The Life We Almost Had

by Amelia Henley

  I had thought, at that time, we would be okay. It was comforting to think that we had a good support network around us, but I didn’t know then that our network would crumble.

  I didn’t know then what was to come the following day.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Anna

  It was a sleepless night. In bed, I placed my hands over my lower abdomen and imagined the adhesions forming under my skin. The adhesions that were preventing me from falling pregnant. Next to me, Adam slept and I hated him for not being awake. Didn’t he care? I glared at him through the gloom until my eyes filled with tears.

  Of course he cared.

  I knew that undoubtedly. He would never blame me, and yet I felt I was to blame. My stupid, faulty body was to blame.

  Tears of self-pity flowed and I let them, turning my face into the pillow, the foam absorbing my sorrow. I was scared. Scared of the surgery. Scared it wouldn’t work. Scared Adam would leave me for someone who could conceive. Every single potential problem I could think of loomed out of the dark.

  By the time the grey sludge of dawn lightened the sky, I had vowed that I would not let this come between me and Adam. I wouldn’t let it become the focus of us. I wouldn’t let my endless fears become his fears. He was my glass-half-full optimist and I needed him to stay that way.

  I wanted to talk to someone though. It wouldn’t be fair to burden Mum. We hadn’t even told her we were trying – not wanting that ‘Am I going to be a grandma?’ question every month. We thought it would be a nice surprise for her when it happened. I was glad she didn’t know.

  Quietly, I dressed. Pulling on track pants and lacing my trainers. The cold air filled my lungs and I ran and ran until I found myself on Nell’s doorstep. Here I could cry unfiltered, lay out all of my doubts before her, knowing she would listen without judgement, without trying to fix it. Fix me.

  It was Chris who answered. Bare-chested, black joggers hanging low on his waist.

  ‘Anna.’ He stifled a yawn with his hand. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry it’s early.’ Stupidly, I hadn’t thought that he might be here. ‘Is Nell awake?’

  ‘She probably is now,’ he said, but not unkindly. ‘Come in.’

  I followed him into the kitchen. The sink was piled with washing-up, most likely from Nell’s housemates. She rarely cooked. Still, she’d be moving into Chris’s house soon enough.

  ‘Congratulations, by the way,’ I said as he filled the kettle. ‘It’s great news.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He turned to me with the biggest grin on his face. ‘I can hardly believe it – me a dad!’

  It was a punch to the gut. I sank onto the kitchen chair while Chris carried on talking. ‘I know it wasn’t planned but Nell will make the best mum, don’t you think?’

  ‘I… I have to go. Sorry, I’ve just remembered… something.’ I rushed towards the front door, reaching it at the same time that Nell reached the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Is everything okay, Anna? It’s the crack of dawn!’

  ‘I was just out for a run but—’

  ‘A run? Now I know something’s wrong. Shit. It was your laparoscopy results yesterday, wasn’t it? Sorry, it slipped my mind.’

  ‘That’s okay, you’ve a lot to think about with… with the house move.’

  ‘What were your results?’ She looked at me with concern.

  ‘They were fine. Nothing wrong at all.’

  ‘That’s fantastic!’ Her face broke into a grin. ‘So you could fall pregnant any day now?’

  I swallowed around the lump in my throat. ‘No. We’ve decided to wait. We’re so young and I want to at least be head of department before I take maternity leave, if not deputy head. There’s no rush.’ My smile was so fake, my face in danger of shattering.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I get that your career’s important and I know you want to follow in your dad’s footsteps and make head teacher, but I thought—’

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  She studied me for a moment. I maintained eye contact, certain she could see all of the pain inside me.

  ‘It’s enough for us to know that when the time is right, there’s no medical reason why we can’t conceive,’ I said.

  She waited for me to say something and when I didn’t, she asked, ‘Are you sure there’s nothing wrong, Anna? You would tell me if there was?’

  ‘Of course.’ This time I couldn’t force a smile. ‘We share everything, don’t we?’

  ‘Always,’ she said. I understood her reason for not wanting to tell me she was pregnant but it smarted.

