People LIke Her(81)

“Emmy?” I whispered.

The house was silent. Remembering the flashlight function on my phone, I took it out of my pocket. I was in a living room. In front of me was a couch and a pair of armchairs, and beyond that a door presumably leading to a kitchen. To my right was a dining table, bare apart from what looked like some old, unopened mail. To my left was a staircase.

“Emmy?”

I flashed the light from my phone around the kitchen once, detected nothing out of the ordinary. A glass-windowed door to the back garden. A single plate on the worktop. The kitchen curtains, like those in the living room, were closed. Outside on the gravel I could hear Irene pacing, calling my name, calling Emmy’s. That was when I saw them, next to the door.

Emmy’s shoes.

I was halfway up the stairs, shouting my wife’s name at the top of my voice, before I even really knew what I was doing. Three steps at a time, crashing into the wall where the stairs turned halfway, I charged up in the dark. I was fucking lucky not to break my neck, especially at the top where the last step caught the end of my trainer and almost sent me flying. The first door I opened was a bathroom. I checked the bath. I pulled the curtain back on the shower.

Nothing there.

The second room I tried was painted pink, with a light shade done up to look like a little hot-air balloon, a little teddy bear in the basket underneath. There was a crib in the corner. The crib was empty.

The third door I opened revealed a bedroom with closed curtains and a bed in the middle of it. I took a step back. The smell was appalling. From downstairs, I could hear Irene stumbling around in the living room in the dark, swearing.

“Up here,” I tried to shout, then realized that my throat was so dry I could barely croak.

In the corner of the room, blinking, was some kind of medical drip with a monitor attached. From it ran a tube. I could see its silhouette running down to whatever was under the pile of blankets on the bed.

Shit. That was one of the things I could smell. Old shit. Also vomit.

I listened. I could not hear breathing. I ran the light over the blankets—brown, woolen, thick. I could see nothing moving.

“Emmy?” I said.

No response.

I found the light switch and flicked it on. I took two steps forward and threw the blanket back.

Emmy was lying on her back with her mouth open, something attached to her arm, very pale, the bedsheets sodden, the clothes she was wearing soaked through.

“Irene!” I shouted. “Up here!”

I think I probably shouted something about calling an ambulance too. Something about checking the other rooms.

I tried to remember how they had taught us to check for a pulse in the Boy Scouts. I could feel nothing. Emmy’s skin was cold, clammy.

Then I felt it. Faint, very faint. It was so faint that at first I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it, just feeling the pulsing of my own heart throbbing in my own fingertips.

She was out cold.

I touched her cheek gently.

No response.

I leaned over her, said her name, shook her by the shoulder. Nothing happened. I shook her harder, tried lifting her up a little. Her head slumped forward. I tried lifting one of her eyelids with my thumb. She offered no resistance. I shone the light from my phone directly into the open eye.

She gave a very faint groan.

I became aware that Irene was standing in the doorway. She seemed uncertain whether to cross the threshold, what to do next. She asked me if Emmy was okay.

“She’s alive,” I said. “She is definitely alive.”

“Bear?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Not here,” I told her.

There was a little pile of whitish vomit on the pillow. There was more of it in Emmy’s hair. I turned her arm to look at where the tube had been taped to her, to see where she was hooked up to it. Whatever had been in the bag was finished now.

“Bear? Bear?”

I could hear Irene opening the remaining doors on the corridor, swinging open cupboard doors and peering under beds and trying wardrobes, crashing around.

Emmy will know, I thought. Emmy will be able to tell us what had happened, who did this, what happened to Bear. Digging my fingers into her shoulders, I gave her a shake, harder and more urgent than I’d shaken her before.

Emmy let out another little groan. Her lips were chapped and cracking. Her face looked drawn. She was barely breathing. But she was alive.

“Emmy? Emmy, can you hear me?”

A sound that might have been almost anything passed her lips.

Her tongue looked swollen, sore.

“Emmy, where is Bear? What happened to Bear, Emmy?”

It was only as I was trying to lift her out of the bed, trying to swing her legs over the side and get her upright, that I realized I didn’t need Emmy to tell me where my son was.

My baby son, grey and unmoving, lay curled up on the mattress next to her. He was so small, so still, that I hadn’t even noticed him, had been practically kneeling on him.

I’d never seen him looking so tiny.

When I picked him up, he was so light it was like picking up something hollow, a husk.

His eyes were closed tight, his swollen lips parted, almost purple. I lifted him to my ear, and I couldn’t hear him breathing. I kept checking his wrists, his neck, for a pulse, for the faintest flickering of a pulse. Nothing.

It was easily the worst moment of my life.