‘Can we delay it at all?’ I asked, earning a grateful look from Amelia, whose complexion was still the colour of old parchment.
‘In an ideal world I would prefer to leave it a few days, but I really don’t think we have that option now.’
There was a long moment of silence. I wondered if I was the only one holding their breath, waiting for Amelia to insist yet again that Sam should be present to make this decision with her.
‘When?’ she asked, her voice thready with fear. ‘When would you do it?’
‘Today. As soon as possible,’ Dr Vaughan replied.
Before responding, she turned to me, her eyes huge and bright with tears. ‘Can you try to reach Sam and let him know?’
I think we all heard my nervous swallow, but I never broke eye contact with my sister. ‘Of course I will.’
Amelia finally turned to face the physician.
‘Alright,’ she said quietly. ‘Do it.’
*
‘What time did they say they were coming to get me?’ Amelia asked, as her gaze continued to shift from the clock on the wall to the door to her room.
‘Still one thirty,’ I said gently.
‘Oh, right,’ she said, nodding as though this was new news, despite the fact she’d asked the exact same question at least four times in the last thirty minutes. That’s how I knew she wasn’t just nervous, she was terrified.
‘It’s all going to be fine, Mimi. The procedure has a very high success rate,’ I assured her, quoting from the many articles I’d read online. It didn’t feel appropriate to add that in about fifty per cent of cases, the patient’s heart refused to stay at its new ‘normal’ rhythm and reverted to the abnormal one. As our dad always liked to say:We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Please let Amelia be one of the successful cases, I silently pleaded to any god who might be listening.Surely my sister deserved one lucky break?
It didn’t help knowing that I was the reason she kept checking the time and the hospital corridor. She believed Sam had been told what was happening, and she was waiting for him to join us. In a film, this was the bit when the hero would come bursting through the door at the very last minute. It was a white knight on a charger kind of thing. And nothing I could say would convince Amelia that Sam wasn’t going to show up. Consequently, it seemed best to say nothing.
*
The hospital café was buzzing with activity. Mum and I had to do two circuits of the room before I eventually found us a free table. I set down the tray with the cups of coffee neither of us wanted and checked my watch again. Amelia had only been gone for twenty out of the sixty minutes her procedure was supposed to take, and I was already itching to return to the ward.
‘Your family can go for a walk or visit the café when we take you down to the lab,’ the arrhythmia nurse specialist had informed Amelia as she passed her the consent form to sign. Amelia’s mind was clearly wandering, almost as much as her eyes. It made me wonder how much of the nurse’s information she’d even heard, let alone absorbed. Her attention had been focused only on the doors of the ward and who was coming through them. Or, more importantly, who wasn’t.
‘Do you have any questions?’ the nurse asked with a cheery smile as she took back the clipboard after Amelia had scrawled her name on it. Even her signature looked different these days; the loops were bigger and untidy, and her name had spilled out of the box she was meant to write in. It was no longer the neat, meticulous script of an accountant. And I’d seen the way she’d hesitated before writing her surname, as though unsure whether to write Wilson or Edwards. In the end, she wrote both.
Amelia waited until the nurse had excused herself before looking up at me with an expression that nearly broke my heart. She looked little and lost inside the ill-fitting surgical gown. After weeks of practice, I thought I was inured to the sight of my sister in a hospital bed, but it turned out I wasn’t, not at all. I realised with a jolt that I’d give anything to swap places with her, which was ironic, seeing as I’d spent the last few months doing precisely that. Not that Amelia knew about that, of course. And she never would, I resolved in a moment of belated clarity. Those staged photographs of her and Sam had been the cause of us falling out. The only good thing to have come out of them was that without them I’d never have met Nick, or known I was capable of the kind of love I’d truly stopped believing in.
I had Amelia to thank for that. Was that the payoff? Were our lives still so inextricably linked that she had to lose her soulmate for me to find mine? We rarely read each other’s thoughts anymore, so it startled me to find that perhaps that uncanny ability wasn’t entirely lost.
‘Don’t go feeling sorry for me, Lexi,’ she said, reaching for my hand.
‘I’m sorry foranyonewho has to wear a hospital gown like that,’ I said, trying to lift the serious look from her eyes with a feeble joke.
She shook her head. ‘Don’t pity me because I still believe Sam is coming.’
‘I… I don’t… I never said…’ My lies were unravelling between us like pulled threads.
‘It doesn’t matter now why you did what you did. Because I knew the truth. In here, I knew it,’ she said, covering the erratically beating heart in her chest. ‘Sam is real, and hewillcome back to me. I know he will.’
I shivered as I was struck with a horrible premonition. What if something went wrong during the procedure? What if this was the very last conversation we’d ever have? Did I really want the last words I said to my sister to be a lie? Hell yes I did.
‘I think he will too,’ I said as they began wheeling her bed away. ‘In fact, I’m sure of it.’
*
