The Second Child

by Caroline Bond

  ‘Sorry.’ That’s all I can manage. She releases her grip and instead takes hold of my hand. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble again. I feel sweaty and cold. Hot and breathless from running, but at the same time chilled to the bone by Anne’s awful truth.

  ‘Wait here. Don’t you dare move,’ Ali barks at me. She slips off her jacket and drapes it across my shoulders before dashing across the road. A few minutes later she forces a paper cup in my hands: tea. The heat leaks through the ridged cardboard into my stiff fingers. ‘Sip it. It’s hot.’ I do as I’m told.

  I sit next to her, anchoring myself to her, and she waits patiently for me to explain why I’m behaving like a lunatic. As the rush-hour traffic stop–starts past us, I tell her, ‘It was her. From the moment she started talking, I knew. It wasn’t the hospital. It was Anne. It was never a mistake.’ And out it pours: Anne’s confession, her pathetic justification and her self-pity. As I’m talking Ali puts her arm around me and swears softly and repeatedly. ‘The bitch. The fucking, evil bitch!’

  A welter of thoughts coils and spirals in my brain. Everything I thought I knew is wrong. Every reaction I’ve had has been misdirected. Everything she said was a lie. And I believed her.

  Ali is white with rage. ‘You need to ring the police. Do it, ring them. I’d do it, right now. She stole Rosie. She stole your life. I can’t get my head round it. All this time. Seriously, I can’t. It’s unbelievable.’ She goes quiet for a second, but I can still feel the energy vibrating through her. Then she says, ‘Jesus! Phil is going to go crazy.’

  The thought of telling Phil makes me feel sick; of telling Rosie… of telling James. I go blank. I can’t. The thought of walking into the house and lobbing this at them – another bomb blast, more carnage, more wreckage – I can’t. I won’t.

  I straighten up, crushing the cup into a tight, hard wad in my fist, and ask what time is it. My voice sounds remarkably normal. Ali scrambles her phone out of her pocket. ‘Ten to eight.’

  It’s late. I’m late.

  ‘I need to go home.’ I stand up, hand Ali her jacket and set off in the direction of the car. ‘I want to say goodnight to Lauren before she settles.’

  Ali chases after me, clearly bemused by my sudden shift of focus. ‘Sarah, wait!’

  But I keep going. ‘Ali. I need to go home. That’s what I’m going to do, just go home. And that’s all I’m going to do tonight.’ She starts to remonstrate, but I hold up my hand, stopping her. ‘No, Ali. This is my call. I’m not going to say anything tonight, and you mustn’t either, to anyone.’ And I speed up, making her hurry to stay with me as we race back to the car.

  She insists on coming back with me. She won’t take no for an answer and I haven’t the strength to argue. I can feel her staring at me as I drive. We barely speak. There’s too much to process. After twenty minutes of cautious, careful driving I pull up outside the house. Most of the windows are open, lights blazing from each room, and I can see the TV flickering in the lounge. Another normal night at home. I brace myself. Nothing feels like it will ever be normal again.

  ‘Sarah. Seriously. You can maybe get through tonight without saying anything, but what are you going to do after that?’ Ali asks.

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’ It’s such an inadequate response, but it’s the truth. She’s seems about to say something more, but checks herself. I pull down the sunshade and look at myself in the mirror, scrubbing my finger across the thin, crêpey skin under my eyes to get rid of the mascara smudges. ‘Do I look all right?’ I ask, turning to her. What I mean is… Do I look normal?

  ‘Yes,’ she declares loyally.

  ‘Good.’ I snap the mirror back up. ‘But, Ali, not a word when we go in. I don’t want you to say anything about any of this. Not yet. And nothing to Jess, when you get home. You must promise me.’ I stare at her, knowing full well that I’m extracting a dreadful, almost impossible promise from her. Eventually she nods. We climb out of the car and head inside, united by a truth that’s so awful I have no idea what to do with it.

  ANNE

  After Sarah’s gone, I doze. The rumble of the shower in the next-door bathroom is soothing. I don’t move from the bed. The room darkens. I think about the pack of pills in the bedside drawer, but even that seems too much effort. The knot has been untied and it will unravel of its own accord. I don’t need to hold it tight any longer. I reach down and untuck the covers from the end of the bed, pull them up to my neck and go to sleep.

