Chapter Twelve
Just before she awoke on Saturday morning, Andrea Lopez had had a strange dream about her daughter’s hands.
They were like the work of an artist, she had always thought that: delicate and perfect.
But in the dream they came to her in a vision that was not always comfortable.
Making the silhouette of a dove, then a horror movie claw.
Shadows on the wall. First a rabbit, then reaching out for help, fingers outstretched.
She opened her eyes to a thick headache.
She turned to kiss her husband’s shoulder, then rolled heavily to see the bedside clock.
Okay, the weekend. But still. Lie-ins? No chance.
A normal waking time was before six, with their child not yet five years old.
She wondered if that was how it worked. The two-year-old got you up at two, the five-year-old at five, and then by the time they were teenagers they were having to be poked and prodded awake in the afternoon.
But no Nina yet. Not this morning. What was it, seven already?
Perhaps she was giving them a break after what happened yesterday.
In a minute their little darling would busy herself into the room as if she had never slept.
She would shake her curls and drop her fists on the edge of the duvet and claim the emergency of a lost dinosaur or a broken handle on a toy saucepan.
Andrea shut her eyes, opened them again. The clock said eight thirty. Wait … how could it be that late?
The young parents had moved to Sidmouth for a better life soon after Nina was born.
They had had four rounds of IVF and three miscarriages and were both emotionally exhausted.
After years in a flat in Exeter, where property was madly expensive, they cashed in for a semi with a garden.
A mile back from the seafront, their house even had room for a dining table.
Now parents, they were almost obscenely happy.
They had put down roots quickly, finding friends in the local Labour Party branch.
Gabriel had even started giving Spanish night classes at Sidmouth Tech, a side hustle to his job as a planning inspector.
And now Nina would have a sister. Her ever-curious Nina would have a sibling to poke and prod.
Andrea felt the baby in her womb as she blinked at the time. The blinking brought the clock into focus but also the events of, what, less than eighteen hours ago?
It was incredible. The whole thing. She placed her right palm on the bump below her breasts. Her husband spoke quietly.
‘Are you awake?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘Thank God. Sweet Jesus, our Nina. Protected by angels.’ His voice was muffled by the pillow, but Andrea thought she could hear his throat narrow, tears coming. ‘Today I will go to church to thank Him. That motorbike could have—’
‘Sweet, don’t,’ she cut in. She had glimpsed the dead motorbiker. Nina had not seen him. But she had been out of her mother’s sight for an instant in the chaos.
‘I was glancing around so rapidly,’ her husband said. ‘Sweet Jesus we thank you for saving our precious daughter.’
‘Why is she not out of bed?’ asked Andrea.
‘Exhausted, I guess.’ Gabriel’s voice was clearer. Andrea could tell without looking that he had propped himself up, and imagined him on an elbow behind her, the thick black hair tousled (not a single grey yet!), moustache wayward with a slept-on-my-face look. ‘I should go see.’
The little girl’s bed was new, and she had slept better after a bout of night terrors on the smaller mattress. But still, thought Andrea, eight thirty was very late for her. She was suddenly filled with a terrible sense of foreboding.
‘Where is Nina?’ Despite the cumbersome shape of her midriff with Nina’s sister due in ten weeks, she sat up quickly on the edge of the bed, back straight.
‘Honey …’ Her husband was lying back down, and his arm reached instinctively to stop her, catching her nightshirt.
‘Something is wrong,’ she told Gabriel sharply. ‘Let me go.’
As she wrapped the dressing gown around her she thought she saw her whole life as a movie, playing out in a second: the Madrid childhood with angry parents, dad leaving for a child of a lover, her alone with mami, losing her virginity at sixteen, finding her facility for spoken language, flowering at university, the brush with cancer, dad’s early death, meeting Gabriel, the traditional marriage, the struggle to conceive, and now, like a ship landed at harbour, this beautiful daughter, kind husband, girl number two on the way.
On Nina, she thought, you are the harbour. Little girl, I was the ship, storm-tossed. You were the place I berthed. The place I arrived after so much tumult. Oh, Nina, my darling. My precious girl, my safe home, my life.
A sense of doom enveloped Andrea as she closed the bedroom door behind her and looked up the narrow stairs to the conversion on the top floor.
Nina was in bed with the most peaceful expression on her face. She woke to her mother’s touch, and with a gappy smile said: ‘Mum!’ Such a British word. Andrea looked at her daughter’s hands, the ones she had seen in the dream. She picked up the left, and was shocked to find it cold and clammy.
‘Honey, are you poorly?’
The child smiled. ‘Your hands are hot, Mummy.’
‘Yours are cold, my darling. Do you have a chill?’
A shudder seemed to pass over Nina. Andrea carried her past the bedroom door where Gabriel was probably back asleep, and into the tiny kitchen. She sat her at the table, in the wooden chair with the booster cushion attached, but the child’s body slumped a little.
‘Are you okay, darling?’ Andrea called, ‘Gabriel! Gabriel, come down!’
Nina was a talkative child, with many friends at her new primary school, although – teachers had occasionally noted – ‘a tendency to be a little bossy with the boys.’ This, Andrea had thought, was a good sign, though she wondered if they would use the same adjective for an assertive male child.
Her child liked a pretty dress but had once taken a toy car apart with a screwdriver: the perfect meld of twentieth- and twenty-first-century female.
Andrea knew she was getting ahead of herself, but you did that when you had longed and longed for a baby.
Now she looked anxiously at her wilting child, who blinked back up at her. ‘Are you okay, Mummy?’
‘Can you sit up? Maybe I’m being silly, worrying about you.’
‘I think I need another one of my sweeties,’ said Nina, apparently recovered.
Gabriel arrived, his pyjama fly hanging open. Andrea pointed at their daughter. ‘Right as rain. Just exhausted by … yesterday.’ She would not mention the bike crash, because she feared the return of Nina’s terrors.
It was then that Andrea saw her daughter’s hands.
They were clasped – unusual for a child of four. When Andrea separated them, they were trembling with such energy she felt a current might be running through them.
‘What sweeties, darling?’
‘The man came off the bike and I found them.’ The child was sitting at the table, rocking left and right as if to a musical rhythm only she could hear. She spread her arms wide like an old-school preacher, and the hands vibrated as she held them out. Now Gabriel was alert too.
‘Sweeties, darling?’
‘Daddy, when the bike crashed, I saw them on the floor. They tasted nice. I just had one yesterday. I saved the other two. Or, no, maybe I had one in the middle of the night.’
Surely this was meaningless, thought Andrea.
She is groggy because yesterday was horrible for us all.
She remembered the noise, the shock, the flames, the panic …
yes, there was a minute where everyone had been moving everywhere …
Had there been a few seconds when she thought Gabriel had Nina safely, and Gabriel thought she did?
Yes, for sure there had. And Nina had used that tiny sliver of time to pick something unknown off the floor and eat it.
Andrea shuddered even as Gabriel shot upstairs. He came back down with two tiny gelatin capsules which he held between the finger and thumb of each hand. ‘Found them! What are they? Vitamins?’
Gabriel was staring at his daughter. Andrea turned to him and then back to Nina.
Nina had slumped left in the high chair and there was a thin line of white froth on her lips.
‘Darling,’ said Andrea, ‘what have you done?’