What's Yours Is Mine, page 14
The Mays serve tea and digestive biscuits—plain, not chocolate—while the boys rush back and forth from their bedrooms with treasures and photos and pictures they’ve drawn for me. Eventually, Mr. Mays tells them to go out and play in the garden while we “get to know one another.”
“Your sister tells me you plan to return to America soon,” Mrs. Mays says, as soon as the boys have left.
“Actually,” I say, with a quick glance at Grace, “I’m thinking about staying now. For a bit anyway. I’d like to get to know the boys properly. If that’s OK with you, of course.”
“It’s not up to us,” Mr. Mays says tightly. “If the boys want to see you, I’m sure the social workers will arrange it. Maybe we can make it once a month to start with. We don’t want to rush things until we know for sure how it’s going.”
Until we know you’re going to stick around.
“I’d like to see them a bit more often than that,” I say firmly. “I want to be a proper part of their—ohhh!”
“Zee?” Grace says excitedly. “Was that the baby again? Did it move?”
“Baby?” Mrs. Mays says sharply.
I’m too stunned to even speak. My belly feels as if it’s being crushed in a vise. A thousand red-hot knives are stabbing my lower back. Black spots dance in front of my eyes. I can’t breathe for the pain.
“Grace,” I whisper, “I think … ambulance …”
And then I pass out.
{ CHAPTER FIFTEEN }
Catherine
I can’t put my finger on what tips me off. Call it a mother’s intuition, but when Tom comes home just a little too early three times in the same week, I know instinctively something’s wrong.
Grace is too wrapped up in her baby obsession to spare a thought for the child’s father. No doubt her single-mindedness is what’s helped her achieve such success in life. But when applied to family and relationships, the reverse is true. She always was a selfish child.
I tell her as much, when the worm turns and Tom finally dares to stand up to her one night. Obviously I don’t make a habit of invading the privacy of their marital bedroom—it goes without saying I absent myself when they have relations—but I’m her mother. I have a right to know what’s happening in her life. Lord knows, if I waited for Grace to confide in me, Hell would freeze over.
I don’t mean to intervene, but Tom is absolutely right when he calls Grace high maintenance, and I’m sorry, but I just can’t keep quiet. Grace is a difficult person to love, as I make no bones about telling her. She gives nothing back. It makes it so hard for anyone to know her.
I watch her pull the shutters down on Tom, just as she always has on me. Even as a small child, Grace was a closed book. If you chastised or rebuked her, she wouldn’t cry or throw a tantrum the way Susannah did. Instead, her eyes would go blank and opaque, and I’d know she was simply shutting me out. Trying to reach her was like hitting a sponge for all the lasting impact I made. There were times when her self-control and composure almost made me fearful. I told David: it wasn’t natural.
The summer Grace was sixteen, when she was right in the middle of her O levels, I nearly died. It started with a bad headache that simply wouldn’t go away, and when I awoke with my temples pounding for the third morning running, I took rather more aspirin than usual on an empty stomach, and suddenly started vomiting. The spasms were so violent they tore a hole in my esophagus, and I began to hemorrhage, passing out on the bathroom floor before I could even call for help. I was literally choking on my own blood. If David hadn’t come home from work to collect a forgotten briefcase, I would have died. The doctors said later that another fifteen minutes, and it would have been too late.
Naturally David kept the details from the girls, fobbing them off with stories of tummy bugs and flu, but the mere fact that I was in the hospital was enough to shock Susannah to the core. There were tears, angry outbursts at school, and nightmares that persisted long after I came home.
Grace got straight A’s in all thirteen of her exams.
No child should be that detached. Her mother was hovering between life and death, and all she could think of were ox-bow lakes and French verbs. As usual, David defended her. He said Grace had learned to shut down to protect herself; he even blamed me. As if it was my fault Susannah needed so much of my time and attention!
