On one of Hugo’s machines an alarm started up, loud urgent beeping. I fumbled for the call button, heart pounding, my dad shouting beside me, but before I could find it a nurse came in—casual and brisk as a waitress, surely she should have been rushing?—and turned the alarm off. Let’s just turn this up a bit fiddling with some dial, standing back to watch the incomprehensible colored lines run across the screen, and then with a small reassuring smile to us: Now. That’s better.
The light at the windows came and went in unnatural fitful flickers, bright one moment and night the next. Hugo you have to tell me what to say to Mrs. Wozniak, remember? How to break it to her? Should I, I mean, what should I . . .
And always Rafferty, silent in the corner, waiting. Rafferty still in his overcoat like the heat didn’t touch him, its rucked-up folds patterning him with deep shadows at strange angles. One time Oliver was giving out to him, belly puffed and finger pointing, ridiculous accusations, the decency to give the family some privacy for God’s sake. Rafferty nodded, understanding, sympathetic, in complete agreement, but then Oliver was gone and he was still there, head leaned back against the wall, at ease.
Hugo. Squeeze my hand or something.
Somewhere an old woman sang “Roses of Picardy,” quietly, in a rusty quaver. The alarm went off again, a different nurse bustled in. What is it? Phil asked, gesturing at the machines with a hand rigid with tension, what’s happening? The nurse made mysterious adjustments and notes: We’re just having a little trouble keeping his blood pressure under control. Doctor will talk to you when he comes round.
Only just as she turned to leave another alarm started going frantically and suddenly things changed, the nurse spinning back to Hugo’s bed with her mouth open, Rafferty sitting up straight— Out the nurse said sharply, hitting a button, everyone out, now— Then we were in the corridor and Rafferty had a hand on my back and one on Phil’s, steering us quickly towards the waiting area—me stumbling, my leg had gone to sleep—and as he pulled open the door a voice snapped behind us, just like on TV, Clear!
The waiting area, all my family standing up in unison, white-faced, What what what happened, Phil explaining in a dead-level voice while Rafferty melted off to some corner. I couldn’t look at them. The dumpy woman and the teenager were gone and instead there was an old guy with droopy bloodshot eyes and a suit worn shiny at the knees, who didn’t even look up from stirring his Styrofoam cup of tea.
For a long long time nothing happened. My father and Phil and Oliver were shoulder to shoulder, a tight pack, pale and somehow all looking alike for once. I wanted to go to my father but I couldn’t, not knowing what I did. I wished my mother was there. Leon leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, chewing ferociously at his thumbnail. There was blood on it.
When the white-haired doctor finally came out we leaped to cluster around him, at a respectful distance and keeping our mouths shut till he deigned to speak, like good little petitioners. “Mr. Hennessy’s stable,” he said—even, weighted voice, carefully pitched to let us know long before he said the words. “But I’m afraid it’s not good news. We were hoping his hemorrhage would resolve, but instead of improving he’s going the other way. He’s needing escalating amounts of support.”
“Why?” my father asked, calm and focused, his lawyer voice. “What’s happening, exactly?”
“The brain damage from the hemorrhage is making his blood pressure unstable. We’re giving him drugs for that, but we’ve had to up the dosage several times already, and one of the side effects is heart arrhythmia. That’s what happened in there. We’ve shocked him out of it for now, but if he has multiple episodes, there’s really nothing for us to do.”
“Why didn’t you drain the blood?” Susanna demanded, sharply enough that I jumped. “From the hemorrhage?”
The doctor barely glanced at her. “We’re doing everything that’s appropriate.”
“Standard procedure is to drain the blood right away, to relieve the pressure on the brain. Why didn’t you—”
“For Doctor Google, maybe.” A half smile, but it was animal and tooth-baring, a warning. “But when your uncle came in, his prognosis wasn’t good. We don’t know how long he’d been down before he was found; it could have been anything up to twenty minutes. We managed to get him breathing again, but there’s no way to know how much damage was done in the meantime. And that’s on top of his pre-existing terminal condition. Even if the hemorrhage resolves, there’s a high probability he’ll be left in a permanent vegetative state.”
Susanna said, “He’s old and he’s dying anyway and he came in from police custody, so he wasn’t worth the hassle and resources of surgery.”
The doctor’s eyes slid away like she bored him. He said, “You’ll just have to accept that everything we’ve done has been within best-practice guidelines,” which sounded strange to me, like I had heard it somewhere before; for a second there his voice even sounded different, everything sideslipping— But then he turned his shoulder to Susanna and said in his own voice, to my father and Oliver and especially Phil: “We need to decide what to do the next time his heart goes into arrhythmia. Do we shock him again? Give CPR? Or do we leave it?”
“‘The next time,’” my father said. “You think it’s going to happen again.”
“There’s no way to be sure. But almost definitely, yes.”
“And you don’t think there’s any chance he’ll wake up. If you keep stabilizing his heart, I mean, to give the hemorrhage time to resolve.”
“Not with any quality of life, no. We’ve all heard the stories about people coming out of comas after ten years, but that’s not going to happen here.”
Silence. Leon looked like he might throw up. Then:
“Leave it,” Phil said. My father nodded, one small jerk of his head. Susanna took a breath and then let it out again.
“We’ll keep him comfortable,” the doctor said, almost gently. “You can go in and see him now.”
We went in and out, one by one, two by two. I knew we were supposed to say our good-byes and any final messages, but there was nothing I could find to say that wouldn’t have been either idiotic or dangerous—Rafferty, stubbled and eyebagged by now, back in his chair—or both. Hugo, I said in the end, into his ear. He smelled musty and medical, nothing like himself. It’s Toby. Thank you for everything. And I’m so sorry. There was something crusted at the corners of his lips; Susanna found a wipe in her bag and cleaned it off, gently, telling him some long story too low and close for me to hear.
Everyone phoning, texting. Oliver pacing the waiting area with his phone pressed to one ear and his finger in the other, talking fast and harshly. Tom bustling in babbling about childcare arrangements to anyone who would listen, which was no one. My mother, Louisa, Miriam with tears pouring down her face as she cast about for someone to hug and the rest of us looked away.
And there we all were, waiting. Far below the window, traffic jammed up in the rain: streaks of light glistening on wet tarmac, pedestrians scurrying, umbrellas flapping wildly.
“They could be wrong,” Leon said, at my shoulder. “Doctors make mistakes all the time.”
He looked awful, pinched and peaky, with a greasy sheen to his face. “What are you talking about?” I said.
“He could wake up. I don’t like that doctor, the way he bullied our dads into—”
“Even if he does wake up, he’ll still have cancer. We’ll just have to do this all over again in a few weeks. And he’s not going to wake up.”
“I can’t think,” Leon said. “I’ve been so fucking tense, for so long, my brain won’t . . .” He shoved his hair out of his face with the back of his wrist. “Listen. About the other night.”
“I was a prick to you,” I said. “Sorry.”
“It’s OK. I’ve probably been a prick to you too, the last while.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I think that’s what she was aiming for, you know that? She kept telling me to chill out, like, ‘What’s the big panic, they can’t even prove he was murdered,’ but then she’d turn around and be all, ‘Keep your mouth shut around Toby, you can’t trust him . . .’”