When Nathan tiptoed in, Gwen was in her pajamas on the sofa, her hair in two thick braids, her knees drawn up, a hot water bottle cradled in her arms. Behind her glasses her face was very white, her eyes fixed on the flickering television. She had the cuticle of her right thumb between her teeth, and did not appear to hear or sense him entering. The room was stuffy, the only light in the room the screen and a reading lamp casting a yellow glow on the far wall.
Nathan hovered in the doorway, uncertain. He spoke her name softly, as though waking her from sleep, and she looked up and gave him a wan smile.
“You didn’t have to come back.”
He sat down beside her, very gingerly. He did not know whether she was in pain, nor what to say if she was. What had been done to her, in the bright white sterility of the hospital? What had been taken?
“I mean, it’s lovely that you did. But you’ve got two exams tomorrow.” Her voice was husky, as if her throat was very dry.
“You’re more important,” he said, fiercely. His father had said the same on the phone: exams tomorrow. But how could they possibly think he’d care about exams today? How could he stay in his boardinghouse tonight? His father’s voice—filled with warmth and pity and a promise of his own reassuring solid presence, at that moment just out of reach, across London—had brought on such a violent lurch of homesickness that he could not have stayed in school another moment. As soon as he stepped out into Victoria Street, arm aloft, purposeful, he felt better. At first in the taxi he felt himself racing against the clock, in a panic to reach the heroine for the climactic scene in which he would be tested and would comfort her, and triumph. Nothing of these last, strange weeks had felt real—around him weird storms had raged, but when he kept his head down life remained unaltered, the threat too far ahead to fear, too abstract to comprehend. Now he felt electrified. Telling the driver “as fast as you can” was manly and exhilarating. This was reality. But then near-stasis in the red neon and clamor and spewing traffic of Edgware Road, and the film crew departed and left him alone, and he was no longer needed to perform. The adrenaline seeped away and left him shaking. No one was picking up the phone. He tried his mother, over and over, but it was midafternoon in Boston and she would be in clinic, inaccessible for hours. Then he had screwed shut his eyes and bitten the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger to try and punish himself into control; he had not been able to answer when the cab driver turned and asked him if he was alright. He did not understand the source of all this sorrow, only its magnitude, and that it had engulfed him.
He had expected hysteria at home, he realized; he had feared blood, or a confrontation of female biology. This muted calm was disconcerting and made his role unclear. She already had a hot water bottle, and beside her on the coffee table lay a still life of sickroom requirements: a plate of biscuits, a cup of tea, a glass of water, a packet of chocolate buttons, a box of painkillers, a small packet of tissues, a weekly celebrity magazine. He had come home intending to nurse her, an evening of his own hard penance so he could go back to school having altered something. But her requirements had been met.
“Are you okay?” he asked, foolishly. He leaned over to kiss her and she inclined her head toward him so he ended up catching her paternally on her hairline.
“I’m okay. Your dad got me an appointment with his friend tomorrow morning. Not that Claire person, someone else. It’s nice of him, usually I’d have to wait longer. It’ll be more comfortable after that, apparently.”
“Does it hurt?”
She shook her head. “They said I could take Paracetamol, but then when we got back your dad gave me— He said I didn’t have to be hurting when he had something stronger that’s okay to take. So he gave me something . . . American,” she finished. This speech had taken effort; she sank back onto the sofa, wearied by it.
“Lucky, Dad never gives me his good drugs. But I mean, you’re okay. You’re safe?”
“Yes. S’just one of those things. Wasn’t meant to be, or whatever.”
“But how can it just be—” His voice broke and he took Gwen’s white hand and raised it to his lips. He could not quite find her in the dark hollows of her eyes. It had begun to dawn on him what had not seemed real or possible before this loss—that he had almost had a child. A son, maybe. A moment later he found himself weeping. Gwen shifted to her knees and held his head tightly against her breast. “How can it just be gone, just like that? That was our baby.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered, “everything’s okay.” Her hand stroked his hair, but the more she soothed, the harder he wept. He did not want to stop. Nothing was okay. He had lost something in which he had never believed.
• • •
UPSTAIRS, GWEN SANK INTO BED. She had ordered Nathan back to school, back to his necessary responsibilities and the unaltered reality of exams. It had been a relief when his father drove him away and the house was silent again. When James returned she could vaguely hear his voice and her mother’s mingled, soft and low in the kitchen, and for once she did not feel an angry impulse to eavesdrop, did not fear secrets or treachery. She knew they were speaking of her, and speaking tenderly. She did not deserve it.
Her mother had changed the sheets and refilled her hot water bottle and this Gwen clutched to the dull ache in her abdomen—though in truth the pain was not bad, no worse than period cramps. After a moment James knocked and came in, with two tablets and a glass of water.
“In case you wanted something in the night. You could take one now and one after two a.m., if you wake.”
“Will it help me sleep?”
He nodded.
“It’s not actually hurting that much. But can I take it anyway?”
“Just tonight, sure. One at a time, though. Gwen”—he paused in the doorway and ran a hand through his hair, gathering the front in his fist, a mannerism she recognized in Nathan—“I’m so very sorry. I’m on call tonight but you know I won’t leave this house unless I really have to. If you need anything in the night—”
“I know. Thanks.”
“Good night. Your mother will come in in a minute.”
“Wait!” She heard her own voice calling him back, and seconds later he returned and was at her bedside.
“Can I ask—” She had no vocabulary for her question but her hand was suddenly between James’s, clasped tightly and shaken on each emphatic syllable.
“You did not make this happen, you hear me? It is not possible. It’s not coffee or what you ate or what you didn’t eat or a heavy box you lifted or anything within your control. This happens in one in five pregnancies, even at your age, and people don’t talk about it and I have no idea why; it would spare a lot of women a lot of needless, toxic guilt. I would not bullshit you. I need you to hear me, okay?”
He would not look away, she knew, until she nodded.
The door closed, and she took a deep, unsteady breath. James had not understood. She had done this, not with her body but with her mind. She had wished away a baby. Overjoyed at the end of the fatigue and nausea, she hadn’t known that for days she had been celebrating death within her. She had longed for liberation and in answer a violent, unexpected liberation had come.
Beneath her hot spread hands her abdomen was flat and unremarkable. In, out. She sank back into her pillow exhausted, washed into unconsciousness on a tide of Tramadol, and a rising steady surge of dark relief.