  PHIL

  Sarah is late back and, for reasons I can’t fathom, she has Ali with her. They both seem subdued. Ali only stays for about an hour, and most of that she spends upstairs, ‘reading’ with Lauren. While she’s up there, Sarah and I grab ten minutes alone in the kitchen. I’m anxious to know how it went with Anne.

  Sarah says that it was difficult, but she thinks we’ll be able to get things resolved. She is, however, reluctant to go into the details of what they actually agreed. She keeps batting away my questions with vague reassurances and her familiar mantra that ‘These things take time’. I feel frustration begin to fizz in my gut.

  ‘But do you think she’s going put up a fight over us having shared custody?’

  Sarah grows still. She looks smaller, paler than usual; in fact she looks completely done in. ‘It’s early days. There’s a lot to sort out.’ I decide to leave off badgering her. She’s bearing the brunt of this, and me chipping at her away isn’t helpful. I step forward, intending to give her a hug, but she avoids my embrace. When she speaks again her voice is surprisingly firm and resolute. ‘Phil, I promise you. We will get what we want. We’ll get what’s right. For us and for Rosie… in the end.’

  It’s the first time I’ve heard such certainty from her. Despite my best intentions, I push a little harder, testing her resolve. ‘What about what Anne wants?’ Sarah’s empathy with Anne has always been the stumbling block.

  She looks past me for a moment, out at the garden, her expression stony. ‘She’ll just have to accept that Rosie wants to be with us. We’re her family now.’

  That really throws me. I’m pleased and impressed, but I’m also slightly stunned. Sarah appears to have travelled a very long way in one conversation. I wonder what Anne said, or did, to provoke such a response. It can’t have been good. Sarah then adds, almost as if it’s not newsworthy, that Rosie is definitely staying until Sunday. Rosie will be delighted. I’m delighted. Christ, what did Anne say? I’m just about to find out when Ali comes downstairs to say ‘goodbye’; she’s followed into the kitchen by Rosie, her hair wet from her shower, then by James, who starts rummaging around for snacks in the cup-boards. Then Sarah chooses that precise moment to remember that it’s bin collection day tomorrow. And so family life swallows up the end of our conversation, and whatever Anne did or said goes untold.

  I whistle as I haul the dustbins out to the kerb. Rosie is staying, Sarah and I are finally on the same page and Anne is relegated to the margins, exactly where she should be. Things are looking up.

  When I come back into the lounge. James is eating a bag of tortillas and Rosie is sitting on the floor, with Sarah on the sofa behind, brushing her hair. It strikes me that we look like a family from a TV ad, which makes me smile. I sit and enjoy the simple pleasure of having us all together.

  We don’t go up until nearly midnight. In the bedroom Sarah shrugs out of her clothes slowly, like an old woman. The itch to know about what went on with Anne is strong, but far stronger is my faith in my wife and my concern about what all this stress is doing to her. She climbs into bed, lies down and pulls the duvet up around her. I know there’s more to come out. Something went on between her and Anne tonight, something that changed the dynamic between the two of them, dramatically, but it can wait. Sarah will tell me in her own time. I know she will. Sarah is not a keeper of secrets.

  After I switch off the light, Sarah rolls towards me, wordlessly seeking me out. I put my arms around her and she buries into my embrace.

  ROSIE

 
I lie in Jim’s room listening to the house creak. I’m so happy that I can stay. I need to, because the more time I spend with them, the more normal it feels. And I want it to feel normal. I want it to feel like home. I hear Lauren shuffle around in her bed through our adjoining wall. She settles and starts snoring. Even Lauren is beginning to seem normal to me now. Because she is. Lauren is Lauren. She’s their daughter, and James’s sister, and me being here is never going to change that. I thought it needed to, but it doesn’t.

  I am fitting in. They are fitting me in.

