The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  Every time the moment materialized, I lost my nerve. I can’t put my finger on why exactly. If I had to, I’d say it was the fear. What if it came out wrong? What if I made you feel that you, that we, weren’t enough? I couldn’t stand to see you upset, especially not at the end of a long, hard day. I told myself there was always tomorrow, the day after that.

  Then, in the midst of it all, you drew a line in the sand. It was a Sunday night, and I was late back from some training course or other, wheelie suitcase in tow. You met me at the door, which wasn’t unusual in itself.

  “Been waiting on the doorstep all afternoon, have you?” I said as I reached up to kiss you.

  “Something like that. Hey—not so fast.” You put an arm across the door frame to bar my entry.

  A scarf dangled from your hand. You took the suitcase and pushed it into the hallway behind you. We were going through the familiar performance with the blindfold, so, naturally, I was thinking about our next jaunt.

  “I’m just back through the door—can’t I have a rest?”

  “We’re not off anywhere, I promise. All right, this way.” You held my hand, guided me over the step in the porch. “Straight on, left a little now. Farther. Yes. Keep it coming.”

  Everyone knows the layout of their own home, so I’m afraid it wasn’t as much of a surprise as you might have hoped, Frank. It was clear after just two or three steps that you were leading me to the spare room, the one place I avoided at all costs. It was going to be the nursery.

  When you opened my eyes, I was standing slap-bang in the middle of a room transformed. The piles of rubbish had gone, and it was freshly painted, a vibrant egg-yolk yellow. The floor still smelled addictively like varnish, not that you could see much of it. Every inch was covered in succulents: great green spines and plush, velvety leaves, arrays of buds and points and strangely ridged stems. Along the windowsill, you had collected all the cacti you had given me over the years.

  “Short and spiky, huh?”

  I stepped away from you to examine the detailing on a terra-cotta pot in the corner of the room, trailing my fingers over the carved Aztec pattern that circled the rim.

  I was about to open my mouth—to ask about the cost, how long it had taken you, the planning, the potting. Before I had a chance, you sidled up behind me, placed your hands on my hips, and answered all my questions in one.

  “It doesn’t matter,” you said. “You are what matters. I thought it was time that we acknowledged what we have lost and what we can’t have. I don’t want us to hide it anymore.”

  And then I saw it—the mobile—the network of fragile paper birds that was the first and only thing we bought for the baby who was never meant to be. Do you know, Frank, I thought you had disposed of it?

  I was a woman transfixed. That night, I made us sit and eat our supper in there on the picnic blanket. When we’d finished, I propped open the window to get a breeze in and we lay flat on our backs, hand in hand, while the birds danced above our heads. We didn’t need to say anything. It was the sort of contentment that there just aren’t the words for.

  I want to thank you for that here, in writing. You went out of your way to make me feel wanted and worthy. To make me feel like I was enough, with or without functional ovaries. I didn’t return the favor. Not because I didn’t love you, Frank.

  No, it was never that. That was never in doubt—I felt that love pulling at every joint in my body. It was because my infertility weighed more. I hope you have read this and have felt just how badly I wanted a child to stanch that gnawing emptiness in my stomach that even you and your green fingers couldn’t fill. Please bear that in mind. What I’m about to tell you looks ungrateful. That’s putting it mildly, I suppose.

  Disappointed, that is what Frank feels. In himself, of course. Just because he had come to terms with their childlessness, it didn’t mean Maggie had. What was he thinking, sticking a job lot of cacti in the spare room and hoping that would cure her pain? He still remembers how excited he was at the nursery, picking out the plants, loading them into trays, and handing over his card at the till. Why didn’t it click that an indoor conservatory wasn’t going to be enough?

  Frank has never had good instincts. He supposes some people are just not born with them, although he has yet to uncover the genetic reason why. It started at school, where he struggled to make friends. He got there eventually, but at the start of term, whenever he met someone new, he just didn’t have the knack of making easy conversation. He went in too hard, asking the sorts of big questions that a bunch of kids with marbles don’t want to hear.

  It didn’t get any easier the older he got. Frank has endured a hundred stilted interviews over the years. He has counted down the minutes of painful small talk at work Christmas parties, willing the soggy sausage rolls over to his huddle just to have something to speak about that wouldn’t sound too eager or too standoffish or even too odd. But with Maggie? He thought he’d finally had the instinct business nailed. To this day, he has thought of that garden as one of his finest hours, the sort of grand romantic gesture that he secretly hoped she would boast about to Edie and her colleagues.

  It has always been his job to look after the plants. There was the logistical nightmare of dispersing them throughout the flat once Eleanor was born and the room had to return to its initial purpose. Then, after they moved to the bigger place, the cacti were spread out across the various rooms, some tucked away in nooks that were easy to forget, but still Frank remained diligent with the watering. A few years ago, for their anniversary, Maggie even bought him a novelty indoor can for the purpose, painted with Frank’s name in big, looping cursive. Every week he would wander through the house, can in hand, and check their hydration with his finger pads, wiping down any excess dry soil with the handkerchief in his pocket.

