I start shredding the tissue between my fingers. The moment’s past; the warmth cools. It’s time for me to tell her the truth – this wise, kind woman, who seems to see the world in a way the rest of us miss.
‘I haven’t told David, my husband, yet, because I, we’ve, had a few miscarriages. Well, more than a few actually.’ I look up at her briefly; she’s looking straight into me. ‘Eight in total.’ I’m surprised how easy it is to say those words, those three little words, too neatly summarising the eight times hope ended in horror.
If Charlotte is shocked by the number, she doesn’t show it. She just nods her head evenly.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Alice.’
I nod. ‘We’ve had all the tests, of course; it’s a chromosomal abnormality. There’s nothing they can do. I’m thirty-eight. I had the last miscarriage last summer. I promised my husband we’d start thinking about alternative ways we could be parents. He thinks we’ve both had enough of trying to have our own. He was right, of course, and then just five days ago, I found out I was pregnant again.’
Charlotte doesn’t move her eyes off my face. ‘It reminds me of that saying, you know: you get what you want when you stop trying.’
She looks away from me for a moment. I can tell she’s thinking about Cassie, about her decision not to tell Jack about their baby.
She nods. ‘I can understand why you’ve decided not to tell your husband yet. How are you feeling?’
Suddenly my precious news seems to hang around us, too fragile in the stuffy air of this bland, windowless room. I can’t protect it any more; I feel the need to move, shift the space, lift the weight of what I just told her.
I stand suddenly. I feel Charlotte’s eyes on my back as I start busily gathering up the mugs from the meeting, putting them in the sink too hard. They chime against each other cheerlessly.
The thrill of telling Charlotte has passed. I’ll try and think of it as auspicious later but now I don’t want to talk about my pregnancy any more, not here where I’m more used to people dying than being born. Not yet, when David still doesn’t know. I turn the tap on hard, the stream of water rattles against the stainless steel sink.
‘I’m just keeping myself balanced and cautiously positive. We’ll see. Anyway …’ I remember one of my gynaecologists littered his sentences with phrases like ‘cautiously optimistic’ as I lay like a trussed turkey, my legs in stirrups on his table. My ‘anyway’ hangs in the air. I turn the tap off and start washing up our mugs.
Charlotte senses the change in me. She stands as well and glances at her watch. ‘Oh goodness, it’s almost eleven. I’ll just go and see Cas and then I’m meeting a friend to take Maisie for a walk.’ Charlotte gathers up her coat and bag.
‘You’re still looking after her?’ I ask, glad of the shift in conversation.
‘Maisie, yes, she’s with me at the moment. Jack’s got enough on and, to be honest, I think he finds it too hard to see her. She reminds him of Jonny, of everything that’s happened …’
Charlotte shifts her bag up to her shoulder. She comes towards me, squeezes my forearm in brief recognition of the moment we just shared, and she says she’ll see me tomorrow, before she leaves.
As the door clicks shut behind her I pull my dripping hands out of the sink, appalled with myself for not asking Charlotte to keep the news of my pregnancy to herself. I think about going after her, but then I remember her steady, calm eyes on me, the warmth of her hand on my back and I don’t think I need to worry. She won’t tell anyone.
There’s a pile of paperwork waiting for me at reception. I should start leafing through it, but first I decide to go and see Cassie.
I’m careful to draw the curtain around us as I sit in her visitor’s chair. Two weeks in this suspended place and her face is a colourless mask, her lips are slightly parted as if she fell asleep in the middle of an unfinished sentence. I’ve washed her hair three times now, but just a couple of days after the last wash, it already looks wilted. The cuts have healed on her arms, but her skin, now a light concrete colour, is dry and scaly. I’ll moisturise it later. Her hands are tight fists. I’ve curled her fingers around hand supports; even though I cut her fingernails the other day, there’s still a risk she could hurt herself. She has extra inflatable supports under her arms and legs to ease pressure points and avoid thrombosis; her bed has become a mini bouncy castle. The baby, now fourteen weeks old, is just visible under the sheets, a sweet molehill.
I move close towards Cassie’s head and look at the colourful display, like a dream of her former life, suspended just above her head. Either Charlotte or Jack have printed off the black-and-white photo of Cassie decorating the Christmas tree I saw on Facebook. It’s stuck at the bottom of her display, resting just above Cassie’s head like a halo. Cassie looks younger in the photo, her smile wide but slightly held.
I look at them both, Cassie in hospital and Cassie in the photo. She looks like two different people. I think of Jonny’s face when he came onto the ward. He had the nauseated, helpless look of someone who knows someone they love is in trouble. I look at the small hump of Cassie’s tummy again and think about all the whispering on the ward. Perhaps Cassie wasn’t protecting Jack from the possibility of another miscarriage; maybe she was hiding something else from him.
I hear him again; ‘She was scared.’
The memory of Jack howling when he found out she was pregnant echoes round my head. I stand back, away from her suddenly, stung by the realisation that I’ve been pulled into the lies myself. I feel vertiginous, unsure of the world suddenly, because the Cassie I thought I knew has disappeared, and the woman before me, this sleeping woman whose fate seems somehow inextricably aligned with my own, is a stranger to me and I know that to feel safe, for our babies to be safe, I have to know her. I have to find out who she really is.
14
Frank
It’s official! Lizzie has a new boyfriend! She told me as she gave me a bed bath this morning, her voice sliding high and low like a xylophone with joy. My eyes have been getting itchier over the last couple of weeks. I lie here like a plate of spoiling meat, willing Lizzie to pause, to notice my sore eyes, and perhaps get something cool to soothe them, but she didn’t look at me for long enough. She was too busy telling me about her new boyfriend, about Alex. It happened in the late January Ikea sales. Apparently, Lizzie likes to take prospective boyfriends to Ikea as a stress test. She told me about him as she soaped my starved skin. I’d listen to her all day, listen to whatever she wants to say, so long as she keeps wiping my skin with exquisite warm water.