  I felt something shift in our relationship. She was slipping away from me.

  She had lied to me. I had lied to her.

  Everything changed from that day forward. It wasn’t that I resented her but it hurt, every time she rubbed her bump, complained about backache, bad skin, morning sickness. I wanted it so badly. I wanted it all.

  Alfie was born seven months later and I fell in love with him instantly. I told myself that it was enough being a surrogate auntie. I told myself not to feel jealous that Nell had made new friends, all part of the first-time mums’ club that I didn’t know if I would ever join. I tried to keep her in my life, but she was engulfed by sleepless nights and baby swimming and massage and yoga and a million other things that I didn’t know babies needed.

  Nell accidentally fell pregnant again just three months later and it was hard. It was so bloody hard to maintain our friendship that I stopped trying. I didn’t know then the tragedy that waited for me ahead. I didn’t know then how much I would need her after that day.

  How much Adam and I would both need her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Anna

  Five years. It had been almost five years since we married. Sixty long months in which I hadn’t been able to give Adam the thing he wanted. The thing we both wanted more than anything else.

  We were two. We were still two. Not three or four. No pram blocked our hallway. Our lounge was impossibly tidy, no plastic toys to throw into tubs at the end of the day. The spare room housed years of accumulated junk instead of a cot. Since my endometriosis diagnosis I’d twice undergone surgery to remove adhesions and taken fertility medication. The doctor had said I could conceive but…

  My eyes strayed to the black and white framed photo of our wedding day hanging on the wall at the foot of our bed. It was the last thing we saw before we turned off the lights, the first thing we saw every morning. It used to make me smile. Now it made me sad. The picture was so intimate, our foreheads touching as we’d leaned towards each other.

  I felt beautiful. Now everything felt ugly. Our marriage showered in a confetti of faded dreams.

  Furiously I dragged the cotton-wool pad across my skin, removing all traces of the make-up I had worn to work. From around my neck I unfastened the silver chain I wore most days. In my jewellery box was the gold star pendant Adam had bought me for our first Christmas together. My stomach tightened painfully. He hadn’t called me Star for ages. I really should have tucked the necklace somewhere I didn’t have to look at it every day, but I knew that wasn’t the solution. Out of sight was definitely not out of mind.

  I pulled out the drawer of my dressing table. Nestled under the pile of underwear, once black and lacy, now washed-too-often-no-longer-white and bought for practicality rather than fun, it lay there like a dirty secret. Gently I pulled out the parcel, unwrapping tissue paper as fragile as my heart. Inside was the tiny lemon sleepsuit covered in bears and the brightly coloured cuddly parrot we’d bought on a whim, the weekend we arrived home from honeymoon when we had begun trying for a family of our own.

  ‘This parrot looks like the one we set free the week we met,’ Adam had said. ‘Our future child absolutely has to have it. We shall call him Percy.’ I still could picture us. Me carefully carrying the shopping bag as if it was as precious as the baby we thought we’d create. Adam’s arm protectively around me. At home, I had sprawled on the rug, Percy Pa
rrot in my hand, the sleepsuit spread over my stomach, while Adam had thrown logs on the fire.

  ‘Will you still love me when I’m fat?’ I had grinned, waiting for his jokey response.

  ‘I’ll love you forever, Anna,’ he had said as he crouched before me. My flippancy had melted away as he kissed me long and hard. His hands unbuttoning my shirt. Fingers brushing against my flat stomach, feather light. Stupid but I had thought that I’d fall pregnant that night. It felt too perfect for it not to happen. Afterwards, Adam had tugged the throw from the back of the sofa and covered us and we had toasted our future with elderflower cordial. I’d been determined not to drink. Adam vowed to be alcohol-free in support.

  ‘What do you think of names?’ I had nestled against him.

  ‘I’m rather fond of them. It would be confusing if we didn’t have them.’

  ‘Idiot. How about Charlotte?’

  ‘Too formal. Iris?’ he had suggested.

  ‘Too old-fashioned. Harry?’

  ‘Too wizardy.’

  I had pushed him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he had said, rubbing his shoulder. ‘That was your grandad’s name, wasn’t it?’

