The voice I am met with as I hold Harry’s phone to my ear is not my father’s but a woman’s, speaking extremely fast Spanish in a strange, unrecognisable accent. Through my panic I make out what I think are the words ‘collapsed’ and ‘unconscious’ and my father’s name, repeated over and over.
‘Wait! Could you just slow do—’
Even as I plead with her, the phone makes a shrill humming sound and the terrible signal completely wipes out all but the last few words of the woman’s sentence.
‘…Centro Medico de Mindo, in the main street, two blocks from the park. Ask for Dr Rivas, that’s me.’
I shove the phone under my ear and scrabble for a piece of paper. Harry thrusts a biro into my hands and I scribble down the information, all the while begging the woman – Dr Rivas – to tell me more about my father’s situation.
‘He just got here. We are doing tests,’ she tells me ambiguously. Then, in English, ‘You will come, yes?’
‘Wait!’ I plead, sensing she is about to end the call. ‘Is there somebody with him? A woman?’ My mind races. If he’s been rushed to hospital for some sort of – my stomach plummets at the thought – medical emergency, Dorice must be there, too. She’ll be able to tell me what’s going on.
‘No woman,’ Dr Rivas replies. ‘A man brought him in, he found him by the riverbank, apparently he was searching for someone when it happened…’ Her voice is swallowed up again by almost deafening interference on the line, then the call goes abruptly dead.
I cling on to the side of the kitchen worktop, still clutching the phone to my ear with my other hand, black dots dancing before my eyes and panic threatening to overwhelm me. I’m vaguely aware of Harry hovering behind me, his hand resting awkwardly on my shoulder. It takes every scrap of strength I can summon from within myself not to sink to the floor in a trembling mess, but instead step forward and take decisive action.
‘Help me pack a bag. I’m going to ask Roberto to drive us there.’
‘Liza and Roberto aren’t here… they left earlier to go and visit her brother in the country for the bank holiday weekend. It’s Halloween tonight and Day of the Dead tomorrow – it’s a massive celebration. The whole country has Monday and Tuesday off work. They’ll be back Tuesday evening.’ I blink and shake my head, trying to filter through all the unnecessary information. Harry is looking at the floor. ‘They did tell you this morning, but you were a bit, er, preoccupied before going to the court hearing…’
‘Then we’ll take a bus.’
I’ve already started throwing items into a backpack – toothbrush, phone charger, socks – feeling strangely numb.
‘Hang on, don’t you think we should wait a bit?’ Harry is following me into the bedroom now, reaching for my hands, trying to get me to sit down. ‘Mindo is over two hours away. Wouldn’t it be better to wait here for a bit until we get some more news, keep trying to phone the hospital back, come up with a plan?’
I don’t look up from pulling off Liza’s uncomfortable suit and tugging on a pair of jeans. ‘Harry, my father is in hospital in the middle of the cloud forest. I don’t know what’s happened to him, he doesn’t speak Spanish and Dorice apparently isn’t there.’ I blink back tears at the protective emotion that washes over me. ‘So I have a plan, and it is to get a bus. Now.’ I haul my backpack up on to my shoulders and look Harry squarely in the eyes. ‘Are you coming?’
The words hang in the air between us, and Harry’s split second of hesitation is all the answer I need.
‘Kirsty, wait…’
I keep striding to the door without even turning back to look at him.
‘I just don’t think it’s a good idea to rush off now before we know what’s really happened…’ He trails off, and I pause with my hand on the doorknob. ‘And you and I need to finish talking.’
Now I do turn to stare at him, incredulously. ‘Yes, we do. But my dad is in hospital. And right now I need you to…’ Support me unconditionally, whatever is happening between us, I continue in my mind, without saying the words out loud. If he doesn’t get it, what’s the point in trying to explain? Shaking my head I ignore the angry tears filling my eyes and Harry’s calls for me to wait. Then I open the door and run down the apartment steps to the street.
Functioning on autopilot, I pay the taxi driver and climb out at Quito’s northern bus terminal, squeezing through crowds of tourists – backpackers and families and couples holding hands – all bustling to escape Quito for the bank holiday weekend. Knowing I must maintain control of my emotions for long enough to navigate this journey, I become filled with a strange numbness as I scan the rows of ticket desks, find the one I need, purchase a one-way ticket to Mindo and join the queue of people waiting to board. I look up at the pristine new double-decker coach with my destination name flashing across its front screen. As my fellow passengers call out to each other in an assortment of languages around me, passing backpacks over heads to the uniformed men loading up the storage space under each bus, I stand silently frozen to the spot, focused on suppressing the creeping panic still threatening to overpower me.
As the bus pulls away jerkily into the busy streets of Quito, memory after memory flashes through my mind like a series of spectres from the past. My father, clutching a bottle of apple juice and awkwardly speaking Spanish with Liza and Roberto. My father, sweeping aside the contents of his dining table and laying out a sheet of paper, titling it ‘Kirsty’s career plan’.
My father, slamming shut the door of a removal van and bending to kiss the top of my head, before disappearing.
