My mouth was drying up. I coughed softly to loosen my throat. “Jessica–” My voice failed and I coughed again. “Jessica – she came back.”
It sounded so ridiculous. I almost blushed, as if it mattered in the dark. For the first time, I confronted the essential strangeness of it – that Jessica, left for dead, back in the distant past, had been resurrected. Just for me. Not for the first time, I felt a flicker of unease.
“She says she’s come back,” I said slowly. I could feel the slow rise and fall of Matt’s ribcage against my cheek. He hadn’t said anything. The darkness sucked at my voice, shredding it down to a whisper. It felt oddly confessional. “But I don’t know, Matt. I don’t know what to think. When you say to me that I’m talking to thin air – and I close my eyes and when I open them, she’s there...” I ran out of breath and took a great rasping gulp of air. I couldn’t quite believe I was going to say it. “Sometimes... sometimes I think I’m just losing my mind.”
I couldn’t say any more for the moment. I looked down at him, trying to make out his face in the darkness. I could see the black fan of his eyelashes lying against the curve of his cheekbone, etched in shadow.
“Matt?” I said, in a more normal voice. He made no answer and I realised he was asleep.
Chapter Twenty Four
Aunt Effie was asleep when I arrived. She lay on the hospital bed, her body almost lost beneath the covers; she barely made a mound under the blankets. Her white hair, usually so carefully set, looked limp and yellowed under the harsh strip lights. Her housekeeper, Jane, was sat by the bed reading Take a Break magazine.
"I thought you said she only broke her collar bone?" I said, when Jane and I were in the corridor with the door pulled closed behind us.
Jane shrugged helplessly.
"She's a very old woman, Maudie. She can't bounce back like you or I could. If you ask me-" she lowered her voice and moved a little closer to me. "If you ask me, she won't recover from this. It's too much of a shock to the system."
I was shocked again, by the jolt that this gave me.
"But-" I said, not even sure of what I wanted to say.
Jane patted my arm. Her eyes were limpid with sympathy.
Aunt Effie hadn't moved position on the bed but her eyes were open. I stood for a moment by the side of the bed, hesitating, and then sat down.
"Maudie," she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
"Do you want some water or something?" I asked. I couldn't get the tone of my voice right - I sounded too lighthearted, falsely jovial.
"Maudie," she said. "I'm sorry."
“Don’t worry,” I said, thinking she was going to apologise for dragging me up here. I said it automatically, without thought.
"I'm sorry," she said again, in her cracked old voice.
I felt something, a tremor of curiosity. Or was it fear? What was she apologising to me for? "Sorry for what, Auntie?"
She moved her head from side to side on the pillow.
"We were wrong," she said. "I think now we were wrong. You should have been in a hospital, you should have had treatment much earlier. We didn’t realise how bad things were."
I went cold. She'd never spoken about that time, never. It was as if it had been rubbed out of existence. It might not have happened.
I was silent. She cleared her throat. “If I thought you’d ever do what you did, we wouldn’t have hesitated. Maudie, you do understand?" Tears were shining in her eyes, the whites webbed with tiny threads of blood. “You don’t know how bad I feel that we didn’t see what was happening. I should have known what you were going to do.”
"It’s okay," I said. I couldn’t believe we were actually talking about it, the bad time, openly. I had a vision of myself then as they must have seen me; face down in a pool of vomit on the bathroom floor, and winced, as if something sharp had just pierced me.
"I'm sorry," she said again. Two tears welled up and flowed into the wrinkles by her eyes. "We thought we were doing what was right. Your mother - she-"
"My mother?" My heart was thumping - I could scarcely hear myself above its beats.
"She - she - that's why we were so afraid. They let her out for the day."
"What are you talking about?"
The tears were clogging Aunt Effie's already hoarse voice; I could hardly understand her. "She ran away with you," she said. "We didn't know she'd done it. We thought she was safe at the hospital and you were in the garden."
"What?"
I felt like taking that frail little body before me by the shoulders and shaking as hard as I could. The strength of the urge to do this shocked me. I had to clench my fists to stop myself grabbing her, shaking her, forcing her to make sense.
"She took you from the garden," she whispered. "We thought she was safe at the hospital but she wasn't. We could have lost you both that day."
I could barely speak for frustration, my teeth clenched, hissing out my words in a slow whisper.
"What are you talking about?"
She ignored me. I thought, suddenly, that she wasn't even talking to me, not directly; she was confessing to someone else, something else that only she could see. I stepped back from the bed, clenching and unclenching my hands.
Aunt Effie's eyes closed. I could hear her breath rattling through the phlegm in her throat. She coughed and her eyes flew open. I held myself rigid for a second, terrified that she'd died, but after a moment, I could make out the barely perceptible rise and fall of the blankets on the bed. I put my hands up to my head, pressing inwards. I could feel each heartbeat pulse in my temples.
The door opened inwards and Jane's head poked around. "Are you okay?" she asked.
I nodded. I couldn't be bothered to say anything else.
She gave me a look I couldn’t fathom. “Well, I’ll just be outside if you need me.”
I waited for a little while. I had each elbow clasped in an opposite hand and I could feel my arms shaking. I tried to take deep breaths while I worked out what to do.
Aunt Effie coughed. I could see her eyes opening again and, for a moment, I contemplated running away. I steeled myself, pulled up a chair and sat down again by the side of the bed.
"Auntie," I said, gently. I said her name again, more loudly this time. Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked at me.
"What was I saying?" she said, faintly.
I gritted my teeth. "You were telling me about my mother. What about her, Auntie? What did she do?"
She cleared her throat again. "I'm not feeling well."
"You started this," I said. "You have to tell me."
I got her some water and helped her drink it. I had to hold up her head but I didn't do it well; I must have been too rough because she winced and the water ran down the side of her neck. She pawed feebly at her wet nightdress and I wrenched a bunch of tissues from the dispenser on the nightstand and thrust them at her.
"Thank you," she said and something in the way that she said it, in a small, childlike voice, got through my anger. I could feel my eyes filling up with tears and rubbed them away.
Eventually, she dropped the damp wad of tissue on the floor and lay still.
"What happened?" I asked.
My anger had passed as suddenly as it had appeared - I merely felt very tired and my head buzzed. I rubbed at my temples.
"Your mother was a very lovely person," said Aunt Effie, eventually. "But she wasn't very - stable. I think we all knew that, quite early on. Your father knew it."
She stopped speaking. I dropped my hands to my lap.
"And?" I said.
She sighed again. "She was always very lively, very animated. Very vibrant. I suppose that's why we didn't notice she was slipping. She was just slightly more - more excitable than she would have been normally. And then, all of a sudden, she wasn't there anymore."