ON PINS AND NEEDLES
chapter 14
When the pair of cold, trembling hands left his eyes, Georg blinked a couple of times to shake and drop the heavy teardrops stuck in the corners and improve the focus of his gaze. He could feel his lids were heavy and his eyes must have been swollen and red for how long he'd been crying. But they didn't seem to be tired of it yet.
After slamming both his palms on top of his knees, he got up and began to pace the long corridor in front of the operating room back and forth, over and over again, with slow and restless steps.
He was anxious, tormented, striken with fear and preoccupation about Maria. Torn between his willingness to avoid touching the worse of conclusions and his inability to think of anything else but them.
After all, why would it take so long if the operation was being successful?
To an outsider he must have appeared just as a numb person, numb as the look on his face and the rhythmic pace of his steps. But inside he was crumbling, entrusting all his hopes to a God he had never considered so highly.
He alternated pangs of gut-turning depression with rushes of rage and revenge, his mind into a dizzy storm of contrasting feelings, his eyes focused nowhere but inside him as he confronted his most hunting fears inwards and got lost in a time with no time.
With the climbing of the night, visiting hours had come to an end and both visitors and nurses had finished their shift and gone home to the loved ones still waiting for them, emptying the place one after the other.
"Herr" a nurse still in shift found herself passing by the corridor and resolutely approached Georg to warn him he couldn't stay there anymore.
She remembered she had seen him earlier that day as she accompanied a family to visit their recovering uncle, she had thought of him and the woman he was carrying as a rather impressive couple. None of them looked in good conditions and if she was being honest, it had frightened her a little bit.
"Herr" she called again, this time gaining Gorg's attention.
Almost completely.
When his head turned towards her, a tired face crossed with desperation and furrowed with tears was revealed in front of her. There was clear shock in the eyes of the man she was facing but he didn't seem to be looking at her, his mouth hung open wordlessly, and the focus of his eyes was lost somewhere behind her.
How long had he been there?
The waiting room didn't seem to be the one he had entered who knew how many hours ago. It was totally empty except for him, much less bright than before and religiously silent. He was almost ashamed to realize his frantic breathing and his sobs were the only sounds to be heard.
Then he noticed the face looking at him, a middle-aged face that had seemed rather cold at first sight but that now somehow felt quite kind in its traits.
"Yes?"
It was all he managed to utter after the sudden realization that she had been probably calling his name more than once.
He hadn't realized he had been so oblivious to what was happening around him.
"You- ... nothing" the woman breathed after a while, "is your wife still under surgery?"
Georg nodded wordlessly, words simply unable to come out his mouth.
If she was still in surgery, it must have been a long time.
"She will be alright" she smiled at him warmly
"Thank you, nurse".
A choked voice managed to utter something again as he smiled her back.
God, he hoped she would be alright.
The nurse turned and head off, feeling somehow involved in that situation. She had been working into that hospital for many years but never during her long career she had faced a case like theirs. She could literally read the pain and the desperation in his eyes, he must have held a love for her that went beyond any imagination, and she felt no one to tell such a devastated man to leave and separate from the woman he loved and was so concerned about. She simply didn't have the guts for it.
"Ah, nurse?" she turned her head to him aware that he could have been the only one to speak, "I wondered if it's too much to ask to make a call".
The woman stopped on her feet and sported a pensive expression on her face.
Normally, she wasn't the direct one to allow calls from people inside the hospital, but this was a request she couldn't deny. That gentlemen seemed quite dignified under his understandably devastated appearance and that convinced her that he wouldn't have asked if not for a very valid reason.
"There is a phone at the end of the corridor, just around the corner. Don't be too loud though, there are patients' rooms down there" she recommended.
Georg hadn't held much hope for it but now that he had been allowed to call, he felt a strange sense of guilt and embarrassment in dialling Raphael's number. From the tall windows in the waiting room, the darkness of the sky seemed to be so statuary that he couldn't tell whether it was very late at night of the first lights of dawn were about to appear.
Three in the morning.
The sound of a phone insistently ringing in the sitting room awoke both Raphael and his wife Carmen. The rest of the house was still asleep, too exhausted to allow any sound to pull them off their slumber. They were exhausted too but the lightness of their sleep seemed to have increased in the past few days so that they could intercept each of the children's needs whenever they would occur.
