Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel

by Dorothy Koomson

  Leo, age 7 years and 5 months

  CHAPTER 37

  I see there’s a family history of hemorrhaging, particularly in the brain,” the doctor says to my assembled family.

  He had originally come into Leo’s room to ask to speak to me alone, not realizing that once we got a nurse to sit with Leo, “alone” meant speaking to six people. We all crammed into the relatives’ room, Mum and Aunt Mer sat on my right, Keith sat on my left, and Dad and Cordy stood behind us as the consultant started to speak.

  Knowing what I am about to unleash in the room, I hesitate before I say, “His paternal grandfather died of a brain hemorrhage twenty-something years ago. An aneurysm that ruptured and became a fatal hemorrhage.”

  Mum gives a small, fragile intake of breath; my father puts his hand on her shoulder to comfort her or to steady himself, I’m not sure which. Cordy takes a deep, deep breath and exhales loudly. Keith becomes a rigid form beside me at the reaction of my family—he hasn’t realized until this point that my family don’t know. He has always assumed that we don’t talk about Leo’s father because I changed my mind about the surrogacy and it must have hurt Mal, not because I have never told them.

  I’m not a natural liar, and not owning up to something makes me feel as though I have lied. And spending the last eight years with this pact to tell only if someone asks directly has been difficult, weighing heavily on my conscience. I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t because as soon as I did, they would have asked questions until it came out about the surrogacy agreement.

  From there, the conversations that would have started—the rebukes, the recriminations, the being silently told I was stupid to even agree—would have been unbearable. After that, I would have had to tell them why I kept the baby. Even after all this time, I still found what he did, how he did it, something too hard to think about, let alone talk about. I had seen how hard he had become, inured to anything except going through with what he had decided. I didn’t want to relive it, nor to visit it upon my family. And knowing Mum, knowing Cordy, they wouldn’t have left it after hearing the story. They would have known best; they would have tried to talk to Mal. They would have tried to set us up, thinking that this could all be fixed with a little staging, a few correct words and a reminder to him how much we mean to each other. I knew that wasn’t true, I’d done all that: I had engineered those meetings, I had tried to talk to him, I’d broken down in front of him and none of it mattered. Mal and his wife didn’t want Leo; Mal wanted nothing more to do with me. I did not want to expose that hardened, uncaring Mal I had experienced to Mum and Cordy. It was a decision I had made that was best for all concerned. I had basically decided to lie by omission, all the while knowing that the longer I avoided admitting everything, the more hurt it would cause them.

  I have hurt the people who care about me most by trying to protect them.

  “And his father?” the consultant asks. “Has he suffered any sort of hemorrhaging?”

  “About ten years ago he had a brain scan,” I reply. “They found nothing.”

  Aunt Mer probably knows the answer to that; however, I don’t dare look at her, which would implicate her in this. And I don’t want my parents and Cordy to feel any more betrayed, which the knowledge that Aunt Mer has always known would do.

  “He’s fine,” Aunt Mer says. “He had another scan last year, when he started to have headaches and blurry vision, but they found nothing.”

  Another almost inaudible gasp from Mum, physical shock from Dad and Cordy. I hate what this is doing to them. I never wanted any of them to find out like this.

  The consultant, one I don’t know, one I probably won’t see again, makes a note on his clipboard with his expensive-looking black pen. He is writing down this new piece of medical information, and probably adding: “Fucked-up family, half of them don’t even know who the child’s father is. Mother clearly has been telling porkies.”

  The doctor’s sandy hair lies lightly on his forehead and I notice how young he is. I never realized that certain things, such as the age of the doctor whose hands in which the life of my son rests, would be important. He isn’t seventeen, but nor is he that much older than me. Shouldn’t he have lived a bit more to be able to diagnose things? Shouldn’t he have seen more of life to be able to stand there and talk to me about things going wrong?

  Which is, of course, what he is doing.

  He began this conversation by taking me away from Leo. If he was going to tell me Leo was going to wake up soon, he would have told me in front of Leo, knowing that the knowledge would help the little boy. Would somehow filter through and let him know exactly what he is meant to be doing. Taking me away means what he has to say is for adult ears only.

