A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  Somehow, Benjamin had got under her skin. Theirs had been a gentle, low-key relationship, a slow burn born of shared interests and companionship. It wasn’t love, exactly, but it was warm and reassuring and safe. Eight months after they’d met, she’d lost her virginity to him in an encounter that, like the relationship itself, was unremarkable but quietly satisfying.

  The pregnancy a year later had been a complete accident. To her surprise, Benjamin had been thrilled. They’d both graduated college by then, and while she made next to nothing at the sanctuary, he was earning enough as a small animal vet to look after them both. He bought dozens of books on fatherhood and had picked out names – Emily for a girl, Charlie for a boy – before Maddie had been for her first scan. He was so excited about becoming a father, his enthusiasm was contagious.

  He’d died in one of those stupid accidents that should never have happened, skidding on wet leaves on a country road one dark November afternoon. No one else was even involved. Maddie herself had been out shopping for baby clothes when it happened. She would never forget turning into their street and seeing the police car parked outside their flat. She’d known, instantly, that Benjamin was dead.

  She hadn’t fallen apart, because she’d had the baby to think of. She’d put her head down and concentrated on Emily and the sanctuary, never permitting herself to think about what could have been. She had her daughter, and her horses. For four years, it’d been enough.

  And then she’d met Lucas, as unlike Benjamin as it was possible to be. Their relationship had been a coup de foudre, stars and fireworks and meteor showers. She fell in love not just with him but with the person she became when she was with him: confident, witty, amusing. When he asked her to marry him, she didn’t hesitate. Lucas had saved her, in every way a person could be saved.

  Maddie spooned a mouthful of Weetabix into Jacob’s mouth and wiped his chin. She’d been so excited at the thought of having his baby, of seeing what the combination of his and her genes would produce. When Jacob was born, three years after they married, she’d expected him to slot into their lives without a ripple, the way Emily had. But from the start, he’d been hungrier and more fretful than his sister. He’d refused to latch on properly and had quickly lost weight. Then she’d developed mastitis. At the midwife’s insistence, she’d switched to formula, feeling like a failure, her anxiety and exhaustion unsettling Jacob even further in a vicious circle. And then, just as suddenly, her agitation and nerves had been replaced by an emotional numbness that was far more troubling.

  It was obvious, even to her, that there was a huge difference between not caring about anything and not being able to care. But she found herself incapable of doing anything about it. There’d been days when Lucas had left to take Emily to school in the morning, kissing her cheek as she sat on the edge of the bed, only for him to return home from work ten hours later to discover her still sitting there, Emily at a school friend’s and Jacob screaming in his cot.

  Her mother had recognised her postnatal depression for what it was and done her best to help, encouraging her to get out more, to relax; she’d taken care of the children and sent Maddie to the hairdresser, for a massage, a girls’ night out. But months had oozed by, and she hadn’t got any better. In the end, her mother had forced her to see the doctor. For a long while, even Dr Calkins hadn’t been able to help and there had been frightening talk of inpatient care and electroconvulsive therapy. But finally, finally, just as Jacob reached his first birthday, the counselling and the pills had begun to work. Her feelings had gradually returned; mainly negative emotions to begin with, like hate and self-loathing and sadness, prickling sensations returning to a limb that had been numb for a long time. She’d been angry for quite a while, too, but everyone had been so glad to see her feel anything, they hadn’t minded. There had been tears, lots of tears, but eventually the good feelings had come back. Things had started to matter again. She started to care.

  Through it all, Lucas had been steadfast in his support. Many men would have given up on her, but not Lucas. She liked to think of herself as independent and self-sufficient, but the truth was, she didn’t know what she’d have done without him.

  His competence with the baby had surprised her. He’d been a hands-on stepfather with Emily from the very beginning, taking her to nursery school and teaching her to tie her own shoelaces. But Emily was a little girl; babies were a different kettle of fish. Lucas was so bookish and academic, Maddie hadn’t really expected him to get his hands dirty when Jacob was born. But he’d changed nappies and soothed tears, as if born to it. Even now, he was the one who comforted Jacob when he had toothache, sitting beside his cot and stroking his back for hours until he settled. On the nights Noah was truly inconsolable, it was Lucas who strapped him into the back of his car and drove around for hours until he fell asleep.

