‘I’m so proud of you,’ her voice had echoed from the past.
Instead of slugging whiskey into his glass, he had glugged it down the sink and stumbled into his office, waking mid-afternoon, a bitter taste on his tongue, his face pressed to his desk, papers stuck to his cheek. He vowed never to drink again. To continue to make Clem proud.
Now, as he finished his orange juice, Oliver thought about the grief he had felt. Still felt. ‘I can’t imagine how you feel,’ he had told Anna but it was a lie. He knew how it felt to lose the person you love more than anyone else in the world. He had felt it too. He perhaps should have told her the truth.
He wanted to bring Anna the answers, the comfort, he himself once craved.
If only she would trust him.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Anna
‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ Oliver had said to me when we met but he knew only too well. Why hadn’t he just been honest? Reading the article filled me with an overwhelming sorrow. His story was vastly different to mine and yet strikingly familiar. Love. Loss. The inconceivable pain of sitting beside someone’s bedside, willing them to come back to you. To recover. The helplessness. He had felt it too. All of it.
Had he and Clem planned a family? I placed my hands gently over my cramping stomach. My nan was fond of saying ‘You can’t miss what you never had’, but oh, she was wrong. Oliver must grieve for the future they had planned. In my mind he made the leap from scientist to man. No longer coming across as odd, just incredibly sad. Now I understood why he was so driven in his research. A picture formed in my mind of him sitting with Clem in the hospice, her physically in front of him but her mind somewhere else entirely, Oliver pushing his glasses onto the bridge of his nose as he tried to read her face. Her thoughts. Unable to know what she was thinking.
Feeling.
Wanting.
‘They look so happy together, don’t they?’ In a photograph from their wedding day, Oliver was barely recognizable, not from his lack of beard but because of his beaming smile. The sea glistening behind them, the breeze ruffling Clem’s long hair.
Nell scrolled down further. There was a picture of Clem’s funeral. Oliver was one of the pallbearers. Her coffin balanced on his left shoulder, devastation crumpling his face.
‘I think he might genuinely want to help,’ I said.
‘Maybe. I’m going to google that Japanese neuroscientist.’
Nell found an article about his work. She read far quicker than my tired eyes could.
‘God, it’s like something out of a film. There’s something that can actually decipher the images in someone’s mind. It’s crazy to think all this stuff goes on and people like you and I have no idea. It sounds so futuristic.’
‘I don’t think Dr Acevedo believes that there’s anything going on inside of Adam’s mind. I don’t think he believes Adam will ever wake up. He’s hardly the most positive of people.’
Nell opened YouTube and typed in ‘miracle waking from a coma’ and was flooded with results.
‘Look, Dr Acevedo doesn’t know everything.’
There were videos of patients waking after two years, twelve years, twenty years. We watched clip after clip. Patients who had defied the boundaries of medical theories by relaying they could hear everything going on, they could think, dream, hope. Dr Acevedo might not know everything, but Oliver…
‘I can’t stop watching.’ Nell blinked back tears. ‘So many people who were written off. They’ve all come back.’
I wouldn’t let Adam be written off, not without a fight. ‘I want to visit the Chapman Institute. Find out more. Will you come with me?’
‘Try and stop me.’
I reached for the apartment phone.
‘Wait.’ Nell pulled a new mobile from her bag. ‘This is for you. I picked it up at the airport. I’ve keyed in some numbers, including Josh’s.’
‘He’ll be heartbroken when I tell him.’
‘Do you want me to call him so you don’t have to keep going over it?’
‘No – I can’t keep putting everything off.’
‘We also need to find another hotel. While the kitchen was making our lunch, I talked to reception about extending your stay but they’re fully booked next week.’
‘Shit.’ Without travel insurance, my accommodation wouldn’t be covered. We had some savings left but I didn’t know how long they would last. My mind flitted to the videos we’d just watched: two years, twelve years, twenty years. How long might Adam be in hospital?
‘We’ll get you both home,’ Nell said.
‘I’m not sure how without insurance. The few thousand pounds in our bank account won’t nearly cover it. Mum doesn’t have any money; Dad didn’t have life insurance. That’s why Adam and I made sure we’re both covered.’
‘It might be worth speaking to them? Some policies have a critical illness pay-out.’
‘We don’t.’ I didn’t think this was a critical illness anyway. They’d say there’s hope of a complete recovery.
‘Never mind. I could start a JustGiving page. A “Get Adam Home” campaign?’
Home. One word. But those four letters brought such comfort.
‘If, and it’s a big if, we let Oliver get involved, he promised me a place a stay and to cover our travel afterwards.’
‘Let me call him. I want to sound him out.’ While Nell arranged for us to visit The Chapman Institute the next day, I washed down two painkillers with water.
‘Are you in a lot of discomfort?’ Nell asked when she’d hung up.
‘I feel…’ My fingers strayed to my stomach. Lost. Empty. Bereft. It was too hard to articulate. ‘I think I’ll go and have a bath. Why don’t you ring Chris and see how the kids are?’
‘I’ll unpack and do it later.’
‘Nell… Call him now.’
There wasn’t always a later.
Several times in the bath I had almost fallen asleep but afterwards I sat on the sofa in clean shorts and T-shirt, damp hair dripping cool water down my back, my mind hopping from anxious thought to anxious thought.
‘What if Oliver is a crackpot?’ I tried not to pin my hopes on him. ‘What if the trial is dangerous? What—’
‘What if you tried to relax for just a little while?’
I tucked my legs under me on the sofa and rested my head on Nell’s shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘That’s okay. I only wish we were back here under different circumstances, but who knows, Adam could wake up any second. We could all be on the beach tomorrow sipping cocktails.’
Her fingers threaded through mine and for the first time in days I felt a glimmer of positivity, which lasted until the phone rang.
It was the hospital.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Oliver
Oliver had been surprised to receive a phone call from Nell yesterday afternoon.
‘Anna’s told me everything.’ Her tone had been hard, almost confrontational. For a split second, Oliver had thought she was ringing to tell him to stay away from Anna and Adam.