  Tonight when Sarah said, ‘Do you want me to brush your hair for you?’ I was thrown. I hate anyone touching my hair. I have done ever since I was little and Mum used to spend hours yanking knots out of it, trying to tame it into the perfect bun for ballet. But I said ‘yes’ because I knew I needed to. To start with, I felt self-conscious sitting so close to her, but after a while I relaxed. She was gentle, holding the tangled hair away from my head as she brushed so that it didn’t pull at the roots, and easing out the knots with her fingers, patiently. Once it was smooth she brushed it slowly, rhythmically, keeping going long after she needed to.

  I didn’t want to destroy the nice, relaxed mood, but I had to ask her how it went with Mum. It made it easier that she was sitting behind me. She answered me quietly, as if she didn’t want Phil and James listening. ‘It wasn’t easy.’ She stroked the brush through my hair again. ‘But we will work it out. I know you need clarity about the future. And I know I’ve not always been… very sure about how things should be arranged. But I absolutely, faithfully promise you that I’m going do everything I can to make it right.’

  Something about the way she said it made me believe her. I said, ‘Thank you’ and for a moment I leant back against her legs and we had a curious kind of hands-free hug. The warmth of her body pressed against mine felt good. Then she went back to brushing my hair.

  I roll onto my front and search around in the bed, but Dog’s not there, so I hang over the edge of the mattress and sweep my hands around among James’s assortment of crap. Eventually I find Dog lying next to a pair of Jim’s trainers, under the bed. I shake the fluff-balls off him, then hug him to my chest, running my fingers through his tatty fur. Here in this cramped little house, in Jim’s clut-tered room, without a bed or a drawer or a corner to call my own, I feel safe – safer than I have done for ages, safer than I ever did when I was little. I’m sorry. But it’s true. The Rudaks make me feel safe. I can’t change that, not that I want to.

  I roll onto my side and face the wall, glad that in the dark I can’t see Jim’s awful taste in wallpaper. I don’t want it to be true, but it is: the Rudaks make me feel better about myself, more okay with life, more loved, than Mum ever has done. Where that leaves her, I don’t know. Of course, in reality I do, but I don’t want to have to keep thinking about her. It shouldn’t be my responsibility. She’s got to find her own way to live, to be happy, to have a purpose in life. I can’t do that for her. I never have been able to. I can’t live my life her way any more, not now that I have an alternative.

  I roll back onto my front, holding Dog to my cheek.

  I listen to Lauren snoring softly, and imagine Phil and Sarah asleep across the hall and Jim crashed out downstairs on the lounge sofa. The house shifts and settles. And despite myself, I think about Mum, alone in a hotel room, feeling rejected and unloved, by me.

  I take for ever to go to sleep.

  43

  Congratulations

  SARAH

  I JERK awake, unconscious to conscious in a second. It must be early as the house is silent. Phil is fast asleep, his face pressed into the pillow, so close that I can feel the little puffs of air as he breathes. He and James look so alike when they sleep, the same bony nose, the same dark brows and smooth forehead, the same utter stillness. I slide out of bed, wrap myself in my dressing gown and creep downstairs, staying close to the edge to stop the floor-boards creaking. I need time to think, on my own, before they all get up and fill my day with their needs and wants.

  The stark truth is that Anne discarded Lauren because she wasn’t perfect. She gave away her own child because she didn’t meet her and Nathan’s expectations, but another woman’s child did: mine. She stole Rosie from us and, in the process, she stole away the family we should have had. And then, and this is the worst part, despite it all – the years of me making my peace with the challenges of Lauren’s disability, after we’d learnt to accept and survive, even thrive – she comes back into our lives and lies and lies and lies. I reach for my phone and scroll through my contacts, looking for Jeremy Orr’s number. I pause on it. One message and I can rip Anne’s life apart, just as she has ours.

  I think back to her slow, deliberate voice telling me that everything I’ve believed about this whole sorry mess is a fiction. It was never a mistake or fate or misadventure or human error. It was a deliberate act. I touch the screen, bringing Jeremy’s number to life. One phone call. Nothing less than she deserves.

  But there’s another stark truth that I have to face. My own culpability. Because Anne didn’t swap them straight away. It wasn’t immediately after the birth, when I was unconscious, it wasn’t during those first few days when Rosie was in and out of the nursery and I was ill; it was the day I was discharged. For five days I fed my real daughter, I held my real daughter, I nursed my real daughter. For five days I had Rosie, then I let her go.

