Try Not to Breathe: A Novel Read online

  Knowing when to call it quits, Alex passed the nurse her card to give to the sitter, just in case, and slinked out of the ward. It was almost noon now anyway, and she needed to get home.

  Jacob’s heart raced. He had been sitting with Amy for too long, he knew that. Nonetheless he hadn’t expected that nosy nurse to yank the curtains back so suddenly.

  He hoped it wasn’t obvious that he was holding Amy’s tiny hand, something he didn’t do with most of the patients he sat with.

  As casually as possible, Jacob uncurled their fingers and dropped her hand, palm facing up, fingers bent.

  Gillian Radson was full of her usual bluster: “I’m sorry to interrupt but there’s a journalist over there and she wants to talk to you,” she puffed.

  Jacob was still recovering from the interruption. “A journalist wants to talk to me? Why would a journalist want to talk to me?”

  “Don’t worry,” soothed the nurse, “she’s writing an article about one of the doctors and she’s interested in this one’s story. She wanted to sit with Amy but I explained that you were with her so she asked to speak to you.”

  In unrehearsed synergy, Jacob and the nurse both shot the journalist a look.

  Jacob had been thoroughly unprepared for this. He stared at the nurse, waiting for her to tell him what to do.

  “Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to her, I can get rid of her.” Nurse Radson smiled.

  “No one knows I come here,” he faltered. “Volunteering is a private thing and, to be honest, I come here in work hours and I could get in a bit of bother if it got back to my boss.”

  The corners of Nurse Radson’s mouth twitched.

  As he watched her thick buttocks heave up and down like piston engines, marching back to the visitor, Jacob finally exhaled. He stood up, and slowly and quietly tugged the curtains to a close again. Then he sat back down, picked up Amy’s skinny hand and pressed its cold skin to his face.

  He said nothing because there was nothing new to say, but he closed his eyes and drank in her almost vanished smell. With the lightest touch he kissed her paper-thin skin and slowly laid her hand palm-down on her stomach.

  After stroking her newly brushed hair and coughing away the lump in his throat, Jacob backed out and took a long blink.

  He was ready to leave, but Jacob couldn’t let Amy be his last patient. There were currently nine patients, so he let Amy be his seventh and chose the two nearest the door as penultimate and final.

  There was an extra incentive to do it this way; patient number eight—Claude Johnson, sixty-two—had an incredibly devoted wife. Nine times out of ten she would be there, holding Claude’s red raw hands, talking to him about yesterday’s Quincy or rolling her eyes about the neighbors. Jacob would offer to sit with Claude, to give Julie Johnson a break, but she never accepted.

  Patient nine, Natasha Carroll, was a happy ending. She was forty-two, and still striking. Her hair was a light gold, with delicate graying strands that sparkled silver in the sunlight.

  Natasha had been in this ward for a few years and before that she had been in intensive care. Jacob remembered the day she was transferred in. At the time, he had been sitting with Joan Reeves, since deceased. It wasn’t long after he and Fiona had returned from their honeymoon and the fading tan on his hands had looked ridiculous against Joan’s lilac-white skin.

  Today, Jacob sat down on the chair next to Natasha’s bed. He placed his vending machine Dr Pepper bottle—its inch of brown liquid now warm and unwanted—on the small beech bedside cabinet.

  Natasha had been propped on her side slightly, her eyes open and peaceful. Her knees pointed toward Jacob’s chair. Golden hair lay slightly matted at the back but curled in waves around her neck and mouth. With the sunlight oozing through the nearby window, she looked like a stained glass Madonna.

  “Hello, Natasha,” Jacob said in a hushed tone. He pulled the curtains casually, leaving them askance so that the nurses could see him going about his business, behaving breezily.

  He knew more details than he wanted to about some of the patients’ backgrounds, mainly from their abandoned partners. About others, like Natasha, he knew very little.

  She looked so peaceful bathed in the pastels and whites of the hospital. She wore a dressing gown that looked like cashmere or something similar, and silk pajamas from a collection of similar pajamas that he knew was several pairs deep.

