17. Eden
Eden
If there’s one way to definitively decide if you want a baby, it’s when you’re on the cusp of losing it. I have never been so scared of anything in my life as when I saw blood in the shower tray and Sloane’s distraught face.
Even though the doctor reassured us everything is okay, my brain hasn’t got the memo. Sloane is ready to kick my arse because I’m hovering and wittering over her, but I simply cannot stop.
I have run through every awful scenario, and I’m determined to be prepared to stop each and every one from happening.
I have a new routine now. I follow Sloane around the house, pretending to be casual, but really just keeping her in my line of sight at all times. Is this how dog owners feel when their Labrador eats a sock and they have to watch its every bowel movement for a week? Unclear.
Nobody else knows. Not Becca, who would show up at our door with a family-size bag of Doritos and a bag of baby-related wool garments.
Not Bella, who would cuss the universe and probably try to hex it or something just as nuts.
Hell, not even Pia, who has a sixth sense for emotional distress and has texted me every day since we returned home.
I keep lying to them. Lying is not my thing, actually.
It makes me sweat, and then I over-explain, and then I end up on a thirty-minute FaceTime with Becca in which I reveal some other unrelated secret, like “I never liked your sourdough starter, it smells like feet,” and then she gets distracted and forgets why she called in the first place.
But this time, I am iron-clad. Steel-jawed. Nothing slips.
It’s not just because Sloane asked me not to tell anyone. It’s because if I say the words out loud, if I let them exist outside the two of us, then the universe might take it as a dare. Like, “Oh, you thought you’d keep this one? How quaint. Let me show you what I do to optimists.”
I am not an optimist. I am a realist with a PhD in Catastrophology.
Every time Sloane goes to the bathroom, I listen for the flush and the running water and then the little cough she does when she’s trying to hide the fact that she’s crying.
If she’s in there too long, I find something to do in the hallway.
“Just passing by!” I say, holding a laundry basket, or a mug, or once, a single, loose AA battery.
I can’t help it. I love her so much it makes me physically unwell.
She’s trying to be strong, which is the most Sloane thing imaginable.
She reads the pamphlets from the doctor, then reads the subreddits, then reads the meta-analyses of the pamphlets and the subreddits.
She builds a fortress of data around herself, and I’m not invited in.
I stand outside, waiting for the drawbridge to drop, but it never does.
Thankfully, it doesn’t feel like when she withdrew in college. She’s still present, and she isn’t pushing me away, but she’s not ready to let me take some of her emotional weight just yet.
One night, about a week after The Incident, I wake up to find her not in the bed but curled up on the floor by the nursery door.
The nursery is a room we painted together in a fit of hope, all pale green and yellow and a single, menacing giraffe mural that I regret every day.
She’s just sitting there, knees to her chest, staring at nothing.
“Hey,” I whisper, sliding down next to her. “You okay?”
She shrugs, which is Sloane for, “No, but I can’t make it into words yet.”
I put my arm around her and rest my chin on her shoulder. “Want to talk about it?”
She shakes her head. “I just keep thinking…what if I’m not built for this?”
Fuck, that gets me. “You’re built for everything, Sloane. You survived me, didn’t you?”
She laughs, but it’s a wet, broken sound. “Maybe that was my quota of miracles.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. I just hold her, and when she starts to shiver, I haul her up and drag her back to bed, and we lie there in the dark, breathing together, until the sun comes up.
The days pass and I still hover, but I hover less.
I go to the studio and throw myself into art, which is what I always do when I’m afraid.
I make a series of bowls. I was inspired by Gran, and it kept my brain distracted by working out the logistics of having a clay wheel in the house and buying a mini kiln.
Every one of the bowls is slightly uneven, some of them cracked.
At first, I trash the imperfect ones, then I start lining them up on the windowsill, a parade of ugly little survivors.
One afternoon, Bella shows up unannounced, as is her way. She marches in, surveys the kitchen, and then me. “You look like shit, Sawyer. And your fridge is a crime scene.”
“Thank you for the feedback,” I reply, trying to steer her away from Sloane, who is reading on the couch and pretending not to eavesdrop.
Bella doesn’t take the hint. “Where’s the missus?”
I sigh. “Couch. She’s fine.”
“Is she?” Bella asks, her eyes going all squinty and detective-like. “Because you look like you’re about to pass a kidney stone from stress.”
I consider telling her, but then I remember the universe, and I remember Sloane’s face that night in the nursery, and I lock it down. “We’re just tired. You know how it is.”
When she leaves, I find Sloane in the bedroom, curled up with her phone. She looks so small. I sit beside her and kiss her temple. We stay silent, which is beginning to become our norm nowadays.
Sloane has several video meetings with Dr Chen, which makes me worry a little less, but what if she’s not telling the Doc how she’s really feeling? Maybe we should tell our families, because if Sloane doesn’t feel like I’m supporting her enough or in the right way, who else is there for her?
I make the decision to tell my mum after I wake from a harrowing nightmare. Actually, it’s more a memory from the eighteen months Sloane and I weren’t together. Even though it was years ago, the distress I felt back then slams into me like a train in my sleep.
Sloane is gone when I wake up sweating and panting. She’s taken to going into the office earlier recently. Instead of sitting staring into the abyss, she’s now working all hours of the day.
