‘Oh, the kale’s come through nicely, all my lettuce too, especially since I put that rabbit-proof fence up, best investment I ever made. Now, to an untrained eye the peppers might look like a failure, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve to revive them.’ And there he is, animated as ever, same old Dad.
We chat for a while longer about nothing of consequence, which is everything to me, and when I say goodbye, I feel calm enough to face driving home, to deal with Sam’s disappointment in me.
When I get back, Sam is sitting up waiting for me. He looks tired, his face drawn. As soon as I’m in the house, he jumps up and strides over to me, pulling me into a hug. At first, I tense, but then I let myself relax into him. After the day I’ve had, I want nothing more than to be comforted by him, by his strangely familiar smell.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he says into my hair, and now I feel horrible for not being more sympathetic. I’ve been mourning my lost life, was in bed for days, of course Sam must be allowed to mourn for his lost wife too.
‘It’s okay, I understand,’ I whisper back.
When he lets go of me, he starts pacing the room, talking rapidly. ‘I know you said you didn’t want to hear it all at once, and I didn’t want to tell you before because I thought you’d remember soon enough anyway. Then it felt too cruel to bombard you, especially seeing how you reacted to the news of Zoya.’ I look across at him, but he can’t meet my eye now. ‘But you not knowing . . .’ He trails off, shaking his head.
‘Something worse than Zoya?’ I ask, feeling a rising bile in my throat as Sam walks over and takes both my hands in his.
‘We had another daughter. Her name was Chloe.’ Whatever I was expecting him to say, it was not this. Sam leads me over to the sofa, his face haunted with emotion.
‘Tell me,’ I say.
‘She was born two years after Felix. She was so perfect, Luce. We were both besotted with her. We were with Felix, too, but he had feeding issues, you had a difficult birth, his was a stressful beginning. Chloe came out smiling, this tiny Zen Buddha. But then the doctors said she was too docile, wheezing, they thought she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.’ I grip his hands tighter, feeling the pain in every word. ‘She had a heart defect. It hadn’t been picked up on the scans. They wanted to wait to operate, for her to be bigger, stronger. But then suddenly there wasn’t any time and it had to happen fast.’ He pauses. ‘She was so tiny, Lucy.’
We had a baby who died. This feels too surreal. I have no idea what to say, so I just sit beside him and let him go on. ‘She got an infection after the operation; it was antibiotic resistant. There was nothing they could do.’
‘I’m so sorry, Sam. How awful,’ I say, reaching for his hand, but he flinches and I sense I’ve said the wrong thing. I knew I would say the wrong thing.
‘I wanted to tell you at the right time, but there never was one. How do you tell someone the worst thing that’s ever happened to them? But then you not knowing, it’s been weighing on me in ways I can’t really describe.’
He walks over to the other chair and picks up a shoebox that’s been sitting there, waiting for me. ‘Chloe’ is written on the top in a gold pen. He hands it to me, and I open the lid. It’s full of photos of a baby; me and a baby, Sam and a baby, Felix as a toddler, holding the baby in a beige hospital chair, a hospital tag with her name and birth date stapled to the first page. There’s a pillowcase, embroidered with the name Chloe, just like the pillows in the playroom that say ‘Felix’ and ‘Amy’. There’s also a framed photograph of me holding her.
‘That was on the mantelpiece, I moved it.’
What can I say? What can I possibly say? I stare down at the photos in my lap, at my own face – tired, with sweaty, lank hair, but eyes full of such joy, holding that tiny baby in my arms. It feels like looking at a long-lost sister I never knew I had. My heart bleeds for her, for Sam too, but that is not me, that is not my child, not my sorrow.
Sam leans forward, an elbow on his knee, then covers his eyes with one hand. It’s as though he needs to get it out, but he can’t look at me.
‘Amy came along, we were both so grateful, but I think about Chloe all the time. It still feels like someone is missing. I’ll watch Felix riding his bike and think, Would Chloe be riding a bike by now? Or Amy will fuss about wearing green, because she hates green, and I’ll wonder what Chloe’s favourite colour might have been. I know you had the same kind of thoughts because we often talked about it.’ Sam takes a long breath, finally dropping his hand. ‘I don’t know how to feel about you not remembering her. It’s something we’ve always carried together.’ He presses his palms into his eye sockets. ‘These last few days, you’ve got this lightness back, a kind of child-like exuberance, as though nothing bad has ever happened to you. But I feel guilty for enjoying it, for wanting to keep this from you. On Saturday, it felt like we were thirty-one again, having a fun first date, all the heavy stuff, the day-to-day stuff, erased. But I don’t want to erase Chloe. I wouldn’t want her never to have existed.’ He pauses, reaching for my hand. ‘It changes you, something like that.’
He closes his eyes, leaning forward, his face now in his hands. The memory box slipping to the sofa beside me. I had a child who died, and I don’t remember her. A baby, who grew inside me, whom I birthed and named and held and loved, and it feels impossible not to remember, but there isn’t even a glimmer of recollection. Nothing. Even the name is alien to me. Instinctively, I put a hand to my stomach, feeling for some distant echo of a life lived there.
‘What’s wrong?’ A voice at the door, and we both look up to see Felix in his pyjamas standing in the doorway.
‘We were just thinking about Chloe, buddy.’
‘Oh,’ says Felix, and there’s so much in that ‘oh’. Felix lost a sister, lived through his parents’ grief. I might never come close to understanding what this family has been through.
‘It’s okay,’ says Sam, walking over to pull Felix into a hug, then kissing his forehead. ‘I’m happy and sad when I think about her. Are you okay?’
‘I had a bad dream,’ says Felix.
‘Come on, I’ll tuck you back in.’
Sam gives me a rueful smile as they head back upstairs. He knows he’s dropped something huge on me, that there is no answer, no quick fix. No wonder I feel nothing like his wife. The road she has travelled, I can’t even begin to imagine.
Opening the box again, I pick up the embroidered pillowcase and lift it to my nose, hoping for the scent to unlock an unconscious memory. Chloe. Chloe. There is nothing.