If she didn’t tell Aunt Mer any or all of that, then she hadn’t told her “everything.” She had, in fact, told Aunt Mer virtually nothing.
“She hates herself for what she did,” Aunt Mer says. “When I showed her pictures of Leo, she started to cry.”
I don’t like the idea that she has shown my little boy to her. Those are pictures I gave to Aunt Mer because of who she is. They are private pieces of our family, not to be shown to just anyone. And she is just anyone.
“To be honest, Aunt Mer, those two are the last things on my mind,” I say, to be diplomatic. I want to say that talking about them, not being able to reveal how I truly feel because of who they are to Aunt Mer, is painful.
I feel her inhale deeply; she is upset. I can understand that she is only doing what she feels is best for her son; I would be the same if it was Leo. “You can tell Mal if you want,” I say to appease her.
“I couldn’t do that, dear,” she says. “He needs to hear it from you. And you need to see his reaction.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to see, when you tell him, how much he still loves you, and how much he loves that little boy.” She pauses. “And, so does Malvolio.”
He did have to have an operation!
Mum said it was nothing to do with his nose and it was in his brain. So cool. And he’d have to go to sleep for a while. And, right now, it was really really late, and he didn’t have to go to bed. This really was the best day ever.
“Can I have ice cream and Jell-O when I wake up?” he asked Mum.
“Of course,” she said.
This was better than silly old ton-seels. It was in his brain! The nurse was coming in a minute to shave his head and everything. Dad was coming home from work so he could see Leo before he went to sleep.
“I’ll be right there, watching you the whole time,” Mum said. She hadn’t started crying, which is why he knew it wasn’t serious. Mum only cried when it was serious. Or when she was cross with him. He never did understand that. Why would she cry when she was telling him off? But now, she wasn’t crying, so he wasn’t scared.
Leo, age 7 years and 5 months
CHAPTER 39
T he door of number 11 Pebble Street has not changed in over two hours.
I know, because I have been watching it. Mr. and Mrs. Wacken are in, but they do not know that I have been sitting in my car, observing them. Waiting for the moment that I will cross the road to go and see him.
The last time I spoke to Mal was about five years ago. Yeah, five years ago, six months after Cordy’s wedding. I came to London on the train and talked my way into his office by saying I was Cordelia. I briefly flattered myself by thinking that he lit up when he saw me step into his office, but anything he did feel he hid straightaway behind a mask of caution. Obviously fearing I’d break down or beg him again.
“I was wondering why Cordy would come to see me,” he said, standing up. “Have a seat.”
On the low filing cabinet behind him and below the large, blind-covered window stood a host of pictures: his wife smiling radiantly at their wedding; Victoria and her husband on their wedding day; Cordy and Jack on their wedding day; Aunt Mer, Mum, Dad and Cordy in front of a heavily decorated Christmas tree in my parents’ house. No pictures of him, no pictures of me and, of course, no pictures of Leo.
“Please stop giving me money,” I said gently, as I perched on the seat at the opposite side of the desk. I had come to see him because the week after Cordy’s wedding, every month money had started to appear in my account. Whenever I returned the money, it—and the next payment—would reappear on my bank statements. I wanted to see him face-to-face to tell him to stop; I wanted him to look me in the eye and know that I was serious.
“It’s for—” He stopped, unable to say the little boy’s name. Instead, he stared at the mesh pot of pens sitting on the far left-hand corner of his desk.
“If you want to contribute to Leo’s upbringing, set up an account for him to access when he’s eighteen, buy him premium bonds, bury it somewhere and send him a treasure map for all I care, just stop giving it to me.”
“You could set it aside for him,” Mal said to the pen holder.
My eyes strayed again to the photograph gallery behind him, wondering how easy it had been for him to remove me from his life. I assumed that at some point I might have been there, with the rest of our family, but now I was gone. Erased, and easily forgotten?
The silence forced him to look at me, to check I was still there.
“Please stop giving me money,” I said, my tone as gentle as before. “I don’t want to be financially tied to you, I don’t want Leo to be financially tied to you until he’s old enough to make that decision for himself.” I softened my voice even more. “It’s what you said you wanted, so please don’t mess us around.”
“OK,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Our gazes met, and stayed fixed together longer than was necessary. All sorts of memories of our life growing up blossomed in my mind. Mainly of us laughing. Clutching our stomachs and laughing, holding on to each other and laughing. That was what we had lost, not just each other, laughter. I’d never laughed with another person like I did with him. Leo made me laugh with the crazy things he did, I made him laugh, but we had yet to get to the point where just looking at each other could reignite an old joke and have us incapacitated with giggles in seconds.
