The Other Child (7 page)

She goes over and checks the locks, then hurries upstairs and shuts the bedroom door behind her. Her phone is on the bed. She calls Greg’s number, but it goes straight to voicemail. Right now he will be surrounded by surgeons and medical reporters. She tries Nell again, but that goes to voicemail too.

She needs to stay calm. Whoever left the note has gone. It is nothing, just a question, just a scattering of words on a page. She wonders if she should take it to the police – but presumably they will tell her that it is not a crime to ask a question.

It has to be the same person who wrote to Greg at the hospital. It seems unlikely now that this is someone with no connection to him since they have gone to the effort of finding out his address and delivering the note by hand. It is more likely, surely, to be a grieving relative – someone who lost a child long ago and blames Greg. He has never told her much about his time as a medical student or about his life as a young doctor here in Boston. The note-writer could have surfaced from those shadowy years, drawn out by the news of his return.

It is not surprising. Greg’s working life takes place on the outermost edges of human experience; he sees and does things every day that take him across an indefinable border and back again, and there must be times when a loved one crosses over with him – a parent, an aunt or uncle or grandparent – and they can’t get back the way he can, they don’t know how; their pain is too deep, their loss overwhelming.

She pulls underwear out of the chest of drawers, shrugging off the bathrobe and glancing at her belly. New, red-pencilled claw marks have appeared up her sides. As she tugs on a pair of knickers and a sports bra she notices that her jewellery box is open. Her nicest earrings – the delicate aquamarine stones on thin gold hoops that Greg gave her for her birthday – are sitting on the surface next to the box. She nestles them back into their velvet cushion. She is sure that she didn’t take them out this morning. Maybe Greg moved them while he was looking for cufflinks yesterday. Or perhaps he got them out deliberately, wondering why she so rarely wears them. She should reassure him that she doesn’t wear them every day because she loves them too much, not too little. But surely, if Greg got them out yesterday, she would have noticed them before now.

She pulls on drawstring trousers and a clean T-shirt, and, as an afterthought, slips the hoops into her ears. The quiet house folds itself around her again, the creak of an expanding floorboard, drops from the shower plinking onto the damp tiles. She has always craved solitude but right now it feels cavernous and threatening. She crosses the room to the side window. A scarlet bird with a black face swoops from a branch of the leylandii, spreading its wings, feathers splayed into sharp points – making her jump back. Then she sees movement in the next-door yard.

Helena is walking towards her garden office, talking on her mobile, and as she steps into a patch of sunlight the caramel streaks in her dark hair are illuminated like long threads of fire. She slows, still talking on her phone, and turns her head to stare through the shrubs at their deck, perhaps all the way through the French windows and into their kitchen. For the second time Tess has the urge to photograph her – to capture the sunlight on her hair, the trees all around. But then Helena moves on, vanishing into her office.

She slides onto the bed and picks up her laptop. Resting it on her knee, she googles ‘Dr Vaus’. Several links spring up, each one containing the word ‘toxic’. She clicks on drvaus.com and a photo of Helena unfurls: pond-green eyes in sharp focus, the rest of the face softened. Dr Helena Vaus, a ‘Harvard-trained physician’, author of a
New York Times
-bestselling book,
The Green Doctor: Detox Your Life with Energy and Joy
.

The headshot has definitely been doctored. Helena’s teeth look as if they have only ever bitten into almonds or apples, the fine lines around her eyes and mouth have been erased, her eyeballs whitened, the shadows removed, her skin tone evened, her nose slimmed, strategic highlights added to sharpen her jawline.

She skims through an excerpt from the book’s introduction.

There follows a long description of how Helena turned her life around with organic food and meditation.

She scrolls through more beatific images of Helena, in a Lotus pose, drinking a green smoothie, jogging through a dappled wood. There is a blog, too, with posts about diet and exercise, mala bead meditation, toxin-free make-up, natural tampons, the benefits of daily orgasm, ‘cortisol-lowering’ green shakes. There is a Dr Vaus Facebook community – a huge following – and links to YouTube videos. Helena is some kind of modern-day guru.

She clicks on ‘Dr Vaus supplements’ and there is a photo of the little pill bottles with their orange flame logos – $159 for a month’s supply of probiotics, omega-threes, vitamins and herbal anti-stress remedies.