  My phone began to ring, pulling me from that memory. It was Mum.

  ‘Hello, I was just thinking about you. Well, about Grandad.’

  ‘What about him?’ Mum asked.

  ‘About his name.’ As soon as I had said it, I kicked myself.

  ‘You’re thinking about names? Anything to tell me?’ Mum sounded so hopeful.

  ‘Mum. You know we’re not starting a family until I’m where I want to be in my career.’ It pained me every time I had lied to her over the past few years but I couldn’t face her disappointment each month, along with my own. I had never told her we were trying. I hadn’t told Nell. She was so busy with Alfie and Emily. Two children under five – she called it a nightmare, to me it was a dream.

  ‘Your dad would be proud of you being made Head of Year, but more than anything he’d want you to be happy. There is no right time to start a family, Anna.’

  ‘I know. We will one day, I prom—’

  The slam of the front door saved me from making a promise I couldn’t keep.

  ‘Adam’s home. Can I call you back?’ I wanted to put the sleepsuit away before he came upstairs.

  ‘It’s okay. Nan just wanted me to tell you there’s a programme about a man who travelled the world on foot on BBC later. She thought Adam might enjoy it.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I had no intention of watching it. Adam didn’t need another reminder of the life he’d given up for me. He was no longer working in a travel agency but in the administration department of the council. He didn’t hate it but he didn’t love it either.

  We said goodbye and after I had stuffed everything back into my drawer, I trudged downstairs wishing Adam and I could talk about our disappointments as readily as we used to talk about our dreams, but we didn’t seem to be able to. Or perhaps it was that we didn’t want to. Afraid of what we’d say. Afraid of what we’d hear. Did he blame me? He must have and I just couldn’t bear to listen to him say that he did. Still, as I headed towards the kitchen I vowed that I would make an effort. Instead, I found myself snapping, ‘Did you get the bits I asked you to from Tesco?’ My eyes scanned the kitchen for shopping bags.

  ‘Fuck. No. Sorry. Bad day. I—’

  ‘Every day seems to be a bad day.’ I bit back and I knew that tonight wouldn’t be the night for meaningful conversations. Again.

  ‘Hello to you too.’ Adam turned his back on me and washed his hands at the sink before flicking on the kettle. I crossed my arms, waiting for him to realize he’d forgotten the milk.

  ‘One thing. I asked you for one thing,’ I said, trying to hold back the tears that had gathered. We both knew I wasn’t talking about the shopping and I knew I should stop goading him but my hormones were all over the place, my period was due, and I couldn’t help myself. I shouldn’t have looked at our baby things. Again I wondered whether we should try IVF but I was so scared that it wouldn’t work and equally scared that it would. Often I tried to recapture the feeling I used to have whenever I had looked at Adam in those early, heady days, but the boy from the bar had slipped through my fingers and in his place was this helpless man standing before me who looked so tired.

  ‘Anna, it’s not my fault…’

  ‘It never is, Adam.’

  ‘Not everything is.’ His eyes met mine. ‘But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to make you happy.’

  ‘Well then, you should leave. That would make me happy.’ I wiped my hand across the back of my mouth. The spiteful words I’d spoken in shame had left a bitter taste as they spewed from my lips. ‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  I stepped into his open arms. This was the way it went. We fought and then we made up. It was exhausting.

  ‘If we can’t have tea, wine? Thursday is the new Friday.’ Adam pulled a bottle of Malbec from the rack while I fetched two glasses from the cupboard. We didn’t drink when we’d first tried to conceive. As time marched on, it became ‘just the odd one’; by two years it was weekends only. But weekends stretched from Friday lunchtime to Sunday night and soon after that it was why not take the edge off? Adam uncorked the bottle while I pushed a stopper back into all the things I wanted to say. It didn’t feel like the right time.

  It never did.

