Jessie waits for Bella to sharply correct the nurse, as she always does if anyone insults her by imagining Jessie is her real mother, but she just stares down at her feet, like someone who knows if they dare say anything they will cry.
“Yes, I . . . I am,” Jessie manages.
Bella scuffs her foot along the floor. Then she stands very still, very stern, pressed against the edge of Romy’s bed, eyes blankly pinned to Romy. And Jessie is thrown back to Romy’s bedroom in the midnight dark, Bella sleepwalking, that tall column looming over the toddler bed. She’d always found it so menacing—only now does it occur to her that it was protective, that Bella might have been watching over her little sister.
The nurse reassures Will that he can pop out for coffee and sandwiches, an excellent idea, since they’ll be here some hours yet. Reluctantly, Will leaves for the hospital café. The nurse is called away, leaving Jessie and Bella sealed behind the pale-green cubicle curtain watching Romy in anxious silence.
Bella’s mouth starts to contort and twitch. She stifles a sob. Jessie is unable to stand it any longer and gathers Bella tight in her arms. Bella doesn’t push her away. Something in her seems to go quite limp, and she buries her face against Jessie’s shoulder.
Jessie doesn’t want to let go. It’s the closest she’s ever physically been to her stepdaughter. She finds Bella’s scent—a sort of hormonal sweetness mixed with shampoo—and the feel of her flexible, lean body, the softness of her long hair, almost unbearably moving, and deeply comforting. It stirs up a confusing rush of maternal feelings.
With no warning, Bella pulls away hard, as if catching herself falling for a trick. “You were thinking of what happened in London, weren’t you? When you saw me and Romy by the pool?”
“Just for a moment.” Nothing can be hidden now, everything leveled by the terrible events of the day, the precariousness of Romy’s situation.
Bella sinks to the edge of the bed, something draining out of her. They listen to the beeping, Romy’s soft shallow breathing, the wails of the children’s ward. Then Bella says, “Just before it happened, that thing with Zizzi, we were in the changing rooms . . .”
It takes Jessie a moment to realize that Bella is talking about the incident at the pool in London, and she feels a sudden wave of trepidation about what she is about to be told.
“. . . and the other girls were chatting about the mothers’ and daughters’ school disco that night, this fund-raising evening that Zizzi was organizing. And Zizzi said to me . . . she said it in front of everyone, Jessie, that . . . that I’d have to borrow someone else’s mother if I wanted to get in.” Her cheeks blaze. “I know it sounds like a small thing to get upset about.”
“Oh, Bella. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I am so sorry. Why haven’t you ever told your dad this?”
Bella is silent a moment, cooling her cheeks with her palms. “I’m not sure. I just couldn’t for some reason. Maybe I didn’t want to make him sad about Mum again. Or think I wasn’t coping. I don’t know.”
“I’m glad you’ve told me.” She feels honored.
“I wanted to scare Zizzi.” To Jessie’s surprise, Bella opens up further. “I wanted to punish her. I was mad. So I held her down.”
“You did?” Jessie’s heart sinks.
“Yeah, I held her down really hard. And it felt good. It felt like I could punish Zizzi for everything that had happened to me.”
“Oh,” Jessie says weakly, refusing to judge her for it.
“But only for a second or two; then I came to my senses and I stopped. I swear. I let go. I waited for Zizzi to pop up and call me a bitch. But she stayed under, flapping her arms about, gasping, hamming it up for the lifeguard.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t try to drown her, Jessie. I’d have liked to, for a moment. But I didn’t. I dunked her, that’s all.”
Jessie doesn’t know what to say, her emotions scattered in all directions.
Her silence makes Bella’s eyes narrow, untrusting again. “Do you still not believe me?”
Jessie knows she cannot lie or sidestep this question, that to Bella it’s fundamental. After all, if Romy offered such an account, even if it was at odds with the lifeguard’s and the victim’s, wouldn’t Jessie believe her? And hasn’t she always said that she will treat the girls the same, or is the shameful, unsayable truth that she doesn’t, that Romy is hers and Bella is Mandy’s, that blood is blood? Is that it?
“I believe you, Bella,” Jessie says simply, but with all her heart.
It is very late when Romy is given an all clear by the doctor. Jessie and Will thank her profusely, tearfully. They ache for home. Outside, it is very cold, the sky a powdery starless gray. Bella tucks a blanket over Romy in her car seat. Romy smiles sleepily at this unexpected fussing by her big sister, then nods back to sleep.
Too shattered to talk, they drive silently out of the gritted town streets into the skiddy, treacherous country lanes. Hedgerows crouch against the car’s windows. Through the black slats of farm gates, Jessie glimpses snowy fields, desolate and strange. Falling flakes catch in the cones of the car’s lights, almost phosphorescent in the icy night air, like something from the ocean’s sunless depths. Jessie does feel submerged, still sealed off in the horror of the last few hours, no longer having anything in common with the busy, casual lives that exist on the surface. She twists in her seat, holds the warm loaf of Romy’s socked foot. Even though Romy is safe, and has shown no symptoms of secondary drowning, the anxiety is still within her. Perhaps it always will be, that heightened sense of danger: life can change in an instant, as it must have for poor Mrs. Wilde in the 1950s, the fear as primal, the stakes the same. This comes as a shock, a deadly blow to Jessie’s belief that bad things happen to other people. Will and Bella already know this, of course. She feels humbled by that now, foolish, too. And still, really, she has no idea of what they must have gone through. Because Romy survived, and Mandy didn’t. Romy was lucky; Mandy wasn’t.
So many things could have altered the fateful timing of the truck’s approach on the junction, Mandy’s spinning wheels—a delivery needing a signature on the doorstep, a punctured bicycle tire that Mandy would have cursed, unaware it had saved her life. Jessie wonders how Bella, so young, bears those what-ifs, and finds herself filled with a newfound respect for the exhausted pale girl resting her head on the window, eyes half-closed, as if still not feeling safe enough to sleep.
After taking the girls up to bed, Jessie and Will huddle in front of the fire, Jessie still in her dress, Will his shirt, looking like the two surviving guests from a party that has gone horribly wrong. Jessie recounts the conversation with Bella about Zizzi, and he nods numbly, his reactions delayed. Jessie knows he is elsewhere, that something about the hospital, the trauma, has taken him back to the accident.
“You’re not okay, are you?” she asks gently.