Lily's Escape

Emma and her husband rush to the hospital reception desk. “My Baby, her…her name is Lily…ehm Lilian. She just got here. She had an accident”. Emma struggles to catch her breath. Michael desperately tries to calm her down by constantly rubbing her shoulders.

“Yes mam, what is the surname please?” “Carter”. Emma impatiently drums her fingers on the counter. “Lilian Carter…”, the receptionist mumbles. “Ah yes, she is in room 10, but the doctor needs to speak to you first, before you can see her. Please have a seat. It won’t be long”.

Michael takes Emma’s hand and tells her to sit down. She feels like she is going to faint. She sits down and buries her head in her hands. She cannot believe this. What happened to their little girl?

“Mr. and Mrs. Carter?” a calm voice suddenly says.

Emma and Michael look up to a tall man in a white coat. He must be in his 40s, with glasses which soon are about to fall off his nose if he doesn’t get them tightened, and a blue tie with yellow ducks.

Emma finds the tie inappropriate, but for some reason she cannot look away. It is better than looking into his eyes. What if they are full of worry? What if Lily is dead?

“Ahem, yes Doctor. How is Lily?”

“My name is Doctor George Brenner. I am the neurosurgeon on this unit. Lily had an extremely traumatic accident. She fell off a 20 feet tree and can be lucky to be alive.”

“What does that mean? Did she fall on her back? Did she break an arm?” Mikes voice almost sounds hopeful, trying to blend out the actual other fatalities.

“No, she fell on her head.”

Emma is covering her mouth with her hand. Mike is just standing there, not able to make a sound. They are waiting impatiently for the doctor to continue.

“She is in a coma, she…”. “A coma you had to induce I assume?”.

“No Sir, A coma which is caused by a brain injury. We have only found little activity in your daughter’s brain. Not enough to function the body parts properly but enough to breathe and probably dream”.

“Oh my god”, Emma whispers, clutching her handbag tighter.

“Are you ready to see her now?”, Dr. Brenner asks patiently, gesturing down the Children’s ICU.

The walls display pictures with happy parents hugging laughing children. Captured on a perfect day. “A perfect fantasy”, Emma thinks. The fluorescent lights are so bright, without looking out of the window, she cannot make out if it is night or day.

Lily is wrapped in white sheets in a hospital bed, so innocent, so still. Like an angel, with no wings, unable to fly. Her chest is rising ever so slightly.

Emma rushes to her bedside and strokes her blond hair, like she always used to, every night when she reads her a story. She is determined she won’t stop reading her stories. She will sit and fight for her daughter, fight with her daughter.

The door opens with a slam and a man in a black suit rapidly walks into the room. He stands at the end of the bed, keeping his hands on his hips, only glancing at Lily from time to time.

“What happened, can someone explain?”.

“Hello Jeff, Lily had an accident, she fell on her head and injured her brain, she is in a coma”. Emma quickly explains the situation to Jeff, trying to avoid any unnecessary sentences and trying to hide her tears. She had never been keen on Mikes brother.

Mike, feeling the tension, quickly gets up to greet Jeff, who doesn’t seem to show any empathy for Emma’s emotional struggle. Both disappear into the hall.

“There is one more thing I would like to discuss with you Mrs. Carter”. Emma looks up startled, almost having forgotten the doctor is still in the room.

“Lily is in a coma yes, but it is in her own power to wake up if she wants to. I don’t know how to describe it any better. It is as though she is trapped somewhere, is struggling with herself, if you will.”

Emma stares at him, trying to make sense of his words. “You… you mean she can wake up only if she WANTS to? Why the hell wouldn’t she want to?”

“That, I can’t answer, I am deeply sorry.”

She sits in silence for a moment. “Can she hear us?”

“We are not 100 percent sure about that, but it is known that some coma patients are able to receive some kind of signals”

Mike comes back into the room and Emma quickly explains what the doctor just told her.

“What do you mean bring her BACK? Darling you are making no sense.” But he can see the hope in her eyes, so he falls silent.

While he is trying to wrap his head around this, Emma strokes Lily’s arm whispering into her ear “Please baby wake up, please, don’t be scared”.

Later that evening both decide that Mike should go home, get freshened up and take the dog for a walk, while Emma stays for the night. At around Midnight two nurses enter the room, smiling cautiously at Emma. “Mrs. Carter, we have to turn Lily to the other side, so she won’t develop bedsores.”

Emma is watching closely the well-practiced motions of the nurses. While they are turning her to her right putting a pillow under her left, Emma notices a bruise on Lily’s upper arm.

“Is that from the accident?” She says and points at it.

The nurses look confused, but both shake their heads. “I am not sure”, one says “It could be, but it could have happened before the accident. You see the yellow lining around the inner part of the bruise? That happens when a bruise begins to heal.”

