The Undivided (32 page)

Ren could see the bird diving for another pass. The rift closed, growing smaller and smaller as the spell collapsed. Brógán was standing in front of the rift on the other side. Ren held his breath, waiting for the owl to disappear.

At the last moment, when the rift was almost gone, the owl burst through.

He ducked instinctively then looked up, half expecting it would come back for another attack. But the sky was empty. The owl was gone. Vanished, as if it had never been there.

Ren wondered if that meant the creature was magical and had perished in this reality where no magic existed. Then he heard a groan behind him.

On the ground a few feet away, rolling to a stop on the grass in the ruins of a stone circle, was a naked girl with long, wavy, blonde hair.

She scrambled to her feet, checking for injuries caused by her rough landing, and then turned to stare at them.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Ren said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Darragh lowered the unconscious Sorcha to the ground. He studied their unexpected companion for a moment, and turned to his brother.

‘If I’m not mistaken, Rónán,’ he said, ‘this is not the first time you’ve met Trása.’

Hayley hated sitting in her armchair by the window, like a little old lady in a retirement home. They moved her there each morning when it came time to change the bed. She’d sit in the chair as the sun streamed through her east-facing window, listening to her Discman, trying to lose herself in the occasional audio-book and songs that all too often went on and on about losing someone, breaking up with boyfriends and other generally depressing topics that did nothing to elevate her mood.

Sometimes it was better to just concentrate on the music and not think too hard about the lyrics.

Hayley had no escape into music this morning unfortunately. The batteries in her Discman were flat. Neil had promised to bring new ones in when he came to visit, but that wouldn’t be until later this afternoon, after school was out. In the distance, she could hear the nurses making their morning rounds, talking in that chirpy, professional way they had about them, checking meds, changing bandages and asking stupid questions like ‘how are we today?’ to which most patients invariably replied ‘fine’ which was nonsense. If they were fine, they wouldn’t still be in hospital.

Hayley turned her face to the window. The sun did take the chill off the air-conditioning, but no sounds leaked in from the
outside world. The double-glazed windows saw to that. She remained cocooned in a world made of hospital noises and the bandages that still encased her eyes.

Soaking up the caress of the warm rays, she sat still for a time with the sun on her face as she imagined being outside. She tried to picture what it looked like, storing the memories away against a future that would include no new visual images to add to her mental archive.

Nobody had said it aloud, but Hayley knew. She was going to be blind. Forever. They just hadn’t figured out how to break it to her yet. Hayley was hoping they’d leave it for a while longer. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to react; didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know if she was angry or just heartbroken over the things she’d never get to do, never get to see …

And she wasn’t sure she believed it, anyway. Her eyes were fine, according to the doctors. She was suffering, the doctors had tried to explain to her, from cortical blindness. Her eyes received sensory information just fine, but her brain couldn’t process it correctly, so although she had vision, she couldn’t
see
.

The damage in her brain was to part of the visual cortex, Hayley now understood, thanks to the well-meaning specialists who’d been poking and prodding and scanning her brain these past few weeks, and who seemed to delight in bombarding her with eight-syllable words. The damage to Hayley’s visual cortex was impressive they told her, as if she’d achieved something clever. Bilateral.

In layman’s terms — she couldn’t see a damned thing.

It was awkward every time the family gathered in her room with the doctors for an update. Hayley was always afraid somebody would say something final; afraid they’d make some horrid absolute announcement that would make her blindness real.

Right now, she was in hospital with bandages over her eyes. That meant that there was still a possibility that one day she
wouldn’t
be in hospital and when the bandages came off, everything would be fine. Nothing was permanent, yet. Nothing was carved in stone.

It was strange, suffering from blindsight, which is what one of the nurses called it. Hayley could see nothing, but she was knew what was happening about her. She could turn in the direction of sounds, discriminate simple shapes and she could shape her hands in a way appropriate to grasping the object she couldn’t see. She could almost tell one colour from another and her pupils reacted to light, like any normal, sighted person. That was what made it so frustrating. If she’d lost her eyes, or if they’d been damaged beyond repair, it might be a little easier to accept her blindness. This diagnosis of ‘your eyes are fine, they’re just not talking to your brain’ was much harder to deal with.