She pushes the laptop aside. It all feels like an elaborate lie. Helena is not picking up her girls every day from school – they are in the after-school programme, and other than that one time in the school playground, it has always been Josh who takes and fetches. Their marriage, what’s more, is clearly not problem-free. But at least the vitamin gift makes sense now. It was not flirtation – it was promotion.

She should feel relieved, but somehow she doesn’t. Perhaps a small part of her was hoping that Helena would turn out to be nicer than she seems, and they would become friends. This, now, feels out of the question.

Greg was supposed to be back from Chicago hours ago. It is almost seven now, and he is still not home. They spoke as he waited for his flight: she told him how proud she was and he sounded tired but elated. He was due to touch down around four, but now he is not answering his phone. There will be a simple explanation; his flight is delayed or he has stopped by the hospital and become involved in something, but she is beginning to feel anxious. She just wants him home.

Darkness is creeping around the house. She has spent the afternoon working, rather unproductively, on
Hand in Hand
. There has been no more bleeding, the sickness has vanished and the baby is active inside her, but after the last twenty-four hours her body still feels precarious.

She gets the ingredients for a stir-fry out of the fridge and begins chopping red peppers, trying not to slice into her fingers with the Japanese knife. She closes the blinds. She wants to call David and speak to Joe, but she knows she mustn’t – she must leave them alone this weekend. It is important to do that.

She hears a noise – a shifting sound, a scrabble, followed by a small thud – and stops chopping.

‘Greg?’ She holds the knife suspended. ‘Is that you?’ She can’t see into the hall from where she is standing. But there is it again: a shuffle, a little thud. ‘Who’s there?’ Her voice comes out high and unexpectedly loud. Someone is in the basement.

With the knife in one hand, its blade pink from the peppers, she steps towards the archway, peering into the pallid hallway. She hears it again. It is definitely coming from the basement. She lurches over and bolts the door.

Her head feels bright; her heart pumps against her ribs. ‘I’m calling the police!’ She reaches for her phone, but then she hears a tiny tapping sound – rapidly receding claws, definitely claws, heading back down the basement steps.

If it is a rat, it is a huge one. Perhaps a dog – or a coyote – has found its way in through the garage. She presses her ear against the door. The tapping has stopped.

She dials Greg again and leaves him a message: ‘Where are you? I think there’s an animal in the basement. Where the hell are you, Greg?’ She wishes she could pour herself a massive glass of wine. Inside her, the baby turns, dreamily, as if she has woken it.

Back in the kitchen she fries strips of tofu in ginger and garlic and cooks the noodles, leaving them to cool in a bowl like little entrails. The evening is still again; there are no cicadas anymore. She didn’t notice when they stopped, but now they have gone everything feels eerily quiet.

She remembers a conversation she and Greg had about the cicadas, soon after arriving here. They were lying in bed, listening to the rasping, ticking sound.

‘They’re so loud it’s like they’re inside your head,’ she said. ‘There must be hundreds of them, but you never even see one.’

‘It could be just a couple,’ he said. ‘A single male cicada can make a phenomenal racket when it’s calling for a mate.’ He pulled her closer and she rested her head on his chest, hearing the faint thumping of his heart and the comforting rumble of his voice deep in his ribcage. ‘There’s this one type of cicada in Massachusetts that spends seventeen years buried underground feeding on roots,’ he says, ‘Then one day, all at the same time, they claw their way to the surface, split their skin and sprout wings.’

She lifted her head and looked up at him. ‘Seventeen years?’

‘Uh-huh. Once every seventeen years cicada experts in Massachusetts get really excited. It’s called a “periodical brood”.’

She laughed. ‘What must it be like inside your brain, Greg? How on earth do you know this stuff?’

‘At college I had a roommate who was studying the periodical brood. They’re kind of scary-looking – black bodies, spooky red eyes, bright-orange legs – but they have very beautiful wings, iridescent, like fairies’.’ He ran a hand through her hair, stroking it gently off her face.

She goes through to the dining room and lays the table now, using napkins and their best glasses, wanting to make things special to dispel the feeling that everything is subtly off-kilter. She tries not to think about the fat black bodies that are out there deep in the soil, buried in the roots of the shrubs and the trees, biding their time.

