Searching for Celia (7 page)

As I read I am only vaguely aware that the train is taking a long time to arrive. I can feel the weight of bodies gathering behind me as people mass on the narrow concrete platform. A hot, anxious, impatient press of flesh inches me forward as I instinctively search for open space in this dense and humid tunnel, which seems to grow smaller by the second. The layering of body upon body thins the air to a dank and sour cloud of carbon dioxide.

I feel the train before I see it, feel it as a rising rumble beneath my feet from somewhere down the line. Then I catch a slim glimpse of light in the tunnel, on the edge of my peripheral vision. The waiting crowd stiffens, straightening in expectation and pressing me toward the warning painted on the floor in white: MIND THE GAP.

Suddenly something strikes me from the side, knocking the air from my lungs as the rumble of the train picks up speed. My hands shoot out to steady myself and Celia’s manuscript flies from my arms, slips of white paper rising like doves, darting, dispersing, and fluttering back to earth. I reach out to grab the pages before they are whisked away on the rushing tunnel wind and I lose my footing, tumbling to the platform. My cheek strikes concrete and pain echoes through my skull. A woman screams; voices shout for help. Stunned, I cannot move my arms or legs. Hands reach down to grab me; someone pulls my jacket but the fabric slips.

A disk of intense yellow light appears in the tunnel, expanding quickly until it explodes into a white-hot corona. I close my eyes, too frightened to weep, too scared to pray beyond asking God to take me quickly.

Rising above the metallic shriek of wheels on steel comes a jagged, jarring wail, a noise I will remember forever and which I was told I could not have heard: the high-pitched rushing cry of my child entering the world—the only sound he uttered in the fifty-three minutes that he lived.

Wednesday

2:21 p.m.

I am not even certain that I’m still alive until I feel the damp, cold concrete of the station floor rising into my spine, followed by the thrust of foreign hands tapping my cheeks and poking my throat. I blink rapidly and open my eyes to find two women crouched over me, one on either side. They must be mother and daughter; the younger, about thirty, is a slim, freckled, long-haired brunette with high cheekbones and a pointy chin; the elder woman, midfifties, has the same pert, pretty features, but on her they have been expanded, loosened, and softly lined.

“Are you all right, love?” the mother asks anxiously, stroking my hand.

“I…I think so,” I reply as blood rushes into my limbs. “What happened? Did I fall onto the tracks?”

“No, nothing half that dramatic. Just tripped on the platform.” Dark pupils dance within the daughter’s bright green eyes. “But you looked a right mess!”

I blink and look around, trying to clear my head. So that explains why the platform, formerly packed with people, is now nearly empty and why the women’s voices echo dully against the damp brick walls. The train must have arrived, released its passengers, and swallowed up new ones, all while I was in la-la land.

“How long was I out of it?” Fingers still shaking, I explore my jaw and cheek, mining for injuries.

The mother glances at her watch and frowns. “Can’t be five minutes? Three, maybe four.”

I sit up and clutch my head, waiting for the world to stop spinning. “Help me up,” I ask.

“Are you well enough?” the daughter poses breathlessly.

“Only one way to find out.”

The women lift me to my feet, each taking a shoulder. Once I’m fully upright and my head clears, I look down and see what remains of Celia’s manuscript: an uneven stack of papers spread limply on top of my backpack, which is balanced near the platform’s edge in a deflated heap. As I turn I see dozens of pages scattered up and down the tracks, some intact, others confettied into tiny shreds.

Frantic, I grab as many loose pages as I can and stuff them into the backpack, which still contains the cell phone, credit card, and £5000 cash. “Please help me,” I ask the women. “We’ve got to get these papers before the next train arrives.” An Edgware train is due in three minutes, according to the electronic sign blinking steadily above my head.

Dutifully the women comply, collecting handfuls of torn, stained, and crumpled pages and passing them to me. We’ve got most of the papers off the platform when a rumble deep beneath our feet heralds the next train. For one desperate moment I look down at the papers still littering the tracks.

“Come away from there, dear,” the mother beckons gently, taking my arm. “You can’t salvage that lot.”

“But you don’t understand,” I protest as the daughter slips the backpack, containing the remnants of Celia’s novel, over my shoulder. “This manuscript wasn’t even mine.”

