Prone to sudden frights and swamped by terrors of dangers merely perceived? Always, like any child, but this time is different. Gracey’s small bloodless face, her unusual silence and stunned eyes, prompt Tom to sink to his knees before the kitchen stool. Seeing her so pitifully reduced before him, he fears that the confidence and certainties his daughter has gained in four years have all been stripped away in a single afternoon.
A sudden recognition of her smallness and wondering innocence hits him under the solar plexus. Her beautiful green eyes don’t acknowledge him, only look through him and blink as the girl’s mind fathoms and ferrets for the truth of a thing; matters and concerns still unshared.
Tom can’t breathe. He wants to hug their daughter, sling her under his chest and squash out the woe. But Fiona is closer and Gracey wants her mother.
Always a child who wanders off. Turn their backs in a supermarket and she’s two aisles over inventing a shopping game with items from the lower shelves. As soon as she could walk, she was off across grass, frigid or dewy, abandoning him in the park with the pushchair laden with bags and bears. He can see her now, two, maybe three years old: rubber boots, like toys at the end of her stubby legs, weaving circles on the turf of recreation grounds, her breath puffing. Reckless and euphoric at the simple joy of movement, she’d always stamp in a straight line towards a horizon busy with cars. How he’d scan the terrain for dangerous dogs, fast bicycles, ponds, the glitter of broken glass, turds hiding like coiled serpents. And give chase. Today, he never even saw her leave the house. The idea of her not coming back is not new but remains an idea he cannot abide.
‘Get lost, my Peanut? Give yourself a fright?’ Stating the obvious just reinforces his feeling of uselessness.
Fiona’s shoulders and voice are loosening with relief, though a stern tone endures in her voice. ‘What did Mommy say, aye? About going in there?’
She casts a sharp glance at Tom and he shies away, withered. He feels fraudulent and suddenly detached, uncoupled from these two people who hold him upright in life. He dragged them to a broken-down house with hideous neighbours, so far from school, jobs, friends and comfort.
Financial anxiety is the only electricity running through their wires now. Like a feckless politician he’s sold his daughter his idea of a life amongst the trees, clean air, rabbits as friends. He’s never lived in the country before. What would he know? About anything? The broadband is a trickle but was fast in the flat. Instant access to the world, to people. Another warning of how far he’s led his tribe from everything familiar.
‘I’ll fetch Archie,’ Tom says.
No one answers him.
Pressed against her mother, Gracey finally sobs. The warmth and scents accompanying her from the hospital bed and cradle overwhelm her. A memory wave, summoned by a simple fragrance of her mother, rises above every seawall erected in a lifetime. The safest place: Mommy.
Fiona shush-shushes and kisses Gracey’s tousled head.
Tom lets himself out.