Wildflowers (6 page)

“Shouldn’t he have woken by now?” I ask as I help the nurse maneuver the awkward machinery round the side of the bed.

He shakes his head and smiles, but not before I see a concerned frown crease his forehead.

“Call in a little while, and we’ll let you know how he is,” he says.

I squeeze Sam’s hand before I walk away, determined to be back as soon as I can.

Downstairs the police have gone. I make my way to the little room Judy took me to earlier, but I see through the glass it’s occupied. I’m just about to sit down on one of the hard chairs in reception when Judy walks up to the desk carrying two large duffel bags.

“There you are!” she exclaims when she sees me.

“I came down to hand myself over, but the police have gone.”

It’s not that I want to be arrested—it’s just I’d rather get it over with. The sooner they talk to me, the sooner I can be back here with Sam.

“Oh, don’t worry about them,” Judy says brightly. “I was hoping you were going to buy me a coffee in the café to celebrate.” She winks conspiratorially.

“Okay,” I say, clueless as to the conspiracy. “I would love to buy you a coffee but all my money was in the car, along with all my other stuff.”

Judy smiles as if she knows something I don’t.

The hospital café is busy. Judy orders a coffee for herself and a sludgy hot chocolate for me, and we sit at a table in the window looking out onto a car park. Hospitals seem to be at least 80 percent car park. Under the table I feel her pushing something against my legs. The bags. I look at her questioningly.

“Yours, I believe,” she says.

I open one of them and peer in: my clothes, Sam’s clothes, music, leaflets, assorted rubbish. She hands me my wallet and all the money I possess in the world, which isn’t much by now.

“What?” I say, my mouth hanging open.

“Managed to get your stuff back from that guy who gave us a lift to the hospital in that stolen Cadillac. Turns out he parked it in front of a consultant’s Land Rover in the staff car park and stole my ID number from the tag I dropped. He must have wanted to get caught.” She smiles. “It seems the police have better things to do than chase vanished car thieves around hospitals.”

I stare at her in silence, and she winks at me, a mischievous glint in her eye.

“Why?” I say. I’m nothing if not grateful.

Her expression changes. Once again she is composed and completely serious.

“I don’t believe you’re a bad person, Xavi. You just made some bad choices—I suspect for what you thought were the right reasons. My son would have been about your age now.” Her smile is tight, more of a grimace. “He and Alex, my nephew, were best friends.”

She stares across the cafeteria, her eyes glassy. I get the feeling she needs me to ask her to carry on talking. “What happened to your son?”

“The same as happens to a lot of people. They make bad choices, they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She looks down at her hands. “He was on an exchange trip to Spain, last year of school. He loved languages.”

I can see this is beginning to upset her. “You don’t have to….”

“It’s all right. I want to tell you. He was such a good boy. Always imagined I’d have loads of kids, but I just had the one.” She takes a shaky sip of coffee and another long drag on her cigarette. “He got high one night, didn’t know what he was doing and tried to cross a busy road. Hit-and-run…. They had CCTV footage of the whole thing. But….” She stops and her eyes are full of tears. I place my hand over hers on the table. “On the CCTV footage, you can see the car hit him, you can see him lying on the ground after, and then you see this woman pull her car over and get out to help him, and she’s there on the video kneeling beside him and holding his hand. And… and to know that there was someone with him when he died—because he was dead by the time the paramedics got there—that he wasn’t alone, is… comforting.

“I tried to find her, to thank her, put out a request on national radio, but… sometimes people don’t want to be found. So your promise to your friend, to stay with him so he wouldn’t die alone, it meant something to me.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I WAKE
up disorientated in the nurses’ staff room where I have been stretched out along a row of chairs, sleeping. Luckily the room is empty. Judy left me in here to close my eyes for five minutes while she went to get ready for her shift on the maternity ward. But I think I’ve been asleep for more than five minutes.

I’m staring at the kettle and the row of cups next to it, debating whether or not I should make myself a hot drink, when the door opens and a couple of young male nurses walk in. I glance at them and smile briefly before getting up and out of the room as quickly as I can.

