FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
Kate slammed through the doors of A&E, still clad in her army fatigues. She knew she looked a mess but she didn’t care. She felt disgusting, dirty, but as soon as they had landed she had begged a lift from a passing officer and raced to her boy. She could feel the layer of dirt and dust that permeated her clothes, and she felt at odds with the bright white sterile starkness of the hospital reception. One of the receptionists recognised her, dashing around the desk.
‘Dr Harper, come with me.’ She nodded and followed dumbly, vaguely aware of the looks of sympathy the other staff behind the desk shot her when they heard her name. She dared not look at them, for fear their expressions would confirm the worst. Confirm without a doubt what she had feared since getting that call, that Jamie was dead. Her phone was in her kit bag, but as usual, and like her, it was having trouble adjusting to the last few hours, and she couldn’t get a signal. She had received no news since the call from Neil, and it was freaking her out. She became aware that the receptionist was talking to her, holding and stroking her hand as they walked briskly from white corridor to white corridor. She couldn’t seem to make herself tune in, to hear the words the woman was churning out. She only saw one thing. SPINAL UNIT. The words, in huge white letters on the wall, jolted her into the present.
‘He’s not dead?’ She asked, confused. The receptionist stopped then, taking Kate’s face between her own two soft hands. ‘No! No, Doctor Harper, your son is alive.’
‘But … why?’ she asked, her words cutting out like failed fireworks. ‘Why?’ she tried again, forcing the very word from her chest.
The receptionist steered her to a chair, patting her hand and scuttling off.
Kate sat there, staring at the empty corridor, for a decade. It had to be a decade, it could be no less. Every second signified a week, every minute even longer. She felt as though her whole life experience was on this hard plastic chair, sat on this corridor, her eyes smarting from the starkness of the white surroundings.
She thought of the day that Jamie had come into the world. Expecting her son to be late, as first babies and boys often were, she was at work, squeezing every second out of her maternity leave. Or so she told people. The truth was, the thought of being at home with a newborn with no work to challenge her was terrifying. Neil was taking two weeks off work of course, but that only seemed to add to the dread, rather than comfort her. She felt as though these days they needed the cushion of work to keep their relationship from imploding. What on earth would they do, stuck in the same house together for fourteen days with a newborn baby and nothing else? The thought filled her with dread, and she realised that this baby would not be the experience that most new mothers had. She often wondered just what would happen, and that sent her running for work more than ever. There, in the hospital, she knew what to do. Broken bones, poking through skin and sinew, she loved. Mending people, fixing their injuries, helping them to walk, to hold their loved ones, to work - that gave her a high that she felt sure no infant would. Even hers.
So when her waters broke two weeks early, just as she had finished setting a dislocated shoulder, no one was more surprised than her. She wanted to shout out ‘no, it’s too early, come back in a fortnight’, but of course, baby waits for no nervous mother. Neil was away at a conference, the nurses frantically trying him all day, their voicemail messages getting more frantic with each try. Nine hours later, exhausted, sweaty and angry at Neil for being sat in some hotel listening to some bore with a flipchart instead of with her, Kate gave one final push and felt her son slide from her body. He was placed on her tummy, Kate reaching for him instinctively, a mewling, purple sticky mess. She cut the cord herself, ending their journey as it had begun, just the two of them, and she waited for the nurses to check him over. She sat and chomped and slurped at her tea and toast, suddenly ravenously hungry and thirsty. She had always wondered at such a strange tradition, giving a new mother builder’s tea and white toasted bread slathered in butter - such an English thing to do after squeezing a small person from your own hoo-ha, but it was the best thing she had ever tasted.
Her son snuffled as they checked him over, giving one lusty cry as they prodded and poked at him, and then he was there. All wrapped in borrowed clothes, with her own overnight bag at home, not yet packed. He looked out at the world from his blanket peephole, a lone curl of dark hair licking the brim of his tiny blue hat. Kate held him in her arms, and the world she knew ended. One look into those blue eyes, and she knew, no matter where her work took her, it would be the two of them, together, forever. As she spoke to her son silently in her head, he reached out a wrinkled hand, touching her face, and she knew he understood. Her Jamie.
Dr Stuart Jenkins, the hot shot spinal surgeon at the hospital Kate worked at, was arrogant but respected. Kate herself had often crossed paths with him professionally, their skills often being required simultaneously, and had a grudging respect for him and his practices. The nurses hated him, but he got the job done.
He stood in front of her now, still in scrubs, a smattering of blood on his clothing. Kate couldn’t bring herself to look at him either, and chose to focus on the blood. Her son’s blood, no doubt. His lifeforce, there on her colleague’s uniform, like paint flecks on a contractor. He moved then, kneeling before her. His hand on her knee, warm and clean. She wondered where those hands had just been, working on her son’s body.
‘Kate,’ he murmured softly. ‘Kate, we have to talk.’
She looked at him then, his deep brown eyes soft and warm. He spoke in terms she understood, no layman’s speak, he told her straight, gave her the facts. All Kate could grasp was the fact that he said spinal compression. When he spoke of permanent lower paralysis, and wheelchairs, Kate stopped listening. All she could think about was the promise she had made her newborn son, the promise of the two of them, together forever. It was then she realised that Neil wasn’t here, again, and she realised that she hadn’t seen him yet. The fact that she hadn’t even thought about his possible injuries or health wasn’t lost on her. She asked now, and Stuart was the one to avoid her eyes. She started to panic then, the thought of her husband lying in a bed somewhere, like their son. When Stuart finally told her that Neil was fine, and that he had left the ward, she knew their marriage was over.
From that day to this, Kate had never been far from Jamie’s side, but the Jamie she knew was gone. The boy she saw that day, tubes everywhere, sleeping off the cocktail of drugs in the large white bed, his thick dark lashes fluttering against the white pillow case, was not her Jamie. This boy was broken, fractured, beaten. His face, swollen from the impact, cut from the glass shards, was unrecognisable from the cheeky boy she had left, and she hated Neil for it. She hated him for not protecting their boy, not shielding him from danger, and for running from his side, instead of clinging to it. His phone was off, and his parents didn’t know where he was, didn’t even know about the accident, about Jamie. What kind of a man lefthis child alone while they had spinal surgery? She utterly despised him, and wished him in Jamie’s place instead every day, but he wasn’t the one she hated the most. It wasn’t the driver of the other car either, a woman on her way to the gym after the school run, now utterly ruined by that morning. She had slept in the hospital waiting room all night, her kids with her - a single parent being there for another person’s child, willing them to get better. It wasn’t her fault, after all. Neil had been the one distracted, pulling into her lane, putting her life at risk as well as his own, and his only child’s. Yet she was still sorry, still traumatised, still feeling better just by being in the same hospital as the boy she crashed into, while his own father kicked up his heels and ran for the hills. Go figure. She didn’t hate them the most, she saved that venomous hate for somewhere far closer to home. For herself.