The Stopped Heart (51 page)

A faint, shaking movement from her shoulders now. Small intake of breath. The hand on the table unclenching for a moment. Is she weeping?

Mary has not moved. Standing there by the door, her breath held.

She knows what any normal person would do. Any normal person would challenge her. Ask her who she is and how she got in and demand to know exactly what she's doing in their kitchen at gone two in the morning. They'd want to know how old she is and where she lives and is there someone they ought to phone?

Are you all right? they'd say. You can't just sit here. What is it? What's going on? Are you in trouble?

A normal person would certainly wake Graham.

Mary will do none of these things. What she will do is, as calmly as possible, given how fiercely she is shaking inside, she will pull out a chair and—oh, so slowly and softly, moving a pile of Graham's clean socks and pants out of her way—she will sit down at that old pine table with its roughness and knots and whorls and she will wait.

W
HEN
M
ARY WAS A CHILD SHE WAS AFRAID OF EVERYTHING.
Wolves, monsters, bees, wasps, fires, drowning or being sick, doors opening, doors closing, people coming around, the toaster popping up.

Her mother took her to see a psychiatrist.

“I found her at our bedroom window,” she told him. “She asked if she'd die if she fell out. I told her that she most certainly would and she seemed pleased.” Her mother broke down. “She said she didn't want to be alive anymore, that if she died, she'd be safe. She's four years old, for goodness' sake. Safe from what?”

Mary's mother told the psychiatrist that she didn't know where she'd gone wrong. That she'd always done her best with
Mary, but the list of fears seemed endless, in fact it was growing. Their lives were becoming unlivable. She was frightened of her own daughter, frightened for her. She could not deal with this anymore.

Mary doesn't remember all of this being said. She doesn't remember her mother being upset and she especially doesn't remember wanting to throw herself out of a window—she only has her mother's word for that.

What she does remember is that no one talked—either on that afternoon or on any future afternoon—about what frightened her. The things she seemed to know, the thoughts that would ambush her seemingly out of nowhere—the risks and possibilities and certainties that lay just around a corner that only she seemed able to see.

She does not remember seeing the hanged man in her room, the vision that so unnerved her mother. And she only has a vague memory of lying in bed with her toy panda and speaking what her parents liked to call gobbledygook. But she remembers the perpetual sense of dread: the pans of milk that were always about to boil over, the phones and doorbells that were about to ring—as well as the people who were constantly on the verge of hurting themselves: tripping up, scalding, burning, bursting into tears.

When the father of a girl at school—someone she hardly knew—died in a car crash, she was sick for a week because she'd seen it coming. And when the little boy next door got meningitis and she saw him crawling happily along the floor in her room and rushed to tell her mother, she was called a liar and told that he'd died in the hospital an hour earlier.

Too much to bear, all these thoughts. Sometimes she thought she would suffocate under the weight of them.

She also remembers that brown office and the large desk and
the fact that when she reached out and tried to pick something up off it, the psychiatrist smacked her hand.

“I think this child just needs a bit of discipline,” he told her mother.

“That didn't hurt,” Mary said.

I
WENT UP THERE WITH MY FATHER.
S
TANDING AND WATCHING
as they brought them out, one after another. Winding sheets and sacking could not hide the pitiful shapes of them, nor the dark, spreading stains. I saw things: the gaping toe of a small black boot. A dirty knee. A loop of hair. A finger. There was screaming from the mothers, a low, groaning silence from the men.

My own ma could not speak or think. She pulled and tore at her clothes. She scratched at her flesh. She started to burn things. I think she wanted to set the house on fire. My father took her somewhere, I don't know where he took her. I don't want to know.

And then, at the end of this long, dark, terrible day, with the whole of the village still out looking for him, he finds me here. Sitting in the thick gray gloom at the table in the kitchen, all of my weeping done now (or is it just begun?), barely a sob or a breath left in my body. I sit here with the candle out, I don't know if I blew it out or someone else. I don't know who did it. I don't know anything. I sit here in darkness.