  What Anne did was wrong, unnatural and wicked beyond words, but what is also very, very wrong is that I didn’t even notice.

  I put my phone aside and go and fetch the photos. They’re where Phil left them, propped at the end of the bookshelf, but when I look through them, the one I want is missing. I search around, pull out the books, root behind all the shelves in case it’s slipped down the back, but after ten minutes of fruitless searching it’s clear that it’s gone.

  Frustrated, I head back upstairs into Lauren’s room. She stirs as I enter and I stand completely still, watching her. She sighs, scratches her nose and resettles. I cross to the chest of drawers, pick up the baby box and creep back downstairs.

  I sit down and draw the box towards me, the last remaining artefacts of our five short days as Rosie’s parents. The Babygro is folded on the top, impossibly tiny, the pattern still bright and cheery, as befits the first outfit for a newborn. The tiny Scotty dogs are actually a dark red, not the insipid pink they look in the photo. I sit with it in my hands, threading it between my fingers, feeling the softness and the give of the fabric. I move the cards aside. And there, tucked in the very bottom, are the name-tags from the hospital. The cloudy plastic bands are still soft and pliable between my fingers, the words clearly legible. Lauren’s name, date of birth, weight and my name as her mother. All wrong. All Rosie’s. Holding the bands and the Babygro to my chest, I rock back and forth, trying to soothe the baby I never loved. I wasn’t mum enough for Rosie then. The question is: can I be mum enough now?

  PHIL

  I wake to a lovely, sunny day and with a bubble of happiness in my chest. Sarah and I on the same team, wanting exactly the same things, at last. Nothing can beat that. Nothing. Music drifts up from the kitchen along with the smell of toast. I roll onto my back and starfish across the bed for a couple of minutes, relishing the space and the cool sheets until I hear Lauren shuffle out onto the landing, my cue to get my lazy arse out of bed.

  Sarah is in the kitchen, drinking tea, silhouetted against the window when we get downstairs. She turns and smiles as Lauren and I come in. A proper smile that reaches her eyes. I brush my fingertips across the small of her back as we wait for the kettle to boil, wishing she could come back upstairs with me. She leans back against me and we watch as Lauren does her worst with her bowl of cereal. It’s unusual nowadays for it just to be the three of us around the table for breakfast. We eat with the sun streaming in through the window and discuss what we’re going to do with Rosie’s last few, bonus days. Lunch out, maybe a swim, the cinema?

  For
the first time in a long while I’m able to set off for work without a nagging anxiety about Sarah, or Rosie, or Lauren, or James, and it continues to be a good day. It’s the same boring routine at work, but I’m buoyed up by the thought that we’re getting closer to resolving things. I’m out at the plant extension that we’re overseeing near Halifax by mid-morning, reviewing the schematics, when my phone pings, a text from Rosie. I’m guessing that she’s just got up.

  Morning. Hope the world of sewage is flowing well!!! Sarah says can u pick up some milk on yr way home. And some more tortillas. R xxxx

  Out of such mundanity can come happiness. After three more hours of trying to resolve the pumping problem I set off back to the office, sunroof open, radio on loud. On a whim I swing left, deciding that a slight detour is excusable.

  The same grubby white plastic chairs await, as does the same seductive smell of overcooked onions. I order a cheeseburger and watch the swifts dart around the sky as Mrs Chu slaps two frozen burgers down on the hot plate. As my portion of grease and heart attack cooks, I ask after Mrs Chu’s family. She updates me on her over-achieving daughter, at Cardiff Uni studying chemistry, and her under-performing son, running orders for his uncle’s takeaway in Hebden Bridge. My interest is purely selfish because, as she flips my burger, Mrs Chu reciprocates by asking, as she always does, after my family; she especially likes to hear how Lauren is getting on. When I tell her we have a new daughter, she smiles and I try and explain about how we were separated from Rosie, but how she is back with us now. Mrs Chu nods and smiles even more broadly than normal, as she layers cheese onto my burger and wraps it in a napkin. In exchange, I pull the photo out of my wallet and pass it across the counter to her. She wipes her hands on a cloth, meticulously, before she takes it from me.