  It was like that when I brought him in with the nosebleed. They had stopped it, but then had taken me into the relatives’ room to tell me that they needed to send him for an emergency MRI scan, because I’d noted down there was a history of hemorrhaging in the family and that Leo had mentioned he had headaches and blurry vision every so often. Then they’d said what they found on the scan, that they needed to go in and operate because one of the blueberry aneurysms was so close to rupture. Every time they told me these things, it had been away from Leo, information they felt he didn’t need to hear.

  So I had known when the consultant, who is a stranger to me, asked to speak to me—to us—in here, that he wasn’t going to deliver the news that I wanted. The news that I needed.

  With his head still bowed, only the doctor’s eyes move away from his clipboard and seek out mine across the room. His eyes are a deep, dark blue that house an old soul. He is young, but he has lived. Maybe seeing lives hanging in the balance day after day does that to you; maybe you age on the inside and only those who look close enough can see it.

  “Mrs. Kumalisi,” he says, straightening up and looking me in the eye.

  “Yes?” Mum, Cordy and I all reply.

  “Doctor Kumalisi,” the doctor tries again, after looking pointedly at Mum and Cordy, asking them silently, Why on earth would I be talking to either of you?

  “Mr. Consultant,” I reply, a small corner of my mind agreeing with him—whose son is in this hospital?

  “We’ve been monitoring your son’s condition for the past four weeks.”

  “Yes.”

  “He hasn’t shown much improvement.”

  “ ‘Much’ means none at all, doesn’t it?” I reply.

  I feel Mum, Dad and Aunt Mer stiffen: young he may be, but he is still a doctor, and speaking to him as I would anyone else is not something of which they approve.

  A little spark of respect ignites in the doctor’s eyes. I suppose most parents would be hanging on to his every word, hoping he will tell them what they want to hear, all the while knowing that they probably won’t get what they’re longing for. I am clinging to hope, too. But I have also seen their repeated and failed attempts to revive him, I have seen the doctors’ faces, I know he isn’t improving.

  “The current course of treatment doesn’t seem to be as effective as we had hoped. Keeping him in the coma was not meant to be a long-term plan. However, attempts to bring him out of the coma have proved unsuccessful.”

  He is recapping this, I realize, for my extended family, to make them understand that they haven’t simply adopted a “wait and see” approach; they have tried.

  “Doctor …”

  “Mr. Consultant.”

  His eyes hold mine, an intimate, unique type of understanding solidifying between us.

  “Leo’s condition is, in fact, deteriorating.”

  Mum and Cordy both burst into quiet tears. Keith reaches over and curls his large hand protectively over mine. Dad moves to the corner of the room. Aunt Mer is the only person to react like me: to become completely immobile.

  “There is no improvement, nor any constant stability,” the consultant continues. “We’re not sure how long it’s going to take, but it seems, at the present, there is only one conclusion.” />
  Slowly, I get to my feet. The crying, the silence, the attempt at comfort from my husband, is all too much. Stifling. Crushing down on my throat, into my lungs, into my arteries, into every blood vessel in my body.

  Once, Leo dropped a rock on an earthworm because he wanted to see what would happen. He had called me out into the garden to show me the crushed beast. When I told him it was dead and that being dead meant it would never wake up and move again, Leo had stared at me in complete horror. “I’m sorry, Mum,” he said, close to tears. “I’m really sorry. Please don’t let it be dead forever. Please don’t let it never wake up.” To calm him as much as I could, we’d had a funeral for it, with a matchbox for a coffin, and buried it at the end of the garden. Two years later, Leo still visited the little grave to say sorry to the earthworm.

  All I want is for Leo to be OK. It’s only a little thing. In the grand scheme of things, wanting for a quiet, kind, beautiful little boy who hasn’t ever hurt anyone to be OK doesn’t seem too much to want.

  There are millions of not very nice people out there. There are thousands and thousands of nasty people out there. There are hundreds of truly evil people out there. And they are OK. All of them are OK. But this boy, my boy, my Leo, isn’t going to be. That’s what this man is telling me. Someone who is sweet and kind and beautiful is not going to be OK.

