Chapter Thirty-One
March 2017
It had been just over a week since Lydia had seen Theo, since she’d texted Jonathan to come and pick her up. Not wanting to be anywhere near the rehab centre, she’d trekked along a dangerously winding country road, trudged the sludgy edges of it, stepping aside if a vehicle dared to come the same way, until Jonathan flashed the lights on his car as he approached and pulled over. And when she’d sat in the passenger seat she’d said nothing. They’d driven back to Bath almost in silence, the only dialogue between them consisting of him telling her they were stopping for petrol and asking if she wanted coffee or a snack, and her telling him she had to use the bathroom.
Jonathan had parked outside the house in the last remaining space and they’d taken off their seatbelts. He reached over and put his hand at the back of her neck in a reassuring gesture.
‘I’ll head home,’ he said, without even waiting for her to say anything.
‘I’m sorry, Jonathan.’
‘Please don’t apologise. I get it, I really do. I’m at the end of a phone line if you need me but I won’t be hounding you.’
She looked at him then. ‘Would you stay?’
‘Here, with you?’ He looked surprised. ‘Don’t ask because you feel guilty telling me to go. This must be hell for you.’
She gripped hold of his hand. ‘I’m so tired. Please, just stay.’
He followed her inside and she slowly climbed the staircase, holding his hand behind her. It was dark but still early evening and he lay with her until she fell asleep. She vaguely remembered smelling home cooking when her eyes opened to the dark but she fell asleep again and only woke briefly when he brought her a bowl of chicken soup with some thick-cut toast on the side.
He insisted she eat and then when she’d finished he curled behind her on the bed again until she was on the verge of sleep and then whispered he should go. She didn’t try to persuade him to stay, not this time. Because she knew when she woke up in the morning she had all this to face all over again.
Now, sitting at work staring out of the window, she stirred her tea absent-mindedly. She’d ploughed herself into work two days after Jonathan dropped her home, tackling anything that came her way. Ian and two others had been down with the flu, increasing her workload considerably but she’d tackled it with gusto, with an energy she daren’t let go for fear she’d fall apart. The crisis had cleared this morning with Ian returning and taking control again and she was enjoying a rare moment of peace before she met up with Sally who thought she was still coupled up with Jonathan and had disappeared into hiding because of some exhilarating love affair.
As soon as the hour hand and the minute hand met at the top of the clock, she left the office and walked over to the café to meet her best friend and Sally’s face was an unsurprising mixture of shock and disbelief when she heard the news.
‘Crap. I mean it’s great, but bloody hell.’
Lydia thanked the waitress for the bacon roll and didn’t waste any time tucking into it. Her appetite often disappeared in times of uncertainty, but today it seemed to be firing on all cylinders and doing the complete reverse.
‘How is he? Physically, I mean?’
Lydia recounted what she’d seen, what Anita and Theo had told her, what the nurses had been able to pass on. ‘He’s going really well and they’ve all been surprised at how his recovery has come along.’
‘I’m not sure his mental recovery sounds as good,’ said Sally before Lydia could say the same thing out loud.
‘No, it isn’t. He’s angry, he’s hurt, he’s sorry, he’s regretful. Give me any letter of the alphabet and I bet I could give you an emotion he’s feeling. I’m trying to understand what it’s like for him but how can I? What he’s been through is unimaginable.’
‘What you’ve been through is unimaginable too, Lydia.’
‘He’s so sure the affair couldn’t have been as solid as Melanie believed. He’s adamant we were happy and he’d probably made a mistake and wanted to move on. He thinks he probably changed his mind about the hotel and forgot about the automatic email. He’s quite sure that would’ve been the case, but he can’t possibly know. It’s like two different Theos. One who existed in the early days and another who lived through the year before the accident and did all these things the first Theo can’t understand. I told him we had sex before the accident and everything seemed good, so now he’s completely convinced he wasn’t going to end it.’
Sally didn’t speak for a moment, just chewed her own tuna roll in quiet contemplation. ‘But were you happy? I mean, think about it. On that one night things were going great, but there was a lot of shit that went down beforehand, and you don’t just forget that.’
