‘Night.’
Worries about the rings under her eyes consumed me all evening. Peter was as subdued as I was. Since I had told him what I had said to Rosie in the heat of the moment, he had seemed distant and disconnected. We didn’t talk properly and we made the unusual decision to eat supper in front of the television.
Before bed, I read through my emails in preparation for tomorrow.
When I finally sank into my pillow, my eyes blinked into the dark.
A memory of Rosie and me driving together last autumn came to me. We were alone, just the two of us, possibly on the way to a play date or a party. As we wound through the countryside, Rosie had jumped up in her seat excitedly and pointed, ‘Look, Mummy, oh wow, did you see that?’ Expecting something extraordinary or outlandish, I asked her what she had seen. She was full of wonder. ‘The wind blew into that big tree and there were hundreds of shiny leaves raining down like sparkles. Oh, it was beautiful, Mummy,’ she had sighed.
Whenever I saw trees shedding leaves in autumn, I thought of Rosie’s face lit up and how she had seen sparkles.
I would suggest a walk this weekend through the woods. The trees were bare at this time of year, but the leaves were still thick on the ground.
I had to sleep now.
My legs were twitching, restless. While my eyes were tired, my body had other ideas. It wanted to keep me awake, knew I needed to think.
It became torturous to lie in the dark with my thoughts churning through my head. I struggled on, replaying my argument with Rosie on a loop, eyes dry as I blinked into the dark.
Peter whispered, ‘Gemma.’
‘What’s up?’ I mumbled, pretending to be sleepy.
Peter turned over to face me, ‘Are you awake?’
‘I am now.’
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘I’ve got a busy day tomorrow,’ I yawned, turning away from him. I couldn’t bear the thought of talking to him about Rosie and our row. He had been so angry with me when I had confessed to the monumental slip-up.
He was silent. His breathing heavy.
‘Can I just ask you something?’
‘Go on then.’
I lay on my back and waited. There was silence for quite a few minutes before he formed the question.
‘What if we told Rosie the truth properly?’
‘No.’ My tongue felt thick in my mouth.
‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting up and bending over his knees as though he was about to throw up.
‘I know I really screwed up, but we just have to ride it out. She’ll settle when she realises nothing’s changed.’
Peter brought his body next to mine. ‘Remember how you used to read stories to your bump?’
‘She loves books now, doesn’t she,’ I replied quietly, grateful to him for reassuring me when I hadn’t asked for it. I turned to face him with my knees pulled up to my chest under the duvet.
‘And you breastfed her and nurtured her and loved her all these years, all of her life. You are all she has ever known. How much more real can a mother be?’
The answer to that question was too blatantly obvious to say out loud without undoing all of his kind-hearted words.
‘Sometimes I wish I knew what Kaarina had been like as a child,’ I said simply.
After three months of searching through donors’ files, having gained access codes to numerous clinics’ websites, we had found Kaarina Doubek, the dark-haired, blue-eyed 24-year-old medical student from the Czech Republic who wanted the 5000-euro fee for a solo cycling trip across Morocco and a deposit for a flat, whose grandparents on both sides had lived into their nineties, whose hobby was jazz piano, but who admitted to being a terrible cook and very lax about tidying her bedroom. After which she had included about ten exclamation marks and a smiley face. I had liked how open and funny she had been, while many donors barely got beyond their measurements and flattering photographs.
Peter turned onto his back. ‘Does it matter where she gets it from?’
‘You seemed to think so the other day.’
‘I was just over-worrying.’
‘But now Rosie’s older... I don’t know... certain traits of hers, I’ve started wondering... you know?
‘Her intelligence and wit come from me obviously,’ he quipped, clearly trying to keep it light, frightened of what we were opening up.
‘On paper, Kaarina was very smart. And so is Rosie.’
‘And we’ve always believed it’s more about nurture than nature.’
‘I don’t know anymore,’ I admitted.
Peter’s face was shrouded in the darkness of the room. If the moonlight had reached him, I wondered what I would have seen.
Kaarina had not been Peter’s first choice. He had been in favour of a very beautiful six-foot-tall mathematician with a passion for flower arranging and blonde hair, similar to Peter’s.
His main gripe with Kaarina Doubek was that she had opted not to meet the donor recipient or the child in the future. I knew this was not going to be a problem for me. If we were not going to tell our baby that he or she was not genetically mine, then we would never need to meet Kaarina.
After some arguing, we had eventually rejected the mathematician based on her size-eight shoe size, and both of us had fallen about laughing and then had rampant sex, releasing the tension of our search.
‘Well, Rosie’s temper definitely comes from you,’ he snorted now.
‘It’s easier for you,’ I shot back sharply, proving his point.
‘Believe me, none of this is easy for me.’
‘Do you remember that photograph of Kaarina in her file?’
‘No,’ he sighed.
‘The one of her when she was a teenager?’
‘I think so.’
‘Rosie looks just like her in that photo.’
‘I’ve forgotten what she looked like.’
‘Come on, Peter!’
‘You shouldn’t have asked me to burn everything if you wanted me to remember what she looked like.’
I shuddered. I longed to see the photograph of Kaarina again now, to see into her eyes again, into her soul maybe. In my head, her face had morphed into an angry grimace, just like Rosie’s when she was having a tantrum.
‘Rosie and Noah look more and more different by the day.’
Peter pushed himself up and put his hands behind his head. ‘Do you think we would’ve told Rosie sooner if Noah hadn’t have come along?’
I stared at the moon shadows on the wall. ‘Who knows.’
‘We should have sued that bloody doctor.’
I thought of Dr Drummond’s box of tissues on the mantle and his sad smile.
‘You know Pattie and John Ambrose?’
‘From New Hall?’
‘They had four unsuccessful rounds of IVF and then got pregnant naturally with Toby after they’d given up all hope. There’s no rhyme or reason to it sometimes.’
‘No wonder they’re broke.’
‘They’re blessed. We were blessed.’
‘And we got lots of brand new linen out of it,’ Peter retorted. Always a joke from Peter. But I didn’t feel like laughing.
‘We needed those new sheets.’
‘You spent three grand we didn’t have on Egyptian cotton.’
‘When Dad legged it with Jill, Mum painted all the bathrooms pink.’
‘I got off lightly then.’
‘I was just giving you a three-grand taster of all the bills to come,’ I laughed half-heartedly, referring unnecessarily to the expense of the IVF treatment and egg donation for Rosie’s conception.
The thought of the high price of that clear-out gave me palpitations, just as it had when I had handed my credit card over to the shop assistant, only an hour after the unsparing consultation with Dr Drummond. I did not want to think about that shopping binge, or that linen cupboard. I did not want to think about how I had wanted to drench every old sheet I ripped out from the cupboard in my tears, but how I was unable to find even one tear to grieve for the child Dr Drummond had told me I would never have.
‘Making Noah was loads cheaper, that’s for sure,’ Peter snickered, snuggling closer.