The Playdate (18 page)
An awkwardness quickly descends. Jez stands there with the twins asleep in the stroller and a tired-looking Henry holding on to it. He is wearing a beautifully cut suit and looks completely out of place among the screaming toddlers and exhausted parents wearing anything they could throw on in five seconds for the run to the hospital.
“Hey, baby,” Suzy says. “Hey, hon.”
“I need a pee-pee,” Henry whines, coming over and pulling her arm.
“Come on then, little boo-boo,” Suzy says, standing up and leading Henry toward a bathroom door at the end of the waiting room.
Jez parks the stroller and approaches me awkwardly, his eyebrows lowered, his mouth upturned, as if attempting to show empathy.
I find myself curious. I’ve wondered in the past how Jez would react if a woman had a crisis in front of him. Whether that rigid exterior would soften and he would put an arm round her, or not?
I sit up straight and try a smile.
What am I doing?
It’s amazing. He’s done it already. I am acting the way Jez wants me to. Polite, emotion hidden away.
“How is she?” he says, looking at Rae. I wonder what he’s thinking.
“They think she’s OK—we’re waiting for a consultant.”
I pause. What will he come out with next?
Jez clears his throat.
“My father knows the hospital director here. I’ll get him to have a word.”
“Thanks,” I say, looking up as Suzy emerges from the bathroom with Henry.
Jez follows my eyes. This is ridiculous. I want to laugh. Instead of offering me a hug and to do something practical, he is offering me one of his networking contacts.
“Sorry you’ve had to come out so late with the kids,” I say. Again, I bite my tongue. Why did I say that? Why am I apologizing?
“Cal, do you want me to stay?” Suzy says, walking back in, carrying a half-asleep Henry. We both know it’s for show. Jez would probably spontaneously combust if he had to put three kids to bed by himself.
“No, go. Really. We could be here for hours.”
“OK, well, I’ll ring you later.”
She hugs me and Jez half-smiles, and they’re gone through a large white door. Free from this place.
* * *
I hate this hospital. All hospitals. I hate the stupid plastic chairs that press meanly into your back. The smells. The sense of doom. The coffee that tastes like chlorine.
Gloomily, I look around the A&E, wondering how many
times Tom and I have dashed here with Rae at all hours of the day and night, worried that every little sniffle and cough meant something. This was just supposed to be the place Rae was born. Where we’d stay for a day or two before returning to Tufnell Park and getting on with the challenge of being accidental parents.
In fact, she was so normal, our only concern was to learn how to do the simplest of tasks for her. To learn how to wash between the tiny creases of her knees, and wipe her tiny mouth with cotton swabs.
How long was it—two weeks later?—when we gently carried her round to the local café, desperate to get out of Tom’s flat in Tufnell Park, and in the bright light of the day we suddenly noticed how pale and limp she was becoming, and realized she hadn’t fed for hours. A woman in the café with three kids told us to go straight to A&E.
“It’s her heart,” the doctor said, with no time to sugarcoat it. “She has a coarctation of the aorta—a narrowing of the artery.”
It all happened so fast that now I realize I don’t know when I fell in love with Rae. All I felt was an overwhelming, primal need to keep her alive, broken up with moments of terrible regret at what might never happen. That I’d never get to see if she’d escape my maddening curls. That she’d never get to sit with me, as I did with Mum, in her bedroom when she was a teenager, having long chats about boys as I folded the laundry. For some reason, I got particularly upset that she’d never get to have sex.
“The medication isn’t opening up her artery, so we need to operate,” the doctor said. “We’ll insert a tube through her groin into the femoral artery with a balloon on it, then inflate it.”
“OK,” we both said numbly. Neither of us had even taken
out a mortgage or made a will. Now we were telling a heart surgeon what to do.
“Even after this, it’s not going to be easy,” he said bluntly. “She’ll need regular checkups and an operation before she starts school to repair the artery.”
“Any good news?” Tom said, a catch in his voice.
I recall closing my eyes and wishing for a second that none of this had ever happened. That I was sitting watching telly in my old flat in Islington, deciding whether to make it out to the pub with Sophie. That I’d never met Tom.
Then I opened my eyes and saw the way he was looking at Rae in the incubator, a tube inserted in her nose. The miracle child that he thought he’d never be able to conceive. Her heartbeat rang out in the hospital room, not in the deep thump of my dreams but a tinny, fragile beep. I went over and held Tom tight.
* * *
It is two hours before Dr. Khatam eventually appears and starts to look Rae over. I have learned to read Dr. Khatam’s face over the years. There is the way the cheek area below his eyes tightens when there is bad news to come, like the first time we met him. Then there is the swish of his white coat—if it flies as he walks toward us, I know he is pressed and only has time to impart crucial information, not soothe anxiety. Today, however, it hangs gently around his knees. He stands back from Rae and gives me a rare smile, showing short, boyish teeth under a thick mustache. The sight is so unexpected, I have to stop myself looking at them.
“She seems fine,” he says. “We’ll send her for an MRI and an ECG to be sure, then she can go home.”
I stare at him. I see his face twitch. Dr. Khatam and I have been here a few times. He knows what’s coming.
“Hmm,” I say. “I just worry that . . .”
He screws up his mouth. “Here we go,” it says. Dr. Khatam spends a lot of his time reassuring parents whose child has had an aortic coarctation that, in most cases, the child will be fine for the rest of his or her life.
