The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  He exits the window and opens up the photo roll, scanning to the very first image they uploaded. It’s a photo of a photo, a reproduction of a disposable-camera shot that is completely unstaged. It is Maggie holding Eleanor, who, according to the date stamp in the bottom right, must have been two months old. Frank zooms in with his mouse.

  Not on Eleanor, but on Maggie: Can he see it there? The distress already beginning? He imagines neatly lopping off the top of her skull and peering inside. He would scoop out every last black thought and incinerate them all. They didn’t deserve to touch Maggie, and they had no place near Eleanor. A monster. Definitely not. We all have darkness in us; he just wishes Maggie could have shared hers.

  Frank zooms back out. There was such ease to the way Maggie handled Eleanor, as if she were an extension of her own arm. If she wasn’t comfortable as a mother, she certainly put on a good show. Frank cannot work out what it is about him that made it impossible for Maggie to say these things at the time. His awkwardness? His earnestness? Whatever it was, he knows he has let her down. He loves them both so much—Maggie and Eleanor—and somehow he still disappointed them. We always think love will be enough, but what if, sometimes, it isn’t?

  The desk chair groans as Frank leans across, tipping as he reaches for the planner. Maggie wanted him to read this, all of this, and he owes her that much. He rubs the grit out of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger; then he sighs, long and hard.

  How much more can the heart hold?

  Three days to go

  I never did feel at home as a parent, Frank. There, I have said it. I could never bring myself to tell you that to your face. Somehow it felt like an admission of failure on my part, even before things started to go wrong. I loved the idea of being a parent so much that it nearly broke us as a couple. And if I had said that when all six pounds, six ounces of that reality hit? It would have sounded capricious at best. Selfish at worst. What sort of mother admits she isn’t up to the job? One who didn’t deserve her daughter or her husband. I have always felt so unworthy to have you both. I maxed out my quota of happiness, and look what I’m left with.

  And why? Why couldn’t I feel at home as a parent? I could never quite figure that out, however hard I tried. There was no denying how lucky I was too. I know that. We managed to make it work, me taking time off nursing until Eleanor was old enough for school. Not everyone gets that chance. More than that, I was happy. The happiest I had ever been. Once I was back on an even keel, those days couldn’t last long enough. If anything, I felt I had wasted all that time before. Maybe I should have seen someone, gotten it diagnosed, the postnatal depression or whatever they wanted to call it, instead of being so scared and so stubborn.

  You told me not to dwell on it. After all, what was the point? There was a lifetime with Eleanor ahead. In the end, I only wished I’d done more to document the sheer joy of those early days. Eleanor padding in to wake me up, Jeffrey tucked under one arm. When the weather was good, we’d have our breakfast sitting on the grass in the garden, Eleanor propped between my legs. When it rained, we’d trace the passage of the drops on the window with her yogurt spoon. We baked cakes, we did crafts, we read books. We went to the meadow and collected daisies and spotted birds and watched the boats. We just were, Frank.

  Over the years, I got to see all the milestones, but more than that, I was there for the moments that inched her closer to them too, the seconds when I could chart the contours of her personality coming into focus right in front of me. Eleanor took her first steps just before her first birthday. She would lever herself up, toes splayed, hands pressed down firmly on the floor ahead. For weeks that was as far as she got, an odd, inverted bridge, before she ended up back on her bottom with a thud, a look of mild frustration gliding across her face. You could see it all then, the tenacity, the focus. I could try to distract her all I liked, but it was only a matter of time before she was up and trying again.

  Her first words were “mama” and “dada,” nothing unusual there. What struck me was the fact that once she found her voice, we never heard the end of it. I’d go to say something and she would be babbling over the top of me. At first, I imagined she was just keen to ensure that her newfound capacities for speech were still working. Then you would get home and the minute I went to ask you about your day, Eleanor would start up again, drowning you out. “Yes, we know you are here,” you would say, tickling her sides until the chitter-chatter stopped and her face puckered with the giggles. As if we could ever forget you.