I couldn’t help but smile as I remembered Mum regularly telling us off for laughing too loud and too long, late into the night, and keeping everyone awake. Then Dad marching into our rooms—we were often talking and laughing through the walls—and saying we should go to sleep “or else.” The sides of my body contracted as I was tempted to start laughing, and his shoulders started to shake. Suddenly, his face telling me he didn’t want to see me again erupted in my mind, punching me squarely in the chest and removing my breath. I glanced away from him.
I stood up without looking directly at him again. “Thanks for understanding,” I said, my voice tight and small.
“Do … do you have any pictures of him?” Mal asked as I reached the door. “Not to keep or anything, just to see.” God knows at that point I could barely keep my purse in my bag for showing people pictures of Leo, but I didn’t want to show him. I shook my head, and left without explaining that I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t punishing him, I was actually protecting him. He didn’t need to torture himself by seeing how much Leo had changed in the six months since he’d seen him at Cordy’s wedding. He had decided he wouldn’t be seeing Leo again, and, difficult as it may be, he needed to stick to that.
“OK, get out of the car now, Nova,” I tell myself in the present.
“No,” the little rebellious voice in my head replies. “Don’t wanna. Wanna go home.”
I am here because Aunt Mer is right. After saying her piece, she went back to the rest of our family, saying she was going to tell them everything so they would understand why I kept it from them, and I took a step outside of myself and the situation. I owed him nothing, I’d decided.
When he had walked away from me, he had said—he had showed me—that he wanted nothing to do with me. That anything that happened to me and the child I was carrying was nothing to do with him. He had no need to know anything now, because he didn’t want to know anything. End of story.
Then I stepped back into the situation again: Mal cared about Leo. The fact he wanted to give him money said something. And, after Leo was born and I was going to register the birth, I sent Mal a text with the details of the registry office and what time I would be there. Unsurprisingly, he turned up. We didn’t speak to each other, not even to say hello; we sat side by side and went through the process of giving our names to our son, and then parted without saying goodbye. The whole time we were there, I noticed the way his gaze kept straying to Leo, lying swaddled in his pram. I noticed the way his fingers twitched as though they wanted to gently trace the lines of his son’s face. I co
uld tell he wanted to reach into the pram and pick up his baby. Mal also thought that I didn’t see him climb into his car, immediately flip down the sun visor to reveal the mirror, so he could examine each and every line of his face, checking for where the similarities and differences were between him and the child he’d just given his name to.
I knew he would have been frozen after that. That he would have sat in his car, staring into space, probably wondering whether he’d made the right choice. Mal had made some sort of pact with his wife to remove me and his son from their lives, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to be involved in some way.
Aunt Mer was right, I had to tell him. He would want to see Leo right now. It wasn’t about what I felt, it was about what was right. I have left Mum, Cordy, Aunt Mer and Dad taking it in turns to sit with Leo today.
They have all been reserved with me for the past two days, staring at me as though they are unsure what to feel now they know everything. Even Cordy, who would normally have asked me a million questions, has held her tongue. They want to know if I would really have given away my baby, their baby. Because Leo isn’t only mine, he is my family’s, too. He would still have been a part of our family, but not. With all the unasked questions and looks still prickling along my skin, I had set off for London. After a half-hour stop at a service station where I had to convince myself not to turn around and go home, I had arrived late afternoon.
I’ve been sitting here ever since. His wife returned first, rushed into the house—earlier than I would have thought, unless she no longer works in the clothes boutique. She practically ran through the door, her hair swinging, a bounce in her step. Ten minutes later he arrived. Involuntarily, my breath caught when I saw him. I hadn’t seen him in three years. Not since I was coming to visit Mum and Dad with Leo and saw him getting out of his car to go into Aunt Mer’s house and I had to keep driving. I didn’t want to risk Mum and Dad ringing Aunt Mer and dragging the pair of them over. Leo had questioned me all the way back home about what had happened, and I had to say I thought I’d left the oven on. He’d rung Mum and Dad the second we got in to tell them what I had done, with a very definite “Mum’s going mad” tone to his voice.
My pulse was still speeding long after I watched him walk into his house.
I have sat here for hours trying to get up the courage to do this. I couldn’t have done it on the phone. It couldn’t be this disembodied, disconnected voice telling him what the doctor had said.
I have been watching. I have been waiting.
This is a nice area, it is a wonder no one has reported me and my car to the police. Maybe they have and, even as I sit here, police officers are watching me, waiting for me to make a move, to drop a bit of litter on their pristine pavement so they can bang me up for life.
I’ve always been impressed that they can afford to live on such a nice road. But that was his wife’s doing. She’d gone out every day for six months, pounding the streets, sometimes sitting outside real estate agents’ doors until they opened so she’d get the details of new properties first. This was in the days before the Internet was so widely used, so it was necessary. She wanted to live in this area so much that she’d done that. She’d done whatever it would take to get what she wanted.