He nods. “Look. Why don’t we wait for the results of the scans?”
“But . . .” I start. I hate this. When my anxiety goes into overdrive. When I can’t control it. “I’m sorry. Could she just stay in? Till tomorrow, in case? I’m just so scared of . . .”
He pauses for a second, then pats my shoulder. “Let’s find her a bed.”
I nod shamefully, avoiding the impulse to hug him.
* * *
Rae is so sleepy after her scans, she quickly falls asleep in a room the nurses have found for her in the pediatric ward, snuggling into her pillow greedily while I lie beside her on the pullout parent’s bed, stroking her cheek with my finger. The radiator pumps heat into the room despite the warm evening outside. If you squeeze your eyes up this could be a hotel room. A cozy little hotel room. Except for the tubes and masks fixed to the wall, ready for the next emergency; the furious screaming of two babies from down the corridor; a television blaring from the room across the hall, where I saw a tearful mum sitting earlier, looking like she needed help.
A nurse walks in with a blanket.
“Hi there!” she whispers with a cheery wave. “How’s she doing? Do you remember me—Kaye?”
I nod and smile, and try to look pleased to see a friendly face. It’s not that I don’t appreciate all the effort the nurses made during Rae’s big operation to lighten the mood for Rae, me, and Tom, but I don’t want to know her face and her name anymore. We live in the outside world now.
“How you doing?” she says gently, touching my shoulder, and I nod. Suddenly I am very tired. A shiver runs through me.
“Hubbie with you?” she asks, looking round the room. The nurses loved Tom and the way he remembered their names and teased them mercilessly.
“We aren’t married.”
“Oh dear, well, you better snap him up before one of us tries to!” she giggles. I know she is only trying to make me smile, but it’s a relief when she heads off down the corridor to fetch some water for us.
* * *
I watch Rae for a while, then quietly pull myself up and head out of the room. I can’t put this off any longer. I tiptoe to the nurses’ desk and ask to borrow the phone.
To delay what I am dreading doing, I contemplate ringing Dad for a second, then decide not to. He’ll only panic and offer to come, and I can’t let him do that. As every farming child in our part of Lincolnshire knows, there is no rock base under the fields. If Dad doesn’t get his new potato crop out this week, the earth could become so sodden with this early summer rain that his tractor might disappear right through it.
I leave a message for Tom instead, telling him not to come back, that Rae is fine. The last thing I can cope with right now is Tom turning up and yelling at me.
And then, finally, the one I have been putting off.
“Guy,” I say, when his mobile goes to voice mail. “Hope you get this message tonight—it’s Callie. I’m really sorry but my little girl had an accident today, and I think she’s OK, but I’m going to have to take tomorrow off to make sure. Hopefully, I’ll be fine to get in on Friday. But I’ll ring tomorrow when I know more.” I pause for a second. “Um, Guy, I know this is a pain but please bear with me. I’ll see if I can find a way to make up the hours at the weekend. And please say sorry to Loll for me. I really, really want to do his film. This week has been amazing. So . . .”
So what? I can’t bring myself to beg, so I end the message.
I walk back to Rae’s room and lie quietly back on my bed. A vision comes into my head of Tom’s and Guy’s expressions when they hear my messages. I groan.
So close but yet so far. And now everything is messed up.
Why has that woman Debs not rung?
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three loud knocks on the front door woke Debs up with a moan. She rolled over, and tried to sit up.
Bang. Bang. Bang. The door went again. Her eyes felt stuck together with glue, her head sliding to the left. Forcing herself out of bed, she staggered to the window, pulled back the curtain, and peered outside.
“Are you taking the piss?” the hazy shape of a man shouted up at her.
“Sorry?” she said, fumbling for her glasses.
“Nearly broke my fucking back,” he shouted at her, raising his arm in anger and walking through the gate.
What?
She pulled her dressing gown round her and took another look out of the window. A trash truck was backing down their road with a loud bleep. Thursday morning. That’s right, trash day. The man and two others were emptying the recycling boxes
into it, him still shaking his head angrily. She looked down and saw that her box had been left, its lid half off, beside the bin.
Feeling like she was forcing her body to run through water, she pulled on her slippers and went through to the bathroom to splash her face in an attempt to revive herself. She had to see the doctor about changing these pills. Even though her eyes told her she was awake, her mind still seemed trapped inside sleep. Woozily, she crept downstairs, holding on to the wall.
By the time she’d got to the front door and opened it to feel a rush of cold air, the truck had backed all the way out onto the main road. Looking around to check that no one could see her in her dressing gown, Debs tiptoed to the recycling box and lifted the lid.
It took her a second to adjust her eyes to the strange sight that met her.
The box was full of big, round, heavy pebbles. There must have been a hundred of them, lying like a stretch of beach. She pushed the box with her foot. It was like trying to budge a brick wall.
“For goodness’ sake,” she said out loud. Quickly, she stuck her head out of the gate to catch the angry recycling man, but he had gone. She tried to think clearly. The box had been full last night, with the cardboard that she had taken out.
She looked around, wondering where the pebbles had come from. A large bare patch of earth caught her eye. It lay in the front garden of No. 17, the house next door on the right, whose owner she hadn’t met yet. The owner was a writer, she seemed to remember, who spent a lot of time in her cottage in Suffolk. Vaguely, she recalled that the woman had a pebbled area between three potted box trees that looked like it had been landscaped professionally.