  Keith stands to come with me, I presume. “I want to be alone with Leo,” I say to stop him.

  He nods, sits down again.

  The consultant has gone back to staring at his clipboard.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” I say to him as I head toward the door. “That’s not going to happen. Not to my boy.”

  CHAPTER 38

  W hen the door to Leo’s hospital room opens, I brace myself to tell whoever it is to leave. I want to be alone with my son, to talk to him, to sit with him, like it was for all those years when it was him and me.

  The smell of fresh lilies and green Palmolive soap tells me that it is Aunt Mer. I relax a little, unable, like the rest of us, to be snippy with her. The only person who ever snipes or rages at her is Victoria, because she has her own unhealed pain and she never wants Aunt Mer to forget it. She actually wants Aunt Mer to relive and remember the hell she put them—Mal and her—through, as often as possible. Fair enough, I suppose. Despite all our best efforts to help her, Victoria clings to her hurt and thinks only Aunt Mer can ease it by feeling guilty every moment of every day for the rest of her life. No one can convince her otherwise.

  The rest of us, Mal included, have always made allowances for Aunt Mer, would never be as harsh to her as we can be to each other, would never think of being offish or unpleasant. I wonder—for the first time—if she minds. We are constantly, unintentionally, treating her as though she is something fragile that the wrong word will break. Isn’t that like what Victoria does? We don’t mean it to hurt her, but it must in some way be a reminder of her illness, make her feel singled out. It’s never occurred to me before that she may mind.

  “Everyone is pretty upset,” she says, coming to stand behind me.

  “With what the doctor said or with what they found out?”

  “Both,” Aunt Mer replies. “Your mother and Cordy both haven’t stopped crying. Your father’s trying to comfort them, Keith has gone for a walk. I came here.”

  “I’d rather be alone, to be honest, Aunt Mer,” I say, still staring at Leo. I am mapping his face, noting the way he has changed and stayed the same in the last month. His hair has grown back a little more, fine bristles covering the top of his head because they haven’t operated on him in two weeks. His nose seems a little bit wider, so it looks even more like mine. His mouth hasn’t changed. The creases in his eyelids haven’t changed. The dark circles under his eyes, however, have deepened.

  The doctor is wrong, of course. Leo is only sleeping. Look at him: his eyes are only closed because he is only sleeping. Like every night since he was born, he is only sleeping. Resting. Taking a time-out. Healing. He will be back.

  “I know you want to be alone,” she says. “I just wanted to … You have to tell him.”

  I don’t have to ask who she means. Even though we have never properly, openly discussed it, always talking around it, knowing that any information, visits, and pictures I give her would be, at the very least, relayed or shown to Mal, we have never said to each other that he is Leo’s father. The closest we have come to that was the time I asked her to stop giving me money and expensive presents for Leo. I knew Aunt Mer, like my parents, had very little—the odd two hundred quid she kept trying to slip me was obviously coming from Mal and I didn’t want it. I might have needed it, but not wanted it. We had to struggle on because, as I had previously told Mal, if he wanted to give Leo money, he should put it into an account for when Leo was eighteen. I didn’t want to accept cash from him that could be seen as condoning what he had done. Not even through his mother. That was the closest brush to that forbidden subject we had ever come. It was enough that she knew, and to talk about it would be to further betray Mum, Dad and Cordy. If Aunt Mer and I never said it aloud, then we weren’t technically lying to my family.

  “There’s nothing to tell anyone,” I say. “He’s going to be fine.” The hollowness of my words echoes around us, ringing loud and clear in my ears. She places her hand on my shoulder, just like Dad had done to Mum a few minutes earlier. Stillness and calm flow through me, from her to me. Peace. Calm. Aunt Mer has always had a raging soul; for as long as I can remember she has always been fighting the two sides of herself, I never knew that at her core she has this … this serenity. I never knew that she could be like the sea, could make me feel as lifted and tranquil as I did whenever I could sit and stare at the sea.

  “He would like to know,” she says. “He needs to know.”

  “Mal hasn’t needed anything from me in a million years,” I say.

