Her gaze dropped to Nova’s face, she reached out to touch her cheek with one finger. I moved my daughter closer to my body, away.
But it was no good anyway, she said. I have no baby.
I looked away from Nova and into Marisol’s eyes, properly, for the first time since we had entered the room, and the air went cold around me.
He was a boy, she said. He hadn’t been moving for a while. I was right, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it. He was born without a heartbeat. I held him in my arms but I knew right away, how could I not? So I no longer have a baby.
She gave a sharp, sobbing laugh. She made to take Nova, but I kept my arms tight around her.
I have no baby, but I can leave this country, I can do it honestly, I can make a life, she said. I’ve earned it. They don’t care whose baby I take.
No, I said. Don’t ask me. Don’t say it.
Marisol bared her teeth. I had never seen her like this before. She was crying openly.
Give me your baby, she said. Give me your baby and I promise that I will care for her as my own. I promise that she will be happy and loved for the rest of her days.
But you said you would help me. You have to help me escape, I said. We can do it together.
We can’t, she said. There’s no way over the border. There’s no escape. I have a visa. Calla. It has to be me.
Take another baby then. Find someone else’s. Not mine, I said. Please.
She held out her hands, imploring. We don’t have much time.
My stomach swooped, my mouth filled with bile. I could no longer look at Marisol. I need to be alone with her, I said. Marisol nodded, levered herself up from the floor too quickly, so eager, so sure. She opened the door and left the room. I’ll wait out here, she said from the other side.
The sound of her body settling down on to the floor. Childless body, still changed. I thought of her as the chimera, of the cells in her bloodstream. And myself as the chimera too. Half animal, half myself. I had been changed irrevocably. I had wanted that. My wanting was no longer important. My wanting could split me apart now and still it would be irrelevant. I thought about a strange woman taking my baby into her home. I thought about Marisol whispering into the ear of Doctor A.
I knew the border was nearby. That was why Marisol had brought us here in the first place. There was a window I could try to force. Or an open door behind me, a corridor to run down. I could get past Marisol, knock the wind from her, but then there would be more people to pass, people with weapons, locked doors, syringes, and I didn’t know if I had the strength or cunning to bring us through all that unscathed. I was bleeding still, and slow, the stitches pulling with every step. I cried all over my baby. I thought about the single note of my instinct, how it had got us so far, whether the time had come to go against it, whether that was what it meant to be a good mother after all. To do the right thing when it felt wrong in every bone of your body.
No, I said again, but with less conviction. I leaned my head against the wall. I breathed in the smell of Nova’s new body. She started crying, hungry, and I opened the buttons of my dress with movements already instinctive. Marisol came back in and for the first time I noticed damp spots on her T-shirt where the white coat fell open. She saw me looking. Your body does not forget as quickly as you would like, she said. It’s the crying that does it.
She knelt down in front of me. If you don’t give her to me, they’ll take her anyway. Give her to me and she’ll never know any of this.
I imagined my daughter grown, a locket around her neck, but only decorative. Only hollow. Nothing inside to tell the world her future, or where she came from. No wilderness to move through. I imagined her among trees, among clean air. I imagined her running very fast, but not away from anything.
Please, Marisol said.
I nodded once, slowly. I handed her over.
Nova opened her mouth and wailed. Her lungs were magnificent. Alarm-pitch cutting through air, proclaiming her alive. That’s right, I said to her. You make that noise and you never stop making it your entire life. That’s your voice. That’s the best thing you have.
Marisol held her awkwardly, seemed surprised at how difficult it was. I had to show her. Like this, I said, positioning Nova against her chest. I did not fall to the floor. I did not crumple.
Find us if you can, Marisol told me, but I knew by her face she thought I would not, that she was going through the motions. She made a move that might have been to kiss me, but thought better of it. Instead she raised a hand in a small, solemn gesture. I understood it as a thank you. I understood it as meaning that we had been through so much together, and that finally it was the end. I watched my daughter disappear, still crying. All that was visible of her was the top of her head, the little shock of dark hair, the edge of the blanket where it rucked up around her face, kept her swaddled and close. Maybe she would not notice me gone until they passed the border. Maybe she would never notice me gone, was too young, too new, flung into the world without ceremony, and maybe it was best that way, whatever I felt, whatever I wanted.
3
I waited in the now-empty nursery for something to happen, but nobody came for me. Eventually I returned to my own room. I sat on the pink bed and wondered if it had been real. Not even a year had passed since that other night in another room when I had pulled wire from my own body. It did not seem strictly possible, but it was the truth. I put my face into my hands, held myself. Somewhere Marisol was holding my baby in the back of a car, getting used to her weight, crossing the glowing line on the ground. Her body was becoming my daughter’s comfort. I was left with nothing but my own body, the pain spilling like the milk beading my skin when my arms accidentally brushed against my nipples.