  Some of the patients Jacob had sat with over the years had faces filled with trauma. Gargoyles bearing the weight of witness. Not Natasha, she looked like a contented house cat, totally assured of comfort and safety.

  Over the years, Jacob hadn’t seen anyone else visit Natasha, but every once in a while a new vase of incredibly expensive-looking flowers would appear at her bedside and birthday cards would tumble over themselves annually.

  He talked in his hushed but singsong hospital voice, telling Natasha all about Fiona’s baby bump, and his job. Talking to her about things he never broached with Amy.

  Natasha lay coiled, silently purring while Jacob listed the names Fiona was currently favoring for the baby (Archie and Harry for a boy, May and Elvie for a girl). Time passed easily, and the steady flow of one-way conversation and the simplicity of Natasha’s expression helped take the weight out of the overall hospital experience.

  It was past noon and his time was up. Smiling at Natasha a final time, Jacob swept up his Dr Pepper bottle and breezed to the clunky yellow bin, swinging its lid up and dropping the bottle inside with a thud.

  Attracted by the noise, Gillian Radson bustled over, cardigan flapping.

  “Jacob,” she puffed. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  She smiled knowingly into Jacob’s frown, waiting just a few seconds too long.

  “The journalist left this card for you, she seemed quite insistent that you might change your mind about talking to her.” The nurse pressed the sharp corners of the business card into Jacob’s sweating hand.

  “Well, okay. I’ll see you next week, then.”

  As Jacob paced out, pushing the double doors of the ward with some force, he looked down into his palm. The card was thick with slightly embossed lettering in a heavy black typeface.

  ALEX DALE

  Freelance journalist

  Tel: 07876 070866

  Email: [email protected]

  15 Axminster Road, Tunbridge Wells TN2 2YD

  Amy bit her lip, tasting the tiniest trace of cherries. She stared up at him from under her hair. Still wearing her uniform, she could feel her knickers cutting into her leg where they’d been pulled out of shape, a new sting between her thighs, the smell of rubber and sweat on her fingers. Under her legs she felt a baby-soft duvet.

  This was without a doubt the worst thing she’d ever done. The meanest, the most secret.

  Poor Jake. He didn’t deserve this, he was such a gentle, trusting boy. Just a kid, and she punished him for not treating her like a woman. She hadn’t really enjoyed being treated like a woman.

  She heard the soft patter of socked feet in the hall and gasped. A shadow crept under the door and scurried away, and the distant sound of bedsprings twinkled. Amy looked up at him for reassurance.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, in his deep drawl. “The others won’t be back for hours.”

  Amy sat up, snapping her knees together. “I thought we were alone.”

  “Don’t worry,” he smiled, “he knows what’s what. We won’t be disturbed.”

  Her secret was out of place in this room. A dog-eared box of LEGOs sat on top of the wardrobe, a framed Star Wars picture hung above the bed. It was pretty neat, and smelled like sweet musk mixed with a tinge of new sweat.

  Amy stood up with a sigh and straightened her skirt. It had happened. Finally. And now she just really wanted to be with her mum, to have a bath and pretend to be a kid for a little longer.

  “I need to get home or I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Let’s get going, then.”

  “It’s
fine, thanks. I’d like to walk.”

  “No, Amy.” He shook his head. “Let’s give you a lift.”

  Alex made it home at 12:28 p.m. and parked just outside her terraced house. She was painfully late. Her feet throbbed. Her eyes and throat were dry from concentrating in the strip-lit hospital air.

  The stone path to her crimson front door was short, but every step pinched her ankle bones while her black dress tangled around her knees. All she wanted in the world right now was to sink into the cool dark behind the closed curtains.

  The house had belonged to her mother but Alex hadn’t been raised in it. Her mother had moved back to Tunbridge Wells from Spain when the first cracks appeared in her memory, and dementia was whispered about in breathy, broken English.

