Dear Jess,
I hope you got the card and flowers I sent. I was so thrilled to hear from Mum about the safe arrival of Mia. It’s such a beautiful name and I’ve no doubt she’s a beautiful baby. I hope you’re OK and that motherhood is everything you thought it would be. I suspect these first few weeks will be tiring and probably a little overwhelming, but I’m sure you’re doing a wonderful job.
As you probably know from Mum, my baby’s due in just over six weeks – a little girl too. It’s so strange to think of us both having our first child at the same time. Two little girls, two young cousins. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could be friends?
It’s been four years now, Jess. Longer if I think about how little you spoke to me when I was still living at home, or when I’d come home from uni in the holidays. I don’t want us to be estranged forever. Haven’t we both been through enough – been hurt enough – to let this continue? I miss you.
I can’t pretend to know why you’re so angry with me, though I understand that we’ve both got a lot to be angry about. But whatever the reason, I’m sorry, Jess. You were so young when everything happened, I can only imagine how confusing and upsetting it must have been for you. I don’t know whether you’re angry with me because I couldn’t do anything to stop it or whether it’s because I went to uni and left you alone with Mum when she was still having such a tough time. Sometimes I even wonder whether you’re angry because you wish I was the one who wasn’t here any more. But whatever it is, I’m sorry. If only you’d tell me why you’re so upset then perhaps we can start to put things right. After we’ve both lost so much, surely we don’t want to lose each other too?
I love you,
Lily xxx
Lily closed the email, her fists curling into tight balls. She wished she hadn’t looked, wished she’d had the self-discipline to delete them all. But since her mum’s diagnosis six months ago, it was as though a sluice had opened up in her mind, releasing all the memories she had kept locked behind closed gates for years.
She shut her eyes, trying to avoid the scene she knew was sidling into her head, but there it was, waiting for her, as it always was.
The room is dark, only the faintest early morning light visible around the edge of the closed curtains. She can just make out the hummingbirds decorating the wallpaper around the window but everything else is in silhouette. The air is still and smells pungent – sharp and slightly sweet – like overripe fruit or an open bottle of vinegar. She hears the crying before her eyes have adjusted to the darkness, before they have found the figure sitting on the bed: the sobs are low and painful. It is a sound that causes Lily’s heart to knock against her chest, gently at first and then more insistently until she fears that it might be heard. She knows she should not be there but now that she is – unnoticed, unheard – she is too scared to leave in case she accidentally reveals her presence. She allows only the smallest stream of air in and out of her mouth, the shallowest of breaths she hopes will not betray her. But the next thing she sees is so unexpected, so shocking, that she knows she will spend the rest of her life wishing she could un-see it. It takes so little time but the sight of it winds her. She stands motionless, her breath trapped in her lungs, watching, waiting, doing nothing to stop it. She swallows silently and she can taste it on her tongue: the bitter, metallic, unyielding taste of fear.
The phone rang, making Lily jump. Her boss’s name flashed up on the screen.
‘Ed, is everything OK?’
‘Yes, fine. Just wanting to check your ETA? Tom and Dana have just arrived and you know they’ll want you to walk them through the strategy, so it’s just small talk until you get here.’
Lily tucked her phone under her chin and crouched among the labelled shoeboxes, searching for the black velvet heels she wanted. ‘I’ll be leaving in less than a minute. Cab shouldn’t take more than fifteen to get there. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’
As the call ended, Lily reached for the right shoebox, in a pile in the far corner of the dressing room. Pulling it free, a second box came tumbling down, and she remembered having failed to put it away properly the last time she had looked inside it two months earlier.
The box fell open at her feet and Lily knew she shouldn’t look, knew she should slip the lid back on before her eyes had grazed something her heart didn’t want to see. She thought about the cab driver outside, already kept waiting longer than she’d promised, instructed herself to close the box, put it back in the corner, walk away.
She knelt down, placed her hands either side of the lid, heard her own silent order to slide it back in place. But it was as if her eyes were working independently of the rest of her, as if her hands no longer obeyed commands from her brain.
Looking inside, Lily stared at the grainy black-and-white images of a life not yet fully formed, of limbs not yet ready to stretch out into the world, of a future she had so desperately wanted to unfold.
Chapter 7
May 2009
Lily tugs the seat belt across her chest, pulls it a few inches loose of her stomach, then clicks it into the slot. She slips her right hand between her body and the belt. Beyond the muscle, the fat, the skin and her clothes she wants there to be one last defence.
The flat of her palm rests against her gently convexing stomach. For eighteen weeks she has not dared take it for granted. She has divided her heart into two equal parts: hope and denial. Superstition demands denial for fear that complacency will be punished. But she cannot extinguish the tentative flame of hope: to do so would seem to be a different form of jinxing.
Next to her Daniel starts the car engine. He smiles, pleased that the weekend has been a success and that they have had something to celebrate.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to drive? I really don’t mind. The consultant said there’s no reason I shouldn’t.’
Daniel shakes his head, strokes her knee. ‘Absolutely not. I just want you to relax. The weekend doesn’t finish until we get home.’
He eases his foot onto the clutch, slides the gearstick into first, and the car crunches across the gravel forecourt of the hotel, out into the Oxfordshire countryside. He switches on the radio and finds Classic FM. Lily prefers Radio 3 but Einaudi’s ‘Il Giorni’ is playing and she allows herself to sink into familiar music.
She barely dares admit it – that superstition again – but this time feels different: firmer, safer, more secure. And it can’t be just her imagination. They have already passed their own personal danger zone. The last two babies have not made it this far. The first – two years after Phoebe had been born – made it to eleven weeks. The bleeding had started four days before they were due to have their twelve-week scan, a cruel fact that at the time had compounded Lily’s grief. If only, she had silently wished, she had been able to see her baby once, even on a screen. But then the second baby, three years later, had made it to twelve weeks and Lily had seen it on the screen, had watched it stretch its legs and unfurl its fingers, had counted the vertebrae of its spine and seen the four chambers of its heart beating out a perfect rhythm of life. She had looked at the black-and-white video footage of her baby and had fallen in love. And when, a fortnight later, that baby too had been scraped out of her uterus after the spotting had turned to bleeding and the bleeding had led her to hospital, she had wondered whether the pain wasn’t infinitely more acute having seen that tiny, perfectly formed creature on screen. A baby who no longer existed beyond half a dozen grainy foetal photographs.