Chapter 30
The rest of the week passed in a haze of work, doing my best to implement organised, stress-free parenting and live out my new list while bouncing a fractious, teething baby on my hip so Toby could smooth out yet more of those minor annoyances that had been like rust on the already wonky, ill-fitting wheels of my life.
On Wednesday and Friday, at ten o’clock, when the only sound in the house was the thumping of my giddy heart, Jonah called. We limited ourselves to an hour, and Jonah respected my request to take things slow. We talked about my children and his siblings, as well as the young people we worked with. I shared how I’d built up my business, and Jonah described starting out as the world’s worst, angriest youth worker before growing into someone who loved teaching. Looking forward to that one hour carried me through each day.
Conversation with Jonah had always felt so natural, and it was becoming clearer that what had happened all those years ago hadn’t been some silly, teenage infatuation. It had been real. What was happening now was real.
I was amazed and flummoxed and brimming over with secret wonder.
The only thing nagging at the back of my befuddled mind was what on earth I was going to do about it. So, of course, I decided to keep on keeping on, Libby-style, and worry about that some other time.
Then, on Saturday morning, as I was getting the kids ready for a cinema trip with Brayden and mentally prepared for an eight-mile hike in the Peak District with Nicky, another postcard plopped through the letterbox.
Guernsey.
See you soon!
I slumped onto the hall floor, quickly pretending to be tying the lace of my walking boot when Toby shuffled in from the kitchen, having entered the house through the patio doors. I’d babysat Hazel while he’d celebrated finishing college the night before, relocating the travel cot to my bedroom. Despite me having been up three times in the night soothing her back to sleep, he looked in far worse shape than me.
‘Good night?’ I asked.
‘What?’ He appeared confused for a second. ‘Oh. Yeah. All right.’
‘Your daughter is watching Bluey with the kids.’ I was about to add a snarky joke about him sauntering in at ten-thirty, but then I noticed his face twisted up in distress.
‘Courtney messaged,’ he blurted.
‘Ah.’
‘She agreed to see us. To, like, talk. I mean.’ He yanked at his curls in agitation. ‘Later today, at the Ruddy Duck. She wanted to meet without Hazel, but I told her that’s not happening. She’s not seen her daughter for weeks.’
‘What are you hoping to talk about?’
‘I dunno. Everything. Why she left. Whether she’s coming back. If it can work if we have a place to ourselves. What she’s doing with the Child Benefit, for starters.’
‘That sounds quite ambitious for a first conversation. Maybe go with one question each, to start? It works really well.’
‘Nah. This might be my only chance. I’ve got to get it all out there. I even made a list, see?’
He was scrolling through the extensive bullet points on his phone when Isla skipped out of the living room.
‘Mummy, how long now until 28 July when my baby sister is born? I made her this drawing and I can’t wait to give it to her!’
‘Um…’ I did a swift calculation in my head. ‘About four weeks. But babies can come sooner, or later, it’s hard to predict exactly when.’
‘Well, she’s got to be borned on the right day because I wrote it on her drawing, see?’
Isla shoved the piece of paper in my face, and, once I’d pulled back to get a proper look, it was enough to momentarily displace all thought of the postcard thanks to her startlingly detailed picture of Silva, silver hair sticking up in every direction, splayed on a birth ball with a giant baby half out of where babies come from, the biggest smile on its face and brandishing a rattle. Brayden was standing in the corner, a speech bubble coming out of his mouth displaying the word ‘push’.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing to a pink scribble across the bottom of the picture.
‘The bloody show,’ Isla replied, with the gravitas of an antenatal educator’s daughter.
She launched into a torrent of inane chatter about all the things she was going to do with her sister once she was born. I nodded, smiled and suggested she might have to wait a while before they could bake cookies, trying to ignore the words on the postcard clanging inside my head like a fire alarm.
The twenty minutes between the kids clambering into Brayden’s car and Nicky’s Tesla whipping into the drive felt like forever.
‘Postcard?’ my sister asked, the second she saw my face.
‘This morning.’ I shut the front door behind me and walked around to her passenger seat. ‘You?’
‘Yesterday. I was at the surgery all day, so didn’t find it until the evening. Didn’t want to spoil your Friday night, in case you had plans.’ She nodded to the card on her dashboard, identical to the one I’d received.
‘That was your cue to stun me with the revelation that you didn’t spend the evening alone drinking and watching reality TV about other people’s love lives.’
