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“Neurology?” She glanced at the board with its list of wards and then pointed to low down on it. “Looks like it’s ward twenty-four, neurology and stroke. Is that what you’re looking for?”
“Yes, I think so.” Rachel felt as if the words were coming from far away, outside of herself. She forced herself to meet the woman’s gaze. “Thank you.”
The doors pinged open and they both stepped in. “Ward twenty-four is on the first floor,” the woman said, pushing the corresponding button. “I’m on the second, coronary care unit.”
“Oh—” Rachel began, and the woman smiled and shook her head.
“It’s all right, love. Husband had a heart attack, and it looks like he’s going to need a triple bypass. But you have enough to be getting on with, it seems.” Her voice was kind, almost tender, and Rachel felt the rush of gathered tears, the pressure in her chest and the lump in her throat.
“I do,” she whispered, and then the doors pinged open.
The first floor of the hospital was clearly dedicated to those in most need of care—Rachel passed an intensive care unit, and then another, for cardiothoracic cases, before coming to the neurology ward. She was buzzed in, and a nurse showed her to her father’s bed, at the end of a ward, the cubicle curtained off.
Rachel stepped inside, taking in her father’s frail-looking form with a sickening lurch of her heart. How could he look sosmall, all of a sudden, his hair so wispy, his face so pale? He was in a hospital gown, which made him look terribly vulnerable; she could see the sharp angles of his collarbone poking through the gown, the white stubble on his chin and cheeks.
As she pulled the curtain closed behind her, with a rattle of its rings, her father opened his eyes.
“Rachel!” His voice sounded raspy, and he struggled to sit up, only to fall back against the thin pillow, irritation crossing his face. “I just fell and bumped my head, that’s all. Why have they got me in this ridiculous get-up?”
“It’s a hospital gown, Dad.” Rachel tried to smile even though she feared she was very close to crying. Her father, she knew, would not want to see her tears. “They’re keeping you overnight for observation. It’s your MRI appointment tomorrow, so we would have been coming to Middlesbrough anyway. Saves you a second trip.”
A frown crossed her father’s face. “I don’t need an MRI.”
“We talked about it, Dad, remember?” She kept her voice gentle but firm. “Just to check everything is okay.”
“Everythingisokay. And even if it isn’t…” He turned his face away from her, to stare stubbornly at the curtain, as if he were looking out a window, at some view beyond. “Maybe I don’t want to know.”
Which was more or less what Harriet had suggested. “If it is something that can be picked up by an MRI,” Rachel said quietly, “then the doctors might be able to treat it. Wouldn’t you want that?”
Her father turned back to face her. “Treat what, Rachel?” he asked bleakly, and she knew if she blinked, a tear would fall.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “They don’t know, Dad.”
“They think it’s a brain tumour, don’t they?” he asked flatly.
“Maybe,” Rachel replied after a pause, her tone hesitant. “How did you know? Did they tell you?”
“No, but I’m not an idiot. I can put two and two together the same as anyone else, even if I have been forgetting things sometimes.”
“It might not be that,” Rachel offered. “And even if it is, a lot of brain tumours are treatable.” Or so she’d heard, somewhere, sometime, although she couldn’t remember any specifics because none of it had applied to her or her life.
Her father nodded slowly. “We’ll just see what they say tomorrow, I suppose,” he said, sounding both resigned and stoic, and then, to Rachel’s horror, his face crumpled, just a little, before he forced himself to smooth it out back into his usual irascible expression. “Never mind,” he said with an attempt at briskness that he didn’t quite manage. “Are you driving home tonight?”
“I came in the ambulance,” Rachel replied, realising only just then that she did not have a lift home.
“Will Harriet pick you up, then?”
Harriet still hadn’t replied to her text. “I don’t have to go home,” Rachel told him hesitantly. “Since I’d be coming back tomorrow, anyway. I could stay here, with you.”
The look of naked hope that blazed across her father’s face was nearly her undoing. Then he shrugged. “There’s not much room. I don’t think you’d be too comfortable.”
“There’s a chair,” Rachel replied, “and it reclines. I’m sure they’re used to people staying over. I think I’d be okay.”
Her father gave another twitchy sort of shrug. “As you like,” he said, and for the first time Rachel felt as if she could see beneath that stubbornly indifferent exterior, to the surprisingly tender vulnerability beneath. Had it been there all along, and she’d just never seen it? Never felt it?
“I’ll stay,” she said.
The nurse on duty was happy to give her a blanket and pillow, and then showed her to get the chair into a reclining position, next to her father’s bed. Rachel thought this was probably the closest she’d ever been to him; they were practically lying side by side. As she set up the chair as best as she could, her dad drifted off to sleep, his jaw slack, his face looking soold. She gazed at him for a moment in silent sorrow, before the wasp-like buzzing of her phone had her quickly stepping out of the cubicle.