And now I am sitting outside in my purple Micra, gripping the cream leather steering wheel and staring at the house. Waiting for my nerve to catch up.
The front door opens and Mal’s wife comes out of the house, hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a stylish black tracksuit with white piping and silver sneakers. Under one arm she carries a blue yoga mat.
I watch her click open her sleek, silver car with the push of a button, and I slide down in my seat as she gets in, because she is effectively coming down to my height. If she looks diagonally across the road now, she’ll look straight into my car. She will see me. I suspect one of us will turn to stone if that happens.
The last time we saw each other was on the tube. The Victoria line between Pimlico and Oxford Circus. I’d been six months pregnant, really quite large, and traveling to see a financial adviser in town. She and I had stared at each other for a few seconds, two intimate strangers banged up together in a tin can. I suddenly thought that this was how a sardine would feel if it were caught with another sardine it didn’t get on with—that horror of knowing for the foreseeable future you were stuck together. In the case of the sardine, you were going to spend the here and now, and then your afterlife with it. She’d dropped her gaze first, and as I gathered my things, ready to exit the train and leave her be, I decided to never eat sardines again. And also to leave London. I was already near the end of selling my flat, so I would pull out of buying the place I had found and leave London. The idea of going through this again was too much. She beat me to it. She got up, went to the door and was first off the carriage.
She starts her car, and I finally let go of the steering wheel so I can slide completely out of sight while she drives away.
My fingers work independently of my brain, of the urge to go home, and open the car door. My legs take over, propel me out of my car of their own accord. Then my hands take over again, lock the car door with the press of a button. And then back to my legs, walking across the road, and moving toward the front door. I can almost hear the swish of net curtains and the gentle clank of blinds being moved aside, the curiosity of a dozen or so people with nothing better to do watching me approach the black door.
Once there, my hands take over. Reach up toward the bell, then make a fist to knock, then reach for the brass knocker. My hand cannot do any of the things that will let him know I am here.
I can’t do it. I’m not ready. Because when I knock, I have to repeat what the doctor said. Those words have to leave my mouth and become real. You can repeat a lie, an inaccuracy, a million times—or even once—and it can start to feel like the truth. The inevitable. As soon as I say it, I will be telling the world some small part of me believes it. The part of me that makes words, the part that communicates with the outside world, will say I know it is a possibility. And then it will spread like a disease throughout my mind, my heart, my soul. And if I’m not using every part of me to will him better, how can he get better? By coming here, I have given in. I haven’t acted out what I believe, what I know. I have betrayed Leo. I have betrayed myself.
I should not have come here.
I should not have given those doubts, those things the doctor was trying to tell me, the chance to infect me. I should not have come here.
My body turns away, ready to go back home, back to that limbo we have been living in.
“Hello?” His voice moves through me like ripples on the surface of water. I stop on the path.
I cannot turn around but I cannot move away.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
Mal and Leo, the connection between the two of them unspools like a reel of ribbon before my eyes: Mal pressing his lips on my pregnant stomach; Mal’s eyes straying to him in the registry office; Mal staring at him across the hall at Cordy’s wedding; Leo showing me a picture of a young Mal, asking me why Mal looks like him; Uncle Victor holding Leo’s hand, taking him away because “I’m ready to go, Mum.”
That’s why I have come here. For him. For Leo.
“Nova?” Mal asks.
I may have all but convinced myself that it was for Mal, because it is the right thing to do, but that isn’t the real, underlying reason I am here. I have come for Leo. Because he has too dads. One is a spy and livs at his huse. The uver one isnt ded.
The uver one is standing behind me and Leo deserves the chance to get to know him. No matter how briefly.
I turn to face him.
He is going on a trip. In one hand he has a pink suitcase, and over his shoulder is a large, black, many-pocketed carryall. In his other hand is a pink beauty case that matches the suitcase. His face breaks into a smile, one fringed with disbelief and happiness and surprise.
A silent beat passes and he sees it in my face.
The beauty case slips from his grasp first, and clatters loudly on the black and white diamond-tiled path. The suitcase doesn’t make as much noise.
“Is it Mum?” he asks, his eyes full of sudden, naked terror.
I shake my head. “Leo,” I hear a voice that could be mine say.
Mal takes a step back, as if he can escape from this back the way he came. His wary face continues to watch me and I continue to speak without being aware that I am using my lips, my throat, my words. “Leo is in a coma. The doctors … I want you to see him. He needs to know who you are before it’s too late.”
Dad looked like Dad when he came to see him before he went to sleep. He brought him the new Star Wars game. It had only just come out in the shops and Dad had said he could only get it if Mum said it was OK. But now, he had it. This really was the best day ever. “Bye, Dad, see you later,” Leo said as they began to move his bed toward the door. He didn’t even have to walk to the room where they’d operate.
Dad kissed his forehead. “You’re a brave boy,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”