Aidan woke up with a start. He had dreamed of Rowan with her pretty heart-shaped face and those bright green eyes, always so full of fun and mischief. She had been lying slumped over the steering wheel in a crumpled mess, calling to him. Her hair was covering her face and when he brushed it back, he saw that she was smiling at him, but when he looked at her eyes, he realised she was dead.
He had a crick in his neck and pain shot through his muscles as he tried to stretch it out. His forehead was sweating even though the air in the room was chilly. He cursed himself for falling asleep, but as he looked at his daughter in the bed beside him, surrounded by high-tech machines which beeped incessantly, he could see there was no change in her condition. He had brought Mousey, her favourite teddy from home, and had tucked it in beside her. It was a mouse dressed like a ballerina that she had slept with every night since she was born. The doctors had told him that the sooner she woke, the better her prognosis would be, and it was now coming up to almost twenty-four hours since the crash. He gripped her hand and squeezed it, as if, somehow, his touch might be able to pull her out of the depths of her coma, but she lay there motionless.
He unplugged his phone from the charger the nurses had loaned him during the night and saw he had several missed calls and texts and WhatsApp messages of sympathy from shocked friends and relatives. He had silenced his phone as message after message had arrived as word about the crash continued to filter out. He listened to his voicemail and, as well as many messages of condolences, there was a message from Garda Rachel Sullivan to say she would be dropping by the hospital that morning to talk to him. He had been too stunned the previous day to properly process what had happened, but now he hoped she could answer the questions he had. There was also a message from Rowan’s father, Philip, to say their flight had landed in Dublin and they would be coming straight to the hospital. The direct Aer Lingus and Ryanair flights from Faro to Dublin were full by the time they had got to the airport the day before and, in the end, they had had to take a connecting flight via London with a six-hour layover.
Aidan didn’t reply to anyone and instead called Gemma to see how the boys were doing. She told him that they had just woken and were really upset. She had already informed the schools and Milly’s playschool of what had happened. He asked her to put the boys onto him for a few minutes and it was as if their voices had changed overnight and were now laden with grief. Jack asked him how Milly was doing and he lied and said she was good, because he couldn’t bear to tell him the truth. He ran his hands down over his face, feeling the prickle of fresh stubble along his palms. Aidan’s heart broke when the call was finished because he should be there with them. He felt so torn; he should be the one holding them and soothing them, but he also needed to be with Milly. He was afraid that if he left her side, she might just slip off on him too and he’d never survive that.
The door opened and Rowan’s parents, Philip and Sheila, entered the room. They looked exhausted and wan, despite their suntans. They were both dressed in bright summer clothes too cool for the autumnal air outside and Aidan guessed they hadn’t even taken the time to change when they got the call the day before. He imagined them lying by the pool, basking in the glorious Algarve sunshine just moments before their lives would change forever.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Aidan said, getting up from his chair as they came into the room. He shook Philip’s hand and Sheila put her arms around him and dissolved into tears.
‘I just can’t believe any of this is real… we saw her laid out in the Chapel of Peace; she doesn’t even look like our daughter…’ she sobbed.
Aidan felt his eyes sting as he blinked back another hot surge of tears as grief pummelled him all over again. He still couldn’t get his head around how much his world had altered in twenty-four hours.
Philip moved up to his granddaughter’s bedside and stroked her pale face. ‘How is she?’ he asked, nodding towards Milly.
‘We’re still waiting on her to wake up. I’ve been here all night.’
‘Sheila dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘When you called us yesterday, I still hoped you might have made a mistake, but now that we’re here, I know it’s all true – Rowan’s gone – my daughter is gone.’ She shook her head with disbelief. ‘And my poor little Milly,’ she choked, as tears overcame her once more.
Philip walked back over, took his wife in his arms and pulled her in close as she sobbed into his shoulder.
After Sheila had gathered herself, she took the seat Aidan had just vacated beside Milly’s bed and reached for her hand. ‘She has to pull through, I can’t bear to think she won’t—’
Philip began pacing around the room. ‘I keep wondering how it happened – the weather was good, I checked the conditions online – it wasn’t raining, the roads weren’t wet or icy. Do you know what happened, Aidan?’
Aidan shook his head. ‘Garda Sullivan is dropping by today and I was hoping I’d find out more then.’
‘When did you last have the car serviced?’ Philip asked. ‘Were the tyres okay?’ He was firing questions at Aidan like missiles.
Aidan knew he was getting a dig in about the age of the car; it was a twelve-year-old people carrier, but it had never given them an ounce of trouble. It had been on his mind to replace it with a newer model at some stage, but, like everything, it had fallen down the priority list. With three children, there always seemed to be other things that had to be bought. There were school fees, swimming lessons, ballet classes; there was always something to be paid.
Aidan ran his hands down along his face. ‘It passed the NCT last month, Philip.’
‘It just doesn’t make any sense…’ Philip continued, ‘maybe if she had been in something newer… something with better impact protection or a more modern braking system… she might still be here.’
‘Look, this isn’t helping, Philip,’ Sheila said, becoming emotional once more as she dabbed at her eyes with the balled-up tissue. ‘We’re all finding this tough.’
Sheila’s distress seemed to shake Philip, and Aidan watched as he swallowed back his angry words and calmed down again. They had just lost their precious only daughter, Aidan realised tempers were bound to be frayed, but he had lost his wife and was perilously close to losing his daughter too.