Murray Symes had been to visit once, offering his apologies and the name of a colleague for her parents to contact, once she was out of hospital. Hayley was going to need counselling, he told them softly, assuming she couldn’t hear his guilt-ridden voice. She wondered if he was going to foot the bill for all this first-class treatment. Kiva had taken care of her medical expenses so far. Hayley knew that because her father had told her about it, impressed the actress would do something so generous. Strictly speaking, Hayley wasn’t family. She was five when her divorced father, Patrick Boyle, married Kerry Kavanaugh, and although she knew no other mother, Kerry was only Hayley’s stepmother. That meant Kiva was her step-cousin a couple of times removed and under no obligation, when it got down to it, to do anything for her chauffeur’s daughter.

Murray Symes should bear some of the cost, Hayley thought, with a flare of anger that always seemed to accompany any thought of the psychiatrist.

He was, after all, the one who had run her down.

The accident and its aftermath remained a complete mystery to Hayley. She remembered seeing Ren across the road with that blonde girl. The next thing she knew, she was waking up in hospital. Everything that had happened in the intervening time was a blank — a hole punched in her memory that had left nothing but a big black fissure in its wake.

The doctors told her it was unlikely she would ever remember what had happened that day.
The mind has a way of blocking things like that out
, they said. And not seeing things too, apparently.

The gap in her memory annoyed Hayley. She had a better recollection of the weird dreams she had experienced while she was in the coma than she did of that pivotal moment in her life. She hadn’t shared her dreams with anyone, however, because a lot of them involved Ren — or a somewhat romanticised version of him with longer hair and a more muscular physique. Besides, these days, Ren’s name was only something one uttered around Kiva if one wanted to trigger a fit of weeping.

Ren was still missing. Once they’d finally let her have the remote control for the TV, Hayley was able to find that out for herself. The story was no longer front-page news, but it still rated a mention now and then. There were occasional sightings of young men who looked like him, but they had all come to nothing. Ren had vanished into thin air. He’d not used a credit card in a month, not used his name, not been seen anywhere since he’d stepped into a lift at the city watch-house with a man and woman wearing suits. They also remained unidentified.

Kiva feared the worst. She was egged on by her publicist, Emma Pimms, who was convinced Ren had deliberately fallen foul of the law to disrupt Kiva’s chances at next year’s Oscars. The cynical publicist fully expected Ren to resurface any day, probably stoned and naked, in front of every paparazzo he could
find. She was already writing ‘damage control’ press releases, apparently, for every imaginable contingency from Ren being kidnapped by drug lords, up to and including him turning up dead.

Kerry and Patrick, who probably knew Ren better than his own mother, were quietly worried for him. Like the Gardaí, nobody had any idea who the man and the woman in the grainy surveillance recording were. And Ren seemed to go with them willingly, according to her father, who the police had shown the recording to, in the hope Kiva’s chauffeur might have seen the couple before. Patrick knew no more than anybody else did, but he shared what he knew with Hayley. He didn’t think keeping information about Ren secret served any useful purpose, even if Kiva and Kerry did.

Hayley couldn’t watch the recording, which frustrated her. She was Ren’s best friend and if there was any chance the man and the woman — who’d somehow knocked out every cop in the watch-house — were people Ren knew, then Hayley was quite certain she’d have seen them before, too.

Hayley heard footsteps in the corridor. Someone wearing heels. She turned toward the door, bracing herself. It was the only thing to do when Kiva and her entourage came to visit.

Hayley listened carefully for a moment, judging how far away her visitor was. She pushed herself up out of the armchair.

Four steps to the bed. Three to the foot of it. Five to the bathroom by the door. If she could make it there and lock the door before her visitors arrived, maybe they’d go away. She was in no mood for Kiva, mostly because she didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t know where Ren was and there was nothing she could say to his mother that might ease her mind.

Reaching her hand out in front of her, Hayley stepped to the bed, felt the soft weave of the hospital bedspread. In the distance, the clack-clack of high heels on hospital-grade linoleum
warned her she didn’t have much time. Kiva didn’t visit her that often now that Hayley was off the critical list. Since Ren’s disappearance, Kiva preferred to stay in the house, rather than face the inevitable barrage of the paparazzi.

Hayley took the five steps to the bathroom and was almost inside when the door opened and Kiva stepped into the room. She wasn’t alone. Emma Pimms was with her, and so was someone else.

‘Hayley, pet! What are you doing? Should you be out of bed?’

‘I’m not crippled, Kiva,’ Hayley pointed out with a sigh. There would be no hiding in the bathroom now. She turned to the publicist. ‘Hi, Emma. Nice outfit.’

There was a moment of tense silence before Emma laughed nervously. ‘Oh … you’re just pretending you can see me. I get it. Very funny.’ Then she stopped laughing and asked, in a concerned voice, ‘How did you know it was me?’