A long corridor brings me round to reception again, and from there I make my way up to ICU. It’s dark outside, and as I walk along looking out the windows, all I can see is my own reflection echoed into the night. Judy stored my belongings in her locker, but I wish I’d picked up my wallet and jumper—not for warmth, it’s not cold in ICU—because I feel somehow naked up here in just my T-shirt and trousers—unprepared and vulnerable.

Visiting hours have ended, I’m informed through the intercom. I should come back tomorrow.

It’s like talking to a machine. “Five minutes,” I beg.

Silence.

“Can you tell me if he’s awake?”

“Are you a relative?”

“Yes.”
I’m all he’s got.

A sigh. “No, he’s not woken up yet.”

I wonder what I’m supposed to do now. All I want is to sit with Sam until he wakes up. Will he ever forgive me? What if he wakes in the night and thinks I’ve brought him here and deserted him?

I buzz through again.

“I’m going to wait here. Please can you tell me if he wakes up?”

Silence. Again.

They’ve probably called security, I think hopelessly. I sink down outside the doors.

I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got nowhere to go.

Judy left a note at reception for them to contact her if my parents arrived and I’m not there. Well, I’m not there. I’m here.

I knew Judy would realize that, though, and that she would send them here to find me. So I don’t know why I’m so shocked when I raise my head off my arms and see my mother and father standing at the end of the echoey corridor. It’s only seconds we stare at one another, but I’m noting all the changes, and wondering how much change they’re seeing in me. My mother is wearing the same dark coat she always wore, with the blue silk lining, and the shoes that make her almost as tall as me. It’s the familiarity that does me in.

I don’t know which of us moves first, but I almost lift her off the ground, the both of us dry-eyed but emotional, my father standing aside as he always did.

It’s only now they’re here, and how totally broken I am, that I realize how much I’ve missed them.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, as if that can ever be adequate.

“Genevieve sends her love too,” my mother whispers in my ear, and I just sob harder.

Genevieve, my older sister. “How is she?” I pull away to look at their faces.

“She’s doing well. She’s only a mile away, so we still see her every day.”

They told me she was going to move in to supported housing a few weeks ago, but because of everything that has happened and the fact that I haven’t had an address, that was the last letter I received from them.

“She’s coping?”

My mother nods. I can see it hurts her even though she must be pleased Genevieve is managing on her own. It’s what they always wanted for her. She was born with her umbilical cord wrapped round her neck and her brain was deprived of oxygen, causing learning difficulties and acute hearing loss. I learned sign language before I learned how to talk aloud.

“How’s Sam?” My mother asks finally.

I close my eyes. I can’t face the concern on her face. “He’s not awake yet. He should be awake. They don’t know what’s wrong with him. I don’t want him to die, Mum,” I whisper, and she cradles my head in her arms.

Distantly I hear my father’s voice speaking to the nurse through the intercom.

“Are you coming?” he calls to us a few minutes later.

I don’t know what he said to the nurse, but there she is, holding the door open for us, a finger to her lips.

“Two minutes,” she says.

Sam looks much the same as he did earlier, damaged and frail. My mother brushes away a lock of his unruly hair and leans down to kiss his forehead. It’s as if she knows him. And I wish she did. She’s the only person I’ve ever seen show him any affection besides me.

I run my fingers across the back of his hand before holding it gently in mine.

IT’S AFTER
midnight when I finally manage to find a place to sleep. My parents have long since gone to their hotel, leaving me with my father’s brick of a mobile phone in case ICU calls, and also, I suspect, so they can contact me.

Judy’s shift finished an hour ago, and she suggested I find an empty waiting room down one of the lower-floor corridors if I wanted any peace.

So here I am, laid out on a row of hard plastic chairs, putting a few unnecessary kinks in my spine and wishing the hours away. A small brown paper parcel sits on the floor next to me. Just over three weeks ago, Sam turned up at my parents’ house trying to find me. They obviously found him trustable enough to give him the address of the library. He left this parcel with them, with instructions for them to give it to me the next time they saw me. I haven’t opened it. I can’t. I trace my finger over Sam’s spiky writing—my name a zigzag across the smooth paper. I know it’s a book. A small book.

