by Karen Perry
She jumps away, and he sees the swerve of panic in her face – it corresponds with the sudden pounding of his heart.
Jake is in the doorway, his eyes dark with suspicion.
‘Nothing,’ she tells him, and Anton hears his own voice explain that Leah was helping him with his wife’s things.
‘Let’s go,’ Jake tells her, and obediently, she sheds the dress, and follows.
Anton listens to their footsteps descending, feels the heat of blood pulsing angrily into his brain. On the floor, the dress lies in a pool of patterned silk.
The boyfriend is a problem.
Even when he’s not around, when he’s away on his bicycle, or flogging the dead horse of his acting career, still his disapproval and suspicion hover over them.
Sometimes when Leah is with Anton there will come the slam of a door downstairs, and Anton has to watch her scurrying away from him, down into the garden, like a nervous rabbit. And then he is left alone to ponder the empty rooms of his house, the cavernous spaces of his heart, while up through the floorboards come sounds of life downstairs. Music, laughter, voices – it stirs the envy inside him. Sometimes, the child stays over with them, and Anton hears the crash of toys, the electronic noise of video games. He stands at his window and watches them in the garden, father and son, wrestling together, conducting some kind of savage game, yelping and squealing with delight. This boy looks no more than six or seven, he thinks. And when he remembers that this is the age Mark was when Anton was sent to prison, he has to turn away from the window, the scene in the garden too painful to observe.
He tries to occupy himself, begins clearing out the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen. Sheaves of envelopes containing old bills, old bank statements. Progress reports for Mark from kindergarten. Hospital notes from both of Charlotte’s pregnancies. Certificates of interest. Investor reports. Scatterings of business cards, yellowed with age. One he finds is crisp and white, the name and numbers embossed in new-looking print. Anton presses the edge of the card to his chin, an idea turning over in his mind.
I wonder, he thinks.
When Anton was in the hospital, Mark had brought him a laptop. ‘It’s an old one of mine,’ his son had said, ‘but it still works. I thought maybe you could use it.’
It had lain there, untouched, through the drift of days he had spent in the ward. But since his return home, he’s had cause to use it more and more. He’s even hooked it up to a little printer, and now, with this new idea gaining heat in his brain, Anton flips it open, clicks on the internet icon. His search does not easily yield a result, and the evening light grows faint as he scrolls down, rethinking the parameters of his search, calculating dates, trying and trying again. He forgets to eat, engrossed in the quest. When at last he finds what he is looking for, selecting the print command, the summertime sounds of evening have all faded, and there is only the distant noise of occasional traffic and the hum of paper feeding through the printer.
When he is done, he takes a blank sheet from the sheaf and sits at the table with the business card in front of him.
You do not know me, he begins to write, and for my own reasons, I wish to remain anonymous. But there is something I wish to draw your attention to. Something I think might be of interest …
When the letter is finished, he folds it carefully, along with the printout, slides the documents into the envelope, addresses it. In the morning he will send it.
That night, he sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks.
20
Leah
The corridor is stifling, heat trapped between the brown nylon carpet and the white ceiling tiles. Jake is standing some way from her, flicking through his phone. He had offered his seat to an expectant mum. In Leah’s lap is the orange file they’ve given her, along with a laminated sheet of paper containing her number in the queue. Along the corridor, she sees several women using the laminated sheets to fan air into their hot faces. One woman talks loudly into a phone; another discusses curtain samples with her partner. There’s a toddler here, a little boy of no more than two years old who runs up in front of the occupied chairs, full of childish energy.
Leah has waited for this day for so long. Excitement and nerves gather in her chest. She has a book with her, but the words blur on the page. She’s too distracted by her thoughts to read. Every time a door opens, her eyes flick to the woman who’s called, taking note of her bump. Her own pregnancy has become clearly visible. What had been a thickening of flesh around her waistband has moulded itself into a small mound. Instinctively, her hand goes to it, sending waves of reassurance and love through the layers of skin and flesh. Leah knows that in a few minutes, she will get to see her baby for the first time. As part of the consultation, her doctor will perform a brief scan. When she anticipates that moment, a wash of nervy joy goes through her, and she sits up a little straighter.
