Emergency: Wife Lost and Found

‘What do you think, Abby?’ May asked as they walked back from ICU where the ‘forgotten patient’, as all the news channels were calling her now, lay fighting for her life, with many doctors and nurses fighting for it alongside her. But May had heard the consultant talking and could see it well enough herself. The outlook was dim.

‘Well, she’s been given every chance. And she did arrest at the scene, so that’s something, but still it doesn’t look at all good.’ Abby said, her pretty face serious. ‘Poor woman, she’s my age, you know. Hopefully her parents will get here in time.’

‘She could make it.’ May said. ‘We did get her back.’

‘As what, though?’ Abby said, stopping at a water fountain and filling a small cup with water. ‘We’ve been going for hours, she’s already got a head injury from the accident. I just wonder if we’ve done her any favours. Still…’ She screwed her cup up and tossed it in the bin. ‘At least her family might have a chance to say goodbye.’

And now May had to tell James.

The staff all thought he had gone home sick, so he hadn’t been disturbed.

He was just as she’d left him, sitting at the desk with his head in his hands. He hadn’t even turned on his desk light but the anguish in his face when he looked up to her would stay with May for ever.

‘She’s just been moved to ICU.’ May dragged a chair over and sat beside him. ‘She has some fractured ribs and a small hairline fracture to the skull, but…’ James knew the score, but he still needed to hear it. ‘She did make some movement when her temperature came up but Khan was worried she was about to convulse, so he’s keeping her paralysed and intubated for forty-eight hours. She’s had a CT, which shows cerebral swelling, but really…’

‘We won’t know for a while,’ James finished for her.

‘No, we won’t. But, James…’ She took his hand, because she cared about him, and because he really didn’t need false hope, she made herself say it, ‘It really is minute by minute at the moment. She’s very unstable. Khan’s not optimistic about her chances and neither is Abby. We’re just hoping her parents get here soon. According to the papers in her car she was here in London for an interview. The police just contacted her next of kin—her parents. Apparently they’re on their way.’

‘Great!’ There was a bitter note to his voice that May had never heard from James before.

‘I’m sorry, James.’ May patted his arm then rubbed it, hating to see him like this. ‘You obviously know her.’

‘I haven’t seen her in ten years… I knew something was up, though not with her, of course, but since I got back from the accident…’ His logical, analytical mind just tripped at that point. ‘I knew something was wrong, I knew something wasn’t right—it just doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does to me,’ May said. ‘How many times have we had babies brought in a whisper from death because their mums suddenly woke up to check them, or daughter who popped into their dad’s for no real reason only to find him on the floor…’

‘I just knew something was wrong.’

‘And you were right,’ May said, but she couldn’t hold back any longer, she just had to know who this pale red-haired beauty was. ‘Have you worked with her?’ May asked, frowning because she would recognise most of the doctors who had been through the department and certainly Lorna, with her stunning hair, would have stood out, except May couldn’t recall her at all.

‘I knew her from medical school.’

‘That’s right—you went to medical school up in Scotland. Was she in your year?’

James shook his head. ‘No, she was a couple of years below me.’

Even though he was sitting down he still looked as if he was about to pass out and May knew that Lorna must have been more to him that a fellow student a couple of years his junior. One of the downsides of working in Emergency was when friends or relatives came in unexpectedly, and she’d been on duty when James’s own father had suffered a heart attack, yet still he had held it together that day.

He wasn’t holding it together now.

‘Did you used to go out with her?’ May asked gently.

‘A bit more than that.’ James’s voice was suddenly urgent. ‘I need to go and see her, before her parents get here.’

‘Of course,’ May said. ‘I’ll walk up to ICU with you.’ Only she couldn’t hold back the question that was on her mind any longer. They were just past the canteen and turning left for the lifts when May finally cracked and asked what she wanted to know. Yes, she was curious, but it wasn’t just that that had her probing. She wanted to help James just as she did with any friend or relative of a critically ill patient—and to do that, it would help to know.

