Authors: Julie Cohen
And then it ended. He didn’t know why, and Maya claimed not to either. They had sex less often, though when they did, it was just as good. They spent more time with other people. Sometimes they didn’t speak for a day or two, maybe even a week, other than text messages
or notes left to each other on the refrigerator. There was no falling-out, no argument, no appreciable difference in how they got along. But they weren’t in love any more. It had drained away, almost without their noticing it. Without either of them speaking of it, or making an effort to revive it.
When Maya accepted an internship in Hong Kong after their exams, they both agreed to stay in touch
but see other people. The heartbreak was there, but it was more for what they’d lost than for the ending of what they had now. He spoke with her occasionally on Facebook these days, friendly and distant.
The third time was Felicity. He’d been dating another woman when he met Felicity on the train from Cornwall. It was nothing serious, a friend of a friend, but they were meant to go to the cinema
the following Friday. He’d cancelled it, apologized over the telephone, told her he had met the woman he was going to marry. She’d thought it was a joke. He and Felicity were married three months later.
His love-life CV wasn’t very different from his friends’, male and female: they all had the one who had got away, the one that should have worked but didn’t, the one who grabbed their heart at
first sight. It was a combination of factors, of well-worn stories and clichés, that was enacted and re-enacted millions, billions of times. They could be reduced down to sketches, to facts, enumerations of sexual positions tried or arguments avoided, betrayals of feeling or fidelity, mindgames or heartbreak.
Oh yes, I had a relationship like that. Oh yes, my heart was broken the same way. Oh
yes, I know the type of person you mean
.
When he thought of Maya now, or Kathy, or Andi, or any of the women who had touched him in some way, physically or mentally – not many, but no fewer than what he supposed was typical – he sometimes felt a warmth or a smile, or a pang of regret or lust. He remembered the facts: I was in love with her once. I used to want to sing just from looking at her
hair or her eyes.
But he couldn’t feel those emotions again; he couldn’t relive them by thinking of them. They were reduced to memory. To traces, with some power, but not much.
Not enough to take precedence over what he felt now, in the corridor outside the neurology ward, still awake on coffee and nerves, waiting for his wife to go through surgery that would probably save her life, that would
possibly restore her to him, but might also kill her.
He had always loved how Felicity lived in the now. He loved her impulsiveness, her ability to see what was in front of her when other people ignored it. And yet Felicity, unlike him, unlike anyone else he knew, was caught in a loop of past feeling that her brain had convinced her was as fresh as the day when it happened.
It was so strange.
Something you’d read about in a health feature, tucked in the back of the Sunday supplement.
In the corridor, near the vending machine that dispensed species of vile liquids containing caffeine, he closed his eyes and tried to recall what it felt like to be in love with Maya. How was it different, for example, for what he felt for Felicity?
If Maya walked into the hospital corridor right now,
he would be able to distinguish his present emotions about her quite easily from what he felt for his wife. There was no comparison. But what if he were presented with the experience of how he felt about Maya, for example, after the first night they’d gone to bed together? Would it be the same raw emotion that he’d felt after first making love with Felicity, the same sleepless drunkenness of flesh
and joy? Was there a space in his brain that carried a specific ‘night after Maya’ feeling, which was quantitatively different from his ‘night after Felicity’ feeling? Or was it more that he had a general ‘Quinn is very happy after making love with someone he cares deeply about’ feeling that was applied whenever the situation arose?
‘Pardon me, are you waiting?’
He came back to himself with
a start. The woman standing next to him was looking enquiringly between him and the vending machine.
‘After you,’ he said, and when she’d collected her cups of brown liquid, he began feeding coins into slots. A coffee, white, from one machine, and a packet of Jaffa cakes for his supper from the other machine. The hospital cafés were all closed by now. He considered a second packet for Felicity
before he remembered she was nil by mouth in preparation for surgery tomorrow morning.