  Alex’s mother had wanted to be on home soil, wanted to be near a hospital whose name she could pronounce, and near familiar roads and avenues that she thought she’d be able to find her way around, no matter how bad it got.

  It quickly got very bad.

  Alex had moved in for the last months, while dementia punched permanent holes in her mother. She watched her only parent turning inside out, while Alex’s husband, Matt, stayed in their rented flat in South London. When her mother moved into the hospice on the hospital grounds for her bitter end, Alex went too. She’d chronicled the experience in a weekly column for The Sunday Times Magazine, “Losing Mum.” Her most intimate, private agonies also the most lucrative.

  After Alex’s mother died, Matt moved in and the couple had tried to make the terraced house in Tunbridge Wells their home.

  Leaving London was easy. To Alex, at least. She only lived in the capital because the newspapers were based there, not out of any affection for the place.

  But Matt had loved living in London, working for the Met Police, surrounded by the constant hum of crime and punishment. He relished buzzing around in an anonymous hive, where nobody outside of his home or station knew his name.

  Alex couldn’t bring herself to sell the place. The house was all that was left, apart from a few bits of jewelry and clothes. Her mother had shed everything else when she had packed up and moved to Andalusia some years before.

  Coming back to England and choosing that house was the last major decision Alex’s mother had made. The last major decision she had been capable of making, and Alex couldn’t overturn it. Not yet.

  The furthest Alex could go was remodeling the two-up, two-down with some of her inheritance money. Matt unhappily but dutifully followed.

  They’d barely lived there six weeks before Matt was back in London.

  —

  Alex had pored over every microfilm clipping she could find on Amy Stevenson, then printed and organized them into sections. So much of it was identical agency copy, topped and tailed for the different papers, but even excluding duplicates the clippings from the first two weeks after her disappearance filled a whole archive box.

  The Mirror, 20 July 1995

  MISSING TEEN FEARED DEAD

  SCORES of local residents are searching for missing schoolgirl Amy Stevenson, 15, who disappeared on her way home from Edenbridge Grammar School in Edenbridge, Kent, on Tuesday.

  Amy’s parents, Jo, 34, and Bob, 33, raised the alarm at 9 p.m. on Tuesday but were told by police that the teenager was likely to have run away.

  Jo and Bob told the Mirror that their daughter was a happy teen and would not have run away, claiming that none of her clothes or belongings were missing.

  Police began searching the nearby area after Amy failed to appear at her home in Warlingham Road, Edenbridge, the next morning.

  Fears are mounting that Amy may have been abducted and police are appealing for any witnesses that saw a man, woman or several adults approaching Amy between 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18.

  Amy is five foot four inches tall, slim with long brown hair and blue eyes.

  Amy was wearing a navy blue skirt, short-sleeved white blouse and black shoes with a wood-effect wedge heel. She was carrying a black nylon and rubber Kickers rucksack, and was last seen with her navy Edenbridge Grammar School jumper tied around her waist.

  If you have seen Amy or saw anything suspicious in the Edenbridge or wider Kent area, call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

  Amy’s parents were initially treated as a unit. But within a day or so Bob had become “Amy’s stepfather.”

  “It’s always the stepdad,” Alex remembered a nicotine yellow news editor telling her once, “sure as death and taxes, abductions are the stepdad, robberies are an inside job and bodies are found by dog walkers.”

  The Times, 22 July 1995

  POLICE ARREST STEPFATHER FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER

  Amy Stevenson’s stepfather, Robert Stevenson, has been arrested for questioning about the teenager’s disappearance. The arrest follows the discovery of an unconscious young woman in woodland near to where Amy went missing.

  Police are yet to make a formal statement but several sources claim it is the missing girl.

  Mr. Stevenson, 33, had taken part in the search party. It is believed he was fewer than 100 meters away when the young woman was found…

  There had been hundreds of clippings about Bob’s arrest, from scathing right-wing columns focusing on stepfamilies and the disintegration of the British community, to flimsy “eyewitness” interviews with unnamed neighbors designed to all but say guilty in blood-red letters.

