A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer for the Day

B RIDIE

B ENNETT WAKES

every morning at seven and says a prayer for the day. This morning she wakes and she cannot remember ever feeling more excited, perhaps except for the day when Oliver was due to be born. She cannot quite believe that this is happening. It is as though reality has let her peek outside his curtainy folds and she is in another timeline. She gets ready, taking extra care to add some blusher, some lipstick, some mascara. They just about do the trick.

Just two weeks ago, Adil S. in his perfectly pristine and silent car escorted Bridie from the train station to Eddie’s funeral and now Johan W. is escorting her to see him. This risen Eddie. It makes him all the more precious that she thought she’d lost him and just yesterday afternoon nearly lost him again. Don’t you see how precious he is?!

the universe is screaming.

They are getting closer and closer. Bridie can feel her insides swirling with adrenaline. Her phone pings. It’s Oliver. Good luck, Mum x

. Oh, how she loves that boy.

Would Eddie recognize her son now, she wonders, all tall

and grey and sensible? Father to a stunningly intelligent pair of daughters and still surprisingly close to his ex-wife. She’s often hanging about in his kitchen when Bridie is invited over. Bridie often wonders if he and May will ever reunite. She would like that for him, so he’s not alone when she goes.

The landscape is changing from residential homes to the out-of-town shops, a big Sainsbury’s, and then there it is. The Queen Elizabeth hospital. Goosebumps shimmer on to Bridie’s arms. Though she was dressed in black for Eddie’s funeral, she is dressed in her brightest colours for his resurrection.

What will happen next is an entirely unknown thing to her. She has imagined it only up to this point. To them reuniting. She has never imagined the practicalities of it. Who will speak first, what they will say, whether she might be able to touch him by the hand, whether he will smile.

The roads around the hospital are quiet, it is the early evening in late August, the sun all golden and warm. Autumn is coming and the earth is ready for it. The sun glares in Bridie’s eyes as the car turns into the taxi drop-off bay.

It is a little heavy-handed that there are birds, two pigeons, pecking at the discarded food in the taxi drop-off point, and yet Bridie cannot help but smile. She has sent him birds. Whenever she has seen a good one. Go and see Eddie

, she’s told them in her mind. She hopes some of them have reached him. Have taken wing to the wild and found him. The ones with a magnificent beak, the ones with a missing wing, the ones with beautiful plumage, with bright, darting eyes. It is not far from Cambridge to Birmingham, really. They might have found him.

‘Thank you,’ Johan W. says as he comes around to open the door for her. She thanks him; she will text her son and tell him to award him the maximum number of stars. All the stars in the digital sky. Because he has brought her here.

Bridie makes her way through the doors, and the high, bright atrium of the hospital is as quiet as the roads outside. It is as though everyone can feel autumn coming too, and they are outside in their gardens, on warmed pavements, in pretty parks, soaking up the last of the summer. There is not a person around,

except one.

There he is.

And it is as though all the music has stopped.

There he is, waiting for her.

Sitting in a wheelchair, he is wearing a hospital gown but has a black bow tie at his neck; beside him an IV drip is standing sentry, wiggling into a vein on the hand that is resting on his knee, and what is left of his white hair has been neatly, carefully, thoughtfully combed to one side.

Though he is sitting in the wheelchair and he has the drip in his hand, he does not look ill. When she allows herself to look upon his face, she sees that he is smiling. Not smiling – gleaming. He is illuminated, and the unbelievable thing is that he is looking at her, Bridie. It is she who has caused the smile to rise upon his face. She upon whom he looks and sees something worth smiling about. Something worthy. The years have not changed the essence of him. She hopes the same is true of herself as she walks across the sun-drenched floor towards him.

And it is now that the thought, full of grace, comes to her:

It is not too late.

She kneels beside Eddie Winston’s wheelchair and she is not tentative, nor afraid to place her hand on his hand. Even where the IV burrows within.

His smile is beyond anything anyone has smiled at her before.

And then he speaks.

‘Hello, Birdie.’