The Flower Arrangement (38 page)

*   *   *

The hospital was a parallel universe, Ben thought—a world of fear and uncertainty that made the intensive care units in TV dramas look like a walk in the park—and Lara was lost in it.

All he wanted was to be useful in some small way, but she didn't need anything from him. The few occasions when he managed to persuade her to go home to get some rest, she spent most of the time on the phone whispering to Katy. At the hospital, the two women were inseparable. They huddled together, their dark heads touching, comforting one another, swapping little shreds of hope, shutting everyone else out. Even him; especially him. Whenever he did manage to get close to Lara, Katy was always there, her eyes watchful, suspicious. Ben felt as if he was playing the part of the supportive partner rather than actually being it, as if his concern for Lara was fake. As the days dragged on, and the date of the wedding drew closer, he felt her slipping farther and farther away from him.

Four days after the accident, he came into the waiting room and saw Katy and Lara holding on to one another. He knew, from their faces, that the news was good. The consultant had just done his rounds. He was pleased with Phil's progress. He was going to start reducing the sedation with a view to bringing him out of the coma over the next few days.

Lara smiled up at Ben and for the first time since the accident, he felt as if she could actually see him. “I'm so relieved,” she gasped. “I'm so happy I could . . . I don't know what I could do.”

Could you get away from here for half an hour so we can talk about the wedding? he wanted to ask her. The wedding was the elephant in the waiting room. It was Wednesday. They were getting married next Monday, but Lara hadn't mentioned this once since the accident. Nobody else had mentioned it either, though Ben suspected that they all knew.

But Katy was listening and he guessed that Lara would not want to leave the hospital, so instead he asked, “Could you eat something?” She had been surviving on coffee all week.

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“I'll go across the road and get you a sandwich.”

On his way back from the café, he passed a bookshop. He went in and picked up a guidebook for Crete. It might be too soon to bring the wedding up, but at least he could remind her that this would be over soon and that they'd be on their honeymoon.

Lara took the sandwich he handed her, then slid the book out of the bag. She stared at the white church on the blue cover.

“Oh!” she said, turning to look at him. “Oh, Ben, I'm sorry. I thought you realized, we can't go ahead with the wedding.”

Ben's heart sank. “What do you mean?”

Katy, sitting in the next chair, was fiddling with the wrapper on the sandwich he'd brought her, pretending not to listen.

“We have to put it off,” Lara said.

“I don't understand.” He lowered his voice. “You said the consultant was pleased with Phil's progress.”

“But he's not out of the woods yet. And when he is, he'll need me.”

What about me? Ben thought. I need you too. He stood up quickly, wanting to get away before his feelings showed in his face.

“Okay, I'll go and give the registry office a call.”

“Thanks.” She lifted her hand to take his, but he pretended that he hadn't seen it. He had to get out before he was humiliated any more by the woman he loved in front of the woman who used to love him.

*   *   *

What could Lara give Phil? she wondered. Flowers were not allowed in the ICU but she wanted him to have something, so she dug out her dad's watch. An old Timex with a brown leather strap that had started to split. The face was the color of milky coffee. The date slowly changed
in a tiny window. She would put it on his wrist when they brought him safely out of the coma. She would do anything, she reminded God, to make that happen. To give her brother time.

*   *   *

Phil was pulling a rickshaw through the cobbled streets in thick fog, trying to find his way back to Katy. He could hear her voice ahead of him sometimes, but he could never quite catch up with her. Then he was flat on his back, pinned down by a heavy animal that was lying on his chest. He couldn't open his eyes, but when he put his hand up, he felt Pat's ears, soft and velvety between his fingertips. But Pat was dead. Did that mean he was dead too?

*   *   *

Phil was still unconscious but now his eyelids flickered as if he was dreaming. Lara and Katy were allowed to see him for a few minutes on Thursday and when Lara arrived on Friday, Katy was already sitting by the bed, holding his hand.

“I think he can hear me,” she whispered.