They raise their palms and shrug sadly, indicating that my cause is lost. Meanwhile, a dozen or so passengers who have traveled down the escalator gather on the platform in twos and threes.

“Can you manage?” The mother lifts her chin toward the approaching train. I nod. My ears ring, my body shivers, but I know if I don’t get on the next train, right now, I will never again ride a subway in my life. I close my eyes as blood rockets through my skull. The brick walls constrict and the train becomes a bullet in a barrel, a malevolently vicious thing. The mother-daughter duo steps closer and absorbs me into the closed circle of their interior, where I revel in the foreign warmth.

The train arrives and shudders to a stop, inches from my face. A buzzer sounds, the doors steam open, and for a moment I am paralyzed. Then I surrender to the force of anxious bodies propelling me into the carriage, where I collapse into the first seat beside the door. The train lurches forward, pauses, then picks up speed.
I did it. I survived.

From Tottenham Court Road there are seven stops to Belsize Park, the station closest to Celia’s flat.
Goodge Street, Warren Street, Euston
—the stations blink by through the windows, offering brief respites of warmth and light between blinding stretches of damp and rapid darkness. My body relaxes, carving out a space for the pain in my left wrist, a pain that increases with each passing minute. By Mornington Crescent I’ve lost the dent between wrist and hand; by Camden Town, purple and black bruises breach my forearm. By Chalk Farm, my fingers have stiffened and I can no longer make a fist.

When I emerge from the station at Belsize Park I am briefly surprised by the hazy daylight filtering through a lacy veil of clouds. It’s less than an hour since I left Dr. Whitaker, but the intense darkness of the Underground seems to have lasted forever, consuming the brightness of several days.

Instead of returning to Celia’s flat, I walk the short distance from the Tube station to the Royal Free Hospital, a multilevel, modern-looking structure with a large illuminated canopy over the main street-level entrance. I’ll lose precious time waiting for an X-ray, but what else can I do? My wrist is beyond painful now, and as swollen and shiny as bruised fruit.

Fluorescent yellow ambulances dart in and out of the lower-level loading bay, near where I enter A&E—the accident and emergency department—through the sliding glass doors. I give my details at the reception desk and am assessed by a triage nurse in a prim, old-fashioned uniform of robin’s egg blue. She declares me green–Priority 4, meaning my injury is not life threatening. This also means I will probably be waiting here forever, until all the more serious cases have been seen to.

As I take my seat in the hot, crowded, antiseptic-smelling waiting room across from a man in a soiled boilersuit pressing a bloodied rag to his forehead, I try not to think about the last time I was inside a hospital, five months ago. Instead I attempt to keep my wrist elevated, as the triage nurse instructed, above my heart. This being England, there is no ice.

A large, flat-screen TV anchored to the wall scrolls rapid, capital-letter updates about the ongoing terror alert, but the ill and injured assembled beneath it seem strangely blasé. I turn away and take out my cell phone. Edwina’s lecture probably finished at two or two thirty. It’s nearly three o’clock now and she answers on the second ring.

“Edwina, it’s Dayle.”

“Dayle—any news?” She sounds frantic.

“Not exactly.” I fill her in on the threatening photo and Dr. Whitaker not knowing of Celia’s overdose. Then I tell her about my accident.

She gasps. “Were you pushed?”

“I don’t know. It was crowded. I wasn’t paying attention…” My voice catches. “I lost most of Celia’s manuscript when I fell.”

“Sit tight. I’ll be right there.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I insist.” She pauses. “As would Celia.”

After hanging up with Edwina, I phone DC Callaway. My first question is whether there’s been any news about Celia. She says that there hasn’t.

“You should probably know, I had an accident at Tottenham Court Road Tube this afternoon. I fell—or was pushed—to the platform,” I explain.

“Well, which was it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you fall or were you pushed?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Did you report the incident?”

“No. I was too shaken up.”

She exhales heavily. “You should file an incident report at the station.”

“But I want to report it to the police. In case…”

“In case what?”

“In case there’s some connection to Celia.”

“Should there be?”

“No. I don’t know.” I pause, rubbing my eyes. “Look, I’m waiting for an X-ray. Your station is on Rosslyn Hill, right? That’s close by. I’ll come over when I’m done—”

“No,” she interrupts with an irritated sigh. “Don’t bother. If you feel the pressing need to make a statement, I’ll meet you there. The Royal Free? I’ll be there shortly.”

