Yes, it’s true that I told you I’d gone on the pill when that wasn’t strictly the case. In all honesty I thought I was too old anyway and did not expect to get pregnant literally two months after we stopped using condoms. It was all over the papers at the time how your eggs all dried up and fell out on your thirty-fifth birthday and—genuinely—when my period was late I thought that was it, thought I’d had my menopause. It wasn’t until my jeans started getting a little tight that it occurred to me to check. So I bought a test and got the little pink lines and sat there on the toilet in my house rocking back and forth and having a little cry because suddenly I thought I didn’t really want a baby after all. Suddenly I realized I’d been an idiot and a fool. How could I raise a child, me with no maternal instincts, me with my baby-scaring face? And how did I know that you’d even want it? Yes, you’d said the thing that you said but I had no idea how you’d react. Not really.
But when I told you, you were happy. At least, you weren’t unhappy.
“Well, well,” you said, “that’s a curveball.” And then you said, “Do you want to keep it?” as though it was a necklace I’d bought myself that I might just take back to the shop. I said, “Well, of course I want to keep it. It’s ours.” And you nodded. And that was that. Except you also said, “I can’t ask you to live with me, you know that?”
That hurt me, but I didn’t show it. I just said, “No. Of course not.” As though the thought had never occurred to me. And to be truthful I did think you’d change your mind once you met the baby. So I never said what I really thought, which was that I couldn’t possibly raise a baby by myself.
I’d missed two periods but wasn’t sure how far along I might be. You came with me for my scan. I remember that day; it was a nice day. You held my hand in the waiting room. We were both a little giddy, with nerves, no doubt, but also I think with excitement. It felt like one of those days that you have
sometimes in life, where you feel like you’ve reached a branch in the road, that you’re setting off on a new journey, suitcases packed, full of trepidation and anticipation. The day felt clean and new, disconnected to the days that had come before and to the days that would follow. I have never felt as close to another human being as I felt to you that day, Floyd. Never.
And then there was the screen, with the tadpole, and I felt your hand tighten around mine and you were thrilled, I know you were. There was your child, inside me, a human being who would come into our lives and who would never tell you that they hated you. A chance to start again. A chance to get it all right. You were happy in that moment. You were, Floyd. You were.
But there was no noise. No noise. I had never been pregnant before. I thought maybe the heart hadn’t been formed yet. Or that maybe it was my heartbeat that kept the tadpole alive. I didn’t know that even at this size—ten weeks along, the clinician said—there should be a heartbeat. How was I supposed to know? But you looked at the clinician as she moved the monitor around my belly, the smile fading from her face, and you said, “Is there a problem?” And she said, “I’m having a little trouble locating a heartbeat.”
And then I knew, too. I knew that there should have been a noise and that there wasn’t.
Your hand came away from my hand. You sighed.
And it wasn’t a sigh of sadness. It wasn’t even a sigh of disappointment. It was a sigh of annoyance. A sigh that said, You couldn’t even do this properly, could you?
More even than the lost baby, that sigh virtually killed me.
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After that you made it clear that this could be our chance to walk away from each other, no hard feelings. But you weren’t strong-minded enough just to end it and I took advantage of that. I lingered on, yes, I’ll admit that. I overstayed my welcome. I reverted 100 percent to the person I’d been before I was pregnant. I came to your house at your command for s*x. I even moved in for a few months when they were doing the damp in my house. I knew you didn’t really want me
there. “Have they said how much longer?” you’d ask. “The builders. Do you have a date yet?”
So I knew nothing had really changed and I didn’t pretend to lay any special claim to you and your time just because my womb had once hosted your tadpole. And there was your terrible child, Sara-Jade, hating you and needing you in equal measure, confusing you and upsetting you, hitting you and spitting at you, then refusing to get off your lap for half an hour when you had things you needed to do. And there was my womb, touched so briefly by unexpected life, echoing with the unheard heartbeat of our dead baby. And I couldn’t make sense
of it all.
You’d gone back to the condoms as I was clearly not to be trusted. So there would not be a baby for you and me, and I needed to accept that.
I tried really hard to accept it, Floyd. Really hard. I tried for two years. I turned forty-three. And then I turned forty-four. And then you started taking chances, thinking, probably, that I was all out of eggs, and one night you ran out of condoms and said, “Never mind, I’ll just pull out.”
Well, clearly you did not pull out fast enough or early enough and it happened all over again. I missed a period. I took a test. Two pink lines appeared. For three days I felt like I was sitting on the crest of a wave, the sun shining on my face, the wind in my hair, angels playing on harps wherever I went. I booked a scan, but this time I didn’t tell you: I could not have born the quiet room, the sigh of annoyance, the dropped hand. But before I could even make it to the clinic your baby had died and fallen out of me. A small bleed. I’d have thought it was a heavy period if I hadn’t taken the test.
I canceled the appointment.
I never told you about the second tadpole.
And it was that day, Floyd, it was that very day that I first went to the home of Ellie Mack. The same day your baby died inside me. I had to slap on a smile and a friendly disposition and sit in a room with a spoiled pretty girl and a hairy cat, surrounded by the paraphernalia of family life: the photos and the kicked-off shoes, the trashy paperbacks and the furniture all from Habitat no doubt, and I had to teach this spoiled pretty girl with a brain too big for her own good who already knew everything she needed to know when what I really wanted to do was sob and say, Today I lost another baby!
But I did not. No. I drank her mother’s lovely tea from a mug with the words “Keep Calm and Clean My Kitchen” on it. I ate her nice chocolate-chip biscuits made by Prince Charles himself. I taught her daughter a good lesson. I worked hard for my thirty-five pounds.
I felt calm when I left Ellie Mack’s house that evening. I walked the half-mile home and it was a cold, sharp evening, with drops of ice in the air that stung the backs of my hands. I walked slowly, relishing the darkness and the pain. And as I walked I felt this certainty build within me, a certainty that somehow it was all connected, the gone baby and the spoiled girl, that there was a conflation, that maybe one thing balanced out the other.
I got home and I didn’t call you or look at my phone to see if you had called me. I watched a TV show and I cut my toenails. I drank a glass of wine. I had a long, long bath. I let the water rush up between my legs, washing away the last traces of your baby.
And I thought of the girl called Ellie Mack, of her big brain and her perfect features, the honey of her hair tied so carelessly into a topknot, the socked feet tucked beneath her and elegant hands folded into her sleeves, the smell of her— of apples and toothpaste, of clean hair and girl—the keenness to learn, her gentleness, her perfection. She had a glow about her, a circle of light. I bet she never told her parents she hated them. I bet she never spat at them or pinched them or threw her food across the room.
She was quite, quite lovely and quite, quite brilliant.
And I have to confess, I became more than a little obsessed.
