Eve's Rib by C.S. O'Cinneide

Author:C.S. O'Cinneide
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press

Eighteen

“Health card number please.” One of the nurses who helped to wheel Selena through the emergency room doors badgered Richard with questions he couldn’t answer. She had a fine spray of Selena’s blood on the sleeve of her blue scrubs.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know her health card number.” A violent hammering started up on the glass behind Richard’s chair. Shaken already, he turned to see a woman wearing a black stovepipe hat that sprouted flowers. They were purple and red and shaped like daisies. She shouted from the waiting area, brandishing a bicycle pump in her hand. The glass muffled her demands.

“Date of birth?” asked the nurse, not looking up from her computer.

Richard tore himself away from the wildly shaking flowers of the stovepipe hat. He thought hard to recall Selena’s last birthday. It had been cold out and Abbey couldn’t drive yet. She and Selena had asked him to take them to the movie theatre. They were going to see that superhero movie all the kids were crazy about, the one where the hero was a bit of a fuck-up. Anti-heroes were in, he supposed. The girls had worn jackets. Was it early winter or late spring?

“I’m sorry,” Richard apologized again. “She’s not my daughter.”

He was ashamed by the degree of comfort he drew from those words. It could have been Abbey on that stretcher, rushed down the corridor with attendants hollering vital signs. It could have been Abbey’s blood on the nurse’s blue scrubs. It was just an accident of fate that Selena drank from the bottle full of glass and not his own daughter. This parallel possibility floored him. Having lost one child already to random circumstance, he couldn’t fathom a world cruel enough to see him faced with losing another.

Richard’s first reaction when Selena had fallen to her knees on the court was to selfishly search the gym for his own child. Scanning the court, he’d located Abbey underneath the opposing team’s basket, holding the ball she’d just sent whistling through it. Everyone had been rushing onto the floor, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of Abbey. She tilted her head from side to side as if she were working out a kink in her neck, then dribbled the ball twice, sharply, on the floorboards. It looked like impatience, but Richard knew she’d just been in shock. He’d gone to race down the bleachers, but people were up by then and blocking his way. Eve had gotten to their daughter first. She held Abbey in her arms while she cried, the basketball discarded and rolling around at the sidelines. When Richard finally reached them, he’d wanted to hold them both. But he stood back instead, too fearful of rejection.

To think that his own daughter might have drunk from that bottle. That she might have been taken from him before he had a chance to rewrite the story she had in her head of what kind of man he was. Before he could prove to her that Julia was gone from their lives forever and that he would never lie to her or her mother again.

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