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“That was nice of you,” her father said gruffly. She knew he didn’t like depending on anyone, needing things.
“Your MRI isn’t till noon,” Rachel told him. “So, we have some time to wait.” She’d already emailed Danielle to explain the situation; she’d been planning to take this morning off anyway, but she’d hoped to be back at her desk later in the day. Now she wasn’t sure that would happen.
Her father carefully reached for his cup of tea, his movements laboured and jerky. Rachel held her breath, wanting to help but knowing it would annoy him. He took a sip successfully and she let out her breath in a slow, silent release.
“If it’s bad news,” her father said abruptly, “I don’t want you girls making a fuss.”
“And what,” Rachel asked, smiling a little, “would a fuss entail?”
“You know,” he said in his usual, irritable way. “Getting all upset. Flapping around.”
“If it’s bad news, Dad, of course we’re going to be upset.” Already she could feel a lump forming in her throat—again—and she swallowed past it. “But I promise no flapping.”
“No need for you to be upset,” her dad said, not looking at her. “It wasn’t as if I was a very good father to you.”
Shock had Rachel gaping at him for a moment. “Dad…”
“No need to talk about it,” he told her dismissively. “I did my best, but I suppose I could have done better, especially after your mother left.”
They had never, ever talked about her mum’s leaving. It was as if she’d ceased to exist when she’d walked out that door, and in any case, Rachel had already been gone, mostly. “Maybe this is a conversation you need to have with Harriet,” she said quietly.
“She knows.” Her dad sighed and rested his head back against the pillow. “It’s not a comfortable feeling, looking back on your life, wondering what you could have done differently.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is.” She’d had some of the same thoughts, albeit on a less dramatic scale. “But it might not be bad news, Dad. You’re not at death’s door quite yet.” She’d meant to lighten the mood just a little, but her father simply shook his head.
“I have some regrets,” he stated slowly, his gaze distant, and Rachel tensed, because he had never, in all her memory, talked like this. Her father wasn’t the kind of man who had regrets, or at least who acknowledged them. He was the kind of man who simply soldiered on, silent and stoic.
“I think we all have regrets, Dad,” she said after a moment. It was, she knew, a bit of a cop-out, because while part of her was intensely curious to know what his regrets were, another, larger part did not have the emotional bandwidth to deal with any potential revelations, not on top of a sleepless night and a potentially difficult diagnosis.
His jaw tightened as he kept his gaze averted. “Some are worse than others.”
Oh, help.She took a deep breath, steeling herself to ask, and then chickened out. “That’s understandable,” she murmured instead, and then the nurse drew the curtain with a cheerful “good morning” as she came in to take her father’s blood pressure. Rachel sat back in her chair with an intermingled sense of both relief and disappointment and sipped her coffee.
*
The next fewhours passed with laborious slowness, as her father became irritable, then silent, and then thankfully drifted to sleep, and all the while Rachel struggled not to feel irritable or drift off to sleep herself. She yearned for a shower; why had sleeping in a chair made her feel sodirty?
She watched other visitors come and go; in the cubicle next to them an elderly woman became fractious, fretful, and her husband gently soothed her, his voice tender yet with a tone that made Rachel think this had happened many times before. Across the ward, a patient was wheeled into an empty cubicle; he was young, not even twenty, with part of his hair shaved, no doubt for some surgery or other.
So much sorrow and suffering, worry and fear, and yet also so much love. Rachel saw it in the mother of the boy who sat by his bed, smiling and holding his hand even though Rachel knew she had to be terrified. Or the husband of the woman next to her dad, who gently wiped her mouth after she’d taken a sip of water.
She felt as if she’d lived—and aged—a year, a century, by the time a nurse came to wheel her father away for his MRI.
“He’ll be gone an hour at least,” she told Rachel with a smile. “We’ll text you when he’s ready to come back to the ward, in case you want to leave the hospital.”
“All right, thank you. See you soon, Dad.” She waved at her father who gave a grunt in response, and then he was gone, and Rachel felt as if there were an emptiness whistling right through her. She decided to take a walk around the hospital grounds; it was a beautiful day, the sun shining through the windows at the end of the ward, and after so many hours in the artificial light and filtered air, she felt the need to stretch, to breathe.
Outside the air was surprisingly balmy, an Indian summer at the start of October. There wasn’t really anywhere to go except along the pavement around the hospital buildings, and so Rachel set off, glad for the fresh air, the chance to stretch her legs.
She’d been walking for ten minutes or so when her phone buzzed, and she saw, with a jolt of shock, that it was Ben—she’d programmed in his number after he’d called her in Ibiza, so she wouldn’t be taken by surprise that way again. For a second, she deliberated about whether to take his call, and then decided she wanted to.
“Ben?” she answered after she’d swiped.
“Hey.” The low rumble of his voice was so familiar, so…sodear. It shouldn’t be, Rachel knew, but it was. “Are you okay?”
The fact that he was asking ifshewas okay, and not her dad, made her eyes sting.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice wobbled just a little. “I think so. My dad’s having the MRI right now.”
