The Forrests (15 page)

Nathan sat and took Evelyn’s pliant hand in his. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ Her chest rose and fell. He stroked the side of her damaged face. Another nurse came in and noted saturation levels from the oximeter.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ Nathan said. ‘I need the air.’

The nurse directed Dorothy to a mini-kitchen down the hall. ‘Cereal, toast. Wee coffee maker. You may as well have a little walk too. We’ll find you if anything happens, but I think she’s going to rest a weeny bit longer.’

‘I might get something,’ said Dorothy. She had eaten a yellow pie from the hospital café at some stage, but had lost track of
time. Maybe low blood sugar was why the nurse’s little wee talk of weeny wee things, probably designed to shrink the fear, instead made her want to scream. ‘I won’t be long.’

The wall in the hospital corridor was just clean enough to lean against while she waited for the toast to pop. If Evelyn’s head resembled a throbbing hammered thumb, the head on the guy waiting with her looked like a sliced-off finger.

‘I’ve had fourteen operations,’ he said, yes, to her, she must have been staring. That he could talk was astounding, that he had any brain function with that steep slope of his forehead, the near nonexistence of his skull.

‘Really?’

‘This will be my fifteenth.’

An older woman stood pulling at her hands, possibly his mother. Dot wanted to stare at her too. She wanted to laugh at the impossibility of the man’s head and tell him how totally incredible he was. She left the toast and walked to the stairwell and rang Tania, the friend of Eve’s who’d come round to look after Lou. In the background was the sound of a television cartoon.

‘Lou won’t go to bed. She doesn’t want to go to school tomorrow either.’ How could you know what was best – to cosset the child or make her go on as normal, when normal – no. Dorothy knew that the classroom was good when things were wrong at home. But then there was the jolt of the present moment, when you found yourself alone without distraction, unable to control your thoughts.

‘How’s Eve?’ Tania asked.

‘It went well. Longer in recovery than we expected.’

‘Nathan’s got five casseroles here. It’s a bit on the much side. Shall I freeze them?’

‘Thanks. Keep one out for yourself.’

‘No it’s all right. You’ll need them.’

When she tried the number she had for Michael the line connected to a pre-recording, a bloodless approximation of a human voice that said sorry but this number was no longer available. ‘Oh fuck you,’ she said into the phone, and people in the contemplation garden outside the glass doors turned their heads. She raised a palm in apology.

Nathan was still out. The nurse who came in to check the catheter bag said Eve had been awake for a little minute and Dot felt cheated, sorry that her sister hadn’t seen her there. She picked up the crossword she’d left on the side table.

‘Hi.’ Evelyn’s eyes were open, tiny slits through the swelling, and Dorothy stood to see them, to gaze at this sign of life, the sheeny curve of eyeball so wet and the colour deep inside, a golden frog at the bottom of a well. The eyelids closed again, a gesture that felt mammoth in weight. Dorothy knelt on the grey lino beside the bed and reached a hand between the safety bars to stroke her sister’s arm.

There was a denim jacket on the floor between the visitor’s chair and the bed. Instinctively Dot glanced at the end of the cubicle to make sure Nathan wasn’t there. This was not his jacket, not the tobacco pouch in the pocket, the thin paper strip of a bus ticket, the scuffed, faded cuffs and collar, the loose threads coming off the stitches around the metal buttons. The fabric still held the coldness of outside. She smelled it. She clutched it to her, buried her face in
it, dark spots on the fabric where it touched her eyes.
Was
it Daniel’s, or did she just want to believe it was Daniel’s? Could that smell be what created, now, a blooming of leaves, shade, underneathness, the smallness of being a child? And everything, the green leaves, the stippled grass, Daniel cross-legged in their hiding place, all of it belonging to her and to time, time that went so slowly, marked by the long silence that came before the small clean cluck of the second hand on a stolen watch, and the silence that came after it. The cells of her body just the same as the cells of the air, the grass blades, the sunlight and the cells of Daniel’s skin.

The nurse behind the desk knew nothing about the jacket or a random visitor. Blood thumped in Dorothy as she strode the corridor, circled the area by the lifts, the jacket over her arm. It was a fantasy. He was in another country, with someone. The last postcard long ago,
Met a girl. Clowning El Salvador.
Then nothing. She had got on with mothering children and being married and teaching, absorbed by the dense volume of things to do in her day, as though this was where her life belonged. Or that was an illusion. She had mistaken being busy for being involved. No, that wasn’t fair. Where else could her attention go? She rounded a corner and came upon a woman sobbing against a wall. ‘Sorry,’ Dot said, before backing away.