There was a muffled groan.

“Phil!” Katy took Lara's hand and put it on top of their joined ones. “We're here. Don't be scared. You're okay, it's just a couple of broken bones!”

Lara flashed her a look of amazement. Dozens of broken bones. Phil would have to have at least two more surgeries and it would be months before he would be back on his feet again.

Phil's hand twitched twice and then he sighed. “Wait!” Katy gripped his fingers. “Don't go back to sleep yet. Say something, anything, just so we know you can hear us.”

He took a long, shuddering breath and grunted two words.

Katy turned to Lara. “I didn't understand him. What did he say?”

Lara lifted their three hands and grinned. “He said, ‘Hand sandwich.'”

*   *   *

Lara and Katy were hugging one another again when Ben arrived at the door of Phil's room with a coffee for Lara. He watched through the window as they broke apart and started to laugh, then hugged one another again. When was the last time Lara had laughed like that with him? Something flipped.

He turned and walked quickly back down the corridor and took the lift down to the cafeteria. The doors opened onto a concrete wheelchair ramp and a sunlit square of grass. He bummed a cigarette from a guy in scrubs, then found a quiet spot between two trees and rolled the last tiny nub of dope into a skinny joint.

He closed his eyes and held the sweet smoke deep in his lungs until a fog rolled in over his frantic feelings, then he went back inside and waited for Lara. He was still sitting in a corner of the cafeteria with the cold, bitter coffee in front of him when she found him.

“I was wondering where you were.” She sat down opposite him. “I was hoping you'd come up to the ward.”

“I came.” He didn't look up. He was making an origami bird from a till receipt. “But I felt like I was kind of superfluous to requirements.”

“I know what you mean,” Lara said. “I worry that I might be in the way when I'm in there with Katy. But I'm glad I was there just now. He said two words, Ben! Isn't that amazing?”

Ben nodded. He ran his nail along a crease in the little square of paper. “Listen,” he said. “I've been thinking about the wedding. I don't think we should postpone it.”

“What? But I thought you were going to call the registry office—”

Ben cut her off. “I did. Now I think we should cancel it altogether.”

“What do you mean?”

Ben looked up. She was staring at him, her expression unreadable.

“That it was a mistake to rush into this.” He looked down at his hands, made another paper fold. “Maybe the whole thing was a mistake.”

He waited for her to contradict him, to protest, to tell him he was crazy, that they loved one another, that she loved him, but she didn't say a word.

Lara could hardly believe what Ben had said. Her mind flashed back to the last week. She had been so frightened that Phil was going to die that she hadn't been fully present, hadn't seen what she suddenly saw now. That Ben had been attentive at the beginning, then a bit distant, then absent. Slipping away from her a little more every day. She had looked away, and when she looked back, she had lost him. She wanted to reach across the table and take his hands, but his hands were busy with the little paper bird and his eyes were flat and expressionless.

“Are you sure about this?”

That was it? Ben thought dully. He told her they should end their relationship and that was her response. No fight, nothing?

“Absolutely!” he said, hurt, wanting to hurt her back. “I've had doubts about it for a while, to be honest.” He had doubted that Lara really wanted to marry him. “I know you have too.”

She felt the heat of tears behind her eyes and blinked them away. “I just worried about the age difference.” She had doubted that it mattered as little to Ben as he'd claimed but she had been willing to marry him anyway.

“You were right. I should have listened to you.”

He wouldn't even look at her. He was busy finishing his origami bird. She watched him pull the tail, but only one wing flapped. It was broken.

He had known it all along, Ben thought triumphantly. She had never really wanted to marry him. Then the sadness hit him and all he wanted to do was take back what he had said. To go back to the night outside the graveyard when she'd said yes.

He looked up at her bent head, the curve of her cheek, the waves of her dark hair around her pale face. He was afraid that he was going to reach over and touch her, make more of a fool of himself than he already had.

He crushed the bird in his fist and stood up.

