After the End(75)

thirty-four





Pip


   2015


Thank you for seeing me. I—I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

It’s been more than two years since I saw Dr. Khalili outside the courtroom. She didn’t come back to work right away, and when Dylan died it was Cheryl who handed us the small box of his things, with the book of poems put together by Friends of PICU, and the leaflet on coping with the loss of a child.

“What I said after the ruling,” I say, forcing myself to meet her gaze. “It was . . .” This is all your fault . . . I’m hot with shame as I remember how I hissed the words, how she recoiled as though I’d spat in her face. “It was unforgivable.”

She shakes her head. “It was a stressful time.” Her fingers play with the lanyard around her neck. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”

I thought she would arrange a meeting at the hospital. I’d steeled myself to see the same corridors, smell the same strange mix of industrial cleaner and canteen food. But Dr. Khalili—Leila, as she prompts me to call her—suggested here, a café around the corner from the hospital. “I thought it might be easier for you to meet somewhere other than the hospital,” she says now.

“It is. Thank you.”

“Plus, to be honest—” She breaks off, and a faint flush creeps across her cheeks. “This isn’t how it’s done.”

“You’re not allowed to talk to me?”

There’s a pause while we order two coffees, and listen to a roll call of cakes neither of us wants.

“It’s not that I’m not allowed,” Leila says, once the waitress has left. “There are protocols.” The hint of an eye-roll lets me know exactly what she thinks of these protocols. “Forms to fill in, a process for patients and the families of patients to request a debrief or to make a complaint—”

“I’m not making a complaint.”

“Even so. Protocols.”

“And you’re breaking them?”

Leila shrugs.

“Why?”

“Because I’m tired? Disillusioned? Because I don’t see how they help? Because you and your husband went through a living hell two years ago, and if talking to you in a café the day after you ask to see me means you don’t have to wait six months for someone in an office to put in place the correct process, then that feels like the right thing to do.” She stops suddenly, as though she’s run out of steam. For the first time, it occurs to me that when a patient dies, the doctors lose someone, too, and although it can’t be like losing a child, or a sister, or a father, it is nevertheless a loss. It must hurt.

Our coffee arrives and we sit in silence, me adding milk to mine, and her adding sugar and stirring longer than is necessary.

“I thought we’d have more time with him,” I say eventually. I stare at my drink. “You told us we might only have a few weeks, but I thought . . . we’d been in PICU for so long already and he hadn’t got better, but he hadn’t got worse, and so I thought . . .” I look at her. “I felt like I was being punished.”

“Punished?”

“For not sending him to America. For going against Max. For taking the easy way out.”

“Easy? There’s nothing easy about what you did, Pip.”

We sit in silence for a while.

“I think,” Leila says, after a while, “that however long Dylan had lived, you would always have hoped for more time.”

“I—I keep wondering if we did the right thing.” I tell her about the flight to Dubai, and the child who walked like a toddler, but nevertheless put one foot in front of the other. The child the doctors said would never walk unaided. I tell her about the articles I read, about the brain-damaged children who defy the odds. I try to put into words what I want to say, without being rude, without accusing her . . .

“What if you were wrong?” There is no other way to say it.

Leila nods slowly. She blows on her coffee and takes a sip, then sets her cup back down in its saucer and folds her hands around it. “I could have been wrong.”

The breath I take pushes me backwards in my chair. Every sound is heightened—the clink of knives on plates, the hiss of the coffee machine, the scratch of the waitress’s pen on her pad. I picture the boy on the plane, only now it’s Dylan—the dark mop of hair replaced with my son’s brown curls—and he’s making his way not away up the aisle, but towards me, towards Max . . .

“But I could have been right.”

The words pull me back. Back to the café around the corner from the hospital, with the doctor I once thought I never wanted to see again.

Leila sighs, and leans forwards so her forearms rest either side of her coffee, her hands clasped together. “We’re used to science providing us with answers. Cures and breakthroughs and discoveries. But there are still more questions than there are answers.” She closes her eyes for a fraction longer than a blink.

“None of us has a crystal ball,” she says. “None of us—not you, or me, or the court—could say for certain what Dylan’s future would be like. All we could do was make the best decision possible, based on the information available to us.”