Before she closes the blinds she peers through the criss-crossed windows at the front yard. Dusk is closing in, the lights from the Schechters’ front room casts a shallow yellow pool on the road. Just for a second she thinks she catches movement in the shadows by the Schechters’ garage. She presses her nose to the glass but it fogs up. She wipes the condensation away and peers out again, holding her breath. The street is empty.

She feels the baby swivel, then hiccup. It is definitely alive – its movements feel stronger, as if it wavered but has now committed itself to being here. She thinks about the little heart on the ultrasound, squeezing faithfully. She remembers, just a few weeks ago, hearing Greg telling Joe about a talk he was going to, given by some doctors from California who put tiny balloons inside the hearts of babies while they are still in the womb.

The two of them were in the kitchen and she was in the dining room next door, but she could hear everything they said.

‘Inside its mom, the baby’s heart is just the size of a little grape,’ Greg said. ‘Imagine trying to thread a needle into exactly the right spot inside a moving grape! The doctors practise using a grape in Jell-O because it wobbles around like the heart would inside a little baby.’

‘Is our baby’s heart the size of a grape?’

‘Yes, right now it is, but it will get a lot bigger before it’s born.’

Her phone buzzes in her back pocket, making her jump. She yanks it out: a text from Greg.

Before she can reply the phone begins to buzz, and Nell’s name appears.

‘Tess? I only just got your messages – I had that massive engagement party today.’

‘Oh – sorry, I totally forgot. How did it go?’

‘Fine, fine – I emailed you a picture of the cake I made; it’s three tiers with a blue VW camper van as the top tier. Everyone loved it, thank God. But look, are you all right? You sounded really rattled.’

Tess glances at her watch. ‘God, Nell, what time is it there? It must be one in the morning – what are you doing calling me? Why are you even up? Go to sleep. We can talk tomorrow.’

‘No, no, I can’t sleep; that’s why I’m calling you, I need to wind down. What’s happening? Did you have more bleeding?’

‘No, I’m fine, the baby’s fine.’

‘You sound odd.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m just . . . well, something slightly creepy happened today.’ She goes through to the sofa and folds her legs underneath herself as she tells Nell about the note on the doormat. There is a long pause.

‘What?’ Tess says.

‘
How can you look in the mirror
? I don’t know, it just . . .’ Nell is speaking quietly, presumably so she won’t wake Ken. ‘It sounds a bit like something an angry lover might say.’

‘Does it?’

‘Well, could it be?’ Nell says. ‘I mean, I know Greg’s a compartmentalizer and doesn’t like to talk about the past and all that, but I do think it’s odd how little he’s told you about his life before he got to England. Could there be some rabid ex hanging around out there?’

‘From his student days?’

‘Maybe. Has he told you anything at all about Harvard?’

‘Of course he has. But there’s not much to tell – all he did was work. He graduated top of his year, which is freakish really. He did have girlfriends, but they always split up because he basically didn’t have time for them. I’m sure there was nothing big to tell, or he’d have told me.’

‘Would he?’ Nell yawns, and her voice stretches with tiredness. ‘Well, I think you should ask him anyway.’

As she hangs up she realizes that this isn’t the first time Nell has questioned Greg’s past. It was just before the movers came and they were in Nell’s kitchen with the boys thudding around upstairs, excited about a sleepover, making the ceiling shudder. Nell was at the stove, in jeans and a stripy top, her hair scooped up messily, some of the dark curls loose, and she turned, one hand on the teapot. ‘Has Greg
really
never been married before?’

They hadn’t even been talking about Greg. There was no preamble. The question had obviously been on Nell’s mind for a while.

‘You know he hasn’t.’

‘I know, but it’s just . . . I can’t stop wondering why not? I mean, look at him: he’s a brilliant surgeon, gorgeous, caring, solvent and, what, forty-seven? It’s just odd, that’s all – isn’t it? – that he wouldn’t have been married at least once. Don’t you find it odd?’

‘I haven’t been married before either.’

‘Yes, well, I suppose you’re tolerably pretty and definitely not stupid, but you’re only thirty-nine and you and David might as well have been married – you were together for six years.’

‘OK, well, thanks for that, but you can stop worrying. He’s had plenty of relationships. A few of them were quite serious – he was with one woman for almost four years.’

‘Why didn’t he marry her?’