  THE STAR, 25 July 1995

  TRAGIC AMY’S STEPDAD IN HIDING

  STEPDAD Robert Stevenson, the main suspect in Amy Stevenson’s disappearance, has gone into hiding following his release by police…

  The clippings thinned out considerably within weeks of Amy being found. The box containing clippings spanning nearly fifteen years was the same size as that of the first two weeks.

  The Sun, 14 August 1995

  STEPDAD DID NOT ABDUCT AMY

  POLICE investigating last month’s abduction and sexual assault of Amy Stevenson, 15, have announced they are formally dropping all charges against her stepfather, Robert Stevenson.

  The unusual move comes amid fears that fresh witnesses will not come forward if they believe Stevenson, 33, is to blame…

  Alex remembered the Crimewatch episode about Amy’s abduction. By then it was fairly old news.

  Alex had watched the program with her mother, who had taken the opportunity to point out that she had been wholly correct to drill stranger danger into her own daughter from a young age. “Why was this girl making these bad decisions? How could she have just disappeared in full daylight?” Her mother had sloshed her whiskey sour as she concluded: “No, Alexandra, you mark my words, she went off with someone.”

  —

  Alex set her two glasses down on the glossy white sideboard. She filled the tall glass with bottled water until it threatened to spill. Carefully, she filled the wineglass with a millimeter-perfect measure of chilled, crisp Chablis. She replaced the heavy-bottomed bottle in the fridge door, alongside five identical bottles.

  Alex had decided this morning, as she carefully wrote out her to-do list for the day, that she would have just one drink first.

  Then she would go to the landline in her bedroom, which was fixed and not wireless. This would tether her away from the rest of the wine for the duration of the conversation.

  Stalling in the kitchen, Alex stood by the Belfast sink while she drank. Slow medicinal gulps.

  She walked slowly to the carefully arranged desk, picked up her Moleskine notepad and pen, then an extra pen, and stepped silently up the staircase.

  The dove-gray bedroom was, of course, exactly as Alex had left it, but its empty chill still surprised her. The wine and the anticipation brought a giddiness to Alex’s gait, and she sat down heavily on the stripped mattress.

  In her notepad, in careful thick black writing, was Matt’s mobile number. She had deleted it from her own phone long ago and had no memory for numbers, but had managed to track it down on an old joint insurance policy.
>
  If she was deadly honest, this was her chance to prove that she’d moved on. Show that she was in control, that she was getting better. But more than any of that, she just wanted to hear his voice again.

  Her stomach lurched as she pressed the keys on her retro handset. The oppressive dial tone burst repetitively. If he didn’t answer quickly she would—

  “Hello?”

  For a moment all that came from her mouth was air, a noiseless whoosh.

  “Hi, Matt, it’s Alex,” she heard each word echo as she forced them out.

  “Oh…okay. Hello, Alex, how are you?”

  “I’m okay, thanks, and before you ask, I’ve only had one glass,” she joked, maybe more spikily than intended. As Matt’s polite laugh crackled down the line, she winced.

  Matt’s low, gentle voice used to be hers whenever she wanted it. Until two and a half years ago, his voice was on tap for her ears, whenever, wherever she needed it. She missed him daily. Of her two great loves, he was the healthy one.

  “I’m really sorry to bother you, but I thought you might be able to help me with something…” Alex was doing her best impression of professionalism, keeping her register high and clipped. But she knew all too well that Matt would know her bottom lip was shaking and tears were pooling inside lower lids.

  “Okay, well, what’s the thing?” He didn’t sound overly disturbed—but curious, if anything. A contrast to the nightly post-breakup calls that Matt had eventually ignored altogether, leaving Alex to babble, hiccup and sob incomprehensibly into his voicemail.

  “Well, I’ve been writing about coma patients…well, they’re not really in comas, they’re…well, you’d call them ‘vegetables.’ They’re not brain dead but they can’t move or talk. They’re not on life support machines or anything. It’s called ‘Persistent Vegetative State.’ ” She drew breath.