David sees self-sufficiency as a strength, which I suppose it can be. But no man—or woman—is an island, as Grace is discovering now. She’s having to rely on Susannah, which can’t be easy for someone as controlling as she is. She’s learning a very important lesson. I was very much against this baby enterprise at first, but the Lord works in mysterious ways.
A much-chastened Grace fusses around Tom the morning after their row, and I expect him to glow with triumph and lap up the attention. However, he’s just as preoccupied and distracted as ever. Clearly, regardless of whatever the two of them resolved last night, Grace isn’t the source of Tom’s malaise after all.
My son-in-law is a straightforward, uncomplicated man. If the problem isn’t his wife, it must be his work. Which means that’s where I need to go next.
It’s not that I’m nosy. I’ve never been the type to interfere in anyone’s business. But clearly I’m here for a reason. It might seem there’s not much I can do to help, given I’m little more than a ghost—and one lacking in the traditional ghostly gifts, such as rattling chains—but I’ve learned over the past few months that I can make myself heard and nudge things along rather effectively at times. Lord knows where Susannah and Grace would be now without me to pour oil on troubled waters.
But I can’t read minds. I need Tom to articulate his problem aloud. Since he’s little given to talking to himself—unlike Susannah, who is revelatory in the shower—I have to hope he’s a little more forthcoming with his colleagues. If he doesn’t unburden himself to someone, I may be condemned to follow him around for a very long time.
The Monday after his run-in with Grace, I trail him to the railway station, feeling like a sleuth in a penny dreadful. I wish I could feel the cool morning sun on my skin as he does. Living in the world but not of it is the hardest aspect of my strange situation. I can neither touch nor be touched. When I bend to my favorite sweet peas, their scent is lost to me. The nights I spend with David, in our bed, unable to comfort him or be comforted, are by far the hardest I have ever known.
I’m not easy traveling without a ticket, but console myself with the fact that at least I’m not occupying a seat. Tom spends the journey staring out the window, his newspaper unread. Fortunately, the train terminates at Paddington, or I think he’d miss his stop altogether.
His mood grows more morose as we take the Tube to Fulham Broadway and then walk down Fulham Road to the Princess Eugenie Hospital. I knew it. Wife or work.
Tom swipes his ID at the hospital entrance, and slopes—there’s no other word for it—inside. Instead of leading us to a grim, cramped office somewhere, as I expect, he takes the lift up to the fifth floor, and turns right, towards the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Once more, he stops and runs his ID through the security pad, then squirts antiseptic gel on his hands from the dispenser on the wall, and pushes the Plexiglas doors open with his shoulder. I follow him as he strides down the corridor, nodding curtly at nurses and doctors as he passes. No one questions him, or offers assistance. Clearly this visit is not just unremarkable, but routine. I wonder why this should be, given that as chief of pediatric anesthesiology, his job must rarely bring him up to the NICU.
At the end of the corridor is a viewing gallery, on the other side of which are about eight or ten Perspex incubators, each surrounded by monitors and heat lamps and whatnot. All but two or three are occupied by tiny babies barely visible beneath the wires snaking in and over their little bodies. I wonder where their souls are while they lie trapped and unconscious like this. I can’t bear to think of them wandering alone and lost, as I am.
Tom taps smartly on the glass. A doctor seated next to one of the incubators looks up. She has wild Titian curls like rusty bedsprings pinned haphazardly on top of her head with a pencil, and extraordinary eyes.
The woman mouths “Five minutes!” to Tom before returning her attention to the little mite in the incubator. Tom smiles and relaxes against the window, his arms folded, not taking his eyes off the woman.
So that’s how it is. I can taste my disappointment. I didn’t expect this of Tom; Tom, of all people. Safe, comforting, predictable Tom.
The door opens, and the redheaded doctor gives Tom a warm hug. I don’t want to witness this sordid little scene any longer. I would rather think myself anywhere than here. I don’t know what I expected to discover when I followed Tom, but I’m hard put to think of anything worse than this.
I turn to leave, and then, for a fraction of a second, I hesitate.
When I hear what Tom says next, I’m glad I stayed.
