Kate picks up the envelope. Every two weeks she gets a report, an update to show her how well the staff at Greenhills are managing her difficult son. It’s printed on thick creamy paper, beautiful, with an elegant letterhead, but it’s not nearly thick enough to absorb the misery of the words typed on it. Ms Turner writes the reports; she’s careful to stress the positives, mentioning Noah’s slow but significant progress. Ms T – that’s what Maddie calls her – is nice enough. Competent. And she doesn’t talk down to Noah like Dr Lovelock did.
Kate remembers his report; it was long and complicated, puffed up and puffed out by medical jargon. She can picture him writing it, his thin lips tweezered, his convex chest sunk in on itself, his stork legs jointed sharply at the knee. Does he like any of his patients, Kate wonders. Or is it just the two of them? Her beautiful, imperfect son, product of a bad mother. He’d talked down to Kate, too, as if Noah’s problems stemmed from her. As if she didn’t feel enough guilt, always wondering if there was anything she should have done differently.
All the way to the moment of conception, that’s how far back her guilt goes, and from there through each of the trimesters of her pregnancy. Kate spends hours racking her brains, trying to remember what she drank, if she’d been in the same room as people smoking. Should she have spoken differently to Noah as an infant, as a young child. Had he been overstimulated? Under-stimulated? Had she fed him the right food? What about their occasional forays over to the dark side, to fast-food joints with their grubby play areas?
Today’s report is kind, hopeful, encouraging, not unlike Ms Turner herself. Even so, Kate cannot see a light at the end of this tunnel. There is one, Ms Turner insists. Just keep going, keep trying; the work will be worthwhile. But Kate needs more than a glimmer of hope. She wants to be blinded by a flash of miraculous light.