Lara put her hand out to stop him, to pull him down beside her, so they could talk, hold one another, try to salvage this. Then she
remembered the deal she'd made with God the day of the accident. She'd said she'd give up everything she loved if Phil lived, even Ben.

Ben took her hand and looked at it. So many flowers had passed through Lara's fingers and all that beauty had left its mark. Her skin was chapped, her nails were thin, there were thorn scratches on her wrists and bumps on her fingers from all the hours she spent working with scissors.

He had loved all of her, but what he'd loved best were her hands.

“Good-bye, Lara,” he said, and then he walked away.

*   *   *

Phil rose up through a blur of watercolors. Sunlight from behind a green curtain. His legs, for some reason, floating before him. The fuzzy outline of a person leaning over him. A woman? Sounds. People chattering from another room, the slam and clang of a trolley, the steady hum of a motor. Slowly it all began to swim into focus. He was in a hospital room. A nurse was elevating the bed he was lying in. He tried to lean up on his arm but it was too heavy to move. His breath was shallow, as if there was a ton weight on his chest.

“What day is it?” he groaned.

The nurse smiled. “It's Saturday.” She pumped up the blood pressure cuff she had attached to his arm. “Day seven,” she said in a Newcastle accent. “In the Big Brother house, or St. Fintan's University Hospital, as it's commonly known!” She let air out of the cuff with a hiss.

He licked his cracked lips. “Remind me what I'm doing here?”

“You and your motorbike had an argument with a bridge a week ago.” She took the cuff off and stuck a thermometer into his ear. The sharp beep made him jump and a searing pain tore through his pelvis.

She frowned down at his face. “Pain?” He managed to nod. “I'll get you something for that.”

He closed his eyes, tried to steady his breathing.
Last Saturday.
He and Lara had had a row and then he'd stormed out of the shop. He'd been too angry to go home. He'd gone for a burn on the bike. He
remembered flashing past the gate to the graveyard where his parents were buried. He'd thought about pulling over.

He went there sometimes to have a one-sided conversation with his dad and to look at that view. It was the closest place you could get to heaven while you were still standing on Dublin soil. On a sunny day, there was no line between the wide, flat sea and the vast sky. The red and blue container ships and ferries coming out of Dublin port seemed to float suspended on air. Sunlight burnished the steel jumble of the docks and turned the glass office blocks of the distant city gold.

But that day, he didn't stop. He was trying to get away from his guilty conscience but it had caught up with him by the time he got to Howth. What had come over him? He had been obnoxious to Katy, then he'd had a go at his sister. All he had to do was decide which one of them to apologize to first.

He rode straight through the village over the summit and down onto the sea road, had to stop himself from breaking the speed limit in his rush to get back into town.

The journey was a blur. The last thing he remembered was pulling away from a red light along the Ranelagh Road. Then there was a blank. As if his mind had been full, like a memory card, and there was no room left for what happened next.

The nurse was back. He felt the pinch of the needle as she found a vein, then his eyes closed. It seemed like a few seconds later that he opened them and, floating up on a cloud of morphine, he saw his sister at the door with an armful of wildflowers.

“Flowers?” he croaked. “Am I on the way out?”

“They're not for you.” She grinned. “You're not allowed to have flowers. They're for Katy.”

Same old Lara, he thought, still looking after everyone else.

“It's so good to see you! I want to hug you!” She had tears in her eyes now. “But I'm afraid I'll hurt you.”

“Hold my hand,” he said. “It seems to be the only part of me that isn't broken.

“Listen,” he said, after a while. “What I said about you and Ben getting married. I was way out of line.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“I should have been happy for you and I wasn't. I was a tosser. Not just that day, the whole time. I never gave the poor bloke a chance. But now that we're going to be related”—he squeezed her fingers—“I'll do lots of manly bonding shit with him. Snooker. Fishing. Golf.”

She shook her head.

“Maybe not golf.” He smiled. “I hate golf. I only played it to keep Dad company.”