The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  ‘Fine,’ says Joe.

  ‘You want me to make French toast? I have exactly fifteen minutes – that’s just about time to rustle up the house specialty with extra maple syrup.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Good man.’

  Whatever Greg feels about the death of the four-year-old, or about strangers sending him notes, he is doing a good job of masking it. And then she remembers something he once told her. ‘Every surgeon has a graveyard in his brain,’ he said. ‘You forget the names of the ones that live but the names of the ones who die are engraved on your mind forever.’

  Perhaps it works the other way round too. She wonders how many grieving parents are walking around out there with Greg’s name etched onto their brains.

  Chapter Five

  All morning, since she drank the latte Greg made her, she has had a lurching on–off queasiness, and the ground is no longer steady beneath her feet. Deep in her pelvis she can feel little stabbing sensations, as if the baby has grown spines. Perhaps the milk was off.

  After she’d got Joe off to school and Greg had left for the hospital, the doorbell rang. Sandra Schechter was on the porch in tennis whites.

  ‘Hey, Tess! How’s it going? Listen, I’m in kind of a hurry right now, but we’re having a potluck in October and I wanted to ask if you and Greg and Joe could join us? We’d love to have you over and introduce you to some of the other neighbours.’

  Another wave of queasiness spread through her and she swallowed, pressing her hands on her belly. ‘That sounds great, thanks.’ She had no idea what a potluck was.

  ‘Well, fabulous!’ Sandra started to move off again down the path, calling over her shoulder, ‘I’ll send you an evite!’

  The nausea continued as she went round the supermarket. Usually she found it uncomfortable to stand doing nothing while the person on the till put the groceries into paper bags, but today she was glad it worked like this because her limbs felt weak, her hands clammy and there was a possibility that she was actually going to throw up.

  Now, as she grabs the brown-paper grocery bags from the boot, she wishes the supermarket person’s job extended to carrying the shopping home and unloading it into kitchen cupboards. The late September leaves are turning golden, but the air feels too close and warm. The postman appears, a middle-aged Chinese-American man who is dressed like a schoolboy in a baseball cap, blue shorts and pressed shirt with a canvas USPS bag over one shoulder. He flips up the neighbours’ mailbox flag, raises a hand to her in greeting and walks past the car. She wonders whether she could ask him to help her carry in the flat-pack bedside table she’s bought for Joe. But she isn’t yet at the obvious stage of pregnancy and he might be upset to be asked.

  Since the mock-Tudor house has no mailbox, he always tosses letters onto the porch. As she bends to pick them up, her head spins. There is a Crate & Barrel catalogue addressed to a former tenant; a letter from the IRS, addressed to Dr G. Gallo; a coupon booklet; a couple of letters from Citizens Bank; and a large padded envelope for Greg, which rattles. She hesitates, and then she rips it open. Four large pill bottles tumble onto the doormat. Each has a tiny orange flame logo, and a name:

  Dr Vaus Energizing Complex

  Dr Vaus Biohacker Mix

  Dr Vaus Corsitol Balance

  Dr Vaus Tissue Repair

  She peers into the envelope and pulls out a card.

  Tissue repair for that hamstring – the others for your sanity and success.

  Dr V x

  The writing is large and definite. She reads it again, her eyes lingering on the kiss. A colleague? An old friend from medical school? He hasn’t mentioned any old friends, and he would never order vitamins. Greg considers most dietary supplements to be snake oil.

  She puts the bottles back in the envelope and goes back out to the car. At the far end of the street she sees a figure hurrying away – a slight and androgynous body, in dark clothes, moving fast, as if falling forwards, hooded head bent. She sees a flash of dark red – a scarf, hair? – as the figure turns the corner and vanishes onto the bigger road. She shields her eyes against the sun, but the running person has gone.

  Back at the car, leaning into the boot for more shopping bags, she notices that Helena and Josh’s garage door is open. Both their cars are gone. She can see recycling bins, bikes, a tub of footballs, scooters, ski boots on a shelf, a stack of flattened cardboard boxes. Maybe a burglar overrode the electric mechanism and winched the door open. She peers down the driveway.