  I was so captivated by our days together, the two of us, that I wasn’t rushing to sign us up for toddler groups. At the back of my mind, I knew I should be. That was motherhood to a T for me—the nagging doubt that there was something I should be doing better. Besides, it wasn’t fair for Eleanor to socialize solely with adults. It wasn’t her fault we didn’t have friends with kids her age. Even if she was so content and cocooned in our love at home, surely branching out was no bad thing? As if in answer to my unspoken neuroses, they opened that big indoor play area ten minutes’ drive away just a few weeks before Eleanor’s second birthday. Perfect timing for checking it out to see if we could book a party there.

  I’d never seen anything quite like it—an aircraft hangar filled with huge plastic slides, numerous ball pits, and nets and flags in the sort of screamingly garish colors that could induce a headache within ten seconds of entry. They had the same three pop songs blaring on a loop. I only realized that after an hour or so, such was the volume of screaming over the top of it. I should have guessed this wasn’t Eleanor’s scene. One look at the place and she turned her body into me, her nose pressed resolutely against my thigh.

  We sat on the edge of a gym mat, rolling a ball between us. I don’t know who looked less enthusiastic to be there—me or Eleanor. Still, we were together, and that was good enough for me. A set of twins ran past close enough for us both to flinch. They entered the fray without so much as a backward glance.

  “Sorry about them.” Their mum appeared behind me and crouched between us. “Can I?” She tilted her head in the direction of the floor between us. There were a few other mums drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups at the back of the room, huddled around what looked like a repurposed picnic table. It didn’t look as though there was an open invitation to join.

  “Sure.” I passed her the ball by way of welcome.

  “You don’t fancy playing with the other kids?” Eleanor didn’t even acknowledge the question that was sent in her direction and shuffled an inch closer to me. Up ahead, the two identical boys I guessed were hers hung upside down from some monkey bars. She turned to me. “Shy, huh? Doesn’t seem such a bad thing.”

  Until then, I had never really thought of Eleanor as shy. That shook me. It was as if there was a whole other side to Eleanor that didn’t exist for us. She was so happy at home, so confident and so loved. It wasn’t long before I made our excuses and got out of there. We had the birthday at home. Were we coddling her? I suppose it didn’t feel that way at the time. It wasn’t as if we were planning on hiding her away forever, homeschooling her and refusing to let her see the real world. Find me a parent who doesn’t want to shelter their own child at that age. At any age, for that matter.

  Besides, when it was the three of us—in the evenings, at weekends, on the odd week of holiday—that was when Eleanor really shone. I put that photo on the mantlepiece, the one of us all at Iffley Lock, because it showed us that. Surprising, really, that it was such a happy memory, given it was just after my mother had left, that five-day visit that seemed to roll on and on and on. She’d had plenty of opinions on our parenting, none of them favorable. In that visit alone, we were declared indulgent, fretful. And the worst? Overprotective, as if trying to inoculate your four-year-old against stress was an offense on our part. On the plus side, Eleanor found her amusing—which made one of us—thanks to her bourgeois disdain for bedtimes and bathtimes and dinners with vegetables.

  The minute her taxi back to th
e airport had rounded the corner, I hotfooted us down to the pub. God knows I needed a drink. The sun was shining, and if I shut my eyes now, I can still feel myself drowning in that sky, a perfect cornflower blue. It was so hot, but Eleanor had insisted on wearing her all-in-one polyester dinosaur suit, which we had given her for her fourth birthday just days before, complete with spiky hood and a tail that trailed a good foot behind her. Before we left, she stuck out her gummy little hand and extended you the chimpanzee mask and me the horse. You wore yours very well indeed.

  “The three musketeers!” you hollered as I locked up.

  My heart swelled walking with you two, and no, not with embarrassment. I was so proud, Frank, of what we had made, of how sensitive and smart and engaging Eleanor was. I watched you, the brilliant father I’d known you would be, and I fell in love with you all over again. I felt giddy, adored. I didn’t want the day to ever end.