It had been about two months after he actually left. Well, that’s how I remember it – as much as a five-year-old has any idea of time passing. It could just as easily have been two weeks, or six months. Mum arranged for my Grandma to take me to the seaside all day, perhaps naively believing this would distract me from what was really going on.
After trudging silently up and down the deserted, shingled beach countless times, we were both so cold and damp that Granny relented and took me home again. Dad was still there then, standing in the driveway giving instructions and maintaining a strict twenty-foot distance from my mother, who remained inside the house, anxiously following the removal men from room to room, checking each and every item they attempted to take outside. Even now I remember the feelings of mounting desperation, of panic, of hope that, if I made enough fuss and cried hard enough, maybe they’d all stop this madness and go back indoors and put the kettle on and behave like normal, calm adults again. Like a family.
Above all, I remember the sound of the van doors sliding shut – a loud, definitive noise signalling the end of an era. The only era my short life had known. I remember holding on to Dad’s leg as he walked towards his car, him bending down to tell me he would see me soon, and I remember already, even at that age, not believing him. Then Granny told me to stop ‘putting my parts on’ and took me inside for a chocolate milk.
Tears roll down my cheeks and splash on to my phone, clutched uselessly in my hands even though I’ve had no signal since we left Quito, and the two attempts I’ve made to call the hospital from the bus station were unanswered. My mind races for the hundredth time, wondering what could have happened to my father. Heart attack? Stroke? Catastrophic thoughts spiral further and further out of control in my mind.
My ears pop as we descend from Quito’s altitude, and signs of civilisation gradually give way to rambling greenery. I realise the tears are not just for my father. How could Harry stand there and hesitate about coming with me now, knowing Dad could be in potentially grave danger, hospitalised in a strange town miles from anywhere? Even if he didn’t agree with my decision to go and find my father, how could he even consider staying behind? If things were the other way around, I would have followed him unconditionally. In fact, I did follow him unconditionally. First to Fenbridge, so that he could take up the job at the Academy he wanted so much. And now to South America, in pursuit of his dreams to travel one last time before we finally, supposedly, settled down and started a family. The very thought of this makes a shiver run through me, remembering how, just months ago, I had been so desperate to have a child with Harry. Now, feeling like I barely know him anymore, the very idea leaves me cold.
The bus continues its winding descent, leaving Quito well and truly behind, spiralling ever downward in a series of brake-grinding curves around the mountainside, now an expanse of green without a single building or relic of civilisation to be seen. A strange, eerie mist creeps down around us, blotting out the sun, making it seem like twilight rather than early afternoon. Giant fern leaves thwack against the bus window just inches from my face as the driver performs another nail-biting pirouette around a tight corner, nothing but open space and twinkling mist filling the space in the sheer precipice to the other side. Despite my anguish I can’t help but lean over and gaze out in wonder at the expanse of unspoilt nature surrounding me on every side, a total contrast to all I have seen of Ecuador since I arrived in the country, and barely an hour outside the capital city’s centre.
When dotted, ramshackle buildings start appearing around us again and the bus finally comes to a stop, my tears have dried and I’m filled with a strange sense of calm. I have made it here on my own, without Harry’s support, and some inner determination tells me that, whatever is about to happen next, I will cope with it. I have to cope with it. I stumble down the bus’s steps clutching the crumpled piece of paper with the hospital’s address on, ready to ask the first person I see for directions.
But as I disembark, I stand frozen to the spot for a moment, taking in my striking surroundings. The bus has pulled over at the side of a wide, sandy street lined with wooden buildings – judging by their signs, mainly restaurants and cafés and souvenir shops – and interspersed on every side with an explosion of nature and greenery. Not the familiar green of an English landscape, but the wilder, deeper shades of tropical plants with oversized leaves and vivid red-and-purple flowers drooping over into the road, emanating rich, spicy aromas. Tourists of various nationalities stroll up and down the street and sit eating at wooden tables outside. The strange mist from earlier still lingers but the air is warm and sticky, bringing with it the sounds of crickets, birds, frogs, and other creatures I can’t place. Apart from a few cyclists and our bus – incongruous in its modern, shiny splendour – there is no other traffic.
I let all the other passengers hustle past me in their search for lunch and hotels and activities, then scan my surroundings for someone who can help.
‘Please – can you tell me how to get to this place?’ I brandish the piece of paper at an older, portly lady serving giant plates of whole fish and rice to a table of tourists at the nearest outdoor café.
She stops, frowning, then slowly straightens up and points to a building just diagonally across the road from us.
It takes me a few seconds to understand.
‘That’s the hospital?’
The woman frowns at me again. ‘This is Mindo’s main street, and that is the local clinic.’ She turns back to her table to collect their empty glasses, and I half expect her to say, ‘You’re not in Quito anymore.’ It couldn’t be more obvious.
The building she indicated is not much more than a whitewashed concrete box painted white with a small sign above the door, that if I really squint I can make out reads ‘Mindo Regional Clinic’.
Part of me wants to run inside, flinging open doors until I find my father, and another part of me yearns to turn and flee as fast as possible in the opposite direction, not ever having to learn of his fate.
Pointlessly looking both ways for traffic, I take a deep breath and cross the road towards the clinic.