“Are you there, Isabel?” a voice said. “Just breathe deeply.”
She heard sounds of fingers snapping in front of her face but was unable to make sense of them.
“You’ve been in an accident, Isabel,” someone said.
Somehow she knew that.
Hadn’t it just happened? A tumbling sensation, and then the monster approaching in the dark. Had that just happened?
She felt a jab in her arm. Was it real, or was she dreaming?
There was a sudden feeling of blood rushing inside her head, her mind collecting itself, bringing order to chaos. It was order she didn’t want.
And then it came back to her, albeit hazy. Him. The man.
She gasped and felt once again the prickling sensation in her throat, her need to cough making her feel like she would be suffocated.
“Just relax now, Isabel,” said the voice. Someone squeezed her hand. “We’ve given you something to wake you up a bit, that’s all.” Another squeeze.
Everything inside her said yes, squeeze back, Isabel. Show them you’re alive. Show them you’re still here.
“You’ve been badly injured, Isabel. You’re in the Intensive Care Unit of the Rigshospital in Copenhagen. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She breathed in and mustered all her strength to nod. The slightest of movements. Just so she could feel it herself.
“Well done, Isabel. We saw that.” Another squeeze of the hand.
“We’ve put you in traction, so you won’t be able to move if you try. You’ve got multiple fractures, Isabel, but you’re going to be all right. We’re run off our feet at the moment, but as soon as there’s a gap, there’ll be a nurse along to get you ready so you can be moved over to another department. Do you understand, Isabel?”
She tensed the muscles in her neck again.
“Good. We know it’s hard for you to communicate, but after a while, you’ll be able to speak again. You’ve broken your jaw, so we’ve immobilized it just to be on the safe side.”
Now she felt the clamps at her skull. The heavy bags wedged against her hips, like she was buried in sand. She tried to open her eyes, but they would not obey.
“I can tell from your eyebrows that you’re trying to open your eyes, Isabel, but you’re all bandaged up, I’m afraid. There were glass splinters in your eyeballs, but you’ll see the sun shine again in a couple of weeks, just you wait and see.”
A couple of weeks! Why was that bad? Why the twinges of protest darting through her body at the thought? Was time that precious?
Come on, Isabel, a voice inside her whispered. What is it that mustn’t happen? What has happened already? The man, and what else?
She found herself thinking that reality could be many things. The lover who never came but who lived on in her dreams. The ropes hanging from the ceiling of the old gym at school, never quite scaled. Reality was also the things that were waiting to happen. It was the same pressure against her temples. The sensation was just as tangible.
And she breathed slowly and took stock of all these impressions that together made up her consciousness. First came discomfort, then disquiet, and finally an upheaval, ushering faces and sounds and words into her scrambled chains of thought.
Again, she felt the reflexive gasp that accompanied sudden realization.
The children.
The man, their kidnapper.
And Rachel.
“Hmnnnnn,” she heard herself groan through immobilized teeth.
“Yes, Isabel?”
She felt the hand let go and warm breath pass over her face.
“What is it you’re trying to say?” said the voice, up close now.
“Aaaaeehhh.”
“Does anyone understand what she might be saying?” the voice said, directed elsewhere.
“Aaaarglll.”
“Are you inquiring after your friend, Isabel?”
She managed a short sound.
“Yes, that was what you were asking, wasn’t it? How is the woman you were admitted with?”
She made the same sound.
“She’s alive, Isabel! She’s here next to you,” said a new voice at the foot of the bed. “She’s rather worse off than you, I’m afraid. Much worse. We don’t know whether she’ll pull through yet. But she’s alive and her body seems to be strong, so we’re hoping for the best.”
It could have been an hour or a minute, or even a whole day since they had looked in on her last. Time was elastic. All around her was the hum of quiet machines and the faint beep indicating the beat of her own heart. The sheets underneath her felt clammy, and the room was warm. Perhaps it was something they had injected her with that made her feel things this way. Or maybe it was just her.
Outside in the corridor, trolleys rattled, and there were voices, as if in accompaniment. Was it dinnertime? Was it night? She had no idea.
She groaned, but nothing happened. She focused on the interval between her heartbeats and the throbbing in her middle finger, to which some little gadget was attached. Seconds or milliseconds, she couldn’t tell.
But one thing was clear to her. The heartbeat she heard measured out in electronic beeps beside her bed belonged to someone else. She was sufficiently conscious as to be in no doubt. It didn’t fit her own.
She held her breath for a moment. There was the sound of the monitor. Beep, beep. And then another machine, a faint sucking noise, abruptly terminated and followed by what sounded like the hydraulic air release of a bus door opening.
It was a sound she had heard before, during endless hours at her mother’s bedside, before they finally switched off the respirator and gave her peace.
The patient with whom she shared her room was unable to breathe without help. And that patient was Rachel. Wasn’t that what they had said?
She wanted to turn onto her side. To open her eyes and cut through the darkness. To see the person who was struggling for life next to her.
She wanted to speak her name: Rachel. To tell her they would pull through, though she didn’t really believe it.
Maybe there was nothing left for Rachel to wake up for. She remembered all too vividly now.
Her husband was dead.
Two children were out there somewhere. And the kidnapper no longer had any reason to keep them alive.
It was terrible, and she could do nothing.
She felt moisture well in her eyes. Thicker than tears and yet so liquid. The bandage wrapped around her head suddenly felt tighter against her eyelids.
Am I crying blood? she wondered, trying not to succumb to the grief and impotence. What good would it do to sob? It would bring only pain that no medicine they could administer would soften.
She heard the door open quietly and felt the air from the corridor seep into the silent room, registered the sounds.
Footsteps on the hard floor. Measured. Too careful.
A concerned doctor, now studying Rachel’s heart rhythms? A nurse wondering how long before the respirator would no longer be of use?
“Are you awake, Isabel?” a voice whispered amid the dogged pumping of machines.
It made her start. She didn’t know why.
Then she nodded, imperceptibly. Apparently it was enough.
She felt the hand take hold of her own. Like when she was a child feeling left out in the school playground. Like the time she had stood outside the dancing school without the courage to go inside.
The same hand had given her comfort then. A warm, loving, and unselfish hand. Her brother’s. Her wonderful, protective older brother.
And at that moment, when she finally felt she was safe, the urge to scream mounted inside her.
“Yes, that’s right, Isabel,” her brother said. “Let it all out. Have a good cry. Everything’s going to be all right. You’re both going to make it. You and your friend.”
We’re going to make it? She repeated his words to herself as a question, struggling to regain control of her voice, her tongue, her breathing.