After the End(12)

“OK?” Leila nods to each of her colleagues in turn. Aaron suctions the ET tube, then deflates the cuff of air that keeps it in place. Leila checks the monitors, looking for a steady heart rate, a steady saturation level. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, she withdraws the tube. She hears Pip’s rapid breathing behind her; Cheryl’s calm voice as she talks to Dylan, despite his sedation.

“Almost there, love, that’s it. You’re doing so well.”

They didn’t make it this far, last time. Leila had thought Dylan was ready, they’d prepped everything just the same, but his vitals had dropped so fast and so hard that they’d stopped and waited for him to stabilize, and when he didn’t Leila had had no alternative but to reverse the process.

This time, she thinks. But there is still the ghost of a doubt that shivers down her spine. Something bad is going to happen.

Only then it’s out, with a bark of a cough that makes Pip jump up from her chair. “What’s happening? Is he OK? Is he breathing?”

“It’s a reflex,” Leila tells her gently. “We’ll give Dylan a little bit of help with his breathing to begin with, then we’ll gradually reduce the pressure and see how he copes.” Aaron suctions Dylan’s airways, and Leila slips a BiPAP mask over his face, and adjusts the pressure. “If he gets on well with this,” she says to Pip, “we’ll try a high-flow nasal cannula. But one step at a time.”

Pip nods meekly. She waits until Aaron and Cheryl take the trolley away, and until Leila steps away from Dylan’s bed, and then she crosses the room and presses her lips to the boy’s forehead. She runs her fingers across the sticky residue left by the tape.

“I’ll get someone to bring you some rubbing alcohol.”

Pip starts, as though she forgot Leila was there. Then she gives a tentative smile, her eyes darting across Leila’s face as though she might be able to read her thoughts. “He’s doing well, isn’t he? Isn’t he? What do you think?” And her face is so pleading, and her voice so desperate, that all Leila wants to say is Yes, he’s great, he’s doing fine, he’s going to be fine.

But Leila can’t lie. And so instead she says, “We’ll see how he goes over the next twenty-four hours,” and she leaves. Because the feeling she’s had in the pit of her stomach all day—the feeling she had in Nick’s office, that something bad was on its way—is stronger than ever.





four





Pip


On the opposite side of the corridor to PICU is the parents’ room, a communal space with comfortable chairs, a kettle, and a fridge stocked with milk and a variety of labelled plastic containers. Anna Roberts. Beckinsale. Noah’s cheese strings. Please don’t touch—it’s all he’ll eat! I take out my sandwiches and sit at the table to eat them.

The room is furnished like the nursing home my grandma was in: high-backed chairs with wooden arms and wipe-clean covers, pale varnished coffee tables with piles of out-of-date magazines. There’s a rack of leaflets headed Your child is in paediatric intensive care—what now? and a television mounted on the wall, too high for comfort. The sound is always muted, subtitles coming a moment after the action moves on, like a badly dubbed film. I watch an ITV newsreader silently speaking above the script for a carpet-cleaner commercial, before her own words catch up. I’m reminded of Mothering Sunday, last March, when Max got up to let me sleep. Dylan was going through a phase of waking at five, and when I emerged at seven thirty—quite the lie-in, comparatively speaking—I found the two of them watching an episode of Peppa Pig with the volume turned off.

“We didn’t want to wake you,” Max says. “Happy Mother’s Day, sweetie.”

“Why have you got the subtitles on?” I asked him, scooping up Dylan for a cuddle. He burrowed into my neck, one hand snaking down the back of my T-shirt. “I mean, our son is obviously exceptionally gifted, but I don’t think he can read yet.”

Max rubbed the back of his neck. He gave a casual shrug. “It’s the one where Dr. Hamster picks her own pet to win first prize—it’s pretty funny.”

“You’re telling me the subtitles are for you?” I laughed so loud Dylan touched my face in astonishment, then he laughed too, and the pair of us howled while Max pretended to be affronted.

“Shh, this is the bit,” he said, and he turned up the volume and moved over so Dylan and I could squash in next to him. And long after Dylan had slid off the sofa to play with his dinosaurs, Max and I were still cuddled on the sofa, watching Peppa Pig.

It’s too early for lunch but I didn’t eat breakfast and hunger has made me nauseous. My sandwiches—in the fridge from yesterday—are dry in my mouth, and I gulp water from the tap to chase them down. I feel flat—the anticlimactic aftermath of this morning’s stress. There’s so much riding on Dylan’s coming off the ventilator successfully, and yet there was no ta-da! moment, no definitive verdict. Hurry up and wait, my mum used to call it, when we had to rush rush rush to get somewhere, only to hang about when we got there.

Forty-eight hours, Dr. Khalili says. She’ll have a good idea in the next twenty-four of how Dylan’s responding, but if he stays off for two days, she’ll call it a success. He’s still sleepy. It’s hardly surprising, after the length of time he’s been sedated, I remind myself, determined not to let this flat feeling sink any lower. I pull out my phone.