If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

  As you probably know from Mum, my baby’s due in just over six weeks—a little girl too. It’s so strange to think of us both having our first child at the same time. Two little girls, two young cousins. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could be friends?

  It’s been four years now, Jess. Longer if I think about how little you spoke to me when I was still living at home, or when I’d come home from uni in the holidays. I don’t want us to be estranged forever. Haven’t we both been through enough—been hurt enough—to let this continue? I miss you.

  I can’t pretend to know why you’re so angry with me, though I understand that we’ve both got a lot to be angry about. But whatever the reason, I’m sorry, Jess. You were so young when everything happened, I can only imagine how confusing and upsetting it must have been for you. I don’t know whether you’re angry with me because I couldn’t do anything to stop it or whether it’s because I went to uni and left you alone with Mum when she was still having such a tough time. Sometimes I even wonder whether you’re angry because you wish I was the one who wasn’t here anymore. But whatever it is, I’m sorry. If only you’d tell me why you’re so upset then perhaps we can start to put things right. After we’ve both lost so much, surely we don’t want to lose each other too?

  I love you,

  Lily xxx

  Lily closed the email, her fists curling into tight balls. She wished she hadn’t looked, wished she’d had the self-discipline to delete them all. But since her mum’s diagnosis six months ago, it was as though a sluice had opened up in her mind, releasing all the memories she had kept locked behind closed gates for years.

  She shut her eyes, trying to avoid the scene she knew was sidling into her head, but there it was, waiting for her, as it always was.

  The room is dark, only the faintest early morning light visible around the edge of the closed curtains. She can just make out the hummingbirds decorating the wallpaper around the window but everything else is in silhouette. The air is still and smells pungent—sharp and slightly sweet—like overripe fruit or an open bottle of vinegar. She hears the crying before her eyes have adjusted to the darkness, before they have found the figure sitting on the bed: the sobs are low and painful. It is a sound that causes Lily’s heart to knock against her chest, gently at first and then more insistently until she fears that it might be heard. She knows she should not be there but now that she is—unnoticed, unheard—she is too scared to leave in case she accidentally reveals her presence. She allows only the smallest stream of air in and out of her mouth, the shallowest of breaths she hopes will not betray her. But the next thing she sees is so unexpected, so shocking, that she knows she will spend the rest of her life wishing she could un-see it. It takes so little time but the sight of it winds her. She stands motionless, her breath trapped in her lungs, watching, waiting, doing nothing to stop it. She swallows silently and she can taste it on her tongue: the bitter, metallic, unyielding taste of fear.

  The phone rang, making Lily jump. Her boss’s name flashed up on the screen.

  “Ed, is everything OK?”

  “Yes, fine. Just wanting to check your ETA? Tom and Dana have just arrived and you know they’ll want you to walk them through the strategy, so it’s just small talk until you get here.”

  Lily tucked her phone under her chin and crouched among the labeled shoeboxes, searching for the black velvet heels she wanted. “I’ll be leaving in less than a minute. Cab shouldn’t take more than fifteen to get there. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  As the call ended, Lily reached for the right shoebox, in a pile in the far corner of the dressing room. Pulling it free, a second box came tumbling down, and she remembered having failed to put it away properly the last time she had looked inside it two months earlier.

  The box fell open at her feet and Lily knew she shouldn’t look, knew she should slip the lid back on before her eyes had grazed something her heart didn’t want to see. She thought about the cab driver outside, already kept waiting longer than she’d promised, instructed herself to close the box, put it back in the corner, walk away.

  She knelt down, placed her hands on either side of the lid, heard her own silent order to slide it back in place. But it was as if her eyes were working independently of the rest of her, as if her hands no longer obeyed commands from her brain.

  Looking inside, Lily stared at the grainy black-and-white images of a life not yet fully formed, of limbs not yet ready to stretch out into the world, of a future she had so desperately wanted to unfold.

  Chapter 7

  May 2009

  Lily tugs the seat belt across her chest, pulls it a few inches loose at her stomach, then clicks it into the slot. She slips her right hand between her body and the belt. Beyond the muscle, the fat, the skin, and her clothes she wants there to be one last defense.

  The flat of her palm rests against her gently convexing stomach. For eighteen weeks she has not dared take it for granted. She has divided her heart into two equal parts: hope and denial. Superstition demands denial for fear that complacency will be punished. But she cannot extinguish the tentative flame of hope: to do so would seem to be a different form of jinxing.

  Next to her Daniel starts the car engine. He smiles, pleased that the weekend has been a success and that they have had something to celebrate.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive? I really don’t mind. The doctor said there’s no reason I shouldn’t.”

  Daniel shakes his head, strokes her knee. “Absolutely not. I just want you to relax. The weekend doesn’t finish until we get home.”

  He eases his foot onto the clutch, slides the gearshift into first, and the car crunches across the gravel forecourt of the hotel, out into the Oxfordshire countryside. He switches on the radio and finds Classic FM. Lily prefers Radio 3 but Einaudi’s “Il Giorni” is playing and she allows herself to sink into familiar music.