  At the pub, you ordered us chips and cola (mine spiked, thankfully) and while you queued, Eleanor and I lay on the picnic blanket, her head resting on my stomach. I ran my finger down the subtle ski slope of her nose, lingering on that perfect point where the cartilage at the end flared up. I fanned out her hair, with all the knots and the clumps that formed down the back. I thought she was drifting off to sleep. Maybe she was. Just before she did, she rolled to face me.

  “I love you, Mummy,” she said, with that certainty children just have. In that moment, my mind was finally able to stop. I’d spent four years on a carousel, swung round and round by the constant questioning of every parenting decision I had ever made—my own, my mother’s, anyone else who felt fit to judge. Whatever I chose, whatever I did, I always felt I was falling short of the mark in some way.

  But who were those marks really for, Frank? Surely it was only Eleanor whose opinion mattered. Being loved by her was the only reward I ever needed. Her seal of approval was the top prize, the only thing that could leave me with an overwhelming feeling of contentment.

  I’d give anything for her to come and set my mind at ease again now.

  Frank stands up and makes his way to the living room, planner open and tucked under his right arm. It is beginning to get light now, and the woman from down the road is already up and out with her two elderly Labradors, getting their exercise in before the heat returns in earnest. He bobs his head in recognition as she jogs past. It seems almost unfathomable that life continues around him, when his is in tatters.

  It is obvious which photo Maggie was writing about. He suddenly feels very guilty that it is lying facedown. Without it, the whole composition of the room feels off; the photo has occupied center stage ever since they got it printed and framed in one of Eleanor’s own creations, a mix of shells and glitter and that strange, fishy-smelling glue that primary schools love. At the time, Frank had felt awkward asking the barmaid to put down her precarious stack of empties and take a snap of the three of them. They swept into formation quickly, keen not to put her out any more than she already was, propping a sleepy Eleanor in front of Maggie in front of him. When they’d gotten the film developed, Frank pointed out that they had formed their very own family of Russian dolls—he couldn’t get over how perfectly their life slotted together.

  Frank picks up the photo and forces himself to absorb every last detail of it—the trim of Eleanor’s T-shirt tangled up in the zip of her costume, a stray strand of hair by Maggie’s right ear curling up like a loose spring. For years, it was seeing photos like this that sustained him at the end of a long day at work. It justified the crack-of-dawn alarms and the sleepless nights and the thousands of tiny sacrifices that constituted family life. Until recently, that is. He is ashamed to admit, even to himself, the lengths he has gone to in order to avoid family photographs in the last six months.

  There was that incident—the one they would both rather forget. It happened three months ago now, but the shame of it makes it feel as fresh as yesterday. Maggie had caught Frank red-handed. Bin liner in one hand, the photos in another. He couldn’t even bring himself to pick them up, instead using the side of his hand like a brush, sweeping away every last hint of his Little Girl Lost. Maggie tried to reason with him. She pleaded. She cried. When she couldn’t stop him, there was nothing for it but to leave the room and wait until his uncharacteristic fury had subsided.

  By the time Frank got up the next day, every last photo was back in its place. It was as if nothing had happened. The two frames that had been chipped in his frenzy had been mended, the tracks of the superglue almost imperceptible. Maggie always did do such a good job of holding them together—him, Eleanor. He turns back to that line—falling short of the mark. It could not be any further from the Maggie he knew.

  There is a crunch. Frank has been holding the frame so tightly that one of the shells has broken off, leaving a chalky residue in his palm. He puts the frame back before he does any more damage and drops what remains of the shell into his pocket.

  “Oh, Maggie,” Frank says. “You never had anything to prove.”

  Three days to go

  I often think about what sort of mother you thought I was, Frank. I knew all too well how I thought I was: highly strung, cautious, scared out of my mind by the sheer weight of love and responsibility I felt for the part of me that fell outside of my control. I so desperately wanted you to feel that I was doing a good job too, that you could be proud of me.

