Page 107 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘It’s Barbara, isn’t it,’ I say dully, a pit of dread in my stomach threatening to pull me right inside of it.
She gazes at me and then shakes her head.
‘Barbara isn’t dead?’
‘No.’ Her voice is raspy and weary.
I allow the wave of relief to wash over me before I look again at Kat’s ravaged face.
‘But she is… she’s okay?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘Then what…?’
Kat flops back down onto her bed and draws her knees up to her chin.
‘What is it?’
She looks at me and her eyes are dark with pain.
‘It’s Jodie.’
Chapter 31
Iam falling off a cliff.
The land is slipping underneath me, relentlessly wrenching at my body. My bones are heavy, dragging me down into the great expanse gaping with malice and darkness.
And then Kat is there, gripping my hands and holding me steady.
Jodie had a heart condition, Kat tells me, a congenital heart disease. She’d known for years that her heart might fail and she was on the transplant list. Her COPD came on top of all that, but it’s all she chose to tell us about. Tell me about, at least. She was here on the respiratory ward, being treated for an exacerbation of her COPD, and doing well, but she had a feeling, Kat says, she told Kat that she just knew, and last night her heart began to fail, and later it stopped and would not start again. I think about my dreamlike state through the night: whispers, crashes, beeps, lights. I slept through Jodie dying.
But the doctors never said, I say to Kat, wrapped in her arms after crying out all the tears I keep inside and blinking my eyes at a world that has suddenly tilted. They never said and neither did she. But why would they, Kat says. Why would they say anything to any of us? Patient confidentiality. Patients’ conditions are notfor sharing with the ward and the world, however friendly they are. I think back over the last two weeks and think about how the doctors would gather round Jodie’s bed and speak in muted tones, and how she would smile and laugh and banter at them, how she would say she was ready for home so they’d no need to worry.
‘I heard you with her in the night,’ I say.
Kat wipes over her face with her sleeve and nods. ‘Yes.’
‘You were, what, praying?’
‘Jodie wanted me to. We do a special little service with the dying. She asked for that.’
‘That’s kind of nice.’
Nice?Nothing about this is nice.
Kat says nothing.
‘So she asked for you. Not Kane.’
Kat nods and smiles softly. ‘She said something to me, before she went.’
‘Oh?’
‘She said that we had set her free.’
The lump in my throat hardens. I remember some words Amina said to her on Saturday, words about how she could now be free from Kane, and so she could take up her wings and fly away.