‘We had the usual couple ups and downs, but I didn’t think we were ever so unhappy that he’d cheat. If we’d been fighting more I could almost understand him wanting someone else. Going by what Melanie told me their affair, fling, or whatever it was called, started just after our really rocky patch.’ She didn’t need to be any more specific because Sally knew what she was talking about. There was no need to say ‘the time Theo couldn’t get it up’, or any words to that effect. At the time what had hurt the most was the way he’d pulled away from her emotionally for months on end. And when Lydia remembered that, she realised they hadn’t been truly happy for quite a while.
Sally bit into the second half of her sandwich. ‘What do you think you would’ve done had the accident not happened and he came home and told you he’d been sleeping with someone else? Because it wasn’t the once, was it? From what this other girl says, it was something that had gone on for long enough to make her think he may leave his girlfriend.’
Lydia didn’t say anything else but as she finished the last mouthful of her bacon roll, Sally asked, ‘What does Jonathan think of all this?’
‘He says I should take all the time I need, he’ll back off.’
‘Something tells me that’s not what you really want.’
‘I don’t. I’m in love with Jonathan.’
Sally’s eyes sparkled. ‘I do believe you are.’ Her smile faded. ‘So where does this leave Theo?’
Lydia had absolutely no idea.
*
Lydia and Jonathan were still in touch by text message but not even a phone call passed between them for weeks. Lydia wanted to work through her feelings, to tackle what was an impossible situation and both Jonathan and Theo had accepted her need for headspace. She worked harder than ever, danced as much as she could, and family and friends kept their distance at her request.
One weekend in early April, she drove up to the rehab centre when she knew Anita was out of town with her sister. Grace had phoned last week and if Theo had told her anything about his conversation with Lydia about Melanie, and about Jonathan, she didn’t let on. They’d ended up talking for almost an hour and Lydia got the impression Theo may have put her up to the phone call, if only to give Lydia some support.
According to Grace, Anita had gone to Bournemouth to play a doubles tennis match with some old school friends, something Anita hadn’t done in years. Prior to the accident Anita had played a lot of tennis, going to the club two or three times a week, but the phone calls begging her to play had dwindled over time, according to Grace. As soon as Theo was back in control of his life, Grace had, in her words, ‘practically thrust the tennis racket at her’ and told her to get out the door and not come back until she’d reminded herself she had a life. Anita had apparently become a different person since Theo had woken up. She’d started to pick up the pieces of her own life and had gone back to being a woman in her own right rather than just someone’s mother, and Lydia was happy to hear how positive life was for her.
Lydia parked the hire car in the car park and stepped out to a pleasantly warm spring day. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she made her way to the front entrance, looking forward to seeing Theo, to actually talking to him, something that still felt weird to think about when he’d been quiet for so long.
When she got inside, Theo was with the physio. Since he first came to rehab, the care he’d received was completely different to what had gone before. Obviously the attention was significant in intensive care at the hospital but on the general ward Lydia had observed Theo going for long periods where he was almost ignored because he was no trouble to anyone around. The same happened in the care home, which was dreary and almost the last stop for many. But here there was an air of positivity carried on a wave, from the staff who managed to smile and speak in the friendliest of voices, to the bright, airy rooms.
Over the year Theo had been unable to speak or communicate with them or move in a meaningful way, the nursing teams, when they gave him the focus he needed, had flexed his legs, moved his arms, turned him in bed to stop sores developing. But the stimulation he got in rehab was testament to why Anita had pushed so hard to get him here. Lydia had thought it was false hope but watching Theo now she felt a pang of guilt that she hadn’t been more emotionally supportive. Because, as it turned out, the woman was right.
‘Lydia, watch this.’ Theo called over to where she was standing. He was walking, not a frame or set of crutches in sight. The female physio was holding his hand but he was definitely more upright than before. He was the closest she’d seen him to his full six-foot-one in a long time.
Lydia stood at the side of the room smiling. The determination on his face was palpable, like she’d never seen before and she gasped when he asked the physio to let go of his hand. He took three steps, hesitated, then a fourth, and then the physio was by his side holding his arm again because he wasn’t quite ready.
‘That’s amazing,’ Lydia gushed and covered her mouth with her hands. ‘I can’t believe it.’ He’d come along in leaps and bounds, and his speech was almost back to normal with only the odd stutter giving away that anything was ever amiss.
