Chapter 23
MADDIE
‘Maddie, come on in.’
Maddie got up from the uncomfortable plastic chair in the waiting room of the maternity unit and headed towards the midwife who’d just poked her head out of her treatment room.
‘Thank God. My left buttock has been numb for the last twenty minutes. Would it kill them to put some padded chairs out here?’ Val said all of this under her breath, in the few steps it took them to get to their destination.
‘Lovely to see you, Maddie. You too, Val.’ This was the fourth time now that Maddie had seen Sharon, her assigned midwife for the entirety of her pregnancy so far, and it always impressed her that Sharon could remember all the names and the details of her patients’ individual situations.
‘Thanks, Sharon. It’s good to see you too and…’
Now that she was up close and facing her, Maddie’s words fell off as her gaze landed on her midwife’s uniform. Or, rather, the extensive roundness in the front of it.
Val obviously had exactly the same realisation at that same time, but she had infinitely less tact, so she was the one that blurted, ‘Sharon, is it smuggle a space hopper to work day or have you got a new arrival of your own coming?’
‘Val!’ Maddie chided her, mortified. ‘You can’t say stuff like that anymore.’
Thankfully, Sharon’s laughter made it clear that she didn’t mind the intrusive question in the least. ‘Much as I love the sound of smuggle a space hopper to work day and I’ll be lobbying to make that an official holiday, I’m actually just more than a little pregnant.’
‘Och that’s lovely. Are we allowed to ask how far along?
’ Val was in full census-information gathering mode as usual.
Her need to chat to every single person they met did mean that it took twice as long to get anything done – case in point, this meeting with the midwife.
Not that Maddie wasn’t a little curious about Sharon’s pregnancy too.
‘I’m a couple of months behind you,’ Sharon was answering Val’s question.
‘And I intend to work right up until my final month, so I’ll still be here when you come in to have…
’ She checked her screen. ‘Ah, that’s right.
We didn’t check the gender of your baby.
How are you feeling about that now? Have you changed your mind or are we sticking with that?
No pressure, obviously. Everyone has their own feelings on finding out. ’
‘Do you know what you’re having?’ Maddie asked, realising that not only had she not answered the question, but she’d jumped right on to Val’s nosy bus.
‘It’s a boy.’ Sharon’s hand rested on her stomach as she said that, and Maddie felt tears spring to her eyes at the sweetness of the moment. That had been happening a lot lately. According to the baby books, it was her hormones and perfectly normal, but it was playing havoc with her mascara.
Did she want to know? Yes. But it seemed like just another thing that should be a joint decision, and she was incapable of making it on her own.
Throughout her whole life, she’d been someone who took charge of her own destiny and got things done.
She’d gone after the job she wanted straight out of school.
She’d moved to Edinburgh and lived independently at an age that most of her friends were still figuring out gap years and what university they wanted to go to.
Later, she hadn’t hesitated with the decision to come back and take care of her mum too.
But now? Some kind of decision paralysis had set in and it was like she had tunnel vision – go to work, earn as much as possible to prepare for the baby, but don’t actually make any of the choices that were stacking up.
She didn’t have a cot. Or a pram. Or a baby bath.
Or clothes for the baby. Or names picked out.
She was going to stay with Val for the first couple of months until she got back on her feet, but other than that, she had no long-term plan about where to go or what to do.
And no, she still hadn’t told Dylan she was pregnant.
‘That bairn is going to be in school before you get round to breaking the news,’ Jessie had gently ribbed her last week. The most upsetting thing about that was that she might just be right.
‘Och a boy, that’s lovely,’ Val reacted to Sharon’s news.
‘Congratulations,’ Maddie added, forcing herself to sound enthusiastic. A boy. If she had a boy, would it look like Dylan? Or would it look like her own dad? Or maybe a mixture of the two.
‘Oh, pet, you’re off again,’ Val said gently, reaching over to the box of tissues on the desk next to her, popping one out and giving it to Maddie.
‘I’m sorry,’ Maddie said, with a loud sniff at the end.
‘I promise you don’t need to apologise. I go through a box of these tissues every week in this room. It’s a safe-cry space.’ Sharon said gently, and Maddie got the feeling that she’d said the same thing to many over-wrought mothers before her. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’re feeling?’
Maddie dried her eyes. ‘I’m just a bit overwhelmed. The baby’s dad is still abroad, and I still haven’t told him, so I think I’m just having very mixed feelings about that.’
‘So you don’t have any contact then? That must be tough.’
Val fell silent and let her lead the conversation, as Maddie went on, ‘No, it’s the opposite.
We call and FaceTime all the time – I just need to make sure that I keep the phone focused above the shoulders.