  She should probably go and close the door – or at least call them to tell them it’s open. But it has been over a month now, and she still hasn’t actually spoken to Helena, let alone exchanged phone numbers.

  There is a team of gardeners trimming shrubs in a front yard somewhere, but other than this, as always, the street is empty. The mailman has vanished. She thinks about the thin figure hurrying away. It is possible that it came from the garage. But calling the police might be excessive. The neighbours might have just forgotten to shut the door.

  If she can get their surnames, she can google them and perhaps call one of them at work. She crosses the lawn to their mailbox. The hatch creaks as she eases the letters out: the same Crate & Barrel catalogue, and one for a clothing company called Athleta, with a muscular woman in sports gear on the cover. She slides them back into the mailbox and looks at the remaining envelopes.

  Dr Joshua Feldman.

  So he’s a doctor, too.

  She flips to a couple of white envelopes. Both are addressed to Dr H. Vaus-Feldman.

  She stares at the name. Dr Vaus.

  So it is Helena who sent Greg the vitamins. Helena is Dr V. But the vitamin bottles were mailed and not dropped round. Perhaps she didn’t want to knock on the door and hand over her little gift for Greg.

  She shoves the mail back in the box and goes back to the Volvo, seizing the bedside table and hauling it out of the boot. It isn’t too heavy, but she hasn’t quite got the weight balanced evenly and she feels the strain down one side of her body. She drops it on the porch. She is sweating and breathing fast. She feels a wave of sickness, and her head spins.

  She thinks about Greg’s response when she asked him this morning about running with Helena. He didn’t look at her – he was fiddling around with his coffee machine. She feels another wave of nausea and has to hold onto the door frame to steady herself.

  Back at the car, as she reaches into the boot, she sees movement on the neighbours’ porch – and there is Helena herself, coming out of her front door. The fabric of her forest-green dress swirls around her tanned legs as she hops off the bottom step. Her hair is in loose waves and for a mad second Tess wishes she had her Leica so that she could capture this movement and colour – the swing of caramel hair, the dress against the moss-green woodwork. But Helena is bending into her mailbox now, pulling out the letters. Obviously this is not a coincidence: she must have seen everything.

  Helena straightens, then begins to walk over. Her hips sway. She is in no hurry.

  ‘Hey.’ She gives a tight smile. ‘Tess, right?’ Her eyes are the same murky green as her dress.

  ‘Yes,’ Tess nods. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m Helena.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Hmmm, I guess you do.’ The green eyes hold steady. ‘Were you looking for something particular in my mailbox?’

  Tess feels her face grow hot but she doesn’t allow herself to look away. She raises her chin. ‘Actually your garage door is open. Your cars aren’t there so I thought maybe someone had broken in – in fact, I saw this hooded person hurrying off down the street just now, looking a bit suspicious. But I didn’t have your number or even know your surname, so that’s why I was looking – I was going to try to call you.’

  The chilly gaze falters. This is obviously not the answer Helena was expecting. She glances down her driveway. ‘Oh, right. Well, thanks, yeah, my car’s having work done today. I guess I forgot to close the garage door.’

  Her
almond-shaped eyes are enhanced by a flick of eyeliner along the top lids. She is definitely beautiful, but not in a conventional sense. She is in her mid-forties, probably, dewy-skinned with rounded features, fine lines by her mouth and eyes, a slightly upturned nose and cheekbones rising like hillocks.

  ‘Well, anyway, look, Tess, I’d love to talk more,’ she says, ‘but I’m about to go on a conference call. We should grab a coffee some time though, OK?’

  Helena turns and crosses the front lawn onto her porch. She looks back before she closes the door, but she does not smile, or raise a hand.

  *

  In the kitchen Tess gulps two glasses of water. A bluebottle butts the window, a small, desperate thudding sound. She is, she realizes, being paranoid. If Helena is Dr Vaus – and she must be – she probably routinely gives away her vitamin products to influential doctors. And as for the kiss, that could just be a friendly gesture, nothing more.