Carmen was the first to flick her lids open, closely followed by Raphael's that with an affectionate look invited her to go back to sleep as he took care of the matter.
It had been one of the stormiest nights the family had experienced.
Ever since their arrival in Paris the children had seemed to be doing fine, except for the occasional moments of disorientation, they would all find back their cheerful spirit under the good care and entertainment this new family was providing them.
But that night something had changed in their attitude and behaviour, Carmen noticing it especially when they had fallen completely silent at dinnertime despite having served the steaming apple strudel the seemed to adore for dessert.
Soon, the entire family had become aware of it once a copiously crying little Gretl rushed to her older sister for comfort. She was holding a doll between her hands, its hair half loose and the other halfway braided. Else and Luisa followed closely, confusion on their little faces as the reason behind the behaviour of their favourite child to play with remained a mystery.
"We were making her hair and then I couldn't remember how mother taught me to braid it anymore, I don't want to stop remembering her too" the little girl burst into tears again after she explained herself through her sobs.
Her words echoed in the minds of all the adults into the room and it felt as though a truth that had been hidden was dawning on them for the very first time.
Of course, it wasn't possible for them to forget Maria, those beautiful traits and her wonderful personality would have remained impressed into the mind of every lucky person that had the honour of meeting her, it was the idea of committing her to memory that was devastating them.
One day she was there wishing them goodnight and hugging them in her arms and the next her voice and her touch had become a memory that could only get inevitably fainter with time passing by.
It caused them all an acute bout of depression. A total breakdown.
Streams of hot teardrops soon began to run down each of their beautiful faces, the old couple's hearts squeezing at the sight of the poor children suffering for the umpteenth time through their short yet intense lives.
Where did they even begin to comfort them? No words could have been appropriate.
But where words couldn't get, music did.
It suddenly came to Raphael's mind that they had seven beautiful voices that would brighten up their spirits and keep alive and vivid as ever the thought of Maria.
Eventually it turned out they had been singing the entire repertoire of songs she had taught them throughout the night, the children falling asleep only when their throats were sore and their bodies too tired to shed other tears.
A relieved smile crossed his lips at the sight of them peacefully asleep as he passed by their room's door before going down the stairs and entering the sitting room.
His hand lifted the receiver with trepidation, no one but one person could've called him at this unthinkable hour.
"Hello?" the old man rasped, "Oh, Georg, thank Heavens. We have all been so worried about you. Tell me, did you find her?"
"Yes, Raphael"
"Please tell me she's alright"
".. no, Raphael".
No? What in the world was that supposed to mean?
His heart skipped a beat when he heard that negative word fill his ears and in the attempt of not jumping to conclusions, he pressed the receiver tightly to his ear, now so attentive to be able to hear Georg's laboured breath as he chose his words with a not too lucid care.
"Maria was ... unconscious and heavily bleeding when I- ... found her" his guts turning and his voice leaving him as his mind was forced to remember the moment he first saw her in those terrifying conditions.
Raphael remained silent at the other end of the phone, unable to process the sickening words he was being told.
"I had to bring her to the closest hospital where she's undergoing surgery. I'm calling you now from Widnau, Switzerland".
Still silence.
Not considering that such a news would have certainly worsened the children's situation even further, if possible, it totally devastated Raphael to be witness of such an inhuman attack from uncivilised people to the sweetest human being he knew.
"I am so sorry, Georg. The children were missing her particularly bad this evening …" he confessed, unaware of the effect it could take on Georg.
His words hit him like the bullet Zeller failed to shoot.
"I know, I'm sorry you'll have to explain them once they wake up" Georg spoke with sympathy, wishing he could explain them himself.
Or rather, wishing there was no need to explain at all. Because it would mean that she was fine and therefore, that so were they all.
"No Georg, telling them about Maria's conditions won't be harder than how it is for you. But keep me updated on her and the two of you. Georg?"
Raphael felt quite confused, the line had gone dead before he had even finished to speak. No point in minding about it though, if he had done that, there was probably a reason.
And, actually, there was one.
