The days after her fall were hazy and Elise felt as if she was floating in the ocean, barely able to stop herself drowning under the black waves that kept closing over her head. Time meant nothing to her as she drifted and waited to finally sink to the bottom. Eventually though the surf spat her out onto the hard shingle of reality. Oh, how she longed to be back in the waters of oblivion for the pain was immense, the lights too bright and every noise reverberated loudly in her head. The hushed whispers of the people around her were amplified, as if they were shouting in her ear and she wished they’d go away and leave her alone.
Leave her alone to die.
She heard doctors and nurses discussing her and she listened to James next to her, pleading with her to please come back to him. She heard the words ‘swelling on the brain’ and ‘broken spine’. She knew they were talking about her and she wondered why James thought she would want to come back to a life confined in a wheelchair. So she closed her mind to their words and concentrated on dying.
But she didn’t die.
One day she woke up and realised the lights weren’t so bright and the noise had quietened to a normal level. She opened her eyes and focussed, blearily, on James sitting next to her bed, holding her hand, gently.
“You’re awake,” he said, smiling, happily, relief shining in his tired grey eyes. “I’ll call the nurse.”
“Not yet,” Elise croaked, huskily. “Talk to me first. How long have I been like this?”
James squeezed her hand. “Eight weeks, El. It was touch and go for a little while. The doctors put you into a coma and they said I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but I knew you were strong enough to fight. I told them if anyone could do it then it was you.”
Elise moved her head, slowly, and looked away from him, staring around the bright busy ICU. When she spoke her voice was low. “What about the baby?”
“Oh El,” he whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”
She hated the fear that threaded her voice when she said, “Just tell me, James, please.”
“The baby died,” he replied, sadly. “It was a little boy. They delivered him by emergency Caesarean, but he didn’t make it.”
Elise closed her eyes and swallowed down the nausea that washed through her. The baby was dead; her baby boy. She had killed him. She should be relieved that she’d done it, but she felt as if she had cleaved a massive part of her soul away and she suspected she would never recover from that.
“Where is he?”
“I had him cremated, El. Your mother and I went to the service and I have his ashes, safe at home with Noah. I named him Nathanial.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, although she didn’t know what she was really apologising for. Was she sorry because she had deliberately killed their son, or was she sorry that she hadn’t died too? Perhaps it was because everything they had ever tried to create was symbolised with the urns of two baby boys' ashes.
That was what she had given James.
He stroked her face and said, “What happened, Elise?”
She could never tell him the truth. How could she ever say she’d killed their child because she knew she couldn’t live a life wondering who or what she had given birth to? There were no words that would help him understand the weight of fear that had churned inside her from the moment Val’s things had arrived in the post. So it was yet another lie she would add to the mountain of untruths they had built the last few years of their marriage on.
He saw the tracks of tears on her face and he wiped them away, tenderly. “You don’t need to tell me now,” he said, softly. “There will be plenty of time to talk.”
“I fell,” she whispered. “I was looking at a ship in the distance and I lost my balance.”
He smoothed her hair from her face and kissed her brow. “I’m going to get the nurse, but never forget that whatever happened or does happen, I love you and I’m going to take care of you.”
As he walked away she wished he’d keep going and never look back.
******
The months of recovery were slow and frustrating, but Elise never complained. She hid the pain and humiliation of learning to let someone else look after her personal needs behind a face of stoicism. She knew her physiotherapy team called her brave and said she inspired the other patients, but she knew it was a lie. She was a coward with a soul so stained nothing would ever clean it. This was her punishment.
At night she lay in her bed and thought about Oliver Penrose…the man who had made her a murderer too. She remembered the weeks of watching James change and all the things she had experienced in the white house. She thought about Val dying under the wheels of a lorry that couldn’t stop in time. She thought about Hannah Penrose being beaten to death in the white house and buried in the garden. She hoped that Hannah had found some peace at last. She remembered the gold ring she’d found all those months ago and she wondered if it had been Hannah’s.
Sometimes she wished she'd burnt the bloody house down.
More than anything she hoped Oliver was gone now.
He had to be gone, otherwise what had it all been for?