“GRACE IS RIGHT,” Susannah muses, lolling against the end of my hospital bed. “I do bloody look like you.”
Actually, she doesn’t. I haven’t seen my daughter look as pretty as this since she was about fourteen. The piercings have gone, the tattoos are covered, and her lovely strawberry-blond hair hangs to her waist in a smooth loose sheet. She doesn’t look at all like me. She looks like a princess.
She comes around the foot of the bed and perches on the edge next to my still body. “We’re on our way to see Davey and Donny,” she says. “I’m fucking terrified, Mum.”
I stroke her cheek, though of course she can’t feel me. “Oh, darling. There’s no need. It’ll be fine.”
“Grace didn’t want me to go,” she says. “I think she’s a bit ashamed about the boys being in care. It must kill her that I’m even going to be related to the kid.”
She tucks my cold hand beneath the covers, and smoothes my hair back from my face, as gentle as if she was the parent and I the child. They’ve cut my hair short; to help with my care, I suppose. Hard for the nurses to wash it, given that I’m trapped in my bed, tethered to machines. It’s gone very gray since I’ve been in here. I look very old.
“She thinks I’m scared the boys won’t like me,” she adds, picking fretfully at her nails. “She’s right, but that’s not the worst bit. I figure I can take it if they get mad. I’d flip out, if I was them. I mean, I left. I don’t mind if they yell. I think it might make it a bit easier, actually.”
I ache to put my arms around her. Susannah could have made a good mother if she hadn’t been born in Grace’s shadow. Of the two of them, she’s the one I thought would have the happy marriage, the nice home, the car full of children. Grace was the most undomesticated child imaginable. She hasn’t earned a family life.
Susannah gets up and paces restlessly towards the window. “What if I don’t like them, Mum?” she says hoarsely. “What if I see my boys again and nothing happens? I don’t feel anything? What do I do then?”
Her hand shakes as she pulls out a cigarette and lights it, in contravention of every rule. I wish I could tell her there’s no need to worry. I wish I could tell her the real irony: that Grace’s biggest fear, the dread that has her tossing and turning all night, and waking before dawn, drenched in sweat, the real reason she didn’t want Susannah to see her sons is precisely the reverse of what Susannah fears: Grace is deathly afraid Susannah will love her sons. She’s frightened her sister will want to reclaim her boys, and put her family back together.
I wish I could tell her that Grace is too terrified even to ask herself the question that must come next, the one that’s been consuming her for weeks: what if Susannah wants this baby back, too?
LESS THAN THREE hours later, I’m with her when she collapses at her sons’ house. I don’t leave her side as the ambulance races her to the nearest Emergency Room, which just happens to be at the same hospital where my useless body is lying. We are only one floor apart.
I can’t even bear to look at my other daughter as she harangues the triage nurse and demands that Susannah is seen now!
This is Grace’s fault. She was the one so insistent on having it all, the one who dragged Susannah into this nonsense, this stupidity. Another baby, after all we went through last time! But Grace doesn’t know how sick Susannah’s previous pregnancies made her, because she wasn’t there to see it. She was too busy being the successful high-flying career girl who made Daddy proud. Susannah didn’t tell her, because she doesn’t want to admit that having babies isn’t quite as easy for her as she pretends. She chooses not to remember that after Donny was born the doctors told her that another child might kill her.
Grace creates so much furor that Susannah is taken straight into an exam room, but I don’t fool myself that she’s doing it for her sister. Her anxiety is all for the baby. Susannah is conscious now, but her skin is the color of sour milk, and her lips are blue. She won’t let go of Grace’s hand.
A nurse comes in to set up an IV, because Susannah is dehydrated and they’re worried about the baby. As soon as she sees the needle, Susannah recoils, shaking so much the nurse can’t begin to find a vein.
“Come on, Zee,” Grace says. She takes her sister’s jaw lightly between her thumb and forefinger, and turns her face away from the nurse. “Never mind her. Look at me. Do you remember when I used to ring the doorbell to make you think the shot nurse had arrived?” she says cheerfully. “You screamed the place down. I couldn’t believe you got so upset.”