Vascular coiling, it was called. The neuroradiologist would feed a tube up through Felicity’s femoral artery at her groin, up her body to the brain. Once the tube was there, the neuroradiologist would insert a coil of thin platinum wire to choke off the aneurysm’s blood supply and stop it from growing. It was
much less invasive than opening up her skull and clipping the aneurysm, and required less recovery time. Yet the risks still included stroke and brain damage and heart attack, and rupture of the aneurysm itself.
He’d watched Felicity as the neuroradiologist explained the procedure and the risks. She had been looking at the print-outs the entire time, tracing her fingers over the pictures of her
brain. He wasn’t certain it had all sunk in. Of course, it was terrifying enough for him to think of her brain being messed around with; it would be much more so for her. For a moment or two, though, a stubborn expression had crossed her face: lips pressed together, chin set – the kind of expression she got when he reminded her she should probably leave earlier for an appointment, or when his mother
started arranging their weekend plans for them.
As soon as she set her chin, he was certain that she was going to object to the surgery; that she was going to tell the doctor to stop being ridiculous, she was absolutely fine, and that she wanted to go home now.
She didn’t. And thinking like that would be madness. This aneurysm wasn’t merely causing her seizures. It wasn’t only a disease that
had come between them, turned her into someone like a stranger. It was something that could kill her at any moment.
He had prepared his arguments for when the doctor left them, but Felicity didn’t say anything. She’d hardly said anything to him at all, since their argument yesterday, since she’d made the phone call to that man. She’d sighed and gone to sleep, leaving him too much time to think.
They hadn’t yet spoken of what would happen after the surgery, when it was time to go home and resume their lives. That was the first thing Suz had asked about when he’d rung her to tell her about the diagnosis and treatment.
‘We haven’t discussed it yet,’ he’d said. Meaning, he didn’t want to discuss it with his family.
He unwrapped a Jaffa cake, popped it in his mouth, and checked his watch.
Time dragged and flew in the hospital; it was nearly nine o’clock. Aside from going home with Suz to pick up his car and have a shower, he’d done little today but shuffle from Felicity’s bedside to the café or shop. There were visiting hours but he knew the ward sister, who lived in a farmhouse outside Tillingford, and she told him they didn’t mind him staying as long as he wanted to.
The other
patients in the ward were connected to machines. Some of them were in comas. Some wore helmets. The elderly lady in the bed near the entrance had had a stroke, her face drooping and dead on one side, but she waved at him with her good hand, as she did whenever he passed, and he waved back. ‘Lovely evening out there, Mrs Chowdery,’ he said, even though he wasn’t strictly certain it was, since he
hadn’t looked out of a window in several hours.
When he reached Felicity’s bed, the curtains had been drawn shut all around it. He slipped between them, quietly, so as not to wake her. She was gone.
The sheet was folded back almost precisely, in a very un-Felicity way. He glanced back through the curtain; both of the loos for patient use were empty, their doors open. Her bedside cabinet was
ajar and her shoes were missing, as was her handbag.
Quinn set off at a rapid walk. He checked the side wards, the reception desk, the waiting room. The staff were busy at a bed in one of the other side wards, an alarm beeping out. If she’d heard it going off, she’d have known this was a good time to slip away unnoticed.
And go where? Just for a walk, or to escape? To meet the man she’d rung
to rescue her?
The corridors were quiet. He met two orderlies pushing a sleeping man in a bed, railings up.
‘Have you seen a woman in a hospital nightgown walking by?’ he asked them. ‘Thirty years old, dark hair in a fringe. My wife’s left her bed and I don’t know where she’s gone.’
‘They wander sometimes after dark,’ said the orderly. ‘Full moon tonight. She’ll be safe. I’ll get some help.’
He raised his radio.
Quinn bit back a response about his wife not being a dementia patient. ‘I’ll keep looking.’
He was close to the stairs; he flew down them and towards the hospital exit. The reception desk was unmanned at this time of night and the lobby was empty. Outside, there were two patients smoking, strangers united in addiction.
‘Have you seen a patient come out? Dark hair in a fringe,
slender, wearing a hospital nightgown and carrying a handbag? Could have got into a car, or walked off with a man?’ The smokers shook their heads, but their cigarettes were still long, they had just lit them; they might not have been there, or have been distracted by lighter and packet.
