by Dani Atkins
‘It’s been a bit of a process,’ I said, which blithely glossed over the numerous occasions I would happily have throttled Heidi, if only I’d been able to get up onto my feet to do so. ‘But at least I can now walk again. I should be getting out of here in a few weeks.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Ryan said unthinkingly. My head shot up and I saw the tightening of his jaw, clamping down too late, for his words had already bolted to freedom.
‘How? How do you know?’
He met my eyes and didn’t flinch under their scrutiny. ‘Because I still speak to your dad on a regular basis. He’s been keeping me up-to-date on your progress.’
Twice betrayed, I refused to let him see how disturbed I was by his admission. I suppose part of me should have felt pleased that he still cared enough to ask about me, but a much larger part was suffused with white-hot anger, at both of them. I hated the idea that they were cosily chatting about me, as though I was still lost from them both in an unreachable cocoon.
‘Well, there’s really no need for you to do that any longer, is there?’
Ryan looked at me for a very long unblinking moment. I tried to read the expression on his face, because I remembered them all so well, but this one was new to me. It had no name.
‘Actually, there is a reason. A very good one. And that’s what I’ve come here today to talk about.’
My heart began to thud so noisily in my chest, I wondered if he could hear it across the room. When I reached out my hand for a nearby glass of water, the complexity of lifting the drink to my lips without spilling it everywhere was a great deal harder than it should have been.
Ryan leant forward and held his hands out towards me, like a bridge. They were extended palm-side-up, in an obvious invitation, and I knew how easy and how dangerous it would be to lay my own once more within his grip. But they were her hands now, not mine. I shook my head, declining the unspoken request, and after a minute he drew them back. They remained resting lightly against his denim-covered knees, and the effort to ignore my own good sense and reach out for them anyway took all of my concentration.
‘The hospital telephoned me. They were the ones who asked me to come and see you today.’
Now I was really confused and even more annoyed. I could just about come to terms with my dad and Ryan staying in contact, but the doctors in charge of my care had no business getting in touch with my former fiancé. His name had been removed as a contact from my medical records, or so I’d thought.
‘I think you’d better explain what this is all about.’ My voice sounded cold, but it was fear that was robbing my words of warmth. There was an avalanche coming, a great big wall of ice and snow, and I wasn’t going to have time to get out of its way, and from the look in his eyes, neither would Ryan. It was going to bury us both.
His eyes darted towards a small black canvas bag which he’d brought with him. It was propped up against the leg of his chair, but it was impossible to see within it. It wasn’t the first time he’d glanced down at it, and I sensed it might be an important prop in the strange play we appeared to be acting out.
‘This is very difficult, Maddie. And there’s no easy way to break it to you. What I’m going to say will change lives. And I don’t just mean yours and mine.’
My heart skipped. It couldn’t help it. This was about his marriage. It had to be. What else could he be talking about? ‘Go on.’
‘You went up to the maternity ward yesterday, didn’t you?’
Whatever I had been dreading – or even hoping – he was about to say, it certainly had nothing to do with my ill-advised walkabout the previous day. I gave a laugh, which didn’t sound real, probably because it wasn’t. ‘My God, why is everyone going on about that? I didn’t do anything wrong. You’re all acting as though I was about to snatch a baby or something.’
Ryan’s eyes softened, and for a fleeting moment I thought I caught a glimpse of the love he had once felt for me. Then he blinked, and it was gone. ‘The doctors thought that maybe there was a reason why you felt drawn to that ward in particular. That it might be some sort of breakthrough.’
I shook my head, still feeling like I was on trial for a crime that no one would reveal to me. ‘I went for a walk, that’s all. And really, would it be so surprising if I was drawn to the nursery? The accident might have been a long time ago for all of you, but for me it’s still so recent. I only lost our baby three months ago . . . or at least that’s how it seems to me.’
His face twisted in pain, and I wondered how difficult it was for him to hear me speak of ‘our baby’ when he now had a child with someone else.
‘But you didn’t,’ he said, overriding my earlier refusal, and reaching across the space between us to hold my hands in his. ‘You didn’t lose our baby three months ago.’
There were tears in my eyes, and there was no point in trying to hide them, because any minute now they were going to flow down my cheeks. ‘I know, I know,’ I said, my voice hoarse with the truth I had finally learnt to accept. ‘It all happened six years ago.’
Ryan was shaking his head, and then unbelievably he allowed a totally inappropriate smile to form on his lips. ‘You didn’t lose our baby.’
I heard the words. Obviously I heard the words. But they made no sense to me. He might as well have been speaking in Swahili.
‘I . . . I . . .’ I had no idea what to say, but Ryan suddenly had more than enough to say for both of us.
‘Your injuries were terrible. Both your legs were badly broken, as was one of your arms. There didn’t seem to be a single inch of unbruised skin on your entire body. And the injury to your head . . . well, no one could tell us what the long-term implications would be. We thought it was a miracle you were alive at all, but actually that wasn’t the real miracle.’
‘You’re saying that I . . .’ The sentence was almost impossible to complete. ‘. . . that I didn’t have a miscarriage?’