Susannah grimaces as the nurse finally finds a vein, but doesn’t flinch. “Mum made such a fuss when she found out it was you. God, she was overprotective. I was fucking glad you teased me. It made me feel a bit more bloody normal.”
That’s not how I remember it.
“I still feel a bit bad about it,” Grace says.
“Well, there’s no need. You must have got really sick of me being ill all the time. Do you remember when Mum forgot your birthday? And you never said a word, you just got on the train and came and brought me a piece of cake the next day?”
Grace sighs. “Mum made a fuss about that, too.”
The nurse moves the IV pole to the head of the bed, and then whisks the curtain shut around us. Susannah closes her eyes again. Her face is swollen and filmed with sweat. I’m so angry with Grace, I could scream.
“How are you feeling?” Grace asks, after a few moments.
“Like shit,” Susannah mumbles, without opening her eyes.
Grace snatches the curtain back open. “Where’s the damn doctor? I told them you’re pregnant. They should be prioritizing you! You need an ultrasound. There might be a problem with your placenta, it could be pre-eclampsia, early labor, you could bleed out or—”
“Stop panicking, Grace. My water hasn’t broken, and I’m not bleeding. I’m sure the baby’s fine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Look at you! Your skin is yellow! You collapsed, Zee. How can I not panic?”
“I told you, the baby—”
“Never mind the baby for a minute,” Grace says fiercely. “I’m talking about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
She waits another ten minutes, and then marches back out to the front desk. Within another twenty, a doctor has been to tell us what Susannah and I already knew, but is news to Grace: Susannah’s kidneys are failing. She was born with only one functioning kidney; the other was shriveled and useless, a dried prune instead of a full, ripe plum. The good kidney wasn’t even that good: only one half was properly healthy, and instead of one tube draining into the bladder, she had two, both of them too narrow to do the job properly. It worked well enough until she got pregnant the first time, and then the growing baby pressed on the tube and blocked it, forcing toxins to back up in her body. Davey was born six weeks early, and Donny was nearly eight weeks premature. Each time, it gets worse. Susannah isn’t even halfway through this pregnancy. If the antibiotics don’t work, if the doctors can’t jump-start her kidney into working, they’ll have no choice but to put her on dialysis until the baby is born.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Grace demands, when the doctor has gone. “How could you offer to do this when it was going to make you so ill?”
“I wanted to,” Susannah says thickly. “It’s not that bad. I wanted to give you a baby.”
Grace picks up her bag. “I’m getting you a private room, I don’t care what it costs. You’re not going on some Crimean mixed ward. I’ll be back in a while.”
Susannah nods wearily. She waits until Grace has left and she is all alone, and then turns her face into her pillow. Her shoulders shudder, and I realize she’s crying. “Oh, fuck. What the hell have I done?” she groans, her voice muffled by the pillow.
Even though I know it’s pointless, I sit on the bed next to her and smooth her hair back from her forehead, reversing our roles from just a few hours ago. “Please don’t cry, sweetheart,” I soothe. “It’s going to be OK.”
Suddenly she twists away from me and flings herself violently onto her back, nearly pulling out her IV. Her eyes are unexpectedly dry and hard. “I have to keep this baby,” she says furiously, her fists clenched by her sides. “I’m going to keep it. I have to keep it.”
“It’s OK, darling,” I repeat. “You’re not going to lose it. You got to the hospital in plenty of time. They’ve got you hydrated again, and the doctor said the baby’s heartbeat is strong. They’ll do an ultrasound tomorrow to make sure. You mustn’t worry. The baby will be fine. You’re going to keep it—”
And then I realize what she meant.
{ CHAPTER SIXTEEN }
Grace
Tom begins, as he so often does, by kissing my face and stroking my breasts. It’s not that it isn’t nice, or that I don’t enjoy it. It’s just that it’s how he always begins these days.