  And I only had the one shot to get motherhood right, didn’t I? After Eleanor was born, we didn’t mention a sibling. For my part, I worried that if I said it, I might jinx something. We’d had such good luck to have the one child, I didn’t want to risk starting a conversation that would make me sound ungrateful or, worse, suggest that Eleanor wasn’t enough. If we were trying, it was without ever calling it that. Ultimately, it was nature that ended any potential discussion: a second child wasn’t happening for us.

  I told myself we had more than enough to focus on with one. If I was disappointed, it was more that my grand plans for a big family were frustrated. Never in you, Frank. Never in Eleanor either. Not back then, at least. At nursing college, I’d envisaged myself with a huge brood, like Edie’s, siblings and noise and huge family Christmases with the sort of boundless happiness that I had craved as a child. When that didn’t happen, I began to grieve for the life I’d thought I would have. I grieved when we couldn’t conceive, and there was a part of me that still grieved after Eleanor was born. There is a special type of grief that comes from packing up your expectations for your own future.

  From the off, I worried about Eleanor being an only child. There were the obvious anxieties: loneliness, selfishness, some sociopathic lack of personal skills. Horrible, empty clichés that were easy enough to put to bed the older Eleanor got, simply by looking at how thoughtful and considerate she was. Gradually, when she’d reached five or six, that was replaced by the worry that we had let her down. Doesn’t every child want a sibling? A confidant, a playmate, a friend genetically predisposed to make up with you after a fight? I didn’t want her to grow up and think we had denied her that. I couldn’t stand the thought that she might resent us.

  I went out of my way to make sure that wasn’t the case. Overcompensating, I’m sure most would call it, but at the time it couldn’t have seemed further from that. On the weekends, if you had to work, I’d take Ellie out to the café round the corner and I’d buy us both buns the size of her face. There would be sugar all over her, a fine white dust that settled on the tip of her nose and her cheeks. She would just talk and talk, mad nonsense mainly, and I was so swept up in the joy she brought me that I wouldn’t even be dabbing at her with a tissue or reminding her to chew with her mouth closed. All the time, there was a smile across her face, stretching ear to ear. Priceless. It seemed impossible that she could have been happier, or that I could have been either.

  So, the first time she asked why she didn’t have any siblings with any real seriousness it took me by surprise, no matter how many possible iterations of the conversation I
had been through in my head. Eleanor was seven, and I’d just collected her from Katie’s house. It was always so boisterous there, with four kids under ten and an open-door policy to any and all of their friends. The noise alone was usually enough to send the girls up to Katie’s room with their hands pressed firmly against their ears.

  We were in the car, just out of the traffic at the top of the Woodstock Road and not more than ten minutes from home.

  “Why don’t I have a brother or sister?”

  I was caught entirely off guard. I turned down the volume on the radio and scoured my mind for the most appropriate answer.

  “Oh, er, why do you ask?”

  “Katie has three.”

  “Well, not all families are the same. Not everyone wants more than one child.”

  “Did you?”

  I had no idea what to say for best. “It doesn’t matter because we are so, so happy to have you,” I managed, after a pause.

  The road ahead was blocked, double-parked on both sides. I let the car ahead try to navigate the chaos and pulled up to the curb. It was dark, and I had to switch on the light above the rearview mirror to see her. Eleanor was staring up at me, visibly puzzled. Her brow furrowed into that wobbly central wrinkle that took me right back to the first time I held her. Every word I’d said was true. It sounds tragic, Frank, but all I wanted then was some affirmation: an “I know that” or “I love you.” Even “Thanks, Mum” would have done the trick.

  Before I had the chance to dig any deeper, the van ahead flashed its full beams for me to come through. The moment had passed. I was fuming with myself on the drive home, all through supper. I hadn’t even had a chance to roll out my ready-prepared spiel: You are enough. We never needed another child. Our family is perfect as it is. It was on the tip of my tongue, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to raise the subject again, in case it made it a bigger deal than it needed to be.