After a shower that fails to wash away my anxiety, I throw on my running gear and jog to my parents’ house. It’s early enough; they will both be at home sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast while listening to BBC radio on the iPad.
Mum is at the kitchen table, in ripped jean shorts and a band tee, teeth sunk into the crust of burnt toast. Dad is hunched over a crossword, brow knitted, pen tapping a nervous Morse code on the wood.
They look up when I come in, and everything about the way they look at me makes my throat constrict.
“Darling,” Mum says, mouth full, “you’re up early. Are you all right?”
I want to say yes, but it comes out as a noise that’s neither word nor sound. I stand there in the doorway, fists balled in my hoodie pocket, and suddenly I am not thirty-two or married or about to be a parent, but just a kid again, desperately needing someone to tell me the world is not ending.
Dad pushes his glasses up and gestures to the seat across from him. “Sit down, love. You look like you’ve run a marathon.”
I sit because my legs are trembling. I mean to make a joke about how I probably did; that’s how I cope, but when I open my mouth, it’s just a hot, embarrassing rush of tears.
“Oh, Eden—” Mum’s out of her chair and around the table before the first sob even fully escapes. She hugs me from behind, arms tight, cheek pressed to the side of my head. “What’s happened?”
I can’t get the words out. They stick, thick and choking, and I hate how dramatic I must look, but I literally cannot stop. Dad’s hand lands gently and warmly on my back, and that’s what undoes me completely. My face is in my hands, and I’m gasping for air between sobs.
“It’s Sloane,” I finally manage. “There was…blood. A lot. I thought—I thought we lost—” I can’t say the word. I can’t even think it. “But we didn’t, at least not yet, but I can’t—I don’t—”
“There, there,” Mum says, the most useless of British consolations, but it helps anyway. “Oh, sweetheart.”
Dad is silent, just tracing slow circles on my shoulder, the same way he used to when I was small and sick or couldn’t sleep. I want to crawl back in time and stay here forever, in this kitchen, before I knew the world could ruin you so thoroughly and so instantly.
“We saw the doctor and she said it might be fine, but it also might not, and there’s nothing—there’s nothing I can do,” I babble. “I hate not being able to fix it. I hate not knowing. I love her so much and she’s so scared and I can’t—I can’t make it better for her—”
I realise my nose is running, and my face is a horror show. Mum just keeps stroking my hair, and Dad finally speaks. “There’s nothing harder, Eden. Nothing. But you’re doing everything you can.”
“I’m not,” I say, voice small and ugly. “I’m hovering and it’s making her crazy. I don’t know how to help her. I don’t know how to help me. I just want it to be over or—or right, or wrong, I don’t care, I just can’t do this in between.”
Mum tuts, wipes my cheek with the sleeve of Dad’s discarded jumper.
“Oh, love, you’ve always been like this.
All or nothing. But life…” She makes a vague, wobbly gesture at the air, as if to say the whole universe is a series of untidy, unresolved middle bits.
“Life is mostly the waiting, darling. The only thing you can do is…what you’re doing. ”
I sniff, squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’t want to lose her. Not Sloane, not—not anything.”
“You won’t,” Dad says, firm enough that I almost believe him. “Whatever happens next, you’ll get through it. You always do.”
I want to ask how he knows, but I can’t bear the answer if it’s a lie.
We just sit there for a while. Mum pours tea, hands me a cup, and I don’t even flinch when she adds an obscene amount of sugar. Dad slides the crossword over to me, pen clicking, and points at 5-down.
“‘Chasm; five letters, starts with A.’”
It takes me a second to realise it’s a prompt, an invitation back to the world of ordinary things. “Abyss,” I mumble, and the word lands on the page with a small, final click.
“Very good,” he says, and I almost smile.
I stay there for an hour, drinking tea and breathing, letting my parents talk around me about nothing and everything. When I finally stand, my eyes are raw and my head hurts, but I feel a tiny bit more…something. Not hopeful, exactly, but less alone.
Mum kisses my forehead and Dad gives me a real, bone-crushing hug, and I promise to text as soon as I get home. I jog back, the air sharp in my lungs, and by the time I reach our street I’m almost steady.
Inside, Sloane is still gone—probably at the office, probably trying to solve all her patients’ problems so she doesn’t have to think about her own. I walk into the studio, breathing in the faint, stubborn scent of clay and paint, and look at the row of ugly bowls on the sill.
For the first time in days, I don’t want to smash them all. I run my thumb over the rim of each one, tracing their cracks and chips, and I think maybe they’re not ugly after all. Maybe they’re just proof that things can break and still be worth keeping.
I sit down at the wheel, hands steady for the first time in a week, and start a new bowl from scratch. This one comes out worse than the others, lopsided and wobbly, but I keep going anyway.
When Sloane comes home, she finds me at the table, hands caked with dried slip, the latest bowl perched precariously and absurdly on the counter.
She looks at it, then at me, and then she does something I don’t expect: she laughs.
Not a polite, therapist-y chuckle, but a real, helpless giggle, and it’s so contagious I start laughing too, and before I know it, we’re both doubled over, wheezing, clutching each other like idiots.
When we stop, she wipes her eyes and says, “It’s hideous. I love it.”
“Me too,” I manage, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all day.