I smell him first—that, before anything else: a terrible stench. Muck, sweat, blood. He stinks of the darkness and of the woods. He smells of death. His limbs hanging loose, his eyes as mild as if he's just come to help with the milking, something in his hands that twists and gleams.

You did this to me, Eliza, he says. See what you made me do? All those little kiddies. You think I wanted that?

I think that I don't know what he wanted.

Answer me, Eliza, he says.

I don't know what answer to give. He licks his lips.

A dull ache inside me. Is it fear? I feel my hands go to my belly: the shape of my baby floating there, small as a fingernail, alive and waiting. He holds out a hand. I can't look at him. I can't breathe. Yes, fear. Panic rising in my throat.

Come on, Eliza—

I feel my insides drop.

Please, I whisper. Please—

He doesn't smile.

What, Eliza? Please what?

I shut my eyes.

Please, James, just leave me here.

He takes a breath.

You know I can't do that, he says.

L
ATER, THAT FIRST NIGHT BACK FROM THE HOSPITAL,
M
ARY
woke from the deep hush of sleep, the still nameless baby breathing beside her, to hear Ella calling from her room across the landing.

Graham, not quite awake, muttered something.

“It's OK,” she said. “I'm going.”

Ella was standing up in her cot. Her pajamas a size too big, the feet of it falling off her, hair standing up in a fuzz.

“Baby,” she said. “Baby.”

Mary bent and kissed her, touched her hair. Yawning. The moonlit room was cold and pale.

“Baby's asleep,” she said.

And she tried to settle her back down, but she wouldn't be settled. Squirming, chuntering, beginning at last to cry.

“Baby!” she sobbed.

At last it dawned.

“You want to see her? You want to see the baby?”

Ella, thumb in her mouth, nodded.

She padded back across the landing and picked up Flo wrapped in her shawl and carried her in and held her out. Ella blinked. Keeping her thumb in her mouth and reaching out with the other hand and touching her sister—patting the small, asleep bundle of her—satisfied.

“Baby.”

“That's right. Baby's still here. Look, she's perfectly safe. You can see her in the morning.”

With the new baby held in the crook of her arm, she settled Ella back down, pulling the blanket over, stroking her warm head, her back.

“Go back to sleep,” she whispered, even though she could tell from her breathing that she already had.

The new baby was now awake, gazing at her with faraway, liquid eyes. Back in bed, she latched her on and fed her.

Who are you? Mary wondered. Who on earth are you? Where have you come from? Why are you here? What are we doing here together?

Somewhere between the first and the last suck, they both fell asleep.

M
ARY SITS AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, THE LIGHTS OUT NOW—DID
she do that? She has no memory of turning them off—back door flung right open, wrenched so hard she thinks it must almost have come off its hinges.

There's a smell of burning—soot, and something greasy. The blown-out candle—candle fat? Out there, coming in through the open kitchen door, damp night air, dew, honeysuckle, and something else, a noticeable stench: stagnant pond or animal dung.

Her two hands are on the table. Rigid and flat and pressed
down so hard that she feels her wedding band digging right in. In her ears, the sound of her own heart.

Her cardigan is on the floor. She picks it up, trembling, tries to get it on. Her fingers so stiff she can barely move them. Cold—that's it—she's so very cold.

And the house: still now. Yes. Very still—for once. At last.

She has no idea what just happened.

B
Y THE TIME SHE GOES UP TO BED—CLIMBING THE STAIRS AS
slow and careful as an old person—there's a faint redness in the sky. The gray already lifting. Birds beginning. Another day not far off.

She pulls off her clothes and sinks into bed beside him, her husband. Side of his face, the freckled curve of his shoulder, his quiet breath. The jeans flung on the chair. The glass of water and his watch by the bedside.

For a moment she looks at him with relief—as if she just came out of a bad dream: razzed and on edge, unable quite to believe it.

You knew all along, he said, that there was something.

Did she? Does she?