I want to be with him whatever the outcome of this, even if he is broken and unfixable. It doesn’t matter, only the most basic human need matters—that he is alive right now, because right now is all that counts.

I want to show him there are things to live for. Words can be forgettable and untrustworthy, and with Sam it was never about what we said to each other. All I can do is show him.

LATE THE
next morning, I wait in a different sun-filled corridor. Judy found me earlier and told me Sam has been moved to a High Dependency Unit this morning, and that this is a good thing as it means he doesn’t need intensive care. Still, my stomach feels like one big weighty knot as I wait for visiting time to begin.

My parents brought me breakfast and a change of clothes—something from home, from all those years ago. I know they are having lunch with Judy so that I can spend some time alone with Sam.

I stare at the parcel in my hands—it’s become some sort of talisman. I tuck it into the back pocket of my trousers so I won’t keep thinking about it.

At eleven exactly the door opens and I’m told I can go in. Sam is in a small room at the far end of a snaky corridor. The nurses tell me he’s been awake, but when I see him curled up on his side, his blanket half kicked off, he’s sleeping again.

The tube down his throat has been removed and he looks more comfortable.

I sit down in the chair and wait, knowing I have hours. There’s no rush.

This isn’t the first time I’ve just sat and watched him. I used to do it all the time at the commune. From the window of our tiny room, you could see all the way across the fields and beyond, to the sea. Sam spent his life wandering back and forth on some mission or other to feed or just to observe the animals he discovered. Watching him made my heart ache—he was so beautiful, so innocent and uncorrupted. And the time I spent with him felt innocent and uncorrupted too. Words weren’t necessary. What we had wasn’t something I could articulate back then, and now I don’t need to.

The bedcovers twitch as he shifts, restless and beginning to stir.

“Sam,” I whisper, my heart speeding.

He wakes with a sudden gasp. Disoriented, he stares at me. I have no idea what he’s thinking.

“You’re in hospital,” I say, though he probably realizes this by now if he’s been awake. “How do you feel?”

Like shit
, he signs and immediately rolls over, hiding his face.

One of the other occupants in the room is sleeping fitfully. I wait and wait for Sam to turn back to me. He doesn’t, though, not for minutes. When he finally moves, I can see he’s been crying, and I’m ashamed for not realizing.

Why did you bring me here?
he signs rapidly.

“I didn’t want you to die.” I hate that my eyes are burning. But I won’t let myself cry, not here.

It’s what I wanted!
He punctuates the words by hitting his chest, and I flinch as though he shouted them. The amber of his eyes gleams as hard as gemstone.

I shake my head. “Don’t say that.”
Talk to me
, I want to beg him.
Explain.

This isn’t going how I wanted, and I wonder if I should give him some space for a few minutes. But when I get up to leave, he says my name, his voice so broken and hoarse, it’s as though he’s never used it. “Xavi.”

I want to take him in my arms, but I’m frightened I’ll hurt him, so I just sit back down and run my finger gently down his arm.

“I wasn’t leaving you,” I murmur. “Please don’t be angry with me. This was the best way of not leaving you I could think of.”

But you will leave
, he signs, closing his eyes. Tears stream down his cheeks again.
I’m so tired of being alone.

“I won’t. I promise….” I want to hold him. Words can be useless sometimes.

I pull the curtain around the bed to give us a little privacy. Hopefully it won’t arouse the suspicion of the nurses. Sam is still hooked up to a drip. Carefully he shifts over, and I crawl onto the bed next to him. I want to take care of him so badly my whole body aches. We find a position he’s comfortable in, with his head on my chest, and I gently run my fingers through his knotted hair. I haven’t felt this good in weeks, maybe months. Fuck, maybe since the last time I held him in my arms. I know he’s still sick, but I don’t want to move away from him for anything.