I’ve spent my fair share of time disorientated in hospitals. When I was five, I came to visit my dying Granddad and wandered away to find a vending machine. A nurse found me curled in a corner with my arms wrapped around my knees, crying about the scary balloons that everyone carried. They were the fluid bags from their IV drips.
There was Aiden’s birth, sixteen years ago. The nurse kept telling me I was lucky to be such a young mum—at least I’d get my figure back. “Try having a kid when you’re forty,” she kept saying.
Then there was the car accident. Mum was in a coma for a week before passing, but Dad’s death had been instantaneous after he flew through the windscreen when the brakes failed on the M1. Their accident had caused a traffic jam of over three hours that day. Twitter had been filled with angry commuters lambasting my father’s death because it made them late for work. But I still remember negotiating those twists and turns around the hospital, failing to remember which ward the nurse said, or finding out that they’d moved her to a different ward. The abbreviations made my head spin. ICU. A&E. CPR. DNR.
The truth is that I was relieved when she finally passed. By that point the doctors were uncertain whether she would ever regain her mental faculties after the trauma she had suffered, and I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that Dad had died while she slept. At least this way they both slipped away together.
In just one moment, I lost my clever mother and my caring father. Like the moment I lost my curious son.
As I burst through the door into the paediatric ward in St Michael’s Hospital, a shiver ran down my spine and I knew in my heart that I had found my son. In one mere moment what had been lost was found again. Moments are what make this life, aren’t they? A life is built on moments; seconds passing by. Some seconds are fleeting—part of a silly dream, or chopping up vegetables, taking the rubbish out, trimming our nails. Some are not.
Detective Carl Stevenson sat on a small bench in a tiny room on the right of the ward corridor. He rose to his feet—polystyrene cup in one hand—as I approached, and opened his mouth to speak. I didn’t let him.
“Where is he?” I blurted out. “Is it him?”
“Emma,” he said, doing away with formalities. “We need to talk. Take a moment and sit down. I want to explain everything to you first.”
I regarded his dark brown eyes and salt-and-pepper beard—more salt since the last time we’d met—and wondered how on earth he supposed I could sit down at a moment like this. There was a chance my son was back from the dead. God, just thinking about it was insane. This was all insane. And yet…
“Love, think of the baby,” Jake said. “He’s right. Sit down and listen to the detective.”
“I need to know,” I said. “I need to see him.”
What would a sixteen-year-old Aiden look like? Would he have bum-fluff on his chin like the kids at school? Would he be broad and lanky? Or short and stubby? Would he look like me or Rob? I shut my thoughts down. What if it wasn’t him at all? What if this was all some sort of mistake? It was the most logical explanation to everything.
“I know,” Stevenson said. “But you need to take a breath. Aiden… the young boy we found… has been through significant trauma and is very sensitive at the moment. The doctor will explain more in a moment but I wanted to talk to you first. I thought you might remember me from the investigation after the flood.”
“I do,” I said.
After we realised Aiden was missing, search and rescue scoured the surrounding area for him. The River Ouse was searched. The woods were searched. The village was searched. But there was no sign of him. There was no body, either. The experts explained to me that when someone drowns in a flood, they do not float downstream like many people believe. They actually sink underneath the turbulent water where it is calmer, and then they rise to the top very close to where they drowned. But there was no body. Aiden was never found. That was when Detective Stevenson had been assigned, because there was a slim chance that Aiden had not drowned at all.
I sat down on the bench as a group of three nurses walked down the corridor on our left. I thought they were staring at me, possibly wondering if I was here to ‘claim’ the missing boy. Like a leftover sock after a PE lesson. My hands formed into fists and I clutched at the cotton dress I was wearing. It was damp from the rain outside. I hadn’t even put on a coat.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“A teenage boy was found wandering along the back road between Bishoptown village and Rough Valley Forest. A couple were heading out of the village and came across him. He was wearing only a pair of jeans. No top or shoes. He was muddy all over. They stopped and asked the boy where he was going. They said he acknowledged their questions but didn’t speak. He stopped walking, looked at them, and maintained eye contact, but he did not reply. They managed to get him into their car and drove him to the nearest police station.”