I run from the parking lot to the double doors at the entrance of the hospital, but I don’t feel the wind on my face. I don’t hear the mechanical voice tell me the doors are opening as I step into the lift or smell the sharp sting of antiseptic as I squirt sanitizer onto my hands at the entrance to the ward. I don’t see, hear, feel, touch, or taste anything. I am in limbo. I am running through a nightmare, chasing the specter of my sleeping child. She hovers in front of me, so close my fingertips are millimeters away, and then—gone—she darts away before I can touch.
She will die unless I get to her. I know it with a certainty that runs deeper than bones, flesh, or thought. I would stake my own life on it. Give my own life. James will not take her. He can have me. I will make him have me. I will give him no choice.
I can see the door of her room, further down the corridor. It is ajar, light spilling through the gap. Someone is in there with her. I run but now I’m wading through mud, each footstep sinking lower than the next, and I move slower, slower.
I took James’s baby from him because I knew that I would never be able to escape if I gave birth to his child. And it wouldn’t have been a child—it would have been a leash around my neck, a choke collar to be jerked whenever he wanted to control me, whenever he needed to abuse me, whenever he had to punish me.
I was dry-eyed and resolute when I walked into the clinic. I took the pill without a moment’s hesitation, lay down on the bed without a second thought, and gripped my stomach stoically, silently when the cramps came. I didn’t even cry when blood trickled down my leg and I hurried to the toilet and felt life slip out of me and into the pan. But half an hour later, as I lay curled up on the bed and a nurse put a hand on my head and said, “You’re a strong one, aren’t you? You haven’t had so much as a Tylenol for the pain,” I sobbed like the world was about to end.
Strong? I was impossibly weak. I’d spent four years of my life with a monster of a man, being tortured by hate dressed up as love. I’d been humiliated, belittled, berated, and cross-examined. I’d been judged, ignored, criticized, and rejected. I’d cut myself off from my friends and my family, lost my job, and been made to choose between my life’s dream and my love for James. And I hadn’t walked away. I tried, several times, but I was weak. He always talked his way back into my life and into my heart. Strong wasn’t lying silently on a hospital bed as I aborted his child so I could be free. Strong would have been walking straight out of the World Headquarters club in Camden three years, two hundred and seventy days earlier when he laughingly called me a slut. Strong would have been refusing to ever see him again the night he refused to sleep in my bed because other men had been there first. Strong would have been reporting him to the police the night he raped me. Strong would have been stopping him from doing the same to another woman ever again.
I didn’t cry for the baby I aborted the day I did it, but I did every year afterward on the anniversary. I cried because it didn’t deserve to lose its life, and I cried because I felt angry with James for forcing me into that situation. Mostly I felt guilty—if I hadn’t been so weak when I left him, if I’d had the tiniest bit of resolve left, maybe I could have taken him or her to Greece with me, somehow made it work as a TEFL teacher and a mother.
I thought I’d be punished for what I’d done. I thought I’d never conceive again, but then Charlotte, our miracle baby, appeared a year into my marriage to Brian. I felt blessed, forgiven, like a new chapter of my life had opened up, that I was truly free. And then we tried to give her a sibling and I had four miscarriages in three years.
My miracle baby.
I put a hand to the door and push it open.
Charlotte is lying prostrate on the duvetless bed, an oxygen mask covering her mouth, her chest polka-dotted with multicolored electrodes. The heart monitor in the corner of the room bleep-bleep-bleeps, marking the passage of time like a medical metronome, and I close my eyes.
“Sue?” There is a hand on my shoulder, heavy. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Brian?” I blink several times.
“Sue?” He’s looking at me and his brow is furrowed, but I have no idea what he’s thinking. “Sue, are you okay?”
“All right, Mum?” I twitch at the word “Mum,” but it’s not Charlotte speaking it. It’s Oli, sitting at her bedside. He’s got a pile of National Geographic magazines in his lap and my best hairdressing scissors in his hand. There are a stack of cuttings on Charlotte’s bedside table.
“Mum?” he says again.
I can’t remember the last time he called me that.
“I…” I look from him to Brian and back again. What are they doing here? It’s as though my world has switched from the hyper real, a living Technicolor nightmare, to the monochrome of the mundane. Why are they sipping tea? Don’t they realize how much danger Charlotte is in? I look at Brian questioningly.
He smiles, his hand still on my shoulder. “Oli popped by to pick up his magazines and said he’d like to visit Charlotte before he went back to university. We came in his car.”