I don't know anything, she thinks as she lays her cheek down on the pillow and tries to close her eyes. I never knew a thing, not a single thing.

When, a few minutes or an hour or a hundred years ago, the girl turned her head and seemed for a second or two to see her, a spark of something appeared to pass between them, but whether it was sorrow or fear or something more like recognition, Mary isn't sure. And does it matter? All she knows is that everything seemed to stop—and she felt a silence in the room so pure and pristine and static that she could not have explained it to anyone, let alone herself.

I know nothing, she thinks.

A long time ago—or not that long at all, depending on how you want to think about it—the girls started coming into their bed in the mornings. Earlier and earlier, they came in, sometimes before it was even light. One time it wasn't much after five.

Graham wasn't happy about it. “They need to learn to stay in their own beds. We shouldn't be encouraging it.”

“I don't encourage it,” Mary said. “And they'll grow out of it soon enough.”

But it wasn't true. She knows that now. She did encourage it. She did. She relished those early mornings.

The creak of the door, followed by the small footsteps padding across the landing. The half-asleep lifting of the covers, a brief tussle as they each established themselves against her: knees, elbows, always too many of them. And the bed-smell of them. Wet saliva. Warm hair. Thumb-sucking. And then both of them quickly asleep—all of them, actually, Mary too, the sweetest, lightest, most taken-for-granted kind of sleep.

The girls didn't grow out of it. They never got a chance to grow out of it.

For a long time, she couldn't think of this memory, could not let herself go anywhere near it.

And now?

When they died, my heart stopped, she told Eddie. My heart just stopped when they died.

In the bed, beginning now to sob, Mary moves herself closer to Graham. She can't help it. She thinks that her heart will burst—that she won't survive this. But then she thinks a lot of things. She thinks he's asleep. He's not asleep.

He reaches for her.

“H
OW LONG HAS IT ACTUALLY BEEN?”
E
DDIE ASKED HER WHEN
she sat with him that afternoon on the huge linen sofa in the
room with the fireplace and the carved figures and the piles of magazines.

She did not hesitate.

“Seventeen months,” she said. “It's been seventeen months.”

He caught his breath.

“That's nothing. That's no time at all.”

“I know.”

“That's like it happened yesterday.”

She bit her lip.

“I know.”

He touched her face, then. Kissed the tips of her fingers. And she remembers with a snag of shame that she let him do it.

And he played with her wrist. Her metal wristwatch. Turning it around and around. The way Ella used to play with her bangle. Gently, she pulled her hand away.

He was looking at her.

“It will get better, you know.”

“Or maybe it won't,” she said. Trying to keep her voice from being harsh. Understanding that he only meant to be kind, that people—most people, everyone in fact—their impulse was only, always, to be kind.

“And if it doesn't?”

“What?” she said, her mind wandering to the stash of pills that she had collected so carefully over the months and which still lay at the back of the wardrobe, safely wrapped in a cotton handkerchief at the bottom of the same jewelry box that contained her girls' milk teeth.

“Well, do you think you can live with that?”

She sat there in silence. It was the big question, the one that meant nothing and also everything—the question that she knew she would be trying to answer every single day for the rest of her life.

“It's not seventeen months,” she told him at last. “It's not even yesterday. It's now. It's happening now. It's always just about to happen. Don't you see? That's what I live with. It will never be over, never.”

She saw that he was struggling with this.

“And you're saying that's what you want—that you'd rather live like that?”

“Like what?”

“Not being able to put it behind you, in the past.” He stared at her, beginning at last to realize. “You don't even want it to be over, do you? You have no inclination whatsoever to move on.”

“Move on?”

She looked at him and she couldn't help it. She began to laugh.

T
HEY CONCEIVED EACH OF THEIR CHILDREN EASILY, HAPPILY,
with no thought whatsoever about the possibility of failure, trouble, or danger. They wanted babies—they made babies. It really was that simple. God, fate, the world, the universe, their strong and willing bodies. The love they shared and in which they trusted. Everything, it seemed, was on their side.