And then there was the screen, with the tadpole, and I felt your hand tighten around mine and you were thrilled, I know you were. There was your child, inside me, a human being who would come into our lives and who would never tell you that they hated you. A chance to start again. A chance to get it all right. You were happy in that moment. You were, Floyd.You were.
But there was no noise. No noise. I had never been pregnant before. I thought maybe the heart hadn’t been formed yet. Or that maybe it was my heartbeat that kept the tadpole alive. I didn’t know that even at this size—ten weeks along, the clinician said—there should be a heartbeat.How was I supposed to know?But you looked at the clinician as she moved the monitor around my belly, the smile fading from her face, and you said, “Is there a problem?” And she said, “I’m having a little trouble locating a heartbeat.”
And then I knew, too. I knew that there should have been a noise and that there wasn’t.
Your hand came away from my hand.
You sighed.
And it wasn’t a sigh of sadness. It wasn’t even a sigh of disappointment. It was a sigh of annoyance. A sigh that said,You couldn’t even do this properly, could you?
More even than the lost baby, that sigh virtually killed me.
After that you made it clear that this could be our chance to walk away from each other, no hard feelings. But you weren’t strong-minded enough just to end it and I took advantage of that. I lingered on, yes, I’ll admit that. I overstayed my welcome. I reverted 100 percent to the person I’d been before I was pregnant. I came to your house at your command for sex. I even moved in for a few months when they were doing the damp in my house. I knew you didn’t really want me there. “Have they said how much longer?” you’d ask. “The builders. Do you have a date yet?”
So I knew nothing had really changed and I didn’t pretend to lay any special claim to you and your time just because my womb had once hosted your tadpole.
And there was your terrible child, Sara-Jade, hating you and needing you in equal measure, confusing you and upsetting you, hitting you and spitting at you, then refusing to get off your lap for half an hour when you had things you needed to do. And there was my womb, touched so briefly by unexpected life, echoing with the unheard heartbeat of our dead baby. And I couldn’t make sense of it all.
You’d gone back to the condoms as I was clearly not to be trusted. So there would not be a baby for you and me, and I needed to accept that.
I tried really hard to accept it, Floyd. Really hard. I tried for two years. I turned forty-three. And then I turned forty-four. And then you started taking chances, thinking, probably, that I was all out of eggs, and one night you ran out of condoms and said, “Never mind, I’ll just pull out.”
Well, clearly you did not pull out fast enough or early enough and it happened all over again. I missed a period. I took a test. Two pink lines appeared. For three days I felt like I was sitting on the crest of a wave, the sun shining on my face, the wind in my hair, angels playing on harps wherever I went. I booked a scan, but this time I didn’t tell you: I could not have born the quiet room, the sigh of annoyance, the dropped hand. But before I could even make it to the clinic your baby had died and fallen out of me. A small bleed. I’d have thought it was a heavy period if I hadn’t taken the test.
I canceled the appointment.
I never told you about the second tadpole.
And it was that day, Floyd, it was that very day that I first went to the home of Ellie Mack. The same day your baby died inside me. I had to slap on a smile and a friendly disposition and sit in a room with a spoiled pretty girl and a hairy cat, surrounded by the paraphernalia of family life: the photos and the kicked-off shoes, the trashy paperbacks and the furniture all from Habitat no doubt, and I had to teach this spoiled pretty girl with a brain too big for her own good who already knew everything she needed to know when what I really wanted to do was sob and say,Today I lost another baby!
But I did not. No. I drank her mother’s lovely tea from a mug with the words “Keep Calm and Clean My Kitchen” on it. I ate her nice chocolate-chip biscuits made by Prince Charles himself. I taught her daughter a good lesson. I worked hard for my thirty-five pounds.
I felt calm when I left Ellie Mack’s house that evening. I walked the half-mile home and it was a cold, sharp evening, with drops of ice in the air that stung the backs of my hands. I walked slowly, relishing the darkness and the pain. And as I walked I felt this certainty build within me, a certainty that somehow it was all connected, the gone baby and the spoiled girl, that there was a conflation, that maybe one thing balanced out the other.
I got home and I didn’t call you or look at my phone to see if you had called me. I watched a TV show and I cut my toenails. I drank a glass of wine. I had a long, long bath. I let the water rush up between my legs, washing away the last traces of your baby.
And I thought of the girl called Ellie Mack, of her big brain and her perfect features, the honey of her hair tied so carelessly into a topknot, the socked feet tucked beneath her and elegant hands folded into her sleeves, the smell of her—of apples and toothpaste, of clean hair and girl—the keenness to learn, her gentleness, her perfection. She had a glow about her, a circle of light. I bet she never told her parents she hated them. I bet she never spat at them or pinched them or threw her food across the room.
She was quite, quite lovely and quite, quite brilliant.
And I have to confess, I became more than a little obsessed.
32
Later that day Laurel visits her mother, Ruby.
“Still here?” she asks, placing her handbag on the floor and slipping off her coat.
Ruby tuts and sighs. “L-L-L-Looks like it.”
Laurel smiles and takes her hand. “We drank a toast to you on Friday,” she says, “at the birthday party. We all missed you very much.”
Ruby rolls her eyes as if to saysure you did.
“We really did. And guess what? I met Bonny!”
Ruby’s eyes open wide and she puts her fingertips to her mouth. “W-Wow!”