Emma looks surprised and embarrassed at the same time. She feels like it should have been her responsibility to notice these kinds of changes on her own daughter. What else doesn’t she know?

Both nurses’ pagers go off and they leave in a rush. Emma stares at Lily for a while. She holds out her arm and places her hand on the bruise. She shakes her head violently. No! No! The bruise matches a handprint. Too big for a child’s hand. How and when did this happen?

Her own daughter has a bruise in shape of a handprint on her arm and she hadn’t noticed it.

Lily is always so responsible, getting washed and dressed in the mornings by herself. Too responsible for an 11-year-old, she must admit. Were there any changes Emma should have noticed? Was Lily becoming more introverted? Or was it just a phase?

The next day Mike returns with coffee. “Have you slept at all?” He asks. She doesn’t answer him, only walks over to the bed and lifts Lily’s arm. “Did you know about this?” Mike looks stunned. “No, oh my god. Is that from the accident?” “No! The nurses say it could be a few days old. We don’t even notice bruising on our own daughter Mike! What kind of terrible parents are we?”

A couple of days later, Emma and Mike receive a letter from the Hospital. Mike had read it already and now hands it to Emma silently. Her faces drops when she finishes reading.

“20 000 Dollars? For the last two weeks?”. Mike nods in silence. “We don’t have that kind of money!”.

Once Emma gets home, she forces herself to stop thinking about money and the bruise and finally manages to take a shower and get dressed into clean clothes. She walks into Lily’s room. Sadness overcomes her when she sits down on her bed. The bed she spent so many nights in with her own flesh and blood. Singing her to sleep. Stroking her soft angel like hair. She lies down and curls up into a foetal position, smelling Lily’s scent, she is lamenting a time when Lily was laughing sitting on a swing in their very own garden, her hair flowed with the wind.

“Higher Daddy, higher. Look mommy!” She shouts. A scream suddenly disturbs the silence.

Emma wakes up abruptly, with her neck as stiff as a board. She feels something under the pillow and pulls out a diary.

No, she shouldn’t! Or should she? She is struggling with herself a minute but ends up opening the small black notebook. She sees a few scribbles, a picture of Emma, Lily and Mike. She reads a few entries where it mentions she went out to get ice cream, the kind of boys she likes. Everything normal until one month back.

On one page Lily only writes down a few words. “It hurts, I am so scared” on the next page “He will come to my room again. He is going to hurt me. He is always holding me so tight when he is doing it” “I want to die, but I don’t want to get Mommy and Daddy in trouble.”

Emma’s eyes widen when she turns onto the next page. There is only a drawing of a dark tall man standing against the light in the doorway. Lily’s doorway. He has red eyes and long sharp teeth.

She slowly puts the book down. Her daughter… being raped….in their own home? It can’t be Mike. He is in the happy family picture and Lily is talking about him as him being her hero.

She quickly gets up, holding Lily’s diary tightly to her chest. She grasps her handbag and runs toward the door when a ping on her phone makes her jump. It is a message from Mike saying “Jeff has given us the 20 000 USD. He just transferred it. He says we can pay him back whenever. One less thing to worry about honey!”. Another message appears on the screen. “$20 000 has been deposited into your account.”

Emma storms into the hospital room waving the diary above her head. “She is being raped Mikey. It is in her diary! I called the police already they will be here any minute” Mike looks at her stunned. He then reads the diary and shakes his head. Who could do this to her?

“Can… Can we find out who it is?”

“We have to”, Emma says determined and walks over to the bed to hold Lily’s hand.

Suddenly the door swings open and Jeff is walking in, in his expensive suit and shoes. He smiles at them. “I see you got the money. Don’t worry about paying it back. I just want the little girl to be alright and comfortable”.

In this moment Lilys heart is picking up pace and the monitor begins to peep faster, showing 200 beats per minute in green light on the electrocardiogram.

For Emma everything that happens now is in slow motion. She doesn’t see the hectic doctors and nurses bursting into the room surrounding Emma, fiddling with the machines. She doesn’t see Mike dropping his coffee onto the floor.

She doesn’t notice the lights flickering for a millisecond.

She only has eyes for Jeff. She has never been so sure, when she feels a faint squeeze on her hand holding Lily’s. She feels breathless and glued to the floor. She needs to get out of this trance like state.

“It is HIM!” she screams. “It is him. Mike stop him! Jeff is the one raping our daughter!” Jeff turns on the spot and fumbles on the doorknob.

In only a matter of seconds Mike manages to pin him to the wall until two security guards are able to block the door.

“You filthy arsehole. How dare you touch my daughter!”

Jeff remains silent with only a faint laugh escaping his mouth. His eyes firmly pierce into Emma’s. He almost looks amused, but Emma walks over and wipes the look off his face with a hard punch in the eye.

Lily’s eyes begin to open.