Nate, I want to say, why did you do it, why did you risk what we had? But instead I said, ‘I love you, Nate, please be strong, please fight this, so that Rachel and Joey can come in and hug you and you can get out of hospital and we can begin again. We don’t have to talk about any of this,’ I whisper, stroking his forehead and his cheek, ‘I just want you well, please understand that, please be well.’
After ten minutes, I am gently extracted from Nate’s bedside and brought out into the corridor where a clipboard awaits me to fill in all his and my details.
‘You’ll ring me if anything happens?’
‘Yes, we’ll ring you. But this will not be a quick process, so you need sleep,’ said an older nurse. ‘Go home. We’ll phone you after the new shift takes over about half eight, quarter to nine, we’ll have a good vision of how he passed the night and that’s a good litmus test for his strength. He’s young, he has that on his side.’
‘Forty-six,’ I say.
‘We need to take care of him now, you need to let him go into our hands.’
‘OK,’ I say.
I’m not sure how I leave the hospital or even make it to the car. I drive home feeling both dizzy with tiredness and wide awake at the same time. What am I going to tell the children?
Your father has had a heart attack and he’s in hospital, and I wasn’t with him because he wasn’t home, he was with someone else...?
There’s no way of saying any of these things, no way at all. I close my eyes. I’ll try to figure out the right thing to do. But right now, I just have to survive this. I just have to exist, that’s all.
Everything looks different, the roads seem unfamiliar. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m driving in the early morning and dawn is thinking about creeping over the horizon. It’s a cold morning and a fewearly-bird workers are on their morning commute. I’m going in the other direction, home.Home.
Even the words seem strange. Home implies a place where you are safe and you live with your loved ones. But, my husband is lying in coronary care after having a heart attack when he was with his mistress, who is also my friend,wasmy friend. I practise saying this out loud and it sounds stranger, every time I say it.
What am I going to tell Rachel? With Joey, I can fib a bit, he’s still young enough not to see through a lie, so I can say he was out with friends. But Rachel, she’s an adult, I don’t want to lie to her.
I’m not ready to tell my mother, she’d have a story printed in the local free sheet newspaper, castigating Nate and with pictures of him saying, ‘cheater’ if she could possibly get away with it. And if she couldn’t, she’d be handing out leaflets. Dominic will hug me. And that’s when I do cry, thinking of being hugged by someone whom I know loves me. All the pain of thinking that Nate didn’t, all the worry that’s been bubbling inside me for months now, breaks. I cry for much of the journey home.
And to think I worried about Angie. Or maybe it was Angie too. Maybe Nate has lots of women.
I get home at half six and I make strong tea, which then makes me feel nauseous. I run to the bathroom and throw it all up.
In half an hour, I have to wake Joey, make him breakfast, pretend this is a normal day. Do the same with Rachel. Or do I? Normality has gone out the window. I have a showing this afternoon but I’m not going into work, no way.
Instead of our usual Friday routine, I sit and wait for everyone to get up.
Even though it’s too early, I still ring the hospital, get put through to the coronary care ward. And a nurse tells me that he’s doing well but that the cardiology team will be on their rounds later. Soon but still later.
‘Can I talk to the cardiologist?’ I say.
‘Possibly this afternoon we’ll have some news for you, because they’ll have to have a team meeting to decide what to do.’
‘OK, but he’s stable?’
‘Stable, absolutely, passed a good night. We’ll call you if there is anything else we need to tell you, Mrs Stanley,’ said the nurse. Even her saying my name makes a flush of pain rise inside me. I’m the woman whose husband was brought in with someone else.
‘Mum?’
I turn swiftly and Rachel is standing at the door to the kitchen, still in her pyjamas. She looks me up and down. I always shower and dress after breakfast. Now, I’m wearing my boots and proper clothes, not my slippers and comfortable fleecy dressing gown. ‘What are you doing up so early, Mum?’
The note must have fallen off her bed, I think, and she didn’t see it.
‘I haven’t been to bed actually,’ I say.
‘Why, what’s wrong?’
She’s beside me in a flash, slender fingers clutching one arm. And suddenly she is notgrown-up Rachel who’s ready to travel around the world: she’s my idealistic daughter, who idolises her father, who thinks everything is normal and simple in life and that things will work out the way she wants them to work out.
‘It’s your dad,’ I say, and years of training kick in. I cannot tell her the truth. ‘He’s going to be fine, but he had a heart attack, a cardiac episode.’ I fumble around a bit trying to find the correct words, words that won’t frighten her. ‘He’s in hospital and he’s OK. I was with him last night for a little while, but they sent me home.’
