Chloe
Chloe felt as though four months of false hopes, dead ends and being passed from consultant to consultant had ended as soon as the glass doors slipped shut behind them. The motion was too abrupt to be fair. She stared back for a moment with her eyes wide, yearning for the simpler life, the open spaces around her home, even the flat grey of the car park which was still within her sight. In the clean closing of automatic doors, all of it had been swept from her grasp.
She took Noah’s hand and led him towards the reception, though it was plain for anyone to see that she was the more reluctant of the two. With every step she seemed to shrink in comparison to the lobby’s high ceiling. Aware of this herself, she glanced up at the steel beams and nests of lights above them, heavenward. The space was like an ancient woodland, but with no patchwork of sky here to stretch above their heads.
Members of the varied cast which kept this very grown up place ticking over passed them by. With every breath, Chloe felt more like a lost child herself.
In chairs which lined a quieter yet somehow more oppressive wing, everything from the noises in the distance to the sickly odour of pot pourri there to mask the disinfectant put her ill at ease. It was meant to smell like pine woods. She knew far better.
For a while Chloe paced around the waiting room, going between the notice board and the carousel of pamphlets. She looked down to Noah’s level, each time startled that something in the lighting was making this mystery illness all but apparent in his face. The bluish hue which bathed the chairs made her son look almost hollow. As he sat there and watched her, his skin was stretched. His shoulders were thin. Even under the coat she had insisted he wear the new angles were accented. And though Chloe squeezed his hand in reassurance, the smile which should have been able to lift her heart for the depths of this anxiety seemed far too old for him to have to bear. Finally seated, she reverted back to old habits, fingering the silver cross which hung around her neck.
Still in utter silence, Chloe stroked his hair. It was soft, smelling faintly of the gentle shampoo they used at home and it curled behind his ear. What with one thing or another, trips to the hairdresser had been forgotten in the past few weeks but either way, it was more for her own comfort than anything else. When she touched him, it meant she didn’t have to inspire him to talk.
Time had grown lethargic, conversation now on a par with that they exchanged four hours past Noah’s bedtime. Three magazines with their covers mismatched and all the best articles torn out, lay abandoned on the chair beside them, though quite why she had thought he would be interested in celebrity, digital photography and angling was uncertain. Chloe squinted up to the small clock which hung over the reception desk, feeling as weak as if this appointment was all for her benefit. She was restless. She slouched forwards to fix her eyes on the skirting rather than the other empty chairs then sat uncomfortably straight. Each phase of her fidgeting though, was incomplete, the better to hide her distress from the only person in the world who mattered.
The doctors, in shirts and loosened ties instead of crisp white coats, were running late. Eleven o’ clock and in the morning and already they were three patients behind. But now they were alone, huddled together in an isolating silence. While his mind wandered, she was praying.
It was inevitable that their turn would come next.
It wasn’t clear that this would be an end to anything at all. But how to explain to a child of eight why, in the middle of a school day, they were here in a clinic with patients seven times his age? Chloe wondered how much he actually understood, or whether all he cared for were the toys he was given after they listened to his chest, the magical distractions for the hours Chloe had been cross examined on everything from his diet to his sleeping patterns. It was brutal, to be ordered here and kept in the dark after the hundredth test on her little boy had revealed what, over the phone, they would only call a “subtle irregularity.” While she was frantic, she wasn’t blind. The speed of it all had to mean that something was wrong, and she had enough experience of life to realise that if they hadn’t called it good news on the telephone, there was nothing here to be look forward too. Consequentially, she had been out of her mind all night. All Noah had asked was whether they would be back in time for lunch.
And so she found herself stroking his hair once again, thinking of his father, feeling nothing but a vague, selfish abandonment, which she quickly forced herself to dismiss. There were happier times to remember. This time last week, for example. All three of them had driven to the forest and walked through the trees for hours, Noah so tightly bundled in knitwear that only his eyes were visible.
“So what obscure part of the world is it next week?” she had asked. The scent of the thawing earth and the sap cloyed in the air around them.
His father smiled back. “You don’t want to know.”
“Will you buy me presents?”
They laughed at Noah’s interjection. They had always laughed with ease.
She could still find refuge in the softness of the weave of pine needles beneath her boots. The sun lanced through the cathedral columns of the trees. The light held all the colour of buttermilk. She breathed in the vital perfume of the air once again.
“I don’t think you should go,” she had told him. Chloe had shaken her head, hair tousling loose from underneath her hat. “You should stay with us forever.”
The appointment not yet confirmed, and Noah’s apparent fragility forgotten for the afternoon, they had each taken one of his gloved hands and swung him off his feet.
He had left the next day, under cover of a hideously early flight and so they came to find themselves on opposite sides of the world. Simply because she was alone to bear the hideous load, a subtle irregularity seemed suddenly to have enough teeth to eat them all alive. She needed him here, this man she found herself loving more and more as the years passed them. Even if it would be all he could do to make her laugh in the face of this, even if that in itself would have been guilt ridden, Chloe wanted nothing more than to hear his voice. He had left, worried of course but still thinking that this would be another ten days to wait for no conclusion at all. It seemed unfair that he knew nothing at all of events at home.
But how self centred, to wish him here. Even left alone, they should have been able to cope. Their son, in his half boredom, half rational fear of these tall doctors who kept flitting past them, files in hand, could nestle against Chloe’s shoulder. In a kinder world, she would be able to lean back and let her husband catch her. He was the one who had to be strong enough for all three.
Chloe watched from the corner of her eye as the last patient talked shortly to the receptionist. With a forced smile he left, prescription crumpled in his hand, looking somehow far more ill than when he had been called in.
Chloe’s mind tore itself apart. She had barely fallen asleep on her own. She hadn’t been able keep her heart enough in check to drive here today. This weak already, it seemed utterly implausible that she would find the courage to hear what it was about her child that seemed to have the professionals so ill at ease.
She took Noah’s hand again, then gave up on trying to be restrained and buried her face in his hair. He recoiled and, though the sound was closer to a son, he managed to make her laugh.
In the new panic, akin to fear for her own life, she considered whether in the moment it would take to sign off on the last case and disinfect the doctor’s office, she would be able to reach her husband and spill out this panic. Mobiles were banned. She had no change for the patient pay phones but she could have begged the receptionist and called across ten time zones from behind the desk. She was desperate enough.
The doctor appeared, striding from a corridor with no windows. His office door was still ajar behind him. He wore a nametag which was barely straight and the look he gave her from behind his thick glasses, the kind of look that only a finely tuned and frenzied mother could possibly register, made him seem nothing short of a bringer of appalling news.
He called her son by name.