Ryan’s eyes filled with tears, and he spoke the words the way you would a prayer. ‘No, Maddie, you incredible, unbelievable woman. You most definitely did not. You kept our baby safe . . .’ his voice cracked. ‘Even with all those terrible injuries, you kept her safe.’
‘Her?’ My voice was an incredulous whisper.
He was laughing and crying now at the same time, a rainbow through a thunderstorm. ‘Yes. Her. A little girl. And somehow you defied everything the doctors predicted and you kept our baby alive. You carried her all the way to the end of the pregnancy.’
The world was spinning, nothing made any sense.
‘I was there when she was born. I held her in my arms, and willed you harder than I had ever done before to open your eyes, so you could see the miracle we had made. We laid her on you, her skin against yours, and for a while I think we all believed that would be the moment. The doctors, the nurses, everyone was in tears as her tiny hands curled against your skin.’ He looked down at his feet, as though suddenly the look on my face was too much to take; it was like looking directly into the sun. ‘But I guess we’d used up more than our fair share of miracles by then, because you never woke up. You never got to see her.’
I got shakily to my feet. My words sounded jerky and staccato, like discordant notes on an out-of-tune piano. ‘I have a daughter? We have a baby? I gave birth whilst still in a coma? Is that even possible?’
Ryan nodded, covering all four of my dazed questions with a single affirmative. ‘Except she’s not exactly a baby any more. She’s five years old now.’
I gripped the back of the chair for support, as though a giant wave – more of tsunami really – had tried to sweep me away. How could I have been so slow to realise what should have been glaringly obvious?
‘The daughter you told me about, yours and your wife’s; she’s not Chloe’s child, is she?’
Ryan looked startled to hear his wife’s name on my lips. Considering the revelations of the day, that was surely the least shocking of any of them.
‘No. She’s not. Hope is your da
ughter. Yours and mine.’
I don’t remember sinking back down onto my seat, but I clearly must have done. Ryan was leaning forward again, staring anxiously into my face, which I guessed was probably several shades paler than usual.
‘Are you all right? Should I call someone?’
I shook my head slowly. ‘No, don’t. But I’m not all right. Not even a little bit. This is . . . this is . . . a lot.’ I seemed to have temporarily lost the ability to string together a coherent sentence.
‘I know it must be. I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re thinking.’
The words were on my lips before I had time to censor them. ‘What I’m thinking is why didn’t you tell me about her straight away? Why wait months to let me know this?’
Ryan shifted awkwardly on his chair, and his eyes seemed suddenly reluctant to meet mine. ‘We decided it was better to wait until you were stronger. Everyone was worried that a shock like this could hinder your recovery, or cause a setback.’
‘You didn’t think that perhaps knowing I hadn’t lost the child I was carrying might have made some of the hell I was going through an awful a lot more bearable?’ There was something on Ryan’s face that revealed that was exactly what he’d thought. ‘I’d lost six years of my life; I’d lost everything I’d planned for . . . I’d lost you. Was it fair to let me carry on believing that I’d also lost our baby?’
‘It wasn’t my decision alone to make,’ confessed Ryan reluctantly.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to step away from focusing on who was at fault, because there were other, far more important thoughts screaming to be heard right then. ‘Do you have a photograph of her?’
The smile Ryan flashed me opened the door to a hundred forgotten memories, and I slammed it shut just as quickly. Not now. Now wasn’t the moment to think about him and me, this moment belonged only to the life we had created together.
‘I’ve got some recent ones on my phone,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his mobile. ‘We went away for a week at half-term.’
I’m pretty sure my expression was blank. I didn’t speak ‘parent’ and had long ago forgotten things like school term dates. But it was a world and a language Ryan was clearly very familiar with. The first spasm of impotent jealousy hit me.
He seemed to take forever switching on the phone and scrolling through the stored images in his library of photographs. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, his lips curving to form a tender smile as he looked at the device. ‘This is the one I was looking for.’ I was so impatient I practically snatched the phone from his hand when he held it out towards me.
My own hand was trembling, making the photograph of the girl on the screen a moving target. But my eyes were locked onto her face with missile-like accuracy. I couldn’t have looked away from that image if my life had depended upon it.
Perhaps a small, slow, part of my brain had been expecting – if not a baby – then certainly a much younger child than the one who grinned up at me from the mobile phone screen. I gasped softly, and pincered my fingers to enlarge the picture, drinking in every detail of her pretty, heart-shaped face. My tears splashed down like silent raindrops and landed on the screen of his phone.
‘She looks like me,’ I breathed in wonder.
He nodded, and swallowed visibly as though the emotion was rising up like lava within him. ‘Heartbreakingly like you. She always has, from the moment she was born.’
My eyes were drinking in every detail of the photograph, afraid to look away. At that moment, if Ryan had wanted his phone back, he would probably have had to wrestle me to the ground to give it up. The skin of my daughter’s face was pale, just like mine; she had full pink lips, the same ones I saw whenever I looked in a mirror. Her hair was long and dark and someone – don’t think about who – had braided it neatly into twin plaits. I’d seen that exact same image in a dozen different school photographs from my past; it was the style I had always worn as a child. That thought shocked me enough to make me raise my head. ‘My parents . . . are they a part of her life?’