‘Who is she, James?’

It took till they were in the lift and heading upwards toward ICU for James to answer.

‘She’s my ex-wife.’

CHAPTER THREE

MAY HADN’T SEEN that one coming. Oh, she knew they all had pasts but she’d been working with James since he’d come to the department on his emergency rotation as a senior house officer, had known him since he’d been fresh faced out of his internship, yet never once had he mentioned that he was or had been married.

For James, that walk to ICU was the longest of his life. Stuck in his office these past few hours, he’d almost prepared himself for her death. He had tried not to think of what would be going on in the resuscitation room. He had just thought about her and felt strangely grateful that Lorna was here in London, that he could be with her now if that door opened and May told him they were stopping the resuscitation attempt.

Yet she’d made it through that, and now he must make it through this.

It felt strange to buzz the intercom and ask for permission to enter, only not as a doctor this time, to have to wash his hands and sit in a little side room as May spoke with the nursing staff.

‘They’re just settling her in.’ May clucked like an old hen when she returned, pouring him a cup of water from the little sink in the relatives’ room. ‘You’ll need to turn off your mobile here, before you go in.’

He pulled it out, saw that there were eight missed calls and he hadn’t even heard the phone ring.

Ellie. He glanced at the clock on the wall. He was supposed to have been there hours ago. He turned off his phone and used the one on the table beside him, listening to it ring and her irritated voice when she realised who it was.

‘Hi, Ellie.’ He tried to keep his voice vaguely normal. ‘Look, obviously I’m not going to be able to make it tonight.’ He heard her strained sigh and glanced up at May, who was pretending not to listen. ‘No, it’s not work…’ He raked a hand through his hair, took a breath and continued, ‘You know I told you about Lorna…’ His words were met with silence. ‘Well, she’s had an accident. She’s here at the hospital in Intensive Care. There’s no one else here for her yet.’

He glanced over to May, who must have read the ‘Please Wash Your Hands’ sign about twenty times now.

‘No.’ James said, and then ‘No,’ again. ‘Look I’d really rather just deal with this on my own. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Ellie.’ James said, when May sat down.

‘Your girlfriend?’ May asked, because even though she never usually would, she was here tonight as a friend and colleague and she was also treating him as a relative of a patient, trying to piece it all together so that she could help him best. ‘So she knows about Lorna.’

‘I told Ellie about Lorna a couple of months ago. We were starting to get a bit more serious. I thought it was right…’ His voice trailed off.

‘You were married to Lorna?’ May checked. ‘For how long?’

‘Not even a year.’ He could have stopped there. A year wasn’t long after all and it had been a decade ago. It should all be neatly relegated to the past, only he’d never quite managed to do that, had never been able to add a neat full stop to that chapter in his life and move on. He’d tried, though, over and over he’d tried, but that year with Lorna had been a roller-coaster ride from start to finish and he felt as if he were back on it again. He’d wondered sometimes at the ease with which patients gave the most personal details, had decided there was this need to make sense of the life the doctors and nurses were fighting for, to make that person real and warm and perhaps, a need to put things into frantic perspective. He had been right, because here he was doing the same now, trying to match up that limp lifeless patient with the person he knew or, rather, had known.

‘She was a couple of years younger than me,’ James explained. ‘She seemed a strange little thing, very prim and shockable, or she was when we were at medical school. She never came to many of the social things, but she always stood out.’

‘With her hair?’ May smiled, but James shook his head.

‘There are plenty of redheads in Scotland. I don’t know May, she just always stood out for me, sort of stood apart. I was a bit fascinated by her, I guess. And then one night there was a party and she was there…’ He even smiled at the memory, his face ashen but still he smiled in recall. ‘She just blew me away, we couldn’t stop talking. We’d known each other vaguely for a while yet that night it was as if we’d met each other for the first time. We went to bed that night. She’d never slept with anyone before…’ He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. ‘But there was no question in my mind that she’d ever sleep with anyone but me again. I was crazy about her. We spent the next two weeks in bed, not just that, talking, studying, May it was the best two weeks of my life. It was crazy, it was wild, but it made perfect sense at the time.’

