The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  Something is rustling below the window, somewhere in the trees and shrubs that divide this house from its neighbour. It sounds big. She sits up, unsteadily. The rustling stops and the rattle of the cicadas rises up again.

  It feels wrong to have Joe across the landing in his own room, but he insisted – showing a new streak of independence that she had not expected in such a strange situation. Perhaps he is instinctively distancing himself to make room for the baby. If so, she is not ready for that. He is only nine years old. He is still her baby really.

  They waited until after the twelve-week scan to tell him, and his reaction was thoughtful, if slightly concerned, as if they had announced that a distant relative was coming to stay.

  ‘Is it a boy?’ He didn’t even look up from his Lego.

  ‘We don’t know yet, love.’

  ‘When will it be born?’ He pressed a brick back into his Lego ambulance.

  ‘In the middle of January, after Christmas, when we’re in America.’

  ‘Will it have to share my new room?’

  ‘No, buddy,’ Greg said, ‘you’re going to have your very own room, way bigger than your room here.’

  ‘But then where will the baby sleep?’

  ‘Well, at first it will be in with me and Greg.’ She reached out and stroked his hair off his forehead. ‘Like you were, when you were little. And then it’ll go in its own cot in a bedroom of its own, next to yours.’

  He had not wanted to talk about the baby since then. Whenever she mentioned it, he looked politely uninterested and changed the subject. Sometimes she wonders if he is picking up on Greg’s feelings, their deep, subconscious male brains siding against this tiny interloper.

  *

  When she told Greg she was pregnant, he was bending down to pull on a sock, and it was as if someone had pressed a pause button. She watched the smooth strips of muscle across his back quiver as he lowered his foot, then turned to face her. His dark hair, still wet from the shower, was swept back from his forehead, giving his face a looming severity.

  She held up the test stick.

  ‘Jesus. How is this possible?’ he said. ‘You’re on the pill.’

  ‘You’re the doctor, you tell me.’ She tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite work. She was expecting shock, but not this – not accusation. Suddenly she felt as if she were teetering above a dark space, knowing she must fall, but not knowing how far.

  Greg sat down, heavily, on the bed next to her, staring straight ahead. ‘Wow,’ he said, in an odd, flat voice. ‘Tess. I mean … Shit.’

  ‘I didn’t plan this,’ she said. ‘I have no idea how this has happened.’

  He took her hand then, as if realizing how unfair he was being. ‘God, no – I know. I know, but … Jesus, Tess. What do you want to do?’

  She pulled her hand away. ‘What do you mean, what do I want to do?’

  ‘Well, it’s early, right? We have options.’

  ‘Are you talking about abortion?’

  ‘Termination is one choice.’

  She felt the anger rise inside her and got off the bed, standing in her pyjamas, staring down at him. ‘How could that be your first thought?’

  ‘But we were both very clear,’ he said. ‘We weren’t going to have a baby.’

  ‘I didn’t plan this, Greg!’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t.’

  ‘Then …’

  He looked at his watch suddenly. ‘Fuck, Tess – if I don’t go now, I’m going to miss the train.’ He stood up, facing her, reaching out his hand, his voice rising. It was not his fault. She had chosen a very bad moment to tell him. Fifty miles away, in London, sick children were waiting for him. He could not miss the London train that morning, even for this.

  He yanked on a shirt. ‘Listen – we’ll talk about this later. I love you. I’m sorry – this is shock, that’s all; you must be in shock too … This is not … we didn’t … Look I’ll call you later, when I’m done – OK? I love you.’ He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, looking into her eyes for a second, before pulling away. His fingers moved swiftly down the buttons of his shirt. ‘We’ll figure this out,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘We’ll talk tonight.’

  But they didn’t talk properly that night because when he came home he had been contacted about the Boston job and he was elated, towering. It was an honour, an astounding opportunity. He had never planned to go back to the States, but Children’s had one of the best paediatric cardiology programmes in the world, and a faculty position at Harvard Medical School – he’d be insane not to at least consider this, to fly out there and meet with them.