She should have known if Daniel was back. Should have been told, but should also have just felt it, like knowing bodily where Eve was, that she was all right. Until this. Their connection had told her nothing about this.

Leaving the hospital into the chilly night, she thought she saw him in a wheelchair outside the main entrance, the wind tunnel
where the smokers went, but when she went up and opened her mouth to speak it was another man. Dorothy hid the denim jacket in her bag and much later, when everything had happened, she took it home and hung it on a hook in the hallway, where after a time it was covered by a torn, child-sized anorak to be taken for repair, a yoga-mat carrier and a rope-handled beach bag, sand collected like a wiggly line of handwriting in the bottom of the white lining.

Dot sat with Lou, stroking the hair back from her forehead and humming a lullaby until she fell asleep. Her own kids were fine. She’d cried on the phone to Andrew, the sound of his voice. The folders on Eve’s desktop computer were named Home, Lou, Finance. Blood in her ears pounded as Dorothy typed in a document search for
Daniel
. A subfolder appeared, and in that a word document contained text that looked to have been cut and pasted from emails. Fuck. She closed the file before she could read too much. So, there it was. Daniel and Eve. Of course.

She had fucking known it.

Nathan decided not to take Lou to the hospital while Eve looked like she did. In the morning Dot ran her a bubble bath, which she was still in when Tania came to the door with a Tupperware dish of pumpkin soup. The laundry was all done, the floors vacuumed and the windows cleaned. Dorothy held her at the threshold, a spray bottle of vinegar and a scrunched sheet of newspaper in her hands, and asked point blank if Eve had ever told her about Daniel.

‘Is Nate home?’

‘Of course not.’

Tania glanced back to her car, where her husband waited in the driver’s seat. He passed a wave towards Dorothy, who nodded back. Quickly Tania walked through to the kitchen and placed the sloshy container of soup on the bench top. Dorothy marked her progress, breathing hard.

‘Yes,’ Tania said. ‘It’s over, but I think they’re still in touch.’

‘Does he know what happened?’

‘I called him. He knows.’

‘He’s in town.’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. Thanks.’

‘Do you want his number?’

‘No.’ She kicked the door shut with a foot, pulled the trigger on the cleaning bottle and squirted vinegar all over the wall.

Their parents flew in from the States accompanied by Ruth, who despite having left her twin girls at home was definitely a mom, in her pale-pink polar fleece and easy-wash layered hair. Dorothy waited at the airport barricade amongst uniformed men holding name boards, as matted backpackers, men and women in business suits, stunned families and countless senior citizens ambled through the electronic doors, their faces expectant, uncertain. Her family came near the end of a large tour group, her mother and father disguised as old people holding hands, Ruth just behind with the teetering trolley. Frank wore the sashed camel trench coat and round tortoiseshell glasses of an Anglophile American. Lee’s pearl earrings looked real. Bless Ruth, she had a photo of her twins right
there in her wallet, and Dorothy pored over it while her parents buckled themselves into the back seat, taking their time, older.

‘Gorgeous girls,’ she said, handing the photo back to Ruth.

‘They are.’ Ruth started to cry.

‘It’s OK,’ said Dorothy, patting her hand. ‘You’ll feel better when you see her. Eve’s going to be fine.’

As Dot drove them into town to shower and ‘freshen up’ at their hotel before the hospital, Lee murmured from the back seat in a fully American accent about the changes to the motorway, the new bridges, the buildings in the hazily approaching city that had never been there before. The rear-view mirror presented a slim rectangle of her swept-back ash-blonde hair, the sensitive indents at her temples more pronounced with age.

‘Oh look,’ she pointed at the new Sky Tower when they reached the city. ‘It’s like something from the future.’

Hospital quickly became ordinary, the place where their days happened. There was the institutionalised gravy smell, and the man with half a head and the kindness of every single person, even the friend who said ‘Boxing on’ each time they spoke, which made Dorothy want to punch her. The hierarchy in a corridor. People going to the shop in their pyjamas. ‘Slippery slope,’ Nathan finger-wagged, laughing at Dorothy when he saw what she had taken to wearing. ‘It’s a slippery slope once you start wandering the halls in your slippers. You’re not even a patient.’