  My nan had a yellow sofa once, her and Grandad had saved for almost a year to buy it when they had first got married. It became battered from years of family life. The springs poking through the sagging cushions. The arms worn and faded. After she had lost Grandad, Mum had worried about her living alone. ‘On top of everything else that’s wrong with that sofa, it’s a fire hazard. You must get a modern one made of non-flammable material,’ Mum had insisted. Nan did buy a ‘three-piece suite’, as she had called it, but was scared of spoiling it. She refused to take off the protective covering. When I visited, I perched on the edge of my seat, afraid of splitting the plastic open. Afraid of ruining what was underneath. That was how I constantly felt now, sitting lightly on the lie that was our marriage, muscles tense, smile static. Terrified that I would press down too hard and the truth would burst out. We hadn’t been able to have a baby and it didn’t matter how many times we said we were enough for each other; I didn’t think that we were.

  Not anymore.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Adam

  My first glass of Malbec lasted about three seconds. I poured another. If I was drinking, I couldn’t snap back. I just couldn’t face another row.

  Nothing I did was good enough anymore. I should have known when Anna had scrawled pink wafer biscuits on the list that morning that it was her time of the month. That I needed to tiptoe around her more than I usually did.

  Five years. Five years we’ve been trying to conceive.

  When do you say enough? Let’s take a break and just be us for a bit.

  It broke my heart that I couldn’t give Anna what she wanted and yeah, I saw through her barbed ‘I only asked you for one thing’ comment. We both knew she wasn’t talking about the shopping. Despite the endometriosis, I felt entirely responsible, like I was less of a man. Rationally I knew that with someone else, someone different, I might have the chance of a family but I’d never once thought about leaving Anna. ‘You should leave. That would make me happy,’ she had said, but I knew she didn’t mean it. I hoped she didn’t mean it. I think she felt the guilt as much as me. Feeling less of a woman, but she was all woman. This I was reminded of each time the app on her phone beeped to tell her she was ovulating and we pounded up the stairs to bed while I tried to prepare myself mentally: ten minutes to curtain call.

  We had visited a clinic to check the quality of my sperm. They had handed me a plastic pot and directed me to a room full of porn but it had been Anna I had thought about. Barefoot at our wedding reception. Crown of flowers. Laughing riotously at something Nell had said.
<
br />   I missed Nell.

  Josh did too. ‘Couldn’t we start hanging out again?’ he had asked.

  ‘Josh! Nell is married now. Time to move on, mate.’

  ‘Giving up is not an option,’ he had said.

  Had Anna given up too soon on their friendship? I wished Nell were here to help Anna through this. I thought she would be if Anna was honest with her, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t be, and in shutting Nell out, a chasm had opened between us all. Nell and Chris’s social circle widening to include other parents, and our social circle ever decreasing.

  Would Anna be happier without me? Could she conceive with someone else’s sperm? Could she have a baby without IVF? Maybe we just weren’t compatible in that way. It filled me with self-loathing that I could be the cause of her unhappiness. That I was walking under a ladder, black cat crossing my path – all kinds of bad luck. If I was being entirely honest, the resentment wasn’t only one-way: I had given up a lot for her. My plans to travel the world. The new job I was offered. My friends when I had left my village. Sometimes I imagined standing at the airport six years before. Anna on one side, and all my hopes and dreams on the other. Would I give it all up again? No matter how much we bickered, the days, sometimes weeks that passed without any meaningful conversation, I knew that I would. Our time together wasn’t all bad, it was just that the bad times were pretty fucking terrible, but every now and then I’d glimpse the Anna of old. Last weekend, for instance, we had been to the engagement party of a guy I worked with and in the back room of the pub was a pool table.

  ‘You up for it?’ I had asked her. It had been about two years since we had played.

  ‘Bring it on.’ She had kicked off her heels and hitched up her tight black dress and thrashed me three times in a row. Afterwards, we had danced to S Club 7, both reaching for the stars and had staggered home at 2 a.m. clutching a white plastic bag bursting with kebab and chips. We had sat cross-legged on the lounge floor, picking meat out of the pitta.

  ‘We couldn’t do this if we had kids,’ I had drunkenly said. Had stupidly said. I hadn’t meant it the way it sounded and the mood was ruined, but for those precious few hours before I stuck my foot firmly in my mouth, we had laughed. Properly laughed.