‘Yes.’
‘Why on earth would Iwantyou to be pregnant?’
‘So I’d be more dependent on you. So I’d be bound to you. You’d have made me have it, ruined my life more than you’ve already ruined it.’
‘No wonder you’re angry at me.’
‘Angry?’ I am swaying a little, dizzy with my rage and the open cabinets of butterflies, their jungle colours, their bright, dead wings. ‘Anger doesn’t touch how I feel about you.’ I am panting now, the exertion sending spasms of pain through me, I wrap my arms round my stomach, try to stop the vibrations.
He reaches for me in the broad light of his living room. If I’d let him, he’d press me against the soft linen of his shirt, it flickers through me for an instant, what it would be like. But it’s just a trick of time, a memory of my fourteen-year-old self, already slipping away. I step back. ‘Don’t.’ Then, it’s time. Time to put everything together. ‘You still haven’t figured it out, have you? Why I’m hurting?’
He looks at me for a long time in a way I can’t read. But when he finally speaks, I understand it is a terrible pity. ‘It’s your husband, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘He’s hurting you.’ His right leg is shaking, he looks at it like it doesn’t belong to him, like he might not be able to control what he’s about to do. ‘He hits you, doesn’t he? That’s why you’ve run away. That’s why you came when you got my letter.’
Then I wonder if Daniel has heard a word of what I’ve been saying or if I am nothing more than an embellishment to a story he’s telling himself. Because no matter where I take him or how many times I try to explain, nothing has dissuaded him from believing thatanotherman’s hurt me,anotherman is dangerous, when he’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever met.
‘Daniel,’ I say slowly. ‘Kit has never laid a finger on me.’
He squints at me, disbelieving.
‘It’s my baby,’ I say, and it feels like I am in a building seconds after it’s been bombed, watching the blast ripple through the bricks, the roof cave, I’m about to be buried alive. ‘I lost my baby.’
‘What?’
‘I had a stillbirth,’ I say and then I hate myself, hate that I know the precise term, the precise definition, I shouldn’t know this, no one should know this. How many babies has this happened to, how many mothers for language to press together these two words? Why should vocabulary be such a testament of loss?
‘When?’
‘Four weeks ago.’ The row of beds flash across my retina. The blue paper curtains. The sound of the monitors.
‘I really believed in the beginning that everything would be all right, I was sure I was being silly, I was over-worrying, not counting the kicks properly, I was ashamed I was in the Maternity Assessment Unit, I thought I was wasting their time when there were other mothers, other babies who needed their help more than me. But Lucy, the midwife, she was so kind, she said, “You were right to come in,” and for once, I felt like I had a real maternal instinct, I might actually be a good mum. She hooked me up to the monitor. I knew instantly something was wrong, I could hear the sound of the monitor of the woman in the bed beside me, that regular, echoey swish, a sound mine wasn’t making. Lucy was unplugging me, ushering me into a private room, telling me I needed an ultrasound, a doctor. That’s when the panic set in. I called Kit, telling him he needed to come, he was on speakerphone when the doctor said the umbilical cord was constricted, the baby wasn’t getting enough oxygen. “We need to go,” the doctor said.’ My nails are in my palms, raising crescents of blood, and I don’tcare because it should hurt, there should be blood, when you’re telling something as appalling as this.
‘Later, I realised, “We need to go” was code, because the entire back wall was suddenly filled with nurses, doctors, midwives, they were getting me up, undressing me, pulling a hospital gown over my head, and I was crying, I kept saying over and over again, “Why is this happening, I don’t understand why this is happening?” But, after they injected anaesthetic into my spine, after they pulled the blue curtain over my ribs so I couldn’t see them cutting into me, or their expressions when they saw she was dead, I knew why it was happening. It was my fault. My body had turned on the baby, it had cut her off, killed her. It knew I was a bad mum; I couldn’t deal with her sister, I’d killed her sibling and, even though I kept it a secret, it was like every vessel in my body knew, every artery and vein, my fault, my fault, my fault. But also, yours.’
He is crying openly now but I am not. There are no tears left. I’ve cried them all for that tiny, clean baby they gave me, those small limbs, that new skin, still rose-coloured and warm. She looked like she was sleeping.
He says over and over again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and as I watch him weep into his hands, it occurs to me that I’ve accomplished what I set out to achieve. Because he can see it now – how the grenade he planted inside me eighteen years ago has finally gone off, all the people it’s obliterated – it’s enough. Call this off. Go home. But the loosening of my hate frightens me. Who would I be without it? It was my companion when I went home without my baby, my dearest friend as I lay crying in the greenhouse. I cannot let it go now. Will not.
‘Does your head still hurt?’ I say.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘You haven’t eaten anything, have you?’
‘Lauren—’
‘I’ll make you something.’
‘I really don’t—’
‘—Don’t worry. I know what you like.’
I go to the kitchen.
From: Kit McDermott