‘I was not alone. I babysat Hazel, so spent most of it walking up and down the garden, singing nursery rhymes.’
‘Well, I suppose a change is as good as a break.’ She accelerated out of the driveway and headed into the countryside.
‘How long until she gets here?’
My confidence in Nicky’s parental intuition was absolute.
‘A couple of days?’ She grimaced. ‘Put it this way, my angel of a husband is currently cleaning the house. I’ve stocked up on decent wine and Waitrose snacks because, while I’m still not sure whether to host her or roast her, I have this unhealthy need to prove that I’m a thriving, successful woman despite her abandonment. And there’s no way we’re letting her talk Dad into inviting her back.’
‘But are we agreed she’s visiting you, not me? One step beyond my hallway and she’ll know I’m barely surviving, let alone thriving. Plus, if it comes to it, you have a spare room.’
‘There’s no way it’s coming to that.’ Nicky glanced at me, eyes wide with horror. ‘I’m thinking polite drink then a not-so-polite point towards the nearest B B.’
‘What if she’s run out of money? I can’t think of many other credible reasons why she’d suddenly come home.’
‘No.’ Nicky screeched to a stop in the middle of the road. ‘She can’t stay in my house. No. That’s not our problem. She didn’t think twice about whether we’d need any help while she was off finding herself.’
‘What if she’s ill?’ I asked, my voice barely a whisper, because that was the only other reason I could come up with.
Nicky swiped at a furious tear. ‘What if we’d been ill, Libby? Or were having a baby, or the anguish of not being able to have babies, or a hideous divorce from a dropout. Never mind job stresses or social and emotional stagnation.’
‘Social and emotional what?’ I asked, somewhat affronted because I knew she wasn’t referring to herself.
‘I didn’t know what else to call it.’ She was openly sobbing now. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my sister cry since Mum left, and two of those were happy tears when Finn and Isla were born. ‘Dammit, Libby. I don’t think I can do this. I shouldn’t blummin’ well have to do this!’ She dropped her head onto the steering wheel, so I reached over and pulled her up against my shoulder instead.
‘At the risk of sounding like a misogynistic oaf, did you get your period?’
She nodded, pressing her face into my neck like Isla always did when upset. ‘I know there was no chance of being pregnant, but it still hurts so much. We saw the private consultant last week about that trial treatment, and they rejected me. Apparently, I’m too “inadequately equipped for pregnancy” to even try. Inadequate!’
I squeezed her tighter. ‘It sounds as though he’s too inadequately equipped for practising medicine.’
‘It was a woman,’ Nicky cried. ‘She has a giant photo of her five children on the wall behind her desk.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Nicky took a shuddering breath. ‘I assessed a fifteen-year-old for pre-eclampsia yesterday.’
While my sister would never breach patient confidentiality, I suspected it might be Petra, from the Green House. I’d mentioned to Maria, when she’d picked her up after Thursday evening’s class, that Petra’s hands and feet looked a bit puffy and it might be worth getting them checked out.
‘She asked if the baby could die, and for a second I swear she half hoped I’d say yes.’
There was nothing I could do but rub her back and gesture to the annoyed driver stuck behind us to go around.
‘I wanted to shake her. Then pin her down with my Pinard stethoscope until she signed that baby over to me. Instead, I had to smile reassuringly, listen to the heartbeat of the new life she never wanted and send her off to hospital.’
‘You’ve never mentioned adoption before,’ I said, once she’d dried her eyes, blown her nose and restarted driving.
‘I never dare consider it, normally. How can I, when I spend two days a week with young women, some of whom are genuinely weighing up their options, and others who will have that choice taken away from them?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s only in my most utterly wretched moments that the thoughts squirm in uninvited.’
‘Why not invite those thoughts in?’ I asked. I’d always wondered why this wasn’t an obvious option for Nicky and Theo, given our childhood. ‘Share them with Theo and see what he thinks.’
‘I don’t know how I’d do it,’ she said, one final rogue tear trickling down her cheek. ‘How I could look our Bloomers in the face, knowing some of them are going to have their babies taken into care, if I’ve got one of them at home. We know adoption is rarely a straightforward happy ending.’
‘We also know first-hand how desperately those children need a safe, forever family.’
She clenched her jaw. ‘Yes. But not with me. Now, can we please talk more about when you’re going to start dating Bronah?’