah, but saw the nurse was smiling.

‘No. Not before Catherine, and not after. And, God forbid, certainly not while they were together. I’m a happily married woman, after all. Fin and I are just friends, and close colleagues.’

‘Didn’t you ever wonder?’

‘What it could be like… otherwise?’ Deborah shook her head firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Not even a little bit?’

‘No!’ Her indignation was only partially fake.

They sat and continued their vigil.

After a few moments Deborah said, ‘Well, maybe just a bit.’

Melissa glanced at her, felt her lips twitch in a grin. Deborah returned the smile, and within seconds the two women were laughing, the mirth spilling out of them until the setting and the circumstances and the sight of an ICU nurse hurrying over towards them forced them to compose themselves.

Wiping her eyes once more, a different kind of tear this time, Melissa said, ‘Thank you.’

Deborah flipped a hand. ‘Don’t mention it. It’s not like me to get soppy and sentimental. It won’t happen again.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll leave you alone now. But you really do need to get some rest, Melissa.’

Melissa turned to wave goodbye, and as she did so the noise from Fin’s monitor changed again. The rhythmic beeping disappeared and was replaced by the steady drone of a single note.

Melissa whirled, stared at the bed.

Fin’s entire body was jerking uncontrollably.

***

Fin tumbled down, down through the black depths, drawn to the bottom of the river as if hauled along on a rope. There was no sound around him apart from the rumbling of distant motors through the pressing weight of the water.

The journey to the bottom seemed to take forever. During it, Fin experienced his entire life. His boyhood played itself out in leisurely fashion, mundane events interspersed with the big, significant ones like the time he fell out of the elm tree at the bottom of the garden and broke his arm (was that the beginning of his interest in trauma surgery? He’d never made the connection before). His adolescence passed almost as slowly, though more tumultuously: there were the first kisses, and more; the clashes with his parents. Then came young adulthood, and medical school, and the breakneck-paced early years as a junior doctor.

He reached the Catherine years, and the terrible time of her death and its aftermath, reliving the experience as acutely and as painfully as if it were the first time. The ensuing years of loneliness and ever-deeper immersion in his career were marginally more bearable.

And then came Melissa.

As he dropped further down into the water, the river seeming implausibly deep, Fin reflected that the richest period of his life – the time he’d had knowing Melissa Havers – was also one of the shortest. She was with him in her totality; he could not only see and hear her, but smell and taste and touch her as well.

Melissa, her blonde hair cascading around his face, her vivid blue eyes blazing into his.

Melissa, her mouth soft and urgent against his, her musk flooding his nerve endings.

Melissa, her arms around his neck in an unbreakable clasp, holding him close so that no matter where he was going, no matter what terrible unknowable eternity lay beyond the river bed, she would be with him always and he needn’t be alone.

As he felt himself slipping away, Fin experienced a revelation. Of all the awful, corroding experiences a human being could have, worse than loss and longing and failure was…
regret
. What a time to understand this, just as he was about to die, when it was too late to do anything with this knowledge.

If he’d had a second chance, Fin would have done what his heart had been telling him to do ever since he’d first acknowledged to himself his feelings for Melissa.

He’d have told her that he loved her, that she meant more to him than anyone else he’d ever known – more even than Catherine – and that he wanted to be with her for the rest of his days.

He’d have questioned the rationality of clinging with every fibre of his being to a vow he’d once made which now seemed not so much a method of atoning for his sins as a way to avoid being hurt again.