‘Oh my God, Nell, what are you like? He didn’t love her enough.’

In fact she knew, because Greg had told her, that his relationship with this particular woman, an academic at UCL, had ended because she wanted a baby and he did not. He told her that most of his serious relationships had ended for this reason. She is not sure, now, why she couldn’t admit this small fact to Nell.

*

It is really late by the time she hears the electronic doors buzz and Greg’s car roll into the garage beneath the house. She isn’t hungry anymore, she is heavy-limbed and headachy, ready for sleep. She hauls herself off the sofa, but before she can get to the basement door he is thumping on it.

‘Tess?’

She slides the bolt back.

‘Good idea to lock it.’ He kisses her. He seems to fill the hallway, taller and broader and darker than he should be. As he hugs her she catches a whiff of coffee on his breath, a hint of soap on his skin and something else – an odd, unfamiliar smell that makes her pull away.

‘I am so sorry,’ he says. ‘I got the emergency call just as I touched down at Logan. It was a newborn, hypoplastic left heart syndrome . . . They sent a car for me. But just look at you, you poor thing – you look really pale. Have you managed to get some rest since yesterday? Did you? Are you OK? God, I hated leaving you like that.’

‘I didn’t know where you were.’

‘But surely you got the call? It was critical.’

‘I didn’t get any call. I was expecting you hours and hours ago. How on earth did you end up in surgery? I thought you were coming straight home from the airport.’ She closes the basement door behind him and bolts it, suddenly furious.

‘I couldn’t call you, I was on the phone from the moment the plane touched down all the way to the hospital, then I had to scrub the minute I got there, but I asked the circulating nurse to let you know what was happening – didn’t she call you?’

She dimly remembers hearing the phone ringing while she was working and ignoring it, assuming it would be another silent call.

‘I didn’t get a message.’ She glances across the kitchen to the answerphone. It is blinking.

‘Oh, you poor thing.’ He reaches for her. ‘You must have felt completely abandoned.’

There is no way, now, no possible way to be angry with him, because of course a newborn with a hypoplastic left heart, whatever that may be, outweighs everything else.

‘Is the baby all right?’

‘Well, she’s stable right now, she’s probably going to be OK.’ He runs a hand through his hair and blinks. She recognizes this look. It is not just physical fatigue, it is more complicated than that. Greg has done things tonight that no human being is supposed to do, and he needs to transition back to domesticity, to home, to her. There is no point blaming him for not being here.

They walk into the kitchen together.

‘I loved watching you get your prize,’ she pushes aside the resentment. ‘You were great. And there were so many people there. Have you come back down to earth yet?’

‘There’s nothing like emergency surgery for that.’ He steps towards her, reaching for her from behind and pulling her to his chest. ‘Are you OK, really?’ he says. ‘No more bleeding? Is the baby moving?’

‘I’m fine, apart from mad letters. Did you get my message about that?’ she says. ‘Someone dropped an envelope off, here, while I was in the shower.’

‘I only picked up your message about that just now. I called you from the car but you were on the phone.’

‘I was talking to Nell.’ She moves away from him, picks up the letter from the countertop, turns and hands it to him.

He takes it and she watches his face as he reads it, but his expression remains blank. Then he turns away and hangs his jacket on the door handle.

‘This person knows our address,’ she says. ‘I think we should take it to the police.’

‘The police? There’s no point in that.’ He runs a hand through his hair. ‘We’d only get embroiled in pointless police bureaucracy, you know how little the police in this town have to do. They’ll tie us up for hours, if not days, but they won’t do anything. What could they do? It’s not even a threat, it’s just a question. It’s nothing. There’s no Massachusetts law against posing a question.’

‘But it
is
a threat. Leaving an anonymous and hostile note on someone’s doorstep is a threat. And we’ve got Joe to think about – we can’t just ignore this. It’s obviously the same person that sent you the note at the hospital. What if they’re dangerous?’

He moves past her and reaches for a bottle of red wine. ‘Look, I’m not worried, OK? I’m really not. I know other surgeons who’ve had similar experiences. Just leave it with me, OK? I’ll work out who it is.’

‘What similar experiences? So you
do
think it’s an angry ex-patient?’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. There’s a couple of people it could be. I’m looking into it. I’ll put a stop to it, OK?’