If I float further out from this epicentre, I see we are the only two motionless figures in the tableau. Beyond the stillness of our bubble, the hospital bursts with chaotic energy, on fire with the emergency of life. Desperate attempts to salvage the air in people’s lungs, to extend the beats in their hearts and give them moments, hours …years.
Don’t they realise how transient it all is? How fragile? How close everyone is to where we are. This cliff from which people justslip.
But then, BAM. I’m sucked back into my body in a rush, blood coursing through veins, heart splintering into minusculepieces that shatter and evaporate, and I realise there is nothing calm about this picture at all. I am not standing here, watching him silently. I amscreaming. Lunging at him. Lunging atus. Shaking his lifeless form, clutching his shoulders, pulling him into my chest while I yell at him to stay here.
‘Don’t youdaredo this, Fraser!’
I am trapped. Trapped between an all-encompassing, desperate wish to be dead and the natural urge to fight to the surface. To burst through these suffocating depths andclawat my life.
The violence of this is going to kill me …
Somewhere, in the near hyperventilation, I draw a breath.
And on that breath, his scent.
I kiss his cheek, salt on my tongue from my own gushing tears, which have sprung from the future somehow. From all the missing moments from the fifty years that he promised.
‘Don’t do this.’ I whisper this time. ‘Please, Fraser. I’m begging you.’
His silence horrifies me.Gaping silence.
‘FRASER!’ I shout. ‘Wake UP.’
There isn’t enough hope in the world to turn this around. He won’t move. He is not here. I am yelling, redundantly, at just the unresponsive shape of him—nothing left inside it for me to reach.
Gradually, his lack of life stills me, until a flimsy acceptance starts to land and I ease his shoulders, slowly, back down on the bed, my head coming to rest on the bruised chest that they pounded relentlessly between the impact and the moment they checked the clock and called it. So brutal. It must hurt.
No.
I am the one hurting. It’smychest that feels like it’s received hundreds of compressions. My heart that aches with five thousand futile attempts to bring him back.
And now I’m backtracking to the decision I made not to have children. The pieces of him that I could have had now and don’t. The alternative future that I would bargain for now, because if we’d gone down that path, or any different path, every moment of today would have been different. This is what happens when a thousand innocent, inconsequential actions end up shattering it all, the week of our wedding—when the flowering of everything, so much joy and light andlifeto come … isdashed.
Never in my life have I felt so desperately alone. While he is so perfectly still. So serene and untortured. Sosafefrom this unbearable agony.
22
FRASER
‘Isn’t it incredible,’ she said to me once over dinner, ‘I have access to the same twelve notes as Mozart or the Beatles or Madonna or Adele but if I arrange them my way, I can create something no human has ever heard! It’s not just the order of the notes, Fraser, it’s the spaces in between. It’s the sounds I leave out. It’s the pace and rhythm and volume and colour and the way you can take dots and squiggles and make them lift off the page like alchemy.’
‘You know you would have been burnt at the stake?’ I replied. Really, I was basking in the rapturous way she spoke about her creativity. She didn’t just hear music. She saw it and tasted it. It was always a full-blown synaesthetic explosion of sensory stimulation that I envied.
And now there is no rise and fall of her chest. No explosion of colour and sound and light in her mind. No sweet and sour. No spice. No crescendos and diminuendos. No spaces in between …
It’s nothingbutspace. It’s all silence.
The lost potential is so crushing I can barely breathe. Not just the potential between us and Parker, for our family’s future.Herpotential. Her wholelife.
There’s no coming back to music now.Not for one single note.And now I’m angry at the impostor syndrome. The self-doubt.The consuming fear that means all that unwritten music has died inside her. We’ve lost pieces that were never played, and the world will always be less colourful. And I amfuriousat my brother and Ridges for what they took from her.
‘I can’t survive this,’ I hear myself whisper. I won’t make it. Depression has slammed into a wall of grief that has crashed in to overpower me. This loss is incompatible with life. It will see me out. Worse,I want it to. This feels like the last few frantic, desperate beats of my heart before it turns to stone and I have no choice but to join her.
My phone beeps with a message. Parker. She’s with Maggie, who rushed to the school when I called her earlier. She doesn’t really know that there was an accident. We’ve been able to shield Parker from Audrey’s fate.
Daddy, are you coming after work? What is happening?
My heart thuds at the innocence. What’s happening is that my need to be here for my daughter is at war with a stronger longing not to be here at all. I’ve never known such miserable purgatory …