  And now, just three months later, the job is secured, the move has happened, but the existence of this baby still feels subtly fraught. They don’t seem to be able to talk about how they feel. Instead they talk about practicalities: setting up antenatal care, the obstetrician – ‘OB/GYN’ – whom Greg knew at medical school, the choice of maternity care, the dates of all the check-ups and scans, her physical sensations. What they never discuss is the actual baby – their child – who will be born in less than five months, changing their lives forever.

  *

  There is the sound again below the window – the rustling noise. She stiffens. The Boston Marathon bombers were gunned down in a leafy street just a couple of miles away. One was found bleeding in a boat in someone’s backyard only fifteen minutes’ drive from this house. She imagines what Greg’s reaction would be if she were to admit that she was worried about fugitives in the shrubbery. When you spend your days treating gravely ill children, this sort of fear must seem pointlessly self-indulgent. She hears the yipping, yowling again – a dog, a coyote? – and the distant hum of traffic, the neutral buzz of lives stretching out for miles in all directions.

  ‘Fuck you!’

  She jumps.

  ‘No. I mean it, really, fuck you!’ It is a man’s voice, close by. He spits each word. She sits up, the mattress swaying beneath her.

  ‘I am not going to take this manipulative shit from you. Not again.’

  He sounds as if he is standing below her window, but of course he must be in the house next door.

  ‘Wait – are you laughing at me now? Are you actually laughing? Seriously? I know what you’re doing and I’m not going to take this again – I mean it, no fucking way, not again.’

  Then she hears a woman’s voice. She can’t make out words, just a low, persistent monotone. A door slams then, and she hears footsteps on a path, a car door, an engine, tyres on tarmac, passing the front of the house, growling round the corner and vanishing into the streets beyond.

  If Greg were next to her on the blow-up mattress, they’d probably grab each other and laugh. She kneels up and peers over the window ledge. The neighbours’ house is shielded by the jagged trees, but through the network of branches she can just see into their kitchen. There are hanging copper pots and wooden cabinets, green mosaic tiles, shelves of cookbooks, a stainless-steel blender, photos on the fridge door – there are children in the house. She hopes that they are sleeping.

  And then a figure appears at the kitchen window: a woman’s face, round and pale, lit from above, features blurred, eyes like coals, hair massed on her shoulders. She stares out as if she is looking for something, or someone, in the trees – or perhaps in their downstairs rooms.

  Tess lies back on the blow-up bed and pulls the sheet over herself, even though she is too hot. Greg was right: it was a spectacularly bad idea to spend the first night here alone. It had seemed silly to pay extra for a hotel when they had this huge expensive house just sitting empty, but now she can see that this is not a good start. When his conference date changed she should have booked into a hotel. They should be starting this life together.

  She feels a sudden wave of longing for him, to feel his arms around her, his body weighing down the mattress next to her. She is used to his absences and, before she met him – not so long ago really – to being alone with Joe. Usually when Greg is away she miss
es his company, his conversation, his laugher, his touch, but a part of her expands contentedly into the space that he has left. Tonight feels different. Right now the longing is uncomfortable and uneasy, a metallic taste in the mouth, an ache behind the breastbone. She recognizes this feeling from long ago; a crumpled letter from childhood shoved beneath the door.

  She glances at the clock. She has now been awake for almost twenty-four hours. No wonder she is feeling insecure. The man next door sounded positively demented. It occurs to her that she and Greg have never had a full-blown argument like that. Greg saves his passion for sex, and she certainly has no taste for hysterics. Nell and Ken, married for eighteen years, yell at each other openly, shamelessly, even in front of her sometimes, but they forget about it moments later, and while there is outrage and frustration in their voices, there is never menace or hatred.

  She hears the metallic clang of a window closing. All couples fight: fighting is normal. She and Greg will fight one day too, and when he does unleash his anger it will be impressive, she is sure of that.

