by Karen Swan
‘It’s a boy!’ she cried, laughing and sobbing simultaneously as she handed him over to Lucy with trembling arms.
‘A boy?’ Lucy repeated, her eyes filling with tears as she gazed down in wonderment at her son’s face for the first time.
Meg covered them both with the softest towel and then sat back down at the bottom of the bed, watching as Lucy held out her little finger and the baby instinctively grasped it. She pulled the sheet down to protect her friend’s modesty too, wondering again at the bruises she saw there. She was going to have some pretty impressive ones of her own tomorrow, she thought, stroking her arms gently.
‘He’s so beautiful,’ Lucy whispered, tears streaming now. ‘I can’t believe I made him.’
‘He’s perfect,’ Meg smiled, having to wipe back her own tears as the stress of the previous hour caught up with her. They still hadn’t cut the cord. Was that OK? She thought she’d read somewhere that it was good to leave it, for a bit anyway. Lucy was too enraptured with her son to think of anything else now but Meg was still worried she hadn’t done everything right or fully. She glanced out of the window again. ‘Have you thought of a name yet?’
Lucy bit her lip. ‘No. Tuck didn’t want to “jinx” anything by talking about the baby before he was born.’
‘I guess that’s fair enough,’ Meg smiled, thinking nothing of the sort. But it wouldn’t help Lucy to air that opinion now.
‘I can’t believe we did it,’ Lucy whispered, looking up at her with a softness Meg hadn’t seen for months. When had they all become so hard-bitten? ‘I was so frightened.’
‘But you did it.’
‘We did it,’ Lucy said, reaching for her hand. ‘I’ve missed you. I’m sorry.’
‘I missed you too—’ Meg smiled, turning her head as she saw Badger trot to the door, ears up. He was her alarm system, always hearing things before she did, and she jumped up. ‘Oh, please say that’s the doctor,’ she gasped, running to the window just as a paramedic jumped off a quad bike and began running up the grass with his medical kit. Barbara – being driven by a stern-looking Dolores – was on another quad, cresting the hill just moments later. Poor Barbara looked stricken as she lurched up the grass.
‘They’re here!’ Meg cried, beaming at Lucy and running to open the door. The paramedic already had his hand raised to knock and Meg just pointed to the back bedroom where Lucy and the baby were resting.
‘It’s OK, she’s OK,’ she called out, standing at the top of the porch steps and not wanting Barbara to worry for another moment. ‘She’s fine. They both are.’
‘She’s had the baby?’ Barbara gasped, stumbling to a horrified stop, her hands on her knees. Dolores, still not recovered to her full strength, walked with slow dignity behind her up the slope, her trusty Nordic walking pole in one hand.
Meg nodded. ‘And they’re both doing well.’
Barbara laid a hand across her chest as though trying to still her heart as she began walking again. ‘What . . . What did she have?’ she panted. ‘Boy or girl?’
‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’ Meg smiled, standing back to let her pass.
Dolores came and stood with her on the porch, staring at her closely for a moment, reading the tension in her face. ‘And are you OK? That must have been a scare for you.’
Meg shrugged and nodded, hiding her face in Dolores’s shoulder as she reached for a hug, all the anxiety and pressure allowed to come out now. She wept quietly for a few moments before pulling back, feeling silly. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying. It . . . it was amazing,’ she hiccupped, wiping her cheeks dry.
‘I bet you were amazing,’ Dolores said, rubbing her back.
‘What took them so long? I’ve been calling for an hour.’
‘They had to get transport arranged. We had to rustle up some quad bikes from the Search and Rescue unit, and obviously there’s nowhere for a helicopter to land up here. Besides, I think they thought they had more time. That really was a very quick birth.’
‘You know Lucy,’ Meg shrugged. ‘She never did mess about.’
Dolores chuckled. ‘Come on then, I’d better take a look. Barbara’s first moments as a grandmother . . . ?’ She tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘God help us all. It’s all we’re ever going to hear of now.’
