What's Yours Is Mine (18 page)

For the next four hours, Michelle patiently teases the knots and tangles from my hair, one dread at a time. My eyes water from the pain, and several times I'm tempted to just grab the scissors and razor and do the job properly, but I don't want the boys to think their mother looks like a freak. It's them I'm doing this for. Nothing else would have persuaded me to go through this grief.

Finally, Michelle throws the comb down, knuckling her hands in the small of her back. “Well, that's the best I can do.” She checks me out, and frowns. “Hmm. Let's hope it looks better when you've washed it.”

No kidding. I grimace at my reflection in the bathroom mirror after Michelle leaves. My hair has been dulled to a sludgy brown by the whale gloop, and hangs in slimy ropes around my face. I look like a lentil-eating, Birkenstock-wearing, week-dead hippy.

It takes five shampoos to get my hair to squeak clean. I leave it to dry naturally, and set about removing the metal from my face. The nipple rings I can leave in, but the tongue-stud, multiple earrings, and lip-piercing all have to come out. My tattoos are mostly covered by the ash-colored tunic and jeans Grace and I picked out—she tried unsuccessfully to get me out of black and into what she
called a “real color,” but in the end we compromised on gray—and it also hides the slight baby bump. I stick my tongue out at my image as I leave the bedroom. I look like fucking Suzy Homemaker. Still, at least the kids shouldn't be too embarrassed when I turn up now.

Grace literally does a double-take when I reluctantly present myself downstairs. “Susannah! I can't believe it! You look so like Mum!”

I resist the temptation to hurl myself over the banisters. She's right: I do look like Mum; at least, when she was younger. It's the boring housewife getup. No wonder I've spent all my life trying to be different.

The boys' foster family lives less than fifteen minutes from Mum's hospital, so at my suggestion, we pay her a quick visit first. I notice Grace spends hardly any time actually
with
Mum; most of the time, she's talking earnestly to the nurses about her. She's never been very good with sick people. I think the lack of control freaks her out. When she's ill herself, she shuts herself in her room and won't let anyone see her till she's better, like an animal hiding in a cave.

I stand at the end of Mum's bed while Grace and the doctors talk gravely in the corridor. She looks so pale and still, like she's made of plaster or something. I talk to her, but I might as well be talking to a statue. There's no sign she's even there.

I know Grace doesn't want to accept it, but it's been more than five months now. Mum isn't getting better. She isn't
going
to get better. She keeps getting infections, and
her organs are gradually shutting down, one by one. The doctors keep pumping her full of drugs, putting out fires, but another one just breaks out somewhere else. How long are we going to keep pretending? I'm sure Mum wouldn't want it. Anyway, what makes Mum
Mum
has already gone.

I'll go when I'm good and ready, and not before. I can't leave you and Grace. Not until we get this mess sorted out
.

“Zee? It's time to go,” Grace says from the doorway, making me jump. “We said we'd be with the Mays by three.”

By the time we get to the Mays' house, I'm practically hyperventilating from nerves. Even with Grace here, I'm petrified. The boys were nine and six when I last saw them, children. They're teenagers now. What if they don't recognize me? What if they blame me for abandoning them? What if they
hate
me?

“I can't do this,” I say, my teeth chattering with fear. “I shouldn't have come.”

“It's going to be fine,” Grace says. “They want to see you. They asked to, remember? You're going to be fine.”

She takes my hand as we start to walk up the path, and doesn't let go. My big sister, looking after me as usual. I don't mind. I've never really minded.

The front door opens, and suddenly a skinny blond boy comes rushing out. My heart lurches.
Donny
. I'd know him anywhere. When I last saw him, his hair was cut short and neat behind his ears, and now it's brushing his shoulders, a cool, skateboarder shag, but otherwise, he hasn't changed. My Donny.
My
baby.

I hang back, hiding behind my sister.

“Auntie Grace!” he cries, launching himself at her.

She laughs, and hugs him, then turns as his older brother slouches out of the door. I gasp. Davey must be over six feet tall! He looks like a man. For a second, I feel a pang of loss for the little boy I left behind, now gone forever.