I think I just haven’t come to terms with the fact that I’m about to derail his life.
It hasn’t felt like the right time yet.’
Last night had been the perfect example of that. She’d been lying on the sofa when Dylan had FaceTimed her, after he’d just finished a soundcheck in a bar in Georgia, and she had angled the phone so that he could only see her face.
When she’d answered, he’d taken the phone outside, jumped up on the back of his pickup truck and lay back, basking in the afternoon sun.
He had a deep tan now, a couple of days of facial hair growth, and he’d adopted a standard uniform of a black T-shirt and jeans, boots, a belt with a buckle the size of a bar of soap and the compulsory accessory for a man in his line of work.
‘Like the hat there, cowboy,’ she’d said.
It was different from the one he’d been carrying on the day he’d walked away from her at Glasgow Airport.
This one was black leather and decidedly Tim McGraw-esque.
She wouldn’t say it, because their relationship took the form of mutual teasing, but he looked pretty good in it.
‘Thank you. I still can’t ride a horse to save my life, so I feel like a bit of a fraud, but I’m going with it.’
‘You could always start with a donkey and work your way up.’
That had made him laugh. ‘You know, you could take the piss out of me in person if you used that plane ticket that I sent you.’
It had been a month since he’d told her that he’d bought her a ticket to come to Nashville, and it had dropped into her inbox that night.
Thank goodness it had been a refundable fare, because she’d immediately cancelled it.
He’d been so disappointed, but she’d used several excuses as to why she couldn’t go over.
She’d said that Jessie was on holiday, and she had to cover the salon.
Then Val had the flu so Maddie felt she should stay and take care of her.
Val had been a reluctant conspirator on that one, but had let out a few groans from the couch whenever he called.
Lately, she’d been using the excuse that it was too close to Christmas, so her appointment book was filling up and the salon was too busy to leave.
Which wasn’t exactly a lie. That, and her need to build up as much cash as possible were the reasons that she intended to work right up until as close as possible to her delivery date.
‘I know, and it’s not that I don’t want to – it’s just bad timing right now because we’re so busy.’
‘I get that. I do. But don’t be surprised if I record a song called, “I Tried To Bribe My Friend With A Plane Ticket But She Knocked Me Back”. It has a ring to it.’
Maddie had opened a tube of barbeque Pringles and popped one in her mouth. ‘If that’s a hit, I want commission.’
‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do next yet? Before I left, you said you were still thinking about going back to Edinburgh.’
His question had taken her by surprise, and she’d got a bit flustered and fluffed the answer.
‘I’m not sure. I think I’m waiting for the dream job to come along and find me.’
‘I thought you said owning your own salon was your dream job?’
‘It is.’ The conversation with her mum at the cemetery a couple of months ago had popped back into her mind.
‘I mean, now that I’ve accepted that I’m not going to be an astronaut.
I watched Apollo Thirteen about a dozen times when it came out and it had a profound effect on me.
I wanted to be an astronaut until I was about twelve.
The plan to have my own salon came after that, and it was the dream for a long time, right up until my mum got sick.
It just kind of got lost in everything that happened. ’
‘You need to get back to that, then. Start to look into it. Work out a plan. There’s nothing stopping you now.’
Nothing stopping her. Except, perhaps, the rotund stomach that was, at that moment, coming in handy because it created a valley below her boobs that was the perfect size for hosting a tube of barbeque Pringles. The stomach that no matter how many times she tried, she still couldn’t tell him about.
Now, in the cold light of day, she really hoped that Sharon wasn’t going to judge her or they would need another box of those tissues.
She was more than a little surprised when the midwife gave her a kind smile. ‘You’ll tell him when the time is right and that’s okay, Maddie.’
‘It is?’
Val had been more or less saying the same thing to her for months, but somehow it hit different when it came from an objective professional.
‘Look, I probably shouldn’t say this, because I’m supposed to be neutral in all relationship matters, but there’s no right or wrong. And I shouldn’t say this either, but I’m in the same boat as you. I haven’t shared my pregnancy with the father of my child either.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Maddie saw Val’s eyebrows shoot up and her friend almost fell off her chair at that little nugget of information.
Maddie knew that the only thing stopping her from turning back into Census Val was that she was clenching her jaw so tightly she was in danger of snapping her back teeth.
‘You do what’s right for you and the baby,’ Sharon went on. ‘Just try to trust your own judgement. You’ll be doing a lot of that when you’re a mum.’
Maddie felt the tears falling again, but this time it was gratitude. And maybe a little bit of fear. This baby was going to be relying on her. She just hoped that by not telling Dylan, she wasn’t messing its life up before it even began.