  She barely dares admit it—that superstition again—but this time feels different: firmer, safer, more secure. And it can’t be just her imagination. They have already passed their own personal danger zone. The last two babies have not made it this far. The first—two years after Phoebe had been born—made it to eleven weeks. The bleeding had started four days before they were due to have their twelve-week scan, a cruel fact that at the time had compounded Lily’s grief. If only, she had silently wished, she had been able to see her baby once, even on a screen. But then the second baby, three years later, had made it to twelve weeks and Lily had seen it on the screen, had watched it stretch its legs and unfurl its fingers, had counted the vertebrae of its spine and seen the four chambers of its heart beating out a perfect rhythm of life. She had looked at the black-and-white video footage of her baby and had fallen in love. And when, two weeks later, that baby, too, had been scraped out of her uterus after the spotting had turned to bleeding and the bleeding had led her to the hospital, she had wondered whether the pain wasn’t infinitely more acute having seen that tiny, perfectly formed creature on-screen. A baby who no longer existed beyond half a dozen grainy fetal photographs.

  But this baby has already made it so much further. This baby—she can feel it—is a survivor. Five years since she last miscarried, Lily feels certain this pregnancy is different.

  A piece of music begins to play on the radio: “Soave sia il vento” from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Lily automatically turns toward Daniel just as he turns to her. They smile, remembering their wedding, where a trio of operatic friends had performed the piece during the signing of the register.

  Daniel’s focus returns to the road but Lily gazes at his profile. Two days of stubble shadow his strong square jaw, long eyelashes frame his deep brown eyes. He is handsome, and she is grateful for his patience, his kindness, his understanding.

  The weekend away had been his idea. He hadn’t told her about it until Friday morning. Pack a weekend bag, Lil. I’m collecting you from the office at four. It’s all arranged with your PA. Your mum’s looking after Phoebe unti
l Monday. Two nights away, just the two of them: a weekend to celebrate the baby who has given them cause for hope.

  Lily turns to look out of the window at the miles of yellow rapeseed carpeting the fields. She rests her head against the glass, closes her eyes, feels the warmth of the sun on her face. She is not aware of drifting off to sleep, will not remember until later the dreams she had of a baby swimming underwater, its eyes open, gliding like a fish toward her, yet always out of reach.

  It is not the dream that wakes her. It is the thump of two heavy objects colliding. The sound of tires screeching, metal crunching, Daniel swearing.

  She feels her body thrust forward, feels the belt tighten across her stomach, feels her muscles tense in response. Before her eyes have sprung open, her hands move downward, tugging at the seat belt, pulling it loose.

  On the other side of the windshield stands a tree: the wide, ancient trunk of an oak, so close as to be surreal. The hood of their Mercedes seems to have been compressed to half its former length, the front end now a mangled snarl of metal.

  “Lil? Are you OK?”

  She turns to Daniel. His cheeks have drained of color as though he has been put through the washing machine at too high a heat.

  “Lil?”

  She nods, even though she does not know whether it is true. Her neck aches and her mouth feels dry and her hand rubs gently across her stomach, trying to soothe the thirteen-centimeter baby within.

  “I don’t know what happened. It was just a really sharp corner. I only lost control for a second. I was barely even speeding.” He is gabbling and she stretches out an arm, strokes the back of his neck.

  “We should probably call the police, shouldn’t we? Aren’t you supposed to report damage to trees? I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

  Daniel shakes his head. “We can’t. You know we can’t. I had a few glasses of wine with lunch. I’m fine, I’m perfectly OK to drive. But you never know with Breathalyzers. You don’t know how sensitive they might be.”

  There is fear in his voice. It is not something Lily is accustomed to hearing in him. “That’s why I wanted to drive, Daniel. That’s why I said I’d drive.”

  There is enough accusation in her voice—more than she’d intended—for Daniel to pull her hand from the back of his neck, for him to turn to her with an expression caught somewhere between hurt and anger. “For God’s sake, I was trying to be nice. I didn’t want you to have to drive all that way. I just wanted you to relax. And you know full well I’m absolutely fine driving after a couple of glasses. You know that.” His voice is imploring: he needs to know she believes him.

  Lily’s head aches and she knows this is neither the time nor the place for an argument. All she wants now is to get home. “I know.”

  Relief washes across Daniel’s face, prompting him into action.

  She listens as he begins to make telephone calls, as he locates a local garage and persuades a mechanic—as only Daniel can—to bring a tow truck out on a Sunday afternoon and transport them back to London for an absurdly exorbitant fee. He does not call the AA, Lily knows, because there is a risk they will ask questions he would rather not answer.

  All the time she listens to Daniel—on the phone, as they wait for the mechanic to arrive, throughout the journey home perched high up in a tow truck—Lily’s palm does not leave her stomach.

  The bleeding begins just after 3:00 a.m.

  Lily wakes, opens her eyes, disoriented as to whether it is morning or still night. She blinks toward the clock and as she registers the time—3:06 a.m.—she becomes aware of what has woken her.

  Pain grinds across her abdomen, grabbing at her, squeezing her. She is being dragged down into an abyss she does not wish to enter.

  She knows this pain. It is hatefully familiar.