  She knows the darker side to Greg. The damage from what happened to him as a teenager manifests itself sometimes in introverted silences or the need to exert control. But this is what drew her to him in the first place. She had felt a vulnerability in him the first time they met, when she looked at him through the camera lens and, beyond the handsome architecture of his face, caught something haunted and pent-up. She fell in love with him because of it. Maybe the fragile part of her recognized something similar inside him. She felt as if she knew his secrets.

  The mattress undulates as she shifts onto her side. She closes her eyes, feeling nauseous again – travel-sick, homesick, heartsick, morning-sick, night-sick. The only thing to do is sleep, but sleep will not come, even though in England it is now dawn. She turns over and feels the baby flutter like a moth deep in the velvet darkness of her womb.

  *

  She wakes to the same repetitive bird she heard the evening before, a rasping, rhythmic sound like mocking laughter. Sunlight, diffused by the leaves outside the window, throws watery shapes across the hardwood floor. She is staring at a ceiling fan that somehow – God only knows how – she failed to notice the night before. She could have had it turning all night instead of sweltering on the rubber mattress. Her sheets are tangled and damp. She is thirsty, queasy and her head aches. She gulps lukewarm water from the glass next to the bed. She urgently needs to pee.

  ‘Joey?’ Her voice echoes off the ceiling as she wobbles up off the mattress. She pulls a pair of drawstring linen trousers out of her suitcase, along with some underwear and one of the expensive Tshirts that Greg bought her before they came. He brought them back from Boston in a Nordstrom bag, four, in different colours, tissue-paper thin.

  ‘You’re going to need lightweight things,’ he said. He seemed to have forgotten the reality of her changing body. Already the Tshirts are almost indecent over her swelling breasts and in just few weeks they will be riding up on her belly, unwearable. But she pulls on the white one, glad, for now, of its lightness against her hot skin.

  ‘Joey? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here.’ His voice is high and echoey, coming, she thinks, from the kitchen.

  *

  The en suite is so cramped you can almost touch the sink from the toilet. As she pees, she notices a dark crack in the ceramic. She peers closer, but it is not a crack, it is a single hair, very long – nothing like her own fine, wavy, shoulder-length blonde hair. She holds it up between her finger and thumb then drops it into the sink, turning on the tap. It clings to the shining side. She gets off the loo and swirls the water so that the hair is sucked down the plughole.

  The empty stairwell amplifies the slap of her flip-flops. She tries to ignore the smell of cleaning fluids. She will wash the floors today to dilute it before the container lorry arrives.

  Joe is at the breakfast bar with the iPad. Greg must have fixed up Wi-Fi on one of his preparatory visits. He looks solid and definite and her chest unclenches at the sight of him. She kisses his head, but he doesn’t look up. At home it would have depressed her to see him plugged in like this with the sun shining outside, but today any predictability feels welcome. You could take him to the top of the Empire State Building or dangle him over Niagara Falls and he would still pull out a screen.

  ‘What time did you wake up, love?’

  ‘I don’t have a clock.’ His tawny hair sticks up in waves and hillocks, his T-shirt is inside out, his hazel eyes wide and accusatory. ‘You didn’t pack my alarm clock.’

  ‘No, I did – it’s in your bag …’ She stops herself. There is no point in arguing with a displaced and jet-lagged nine-year-old. ‘You know all our stuff is arriving this afternoon, don’t you?’

  She needs to walk around and decide where everything will go. She can already see that their furniture will not fill even half the space in this house. ‘It’s coming in a huge container, all our furniture and your clothes and toys and all our books, everything we packed up six weeks ago in England has travelled all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to here.’

  Joe still doesn’t look up from his screen. He is a small, round-faced version of David, and when he is concentrating like this, he not only looks like his dad – even-featured, solidly built – he feels like him, self-contained and absorbed in something to which she has no access.

  ‘Maybe we should call your dad and tell him you’ve arrived?’

  ‘Is Dad coming?’ He looks up. ‘Today?’