‘How could you?’
The words come at her without warning. Yvonne Hannigan, uttering those words with fury, her eyes bright with tears. This was in the church grounds after the funeral, the place heaving with mourners, many who didn’t even know the Hannigans but were moved by the awful tragedy. ‘There but for the grace of God,’ she’d heard one woman mutter to the other. Leah hadn’t wanted to go to the funeral. After the interview with the police – all those questions they’d asked her – she dreaded having to face other people, knowing that doubts lingered over the death, questions to which she had failed to provide answers. She had wept and railed against attending the funeral, but her father had been firm. She had to face these people, he’d insisted. She had to show her sorrow, to share their pain. To shirk it would be indecent, unforgivable. So she had gone, kept her head down, felt her parents’ protective grip on each arm. She had not expected to be seen, had failed to anticipate the icy rage of the grieving mother. ‘How could you?’ Yvonne had demanded. ‘How could you show your face here?’ before being led away. Jim had barely looked at Leah, hostile disgust in his eyes, which was nearly worse.
The baby’s face is in her head. The chubby softness of it, a dimple in one cheek, bright blue eyes, like little marbles. Cian. She remembers again the screaming from upstairs. The instant surge of panic, followed by the long, slow sigh of dread that filled out inside her and stayed with her long after that little body was taken away. His mother would once have sat in a corridor just like this one, waiting, full of hope and expectation for the life she was carrying inside her.
‘They’ve called your number,’ Jake prompts her. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks, concern in his voice.
‘Fine.’ She pushes down hard on all the negative thoughts and feelings, focusing instead on hope for what lies ahead.
Leah is reassured by her obstetrician’s age, which she guesses to be early fifties, and by Dr Feeney’s quiet manner. A man of few words, he’s polite and warm but not over-friendly. Efficient and professional, he looks through her chart and puts some clarifying questions to her, which she answers.
‘First baby,’ he comments. ‘And naturally conceived.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Trying for long?’ he asks, and Leah feels herself blush a little.
‘Actually, no. It was sort of an accident.’
‘A happy accident,’ Jake clarifies, and she smiles at him.
Things have been strained between them lately. Distracted by the prospect of his son being taken from him, Jake has been frequently absent from their home over the past few weeks, and when he is there he has seemed distant and preoccupied. He’d made it clear to Leah that he disapproves of her friendship with Anton, and while they have avoided any outright confrontations of late, the atmosphere between them has been prickly with unspoken resentments and anxious uncertainties. At times, it has felt like their relationship might be too precarious to support a new life.
But with the squeeze of Jake’s hand around hers, his excitement passing through to her, any lingering doubts she’s had about his feelings for this pregnancy evapora
te. They are in it together. Whatever happens.
‘Right then,’ Dr Feeney says. ‘Shall we take a look?’
The gel is cold on her belly. He’d warned her it would be but, still, it’s a shock. She’s stretched out on the examining couch, Dr Feeney on a little stool beside her, one hand pressing the paddle of the ultrasound into her bump, the other hand working the computer beneath the screen, which throws back blurry images in black and white, like interference on an old TV.
Jake stands behind her. He’s holding her hand. She feels his excited anticipation communicating with hers, but keeps her eyes on Dr Feeney and that screen, waiting for him to find her baby through the walls of tissue, then turn the screen so she can see.
The silence in the room seems to stretch and grow taut. She watches his face carefully, scouring it for clues. It’s a serious and concentrated look, but then she catches a fleeting frown – a barely perceptible tightening of his features. The pressure of Jake’s grip around her hand intensifies and she knows he’s seen it too.
‘Is everything all right?’ she asks the doctor, because she’s deeply worried now.