They walked back inside together and Meg looked with fresh eyes at her chaotic little cabin, where papers were strewn across the main room, clothes across the spare room and towels across the bedroom, Lucy and her newborn son nuzzling contentedly in bed as the paramedic clamped the cord and Barbara fussed. And sitting in the corner by the door, she saw her own suitcase full of clothes – a plane in Calgary taking off without her, an office door in New York slamming shut, a seat in a conference hall remaining empty as an astronaut talked about living in space . . .
As signs went, this one was pretty unequivocal. She had asked for a sign and her question had been answered – she wasn’t going anywhere. She was staying here.
The gods had spoken.
Chapter Twenty-five
Monday 6 November 2017
He was perfect. Ten little fingers, ten little toes; button nose; baby-seal eyes; a cry like a newborn lamb . . . Lucy had never known love like this before. He was hers. Totally and completely hers and no one could ever take him away from her. He was her reward for all the sickness and sleeplessness, the swellings and strange pains that had afflicted her throughout the pregnancy.
It all made sense now. Even coming almost a month early, he’d weighed in at 4.3kg and the paramedic had said she’d ‘dodged a bullet’ not having to deliver him at full term – he would have been almost 5kg, he’d guessed. It had made her mother sheepish too – all those waspish comments about her size and gargantuan appetite when, all along, she’d been growing this delicious, bouncing butter-ball of a boy. Of course she’d been hungry! Of course she’d been tired! Of course she’d been big!
She sighed, resting her cheek on her arm as she watched him sleep. He was five days old but already his cheeks were rounded and plump, his scrawny little thighs beginning to fill out. He startled a lot – Moro reflex, they called it; particularly strong in boys, apparently – so she liked swaddling him in a blanket, his little pointed chin dipping into the V where it criss-crossed over. It helped to settle him and she liked how solid it made him feel in her arms, like a bag of sugar rather than a flailing mass of limbs as he rooted for the breast.
He was feeding well – she was a natural! – but he wasn’t sleeping great on account of her difficulty burping him. Her mother had been a revelation on this topic, showing off some complicated positions to help settle him but whilst they seemed to work fine in the day, they weren’t so successful in the middle of the night, although possibly that was because she was worried his crying would wake the hotel guests across the courtyard and she gave up sooner. But the pattern seemed to have been set – she’d feed him for forty-five minutes, wind him for another thirty and then would only get ten, fifteen minutes’ sleep before he was hungry again – and it was beginning to take its toll. She thought she could probably sleep standing up. The idea of sleeping for more than forty minutes at a stretch had suddenly become the greatest luxury she could imagine . . . Those were the times she wanted Tuck back. If they could just have tag-teamed, she might not feel so desperately exhausted . . .
But she knew she had to be strong now. Stronger than she’d ever been. This baby had opened her eyes only minutes after opening his own and when Tuck – on being told his son had come early – had said he couldn’t leave Toronto early (with ‘no cover’, he’d said, he couldn’t risk losing winning accounts for the coming season) she had seen with crystal clarity how things had to be. How could he not have moved heaven and earth to see his child? Everyone had been astounded – even Dolores, who wasn’t prone to sentimentality.
No. He would never be a good enough father for her child and she knew now that at some level, she’d understood it from the moment she’d seen the line on
the pregnancy stick – maybe they both had – his restlessness and persistent refusal to face up to fatherhood, even in spite of his best intentions. Several times, he had raised his game – after the Room 32 incident, and following the bear attack. But he could never sustain it, always falling back into his old habits within days . . . maybe they had both been aware that this clock ticking down in the background would be detonating them.
But it was done. There was no turning back. She had grown in more ways than just the physical and she was a mother now. Once upon a time, Tuck had been the sun that shone in her sky but he’d been eclipsed – she had a new sun now. A newborn son.
