Always, in December(92)
“I’ll come with you,” Bia said immediately.
“No.” Josie took a step toward her, took her hands, and squeezed them. “We can’t both miss the plane.”
“Shit, the plane.” Bia grimaced.
“Precisely. Look, you go. I’ll ring the airline to see if I can catch a later flight if…” But she didn’t want to finish that sentence, didn’t want to say an “if,” because she wasn’t sure what the end of it would be.
Bia shook her head. “I can’t let you go alone, Jose.”
“I won’t be alone. I have Helen, and my grandad.” Where all this calm was coming from, Josie had no idea.
“But—”
“I forbid you to come, OK? Go to Budapest, start having fun. Meet some hot guy and get ready to introduce me.” She tried for a smile. “You can’t do anything anyway, and in all likelihood she’ll be fine.” But despite her words, she was desperately trying to quash the gnawing in her belly that was hidden beneath her cool exterior.
She turned, grabbed her suitcase, and wheeled it to the front door, closing the matter simply by the fact that she was ready to leave and Bia wasn’t. She hugged Bia, who gripped her tightly back. “Call me, please,” Bia whispered.
“I will,” Josie promised. “It’ll be fine,” she said again. And she really, really tried to believe it as she ran down the stairs, out of the building, and toward the station.
After a thirty-minute drive from Josie’s grandparents’ place, Helen parked in the car park of the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford and the three of them got out of her car, Josie reliving her teenage years by hopping out of the backseat. She and Helen had both stayed overnight with her grandad in her grandparents’ cottage, Helen insisting that Josie sleep in her old room while she took the sofa. Not that any of them had had much sleep, each of them waiting for a call, waiting to be told something worse had happened.
Josie hadn’t cried yet. She felt like she’d been in a constant fight to control the tears from the start of the three-hour journey—a train then tube from Streatham to Marylebone, waiting at the station, a train to Oxford, and then a taxi. Even after she got to the cottage, she hadn’t given in to the urge to cry and the result was that she was fluctuating between a calm stillness and an intense burning behind her eyes.
They arrived at five to nine, all of them having been up since the early hours, filling the morning with small talk until it was late enough to leave the cottage. Now they walked in relative silence, across the car park and through the glass doors of the hospital. She was in the cardiology ward, according to Josie’s grandad, so they followed signs through the hospital and ended up in a small waiting room.
The nurse at the reception desk there smiled, putting on big round glasses when Helen asked where Cecelia Morgan was. She glanced briefly at something behind the desk. “She’s just through the doors to your right, then take the first left and you should see her. I can only let two of you through at a time though,” she added. “Hospital rules, I’m afraid.” She slipped off those glasses, smiled benignly at them.
“You two go first,” said Helen. “I need to pop to the loo anyway.”
So Josie followed her grandad through the doors, trying to keep her stride relaxed for his sake. They knew nothing, she reminded herself, and people didn’t always die from a heart attack. Some did, though, a dark voice in the back of her mind said.
Memo was propped up against two cushions in the ward where they found her, the two beds on either side of her also occupied. She smiled as Josie and her grandad approached, and though her face looked a little paler and more lined than usual, her grey bob unnaturally unkempt, she seemed OK at first glance. In all honesty, her grandad looked worse than Memo, dark purple circles under his brown eyes, like he hadn’t slept for days.
Memo held out a hand for her husband, who went to her side immediately, stroking back her hair in a tender gesture of the kind he never usually liked to perform in public. She held the other hand out to Josie, who went to her, making sure to keep her smile in place. Neither of her grandparents needed to see her cry right now.
“How are you?” croaked Josie’s grandad.
“Oh, I’m fine, like I told you,” Memo said reassuringly. “It’s a bit odd, what with all these doctors and nurses prodding about, and they want to keep me here awhile to observe, and really this gown does nothing for my complexion, but apart from that…” She smiled at each of them in turn, though Josie felt her own smile falter. Because the thing was, even if she was in a lot of pain, there was no way she would say anything—this was the woman who had once brushed off a broken arm as “just a minor inconvenience when you’re trying to do the shopping.”
“Have they said anything about how long you have to be here? Or what happens next?” Josie asked, glancing around to take in all the other patients here. It was quite a big room and had that peculiar smell—disinfectant mixed with hidden body odor—and Josie found it strange how a room so bright and white could feel so incredibly claustrophobic.
“Well, they drew me a diagram this morning, and said something about eighty-five-percent blockage, but, really, they just need to run some tests and scans and the like so they can tell us what to do.” This time when Memo smiled, it seemed a little more strained. Josie caught sight of a nurse across the other side of the room—blond, with creamy skin, and younger than Josie—bending over one of the patients. She had the strongest urge to go up to her, to tell her, tell someone, that her grandmother wasn’t usually like this—she wasn’t old and sick, she still went for bike rides on the weekends, she baked terrible biscuits and hosted a book club every month, even though she failed to finish the damn book every single time. She was a person, not just an old, sick lady. She took a slow breath, returned her attention to her grandmother, and tried to join in the idle small talk—it was clear that Memo wanted to be distracted, that she didn’t want to go over and over what had happened or what might be about to happen.