  The nausea is intensifying now, and the uncomfortable prickling sensations are back, low in her belly. She cannot contemplate lunch. She will put on a load of laundry, then go upstairs and lie down, calm down, maybe sleep for a bit before she has to go and deal with an unhappy Joe.

  The clammy air in the basement folds itself over her skin as she goes down. It smells mildewed, mushroomy. The stairs are steep and there is no bannister; you could easily lose your balance and topple onto the concrete below. She steadies herself with one hand on the wall. The bricks feel reptilian, with small, slimy bumps beneath the cold paint.

  There are two industrial-sized machines in the laundry room, and a wall of shelves where she has stacked Greg’s four boxes, a crate of coats and a big box of winter boots. The square mouth of the stainless steel laundry chute gapes in one corner. There is a box on the first-floor landing which she initially thought was storage until Joe opened it and shouted, ‘Mum! It’s a tunnel!’ It took her a moment to work out that it was in fact a steel laundry chute, plummeting through the house like a wide oesophagus. The clothes she has thrown down it are piled on the floor now, along with some Lego bricks and a few soft toys that Joe has shot down.

  As she begins to gather these things up, her nausea rises until suddenly she knows that she is going to be sick. She presses her hand over her lips but there is no time – there is no bin here, nothing to be sick into – and she has to squat as her stomach heaves and hotness surges up her throat, bulging out of her, splattering onto the laundry.

  Afterwards she curls up on the floor. Her eyelids are heavy, her limbs and torso ache, her throat feels flayed. The stench is vile but she cannot open her eyes or move. Everything feels far off. Somewhere in the distance she is aware of a scratching, scrabbling sound. She slips into a flat, dead sleep.

  *

  There is knocking inside her head. She opens her eyes. Her left arm is numb, her throat sore, her brain throbs against her forehead and the stink is appalling. She gets up, shakily, and scrapes everything into a pile, wiping the concrete with dirty clothing. She peels off her dress and adds it to the pile, then heaves it all into the drum of the washer. She wipes herself down with a pillowcase. Then she feels something sticky between her legs. She looks down. There is a dark smear on the pale skin of her inner thigh. She grabs a towel and wipes herself – more smears.

  Very slowly, she walks upstairs, trying not to jerk or go too fast. She goes into the ensuite and sits on the toilet, her heart beating cold and fast inside her chest. The pink and grey tiles sway. She doesn’t seem to be bleeding anymore. She puts both hands onto her belly. ‘Don’t go,’ she whispers. ‘Stay. I want you to stay. I want you.’ The baby gives a delicate, answering kick. She closes her eyes, feeling the tightness in her chest release, just a little.

  There is a precarious feeling in her belly, as if, were she to move too suddenly, something would unhook, causing everything to cascade out of her. She gets off the toilet and goes through to the bedroom, walking slowly like a stiff princess. She gets dressed, using a pad, then she calls Greg. Miraculously, he answers on the first ring.

  Twenty minutes later she is curled on the sofa with a cup of tea, waiting for his car to pull up in the street. She stares at the framed photos on the side table. One has fallen face down. She picks it up – it is the one of Greg’s parents. She found it with the contents of his desk when she was unpacking the boxes, got it out, put it in a frame and put it here with the others – of Joe as a baby, a toddler, of her and Greg on Brighton beach, of her and Greg and Joe in the garden. It is possible that Greg hasn’t even noticed the photo of his parents. He so rarely even sits on the sofa these days. She reaches over and picks it up. The couple is arm-in-arm facing the camera: a tall, forbidding-looking Italian man with an angular face, wearing a slightly flared suit, and an equally solemn woman in a dress with a Peter Pan collar. There is a definite look of Greg about them – in the father particularly. These people are the flesh and blood of her flesh and blood, their genes are growing inside her. And yet she knows almost nothing about them.

  She hears Greg’s car pull up, puts the photo back on the table and gets up, not too fast, crossing the room and peering through the diamond windowpanes. She sees Greg slam the car door and pause, straightening his shoulders. He is still wearing his green scrubs. He looks determined, granite-faced, as if bracing himself for what he might find when he turns the key.

  ‘Tess?’