“Oh.” I’m not sure what else to say. “Well, thanks, then,” I add, but she has already hung up.

*

I am called into an exam room more quickly than I expected and after an initial and rather brusque examination of my forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers, the doctor orders an X-ray. While the technician positions my aching arm, the pain worsens and I feel sick. Waves of nausea lash the sides of my stomach while my throat tightens and dries. Something about the room—the heat, the lights, the smell—brings back too many terrible memories. The technician, a full-figured black woman with kind, round eyes, senses my anxiety and tries to comfort me, but that only makes it worse; her detached compassion, so clinically efficient, bruises my nerves and reopens old wounds.

I close my eyes and hold my breath. As the X-ray clicks, I feel an invisible stream of energy moving through me. In a moment of clarity, the entire hospital comes into focus and I can sense everything happening within this building, from the suffocating sorrow of the soon-to-be-bereaved to the desolation of the newly dead, who release their heat alone, untended and unconsoled. I have to get out of here. Now.

When the doctor returns to the exam room he holds a film up to the light and says I have a sprained wrist and a hairline fracture of the fifth metacarpal, the bone that runs between the wrist and the little finger. He shows me the ghostly bone on the X-ray and helpfully traces the line of the fracture with a capped pen. It looks fine to me, but what do I know? When I look at the X-ray, I am primarily surprised that anything inside of me is so small.

I ask for a fiberglass cast but I’m told that, given the position of the break, the cast must be plaster. The cast is set and the plaster still drying when I hear from the hallway the insistent tap-tap-tap of Edwina’s Docs coming closer. “Edwina? In here,” I call out. A moment later she pulls open the striped curtain and her square shoulders block the light. Her gray eyes widen as she notices the still-damp cast.

“Oh no—it must be broken.” She strides toward me and slips her arm around my neck, carefully avoiding my left side as she pats my back in stiff circles. Edwina smells of strong soap and sandalwood and the coarse coils of her closely cropped hair graze my cheek as she pulls back, placing her hand firmly atop my shoulder.

“Hairline fracture,” I explain, nodding toward my immobilized arm. “Tiny, apparently, but broken.”

“No worries. Bones heal.” She flashes that gap-toothed grin. “It’s not your heart.”

I look down again at my forearm, now encased in pristine white plaster of paris, with my bruised and swollen fingers poking out at the end like half-wrapped sausages. “I lost most of Celia’s manuscript,” I whisper. “Celia gave it to Dr. Whitaker for safekeeping.” I try not to cry around British people but my eyes burn and tears clog my throat.

“Never mind. Celia must have another copy. In her flat, perhaps. Or on her computer.” Edwina motions for me to lie back on the exam table as she straightens the paper pillow behind my head and smooths my hair. Fussing over me, she seems more feminine: still a solid presence, but her soft gray eyes are warmer, crinkling when she smiles, and lines of kindness surround her generous mouth. I realize with a stab of envy how lucky Celia was to have been intimate with this stunning woman.

“Are you going to be all right?” Edwina frowns.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re quite pale. And trembling.” She squeezes the fingers on my good hand. “Perhaps you should stay here and let the doctors look after you until you’re feeling better.”

“No, I’ll be fine. I’ve got to get out of here and figure out what happened to Celia. I’ve already wasted too much time.”

“What have you learned so far?” She motions for me to slide over, then she sits on the table beside me with her hand cupping my knee.

“I’m convinced Celia planned to leave London,” I explain. “I think something went wrong with her plan, but I believe she is still alive.”

Edwina looks down and shakes her head sadly. “I’m certain she’s dead.”

Her comment startles me. “Why do you say that?”

“She still loved me, even after the breakup. She wouldn’t have left without saying good-bye. Unless…” Her voice trails away.

“Unless?” I ask softly.

“Unless she had decided to die. And knew I’d try to stop her.”

Before I can respond, a blue-uniformed nurse bustles back into the room, breaking the somber mood. After checking that my cast is dry, she tells me I can leave. “The hand should be X-rayed again in four weeks—the cast can come off in six,” she explains. “You may need to take some paracetamol for the pain.”