He doesn’t answer, continues to stare hard at the screen, and she wills him to speak, wills him to tell her that everything is all right. Her baby is safe.
Slowly, he draws his gaze away from the screen and the look he gives her is so full of compassion that she feels it at once: the prick of fear, the puncturing of hope.
She knows what he is going to say before he says it. His voice is soft and she steels herself against it, feeling the imminent return of that old feeling: dread.
‘I’m afraid, Leah,’ he says gently, ‘it’s not good news.’
There is no baby.
Even though her belly has become a small mound, there is no baby inside. A molar pregnancy, is the term he gives it. A rare complication, characterized by the abnormal growth of placental tissue. There might, in the early days of her pregnancy, have been a tiny foetus, but if there was, it had been overwhelmed, pushed out, strangled by this abnormal growth – this mole – with its voracious appetite, swelling to fill her womb with its fluid-filled cysts.
A mole. At first, Leah cannot help but think of the small tunnelling creature of The Wind in the Willows – all velvety fur and gentleness. But now, in her mind, that creature grows sharp teeth and becomes vicious, a slavering fearsome thing, its tiny eyes flashing with malicious intent.
Jake runs a bath for her. ‘Will I bring you a cup of tea?’ he asks.
But she says no. His concern – his lovingness – helps, but one part of her simply wants to be left alone. She sinks down into the water, stares at her sunken belly, creases in the skin. It takes a certain amount of courage to do this – as if she has to steel herself to confront her own body. She thinks again of the operating theatre where, yesterday, the procedure took place.
‘Just relax there,’ the anaesthetist had told her, in his calming voice, and soon she was under in a dreamless sleep.
When she woke, it was with the impression that her eyes had been closed for just an instant – a minute or two. She had the unsettling thought that it hadn’t happened yet – that she’d woken up too soon. But then she felt the pad that had been placed between her legs – the wad of it like some awful evidence of the trauma to her insides.
In the ward, Jake had sat by her bed, grey-faced and anxious. He stroked her arm, offered her sympathetic looks, while she lay there waiting. On the opposite side of the room, two women in beds were talking across the space between their cubicles.
‘Is this your first miss?’ one asked, and the other said: ‘Yeah. I’ve a little fella at home already, though.’
‘Ah, that’s nice.’
Leah turned over on her side, away from them. Closing her eyes, she felt Jake’s kiss pressed to her forehead.
Now, in the bath, there is an ache inside her, like a long, deep pull. She imagines gloved hands delving inside her, surgical tools scraping her out. Blood clots escape into the water. Shaking, she pulls the plug, hauls herself out.
How long will it take? she wonders. How long until this heaviness inside her breaks, like still heat broken by a storm? She hasn’t cried yet – not really. A few frightened tears before the surgery, but the shock has a hold on her. She has the feeling that sorrow – grief – has not come upon her yet.
Jake makes her meals, brings her little presents: books, magazines. They lie on the floor unread.
‘You should go back to work,’ she tells him, worried about all the time he’s taking off. He needs to work. They need his earnings.
‘I want to take care of you,’ he says.
‘I’m fine,’ she tells him, his arms around her, trying to feel safe in his embrace.
When he draws back, his eyes scour her face, as sharp as a physician looking for evidence of illness or disease. ‘You’re not fine,’ he says gravely.
Leah’s mother calls to see her. A tricky one, this. A test. If anyone can cause the emotion to break, it’s her mother – always able to reach the tender spot inside her, always able to coax her true feelings out. She sits on the side of Leah’s bed, fixes her with a stare that is a complex mix of love, anxiety and maternal warmth. It has some effect. Tears roll. Leah presses a Kleenex to her face.
‘You’ll have another baby, sweetheart,’ her mother says, holding her hand and squeezing it. ‘Just give yourself some time. Let your body heal. Be patient, darling. It will happen, and then all of this heartache will be forgotten.’
It is not enough.
