unmoving curtains onto a double-glazed aluminium-framed window through which there was a manicured rock garden, koi carp drifting in a pool. Dorothy stood at the reception desk waiting for the nurse to get off the phone. This was the next stage, after the long waiting while Eve was in surgery, and it was good to have a place to be. The flowers she had bought from the shop downstairs had to stay outside the ward’s double doors, in the nothing space by the lifts, stems set in an old ice-cream container on the floor, the flowers balancing tenuously against the wall. It was inevitable that a small human movement would make the flowers slide down, the bases of their stems emerging dripping from the water, so that who knew what state they would be in later. She had already decided to take them to Nathan and Eve’s, where she was going to stay, Andrew holding the fort at home with the kids. The flowers would make a good payment in kind for one of the casseroles Nathan would be brought that night. There hadn’t been time to make casseroles at home, or do anything but get here.
The nurse got off the phone and pointed Dot in the direction of Evelyn’s room. ‘You’re her sister?’ Usually this wouldn’t have to be asked. Usually there would be the resemblance. ‘Hubby’s in the family room. Think he’s having a wee rest. Long day.’
Evelyn was asleep, her head encased in a giant white turban of bandages so that she looked like she had encephalitis, which she did not, or like her head was an enormous cartoon thumb. ‘What’s the worst that could happen,’ she’d said once when Dorothy felt guilty over the children watching Tom & Jerry, ‘they grow up with a sense of comic timing?’ Her face was swollen, streaked with purplish and yellow bruises. Between the lacerations her skin shone greasily in the light that came from the window. Dorothy took a tissue from the bedside table – it came out of the box with a long, pulling hoosh – and gently, hardly touching at all, patted her sister’s nose and the grazed cheekbones and chin. A heavier breath escaped Evelyn but she didn’t wake. Dorothy sat down and took the newspaper out of her bag and dug her fingernails into her palms when an image rose up of sitting in the hospital beside Amy’s incubator, the tubes and lines going into her baby.
Before long a little clutch of people crowded towards Evelyn’s bed, the surgeon’s walk-through, and Dorothy rose from the chair to greet them and to make space. ‘I’ll get her husband,’ she said, but was rooted to the spot; she wanted to see her sister conscious. Someone shook Evelyn awake and Dot tried to poke her head in between the shoulders of the doctors and interns so that Eve would know she was there. Evelyn’s gaze rolled over Dot the way it rolled over everyone else surrounding her, and her eyes clammed shut again. A brief exchange agreed that this drowsiness was fine.
‘Been breathing on her own, good girl. So there’s head injury here,’ the surgeon said to a – what, a student? – using the sort of elegant hand gestures people made when selling jewellery on late-night infomercials. ‘Broke the left arm here and here, and the shoulder here.’ He examined his folder. ‘There was another fracture here, the ulna, but that’s old, probably a childhood break.’ He looked at Dorothy.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When she was nine. Or ten.’ She couldn’t remember how Eve had done it, only that their parents had brushed off her complaints of a sore arm and it wasn’t till a fortnight later when she got bumped at school, rebroke it, that the secretary had called Lee and said, Your daughter needs an X-ray.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I think she was ten.’
A girl in a white coat said, ‘The hip?’
‘No, she was lucky. Internal bleeding, ribs. She was on a bicycle?’ A question, to Dorothy.
‘Yes, she, the driver just opened the car door, it threw her off. She hit the road.’ Unnecessary to add no helmet. Enough people had remarked on that.
‘Thank you.’ He addressed the others, again, telling them the serious issue was brain swelling, ‘but we’ve gone in here – and here – to relieve pressure.’
Perhaps these were the hand movements of a weather presenter, or an air hostess in a safety demonstration, the hand that mimes pulling down the oxygen mask and gripping