When I next open my eyes it’s the morning and, all at once, the events of the previous evening come rushing back. I turn my head toward Matthew, wondering if he tried to wake me when he came to bed to apologize for his hurtful words. But his side of the bed is empty. I look at the clock: it’s eight-thirty. My breakfast tray is on the table, which means he’s already left for work.
I sit up, hoping to see a note propped against my glass of juice but there’s only a bowl of cereal, a small jug of milk and my two little pills. I feel sick with apprehension. No matter how much he tells me that he’ll never leave me, that he’ll stay with me, this new harder edge to his character has thrown me. I understand that it must be frightening for him to have a wife who keeps banging on about being stalked by a murderer but shouldn’t he try to get to the bottom of my fears before dismissing them so abruptly? When I think about it, he’s never once sat me down properly and asked why I think the murderer is after me. If he had, I might have admitted to seeing Jane’s car that night.
Tears of loneliness spill from my eyes and I reach for the pills and the juice to wash them down with, desperate to numb the pain. But I can’t stop crying, even when sleep begins to take me, because all I feel is terrible despair, and fear at what the future might hold for me. If I have dementia and Matthew leaves me, all I’ll have to look forward to are years in a care home where a few of my friends will visit out of obligation, an obligation that will end the minute I can’t remember who they are. My tears increase and become huge sobs of wretchedness, and when I’m woken some time later by a terrible groaning noise, with my head feeling as if it’s about to explode, it’s as if my emotional pain has manifested itself into physical pain. I try to open my eyes but find that I can’t. My body feels as if it’s on fire and, when I lift my hand to my head, I find it wet with sweat.
Aware that there’s something terribly wrong, I try to get out of bed but my legs won’t hold me up and I fall to the floor. I can feel sleep pulling me back but some sixth sense tells me that I mustn’t give in to it and I focus instead on trying to move. But it seems impossible and all I can think of, through the fog in my brain, is that I’ve had a stroke of some kind. My survival instinct kicks in and I know my only chance is to get help as quickly as possible so, heaving myself onto all fours, I make it to the top of the stairs and half fall down them to the hall below. The pain makes me almost lose consciousness but with superhuman effort I use my arms to pull my body along the floor toward the table where the phone sits. I want to call Matthew but I know I have to call the emergency services first, so I dial 999 and, when a woman answers, I tell her that I need help. I’m slurring so much I’m terrified she won’t be able to understand what I’m saying. She asks for my name and I tell her it’s Cass. She then asks where I’m calling from, and I just about manage to tell her our address when the phone slips from my grasp and clatters to the floor.
* * *
“Cass, Cass, can you hear me?” The voice is so faint that it’s easy to ignore. But it comes back so insistently that I end up opening my eyes.
“She’s here,” I hear someone say. “She’s waking up.”
“Cass, my name’s Pat, I want you to stay with me, all right?” A face comes into focus somewhere above me. “We’re going to take you to hospital in a minute but can you just tell me, is this what you took?” She holds the box of tablets that Dr. Deakin prescribed for me and, recognizing them, I give a little nod.
I feel hands on me, lifting me, and then cool air on my face for a few brief seconds as I’m carried out to an ambulance.
“Matthew?” I ask weakly.
“You’ll see him at the hospital,” a voice tells me. “Can you tell me how many you’ve taken, Cass?”
I’m about to ask her what she means when I start vomiting violently and, by the time we arrive at the hospital, I’m so weak I can’t even smile at Matthew as he stands looking down at me, his face white with worry.
“You can see her later,” a nurse tells him briskly.
“She’ll be all right, won’t she?” he asks, distraught, and I feel worse for him than I do for myself.
There’s a blur of tests so it’s only when the doctor starts asking me questions that I realize she thinks I’ve taken an overdose.
I stare at her, appalled. “An overdose?”
“Yes.”
I shake my head. “No, I would never do that.”
She gives me the kind of look that tells me she doesn’t believe me and, bewildered, I ask to see Matthew.
“Thank God you’re all right,” he says, reaching for my hand. He looks at me in anguish. “Was it me, Cass? Was it what I said? If it is, I’m so sorry. If I thought for a minute that you’d do something like this I’d never have been so harsh.”
“I didn’t take an overdose,” I say tearfully. “Why does everybody keep saying that I did?”
“But you told the paramedic you did.”
“No, I didn’t.” I try to sit up. “Why would I say something that isn’t true?”
“Try to stay calm, Mrs. Anderson.” The doctor looks severely at me. “You’re still very ill. Fortunately, we didn’t have to pump your stomach as you brought up most of the pills in the ambulance, but you’re still going to need monitoring for the next twenty-four hours.”
I clutch Matthew’s arm. “She must have misunderstood. The paramedic showed me the pills Dr. Deakin prescribed for me and asked me if they were the pills I took, so I said yes, because they’re the pills I take. I didn’t mean I’d taken an overdose.”
“I’m afraid our tests show that you did,” the doctor says.
I look beseechingly at Matthew. “I took the two you brought me with my breakfast but I didn’t take any after that, I swear. I didn’t even go downstairs.”
“These are the boxes the paramedics took from the house,” the doctor says, handing a plastic bag to Matthew. “Would you know if there are any missing? We don’t think she took a lot, maybe a dozen or so.”
Matthew opens the first of the two boxes. “She only started this one a couple of days ago and there are eight pills missing, which is right because she takes four a day, two in the morning and two in the evening,” he says, showing the doctor. “As for the other box,” he goes on, checking the contents, “it’s full, just as it should be. So I don’t know where she would have got them from.”
“Is there any way your wife could have stockpiled some of them?”
Upset at being dismissed from the conversation, I’m about to remind them that I’m present when I suddenly remember the little pile of pills in my drawer.
“No, I would have noticed if there’d been any missing,” Matthew says. “It’s usually me that gives them to her, you see, before I leave for work in the mornings. That way I know she’s not going to forget to take them.” He pauses. “I don’t know if you know—I told one of the nurses—but there’s a possibility that my wife has early-onset dementia.”
While they talk about my possible dementia, I try to work out if I somehow took the pills from my drawer without knowing what I was doing. I don’t want to believe that I did but when I remember how wretched, how hopeless I’d felt and how I had craved oblivion, maybe, after taking the two pills that Matthew had brought me, I’d reached into the drawer and taken the others. Had I subconsciously wanted to end the life that had suddenly become unbearable?
Already weakened by what I’ve been through, the remaining energy I have drains out of me. Exhausted, I lie back on my pillow and close my eyes against the tears seeping from their corners.
“Cass, are you all right?”
“I’m tired,” I murmur.
“I think it’s best if you leave her to sleep,” the doctor says.
I feel Matthew’s lips on my cheek. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he promises.