“To Dad,” he agreed sombrely, lifting his bottle to gently clink it against hers.
They both took a sip and his peripheral vision seemed to return in a rush. The music seemed louder, he could make out snippets of conversations going on around them and he almost felt like he was trapped in some kind of time warp. Sitting across from her like this, it was as if the last four years had never happened. He smiled over at her, determined to live in the moment.
Three Years Earlier
Ally sat on the floor of her studio, surrounded by tubes of paint, dirty brushes and cloths and a finished canvas. The hollow eyes in the painting stared back at her. She felt a chill work its way up her spine, from the point of injury, where sensation below ceased, right up to the base of her skull.
I can’t do this.
The phrase echoed in her head relentlessly.
I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.
The canvas blurred in front of her and she blinked, hurriedly stemming the flow of tears while she still could.
The twelve-month check-up with her neurologist had arrived like a storm-front, dark and foreboding. Now that it was over, she just felt empty. The hope she had been hanging onto, and the fear she had been desperately trying to keep at bay, had simultaneously deserted her and slammed into her, leaving her reeling.
She couldn’t remember the last time she ate. Going to bed had seemed a fruitless exercise, so she hadn’t, choosing to paint instead. She had stopped answering the phone. All that mattered was getting this out of her head and onto canvas before it drove her mad.
Staring at the canvas now, she realised she had nothing left. She wasn’t angry anymore, she wasn’t even depressed – she was just hollow. For the first time since the accident, there was nothing. Nothing to fight for, nothing to aim for, nothing to cling to. Just a big, black hole of nothing that was consuming her, piece by piece.
She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there. She glanced up towards the window and saw the soft light of a new day filtering into the room.
Another sunrise.
She felt similar to the way she had when she woke up in the hospital, after the accident – detached, not fully aware, reality constantly slipping through her fingers.
The past twelve months seemed to have passed in a blur, yet the rest of her life stretched out in front of her, a yawning chasm of uncertainty. She glanced down at her legs, crossed at the ankles and pulled in close on the floor in front of her. She hardly recognised them anymore. The muscles had atrophied, just like she had been warned they would, despite the regular range-of-motion exercises Callum put her body through and the massage and stretches she performed on a daily basis.
Her conscience pricked slightly at the thought of Callum. The one thing she knew with absolute certainty was that she could never have gotten to this point without him. But it wasn’t enough.
I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.
On the brink of exhaustion, her mind wandered. She thought about Jack. She didn’t talk about him anymore because it just seemed to upset everyone, but she hadn’t been able to banish him from her mind. He remained there, perched on the edge of her consciousness, messing with her peace of mind. The unanswered questions taunted her as much as the random pain in her back and the frequent nightmares.
A phone rang somewhere inside the house. She didn’t even flinch when she heard it this time. It had rung several times yesterday – or was it this morning? She heard her own voice on the answer-phone message, followed by Tom’s. She picked up on the worry in his voice, even if she couldn’t quite make out the words. She didn’t let the guilt seep any further than skin deep, however. She couldn’t afford to.
She looked around for the wheelchair she had abandoned at some stage during the night. In a desperate frenzy, driven to the point of madness as she had tried to exorcise the demons in her head, she had climbed down onto the floor, dragging the canvas with her so she could access it more easily.
That was the thing about her wheelchair: it got in the way. It was as if no one saw her anymore. It didn’t matter what clothes she wore, what she did with her hair, whether or not she wore make-up – they didn’t see any of that. She had ceased to exist. Sometime over the past year, her old self had quietly slipped away, leaving behind a shell, and an incomplete one at that.