  She steps into the hallway to meet him. The sight of him, so big and healthy and broad in his scrubs, so concerned, makes her throat tighten. ‘You didn’t need to come home.’

  ‘Oh, my darling, my poor love.’ He folds his arms around her. She smells hospital soap and fabric bleach. ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘I’m really all right now, I think.’

  ‘So, how much did you bleed?’

  ‘It was just spotting, just some smears, and it’s stopped now.’

  ‘And you can feel the baby moving?’

  She nods, ‘I just felt it kick again.’ She puts a hand on her belly. It occurs to her that if she is losing this baby then a part of him will feel relieved – but she cannot allow herself to think like this, not right now; she sweeps the thought aside and looks back up at him. His expression is kind, but she can feel his anxiety.

  ‘I’ve left a message for An,’ he says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘An – the OB/GYN. She’ll probably want you to have a quick scan to check it out, but if it was just spotting and if that’s stopped now and the baby’s moving then I’m sure everything’s going to be just fine.’

  She does not want to go and see the OB/GYN, a tiny Chinese-American woman with a shining bob and a clipped, emotionless voice who makes her think of emergencies and surgical instruments.

  ‘An’s the best – she has a wait list years long,’ Greg had said, when he got her on the patient list. ‘People sign up with her the day they get pregnant. If something goes wrong, An’s the one I’d want opening up your uterus.’

  ‘Jesus, Greg! Nobody’s going to be opening my uterus.’ It shocked her how he could switch like this to seeing her body as an object that might malfunction.

  ‘Come on,’ he says now. ‘Come and sit back down.’

  ‘What about the throwing up?’ She follows him to the sofa. ‘I was pretty sick.’

  ‘That’s probably unrelated. It might be just a virus. You’re being exposed to a whole range of viruses here, probably for the first time, so you’re likely to get sick more than usual at first, until you build up immunity.’ He tucks a pillow under her back.

  ‘Do you think I’m miscarrying, Greg? I need you to tell me the truth.’

  ‘Blood spotting happens, even in the second trimester. It’s probably nothing, really. We’ll get you checked out, just to be one hundred per cent sure. You should lie down now, put your feet up for the rest of the day. You look pale.’ He smooths a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’

  ‘But I have to go and pick up Joe in half an hour. When’s your flight
to Chicago?’

  ‘If I’m going to catch it, and make the dinner tonight, I’ll have to go in about’ – he grimaces – ‘ten minutes.’

  She does not want him to get on a plane, not even to receive an important prize. She wants him to sit down on the sofa with her, put his arms around her and stay.

  ‘The moment the plenary is done tomorrow I’m going to turn around and fly straight home,’ he says. ‘I can be back here by mid-afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, honestly.’ She feels herself retreat inside, curl back into herself. She stares at the parquet floor, at little nicks and scratches caused by all the feet and furniture that have passed through this house over the years. She thinks about the dramas and the hurts, the misunderstandings and betrayals that have taken place right here, on this floor.

  ‘I wish to God I could cancel.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘But it would be … It’s an annual national meeting; there’s a plenary session just for me to give a talk, then get the prize; there are several hundred people coming. It would be … almost unforgivable not to show up …’

  ‘You absolutely have to go.’

  ‘But I don’t want to. This is horrible. I want to stay here with you – you know that, don’t you? This is not what I want at all.’ He squeezes her hand again and she makes herself look up at him. His mouth is grim. ‘I hate this,’ he says.

  ‘It’s OK.’ She feels as if she is pushing herself up through layers of heavy earth. ‘You can’t possibly miss getting your prize. It’s just bad timing, that’s all. You have to go. I’ll be totally fine. Don’t worry, OK? You said yourself, it’s just spotting. The baby’s moving. And you’ll be back tomorrow.’

  There is a long pause. He keeps his eyes fixed on her face. ‘No,’ he says, finally. ‘You know what? I can’t. I’m just not going to leave you here. Fuck it. Fuck the whole thing. I just can’t do this.’

  ‘But you have to go!’

  ‘No, I don’t. You’re more important. I can’t leave you on your own when you’re feeling like this.’ His face is set. ‘I’m not going.’