Splinter

67

Sandra.

She was deathly pale. Her eyelids were half closed, her hands folded as if in prayer on her mountainous belly. Tubes led from her arms to some medical apparatus attached to the bed frame. The nurse wheeled her on down the corridor.

‘Wait!’ Marc called. He hurried after the bed to make sure, but she was no more of a hallucination than she had been when she opened the door to him yesterday.

Sandra.

He recognized the lips he had so often kissed and the curve of the eyebrows he had so often traced with his finger that the time he’d spent doing so could have been measured in hours.

‘Who are you?’ the nurse demanded, alarmed by the sight of the gun in his hand. She reached for her bleeper.

‘It’s me, Marc,’ was all he said, gazing fixedly at Sandra.

Is it really me? Am I standing here, looking into the eyes of my late wife, or don’t I exist at all? Am I living in a horrific world of illusion?

He started to sob. Putting out his hand, he parted her lips with his forefinger as if trying to help her to speak, because she seemed to find it a superhuman effort to open her mouth. At last, after what seemed like an eternity, he heard the words he longed to hear.

‘I love you, Luke.’

Boundless relief surged through him.

‘I love you so much.’ Her speech was slurred and her gaze glassy. She smiled like someone on drugs.

Tears sprang to his eyes. He raised his arms in a helpless gesture and turned to Benny, who had been watching them both in silence. Then he dropped the gun unheeding and gripped the metal frame of the bed, which the nurse was now wheeling further along the corridor. He was incapable of articulating even one of the countless questions that were striving to cascade from his lips all at once. Why are you still alive? What have you all been doing to me? What’s wrong with our baby?

‘Why?’ was all he managed to say.

‘Please leave her alone. She’s already been given her pre-meds. I must get her to the theatre.’

Marc scarcely heard what the nurse was saying, but he made no further attempt to delay her. He walked alongside and bent over Sandra, whose lips were moving silently.

‘What?’ he asked. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’

They were now only a few metres from the glass doors beyond which the sterile area began.

‘We went too far.’

‘Too far in what way? What did you do?’

The drugs inside her body were numbing her from within, bearing her away from him and into oblivion. Her tremulous voice sank to a whisper. ‘But we had no choice, understand? We couldn’t let you remember.’

She made a last effort to sit up, but the nurse gently forced her back on the bed. Marc felt a hand on his shoulder pulling him backwards – backwards and away from his wife, whose bed was being wheeled through the airlock and into the theatre.

‘We couldn’t let you remember,’ Sandra repeated despairingly before she disappeared from view.

For ever.

As the double doors closed behind her, Marc felt that he had lost his wife for good.

‘Come,’ said the voice belonging to the hand that was holding his arm in a vicelike grip. ‘It’s time. I’ll explain everything.’

Turning round, Marc gazed into his father-in-law’s drawn, weary face. Constantin Senner had never looked so old.