The day she left Layla, tears streamed down her face.
When she pictured home she imagined a ravine, two bodies of rock once whole, torn in half with a gaping wound.
‘She’ll be fine, she knows me so well. Don’t you, baby?’ Polina assured her, taking Gabriela’s sleeping daughter from her arms and holding her to her own chest as the surrogate parent she was, intermittently, to become.
‘I know, but she’s only six weeks old.’ Gabriela was unable to stop her body from shaking.
‘You’ll be back soon,’ Polina added, her voice more tender than usual. ‘Besides, sounds like you don’t have a choice.’
Remembering the lie she had fed Ivan about the foreign conference she had to lead, Gabriela swallowed. ‘You know I wouldn’t be going, if it wasn’t so important.’
Polina ignored her words. ‘I’ll look after her, you know that, and Ivan will be back in a couple of days, too.’
Gabriela thought of him heading off on another one of his business trips, the argument from last night still percolating in her mind. He had been so bemused by her suggestion that there was little difference between him going off and leaving their daughter and her doing the same thing that it felt like another chasm had opened up that she could see no possible way to get back from.
‘But you’re her mother,’ he said, this alone was a rational argument.
It was baffling, she thought, this change of heart. He had been so understanding when she was pregnant, so on board when she repeatedly explained to him that she would still have to do stints abroad, even when the baby was young; drilling it into him so that there could be no mistaking her intentions down the line.
Yet the look on his face when she’d told him she was going away for a week, to work on the case she’d left early during her maternity leave, made her feel as if she had never prepared him for it at all.
‘Like I said in Moscow, I suppose I just assumed that once you had the baby you’d feel differently,’ he said again when she asked him what was wrong, refusing to meet her eye.
She had studied him long and hard last night, waiting for him to tell her it was OK, but he simply leaned down and kissed their daughter on the head, and walked out. By the time she woke up, he’d already gone.
It was only once she was in the cab home that she realised her mistake. She had been reaching in her bag for her phone – anything to distract herself from the baby screaming for her on the other side of the city – when she felt her fingers land on the bunny’s fur. As she pulled the toy from the bag, instantly she knew what she’d done.
She had almost forgotten Otto entirely, but when she moved past Layla’s room the previous evening as she prepared to leave, escaping to the relative serenity of the top of the house after her fight with Ivan, she spotted the bunny abandoned on the shelf, slumped over in the half-light. Creeping into the room, careful not to wake her daughter, she’d lifted it up and placed it discreetly under her arm.
In the hall, she’d heard Ivan’s footsteps following her up the stairs and she’d moved quickly back into their bedroom, stuffing the toy in the bottom of her bag and placing her make-up and book on top to obscure it, should Ivan for any reason glance inside at the contents.
But as soon as she drew it out now, she knew what had happened.
Briefly, she remembered the That’s Not My … touch-and-feel books which she’d read repeatedly to Callum when he was little, borrowed from the same library in which she had spent hours when she was young. Closing her eyes, she imagined him on her knee as she regaled him with the details revealing how this particular item wasn’t the narrator’s lion or pirate or train.
With a rising sense of panic, she pictured her son. There was no way he would see this toy and not know immediately that it was not his Otto.
Her voice breaking, she called out to the driver as the car idled along Kentish Town High Street. ‘Can you stop, please? I need to run into McDonald’s quickly.’
Inside, she moved towards the counter. ‘Do you have any jam?’
Noting the attendant’s expression, she continued, ‘OK, I’ll have a Big Mac, with ketchup, please.’
Clutching the food, her bag over her shoulder, she made her way towards the bathroom. Inside, she dumped the burger in the nappy waste bin and crouched down, tearing at the foil lid of the plastic ketchup container. As the foil tore open, she ingested a mouthful of the sweet-sharp-tasting liquid and when she looked up she caught her own reflection, red goop smeared down her chin.
Lifting the rabbit to her mouth, she dabbed it on the stain, being careful to replicate the placing of the jam Callum had left on Otto the day before she left.
But when she pulled the toy back and looked at it, the colour was all wrong. Wiping her mouth with a tissue and throwing it in the bin along with the sauce packet, she looked down at the rabbit that wasn’t Otto and, without warning, her vision flooded with tears.
Feeling her knees buckle, she collapsed into the space between the toilet and the door and ignoring the meter on the cab ticking outside, she sat there, her whole body heaving with tears until she could cry no more.