Davey nods at his aunt, but doesn't come forward. He was always more reserved than his exuberant younger brother. Donny wears his heart on his sleeve, but Davey always held something back, even as a small child. He reminds me of Grace sometimes.

“Aren't you going to say hello to your mum?” Grace asks them.

For a terrifying second, I think they're going to say no, and then Donny throws himself at me, wrapping his arms around my waist and burying his head in my chest. I pull him into me, not caring that I can hardly breathe. How could I leave them? How did I?

“Mum,” Davey says hesitantly.

I free up an arm and hold it out to him. He doesn't take it. Instead, he wraps his own around me, pulling the three of us into a fierce embrace. I don't realize I'm crying until I taste salt.

Reluctantly, I release my boys as their foster parents come out onto the doorstep, their smiles polite but stiff. I'm more grateful than ever for Grace as we're shown into a neat sitting room with royal souvenirs on every sparkling, dust-free surface. Thank God I took out the dreads and
covered up my tattoos. I wouldn't have been allowed in the house otherwise.

The Mays serve tea and digestive biscuits—plain, not chocolate—while the boys rush back and forth from their bedrooms with treasures and photos and pictures they've drawn for me. Eventually, Mr. Mays tells them to go out and play in the garden while we “get to know one another.”

“Your sister tells me you plan to return to America soon,” Mrs. Mays says, as soon as the boys have left.

“Actually,” I say, with a quick glance at Grace, “I'm thinking about staying now. For a bit anyway. I'd like to get to know the boys properly. If that's OK with you, of course.”

“It's not up to us,” Mr. Mays says tightly. “If the boys want to see you, I'm sure the social workers will arrange it. Maybe we can make it once a month to start with. We don't want to rush things until we know for sure how it's going.”

Until we know you're going to stick around
.

“I'd like to see them a bit more often than that,” I say firmly. “I want to be a proper part of their—ohhh!”

“Zee?” Grace says excitedly. “Was that the baby again? Did it move?”

“Baby?” Mrs. Mays says sharply.

I'm too stunned to even speak. My belly feels as if it's being crushed in a vise. A thousand red-hot knives are stabbing my lower back. Black spots dance in front of my eyes. I can't breathe for the pain.

“Grace,” I whisper, “I think … 
ambulance
 …”

And then I pass out.

I can't put my finger on what tips me off. Call it a mother's intuition, but when Tom comes home just a little too early three times in the same week, I know instinctively something's wrong.

Grace is too wrapped up in her baby obsession to spare a thought for the child's father. No doubt her single-mindedness is what's helped her achieve such success in life. But when applied to family and relationships, the reverse is true. She always was a selfish child.

I tell her as much, when the worm turns and Tom finally dares to stand up to her one night. Obviously I don't make a habit of invading the privacy of their marital bedroom—it goes without saying I absent myself when they have relations—but I'm her
mother
. I have a right to know what's happening in her life. Lord knows, if I waited for Grace to confide in me, Hell would freeze over.

I don't mean to intervene, but Tom is absolutely right when he calls Grace high maintenance, and I'm sorry, but I just can't keep quiet. Grace is a difficult person to love, as
I make no bones about telling her. She gives nothing back. It makes it so hard for anyone to
know
her.

I watch her pull the shutters down on Tom, just as she always has on me. Even as a small child, Grace was a closed book. If you chastised or rebuked her, she wouldn't cry or throw a tantrum the way Susannah did. Instead, her eyes would go blank and opaque, and I'd know she was simply shutting me out. Trying to reach her was like hitting a sponge for all the lasting impact I made. There were times when her self-control and composure almost made me fearful. I told David: it wasn't
natural
.