“You came in Oli’s car…”
“Yes. Mine’s still at home. It won’t start, some kind of problem with the fuel pipe, I think. The sooner I get myself an electric car, the better.” He squeezes my shoulder. “We waited for you to come back from the beach so you could come with us, but when you said you wanted to be alone, I thought…” He tails off. “I would have left a note, but somewhere between grabbing my jacket and leaving the house, I forgot.”
Oli laughs. “Not like you to be forgetful, Dad.”
I stare at the two of them. They’re laughing and smiling, but lying on the passenger seat of my car are two blood-stained booties and a card threatening our daughter’s life.
“You look a bit pale.” Brian angles me into the empty chair on Charlotte’s left and crouches beside me.
No one says anything for several minutes until he inhales noisily through his nose. He’s steadying himself to say something big.
“I found these.” He plunges a hand into his trouser pocket then uncurls his fingers to reveal three small white pills. “I was having a bit of a tidy up. I thought you’d appreciate it after everything that has happened but”—he looks at the treasures he has uncovered—“I was wondering if there was anything you wanted to tell me, Sue.”
“Yes.” I sit upright, suddenly, which makes him lurch back in surprise. “Charlotte’s in danger. James has found me. I’m not imagining it this time, Brian. I’ve got proof. It’s in my car. Blood-stained booties. He knows about the abortion and he’s trying to get his revenge through Charlotte. He blackmailed her, that’s why she’s in the coma, that’s what made her walk in front of the bus that Saturday afternoon. But it’s not enough for him to hurt her.” I grip Brian’s wrist. “He wants her dead. He’s going to kill her.”
I stare at his face, waiting to see rage, violence, or murder, but I see nothing at all, save a quick glance toward Oli.
“Brian?” I tighten my grip on his wrist. “You do believe me, don’t you? Look at my hands, they’re…” But my hands aren’t bloodied in the slightest. “Clean. But only because I used the hand sanitizer when I came in. If we go down to my car, I can show you the booties and the—” I try and stand, but Brian pulls me back into the chair. “Brian, please! Why are you looking at me like that?”
He looks at Oliver and nods again. Three seconds later, he’s standing beside me too, a plastic cup in his hand.
“Sue,” Brian eases my fingers off his wrist. “I’d like you to take a couple of these pills.
“No!” I look imploring at Oli, who looks down at the ground. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I only went along to the doctor’s because I made a mistake about that teacher at the school, but I’ve got proof this time. I haven’t made another mistake. Please! Let’s just go down to my car and I’ll show you.”
“Sue.” Brian presses the pills to my mouth. They graze my bottom lip. “Take the pills and then we’ll talk.”
“No!” I try and stand up, but he puts a hand on my shoulder. The pressure is gentle but insistent. He’s not going to let me up.
“Please, Mum.” Oli takes a step toward me, holding out the plastic cup like it’s a sacred chalice. “Take a sip. It’ll help the pills go down.”
“Oliver, no.”
“It’s just water.”
“I don’t care what it is. I’m not going to—”
“Mum, please! We’re worried about you. We have been for a while. You…” He looks away, unable to sustain eye contact. “You haven’t been yourself since Charlotte’s accident. All that talk about Keisha and Charlotte and who was best friends with who and asking for Danny’s number and address and…well, I thought it was a bit odd, but I wouldn’t have said anything until Dad mentioned that he’d found your pills down the side of the sofa.”
The haze that hit me when I walked into the room clears, and I stare at my husband and stepson as though seeing them for the first time. They think I’m mentally ill. I can see it in their frowns, in the hunch of their shoulders, in their whispering voices. They’ve put one and one together and come up with “mad” and nothing I do or say will convince them otherwise. What can I say? That I’ve spent more time with Charlotte’s friends recently than I have my own daughter? That I went to a club in London and got in a blacked-out car with a footballer’s agent? That I’ve been peering into the front rooms of stranger’s houses? They wouldn’t believe a word. Worse than that, they’d think it was all part of the delusion. And of course I’m deluded—I haven’t been taking my pills, have I?
I could show them what’s on the passenger seat of my car, but they’d probably think I did it myself, for attention or because I’m disturbed. Brian would take one look at the blood-stained booties and be on the phone to the doctor quicker than you can say “psychiatric unit.” There’s only one option left to me. One thing I can do.
I look at the pills in Brian’s fingers. “If I take them,” I say steadily, “will you listen to me then?”
A slow smile crosses his face. “Of course I will, darling.”