This Bella was facing the reality of her deformed foot and that she had got very close to losing a toe.
Chapter 26
Juliette was sitting in the same dull, grey-pink chair in Pettacombe Valley Hospital that she had first sat in when she had arrived in the morning. Bella had been sleeping on and off for most of the day, had barely touched the lunch that had been delivered, and had then fallen back to sleep.
Juliette had exhausted the headlines on her phone, checked her emails, sent through an order for A Christmas Sparkle to Michael with directions of where to find it in her unit, and was now sitting staring out the same window Bella had been when she had first walked in much earlier on in the day.
She looked out over the car park behind the hospital. The black-grey clouds had now moved on and the rain had stopped, but it was still dull and grim outside considering the time of year. It was almost better somehow that the weather was bad, it fitted her low mood. It fitted that the weather wasn’t happy and shiny when her Bella was lying in a hospital bed.
Juliette shifted her position in her chair and smoothed down her green ditsy tea dress and took a humbug out of her bag, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth and wondered how long it would be before Bella would be allowed to go home. How long before she could go back to Oxford? How it was going to affect her walking. The trouble was that nobody knew.
The door opened from down at the end of the ward and Juliette assumed it was one of the nurses coming in to do their observations checks. She didn’t look up or turn around and then felt someone touch her elbow and shifted to see Jeremy standing in front of her.
‘Hello,’ Jeremy whispered and bent down to kiss Juliette on the cheek. Juliette breathed in that same familiar expensive Italian aftershave and watched as Jeremy silently picked up another of the dull pink plastic chairs and placed it next to hers.
‘My god. She looks terrible. I can’t believe it. She looks like someone has drawn all the colour out of her and deflated her,’ Jeremy observed whispering whilst repeatedly shaking his head.
‘I thought it was just me,’ Juliette said, almost relieved that someone else also thought that Bella looked so bad.
‘Absolutely awful. This is hard to swallow. I can’t stand to see her like this,’ Jeremy continued.
Juliette put her hand on Jeremy’s leg. ‘I know. I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, though. I’ve just had a long chat with one of the senior nurses and I’ve spoken to the consultant. She seemed relatively hopeful. She said Bella was doing much better than she had anticipated.’
‘Thank goodness for that. We should be grateful for that I suppose, shouldn’t we?’
‘I keep telling myself it could have been a lot worse...’ Juliette said trailing off and looking over at Bella. ‘But somehow that doesn’t seem to make me feel a whole lot better when I see her looking like this.’
‘No. I’ve felt the same. It’s made everything around me feel so delicate. You know? You don’t realise it until something like this happens. How life is just hanging there on the edge and one little foot wrong, one slip on a boat and everything can change. Actually, everything has changed.’
‘It has,’ Juliette replied and looked down at her feet glumly.
‘Sounds really mean, but I just kept thinking I wish it hadn’t happened to Bella, like why did it happen to her and not someone else?’ Jeremy said as he fiddled with the edge of the blue cellular blanket on the bed.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve had all kinds of thoughts and some of them have been completely and utterly irrational. I’ve even tried to blame Luke for buying the boat,’ Juliette said with a small smile.
‘I just keep thinking. Why her? Why not choose me? I wouldn’t care if I had to put up with having a couple of my toes chopped off if it meant her not having to go through all this. No one’s going to be looking at my toes anyway. Whereas she’s on the beginning of her life journey.’
Juliette looked at Jeremy through eyes full of big hot tears and felt some comfort. Jeremy seemed to be on the same tumultuous ride of emotions she was and that made her feel ever-so-slightly better.
Chapter 27
Juliette didn’t know how to feel as Luke drove them home to Pretty Beach after they’d dropped Maggie off at school. It was a few weeks after the initial surgery, and they had just received the news from Bella’s check-up that one of Bella’s toes was not responding well and would need the second surgery sooner than they’d first envisaged. The silence in the car had been deafening as Luke carefully tackled the tight bends of the coast road.
Juliette looked out of the passenger window and watched the sea flashing past the window. Why them? Why her little family? Why Bella? Just as everything had been going so well. She’d known something bad was going to happen. She’d felt it in the water.
‘It’s just so not fair,’ Juliette said, continuing to stare out of the window. She knew she must be annoying. She had said the same thing over and over again for weeks.
‘I know. It’s not.’ Luke replied patiently.
‘Why did it have to happen to her? No father in her life, she had to put up with me and having no money, and then she’s got the whole world in front of her and then this. Oxford, who gets into Oxford? My Bella did. And now she’s looking at it potentially affecting how she walks for the rest of her life.’
‘She didn’t have to put up with you - from what I know and can see she couldn’t have asked for a better mother.