‘And then what?’

James didn’t answer straight away. He stared up at the clock that must surely have stopped, because if felt as if they’d been sitting in there for hours. Felt as if he was living it again after all these years.

‘Let’s just find out!’ Normally calm and practical, he needed to be even more so here, James had realised, because Lorna was a mess. Handing her the little paper bag with the pregnancy test kit he had bought, he remembered guiding her to the bathroom, but at the door she baulked.

‘You don’t understand…’

‘Lorna!’ He was getting exasperated now. For two days she’d been panicking that her period was late, two days of anguish, which, over and over he had pointed out, might be unnecessary—they had been careful. ‘Let’s just find out first if there really is anything to worry about.’

He’d sounded so calm and practical, but sitting outside the bathroom in his junior doctors residence flat, he had been nervous. He’d just started his internship, had just moved out of student accommodation, and was finally starting to earn some money—and now this! As careful as they had been…well, they’d barely been out of bed, and… He closed his eyes and blew out a breath, trying not to think about how they could have been a bit more careful. Well, they would be in the future, James had decided. She hadn’t wanted to go on the Pill in case her parents found out, which James had found bizarre! Well, they’d have to sort something out, they couldn’t go through this each month.

They wouldn’t have to.

Her sobs from the bathroom told James before he even went in that there would be no second chances. Holding her sobbing body, he tried to comfort her, to tell her it would be okay, that they would sort something out, that they would get through this, only she was beyond comfort.

And as he held her late into the night, only then did the realisation hit that she wasn’t worried about her career, or her future, or how a baby would affect her life, and she wasn’t worried what a pregnancy three weeks into a relationship might do to them. The only thing that consumed her, the only thing that seemed to literally terrify her, was how her father would react.

‘What happened then, James?’ May’s voice broke him from his introspection.

‘We found out that she was pregnant.’

‘Hello!’ A bubbly ICU nurse who introduced herself as Angela came in and interrupted them, but even with her bright demeanour James could tell she was nervous—it was never easy dealing with staff, especially when the patient was so ill. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but we’re still having a lot of trouble stabilising her. Now, I just need to go through a few details. You’re Lorna’s ex-husband?’ she checked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Firstly, is there any past history you’re aware of that we should know about?’

James hesitated for a second, not sure it was relevant, not really wanting to share that part of his past, but if it helped her, they had to hear it.

‘I don’t think so. She had an appendectomy when she was twelve, I believe, and she had an an ectopic pregnancy, but that was ages ago.’

‘How long?’ Angela asked, scribbling the information down.

‘Ten, nearly eleven years ago.’

‘Anything else? Diabetes, epilepsy…’

James shook his head. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘Do you keep in contact with Lorna?’

‘No.’

‘And how long is it since you’ve spoken with her?’

James gave a tight swallow. ‘Ten years.’

‘I see.’ James felt sorry for Angela, it was a difficult situation after all. He had no real right to see Lorna, less right even than a person on the street who might walk in now and claim to know her. Divorce did that, James had long ago realised. ‘Her family are on their way,’ Angela said. ‘They should be landing any time now—they got a flight as soon as they were informed. Obviously, while Lorna is unable to speak for herself, we have to rely on the next of kin to determine her wishes, which in this case is her parents.’

‘They won’t be thrilled to see me!’ James looked her right in the eye. ‘Look, there was nothing acrimonious in the divorce.’ It was killing him to discuss this with a stranger, he wouldn’t discuss this with a stranger. ‘It just didn’t work out, but we did both care about each other. I know I’m her ex, which should mean I’m the last person she wants to see,’ he faltered, because from previous indication that was exactly the case. ‘She was in full cardiac arrest in my department. I just need to see for myself…’

‘I understand.’ Angela said, but James was quite sure she didn’t. However, her eyes were kind and she gave a sort of half-smile. Then what she said next made him realise that maybe she did understand after all. ‘I’m divorced myself, but I know I’d want to see him if he was so ill. But once the family get here, the decision will be theirs.’

