‘He’s been saying his ex turned up at his place when he got back from the party, that she was with him when Cassie was hit, but she’s not corroborating his story.’
I realise now is not the time to tell him about the pregnancy; he’s too exhausted. I want to think of an excuse to leave for a minute, to tell Sharma we have to wait until Jack’s slept before we tell him, but it’s too late. There’s a gentle knock at the door and Jack stops rubbing his temples and looks up as Sharma strides behind the desk to stand next to me, a large envelope under his arm. Jack stands to shake Sharma’s hand.
‘Mr Jensen,’ Sharma says, his face blank.
Jack nods his head, and I bite my lip as Sharma sits next to me. I move my chair a few inches away; I don’t want Jack to think we’re a double act.
‘Mr Jensen,’ Sharma repeats. Jack looks at him but his gaze is lazy, as though he doesn’t have the energy to focus.
‘Our test results show little change in Cassie’s condition at present. The swelling to her brain is, I’m afraid, still substantial and doesn’t appear to have decreased. That’s not to say it won’t, of course. Time will tell on that front.’ He sounds like a newsreader; enunciating every word, he talks with practised empathy. Jack just stares at him, still frowning, Sharma seems to interpret the silence as an invitation to continue talking, so he does.
‘There is another matter of some delicacy that has come to light during the course of our tests on your wife.’
Jack’s eyes flick from Sharma to me and back again to Sharma.
Sharma coughs gently before speaking. ‘Now, this may come as a shock but she is, it transpires, pregnant.’
It’s as though the words fly across the desk and sting him. Jack stands up immediately, to his full height. He’s a tall man; I hadn’t noticed before.
‘What did you say?’
‘She’s pregnant, Mr Jensen.’ Sharma opens the envelope and starts to slowly lay the scan images of the baby on his desk. Jack has his hand over his mouth. He starts moving recklessly around the room, turning in circles, as if we’ve trapped him in here and he’s desperate for a way out.
He stops suddenly and fixes his eyes on me. ‘Cassie’s pregnant?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘How … how many weeks?’
‘She’s twelve weeks.’
‘Jesus! Twelve weeks!’ He spits the words out like wasps. ‘Twelve?!’ he shouts.
‘Yes, Jack.’
He rests both of his large palms on the desk and hangs his head; he exhales long and heavy. I think he might be crying but he’s shaking his head as he looks at the images.
‘These are from a scan we did this morning, Jack. The baby is healthy and seems to be causing Cassie no extra stress.’
Jack squints at one of the images. The little bolts of the baby’s spine are visible and one of its hands floats in front of it; it could almost be giving a thumbs up.
‘No extra stress?’
‘Ms Longe, a senior consultant obstetrician, who you’ll meet, gave Cassie a thorough examination this morning,’ Sharma interjects. ‘From what we can see everything seems to be fine with the foetus and Cassie is naturally producing all the hormones needed to keep her pregnancy progressing. It does, of course, mean that we need to be more sensitive about the drugs we use for Cassie’s comfort to protect the foetus. We’re increasing her vitamin intake but, other than that, we don’t really need to do anything apart from let nature run its course.’
No one speaks for a moment or two. I stare at Jack’s dark head as he bends forward over the desk. When he looks up, his face is flushed under his two-day-old stubble, the capillaries on his cheeks full of blood. He looks directly at me. He’s picked up one of the scan pictures. He’s holding it so hard the edges crumple and fold towards each other. I want to tell him to be careful.
‘But … but why didn’t she say?’ He looks to me again for an answer.
‘Jack, many women don’t know they’re pregnant, even at twelve weeks.’ I want him to feel better.
Jack frowns, his eyes desperate. ‘She didn’t know she was pregnant, did she?’
‘That seems likely.’ I nod back at him, thinking the opposite.
He opens up his hand and the scan image floats like an autumnal leaf to the floor. He clutches clumps of hair between both his hands and looks at the image by his feet. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he says, and I feel Sharma bristle with every ‘fuck’.
Sharma stands up, opposite Jack. ‘We know this is a lot to take in, Mr Jensen, but you need to …’ Sharma is doing his two-handed ‘calm down’ gesture, stroking the air with his palms turned to the ground, but it doesn’t work on Jack.
‘Don’t tell me to calm down, Doctor, please. My wife is practically fucking dead and now you tell me there’s a living baby?’
He sits heavily in his chair and looks at both of us for a moment, his eyes still wild, as if we just punched him, and then he rakes his fingers through his hair, bows his head and howls into his hands.
An hour later, Jack and I are sitting in the family room with two styrofoam cups of hospital coffee in front of us. He takes a sip and winces.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘You think that’s bad, you should try the food.’
He nods his head with a tired smile. The rawness around his eyes accentuates the maple syrup brown of his irises; they’re flecked with gold flakes like frozen petals. It strikes me as improbable that such a practical part of anatomy could be so beautiful.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have got so upset earlier,’ he says.
‘Please don’t worry about that at all, it would be strange if you weren’t upset, all things considered.’
‘I told my mum, you know, about the baby. She burst into tears. She’s on her way in now.’
I nod. ‘It sounds like it’s a shock for you both.’ I want to hear Jack say neither of them knew about the baby, but he just nods in an absent way. He looks as if he’s trying to figure out how much to tell me. I smile and let him take his time to decide.
‘We’ve been trying for a baby since we got married just over a year ago. We used to talk the whole time about the kind of parents we’d be. Cassie had irregular periods and stuff so we knew it might take a little while. She was pregnant over the summer, you know; we had a miscarriage just two days before the scan. It was just one of those things the doctors said. I still can’t believe she didn’t know she was pregnant.’ Jack shakes his head and smiles in the same tired way again.
I feel a sisterly tug towards Cassie, as I always do when I hear a woman has had a miscarriage. I like how Jack uses ‘we’ when he talks about their miscarriage.
‘That’s so Cassie, though. She can be spontaneous, forgetful. She’d never keep a track of her periods and things. I think she got that from her mum. It drove me crazy sometimes but I still loved her for it.’ Jack takes a sip of his coffee and opens his eyes wide, as if trying to wake himself up, before he starts talking again.
‘To be honest, she’d been going through a bit of a rough patch just before the accident. She was frustrated with her painting, and not sleeping well. Sounds so stupid to say that now, doesn’t it?’