Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(87)
This time they all exchanged glances. I noticed Dad’s fingers tense over the notepad. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, but by now even he seemed worried. He looked at Claudia again. ‘Thanks, Claudia.’
It was 3.27 a.m. when I made it back to my hospital room, and it was Claudia who spotted the note. Next to the empty box of Jaffa Cakes, written on the back of a leaflet about juvenile diabetes.
I’m sorry for everything.
Buonanotte.
Love, Suze xx
This is the image I have:
Around the time I was hobbling across the hospital tiles, Suzanne sat herself down on Brighton beach. She swallowed the pills in groups, three handfuls in total, pausing between each to force down the vodka. When she’d finished she took the empty bottle and half buried it in the stones, so it wouldn’t get smashed or blow away. She slid her earphones carefully into her ears and scrolled through her iPod albums until she found Abbey Road. She listened with her eyes closed, and she didn’t even cry.
And then, during the second chorus of ‘Octopus’s Garden’, she fell asleep.
After
I hadn’t expected to sleep at all after Claudia left the room, but the drugs in my system, the pain and the panic caught up with me and pulled me under. I woke up more than once, drowsy and disorientated, convinced I could hear voices, before sinking back into sleep.
I dreamed snapshots of confusion and colour: sunflowers that towered over me, blocking out the sun, bending on impossibly long stalks; dancing kites with yellow tails, the string biting into my hands; Suzanne on the other side of the road, standing with her back to me at the seafront railings, blonde hair tousled in the wind; Tarin surrounded by origami birds, painting the bedroom walls green; pebbles on Brighton beach rolling under my feet like a waterfall cascade, carrying me away; Rosie, her face close to mine, saying, ‘Caddy? Caddy?’
And then the unmistakable reality of a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes; the world lurched and righted.
‘Caddy.’ My father’s voice, unusually soft. Not a question, not a request, not a reprimand. Just my name.
When I spoke, my voice came out cracked and husky, like I’d been crying in my sleep. ‘Did you find her?’
‘Yes.’ He looked tired. His hair was dishevelled, like he’d been running his fingers through it. ‘We found her.’
The terror that seized me was absolute. I felt instantly cold, my throat closed up. I tried to speak, but he got there first.
‘We found her in time,’ he said, inclining his head and meeting my gaze with a steadiness that made me let out my breath, my heart rate calming. ‘It’s OK. We found her in time.’
Relief is a flat word for an emotion that feels so boundless. I felt at once full and emptied by it. I cried, of course, but once the tears were done I wasn’t sure quite what to do with myself apart from grill my parents for details, which I did, at length. They were unusually patient with me, answering all my questions until I had the fullest picture I could of what had happened.
As promised, Dad had called Rosie’s mother and then Sarah, who’d called the police. Once she’d finished talking to them, her phone rang again. This time it was Rosie’s mother on the end of the line, relaying possibly the six most important words Rosie had ever said: ‘Tell them to try the beach.’
Would anyone but Rosie have known how much the beach meant to Suzanne? I thought I did, but it hadn’t occurred to me that that was where she would choose to die, which was why I couldn’t shake the queasiness of knowing how easily things could have been different. If I hadn’t woken up. If I hadn’t got my dad. If I hadn’t made him call Shell to get Sarah’s number. If Shell hadn’t woken Rosie. If any of these steps hadn’t happened, who would have been there to save her? No one.
We found her, Dad said, and in a way it was true. But it wasn’t a reassuring sequence of events, not a montage-worthy pulling together of heroes, racing against the clock to find Suzanne in time. It was just a couple of lucky phone calls, and a girl who knew her friend.
After the drama came the anticlimax. I felt as if I’d spent the last few months being swept along a river and now, suddenly, there I was, dropped over the waterfall into the sudden calm of a plunge pool. The noise and motion and panic were gone. Everything was still. It was disorientating.
I wasn’t allowed to see Suzanne, who’d been brought to the same hospital I was in but was, apparently, in no state to see anyone who wasn’t a medical professional or family. I worried about her, of course, but it was a different kind of worry than before. Now at least I knew she was in safe hands. The hardest part was over, the worst had happened; it was surely all good things from here. And that was, at least in part, because of me. I’d saved her, just as I’d been so scared I’d lose her. It wasn’t just relief I was feeling, it was pride.
I left the hospital four days after my fall, my leg and arm in plaster and stitches twinging in the side of my face. ‘It might scar,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s too early to tell.’ Secretly I hoped it would. A small scar by my hairline, between my cheekbone and my ear, seemed like the kind of souvenir I was owed after everything that had happened.
I was given only the barest details about Suzanne, even after I was settled at home. I knew that they’d got her to the hospital quickly enough after she’d taken the pills that there would be no lasting physical damage, but that her mental state, not so easily measured with monitors or fixed with drips, was the biggest concern.