Aidan thought he might suffocate if he spent a minute longer in this room and even though he hated to leave Milly’s bedside, he needed to get out of there before he said something he might regret. ‘Look, I could do with a coffee,’ he sighed. ‘Can I get you both anything?’
‘No thank you.’ Sheila and Philip shook their heads wearily.
‘You’ll call me if she wakes up, won’t you?’ Aidan asked as he left the room.
‘Of course,’ Philip said.
Once outside in the corridor, Aidan took a few deep breaths to slow his heart rate. Why did Rowan’s father have this effect on him? Philip always managed to rile him up. Even at a time like this, the man couldn’t resist getting a gibe in.
Aidan took the stairs down to the ground floor and continued along the corridor until he reached the coffee shop. He went inside and ordered an Americano. Some people laughed and chatted with one another at the surrounding tables, whilst others sat alone with tired eyes and unwashed hair, looking dishevelled, like him. It was surreal to watch normal life unfold all around him. Everything still continued on even though his world had ended.
The smell of bacon aroused his stomach, and he had a vague sense of being hungry, but yet when he looked at the sandwiches and cakes displayed behind the glass screen of the counter, he couldn’t summon the appetite to eat anything.
He was just paying for his coffee when a newspaper headline on the stand below the till caught his eye: ‘Woman Killed in Horror Crash’. He lifted the paper and read on.
A woman was killed in a fatal collision on the Coast Road in Dublin yesterday morning and two passengers are said to be in a serious condition – one, believed to be a child, is critical. The dead woman, who was the driver of the car, has been named as Rowan Whelan (42). It is believed her car crashed into a stationary queue of traffic. Weather conditions were said to be good at the time and Garda Forensic Collision Investigators are continuing their investigations into the circumstances surrounding the fatal crash.
As he read his wife’s name inked on the paper, Aidan had to shake his head to make sense of it. Why did it mention two passengers? Milly had been the only other person in the car.
‘Do you want the paper too?’ the woman at the till was asking him, pulling him out of his thoughts.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, handing her the money and walking away clutching the newspaper in one hand and the coffee in the other before she could give him the change.
Once outside the coffee shop, he stopped in the corridor and read the article again, thinking that perhaps his tiredness was affecting his vision, but no, it definitely said ‘two passengers’. Garda Sullivan hadn’t said anything about there being two passengers in the car, had she? But maybe she had, and he hadn’t been listening properly… or maybe the journalist who wrote the story had made a mistake…
His heart was racing, and thoughts careered wildly around inside his head. He stepped outside the hospital doors to breathe in the fresh morning air, sweetened by the trill of birdsong. After a few minutes, he decided he had better head back up to Milly just in case she woke.
He was making his way back down the corridor towards the ICU when he heard commotion coming from inside her room. Panic seized him. He began to run.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he cried as he hurried inside. He noticed there was a nurse in there with them.
Sheila and Philip were grinning at him with tears in their eyes.
‘She woke up, Aidan!’ Sheila gushed. ‘We were sitting here with her and suddenly she just started blinking, so we called her name and she opened her eyes and looked at us.’ Her diamond-studded fingers were fluttering around her throat.
‘She recognised our voices,’ Philip added, and Aidan couldn’t help but wonder if he was imagining a smugness in his smile.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Aidan shouted, rushing up to his daughter’s bedside. He couldn’t help feeling aggrieved that he had missed it. He would have come straight back instead of taking a breather outside. Then he felt guilty; she had woken up, wasn’t that all that mattered? ‘Did she say anything?’ Aidan continued, feeling contrite.
Sheila shook her head.
Her eyes remained closed, and she looked just like she had looked before he had left. Aidan reached for her hand. ‘Milly?’ he called. ‘Milly, it’s Daddy,’ he tried again, but there was no reaction.
‘Don’t expect too much too soon,’ the nurse cautioned. ‘She’s been through a huge trauma, but it’s a really good sign that she’s starting to come out of her coma.’
Aidan nodded, knowing she was right. After everything Milly had been through, he needed to be patient.
When Sheila and Philip, both wall-fallen with tiredness and weary with grief, decided to head back to their Foxrock house to get some sleep a while later, Aidan was relieved to be left alone with his daughter once more and away from Philip’s overbearing presence.
‘Milly, it’s daddy,’ he tried again as soon as he was alone with her and, this time, he saw her eyelids begin to twitch. She recognised his voice; he was sure of it. ‘Come on, love,’ he encouraged. He gently squeezed her hand inside his own.
Aidan hardly dared to breathe as she opened her eyes, two huge pools of blue, and looked around the room, taking it all in. He could tell she was confused by where she was.
‘You’re in the hospital, sweetie,’ he explained.
‘Mama,’ she said after a few moments. ‘Me want, Mama.’
Aidan’s heart twisted as though somebody had ripped it clean from his chest and put it between the jaws of a vice grip. He felt panicked and out of his depth. The trauma nurses had told him to wait until she was stronger before telling her the news. So what was he supposed to say now? How could he tell her the truth? She was still so weak, would the news of her mother’s death set her recovery back? Did a three-year-old even understand the concept of death? This was another instance of where he could use Rowan’s advice – she would have known how to handle this, what to say or what not to say. She would know how to distract Milly or explain it in an age-appropriate way.
‘Mama will be back soon, sweetie,’ he lied, hating himself with every word that left his mouth. He knew he would have to face telling her eventually, but right now he needed his precious daughter to hang on.