******
James visited every day and she was reminded of the time she had spent in the psyche hospital, lost in madness. He never asked her if she wanted his company and one day she looked at him sat by her bedside and she knew she couldn't divorce him anymore. Not because she needed him to look after her, but because despite everything they still needed each other. He talked about his job for the LEA and he brought her mother in to see her every weekend. Eventually, they broached the subject of buying a house big enough for the three of them and having it converted for wheelchair use with a downstairs bedroom and wet room for Elise. They showed her pictures of the houses they liked the look of and she realised that her life would always be like this now; James and Sarah mollycoddling her and making the decisions two feet above her head.
In the end she said no to all of the houses.
“What’s wrong with them?” James’ voice was woven with exasperation.
“I don’t want to live in Cornwall anymore,” Elise said, quietly. “Find a house in Kent, please.”
He touched her leg and she wondered why he would bother touching the one part of her that couldn’t feel it. “Are you sure, El?”
“Please, James,” she whispered. “I just want to go home.”
******
James bought a spacious three bedroom house with an annexed granny flat in Tonbridge that overlooked the river Medway, not far from Sarah’s old place. Every weekend he travelled back and forth to the hospital, bringing Elise photos of the renovations, keeping her filled in with how it was going and entertaining her with funny tales about the people he worked with in his new job for Ofsted.
He seemed content and looking forward to the future, but she couldn’t help wondering if he was really happy at the thought of living the rest of his life with a crippled wife and her mother. She didn’t ask him though. She nodded approval at his plans, and smiled and laughed in the all right places. It was the least she could do for him when she had taken his whole life and turned all of their dreams into a funeral pyre.
******
Two weeks before they were due to move into the house in Kent she asked him to bring the two urns with him the next time he visited. For a few seconds she thought he was going to refuse, but he must have seen something in her gaze; something that reassured him for he nodded.
True to his word he brought them the following weekend and placed them on the table in front of her. With shining eyes, she looked up at him and asked him if he’d drive her to the churchyard in Porth Kerensa. He hesitated for a few seconds then nodded and went off to find a nurse.
It was strange driving back through the cobbled streets of the little village, almost a year to the day after they first moved there. She kept her eyes straight ahead when they drove past the white house and she noticed James did too. They had never spoken of what had happened to them there during the long months of her recovery, not since the day James had told her the baby boy had died. She supposed one day they would have to and she tried to imagine telling him the truth, or James ever having the strength to believe it.
But then she wasn’t sure if she believed it anymore.
Time made things fuzzy and with every day that passed she asked herself more and more what real madness was. Perhaps she’d always been mad or maybe she’d never been mad. Maybe she had gone completely insane when Noah died and she’d never even left the hospital the first time round. Perhaps she’d imagined the entire last year of her life and was sitting, somewhere on a ward in a hospital in Kent, rocking and dribbling.
James parked the car by the church, helped her into her wheelchair and pushed her round to the cemetery. On a bitterly cold grey winter’s afternoon she opened Noah’s urn and let the wind carry his ashes away across the ocean, and by unspoken agreement James opened Nathanial’s urn and did the same thing.
She heard him whisper goodbye and she saw him wipe his tears away, but her eyes were as dry as her heart and again she had that sense that her soul was missing something now; something vitally important. Whatever it was she knew she would never get it back. She had lost it forever in the white house on the coast road.
James reached out and grasped her hand and they watched the ashes get swept high up into the sky and blow away on a bitter winter’s breeze. He squeezed her hand, gently, and he said, “We’ll be alright, El. You know that, right?”
With tears of hope in her green eyes she nodded, simply. “We have to be,” she replied, quietly. “Otherwise, what the hell was the point in all the suffering?”
He pushed her chair back to the car; back towards a life of polite lies that they would tell each other until the day they died. When they drove back past the white house she gazed, resolutely, at it, steeling her heart to the memories and the tears. She stared up at the windows of the attic and she remembered the freedom she had felt when she had let herself fall. She thought about Oliver Penrose, trapped in the house for all those years, growing ever more angry and determined to escape, and she shuddered.
He almost had, she thought, grimly. He almost had.
James sped up and she pulled her gaze away from the place that had brought them such misery. As they drove away from Porth Kerensa she knew she would never return there.
She didn’t see the man who appeared at the window when James accelerated away…the man with brown hair and blue eyes that blazed with an icy anger…
THE END
By Mary A Atkins
30th May 2014