‘Ready, wife?’
Charlotte takes her other arm, and it’s all over so quickly, and, before she knows it, they’re outside with the few remaining guests, and Marcus has disappeared into the night already. Probably for the best.
Nicky raises her hand, palm up to the sky and says, ‘It’s raining.’
Charlotte opens an umbrella, holds it over Cassie. ‘It rained cats and dogs on mine and Mike’s wedding day, it’s good luck.’
As Cassie kisses Nicky and Charlotte goodbye before getting in the car to the airport hotel with Jack by her side, she feels the hair on her bare arms rise and she doesn’t know if it’s the rain or something else that’s making her feel so cold.
4
Alice
I don’t have long with her. Cassie Jensen still smells fresh, like an aura of the outside surrounds her. The hypothermia has turned her lips and eyelids an unnatural ice blue, like bad make-up, but her cheeks still have the slight plumpness of recent health, helping her look more alive than dead, but only just. They’ll lose their bounce in a few days. The surgery team has removed any jewellery she was wearing.
I stroke her left arm, the one that’s not pinned by the surgeon like a voodoo doll; it’s ribboned with thin red lines, lacerations from the accident. I hold her right hand for a moment; it’s warm but there’s no ripple of response beneath Cassie’s eyelids. A tube runs from the back of her blonde head where the neurosurgeon drilled into her skull to insert a temporary probe in the cavity to monitor the inter-cranial pressure and swelling around her brain. It looks like they’ve done a good job; the horror of the tube as it plunges into Cassie’s head is discreetly covered with a small bandage and they’ve only shaved a small bit of her hair. She’s patched with a couple of deep bruises on her neck and chest and there’s a nasty cut on her lip. Like tiny, blazing galaxies, the bruises colour her otherwise fair skin. I wonder as I always do with new patients who she is, what her laugh sounds like, what she had planned to do today. Maybe she should have been meeting a friend for coffee right now. Even with the bruises, the cuts and her broken fingers, she doesn’t look like she belongs here. She looks like she’s pretending.
I pick up her folder from the little table by her bed. It says her dog was spooked by New Year fireworks and disappeared in the early hours of New Year’s morning. Cassie went out in the dark to look for her. It was noted there was a puddle close to where she would have fallen, which could have caused her to trip. The form is marked that it was either an accident or a hit and run, so the police will be calling.
‘Nurse Marlowe?’ It’s Lizzie, speaking from behind the curtain, probably unsure whether she’s allowed in or not.
‘You can come in, Lizzie.’
She pulls back the curtain just enough to move her head around. She looks quickly at Cassie before turning to me. ‘The family are here.’
‘Her husband?’ I ask.
‘Yes, and I think maybe her mum?’
‘OK, so there’s only two relatives?’
‘Yup. Yes, I mean.’
‘OK, show them in, please. Oh, and Lizzie.’ Her face reappears from behind the curtain. ‘Call me Alice.’ She nods and we smile at each other before she leaves.
I stroke Cassie’s shoulder-length blonde hair back to try and conceal the bandage on her head as much as possible, a feeble attempt to minimise the shock for her family. Other senior nurses delegate the family liaison duties as much as they can, but I like to do the initial meet if I’m on duty. What a patient’s family is like has a huge impact on the ward. It’s often a fine-balancing act: empathy tempered with realism.
I hear footsteps coming towards us and Lizzie says in an appropriately subdued voice, ‘Here she is’, before drawing the curtain back. Lizzie closes the curtain again behind a woman, who’s probably in her sixties, and an athletic-looking man with dark hair – Cassie’s husband – who looks just a few years younger than me, in his mid-thirties. I stand back. They don’t notice me. It’s as if they’re magnetised towards Cassie.
‘Cas, oh Cassie,’ says the husband, clasping and kissing the hand I just held. The woman stands just behind him; she places one tidy hand on his lower back. ‘Oh god,’ exclaims the husband, and starts sobbing. The woman makes small circles with her hand on his lower back and makes ‘shhh’-ing noises. The woman is wearing jeans and an old, lumpy cricket jumper – the sort of clothes thrown on in an emergency. The husband is in jeans and a crumpled blue T-shirt.
The woman raises her silvery head, as if suddenly aware of where she is. She looks around the curtained area and sees me for the first time. She looks as if she’s searching for something but I raise a hand and say as gently as I can, ‘Please, take your time.’ I don’t think the husband heard me. I don’t want them to feel glared at, so I step to the other side of the curtain. The husband is still sobbing.
‘Jack, remember,’ the woman says, ‘the surgeon said this would be a shock … that this is the worst we’re going to see her.’ Her voice starts out clear but crackles at the end of the sentence.
I wait a few minutes while she mumbles some more soft words, and then I step forward, the rattle of the curtain makes them raise their heads. The woman has her arms around him in a small two-person huddle over Cassie. They look at me, surprised, as if they forgot they were on a hospital ward. The woman breaks away from Jack and comes towards me, her palm outstretched.
I take her hand. ‘I’m Alice Marlowe, the ward nurse. My team and I will be looking after Cassie while she is with us.’
‘Hello, Nurse. I’m Charlotte, Charlotte Jensen, Cassie’s mother-in-law.’ She smiles, a quick reflexive flicker. She smells subtlty of perfume, warm, as if she’s been wearing the same scent for so many years, it’s become part of her. I’ll bet all her clothes carry the same smell.
Unlike his mum’s, Jack’s hand is clammy, almost lifeless. He’s grown a sprinkle of reddy-brown stubble while they’ve been waiting overnight on plastic chairs.
‘I’m so sorry. This must be the most terrible shock for you.’
Jack meets my eyes briefly and nods his head.
‘Let’s go through to the family room,’ I say gently, ‘so I can give you an update and then you can come back and spend more time with Cassie, if you like.’
They follow me like zombies to the end of the ward. As soon as we walk into the family room I wish I’d binned the decorations in here as well. The Jensens don’t seem like plastic-reindeer people.
They both shake their heads at my offer of tea or coffee. Someone’s thoughtfully arranged three chairs in a semi-circle; I think it must have been Lizzie. Jack pulls his trousers up an inch at the thigh as they sit down; a sweetly old-fashioned habit, I wonder briefly who he learnt it from.