Chapter 280
THE corridor of the hospital was cold, with pale blue colours that just made Amelia's depression worse. It smelled offensive in the antiseptic kind of way. T strip lights made everything look slightly unreal. Amelia sat in a plastic chair with her back straight and her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on the set of double doors at the end of the corridor, which had not opened in forty-seven minutes.
She was still in the clothes she had been wearing on Chambers Street. She had not looked at them directly. She understood, from the way the paramedic had handed her a small sealed bag of something at the scene, that this was a practical consideration she would have to attend to at some point. She tucked it away, not caring to check what it was.
Ryan arrived first, having apparently been called by someone whose identity she would ask about later. He sat beside her and did not immediately speak, which was one of the things she had always valued most about him. He was simply there, which was what was needed.
Clara came twenty minutes after, having driven from the other side of the city at a speed that she mentioned only once and then did not bring up again. She took Amelia's hand and held it, and Amelia let her.
Hazel arrived at eight-forty-seven with the boys in their pajamas, which told Amelia that whatever call Hazel had received, she had decided that she and the boys needed to be where their mother was rather than waiting at home with uncertainty. Gabriel went directly to Amelia and climbed into the chair beside her like a child who understood that the most useful thing he could do was be close. Gaddiel stood in front of her and looked at her face with his hands on her knees and said, "Are you hurt, Mommy?"
"No," she said calmly, which surprised her. "I'm not hurt."
"Okay," he said, and sat on the floor at her feet, which he did sometimes when he was handling something large and needed to be connected to the ground.
Adrian sat across the corridor. He had been there since they arrived, watching how quiet Amelia had been ever since Ifeanyi was wheeled into surgery. He couldn't go and console her, no, that would make things worse. He just sat there, watching her process her feelings and he felt terrible that there was nothing he could do at that moment to help her. There was a cut on his jaw from the struggle with Charles that nobody had attended to, and neither had he mentioned it. He sat with his forearms on his knees and his eyes moving between the double doors and Amelia's face.
The doctor came out from surgery twenty minutes later. She was young and composed, and Amelia watched her face across the corridor as she walked toward them while struggling to read the expression that the doctor had on. She felt her heart sinking even before the doctor stopped in front of her.
"Miss Amelia?" The doctor called to be sure.
Amelia's knees were so weak that she could not stand up, so she just nodded in response.
She listened to every word the doctor said. She nodded at the right moments. She said thank you when it was over, because it was not the doctor's fault, and then she sat back in the chair and the corridor was very quiet. Clara's hand tightened around hers while Ryan looked at the floor. Gabriel pressed himself against her side without speaking, and Gaddiel, from the floor, reached up and put both his hands on her knee.
Hazel, sitting on her other side, said only one word. "Mom." She didn't know what else to say because she herself was also breaking inside. Ifeanyi was a fresh breath of air for them.
That was the thing that undid it for Amelia — not the doctor's words, not the long minutes of waiting, not the weight of the evening sitting in her chest like something solidified. It was Hazel saying her name in that voice, the one that carried everything it couldn't say. Then there was the complete safety of being surrounded by people who loved her, and it was two years of holding things together finally locating the crack they had been looking for.
She cried.
It wasn't the quiet sobbing that made her shoulders shake slowly, no, Amelia let it all out. The pain, the trauma, everything that had happened so far that she had held herself together. Amelia thought about the circumstances, Ifeanyi's dreams that was shared between them, his parents and siblings who loved him, everything made her heart feel so heavy that if Adrian had not moved quickly to hold her, she would have slumped right there on the hospital floor.
Amelia yelled, cried and fisted Adrian's shirt.
"It's all my fault! It's all my fault! I was supposed to be the dead one, not him." She was hitting Adrian's chest as she cried bitterly, her whole body wrecking with guilt. "I embarrassed Charles, and he was going to come after me. Not him, me. Ifeanyi... why..." Her voice broke. "Why did you try to save me? Why did you..." She choked.
Behind her, her children couldn't take the scene anymore. Gabriel and Gaddiel were already moved to tears but they were trying their best to hold it in and be strong for their mother. Hazel tried too, but the more she watched her mother breaking, the more the tears rolled down her eyes.
Ryan's hands were in his face. He had begun liking Ifeanyi and had even shipped he and Amelia together, even though Amelia brushed it off like he was just a friend.
It took a while before Amelia's cries turned into sobs, until it seized completely. When she finally lifted her head, her face was entirely unguarded in a way Adrian had not seen in years.
She looked straight into his eyes, her eyes still red, and he held her gaze. He knew what was happening was also as a result of his infidelity. If he hadn't cheated or done the wromg things, Amelia would not find herself wrapped up with a man like Charles. This could have been prevented. Adrian blamed himself, but he knew that everyone else in the room also blamed themselves for this.
Then Gaddiel said, very quietly, with his head still against her shoulder: "Is Ifeanyi in heaven?"
And Amelia closed her eyes, extracted herself from Adrian's body and held her children, and answered him.
"Yes, he is.”