‘I understand that.’ James gave a grateful nod. ‘I’m not going to get in the way.’

‘Do you want me to come?’ May offered, but James shook his head. ‘I’ll just wait here.’

He’d always wished for one more chance to see her, to talk to her, to say he was sorry, so very sorry for all that had happened and to find out why, and some of his wishes had been granted tonight. Even though they hurt like hell, he was incredibly grateful for them.

She was pinker now. It was the first thing he noticed when he approached, just as if she were sleeping really, apart from the tubes everywhere.

The warming unit was on—a large inflated duvet, that would help maintain her temperature, and she looked tiny beneath it with just her head and shoulders visible.

He’d wanted this moment with her, would have pulled rank or just stormed his way in to get it, only now it was here, James didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what she’d want him to do.

A chair had been placed by the bed so he perched on it. Angela took over from the float nurse who had been watching Lorna and now she sat, high up on a stool at the end of the bed, reading all the equipment and filling in the charts, watching Lorna every second, which was what Intensive Care was, after all, but he’d have killed for just a couple of minutes alone with her.

‘She’s the most private person.’ James glanced over at Angela. ‘I mean, she’d really hate all this. I know anyone would, but…’ He was rambling, really didn’t know what to do. Her collar bones were exposed so he pulled the warming unit up higher around her neck. She’d always been slim but she was skinny now. As Angela exposed her arms to check her reflexes he could see the veins, see her neat, short nails which, unlike her toes, were left unpolished.

‘Here.’ Angela left one skinny forearm out from under the warming unit. “Why don’t you hold her hand, tell her that you’re here? It might be reassuring for her to hear a familiar voice.’ He hadn’t held Lorna’s hand in ten years and he didn’t know if he should, but when he did her hand felt cool, but that was how she had always felt. He stared at the bony fingers and the blue veins on the back of her hand and the smattering of freckles that he had adored but she had so hated.

‘She was always cold.’ He was talking to Angela but looking at Lorna. ‘She’d come in after a night shift and she’d be frozen.’ Now he was remembering things that he had chosen not to, those freezing winter mornings when she’d climb into bed beside him as cold as the ice outside, or when he’d crawl into bed beside her at 7 a.m., cold himself to find her for once warm. He wanted to warm her now, wanted to crawl into bed and hold her, feel her again. Only he couldn’t, hadn’t been able to for a decade now.

What to do, what to do? His head was spinning. She’d left him, would she even want him sitting beside her now?

Yes.

Accidents did happen—James Morrell knew that better than anyone, but for her to be here when she was so very ill… His head tightened at the thought that she might die, or be brain damaged, but somehow there must be a reason that she was here. Somehow she had come back to him, even if it was just to say goodbye.

He was holding her hand to his face now and it was like a dam breaking. Feeling her skin beneath his lips he leant over, buried his face in her hair, inhaled the last wisps of the lavender shampoo she had always used, felt her cheekbone rest beneath his.

For a second he thought someone must have died in the next bed, because he could hear crying—a deep, pained crying. It was only when he felt a hand on his shoulder that James realised it was him.

‘Talk to her, James.’ Angela must have gone and got May, because it was her at his shoulder, urging him to say what he had to while he had this chance. So he did—told Lorna all the things he’d wanted to say, all the things he never had, told her over and over in the pathetic hope that maybe she could hear him.

‘Her family just arrived.’ Ages later, but way too soon, May prompted him to move. ‘They’ve asked that you leave.’

He’d worked in Emergency for years and had never understood it—those flashpoint rows that were so out of place in a hospital, rows that infuriated the staff and prompted review panels to be set up to avoid them. But seeing that smug face come towards him, seeing the beatific smile of Minister McClelland as he approached him, suddenly James understood.

‘James.’ Minister McClelland held out his hand. ‘Thank you for sitting with Lorna till we arrived. It is much appreciated.’