No one else knew of her decision yet. Not her mother. Not Meg. But yesterday afternoon, when Barbara had taken the baby for a stroll down Banff Avenue – ostensibly to give her a rest and him some air (but really to show him off to everyone) – Lucy had packed a case of his stuff and driven to the Titch store. Mitch always used to sleep over there on a mattress in the eaves whenever he was too late or too drunk to get back up to the cabin, and now Tuck could stay there too until he got himself sorted.
She hadn’t yet decided on her cover story or whether even to use one. The truth was ugly but Tuck had made it easy for her in some ways, this latest no-show just another example of what she had to endure – his cheating on her, drinking too much, not coming home . . . But if that wasn’t enough, then there were always the bruises. Enough people had seen them over the years, although only one person had ever seen the truth. Just one. That was how good she was at hiding it.
Lightly, she stroked her baby’s cheek. He was what she’d been waiting for, he was the strength she needed to make the break and start afresh. Perhaps the way everything had happened hadn’t been accidental at all; it had been fate . . .
The sudden sound of the kitchen door slamming shut – making the baby startle in his sleep – made her jump. He was back? Hadn’t it crossed his mind that perhaps his newborn son was sleeping and he couldn’t blow in and out of the house now like a teenager?
Of course not, and that action alone told her he was still the same man he’d been six months ago, a year, ten years ago. He wasn’t a father. How could he be when he was still a boy himself? He was never going to change. Throughout the entire pregnancy she’d waited for him to join her on this path – after Mitch’s death, after the bear attack, after she and Meg had fallen out and she’d barely spoken to another soul apart from him and her mother. But he was as fixed as the Pole Star; the man he was now was the man he would always be. She might once have taken comfort in that, construed it as constancy, but their lives had changed in the time it had taken her to grow this baby. She had to leave him.
He was standing there now, gazing at her from the doorway, looking indecently handsome in his jeans and navy parka, blond hair dazzling under the light. He’d always been too handsome for his own good and it had spoilt him – bringing pleasures he hadn’t had to earn.
She pulled the belt tighter on her dressing gown (she hadn’t got dressed today; if she couldn’t stay in her pyjamas with her newborn, when could she?) and watched the change on his face as he saw the baby, swaddled tight and dreaming, on the bed beside her – physical proof at last of what had just been an abstract concept to him up to now, her pregnancy little more than an affront to his desires.
‘Holy fuck,’ he whispered, tiptoeing over.
He reached a hand to touch him but her arm shot out, stopping him. ‘Don’t wake him. He’s just finished feeding.’
Tuck looked at her, apprehension in his eyes, and nodded. ‘You look whacked.’
That was the first thing he said to her on becoming a mother? ‘Thanks.’
He didn’t seem to notice her sarcasm, instead tilting his head to the side and trying to get a better look at his son’s face. ‘Does he look like me?’
‘He doesn’t look like anyone yet.’
‘I reckon he’s got my nose,’ he murmured, carefully lying flat on the mattress – boots and all – his face just centimetres from the baby’s.
Lucy didn’t need to look between Tuck’s once-broken nose and the baby’s snub one to know he had nothing of the sort. ‘Mmm.’
He chuckled softly, looking up at her. ‘I always think most babies look like pugs but he’s cute, right?’
She sighed. ‘Well, I think so, but clearly I’m biased.’
‘He’s big too. He’s gonna take after his papa.’
Lucy nodded but she wasn’t bemused or charmed by this belated show of affection. He was five days old already. How could Tuck not have come back before now? ‘He wasn’t as big five days ago. He’s put on a hundred grams since then.’
She couldn’t keep the tint of sourness from her voice and Tuck heard it this time, pushing himself back up to sitting, the baby between them. ‘Listen, honey, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get back before now.’ His voice was a low murmur.
‘Oh, no, I get it,’ she replied flatly. ‘You can’t let something like becoming a father get in the way of work.’
Tuck looked surprised, then hurt. ‘No, you don’t understand—’
‘Oh, I think I do.’ The vein of steel in her voice caught his attention and she watched as the realization dawned on his face as to how much trouble he was in with her. But it was still more than he knew. He had no idea of what was about to happen to him.
