Gina’s voice, her tone as she said, ‘I’m here,’ provided another brief lifeline, but Vivi didn’t know how to grasp it.
Flashes of memory were showing themselves now – the brightness of sunshine in Beaufort House, friends’ faces turning from laughter to confusion and horror; a stranger thumping her chest, sirens wailing – and as the stultifying reality of it overwhelmed her she closed her eyes again, trying to shut out the fear.
A week passed in frightening and painful stages; a slow and often doubtful return from a near-fatal myocardial infarction – in other words a major heart attack. Vivi had been told more than once that it was lucky a doctor had been at hand, and that she’d been so close to the hospital, because every second had counted.
Apparently she’d suffered two cardiac arrests in the ambulance, and had twice been brought back to life.
She had no memory of that short, frantic journey to A & E, although some residue of it seemed sometimes to filter into her dreams. What had come next, her arrival, the emergency treatment, also remained a blank, but she’d been told about the resuscitation efforts, the urgent transfer to a cardiac catheter lab, how her poor, struggling heart had collapsed into near-catastrophic failure.
She was in the High Dependency Unit now, having been moved from Intensive Care two days ago, though she wasn’t sure she could remember it happening. She remained weak and sometimes disoriented, as though she was tuning in and out of someone else’s world. The monitors she was attached to registered her heart’s functions, from its rhythm, to blood flow, to pressure, while the drainage tubes in her chest and bladder performed their unjolly, but necessary duties.
In more lucid moments she felt as though she’d been slammed by a speeding truck. It hurt to breathe, to move, even to think. In some ways thinking was the worst for it invariably took her to a place of panic, to a dark, unnatural world she might never now escape from.
People came and went: doctors, nurses, medical students, technicians, friends and colleagues. Everyone was trying to bolster her, to tell her how much better she seemed today, but she didn’t feel better, and didn’t know what to say to them.
She wasn’t herself. She’d changed in ways she didn’t yet understand; she just knew it had happened, not only in her heart, but in her head.
As her strength staged a tentative and unreliable return she was weighed daily and encouraged to eat and drink. Her heartbeat and blood pressure were held steady by the inotropic drugs being fed through the IV in her neck.
‘I think we can remove the pacing wires tomorrow,’ Arnie Novak, the cardiologist, had told her this morning. He was a nice man, Eastern European, she thought, but she couldn’t tell which country, and she didn’t like to ask. She hadn’t said much to anyone since waking; often she didn’t have the strength to utter more than a few words, and just as often she wanted to hide away from what she might be told.
Now, hearing footsteps approaching, she knew intuitively that they were heading her way, and that they belonged to her mother. It was a kind of telepathy that made her feel secure and relieved, but other things welled up in her too, such as anger and resentment, things her mother didn’t deserve. Breakfast was barely over and here was Gina, worried, frightened, and failing to understand why this had happened when they’d been told, twenty-seven years ago, following two-week-old Vivienne’s arterial switch operation, that they had no more to fear, she could lead a normal life.
As far as Vivi was aware no one understood what had gone wrong, or, if they did they hadn’t yet told her whether the serious episodes she’d just suffered were in any way connected to the congenital heart defect she’d been born with.
‘How are you feeling?’ her mother asked fondly, putting down the magazines she’d brought in and pressing a kiss to Vivi’s forehead. Vivi caught the citrusy scent of her, light and fresh with the earthy warmth that came from her skin – as familiar as the sound of her voice and the movements of her hands.
How was she feeling?
‘Fine,’ Vivi replied. Her voice was stronger than a whisper now, but not as full as it should be. What was the point in telling the truth when there was nothing her mother could do to change things?
‘No pain?’
Vivi shook her head. She didn’t class the constant hurting in her chest as pain any more; it was more of an ache that occasionally flared up into something hot and untameable until the drugs kicked in.
‘How are you?’ Vivienne asked. ‘You look tired.’
Gina’s blink made her seem slightly lost, as though she’d forgotten that she might matter, and Vivi felt a flood of love filling her struggling heart. Funny how emotions didn’t hurt – or they did, but in a different way. They worried her too, in case they were causing undue strain, especially the negative ones. ‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked.
Gina smiled. ‘I did,’ she said, but Vivi knew it wasn’t true. ‘You have a very comfortable bed.’
Thinking of her flat was as difficult as thinking of all other aspects of the life that was going on without her, and would continue to as if she’d died that day in Beaufort House. The world wouldn’t wait for her, it simply wasn’t possible, but she wasn’t to worry, her boss had told her when he’d come to visit, she’d still have a job when she was strong enough to return.
No one had told her that was never going to happen, but they didn’t have to, because on a deep and intractable level she knew it anyway.
Greg had come to see her, twice, but he’d seemed so awkward the last time that she’d almost asked him right then not to come again. His wide, baffled green eyes hadn’t been able to hide the panic he felt, or the helplessness, or the shameful need to escape. She could tell he hated himself for it. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her, she was sure he did, but he wasn’t able to cope with her being anything other than the vibrant young woman he’d been dating. She’d decided to text him after he’d left. It would be easier that way, no pretence that things could be the same when she got out of here, no difficult goodbyes. She needed to be as pragmatic and brave about this as her mother was trying to be; as truthful and unemotional as the charts detailing her progress and mapping the way into her future.
She didn’t feel brave or pragmatic, or like being truthful or detached; what she felt was shattered and terrified, a wreck of the person she really was – and beyond angry with the cruel fate that had put her here.
She would fight it; show it who was in charge. It wasn’t going to win this battle and it might as well know it now. She’d find the weapons she needed, strength of body and spirit, indestructible determination of mind, belief in herself. Her dreams might lie in shattered pieces now, the debris of a collision with life’s capricious and brutal plans, but she wasn’t a puppet to be jerked about on the end of some random, intangible strings. She’d put everything back together and go on as she was before …
The flame of defiance was hard to keep alight when it was constantly assailed by fear; and when it sometimes took all her strength simply to summon the breath to speak.
‘Where’s Mark?’ she asked her mother, her voice low, the words croaked with effort.
‘I let him sleep on,’ Gina replied, taking out a tissue to wipe something from Vivienne’s cheek. A speck of breakfast? Maybe it was a tear. She felt like crying all the time, crying and crying as if somehow the flood would widen and deepen and carry her away from all this.
‘I’m sure he’ll be here as soon as he wakes up,’ Gina added.
Vivienne remembered being told that he was sleeping on the sofa in her sitting room, the one she’d bought mostly for when he came to stay. She wished she could see him there. More than that, she wished