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CHAPTER 1
‘Just one more, then we’ll stop.’
The sweat running down my back was more of a cascade than a trickle and the flight of stairs before me resembled Everest rather than thirteen risers that would take me up to the next floor of the hospital.
‘Isn’t that supposed to be my line?’ asked Duncan, my physical therapist who was standing beside me, his eyes narrowing as he took in my heaving ribs. ‘You’ve done four flights already. That’s enough for today.’
I shook my head, feeling the smart of perspiration trickling into my eyes. I’d forgotten to tie back my hair and it was sticking unpleasantly to the back of my neck. Was I too old to have hair this long, I wondered. In my head I still felt as though I was in my twenties, but my birth certificate told a completely different story.
‘One more,’ I told Duncan, not waiting for his approval as I set off up the flight.
‘Most obstinate and driven patient I’ve ever worked with,’ grumbled Duncan good-naturedly, trotting up the stairs beside me, always watchful for a stumble or trip that would prove him right and me wrong. I was pushing myself harder than he ever would, harder even than Heidi, my previous therapist, would have done – and her regime would have made a Marine quake.
When we got to the top, I reached greedily for the bottle of water Duncan was holding out in readiness as I collapsed against the wall.
‘Why do you do this, Maddie?’ Duncan asked, not for the first time. ‘Why are you in such a hurry?’
I drained half of the bottle before slowly meeting his eyes. He knew why. Everyone in the hospital knew why. Hell, half the town probably knew it too if they followed the news. Seventeen years ago, pregnant and just days before my wedding, I had been hit by a van that had left me in a coma for six years. When I woke up, I discovered my baby had miraculously survived the accident, but that my fiancé, Ryan, had married someone else. My daughter, Hope, had grown up calling another woman ‘Mummy’. I had only a little over a year to get to know my little girl when I had mysteriously collapsed again. And this time my coma had lasted ten years.
There are lots of reasons I would rather be famous for. I would prefer it if my name were in medical textbooks for having cured something, instead of finding it in chapters devoted to the longest-known surviving coma patients. And if you bother to read further, my history becomes even more intriguing, because I had been in a coma not just once, but twice.
‘You’re a bit like Harry Potter, aren’t you?’ Hope had said recently, her impossibly long legs scissoring back and forth as she perched on the edge of my hospital bed.
‘Magical, you mean?’
She took an enormous bite from the bright red apple she had swiped from my fruit bowl, looking so much like Snow White with her porcelain pale skin and long dark hair that I did a quick double take.
‘No, infamous,’ she had said, her mouth half full of apple. It was something I’m sure Chloe, the woman she had called Mum for the past sixteen years, would have pulled her up on if she had been in the room. I said nothing. ‘When I tell people I’m Maddie Chambers’ daughter, everyone knows who you are. If Harry’s ‘The Boy Who Lived’, then you’re ‘The Woman Who Slept’.’
‘Well, I’m awake now,’ I had said, reaching for her hand, because I would never, ever grow tired of holding it. Inwardly, I had congratulated myself for having edited my original response which would have been ‘I’m awake for now.’
I had woken more slowly this time, as though my body really hadn’t been sure whether it wanted to do this again. After the first coma, I had opened my eyes and immediately been all the way back. But this time it was as though I had been cautiously dipping my toe into wakefulness. I had been drifting through a thick grey fog for what I suspect was several weeks, hearing and smelling things from the outside world that I grabbed hold of and took back down with me to my place of hibernation.
It was the voices that had pulled me back, my father’s, and, more powerfully, one that I didn’t recognise that called me ‘Mum’. But there had also been wafts of perfume that drifted in and out of my consciousness and a hand, large and comforting that sometimes held mine. I had no idea who either of these people were.
?
‘I wish I had a better answer to give you, Maddie,’ my consultant had said with genuine regret in his voice the day before I was discharged. ‘Your case remains one of the most baffling and mysterious we have ever encountered.’
‘And none of the tests you’ve run can give you a clearer idea?’ I had asked sadly, because his slowly shaking head was already telling me they could not.
‘I know the last six months have been frustrating for you, but if we kept you in hospital for a further six Istilldon’t think we’d be any closer to knowing why you slipped into a second coma, nor why ten years later you miraculously woke up again. There’s so much about the human brain we still don’t understand and something unique and unfathomable happened to yours when you were struck by that van seventeen years ago.’
‘So, what do I do now? How do I know it won’t happen again; that there won’t be athirdcoma?’
I have met many doctors over the years, and I know the one thing they really don’t like is being asked questions they simply cannot answer. My consultant was no different on that score.
‘We don’t.’
*
‘Are you excited to be going home?’ asked Leah, one of my favourite nurses, who had popped into my room to say a quick goodbye on my last morning as her patient.
‘Of course,’ I replied, remembering to put a smile on my face as I turned from the small pile of belongings on my bed, which like me were waiting to be collected. It was the answer she wanted to hear, and the one closer to the truth – the one where I admitted I was terrified of a world that had moved on without me – remained unspoken.
There were several people who had volunteered to collect me from hospital on the day I was finally discharged. Mitch, my close friend and landlord; my father, who had performed this task eleven years earlier; and even Ryan, the man I had loved and then lost while I slept the first time. But in the end there was really only one person whose arm I wanted to lean on; the woman who’d leant on mine when going through her own health trauma. Chloe. The person who had married the man I loved; who had become mother to my only child; and more remarkably than all of that, the woman who was now my closest friend.
‘You’ll come back and stay with us, obviously,’ announced Chloe in that no-nonsense decisive way of hers, when I had told her they were allowing me to go home. It was a tactic that might have worked on the daughter we shared, but on me… not so much.