Theo had graduated top in his class at university. Despite the rugby mentality he had adopted with his mates, when he got down to the books, Theo was remarkably clever. It was the reason he’d sailed into a top job and eventually got a promotion he deserved. He aced tests, he could do The Times crossword better than anyone she knew, and he was freakishly good at maths. He’d tutored the teenage son of a colleague at work before he sat his GCSE’s and the dad had had high praise for Theo when he brought round a box of beers to say thank you.
During the time since Theo’s accident, Lydia had spent plenty of time on Google. With information at her fingertips she’d read things that encouraged her and gave her hope, others that pointed out the reality of the situation Theo was in. There were frightening statistics of how many coma patients stayed the same way forever and never got any better, other reports about those who woke up and faced unthinkable disabilities. But looking at Theo now she remembered something else she’d read: that if you were bright then you stood a good chance of making a significant recovery. It had something to do with more brain cells and how they could make new connections. She couldn’t remember the exact details but maybe that was why Theo was progressing so quickly now.
The physio session came to an abrupt end when Theo lashed out at the wall. He was pushing it, pushing his limits – perhaps with Lydia watching he felt he had to – and he’d stumbled over with the physio coaxing him towards the wheelchair, telling him that was enough for one day.
Theo refused to let Lydia push him back to his room and barely said a word as she followed after him. He could move the wheelchair himself and he wasn’t waiting for her.
The physio caught up with her before she reached Theo’s room. He’d already disappeared through the door anyway. ‘It’s frustrating for a man like Theo,’ she told Lydia. ‘I didn’t know him before but he talks about things he did as a young man, things he remembers and they all speak of someone who was incredibly capable, active and able to do anything he put his mind to.’
‘That’s Theo,’ said Lydia. She’d summed him up perfectly.
‘It’s hard for patients to come to terms with the fact that they may not be exactly the same as they were before. He may not go back to the same job, he may not do the same sporting activities as before – certainly not for a while – but all of us staff here also make it known that although there’s a lot about the brain that we do know, there’s an awful lot we’re yet to discover.’
Lydia was sure someone at the hospital had told her the same thing once. ‘So anything is possible?’
‘Anything is possible.’ She smiled at Lydia. ‘He might be angry, something very common in patients who’ve had a brain injury. Go in and see him, see how he is. But don’t be surprised if you don’t get much more out of him today.’
Lydia asked for directions to the bathroom, where she used the toilet, washed her hands and then stood for a while until someone else came in, and by the time she walked to Theo’s room again she felt prepared.
‘You’re doing well,’ she said, but he didn’t reply. He was still sitting in the wheelchair, facing the window, looking out. She went and stood beside him but kept a distance. ‘Spring is in the air, the park in Bath is starting to look beautiful. We always loved it there, remember?’
On Valentine’s Day three years ago, Theo had surprised her with a champagne picnic for two on the grass near the bandstand. They’d eaten miniature bread rolls filled with prawns and mayonnaise, drunk out of plastic glasses filled to the brim with fizz, and let chocolate melt on their tongues as they attempted to stay warm. It had tried to snow earlier that day and Lydia was all up for cooking a romantic meal, a casserole probably, and snuggling in front of the fire. But Theo had other ideas and insisted they needed to get outside and enjoy the fresh air. He never had been one to sit around and when he made his mind up about something, there was no talking him out of it. But he’d been singing a different tune when the weather showed them who was boss and hailstones sent them running with all the gear back home, where they showered together and she teased him about whose idea would’ve been best all along. They eventually collapsed in front of a fire, riling each other about who was going to get up and chop things for the casserole that right now was just a bunch of raw ingredients lurking in the fridge.
She tried to reminisce about the picnic with Theo now, but it didn’t work. Instead he wheeled himself away from the window and sulked over by the bed, facing the wall.
‘Do you need help getting in?’ She pulled back the duvet cover and plumped the pillow.
‘Leave it, Lydia.’
‘You must be exhausted after physio, that’s all. I’m just—’
‘I said leave it!’
Tears stung her eyes and she walked over to him, determined not to let him push her away. She put a hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it off. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘I’ll go then.’ She hoped he’d tell her not to, but when he didn’t protest she picked up her bag and left.
In the car park she didn’t look back. She reversed out of the space and drove down the driveway that had led here in the first place, and it was only when she pulled over into a layby on the country road that she allowed herself to fall apart and cry.