And the peeling paint over the plaster walls in the hospital corridors, psoriasis on an industrial scale. Scurf tide in the shower. The male orderly who all night was trying to kill Evelyn, sending
a signal to his murderous colleagues by the clicking of his pen. The one time Eve lost it, crying at Nathan and Dot, ‘Would you just go? Would you go, please, so that I can start waiting for you, so that I can start counting the fucking paint-drying hours until you come back?’ Toast on a tray. Sleeping in the afternoons, her head shaved and stapled, a cannula plug sticking out of her hand. Taking the anti-fitting pills, the steroids that made her paranoid. The move to a general ward, the visitors and flowers and boxes of home baking, Evelyn’s friends sitting on the end of the bed, women in their thirties cross-legged like schoolgirls still.

Across the café Dorothy saw her mother’s back, the age in the hump of her upper spine. She was perched on the end of a table that another family occupied, big kids eating burgers and parents with chips and soda, the paper on the chip bag soggy, streaked red with ketchup. ‘Hi, Mum,’ Dorothy said, and Lee startled. She folded the newspaper into her handbag, put away the pen.

‘How is she?’

‘Sleeping. Shall we go and sit over there?’

They moved to an empty table by the floor-length windows. A bird had gotten in and hopped along the wainscot, pecking at crumbs. ‘Where’s Dad?’

Lee shook her head. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘What does that mean? Where is he?’

A one-shouldered shrug. ‘Out somewhere.’

‘Do you not care?’

‘Of course I care.’ The words snapped out of her. She sighed, and regained control. ‘I just do not know where he is.’

Now Dorothy looked away, exasperated. ‘He should be here.
Or he can always visit my kids again if he doesn’t like the hospital. Go and spend some time, get to know them a bit.’

‘I know, darling. And we will,’ Lee said, a bony hand patting her daughter’s wrist. ‘Of course we will, but we’re thinking about Eve right now.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ This was infuriating, that Lee had become frail and tremulous in direct relation to Dorothy’s growth in perspective, her strength. The rage of teenagehood swelled biliously inside her, but she could not let it out. She was afraid of this power she felt, that she might kill her mother.

One day Eve came home. She slept for a long time getting over the discomfort of the car journey, and when she woke, Lou and Dot sat on the bed and dealt her into a game of gin. Lou was being shy with her mother.

‘Wow,’ Eve said. ‘I’ve got a great hand.’ After a minute she shut her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured through a face that looked close to sleep again. ‘Hurts to look at the cards.’

‘Lee’s managed to get hold of Michael,’ Dot said. ‘He sends his love. Can you believe it, of all of us she’s the one he keeps in touch with?’

‘Why is that strange?’ asked Lou, and Dot said, ‘Your grandmother is a strange woman.’

‘I think she’s nice.’

‘Well, that’s because you’re nice.’ She split the deck and arched the halves into a bridge and shuffled them together, like Daniel had taught her to do. ‘Come on, we’ll just sit here and play quietly while your mum has a rest.’

*  *  *

The Forrest seniors announced that now Eve was home they were going to leave. ‘End of the week,’ Frank said. It was Thursday. What were they racing back to, their golf handicaps, their lunches? But that was how it was with them. The thread count of Frank’s shirts and the sheen of Lee’s gold fob chain revised the past, as though the years they lived here and had children and were broke were their wilderness, an interlude. They’d reverted to type, and Ruth was the only child who’d had it in her to adapt. Dorothy stepped into the cold garden to take it out on the weeds.

‘Dorothy.’ Frank stood by the back door.

She rocked back on her haunches, balanced with her dirt-smeared hands on the trowel. ‘Hi, Dad.’ Breath briefly visible in the air.

‘You might recall that trouble from the traffic fines. From …’

‘God, from like twenty years ago. Yeah.’ A snail crawled up the trunk of a broccoli plant and she picked it off, tossed it into the hedge.

‘Something I meant to deal with at the time, but … It slipped my mind. Just to let you know, in case they call, looking for you.’

‘The who, the Ministry of Justice?’

‘Yes. I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about it.’