  ‘Oh, no, love, not today, no. He’s working away, remember, he told you? But he’s going to come the moment he’s back – in about three weeks, he thinks. I know he can’t wait to see you. He wishes he could come sooner.’

  Joe’s face falls. She shouldn’t have said anything. Just because David is now based in New York does not mean that he is actually there. He will still spend most of his time travelling. She can’t even remember where he said he was going this time – Kigali? Mogadishu? Baghdad?

  ‘Greg’s plane gets in soon though,’ she says. But Joe is engrossed in his game again and does not even look up.

  Greg has decided not to be pushy, but she sometimes wonders if he is any different with Joe than he is with his patients. He is genial, kind and approachable, but always slightly detached. But perhaps that’s unfair – it’s early days and Greg has been away so much lately, criss-crossing the Atlantic, setting things up, finishing off at Great Ormond Street. It is too much to expect him to have bonded with Joe. But surely this baby will change that. This baby is their shared biological tie. When it is born it will knit them all together.

  A trilling sound fills the kitchen, making them both jump and look at each other, big-eyed. She spots a cordless phone next to the fridge. She didn’t know it was connected – Greg didn’t say; she doesn’t even know their number here. She picks it up. ‘Hello?’

  There is a hollow buzz.

  ‘Hello?’ She waits. ‘Hello?’ The back of her neck begins to tingle. She can feel someone there, behind the white noise, listening but saying nothing.

  ‘Greg?’ she says. ‘Greg? Is that you?’

  There is a click and the line goes dead. She replaces the handset.

  ‘Who was it?’ Joe asks.

  ‘Oh, nothing, nobody at all.’ She tries to sound breezy. ‘Just a wrong number.’

  ‘Can I have something to eat? I’m hungry.’

  ‘OK, I know, me too. Breakfast!’

  She shakes herself back into action, opening the cupboard above a shining Gaggia espresso machine that still has its tags on. The cupboard contains two plates, two cups, two glasses, a pouch of disposable cutlery and a new, serrated kitchen knife. A Post-it has fallen off the door – she picks it up.

  Bagels, butter, milk and jam in fridge.

  His writing is not a doctor’s scrawl; it is clear and neat with each line, angle and curl thoughtfully spaced. There are no kisses or ‘love you’s’ – but that doesn’t matter. He has thought of e
verything they’ll need for their first morning, until their belongings arrive. A small part of her love for him, she knows, is rooted in his no-nonsense practicality, his efficiency – perhaps in simple gratitude that he is so unlike David.

  David was useless in practical terms but prone to expansive, romantic gestures. Once, when Joe was eight months old, he showed up after six weeks in the Sudan with tickets to the Opera in Verona. They couldn’t afford the flights. Before Joe was born she would take this sort of thing in her stride, but at home with a new baby, the finances and practicalities throttled the romance and David’s absences began to feel wilful and irresponsible. Nell has teased her about choosing another man whose profession takes him away a lot, and perhaps unconsciously that is what she’s done. But Greg’s way of loving – generous, fiercely organized, protective – never feels careless, and his absences are usually brief.

  Sunlight pours through the French windows making the steel appliances gleam. She opens a few cupboards. There are, of course, no supplies yet – no herbs and spices, flour, baking powder, salt or pepper or cling film or paper towels or sponges. Without this domestic infrastructure, the kitchen feels precarious, like a film set that could be dismantled at any moment.

  The shippers are due to call with their estimated arrival time. It will feel better once their things are here. In the end, almost all the packing and organization had fallen to her because Greg was going back and forth between London and Boston, trying to sort out the job and the house. Other than the paperwork – which was substantial – his main contribution to packing had been to bring his four sealed boxes down from the attic and stack them in the hall.

  The boxes were not labelled, but she recognized them from when he had moved in. They contained his old university things, some visa paperwork and essential documents like his birth certificate. They are wrapped in masking tape and it is clear that he does not want them opened so she got the movers to put them in crates marked ‘basement storage’. If Greg wanted to carry four sealed boxes wherever he went, that was his business.