Tuck blinked at her. ‘Sweetheart, believe me – our lives changed out there.’
‘No, Tuck, they changed here,’ she whispered. ‘I had a baby. On my own.’
He frowned. ‘I though you said Meg was with you?’
‘Without a doctor, is what I meant!’ she hissed. ‘We were on our own in that godforsaken cabin. Anything could have happened and you were thirty-five hundred kilometres away, selling snowboards.’
‘Hey, that is not fair! You weren’t due for another month—!’ he shot back angrily, raising his voice.
‘Shh!’ she hushed him furiously as the baby startled again.
Tuck withdrew, physically pulling in his arms and legs as though he was worried he might accidentally hurt the baby in some way, looking anxious as his son twitched and jerked his legs, his mouth beginning to open and root.
‘I never would have gone if I’d known the baby was coming,’ Tuck whispered.
‘But you didn’t come back when he did.’
‘I told you! Things happened out there.’
She rolled her eyes. He just didn’t get it. It didn’t matter if he’d quadrupled their number of stockists for the coming season; they could have survived another year on the existing contracts. He should have been here. She’d needed him to prove to her the kind of father he could be; she had needed evidence that things had changed, that she could trust him. But he’d failed. He’d fallen at every hurdle and he was out of time. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – wait for him any longer. She had to put her baby first now.
But how did she say those words, ‘I’m leaving you’?
He reached across the bed for her hand. ‘Look, I get why you’re pissed. Honestly I do. And if things had worked out any way different, I’d have been straight back here. But there’s something I really need to tell you.’
She inhaled sharply, summoning her courage. ‘Yeah? ’Cause there’s something I need to tell you too.’
He looked a little surprised. ‘OK. You first?’
She shook her head. ‘No. You. I insist.’ Once she’d said her words, there’d be nothing left to say.
He looked straight at her and she felt those blue eyes lock around her heart like a clamp, holding her in place the way they always did, stopping her from leaving, giving her hope when she thought there was none. ‘I sold the company.’ The words smoked in the air like flares in a night sky. ‘Well, in principle,’ he added quickly. ‘Obviously it’s not just my decision to make but . . . it’s an amazing offer.’
At first she couldn’t reply. She couldn’t form the shapes to make words, she couldn’t push the air from her lungs.
> ‘What?’ she managed, finally.
‘Nordica made an approach on the second day. I’ve been in meetings with them ever since.’ He grinned delightedly, his eyes electric. ‘That was why I couldn’t leave, baby.’
It wasn’t a joke? He’d sold Titch?
‘Ask me how much,’ he said, enjoying the stunned expression on her face.
It was another moment before she physically could. ‘How much?’
His smile stretched across his face and she realized she hadn’t seen him as happy as that, not once, in the last seven and a half months. ‘Seven million dollars.’
He got up from the bed and walked round to her side, pulling her up by the hands so that she was standing toe to toe with him, his hands on her waist. Her stomach was still swollen – in truth she still looked pregnant – but for once she didn’t care. ‘I did it, baby. I did it for us.’
‘Seven million dollars?’ she whispered. They would never need to worry again.
He beamed wider, his excitement growing. ‘Say it again! I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of hearing it.’
‘This isn’t a joke?’
‘Luce, do you really think I’d have missed the first few days of my son’s life for anything less than seven million dollars? I was too scared to leave until we’d got the details sorted out. I kept thinking it would just go up in smoke, turn out to be some crazy-ass dream,’ he said, bending his knees so that he was eye level with her. ‘It almost killed me not being able to tell you, but I wanted to see your face. I wanted to see this,’ he said, clasping her face in his hands.
He kissed her and she let him. In fact, she kissed him back. She’d missed him. Seven million dollars?
‘Oh, Tuck,’ she whispered, looking up at him. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘It changes everything, don’t you see?’
She caught her breath. ‘Everything?’
