Read Online The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans - Free Book Online

said, the girl might well be dead. When her head hit the road, the hat had cracked but not the skull. A second scan however had found some diffused bleeding in the brain so they had drilled a tiny hole in her skull and inserted something that was now monitoring the pressure inside. The respirator, they said, would help stop the swelling in the brain. Its rhythmic whoosh, like the waves of a mechanical sea breaking on shingle, was what had lulled Robert into sleep. He had been holding her hand and it lay palm up where he had unwittingly discarded it. He took it again in both of his and felt the falsely reassuring warmth of her.
    He leaned forward and gently pressed down a piece of tape that had come unstuck from one of the catheters in her arm. He looked up at the battery of machines each of whose precise purpose Robert had insisted on having them explain. Now, without having to move, he carried out a systematic check, scanned each screen, valve and fluid level to make sure nothing had happened while he slept. He knew it was all computerized and that alarms would sound at the central monitoringdesk around the corner if anything went wrong, but he had to see for himself. Satisfied now, still holding Grace’s hand, he settled back in his seat. Annie was sleeping in a little room they had provided down the corridor. She had wanted him to wake her at midnight so that she could take over the vigil but as he himself had dozed Robert thought he would let her go on sleeping.
    He stared at Grace’s face and thought that amid all this brutish technology she looked like a child half her age. She had always been so healthy. Apart from having a knee stitched once when she fell off a bicycle, she hadn’t been in a hospital since she was born. Though there had been drama enough then to last a good few years.
    It was an emergency caesarean section. After twelve hours of labor they had given Annie an epidural and because nothing seemed likely to happen for a while, Robert had wandered off to the cafeteria to get himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich. When he came back up to her room half an hour later all hell had broken loose. It was like the deck of a warship, people in green running all over the place, wheeling equipment around, yelling orders. While he was away, someone told him, the internal monitoring had shown the baby was in distress. Like some hero from a forties war movie, the obstetrician had swept in and declared to his troops that he was “going in.”
    Robert had always imagined caesareans were peaceful affairs. No panting, shoving and screaming, just a simple cut along a plotted line and the baby lifted effortlessly out. Nothing then had prepared him for the wrestling match that followed. It was already under way when they let him in and stood him wide-eyed in a corner. Annie was under general anesthetic and hewatched these men, these total strangers, delving inside her, up to their elbows in gore, hauling it out and sloshing it in dollops into a corner. Then stretching the hole with metal clamps and grunting and heaving and twisting until one of them, the war hero, had it in his hands and the others suddenly went still and watched him lift this little thing, marbled white with womb grease, out of Annie’s gaping belly.
    He fancied himself as a comic too, this man, and said casually over his shoulder to Robert: “Better luck next time. It’s a girl.” Robert could have killed him. But after they had quickly wiped her clean and checked that she had the right number of fingers and toes, they handed her to him, wrapped in a white blanket and he forgot his anger and held her in his arms. Then he laid her on Annie’s pillow so that when she woke up Grace was the first thing she saw.
    Better luck next time. There had never been a next time. Both of them had wanted another child but Annie had miscarried four times, the last time dangerously, well into the pregnancy. They were told it was unwise to go on trying but they