Ryan looked surprised by the question, as though it was a slightly ridiculous thing to have asked. ‘Yes. Of course they are. Your dad absolutely idolises her. It’s harder for your mum.’ He bit his lip as though unsure how indiscreet he was allowed to be. ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn here, but because of her condition your mum gets confused. She thinks Hope is you.’ I felt a small sick feeling creep into the pit of my stomach. My mother must have deteriorated a great deal more than my dad had chosen to share with me. ‘But Hope adores both of them. They’re the only grandparents she knows, because my parents still live in the States, and sadly both of Chloe’s have passed away.’
I struggled to keep the expression on my face completely neutral, but I could feel my lips and cheeks tightening with irritation. Those people were not her relatives. Those people were not her grandparents. Something small, green and ugly crept up and slithered inside me, like a cancer.
Without bothering to ask for permission, I side-swiped the photograph, eagerly seeking another. And I found one. Ryan’s brows drew closer together in concern when he realised what I’d done. The spasm of pain lingered on my face like an angry birthmark as I looked down at this second photograph of our daughter. Except Hope wasn’t the only subject in this one. A woman of around my age, wearing a navy swimsuit, was sitting in a large rattan chair beside a glittering-surfaced swimming pool. On her lap, dressed in a cute polka-dot child’s bikini was my daughter; my flesh, my blood, my perfect beautiful child. She was mine, you only had to look at her to know that, but the arms wrapped tightly around her belonged to another woman. Both of them were laughing at the camera. They looked happy and carefree, and the knife in my heart twisted viciously.
Ryan had moved to stand behind me. I could feel his breath gently fanning the back of my neck as he leant forward and also studied the photograph. ‘That was the day Chloe taught her to swim. She’d been wanting her to learn for ages. She always panics whenever we’re anywhere near water. But she’s right; it’s an important life skill. Hope had just managed a whole width of “doggy-paddle” when I took that photo.’
I turned my head; it felt slow and heavy as I lifted it to look at him over my shoulder. ‘I used to work as a part-time lifeguard at my local pool before I went to university. Did I ever tell you that?’
Ryan’s eyes clouded, so I knew the answer before he said it. ‘Yes. I believe you did.’
‘I could have taught her to swim.’ It was one more precious moment I’d had to hand over to the woman who was now living my life. I looked back at the photograph, this time concentrating not on the miniature version of me, but on the woman who held her so tightly and securely against her. Chloe’s hair was a shade or two lighter than Ryan’s. Her eyes were clear and a curious blue-grey colour. They were unadorned by mascara, even the waterproof kind. It was impossible to gauge her height as she was sitting down, but her legs looked shorter than mine, and her frame more gently rounded. The swimsuit was functional rather than sexy, yet still displayed a cleavage way more impressive than my own. How happy Ryan must be; he’d always been a boob man.
Chloe looked like the kind of person who easily made friends wherever she went. She had a smiley openness that came across even through the distortion of pixels. She looked womanly, and motherly. She looked like a perfectly nice, perfectly happy wife to the man I loved.
I hated her with a ferocity that scared me.
They’d warned me about extreme mood swings. Apparently it’s not uncommon in patients emerging from a coma. It was my first encounter with how wayward they could be, and I was still in thrall to this new, not-so-nice version of me as I handed Ryan back his phone.
‘I’ve missed so much of her life. There are so many things I’ll never know about her and her early years. I don’t even know what it felt like to give birth.’
‘There are probably a great many women who’d just as soon not remember that,’ said Ryan,
trying to gently ease me back into good humour. It was a trick he used to be particularly good at, and it was interesting to see that he hadn’t lost the knack. He slipped his phone back into the pocket of his jeans and bent to pick up the black canvas bag that was still propped up beside the chair.
‘Actually, there might be a way of accessing some of those lost moments,’ he said, his hand delving into the bag and extracting a large, leather-bound book.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s something we decided to put together for you shortly after the accident, when we realised you were taking your time waking up.’ I smiled slightly at the way he made it sound as if I’d simply decided to have a very long lie-in for the last six years.
‘We knew there would be lots of blanks that you would want filled in if—’
Such a small slip, but it changed the smile on his face to an expression of mortification. ‘When,’ he corrected hastily. But of course it was too late, the Freudian slip had fallen; there was no pretending it hadn’t been said.
‘We compiled a photographic memory book for you,’ Ryan finished awkwardly, holding out the album to me. I went to flip it open, but his hands reached out to stop me. For a moment they rested on top of mine, and a million nerve endings leapt into life at the memory of his skin.
‘Some of them were taken fairly early on after the accident. They might be uncomfortable to look at.’ I stared down at the album with slightly less eagerness.
‘Okay. I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said cautiously, taking the unopened book from him and going back to my seat beside the window.
Ryan looked like a man being slowly torn down the middle. He took a step forward, as though intending to go through the album with me, and then abruptly stopped. From somewhere far away I imagined a voice audible only to him was calling him back. ‘Actually, you know what, I think I’ll go down to the cafeteria and grab a cup of tea and leave you to look at it in peace. Is that okay?’