  He ruffled Jacob’s hair now as he crossed the kitchen to put the milk away. His son slammed the palm of his chubby hand against the tray of his high chair, impatient for his breakfast. Maddie jumped and stirred the bowl of Weetabix again as Emily appeared in the kitchen doorway, still wearing her nightdress.

  ‘Why aren’t you dressed?’ Lucas demanded. ‘We have to leave in ten minutes or you’ll be late for school.’

  Emily ignored him, lolling against her mother’s chair and chewing a rat-tail of long blonde hair.

  ‘Lucas asked you a question,’ Maddie said sharply.

  Imperceptibly, Lucas shook his head. Not now. It was an argument they’d had more than once over the years. She was loath to admit it, but the truth was, the joins in their blended family showed, however much she tried to pretend they weren’t there. Emily had had her mother to herself for the first three years of her life. Together with her grandmother, Sarah, they’d formed a tight little family unit. And then Maddie had met Lucas and brought first him, and then Jacob and Noah, into their feminine circle. Sarah adored Lucas, she thought he was the best thing that could have happened to her daughter, but Emily had been slow to thaw. Even now, her relationship with him was painfully polite at best. Lucas accepted it for what it was, but Maddie bridled on his behalf every time her daughter snubbed him.

  ‘Go and get dressed,’ Maddie said, giving her daughter a chivvying push. ‘You’ll make everybody late.’

  ‘But I don’t feel well.’

  ‘What sort of not well?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘I feel hot, and I’ve got a headache,’ Emily whined. ‘And I’m so itchy.’

  ‘Don’t scratch,’ Lucas and Maddie said simultaneously.

  She handed the cereal bowl to Lucas so he could take over feeding Jacob. ‘Come here, Emily. Let me see.’ She peered down the back of her daughter’s nightdress and immediately felt guilty for her brusqueness. ‘Chickenpox. That’s all we need.’

  Lucas looked alarmed. ‘Shit. Am I going to catch shingles?’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ Maddie said. ‘You can get chickenpox from shingles, but not the other way round.’ She tugged Emily’s nightdress back into place and made a quick decision. ‘I’ll see if Jayne can have her today.’

  ‘Can’t I stay home with you?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Sweetheart, I wish you could, but we have a new horse arriving today and I have to be there. You could come with me, if you like?’

  Emily shook her head. She was terrified of the horses: their sharp hooves, their huge yellowing teeth, the sheer size of them. Maddie blamed herself: when Emily had been two, she’d put her on the back of one of her most tranquil sofa-ponies, Luna, a wide-backed, sweet-natured grey who’d taught a generation of children to ride. But that particular day, something had spooked her and she’d bolted and thrown Emily off. Her daughter hadn’t been hurt, but the episode had given her a lasting fear of horses.

  ‘Do you think Jayne could keep Emily overnight?’ Lucas asked Maddie.

  ‘I doubt it. It’s Steve’s birthday and Jayne’s taking him out for dinner to celebrate. Maybe Emily could spend the day with her and go to Mum’s tonight
. I really don’t want Noah getting sick, especially when it’s only his second week at daycare. He’s just got used to his new routine, and I don’t want to disrupt it if we can help it. When you drop the boys off this morning, Lucas, tell them to keep an eye out for spots and call me if either of them run a temperature.’

  ‘I can sleep over at Manga’s?’ Emily said, brightening. ‘Can I stay there till I’m better?’

  ‘Yes, good idea,’ Lucas said hastily, thrusting Jacob’s breakfast back into Maddie’s hands. ‘I can’t be getting sick, not with all I’ve got on at the office.’

  He was already halfway out of the door. Maddie suppressed her irritation. Lucas was irrationally phobic about illness. A single sneeze was enough to send him into meltdown. Maybe it had something to do with what had happened to him as a child, an association with doctors and hospitals. A trauma like that had to have left emotional scars. Generally speaking, her husband had emerged from the tragedy remarkably sane and well-balanced, but Candace had fared less happily, even though she’d been so much younger when the fire had happened. Lucas was naturally very protective of her, but there was only so much he could do. Maddie didn’t resent their closeness, of course; as an only child, she actually rather envied it, and she adored her eccentric sister-in-law. But Candace had cost her husband many sleepless nights over the years, and there were times Maddie felt that her marriage was rather crowded.

