The Reunion

hanging down, fingers tracing the sand, like a puppet without a master.
    ‘OK, OK. We’ll take her to the hospital. It’s in the centre of town, we drove past it…’
    There was a faint moan from Lilah’s lips.
    ‘Lilah?’ Nat was kneeling at her side. ‘Lilo, it’s OK. It’s OK.’
    ‘No, no, no, no, no.’
    ‘Are you in pain, Lilo? Sweetie, tell me.’ Natalie put her hands on Lilah’s shoulders, she was starting to cry. Jen was beginning to feel desperate.
    ‘Not the hospital.’ She said it loudly and clearly, she raised her head. ‘Not the hospital.’
    ‘We have to, Lilah, just to check…’
    ‘No! No!’ She started struggling against Natalie’s grasp. ‘Please. Please. Take me home. Please take me home.’ Lilah started to sob, her tiny body shaking. ‘Please, Nat. Take me home. Take me home to Zac.’
    She’d forgotten that he wasn’t there.
    Jen drove like a madwoman, faster than she’d ever driven in her life, her hands gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white, praying all the way, please, please, please don’t let me crash, please don’t let her die, not in the back of the car, not like this, not like this, not like this. Natalie sat in the back seat, Lilah’s head in her lap, one hand gripping the back of Jen’s seat.
    ‘Hurry,’ she kept saying, ‘we have to hurry.’ Natalie, the woman who broke into a cold sweat at speeds of more than sixty miles an hour, was urging her to put her foot down. Jen could only guess at the depth of her terror.
    Lilah drifted in and out of consciousness. She didn’t cry out, she was calm. The moment they had agreed that they wouldn’t take her to hospital, she’d become composed. Almost serene. Jen feared it might be resignation.
    ‘Stay,’ she whispered to herself under her breath, ‘please, Lilah. Stay.’
    Natalie rang Andrew from her mobile. It went to voicemail. She rang Zac. Voicemail. ‘Voicemail, voicemail, fucking voicemail,’ she yelled from the back seat.
    ‘Ring Dan, Nat. Ring Dan, tell him to try landlines, send emails, whatever. Tell him to get them here.’
    Dan was waiting on the lawn outside the house when they pulled up. The three of them lifted an unconscious Lilah out of the car and carried her up the stairs to her room. Downstairs, Jen and Dan fought about what to do.
    ‘You should have taken her to the hospital,’ he hissed at her.
    ‘She begged us, Dan. She begged us. You would have done the same thing in our place, you didn’t see her. She was desperate. She doesn’t want to… They can’t fucking help her now anyway,’ Jen said. She slumped against the kitchen counter, sliding down onto the tiled floor, swallowing the sob in her throat. ‘She’s dying now, they can’t do anything.’
    ‘I’m going to call Doctor Hulez.’ He disappeared into the living room and came back a moment later with a sleeping Isabelle in his arms. Jen had forgotten all about her.
    Doctor Hulez said it probably wouldn’t be much longer. He strongly advised them to take her to hospital, for the purposes of pain management. But Lilah was insistent. The doctor shook his head miserably, but allowed her to stay there on condition that they promised to call him or an ambulance if things got very bad. As the doctor was leaving, Andrew rang to say he had a flight first thing. No one had been able to get hold of Zac.
    Lilah slept.
    Jen, Natalie and Dan stayed up through the night. Dan suggested they take it in turns to watch over her, but Natalie would not leave her side, she would not be persuaded, so Dan and Jen took turns to sit with her, while the other kept an eye on Isabelle, who was in her cot downstairs. They’d moved the baby from the next-door room, they didn’t want her crying to wake Lilah.
    Because when she woke, it was horrible. She cried out. She screamed. She was sick, she convulsed, she pleaded with them to make it all stop. She asked for Zac. Over and over, she asked for Zac. She yelled at them to get out, to leave her alone, why wouldn’t they bring Zac to her? Why were they keeping him from her? And all the while, Natalie at her side – her face white, her hands shaking – didn’t once cry, didn’t flinch, even when Lilah spat at her, swore at her, scratched her face. Jen stood rooted, horrified, cowardly, in the doorway, but Natalie climbed onto the bed and pulled Lilah’s emaciated frame to her, she held her like that, physically restraining her, stroking her hair, whispering to her, words of