Blood. Foreign blood is being fed into her body through a tube in her veins. She experiences a moment of vertigo even though she is lying down.
She turns her head sideways, away from the transfusion she does not remember being administered. In the back of her left hand is another cannula, another tube, another drip, this time to a bag of clear fluid she assumes is saline.
She closes her eyes, tries to stop the swell of nausea surging into her throat. She does not need to be told what has happened. As the image of a future without this longed-for second child pulls itself reluctantly into view, a torrent of grief rises into her chest, squeezing through the narrowing of her throat, finding its way out in deep, guttural sobs.
Daniel sits on a brown plastic chair by the side of the bed, holding her hand which is now free of its cannula, just a small red mark and infant bruise the only evidence that it was ever there.
It is, Daniel has told her, almost seven hours since she arrived at the hospital, time of which Lily has little recollection. She does not know whether she ought to be grateful for this lapse of memory or mourn it.
Daniel is talking and she is trying very hard to focus on what he is saying. But it is as though her brain will let only certain words through, so that their meaning must be slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle in which half the pieces are missing.
Miscarriage, haemorrhage, emergency D and C.
She lets him talk, wondering why her mouth is so dry, hoping that soon he will tell her the only two pieces of information she wants to know.
Blood loss, transfusion, lucky to be alive.
Finally she can wait no longer. Her voice, when it emerges, is quiet and small, as though it has shrunk in the hours of lost consciousness.
‘Do they know what caused it?’
Their eyes catch before he looks down, studies the back of her hand, shakes his head. ‘No. There’ll have to be more tests. But given your history …’ His voice trails off, leaving more questions than answers in its wake.
‘Do they think it was caused by whatever happened with the other two?’
The doctors do not know the reason for her two previous miscarriages. The loss of those babies is a secret her body has thus far refused to divulge. Lily is hoping that perhaps this time the mystery will be solved and that, as a result, it can be overcome in the future.
Daniel shrugs. There is something non-committal in the gesture which makes Lily want to pull her hand free from his but she hasn’t the strength.
‘So it could have been something different? It could have been something … specific?’
She cannot bring herself to voice the accusation. It is unfair, she knows, to apportion blame when they are both in mourning. But the unspoken allegation hangs between them, heavy and thick like winter fog, so that they are unable to reach out towards one another’s grief.
‘They don’t know, Lil. They’ll need to do more tests. They just don’t know right now.’
It is not the answer she wants but she hasn’t the will to challenge him. Instead she turns her head away and blinks against the tears.
Daniel begins to speak again, his words tripping over each other in order to deliver quickly the news he knows she will not want to hear.
Pregnancy. Risks. Advised not to try again.
She hears the words but will not absorb their meaning. Turning to look at him, she cannot read his expression, cannot tell whether it is the frown or the smile he means her to see.
‘We don’t need to try again, do we, Lil? Three times, that’s enough, surely? We have Phoebe. Shouldn’t we just be grateful for her? Let’s not put ourselves through all this again. I don’t feel the need for another child to complete our family. We’re fine just the way we are, aren’t we?’
Lily neither dissents nor agrees.
Later, she thinks. Later she will be able to change his mind. It is not a conversation for now. She can wait. She can be patient.
She lays her head back on the pillow, closes her eyes and invites in sleep. She just needs to give him time. He will, she feels sure, want to try for another baby eventually.
Chapter 8
Jess
Jess glanced at the clock on the dashboard as she edged over the speed limit along the Westway. Her jaw tightened as a queue of traffic ahead of her forced her to brake. Thirteen hours after arriving on set, all she wanted to do was head home, but instead she was having to clear up Lily’s mess yet again.
Irritation needled her skin. Even when she had no direct contact with her, Lily still managed to inveigle her way into Jess’s life, still managed to cause disruption. Even after all these years of avoiding her, Jess was still covering up Lily’s mistakes.
Her mum had said she’d get a cab home from the audition, but Jess couldn’t let her do that. Lily might be able to cancel arrangements at the last minute and leave their mum in the lurch, but Jess couldn’t.
A dull throb pinched at Jess’s temples as she thought about how different things might have been had her mum moved in with Lily instead of her. Lily had asked first – she had a habit of making grand gestures without any thought for the consequences – and in truth it hadn’t occurred to Jess to offer until then. But as soon as her mum had said she was contemplating moving in with Lily, Jess had been forced to intervene. She couldn’t have let her mum do that. She’d never have forgiven herself. The thought of it even now – even when the possibility no longer posed a threat – made Jess squeeze the steering wheel until her knuckles ached.
Stuck in stationary traffic as another minute ticked by, Jess silently cursed work for having made her so late. She thought about all the times when Mia was younger that her mum had collected her from school and taken her to ballet, gymnastics or swimming classes because Jess had been at work. All the times she had fetched Mia from childminders, play dates, school outings, and delivered her home safely and on time.
Jess breathed deeply, an automatic barrier slamming down on the thought that one day, in the not-too-distant future, her mum would no longer be alive.
Turning her head sideways to look into the adjacent car, Jess’s eyes sharpened their focus. The hairline, the jaw, the shape of the ears: the profile of the man in the driver’s seat teased open the lid on a box of her memories.
‘What’s black and white and read all over?’
Jess is curled up on her father’s lap, wrapped in an oversized bath towel, water dripping down her neck from her freshly washed hair. She squints with concentration, can feel her forehead creasing.
‘I don’t know, Daddy. That’s too hard!’
‘Come on, you can do this one, I know you can. What’s black and white and read all over?’
Jess repeats the riddle in her head, determined to prove that her dad isn’t mistaken in believing she can solve it, even though just thinking about it is beginning to hurt her five-year-old brain.
‘That’s easy. It’s a newspaper.’ Her sister sashays into the bathroom only long enough to collect her hairbrush and answer the conundrum before swishing out.
Jess doesn’t have time to compose an appropriate retort, but she feels humiliation bleed into her cheeks and buries her face in the towel.
‘OK, how about a joke instead? How does a monkey make toast?’
Jess lifts her head and smiles. She knows there is no expectation to work out the answer to a joke. ‘I don’t know, Daddy. How does a monkey make toast?’
‘He puts it under the gorilla.’
It takes a split second for the punchline to unfold in Jess’s head and she collapses into satisfied giggles. ‘Tell me another one!’
‘OK. Why did the lobster blush?’
Jess pretends to think, playing her role in a charade she knows makes the joke more fun for the teller. ‘I don’t know. Why did the lobster blush?’
‘Because the sea weed.’
Jess’s hand shoots up over her mouth, her eyes widening with delight that her dad has told her a joke her mum probably wouldn’t approve of. She commits it to memory, ready to share with her classmates tomorrow.