  Frank has kept this up even in the silence. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if this was what he had been doing five days ago while Maggie sat scribbling above his head, the plants thirsty from the heat. He couldn’t stand to see the leaves, once so fleshy and full, wither and turn brown. Maggie would hate that, and he, in turn, would hate for her to think that he had let his great romantic gesture wilt.

  Now he knows even his best horticultural efforts have fallen short. It’s time he stopped living with his head in the clouds and paid attention to what is right in front of him.

  Five days to go

  About six months after your gardening triumph, you went on your sabbatical in the States. All that effort on your part and still it only took a day to gather my resolve. I had been keeping the application papers at the back of a file, slid between the photos and the booklets on bonds. The whole thing was fairly painless. My only hesitation was over your signature—should it have been a bit smaller?

  I was quite surprised by how quickly we were contacted, but I suppose we were just what they wanted. Middle-class values, a stable home, and the perfect gap for a child. I cleaned the house from top to bottom. I dusted off the images of our godchildren that had been accruing in the cupboard under the stairs, framed them, and made sure they were in the eyeline of the sofa. I’m sorry to say that I locked the spare room, with its abundance of herbaceous health and safety hazards. By the time the doorbell rang, my head was spinning from nerves or from the surface-cleaner fumes—I couldn’t tell which.

  “Mrs. Hobbs?” The smaller and skinnier of the two women at the front door stepped forward, extending her hand.

  I gave them the warmest smile I could muster and beckoned them in. They introduced themselves as Grace and Mary—very biblical, I remember thinking. If ever there was a time for salvation, this was surely it. I could see them evaluating the steps up to the living room, the lack of a handrail.

  When they were settled on the sofa, they both produced clipboards and wriggled their Biros out from underneath the hinges.

  “Will Mr. Hobbs be joining us?” Grace asked.

  At least they were cutting to the chase. I made your excuses as best I co
uld, all the time watching as the muscles in her face tightened.

  “Normally, we would expect both potential parents to be present.”

  I went to apologize, but Mary cut me off, angling her body toward me and almost blocking out her partner in the process. I liked her immediately.

  “So, Mrs. Hobbs, tell us a bit more about why you and your husband would like to adopt.”

  I was glad you weren’t around to hear me put words into your mouth. I reeled off the usual answers—the desire for a child, to share our home, our resources, our time. When I touched on the miscarriage, I could feel my voice flaking.

  “I was pregnant not long after we married, but I lost the baby at four months. It was very traumatic . . . mentally, physically too. We tried again, a lot. But we were told that what had happened would make conceiving naturally pretty much impossible.”

  Mary reached over and touched my hand, stilling its insistent fidgeting with a loose thread on the seam of my jeans. I could feel her keeping that same tenderness as we moved through a series of practicalities, a tour of the flat. I could tell the interview was wrapping up when we made our way back to the living room and neither of them sat down.

  “So, Mrs. Hobbs—”

  “Maggie, please.”

  I wanted Mary to see me like a friend. I wanted her to feel she would move mountains for me. She sure as hell would need to.

  “In terms of the next steps, we will be following up on the references you provided. We have down here Edith Carlisle, Julia Allen, and Francesca Hobbs—is that still correct?”

  I had taken a bit of a risk putting down your sister, but I had hoped they would be too stretched for time to follow up with someone with an Australian dialing code. Besides, the two of you rarely spoke.

  “Well, we will need to meet your husband and speak to him too.” Grace handed over a card. “If you could get him to give me a call when he’s back, I’ll fix up a time for that.”

  That was the end of that, then.

  I lost track of the sleepless nights I endured that whole time you were away, running through every possible permutation of how on earth I could explain this to you. I was halfway through an adoption procedure and had forged your agreement. Just testing the waters? I’d gone a bit far for that. Doing the hard work for you? Parenting doesn’t work that way. In retrospect, I can see that, in the end, it was me who held us back and that you were just the excuse. That looks so awful, written down. I soon realized it wasn’t so much a child that I wanted as our child.

  I know they checked our references; Jules and Edie called to wish us luck. Nothing from your sister, though. Not to me, at least. Did she call you, Frank? But then the betrayal was so heavy, surely you would have said something. Wouldn’t you? In this silence, I have begun to question everything I thought I knew.

  I hope you are angry rather than upset. You are so slow to anger—you always were. Your default is upset, and that is always so much worse. Nothing hurts me like the sight of you hurting. I have tried to explain what childlessness meant to me—more than an inconvenience, more than failure, more than wanting someone to lay flowers on our graves. It was all I was back then.

  Can you understand that? Can you really? Please try to, Frank, because I think it will help with what comes next.

  Chapter 4

  Over the past six months, Frank has had more than sufficient opportunity to mull the passage of time, the way it slips by like a black cat in the night. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Christmas. Those odd made-up holidays that Hallmark has gotten rich on that he never managed to keep track of. Repeat.

  Now he is forced to think of everything that slipped by over those years. He is aware that he is not the most perceptive of men. Maggie used to buy new outfits and model them up and down the stairs, waiting for him to clock. “Is that new, darling?” he would ask at last, after copious throat-clearing on Maggie’s part. But this? He must have been blind not to have noticed.

