PART 1
My wife had spent nearly eight months motionless in a hospital bed.
Her name is Emeline. She is thirty-two years old and she teaches music to children who do not want to learn it. She was deep in a coma — silent, unreachable — while the life inside her carried on growing, waiting for a mother who had not opened her eyes.
I am Daelen. I am thirty-eight.
I have not worked since the July. I had eleven years at the same firm and I handed in a resignation on a Tuesday afternoon in about four minutes, and the man who took it looked relieved.
Then, on a rainy afternoon in March — proper rain, the sort that runs down the corridor window at the far end — something happened that nobody expected.
Including the person it happened through, who was seven years old and who did not understand what she had done until about eleven weeks later.
A small girl, no older than seven, walked quietly down the maternity ward corridor.
She is the granddaughter of a night-shift cleaner on that floor.
I had seen her perhaps four times in eight months. Always at odd hours — half past nine, eleven at night — always sitting in a corner with a colouring book while her grandmother worked.
I had never spoken to her. I had never spoken to her grandmother either, beyond the four words you say to somebody who is mopping round your feet.
In her hands she carried a small glass jar filled with dark, damp soil.
She had heard the story.
The sleeping mother in 312. The baby still waiting.
On a ward like that, everybody knows. Eight months is long enough for a room to become a landmark, and I have since found out that the staff had a name for it that nobody ever used in front of me.
And somehow she believed she could help.
She was seven years old. Of course she did. That is what seven is for.
