‘You’re my family.’ Dot leaned her head back into the sofa seat and looked at Evelyn’s upside-down face. ‘I mean, thank god we’ve got each other. I love Ruth, but she’s from outer space.’
‘I feel like the one who’s a Martian. Changed.’
Dorothy squeezed the hand that Evelyn had rested by her shoulder. ‘We all are.’
That same night the fever came, vomiting and delirium. Eve mangled her words. Nate drove her back in to the hospital. The doctors couldn’t tell them. Maybe an infection they couldn’t locate. Scans revealed nothing, nobody knew why, meningitis from an infected bone, the blood/brain barrier, quarantine Louisa, visit in a surgical mask, we’ve only got room in the chemo ward, no high risk on the chemo ward and we’ve had some results, it might not be meningitis, let’s get her into the chemo ward where beds come free regularly, where there’s always a guy in trouble for smoking in his bed and how do you enforce that ban, how do you discipline a person who’s got nothing to lose, could you roll over, darling, we’ve got to do another LP, let’s get you on your side, can you hold her hand, Nathan, that’s it dear just look into your husband’s eyes, hold on, we’re going to be gentle as we, yes, there it goes, yes, it’s in, not long now, good girl. The syringe came back – still cloudy. They’d try the other kind of antibiotics. Wait.
Tania appeared in the doorway with Lou. ‘Thank you,’ said Dorothy, hugging this very good woman, holding the sides of her worried face and nodding. ‘Thank you.’ Nathan clutched the girl’s shoulders and she walked over to her mum and stroked her arm, then ran into her father’s arms.
Her parents were called at their hotel. A chest X-ray and a cranial scan revealed nothing. An MRI showed the abscess. Another drug was tried. They waited, again, but the infection had her in its grip. ‘We’re going to operate,’ the surgeon said. Dorothy heard drainage, shunt, bone flap.
In the flurry of medical preparation, nurses adjusting drip bags and the catheter, the machines started telling a different story. ‘Are we getting her into theatre or not?’ said a nurse.
‘Wait.’
‘Right,’ the nurse said. ‘Time for theatre.’
But there, at the last minute, it all stopped.
‘This looks like stroke. I’ll get the specialist,’ an orderly said. ‘Wait.’
‘Should we leave?’ Lee gestured to the door.
Nate and Lou approached the bed. Lou climbed up and lay next to her mother. The nurses backed off.
‘But she was fine,’ their father said. ‘She was fine.’
Dorothy nodded. OK. There was the click of relief that the worst was arrived at, the tension and fear floating away. For a second. Straight after that, she knew the fear had been the only thing that held her together.
Afterwards, she drove Nate and Lou home. Andrew and the kids would be there now; she’d rung them from the hospital. Her husband had said, disbelievingly, ‘No.’ She parked away from the lights of the house and the three of them sat there in the dark and clutched each other’s hands across the handbrake. Louisa passed her dad the box of tissues from the pocket in the back of the passenger seat and said, ‘Come on,’ and they waited a minute longer until he was ready to face the house.
Near dawn Dorothy found him in the garden, looking at the council block behind the house, the high walls covered in scaffolding. Rusty metal rods rattled and the wooden platforms creaked. Blue tarpaulins sheeted in the wind.
‘Looks like the whole thing’s going to take off,’ Nathan said.
‘It might. Tania brought another lasagne.’
‘People are amazing.’
The morning was cold. He blew on his hands to warm them and put them over his ears. Inside his head it would be stifled, there would be the seashell sound of his blood. This was what Dorothy was thinking about, so that it was a surprise when Nathan said with perfect clarity, ‘Looks like the whole thing’s going to take off and fly away.’
The music from the stereo inside flared across the garden; one of the kids must have gotten hold of the remote control.
11. Loose
He was a young man in a beanie and a suit, carrying a plastic bag full of paper. Dorothy saw through the bubbled glass of the door his figure approaching, his clenched fist raising, getting closer. He knocked on the door as if he was a friend. A rhythmic, it’s showtime knock. She was