  Guiltily, she pushed the thought away. Despite his issues, Lucas had been undeniably supportive when she’d had postnatal depression; she could hardly turn around and complain about his loyalty to his sister now. It was one of the things she loved about her husband: once earned, his support was absolutely steadfast.

  But there was only so much any man could take, even one as devoted as Lucas. Maddie had already put him through the wringer once. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about her strange memory lapses and have him worry he couldn’t trust her with the children. She was sure the doctor was right, anyway. They were bound to stop once Noah started sleeping through the night.

  Chapter 3

  Tuesday 10.00 a.m.

  As soon as Jayne opened her front door, Emily pulled away from her mother and ran down the hall to the kitchen. Jayne’s house had an identical layout to their own, although her garden was bigger because she was on the end of the modern housing estate in East Grinstead where they both lived. The resemblance stopped there, however; whereas Maddie’s decorating style could best be described as working-mother-meets-couldn’t-care-less, Jayne’s home was exuberantly themed. She and her husband Steve had gone on a safari in Lesotho to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary the previous year; the living room was now filled with African masks and zebra-print cushions. Both her adult sons had recently left home and Jayne had turned one bedroom into a Moroccan souk and the other into a minimalist Swedish spa. It was an interesting look for a four-bed semi, but if anyone had the personality to pull it off, it was Jayne.

  Maddie dumped Emily’s pink backpack on the retro fifties kitchen table. ‘You’re a total star,’ she said. ‘I literally don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

  ‘Forget it. I literally can’t think of anything I’d rather do.’

  The two women grinned at each other. She and Jayne had met eight years ago at a council meeting about a proposed bypass that would cut through a beautiful section of their West Sussex green belt. The main speaker against the development had had an irritating habit of adding ‘literally’ to almost every sentence; sitting next to each other, she and Jayne had got the giggles and had eventually been asked to leave the meeting, as if they were naughty schoolgirls. They’d been firm friends ever since.

  ‘Seriously, though, you’re a lifesaver,’ Maddie said. ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. If it wasn’t Steve’s birthday, I’d have her overnight. I’ve got more than enough time on my hands.’

  Maddie gave her a sympathetic smile. Jayne had quit her job as a receptionist at a law firm a couple of years earlier to look after her widowed father and his death four months ago had left her at a bit of a loose end while she searched for a new job.

  ‘Time for a quick cuppa?’ Jayne asked, putting on the kettle.

  Maddie glanced at her phone. ‘Go on, then. I’ve got half an hour before I have to leave.’

  ‘Do you want me to put on a DVD for you, Emily?’ Jayne asked. ‘Or would you rather play in the garden?’

  The little girl looked hopefully at her mother. ‘Can I watch Netflix on my phone?’

  ‘I suppose, since you’re theoretically sick. But not all day,’ she added helplessly, as Emily grabbed her back-pack and shot off towards the sitting room.

  Jayne got out a couple of mugs. ‘You’ll be telling me next Jacob has a Snapchat account,’ she teased.

  ‘Oh, God, am I an awful parent for getting her a smartphone?’ Maddie exclaimed. ‘I am, aren’t I? Lucas was dead set against it, but I wanted her to be able to reach me if there was an emergency—’

  ‘Give over. You’re a great parent. I was just teasing.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ Maddie groaned. ‘I can’t keep up with it all. I’ve only just got to grips with Facebook, and now they’re all on Instagram or Pinterest or God knows what instead.’

  ‘Listen to you. You sound like your own grandmother. You realise you’re technically a millennial, don’t you?’

  ‘You know you’re way more on the ball than me.’

  Jayne set a mug of tea in front of her. ‘That’s a low bar, love.’

  At first glance, theirs was an unlikely friendship. Jayne was nine years Maddie’s senior, an energetic, outgoing woman who’d grown up with four brothers and was the life and soul of the party. She’d married and had children young and had been the kind of mother who threw end-of-term parties for the entire class and was everyone’s favourite chaperone on school trips. Maddie never even went to parent–teacher conferences without Lucas as a protective buffer. But she and Jayne had both grown up in homes where money was tight and dessert a treat you only had on Sundays. They’d learned the value of thrift and hard work.