  “That is not true,” she replies. “The pair of you were so close. I’ve never known two closer people. Ask your parents or Cordelia, they will say the same thing.”

  “Were. We were close. He hasn’t wanted anything to do with me in eight years, why should he care now?”

  “Of course he wanted something to do with you, he just couldn’t.”

  “Yes, I know, because I had his baby. So why would he care now?”

  Aunt Mer doesn’t say anything for a few moments, I sense she is wrestling with herself about something. Whether to say it or to keep it to herself. “I saw Stephanie last week,” she says.

  Every nerve in my body leaps up in protest. Her name … It is like running one long, sharp fingernail down a blackboard, it is like scoring my back with a red-hot blade. Every time—every time—I hear that name, every nerve in my body leaps to attention; my muscles tense, my teeth grit against each other.

  That woman robbed me. She robbed me of being pregnant. Of enjoying that time at the beginning of being pregnant. Touching my baby, wondering at it growing, knowing that the any-time-of-the-day sickness, swollen ankles, exhaustion, miscarriage terrors would be worth it because at the end of it I would have a baby. I had been so careful not to bond, not to get involved, not to think of him as my baby because I was going to give him to his “real” parents, I had missed all those months. Even later on, a little part of me was still removed, still thinking that maybe Mal and she would change their minds. She had taken that from me. I knew it was she who had changed their minds. Mal shouldn’t have gone along with her, but she had been behind it. I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that.

  And she had done it because she never wanted me around. Despite my best efforts, she had never changed the decision to get rid of me she made when she first met me. I can recall the moment vividly in my mind because I saw it happen: I said to her I would like us to try to be friends, and she, rather than answer, had glanced at Mal. That had unsettled me, had made a cold chill slip down my spine—as it did again the day she asked me to have a baby for them—but I had dismissed it as paranoia. As me b
eing silly. What I didn’t do, as I should have done, is protect myself from her. She wanted to fill all roles in Mal’s life and she did not like my place as someone important to him. The only time she had started to like me was when I agreed to do something for her, and even then, I realized over the years, that was because she understood a part of me better than Mal did. She knew that I would not be able to stay around too long after the baby was born, that I would disappear for a long while afterwards and I probably wouldn’t be as close to them because of the baby. When she asked me to have a baby for them, it was the perfect way to get the perfect life she wanted—Mal and a baby, with me gone. I don’t know what made her change her mind about the baby, but she got the result she wanted in the end: Mal finished with me.

  The irony, of course, was that the depth of her dislike for me was matched by the depth of my like for her. I couldn’t help myself. Not only because she made Mal happy, like Jack made Cordy happy, but because underneath the disguises and masks, I knew there lay a good person. A person with a good heart and a troubled but beautiful soul. Now, of course, I did not feel that way about her. After she had robbed me of being pregnant, taken my closest friend, almost forced me to have an abortion and maneuvered me into lying by omission to my family for so long, I have nothing but dislike for her.

  Sometimes, I think I hate her.

  I certainly cannot talk about her, or hear about her.

  Aunt Mer’s hand curls into my shoulder, her thumb stroking along its brow, trying to get the knots of tension that name has caused to untie themselves. “She … she told me everything. What you agreed to do for them. What they did to you.”

  She didn’t tell Aunt Mer everything. How could she? She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that I had begged Mal, that I had lost all self-respect and had been so scared that I had begged him not to do what he did. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that I had almost gone through with the abortion. I didn’t feel the baby move and then change my mind about a termination. I actually went to the clinic, changed into the gown, and was about to undergo sedation when I asked them to stop. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that sometimes—for months after Leo was born—I was slightly distanced from him because I had brainwashed myself so well into believing that he was their son. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that sometimes I would take Leo down to the seafront in the middle of the night and, with him asleep in the pram, I would sit and cry over how my life was such a mess because I had tried to do something I thought was right for someone I loved and I was scared of being alone and I missed Mal so much I felt physical pain. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer about the cavern that had opened up inside me when I realized that for someone I loved to be able to do something like Mal had done to me, love was not the be-all and end-all. That at that moment of realization I stopped believing in love for a long time. Even when I got back together with Keith, I was waiting for him to prove he didn’t love me.