The Rabbit Girls(57)

‘Please, Axel, just tell me where he is, he needs me, and I’ll take the medications, I’ll do anything.’ The silence on the other end of the line goes on and on. ‘Please, Axel,’ she begs.

‘The professionals and I all agreed you are not of sound mind. And this, Miriam, this is you returning home, being my wife, taking the medications and getting well.’

‘What did you do to him?’ Miriam’s mind runs around a thousand scenarios. ‘Please.’

‘Do you agree?’

‘To come back to you?’

‘Yes, to come home.’

She bites down on her thumb, hard.

‘Axel. I’m not coming home,’ she says it. For the first time, out loud. There is only static at the other end. She can hear the change in him as the pause grows.

‘You may not have a choice soon anyway.’ His tone is playful. She imagines his smile. Frostbite. Her fingers hold on to the handset so hard the phone sounds like it’s cracking against her ear. Axel laughs.

‘I have to go, Mim. I’d call the doctors if I were you. You are accusing me of what? Stealing your father from an ambulance? I’m tired of all this erratic behaviour. You are paranoid.’ And she gets dial tone in her ear.

Hands still shaking she calls Hilda, but with no answer, she hangs up. She paces up and down, walking past her father’s empty room each time. Nothing.

She puts on her coat and shoes, but having no idea where she would go, she returns to the phone. She redials the hospice.

‘Do you know where else the ambulance may have taken my father?’ she asks, desperation bringing her voice out high.

‘The ambulance is attached to the hospital. Try there and ask for the paramedics. Ambulances do deliver patients into hospital, maybe your father is there?’

After about ten rings to the hospital emergency department, someone answers. After talking to three different people asking the same questions and being placed on hold again and again. After peeling back the skin on her fingernail with her teeth, and digging her nails deep down into the broken flesh of her wrist until her stomach feels like it’s spinning, she finally gets an answer.

‘Yes, Herr Winter was redirected to the emergency department after he deteriorated en route. He has since been transferred to ward 71, where he has stabilised.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘Visiting hours finish at eight thirty.’

‘Thank you.’

Miriam picks up her bag and leaves.

At the hospital, day or night, lights, hubbub and noise. She buzzes on ward 71 and is shown to her father’s side. He is as white as the sheet he lies on, an oxygen mask over his face, his mouth ajar, asleep. She sits, holds his hand and stays by his side, folding and refolding the pleats in her navy skirt.

Being back in the hospital again. She remembers the night she left Axel and feels a little better that she didn’t concede on the phone and say she’d return.

Over a month ago, she got off the bus and entered the hospital. She found herself sitting on a plastic-covered chair that crackled as she moved, with such a high back she was unable to look up without getting a stiff neck, dressed in only her nightie and coat. Awake and listening to what she thought were her father’s last breaths. The beeps on the monitors soothed her. Each wave of nurses offered hot drinks, food and blankets as they cared for her as much as for the man in the bed.

And now she is back: same green, plastic chair, same watchful eye on the monitors, but this time she knows that Axel is at her back. Before, she thought her father would die and then she would too. But now, she thinks maybe her father might be okay, but in that way, there is no escape for her. She will have to deal with Axel too. And she has no idea how to do that. It was stupid to call him. Her father’s heartbeat traces lines across the screen and she wonders what Axel has lined up next.

‘I need to be less crazy,’ she says out loud, and laughs at the irony.

She is shooed out of the ward at nine thirty, having overstayed her welcome with the nurse in charge. All her questions were answered with ‘tomorrow’.

‘Will he be okay?’

‘We’ll find out tomorrow.’

‘Will he go to the hospice?’

‘We can ask the consultant tomorrow.’

‘What time can I come back?’

‘We’ll call you tomorrow.’

But in the back of her mind, she isn’t sure he’ll make it to tomorrow and the relief and fear that come from that thought bring tears to her eyes and a pounding in her heart. She leaves the ward feeling like she’s just run a marathon.

In the hospital corridor, she sits on a bench placed within an alcove, a grey filing cabinet on both sides, she feels oddly safe, unwatched. And thinks about staying here until that elusive tomorrow has arrived.

But she hears footsteps and she smells him before she sees him.

‘So, you found him then?’ Miriam stands and tries to step around Axel, who seems to grow into the vacant spaces, no way around him.

Not looking up, focusing her eyes only on the floor. He places an arm out to stop her moving, but all she has done is shift her weight from foot to foot.

‘What antics, Miriam. I mean what will Dr Baum say?’ She makes to move in the other direction, but he catches her wrist and pulls her into him.

‘What am I going to do with you?’ He smooths her hair. ‘Because you really are not well, are you? Such a shame. Hilda called me, love, to say your father was here. Not one person believes in you.’ Her mind rushes as his words penetrate.