Matthew stays away. At weekends, Jake takes his son to the park, the zoo, the cinema, but he doesn’t bring the boy back to their flat. It’s as if he’s anxious Matthew’s presence might upset her. Leah feels grateful for this sensitivity, but it worries her too. The weekends, without Jake, are lonely and long. She idles around the flat, half-heartedly rearranging their possessions, her mind elsewhere. When Jake comes home, she smells the outdoors on his skin. There is a thoughtful air about him on his return, as if his mind is still with the boy. With Jenna. A new and unwelcome thought comes to her: that he is reluctant to come home to her and her pent-up sorrow. That, in his heart, he wishes he were back in his old home with his wife and son. That he is secretly nursing feelings of nostalgia and regret.
‘She asked me to give you this,’ he tells Leah, handing her a small box.
She opens it and finds a tiny ceramic angel – a brooch pinned to a sheet of card. On the card is printed a poem. Leah reads the first line:
A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam, and for a brief moment …
She stops and puts it aside. A sudden burn of anger comes up her throat.
Carefully, she returns the brooch to its box, sets it down. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Jenna’d be into that sort of thing,’ she comments. She cannot keep the acidity from her voice.
Jake’s eyes flicker over her face. ‘She was just trying to be nice,’ he says.
Leah picks up the paintbrush she has been using, goes to the bathroom and runs the tap.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks, following her.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t seem fine.’
She squeezes paint from the bristles, watches the water swirl in the basin.
He runs a hand through his hair, then puts his hands into his jeans pockets, leans against the door frame. ‘Is it the pin or the fact that it was Jenna who gave it to you?’
Leah cannot say what is really bothering her. When she thinks about him having that conversation with Jenna, imagines the confidential tones he used to tell her about the failed pregnancy – about the mole – she feels a rage inside her so strong it makes her shake.
‘Have you seen Anton?’ she asks, keeping her tone neutral.
‘No. Why?’
‘I promised Mark I’d keep an eye on him.’
‘He’s a grown man, Leah. And you’ve enough to deal with.’
‘Could you call up there?’ she asks, catching his eye no
w and holding him with her stare.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘It would just be five minutes. Just call up and see if he’s all right.’
Jake shakes his head, an expression of distaste on his face. ‘I’m not going anywhere near that man.’ Then, softening his stance, he says: ‘Besides, it’s Mark’s problem. Let him take care of it.’
Thinking that’s the end of it, he comes towards her and puts his hand to her neck as if he’s going to kiss her. She turns away, anger pumping through her. It was such a small thing to ask of him. ‘I’m tired,’ she says.
He lingers a moment behind her, and when she looks up at the bathroom mirror and catches his reflection there, she sees the expression on his face, full of doubt.
‘Fair enough,’ he says, in a flat voice, before moving away.
She cannot sleep. At night, she lies in bed, tracing the map of shadows on the ceiling. The window is open, and she can hear the call of night birds, the distant sounds of an occasional car passing on the road. Somewhere nearby she hears a fox barking. There have always been foxes here, Anton had said.
She misses him. Misses the softness of his presence. His undemanding company and the way it soothes her. If she admitted such a feeling to Jake he would be horrified. The world is black and white to Jake. He can pin the label ‘murderer’ on Anton and dismiss him from his mind. But for Leah, it is not so easy. She has thought long and hard about Anton’s account of what happened to Charlotte. She has tried to imagine the frustrations within their marriage, the difficulties involved in living with such a woman. ‘I did not kill my wife,’ he had told her, and she had felt the resonance of truth in those words, the fierce demand to be believed right there in his eyes.
Leah is not an innocent. Unlike Jake, she knows the world is not black and white. Images come to her unbidden, memories of the little boy who died, all the sorrow and pain she is responsible for. This thing that has happened to her – this mole – it is a type of penance. Even though she doesn’t believe in Catholic guilt, she feels it keenly. She is a person who has lied to bereaved parents, lied to the police. I deserve this, she thinks, while Jake turns over in his sleep.