I never saw Doctor A again. In the morning an emissary knocked on my door. She was solemn, respectful. I had passed. Or I was no longer a person of interest. I found that I no longer cared at all. She gave me a change of clothes, a rucksack. In the bathroom I showered and changed and examined what had been given to me. The rucksack did not contain a tent or a map or weapons, only a small soap, a towel, a cereal bar and a bottle of water, and some money in a simple black canvas purse. Outside there was a coach waiting for me, striped with pastel colours along the side. The doors opened with a low hiss. I was alone; I sat at the back, folded up my knees against the seat in front of me, wrote the word Nova with my finger on the window, so that when condensation flushed the glass her name would be there, waiting. Someone else would sit in this seat and they would see her name and they would know it. I bit my nails down to the skin, wishing my teeth were sharper.
The coach drove down through the country I had crossed so slowly. We stopped periodically for other women to board, women who had the same rucksack as me. We did not speak. We lay our heads against the windows and watched the road move underneath us. No music from the speakers. Rain came in from the slice of open window near the roof.
A few hours passed and we pulled into a service station. The driver took a count as we got off the coach, but nobody was really watching us. We were allowed to go and use the bathroom and buy things. I got myself fries and a pink milkshake and left them untouched on a table, the ice cream congealing at the top.
In the gift shop I bought cigarettes, my old brand, comforting shape in the hand. I went outside to smoke them. Beyond the car park there was a little patch of not-quite woodland, scrubby trees polluted by so many cars, so many coaches, people moving onwards and backwards. I felt all the threads of these lives tangling in mine. I watched a woman with red lips and a red car close her door behind her, near me. She glanced at me and looked away. The early-evening light looked fluorescent behind the service station, radiating gently outwards. The slick of petrol on the tarmac didn’t trigger anything in me any more, my senses no longer heightened, no more arcane cravings, no radar. My rucksack was on my back. Nobody was getting back on to t
he coach yet. I tried the door of the red car, but it didn’t open. I turned and walked away from the car park, a little way into the trees. The ground was strewn with cans, scraps of bright plastic, cigarette butts. Beyond the trees there was road. Beyond that road there was green.
I’m coming, I said to nobody. The cars closer, the road leading elsewhere. The glowing filled me still, reminding me of where I had to go, however long it would take. My body still a reminder. It would never stop reminding me. I’ll see you soon, I said.
EPILOGUE
Sometimes I still think of Marisol swimming from the car she drove into the lake; her body just starting to show but agile in the water, the shape of her silhouetted against the surface as she swam, hard and true. I never saw her like that, but I feel like I did.
I dream of her too. Sometimes in the dream she is my mother, whose face I didn’t know. Sometimes in the dream she is dead and sometimes so am I.
In the most frequently recurring dream I am sitting across from her at the table of a roadside diner. She smiles. There is a small cut on her face, near her mouth, almost at the end of healing, but her eyes are bright.
I have somebody I want you to meet, she says.
She lifts Nova over the table to me, like a gift, and I take her without question. It is the only apology I needed or will ever need.
She moves like a thing come from the ground. She moves in the way of ancient and eternal things. I kiss her head. I support her neck, instinctively, even in the dream.
Look, I say to all present. Look who it is.
Acknowledgements
A large portion of a later draft of this book was written during my time as Gladstone’s Library Writer in Residence—it would not be what it is without the time, support, resources and research that my month there made possible, and I’m eternally grateful to all of you. Thank you to my UK agent, friend and forever champion, Harriet Moore, for believing in this book from the first sentences, and to the rest of the team at David Higham—superstars all of you. Thank you to my U.S. agent, Grainne, and everyone at Fletcher & Co. for looking after my book so well across the pond. Thank you to my brilliant editors Hermione, Margo and Deborah, who saw this book for what it could be and made it all possible. I’m very grateful to everyone at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin General, Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton Canada.
Thank you to everyone who read The Water Cure, and to all the kind strangers I’ve met since its publication. Thank you to all the friends and family who gave me encouragement, support, inspiration, beauty, blue talismans and more. You know who you are. Thank you to everyone who talked honestly with me about motherhood and babies in the last few years—all those who shared their reasons and feelings, gave me hope, scared and reassured me, let me hold their children.
Thank you to Christopher, for everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sophie Mackintosh won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago / Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta magazine and Tank magazine, among others. She is also the author of The Water Cure.
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