‘Is there anything you need?’
Alice tried to ask for a glass of water, but couldn’t form the words. She gestured for a drink.
‘Easy-peasy. Back in a tick, love.’
Brooke left. The machines beeped. The white room filled with a hum of strange noises: distant pinging; staticky voices, some calm, others urgent; the whoosh of doors opening and closing; squeaky footsteps, some running, others ambling. Alice’s heart began to knock against her ribs again. She tried to slow it down with her breathing, with her eyes closed, but it hurt to breathe too deeply. She tried to call out for company, for help, but her voice was no more than vapour. Her lips cracked; her eyes and nose burned. The weight of her accumulating questions hung from her ribs. Where was her family? When could she go home? She tried to speak again but her voice would not come. Her mind filled with an image of white moths flying from her mouth in the ocean of fire. Was that a memory? Did that really happen? Or was it a dream? And if it was a dream, did that mean she’d just been sleeping? How long had she been sleeping?
‘Easy, Alice,’ Brooke said as she hurried back into the room with a jug and cup. She put them down and took Alice’s hand as she wiped the tears from her cheeks. ‘I know it’s a shock waking up, love. But you’re safe. We’re taking good care of you.’ Alice looked into Brooke’s mother-of-pearl eyes. She wanted so much to believe her. ‘The doctor’s on her way to see you.’ Brooke rubbed slow circles on Alice’s hand with her thumb. ‘She’s lovely,’ she added, studying Alice’s face.
Soon after, a woman in a white coat came into Alice’s room. She was tall and willowy with long silver hair swept off her face. She reminded Alice of seagrass.
‘Alice, I’m Dr Harris.’ She stood at the foot of Alice’s bed and flipped through papers on a clipboard. ‘It’s very good to see you awake. You’ve been a very brave girl.’
Dr Harris walked around the bed and took a little torch out of her pocket, which she clicked on and shone back and forth between Alice’s eyes. Alice instinctively squinted and turned her face away.
‘Sorry, I know that’s not nice.’ The doctor pressed the cold pad of her stethoscope on Alice’s chest and listened. Would she hear the questions inside? Was she suddenly going to look up and give Alice answers she wasn’t even sure she really wanted to hear? Tiny holes of fear widened in her belly.
Dr Harris took the buds of the stethoscope out of her ears. She murmured a few things to Brooke and handed her the clipboard. Brooke hung it on the end of Alice’s bed and closed the door.
‘Alice, I’m going to talk to you now about how you got here, okay?’
Alice glanced at Brooke. Her eyes were heavy. She looked back at Dr Harris and nodded slowly.
‘Good girl.’ Dr Harris smiled briefly. ‘Alice,’ she began, pressing her hands together as if she was praying, ‘you were in a fire on your property, at home. While the police are piecing together what happened, the most important thing is that you’re safe and recovering so well.’
An awful pause filled the room.
‘I’m so very sorry, Alice.’ Dr Harris’s eyes were dark and damp. ‘Neither of your parents survived. Everyone here cares about your well-being and will look after you until your grandmother arrives …’
Alice’s ears stopped working. She didn’t hear Dr Harris mention her grandmother again, or anything else she said. She thought only of her mother. Her eyes, filled with light. The songs she hummed in her garden, their haunting sadness. The turn of her tender wrists; her pockets filled with flowers; her warm, milky breath in the morning. Being in the nest of her arms, on cold sand under hot sun, feeling the rise and fall of breath in her chest, and the rhythm of her heart and voice as she told stories, spinning the two of them into their warm, magical cocoon. You were the true love I needed to wake me from a curse, Bun. You’re my fairytale.
‘I’ll see you on my next round,’ Dr Harris said, and, after glancing at Brooke, left the room.
Brooke stayed at the end of Alice’s bed, her face sombre. A hole was burning through Alice’s middle. Couldn’t Brooke hear it? Roaring like fire, hissing and raging, swallowing everything inside? A question repeated over and over in her mind. It hooked through Alice and tore bits of her away.
What had she done?
Brooke came around her bed and poured a cup of pale juice, handing it to Alice. At first she wanted to smack it out of Brooke’s hand, but once she tasted the cold sweetness, she tipped her head back and swallowed. It hit her stomach, cold. Panting, she held her cup up for more.
‘Easy does it,’ Brooke said, hesitantly pouring more.
Alice drank so fast some juice dribbled down her chin. She hiccupped as she held the cup out for more. More. More. She shook the cup in Brooke’s face.
‘Last one.’
Alice nearly gagged swallowing the last mouthful. She lowered her cup shakily. Brooke grabbed a sick bag and flicked it open just in time as Alice vomited up streams of juice. She fell back on her pillow, heaving.
‘That’s it.’ Brooke rubbed Alice’s back. ‘Nice and steady. Good girl. One breath at a time.’
Alice never wanted to breathe again.
Alice slept fitfully. Dreams of fire left her drenched in cold sweat. When she awoke her heart was so hot she felt it might melt her chest right open. She scratched at her collarbone until her skin bled. Brooke clipped her nails every few days but it didn’t stop; Alice clawed at her skin night after night until Brooke brought fluffy gloves for her to wear to sleep. And still, her voice would not come. It was gone, evaporated like a salt puddle at low tide.
New nurses came to visit her. They wore different pinafores from Brooke. Some walked her around the hospital, explaining that her muscles had weakened while she was sleeping and needed to remember how to be strong. They taught her exercises to do in bed and around her room. Others came to talk to her about her feelings. They brought picture cards and toys. Alice didn’t hear the storyteller’s voice again in her dreams. She grew paler. Her skin cracked. She imagined her heart was withering of thirst, drying out from its edges to its raw, red centre. Every night she fought her way through waves of fire. Mostly, she lay in her bed and stared out the window at the changing sky, trying not to remember, trying not to question anything, and waiting for Brooke to arrive. Brooke had the best eyes.
Time passed. Alice’s voice was lost. She could not eat more than a few forkfuls at each meal, no matter how much Brooke fussed over her. Her unasked questions took up all the room in her body; the same one frightened her the most.
What had she done?
Though she hardly ate, she drank jug after jug of sweet juice and water, but nothing washed the smoke or sorrow away.
Soon dark purple smudges appeared like storm clouds under her eyes. Nursing staff took her for walks out in the sun twice a day, but the glare of the light was too much to bear for more than a few moments at a time. Dr Harris visited again to explain that if she didn’t start eating, they were going to have to feed her through a tube. Alice let them; her unasked questions hurt more than any tube ever could. She had no room left inside her to care.
One morning Brooke squeaked into Alice’s room in her pink rubber shoes, her eyes twinkling like the summer sea. She had something in her hands, hidden behind her back. Alice looked at her with weak interest.
‘Something’s arrived.’ Brooke grinned. ‘Just for you.’ Alice raised an eyebrow.