The summer Grace was sixteen, when she was right in the middle of her O levels, I nearly died. It started with a bad headache that simply wouldn't go away, and when I awoke with my temples pounding for the third morning running, I took rather more aspirin than usual on an empty stomach, and suddenly started vomiting. The spasms were so violent they tore a hole in my esophagus, and I began to hemorrhage, passing out on the bathroom floor before I could even call for help. I was literally choking on my own blood. If David hadn't come home from work to collect a forgotten briefcase, I would have died. The doctors said later that another fifteen minutes, and it would have been too late.

Naturally David kept the details from the girls, fobbing them off with stories of tummy bugs and flu, but the mere fact that I was in the hospital was enough to shock Susannah to the core. There were tears, angry outbursts at school, and nightmares that persisted long after I came home.

Grace got straight A's in all thirteen of her exams.

No child should be that detached. Her mother was hovering between life and death, and all she could think of were ox-bow lakes and French verbs. As usual, David defended her. He said Grace had learned to shut down to protect herself; he even blamed
me
. As if it was
my
fault Susannah needed so much of my time and attention!

David sees self-sufficiency as a strength, which I suppose it can be. But no man—or woman—is an island, as Grace is discovering now. She's having to rely on Susannah, which can't be easy for someone as controlling as she is. She's learning a very important lesson. I was very much against this baby enterprise at first, but the Lord works in mysterious ways.

A much-chastened Grace fusses around Tom the morning after their row, and I expect him to glow with triumph and lap up the attention. However, he's just as preoccupied and distracted as ever. Clearly, regardless of whatever the two of them resolved last night, Grace isn't the source of Tom's malaise after all.

My son-in-law is a straightforward, uncomplicated man. If the problem isn't his wife, it must be his work. Which means that's where I need to go next.

It's not that I'm nosy. I've never been the type to interfere in anyone's business. But clearly I'm here for a reason. It might seem there's not much I can do to help, given I'm little more than a ghost—and one lacking in the traditional ghostly gifts, such as rattling chains—but I've learned over the past few months that I can make myself heard and
nudge things along rather effectively at times. Lord knows where Susannah and Grace would be now without me to pour oil on troubled waters.

But I can't read minds. I need Tom to articulate his problem aloud. Since he's little given to talking to himself—unlike Susannah, who is revelatory in the shower—I have to hope he's a little more forthcoming with his colleagues. If he doesn't unburden himself to someone, I may be condemned to follow him around for a very long time.

The Monday after his run-in with Grace, I trail him to the railway station, feeling like a sleuth in a penny dreadful. I wish I could feel the cool morning sun on my skin as he does. Living
in
the world but not
of
it is the hardest aspect of my strange situation. I can neither touch nor be touched. When I bend to my favorite sweet peas, their scent is lost to me. The nights I spend with David, in our bed, unable to comfort him or be comforted, are by far the hardest I have ever known.

I'm not easy traveling without a ticket, but console myself with the fact that at least I'm not occupying a seat. Tom spends the journey staring out the window, his newspaper unread. Fortunately, the train terminates at Paddington, or I think he'd miss his stop altogether.

His mood grows more morose as we take the Tube to Fulham Broadway and then walk down Fulham Road to the Princess Eugenie Hospital. I knew it. Wife or work.

Tom swipes his ID at the hospital entrance, and slopes—there's no other word for it—inside. Instead of leading
us to a grim, cramped office somewhere, as I expect, he takes the lift up to the fifth floor, and turns right, towards the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Once more, he stops and runs his ID through the security pad, then squirts antiseptic gel on his hands from the dispenser on the wall, and pushes the Plexiglas doors open with his shoulder. I follow him as he strides down the corridor, nodding curtly at nurses and doctors as he passes. No one questions him, or offers assistance. Clearly this visit is not just unremarkable, but routine. I wonder why this should be, given that as chief of pediatric anesthesiology, his job must rarely bring him up to the NICU.

At the end of the corridor is a viewing gallery, on the other side of which are about eight or ten Perspex incubators, each surrounded by monitors and heat lamps and whatnot. All but two or three are occupied by tiny babies barely visible beneath the wires snaking in and over their little bodies. I wonder where their souls are while they lie trapped and unconscious like this. I can't bear to think of them wandering alone and lost, as I am.