James knew that he should nod, shake his hand, take his exit cue and just leave, except he couldn’t.

‘Of course I sat with her.’

‘James!’ How did one smile and shoot venom at the same time, but Minister McClelland had it down to a fine art. ‘It was very kind of you to take time out of your schedule—’

‘What do you mean “take time”?’ James interrupted. ‘She was my wife.’

“Now your ex-wife,’ Minister McClelland neatly pointed out. ‘She left you, remember?’ He wasn’t smiling now, just dripping false compassion. ‘Lorna divorced you more than ten years ago. As I said, Betty and I have drawn a lot of comfort knowing that someone who used to be close to our daughter could sit with her till we arrived. But we’re here now—and we’d like you to leave.’

‘Lorna would want—’

‘I know what my daughter would want, James.’ Minister McClelland broke in. ‘You haven’t seen her in years. She’s a very different woman to the one you took advantage of then—and, I can assure you, the woman Lorna is now would not want you sitting by her bedside. Now, you’ve caused my family enough pain in the past, you’ll forgive me if I don’t invite it in again.’

He headed to his daughter’s bedside and James stood there, knowing he had to leave, but loath to.

‘Come on, James.’ It was close to midnight, but that wasn’t why May was in a hurry, she just wanted James away from the toxic atmosphere the minister had created. ‘You’ve seen her, you’ve spoken to her.’ And with that he had to be content.

‘Thanks for all you did,’ James said to Angela, and took a long, last, lingering look at Lorna. ‘Will you call me if there is any change? I’ll be staying at the hospital.’

‘Her family have asked that only they be given information as to her condition.’

Bastard. The word hissed in his head.

‘There’s a lot of press interest and things—they’ve made their wishes very clear.’

Oh, they’d always made their wishes very clear. He could see them all praying around her now and wondered what Lorna would want him to do, only he truly didn’t know. Out of control and hating it, he asserted himself as best he could. ‘Well, I’m not asking as the press and I’m not asking as her ex-husband. I am the emergency consultant—and she did come through my department. I have every right to be informed if our prolonged resuscitation was successful. Page me when there’s any change either way.’

‘Certainly, Dr. Morrell.’

‘Mr Morrell,’ James corrected, and then he gave her a small smile. ‘Again, thanks for your help.’

CHAPTER FOUR

ICU DID keep James informed of Lorna’s progress.

Despite Ellie’s protests that she was hardly seeing him, he moved into the on-call room and divided his time between work, of which there was plenty, and staring at the ceiling, or dozing on the small single bed, jerking into consciousness whenever his phone bleeped.

Sixty hours later, after two failed attempts, she was successfully extubated and twenty-four hours after that on the Tuesday morning she was transferred from ICU to a medical ward. This was all extremely encouraging, except Lorna’s consciousness levels were variable and at best she was disorientated and confused, at worst she didn’t know her own name.

May never said a word to anyone, but the hospital world was a small one and word soon spread that the dashing but elusive Mr Morrell’s ex-wife was a patient and that he was devastated apparently—absolutely devastated.

Which he wasn’t. Apart from the shock of seeing her and the hellish hours waiting to see whether she lived or died, apart from that one breakdown when he’d held her again after all those years, James was doing fine.

‘I’m fine,’ he said in answer to everyone who enquired.

‘I’m fine,’ he said to Ellie when she asked why he hadn’t called, and why he wouldn’t talk to her about it. He was just busy, that was all.

‘Look, really I’m fine,’ he said to Abby, when she said she knew what he was going through and when it hit him, as it surely would, she was there if he needed to talk.

‘Fine,’ he said to Minister McClelland when a week after the accident Lorna’s father came to speak with James, who was going through the medial roster and having an impromptu meeting with May at the nursing station about the increasing pressure the shortage of doctors was creating for the staff.

Naturally, May stood to excuse herself and James asked if she’d mind waiting for the whole sixty seconds that this would take.