Because I can smell your horrid perfume from the car park
, Hayley was tempted to reply, but thought better of it. Let Emma think she’d traded her sight for a sixth sense. It made Hayley seem more mysterious, and it unsettled Emma. Hayley was bored in hospital and unsettling Emma Pimms seemed as entertaining as anything else on offer. ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘God,’ she heard Emma mutter softly to Kiva. ‘It’s creepy the way she does that.’

Hayley bit back a smile.

‘We’ve brought Gavin to see you, darling,’ Kiva said, taking her by the hand and leading her the five short steps back to the bed.

‘Hey, Hayley,’ a male voice called out. Presumably, that was Gavin.

‘Who’s Gavin?’ she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed. There was no escaping this visit now. All she could do was pray it would be a short one.

‘Gavin’s a photographer, dear,’ Kiva explained. ‘He’s doing a feature on you for
OK! Magazine
.’

‘No,’ Hayley corrected, ‘he’s doing a feature on
you
, Kiva. Nobody gives a rat’s arse about me.’

There was another moment’s awkward silence, and then the actress sighed. ‘Thing is, we don’t have much choice, sweetie. This business with Ren has done us no end of harm. Emma says we need some positive publicity.’

‘
We?
’

‘You’re family, Hayley,’ Kiva said, hugging her warmly. ‘What affects one, affects us all.’

‘Do Mum and Dad know you’re planning to exploit me like this?’ Hayley asked cheerfully.

‘Oh, now, that’s not —’ Kiva was cut off by her phone ringing. She answered it and then said to Hayley, ‘I’m sorry, sweetie, I have to take this. I’ll be back in a minute.’ The promise was followed by the clack of heels on linoleum and the door closing as Kiva left the room.

‘You ungrateful little bitch.’

‘
Excuse
me?’

Hayley felt Emma plant herself, hands on hips, in front of her. She couldn’t see her hands, of course, but she could tell that’s where they were, just by her tone of voice.

‘Do you have any idea how much Kiva has done for you?’

‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me,’ Hayley said. She didn’t like Emma. Never had. Hayley was pretty sure this woman was the one who had wanted Ren sent off to Utah.

Well, she had her wish. Ren was gone. And now, here she was, trying to use Hayley like a movie prop for good publicity, just as she always had with Ren.

‘Kiva has done
everything
for you,’ Emma told her in a low voice full of restrained anger. ‘You’ve had the best medical care
money can buy, you’re being moved to the best rehabilitation facility in the country —’

‘Whoa!’ Hayley cut in. ‘I’m
what
?’

‘You’re being moved,’ Emma told her impatiently. ‘That’s why we have to get the shot today. By tomorrow, according to your father, you’ll be too preoccupied with living-skills classes, or whatever they call them, for Gavin to do the shoot. And we can’t do it any other time because Kiva is leaving soon for the States. She’s booked to appear on
Oprah
next week. We need to give her something other than that missing fugitive kid of hers to talk about.’

Gripping the edge of the mattress, Hayley didn’t really hear the last bit. All she heard was that she was being moved. Released from hospital. Finally.

But she wasn’t going home. The thought panicked her.

‘Why am I being sent to a rehab facility?’ she managed in a surprisingly steady voice. ‘I don’t have a drug problem.’

‘It’s not that sort of rehab,’ Emma snapped. ‘It’s some place in the city where they work with disabled kids. You’ll be fine. There’ll be plenty of other cute little blind kids there for you to bond with. In the meantime, we need a shot of you and Kiva together. You don’t need to do anything except look pathetic and a little bit grateful to her. The bandages say it all, really. After that, we’ll leave you alone and you can go back to listening to “Lady Marmalade”, or whatever it is you’ve got in that thing,’ she added with — presumably — a wave in the general direction of the Discman.

Hayley wasn’t listening.
Don’t send me to a place for blind kids!
she was screaming inside.
I’m not blind! My eyes are fine. I’ve just got to wait until my brain heals and can work out what it’s seeing. I don’t need to learn how to cope with a disability! I don’t have one! I’m going to get better!

She felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and was grateful for the bandages. She didn’t want Emma to see her crying. She
wanted to scream, to sob uncontrollably. She’d known they were going to tell her she was blind, but she’d wanted someone to hold her while they said it. She wanted her father to reassure her and tell her it was only a temporary thing … that it would be all right. That the blindness would go away. She cracked her skull, that’s all. Once it was mended …