The sound of footsteps had inevitably attracted Georg's attention. There was a nurse approaching him, cards and papers busing her hands.
His hand hung the receiver back to its place.
His heart plunged once again into his stomach.
Hers was not a happy expression.
He quickened the pace of his steps to reach her as soon as he could, convinced Maria had been brough in the room whose door she had just closed.
When they stood in front of each other, Georg couldn't help but focus his eyes on the white door behind the woman, hearing her voice but totally unable to listen.
Not because he didn't want to but because he just couldn't think straight anymore. He mustn't have been more than a foot apart from Maria and seeing her was all that mattered to him, nothing could be more meaningful to him that very moment.
"Sir, your wife has be-" the nurse tried to speak despite his lack of attention
"Can I see her?" he interrupted.
A frow created between the brows of the young nurse, such an unpolite behaviour towards someone that had been working long hours under stress and pressure.
The older nurse, the one that had spoken to Georg earlier on, witnessed the scene. The nurse who was talking to him now was not the most patient of women and quite an unemotional one, it wouldn't have surprised her if the two ended up fighting in the middle of the night because of the incomprehension.
She approached her younger colleague and took her by the arm, bringing her away before nodding to Georg and allow him to enter Maria's room.
He pushed the door handle open and as soon as his eyes fell on her, he felt his heart burst with relief at her sight.
There she was, laying on the single bed, a hand hanging parallel to her bust, the other resting over the flatness of her stomach above the white covers keeping her warm.
Tears began brimming into his eyes again, blurring his vision, but his hands didn't make it to wipe them away gripping instead on the backrest of the chair next to her bed, as if he needed something to lean on and avoid falling to the ground for the miracle his eyes were seeing.
Now that he was closer to her, the sight of her breathing again, strongly and on her own, felt just like the most exciting of discoveries. Her chest expanded and dropped with her typical gentleness, mesmerizing him to the point that he kept staring at her simply breathing for several long seconds.
Simply.
Well, after risking her life for long straight hours, breathing was all but a simple thing.
A few more steps and he had reached her bedside, standing next to her and his head bowed down to the beautiful creature beneath him. His arm extended, his hand succumbing to the need to feel her against his palm again through a caress to her cheek, a feeling that he tried to asset, remember and treasure as if it was the first time. And it felt indeed like that – the softness of her skin, its natural and beautiful blush, the delicate veil of freckles that covered it – they were all things that he loved so much to both never forget them and yet never stop to be enchanted by.
She didn't have any kind of reaction at his touch, a soft smile crossing his wet and swollen lips as he realized it was because she was profoundly asleep, probably getting the peaceful rest she had been denied for so long.
Curling his fingers around the flap of the cover, he tucked her better beneath them, until they had reached her chin. Then he drew the chair as close to the bed as it would go and allowed himself to sit on it, perching himself onto the edge, at least that gave him a more comfortable position rather than spending the rest of the night standing up.
His elbows rested on his knees as his chin lowered onto his palms and now that he could look at her even more closely, he couldn't prevent himself from feeling a twist of his stomach when the focus of his eyes fell on her wrists, still red and bruised from the rope marks. He could see they were probably running up her arms too. He held out his hand and gathered hers into his palm, lifting it merely inches apart from the mattress as he leaned his head closer to it, his lips grazing over the backs of her slim fingers and pressing a deep kiss on her knuckles.
Tears soaked it as well, but he couldn't pay attention to it, all he needed was to keep holding her hand and never, ever let go. He had gone oblivious to whatever was going on around, now existed only she and him. His mountain girl and her Captain.
But the world around them kept spinning, living, breathing and observing as did the pair of eyes from the thin opening of the door. Silently, tearfully, the nurse was rejoicing in their happiness and couldn't help but stop and stare at the moment of reconciliation with that restlessly loving husband and his beloved wife.
Yes, they were in love beyond anything comprehensible.
Auhor's Note: Hello everyone, finally after long gruelling chapters there you have a happy ending. But, we're not anywhere near to the end of the story! Many things need to be sorted out, more fluff to come for our couple and a very relevant detail in store. So, I hope you enjoyed the first moments of their reconciliation and will be back to read what comes next. I'm looking forward to read your reviews and, I'll see you next week!