  ‘You all right?’ Jayne asked. ‘No offence, love, but you look shattered.’

  Maddie sighed. ‘I’m fine. Just tired. Noah’s still not sleeping. I know it’s just colic, but it never seems to end.’

  ‘I hope that lovely bugger of yours is pulling his weight.’

  She shrugged. ‘He has to get up for work in the morning. I’d bring Noah into our room, but there’s no point both of us being up all night. The horses don’t mind if I fall asleep on the job, but if Lucas does, a hotel will end up with no windows or something.’

  ‘Screw his hotels. You’re more important. It’s easy for things to get you down when you don’t get enough sleep—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Maddie interrupted, knowing what her friend was driving at. ‘I’m OK. I’m still taking my pills. Dr Calkins even said I can start tapering down soon. I’m not depressed.’ She summoned a tired smile. ‘Exhausted, but not depressed.’

  ‘Any more funny turns?’ Jayne asked lightly.

  Maddie hesitated. Jayne had been with her the first time she had one of her memory lapses, not long after she’d found out she was expecting Noah. They’d been at the garden centre, looking at lavender bushes for Jayne’s new landscaping project. One minute she’d been crushing a soft purple stalk between her fingers, inhaling its aromatic scent, and the next, she’d been eating cheddar-and-kale quiche at Stone Soup two miles away with absolutely no idea how she’d got there.

  Jayne had laughed when she’d told her, said it was typical baby brain, to forget about it. She’d left her car in the multistorey at the shopping centre when she’d been expecting Adam, Jayne said – she’d actually got the bus home before she’d realised!

  But then it had happened again, three months later, when Maddie was collecting Emily from school. This time she’d lost a whole afternoon. It was like someone had simply wiped the slate clean. S
he could remember turning into the crescent-shaped drive in front of Emily’s primary school for afternoon pick-up; she could see Emily standing on the front steps, chattering to her best friend, Tammy, windmilling her arms as she demonstrated some sort of dance step. And then suddenly Maddie was upstairs in the bathroom at home, kneeling next to the tub as Jacob splashed fat hands on the water, giggling. It was dark outside; she’d lost four hours, hours in which she’d driven her children home and fed them and helped out with homework and changed nappies. And she couldn’t remember any of it.

  It wasn’t baby brain. This was something different and it scared her. She hadn’t done anything odd or out of character during one of her episodes – at least, not yet – but just the thought was frightening. She hadn’t wanted to go back to her psychiatrist, Dr Calkins; he was a good man and he’d done his best to help her when she’d had postnatal depression, but he’d also been the one pushing for her to be admitted to a psych ward and suggesting ECT. She knew he’d only had her best interests at heart, but the idea of electric shock therapy had terrified her. She’d worried that if she’d told him she was literally losing her mind, he’d definitely have wanted to admit her, and if she’d refused, she might have ended up sectioned.

  Nor did she want to tell Lucas; it would only worry him. And she couldn’t talk to her mother, either; Sarah wasn’t the kind of woman who did reassurance and sympathy. She solved problems, found solutions. She’d parented Maddie efficiently when she was a child, ensuring she was clothed and fed and nurtured, but although Maddie had always known she was loved, she’d never felt Sarah liked being a mother very much. Even when Sarah played with her, getting out the finger paints or making jam tarts, she’d always had the sense her mother was ticking off a good-parenting box rather than actually enjoying spending time with her.

  But the third time she’d had a memory lapse, four weeks after Noah was born, Maddie had been so frightened she’d had to tell someone. Jayne might only be a little older than Maddie, but she made her feel mothered in a way Sarah never had. It was Jayne who’d finally talked her into going back to Dr Calkins, even offering to come with her. With Jayne beside her, she’d told the doctor everything and had been surprised, and immensely reassured, when he’d explained it was nothing more than a side effect of the antidepressants she’d been on since Jacob’s birth. Once Noah was a little older, he said, they’d scale back her meds and everything would be fine.