  Frank stands up from the edge of the bed and goes to the window, pushing it open as wide as it will go. Diagonally opposite, they have been too tired to close the curtains. Frank can make out the father of the family in a baggy football shirt and tartan pajama bottoms, trying to soothe a wailing, wriggling baby on the stairwell. He looks frazzled, but his tenacity is admirable. The things we do for our own flesh and blood, eh? Limitless.

  Adoption would have been quite different. But would his feelings have been the same? Frank hopes so. He tries to think of how that conversation would have played out, if Maggie could have plucked up the courage to show him those leaflets instead of shoving them into the admin drawer of no return. He likes to think he would have responded well, maybe even enthusiastically. But then he is not so sure. It isn’t just Maggie with a fear of the unknown.

  The alarm clock on his bedside table gives its electronic tut as the digits reset to 03:00. What he wouldn’t give for a fresh start himself now. He hasn’t thought much beyond getting back to Maggie the minute he is allowed in again. He’ll tell her then, no excuses—what he did, why he shut down. And then? Well, there is no second part to his plan.

  What comes next. He is not sure that he wants to know, but he can’t stop now.

  He turns the page.

  Four days to go

  Do you know, Frank, that I didn’t even realize I was pregnant with Eleanor until eight weeks in? Now that I was over forty, things weren’t as regular as they used to be. I was exhausted, bloated, but nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe a little fuller in the face and feeling awful with it—slamming headaches and a niggling pain in my lower back that wouldn’t budge. It was one of the younger practice nurses who mentioned it. That irked me. Just qualified and suddenly turning her diagnoses on her supervisor.

  It had been nearly three years since Grace and Mary’s visit. In the soul-searching that had come after, I had managed to catch sight of a future for us that didn’t involve children. A happy one too. I put our application on hold a month or so later. I sent a nice email to Mary, and they must have been used to it because there was no fuss, less rigmarole to putting things on pause than there had been to start them up in the first place. She even left me her direct number, in case I ever wanted to talk anything through.

  So, for the first time since we were married, a baby wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. I suppose that was why, at first, I could laugh at the nurse’s suggestion. Unfortunately, suspicion is never that easy to shake for good. Another four weeks went by without a period, and that was enough to send me home via the shop. As I handed over the cash and pocketed the two-pack of tests, I wondered if the girl on the till assumed they were for my daughter. I left before she could even print the receipt.

  The minute I got in, I locked myself in the bathroom and took the two tests in succession. Sixty, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and eighty Mississippis passed by. I went up to two hundred just to be sure. When I finally allowed myself to look at them, there were two blue lines neatly spaced in the window of each plastic stick. All those years hallucinating them and there they finally were—undeniable.

  I didn’t stay there to stare at them, much as I could have done. I used a whole loo roll to wrap them both in before putting them in a plastic bag and looping the handles into a tight double knot. I even went to the trouble of dropping the package in the bin four doors down. By the time you arrived home that evening, it was as if nothing had happened.

  I knew I couldn’t tell you until I had it straight in my own head. The thing is, though, I’m not sure I have ever been straight in the head since that moment in the bathroom, dual blue lines dancing in front of my eyes. This was what I’d wanted; what was there to get straight? Plenty, Frank, plenty. I was too old for starters. Sure, I saw women my age at the surgery for their prenatal checkups, but for the most part they already had a few kids under their belt. Even if they didn’t, had they been through the same wringer? Fifteen years of trying and fifteen years of failing. If I hadn’t carried a child to full term at twenty-
six, light and tight and energetic, what hope was there for me now? I was scared, Frank, so scared. We were in this together, but somehow I felt so alone.

  That night, as you lay snoring to my right, I assessed you with a whole new purpose. I looked at that cushion we had bought for your lower back after the escapade with the slipped disc. We’d laughed at the time, hadn’t we? I spent the week after the X-ray calling you “Granddad,” with that unspoken assumption that probably no one else ever would, not after so long with no success. I examined your hands, the skin between your fingers flaking and raw from the washing-up—all those years of hard marital labor, and to think you were unaware that this was just the start.

  More than anything before, this felt like my biggest betrayal. I was carrying a child, our child, but I couldn’t risk telling you before I knew I was too far gone for there to be any sort of meaningful discussion about what we would do. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine the word “abortion” coming out of your mouth—it was too hard, too final. If you had scrupulously avoided it three months into dating, would you really reel it out now? Even if I couldn’t envisage it, I didn’t want to risk it.

  If I’m entirely honest—and what is the purpose of this whole exercise otherwise?—I didn’t want to have that discussion because I didn’t know how I would respond to your questioning. I had spent years wanting this so badly I had thought of barely anything else. And then it happened and suddenly I felt unsure. I was excited, elated, but that wasn’t the whole picture, not in the way it seemed to be for everyone else.

  Could I mother? Did I even know how? It wasn’t as if I had been set a good example. I hated my own contrariness, my mind’s complete inability to just settle and accept that everything would work out fine. Now I wonder if it was a sign. That sounds terribly spiritual of me, but you know what I mean. Maybe there was something, somewhere out there, trying to tell us, Frank, about Eleanor?