  She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and lifts herself from the mattress, careful not to wake Daniel asleep next to her. If she is about to enter this circle of hell again, she would rather go there alone.

  Her body doubles over as another wave of pain clenches her stomach. She stumbles out of the bedroom, past their en suite, along the landing, and into the guest bathroom at the end of the hall. She switches on the light, closes the door, lies on the floor, legs hugged to her chest, willing the pain to go away.

  When the first trickle of blood comes, she feels it before she sees it. A violent tensing of the muscles above her pubic bone and then, abruptly, a release.

  The insides of her thighs are warm and wet and she knows before she opens her eyes that she will be greeted by a dark red message spreading across the cream cotton of her pajamas.

  Her eyes sting but before the first tear can surface there is another surge of pain. Her uterus contracts and she holds her breath until it passes. She knows there will be more blood, can feel it oozing out of her. But she cannot look. She will not allow herself to look.

  She scrunches her eyes shut, awaits the next cycle of pain, tries to breathe through it, just as she knows she should, but it is too early to be breathing like this, four and a half months too early. She is only halfway through the pregnancy and her head does not want to comply with what her body is urging her to do.

  More rounds of pain-and-release. Lily has no idea how much time has passed, how long she has been on the bathroom floor, bleeding. She knows that her head feels light and is swamped by a powerful desire to sleep. But she also knows that sleep is the one thing to which she must not, under any circumstances, succumb.

  She forces open her eyes and when she raises her head to look down at her legs, her only instinct is to scream. She calls Daniel’s name, over and over, until there he is, standing in the doorway. She sees immediately, from his expression, that it is worse even than she has registered.

  “Shit, Lil. Shit. Just stay there, OK? I’ll call an ambulance. You’re going to be fine. Just stay there.”

  She knows he is not telling her the truth. But she also knows, as her mind floats away to some distant place, as her eyelids grow so heavy she can no longer keep them open, that she does not have the strength to think about it right now.

  When Lily wakes she enjoys a few delirious seconds during which she believes she is emerging from a terrible dream. But before she is fully roused the sharp smell of antiseptic penetrates her nostrils and she knows she cannot pretend that the events of last night did not happen.

  Her eyes scour the room, searching for something familiar amidst the foreign bedsheets, melamine wardrobe, white china washbasin.

  Light is inching around the edge of the curtains but she has no idea of the time or how long she has been there. It is only when she shivers that she realizes how cold she is. Her body is shaking and she cannot imagine ever being warm again. She lifts her arm to pull the sheets higher over her chest and notices the small plastic cannula piercing the skin in the crook of her right arm, the attached tube rising up into a bag of ruby-red fluid hanging from a tall metal stand.

  Blood. Foreign blood is being fed into her body through a tube in her veins. She experiences a moment of vertigo even though she is lying down.

  She turns her head sideways, away from the transfusion she does not remember being administered. In the back of her left hand is another cannula, another tube, another drip, this time to a bag of clear fluid she assumes is saline.

  She closes her eyes, tries to stop the swell of nausea surging into her throat. She does not need to be told what has happened. As the image of a future without this longed-for second child pulls itself reluctantly into view, a torrent of grief rises into her chest, squeezing through the narrowing of her throat, finding its way out in deep, guttural sobs.

  Daniel sits on a brown plastic chair by the side of the bed, holding her hand which is now free of its cannula, just a small red mark and infant bruise the only evidence that it was ever there.

  It is, Daniel has told her, almost seven hours since she arrived at the hospital, time of which Lily has little recollection. She does not know whether she ought to b
e grateful for this lapse of memory or mourn it.

  Daniel is talking and she is trying very hard to focus on what he is saying. But it is as though her brain will let only certain words through, so that their meaning must be slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle in which half the pieces are missing.

  Miscarriage, hemorrhage, emergency D and C.

  She lets him talk, wondering why her mouth is so dry, hoping that soon he will tell her the only two pieces of information she wants to know.

  Blood loss, transfusion, lucky to be alive.

  Finally she can wait no longer. Her voice, when it emerges, is quiet and small, as though it has shrunk in the hours of lost consciousness.

  “Do they know what caused it?”

  Their eyes catch before he looks down, studies the back of her hand, shakes his head. “No. There’ll have to be more tests. But given your history . . .” His voice trails off, leaving more questions than answers in its wake.

  “Do they think it was caused by whatever happened with the other two?”

  The doctors do not know the reason for her two previous miscarriages. The loss of those babies is a secret her body has thus far refused to divulge. Lily is hoping that perhaps this time the mystery will be solved and that, as a result, it can be overcome in the future.

  Daniel shrugs. There is something noncommittal in the gesture which makes Lily want to pull her hand free from his but she hasn’t the strength.

  “So it could have been something different? It could have been something . . . specific?”

  She cannot bring herself to voice the accusation. It is unfair, she knows, to apportion blame when they are both in mourning. But the unspoken allegation hangs between them, heavy and thick like winter fog, so that they are unable to reach out toward one another’s grief.

  “They don’t know, Lil. They’ll need to do more tests. They just don’t know right now.”