Three people were in the room when we got there—doctors, researchers, scientists, I don’t know what to call them. We watched through the window. They were preparing him for the operation, getting ready in case.
‘Get them out of there.’
Maggie nodded and moved into the room. They listened quietly, made a few last adjustments and filed past me without making eye contact.
It was a great relief to cry the way I did: deep from the stomach, the sheet on his bed clumped in my fist, wet with my tears. I felt awful, but also, for the first time since I’d arrived in the hospital, human. I no longer saw an accident, a patient, a problem to be solved. Now I saw Theo. My brother. My other half.
I don’t know how long I stayed that way. At some stage I stood, stroked his hair, and kissed him—on the bridge of his nose, so its tip pressed against my chin.
Lips, chin, nose. Rare, medium, well done. Theo taught me that. I backed into the middle of the room, intending to leave, but unable to look away. As if that would be the final betrayal. I have never felt more hopeless.
Maggie stood three steps behind me. Giving me space, I suppose.
‘Would it fucking kill you?’ I asked.
‘Would what kill me?’
My shoulders were hunched, cramped into the crying position, as if they might never straighten. ‘To hold me. To help me.’
‘I’m not here to…There are people, if…’
For the first time I sensed discomfort in her voice.
‘Why aren’t you here to help me?’ Now I turned. Blazing and unguarded. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I have job to do. I can’t do it if…’
‘How do you know you can’t?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Her restraint repulsed me.
‘But it’s my profession’s best guess. It’s how we operate.’
My knees were buckling. Would she think it an act, if I fell? She didn’t move.
‘And if it wasn’t your job, if it was just you and me, would you hold me?’
‘If it wasn’t my job, I wouldn’t be here.’
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ I said.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
In my memory, she looks around, to make sure there’s no one outside, but I suspect I’ve added that detail since. She takes me in her arms and lets her collar grow wet with my tears. Her neck smells of shampoo; her skin is warm, like a mother’s. I lean against her.
I could have stayed there, and let time pass until there was no decision left to make.
‘We need to get back.’ Her voice tickled my ear.
I nodded and wiped my eyes with my sleeve. ‘Thank you.’
Theo would have loved her.
I turned back to him. I looked at his face, properly. My living, breathing mirror. Almost living. With his eyes closed, the eyelashes were even more striking. Long and thick, like a girl’s, curling upwards.
‘I always wanted to be him,’ I said. I don’t know if she heard me. Maybe she thought it wasn’t for her. ‘I watched the way he was with people, the way people were with him, and I never admitted it to him, but I spent a lot of time trying to work out how he did it.’
‘Maybe he wanted to be like you, too.’ She put her hand on my shoulder.
‘Maybe.’
It was the kind thing to say, but it wasn’t true. I wasn’t even sure, if he’d been given the choice, he would have wanted to be a twin. I never asked him. The millions of words we spent, like we thought we’d never run out, and I never asked him. But I wouldn’t have changed it, not for the world.
‘It must have been good,’ she said, ‘to have had someone always looking out for you.’
‘Don’t you?’
She didn’t answer.
‘There was one time, when he could have died, trying to help me.’
Her hand tightened at my collar.
‘We were in the forest, with Mum and Dad. They liked to take us camping. For Mum, it was the quiet she loved; it was a place she could sit and sketch. For Dad, it was to do with us all being together. I remember one night when we were still young, and he had all four of us sleeping beneath a fly strung between two trees. A storm came, and the fly flapped loose. We ended up out in the sheeting rain, trying to tame the beast. Mum looked wet and miserable—that’s how I remember it—but Dad was laughing the whole time. Like the storm was the whole point. It always seemed right to me, that he died in the rain. This time though, there wasn’t a storm. Mum went off to draw something, and I followed her, and Theo thought I’d gone missing, so he followed me. Dad found me and Mum, but not Theo.
‘They panicked. We all panicked. Mum and Dad wanted me to go to the road with some people we met on the track, but I wouldn’t leave them. Someone must have called Search and Rescue. I remember us all shouting his name out, until we had no voice left. When the calling stopped, there was that silence you only get in the forest, a silence filled with sounds—of the wind moving through the trees, and the river easing over the rocks—sounds that go on forever.
‘It took four hours to find him. The Search and Rescue woman had come to tell us we had to get back to our car, because soon it would be dark. Dad was refusing, and Mum had begun to howl. Then I saw his jacket, a flash of blue amongst the green, on the other side of the river. Just a moment, and it was gone. I knew they didn’t believe me, but it made a good negotiating tool. We would cross the river, have ten minutes looking, and then we agreed we would head back. We linked arms for the crossing. The water wasn’t high but Mum and Dad weren’t about to lose another one. I was between them, lifted off my feet for most of it.
‘Theo tried to pretend he hadn’t been crying. At some point he’d abandoned his pack. He didn’t know where. The cold that night would have killed him. That’s how close we came to not being twins anymore. I’ll never forget the look on his face. It wasn’t relief that we’d found him, but relief they’d found me. He jumped up and clung to me, and I was so tired I fell backwards. That’s the way I’ll always remember him, inches from my face, his eyes too big for his head, his face so pale. That night I first saw how delicate everything is, how easily it can come apart. In the background there was crying: Mum or Dad, maybe both. But Theo and me, we were already laughing.
‘I’ve thought about it so often, imagined Theo alone on the other side of the river, calling out my name until his throat hurts, feeling the chill of damp moss where he’s settled, the cold of loneliness. If someone told me I’d got it the wrong way round, that I was the one who’d got lost, it wouldn’t be hard to believe. That’s what it’s like, having a twin brother. In case you were wondering.’
I couldn’t look at him anymore, him or the machine or the hospital bed. I closed my eyes.
‘He loved you.’ Maggie said.
I felt the past tense settle on us, like a blanket.
‘Yeah, he did.’
I turned away, knowing it might be the last time, and walked out before the thought took my legs from under me.