The entrance was quite well-lit by streetlights and lights from the hospital itself, but he couldn’t see Felicity
anywhere. A small queue of cabs lined the kerb, but a quick question to each driver elicited no information.
She couldn’t have been gone for long. It had probably taken him twenty minutes max to get coffee, which would be long enough, but surely if she’d been missing from her bed for some time, some of the staff would have noticed. He wished he’d thought to touch her bedsheets to see if they
were still warm. If a car had been waiting behind the taxi rank, the same place that Suz had parked the night before, she could have got into it without anyone noticing. If she’d rung the other man, and asked him to come and get her.
He ran to the end of the block anyway, looking around for her. A searching glance both ways down the street, and then up in the other direction. His footsteps echoed
against the hospital building.
She could be anywhere. She could be gone.
Quinn pounded on his forehead with both fists. He’d suspected she didn’t want the surgery, but he’d dismissed it as too ridiculous. Why would she refuse something that would almost certainly save her life?
She’d risk it for love.
Breathing hard, he turned back to the hospital entrance. Maybe someone inside had found her.
On the way, he tried ringing her phone, but he wasn’t surprised when it went straight to voicemail.
If she had gone with the other man, what message could he possibly leave that would convince her to come back?
He took the stairs up rather than the lift, and was about to push open the door to the second floor where the ward was, when something occurred to him.
Full moon tonight
, the orderly
had said. And the stairs continued up, towards the roof.
His phone, set to silent for the hospital, vibrated with a message as he climbed. He curled his fingers around it in his pocket, but didn’t pause to check it. At the top of the flight was a glass door to a rooftop garden.
Open 10.00–18.00 NO SMOKING
said the letters on the door, but when he pushed it, it opened.
It was cooler out here.
The garden was surrounded by walls, with light shining from some of the windows overlooking it, but it was still dark and quiet. She sat on a bench not far from the door. Silver moonlight lit her face and the white of her nightgown. Quinn sat down beside her. She was looking up at the moon, so he did too.
‘I just left a message for you,’ she said. ‘I thought you might worry. Your phone was busy.’
‘I was worried,’ he said.
‘I wanted to see the sky. I might never see it again. It might be the last time.’ She drew in a deep breath. So did he, to taste the same air, perfumed with honeysuckle and warm asphalt.
‘You don’t want to have the surgery, do you?’ The dark made it easier to speak to her.
She shook her head. ‘I’m frightened.’
‘I thought you’d run off with him.’
She sighed, but didn’t
answer.
‘Would he rescue you, if you asked him to? Take you away so you wouldn’t have to have the surgery?’
‘I’m going to have the surgery. And no, I don’t think he would. I think he’d be as vehement about it as you are. Because it will probably save my life.’
‘Who is he? How long have you been seeing him?’
‘I knew him when I was twenty. My mother painted a picture of him – I saw it when we
went to New York.’ Her voice was weary and sad.
‘Is that when it started? When you saw the painting?’
‘A little before that. I had the first seizure thing in May.’
‘Had you been thinking about him before? During our whole marriage?’
‘No. I didn’t think about him. It came out of the blue, with the scent. And then the feeling, and the picture.’
Quinn clenched his hands on his lap. ‘How many
times?’
‘How many times have I had the feeling? I’m not sure. A lot.’
‘No, I meant how many times have you slept with him?’
‘I haven’t.’
He let his silence show his doubt.
‘I haven’t, Quinn. Not for ten years. When you walked in, I was – I was just about to tell him to stop. That we couldn’t.’
He heard the hesitation. It was a lie, to spare him. And even if it wasn’t, did it even matter?
‘Do you think he really loves you?’ he asked instead. He knew the answer, but he wanted to know what she’d say.
‘He says he does. Though …’ She paused. ‘Yes, I believe that he thinks he’s in love with me.’
Careful phrasing. Hesitation. It was nearly as bad as walking in on them together.
‘But your feelings about him aren’t real,’ he said. ‘They might have been real at one point, but now they’re
being triggered by seizures. You say you didn’t think about him at all before you started smelling the flowers?’