by Carrie Adams
The next day Ben suddenly had things to do that did not include me. I felt deserted. Cut loose. Confused. It made me panic. I called some friends up from college and met them in the park. I went through the motions of a picnic, Frisbee, warm wine and cold sausages, but all the while I was thinking about his hand in mine and whether I’d been the only one experiencing the lightning. I went home that night. Rather than back to Ben’s house. I had to force my feet to get there, though, step by step, in the opposite direction to where I wanted to run. My mother was awake. She called me into their room.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Ben’s called. I thought you were with him.”
“He had things to do, so I saw some mates from college.”
“Well, he’s rung, I think he was worried.”
I played dumb. “I’ll give him a call now.” I’ve been playing dumb ever since.
We didn’t have mobiles then. I dialed his home number. What did he expect? That I’d wait home for him all day?
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Oh.”
And? Oh and what?
“I didn’t know how long you were going to be.”
“I was only signing some papers for the new job, I told you that.”
Had he? Was I being completely over-sensitive? Irrational? Why had two hours out of the house felt like a betrayal? “Sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you had things to do all day.”
“As long as you’re all right.”
“Fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“Yeah.”
“OK. We’ll speak tomorrow then.”
“OK,” he said. I put down the phone and groaned.
The following night Ben arranged to meet me for dinner at a more upmarket restaurant than we’d ever been to before. We talked around the subject of us. How spending this time together had been so great; that he’d missed me when I hadn’t been there last night; that he had no real inclination to talk to Mary. I didn’t know if he was leading on to something or referring to our “friendship” in order to remind me of the boundaries. Everything could be taken either way. He told me he adored me. But I knew that. What I didn’t know was in what way. Or how much.
On the walk back from dinner we cut down a narrow passageway. There was one street lamp at the end. Our footsteps echoed off the high walls as we walked in silence towards the puddle of yellow light. Something caused us to stop walking. A noise? Intuition? Who knows, but we both turned towards each other. It was the tunnel that did it. It made it feel as if the world no longer existed. There was no Mary. No foursome of friends. No expectations. Just Ben and me. Our world. Brought on by four days alone together.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“This is driving me mad.”
“Me too,” was all I managed to say.
“What are we going to do about it?”
About what? We couldn’t even say out loud what it was we were talking about. I didn’t dare speak. I wanted to. But I was terrified of ruining everything we had. He stepped towards me…What would one kiss do? Lead to another. Then more. How long would that last? We were eighteen. It wouldn’t last for life. We’d split up in the end, and we’d ruin our friendship in doing so. I panicked. Instead of pulling him towards me, I took hold of his hand.
“Let’s go home,” I said and pushed him towards the end of the passageway. I needed time to think. Because once we’d kissed, there would be no going back.
If only I’d had the courage of my convictions. If only I could have followed my heart, not my head, and spent a little more time lost in that passageway, the cyclist would have sailed by and I wouldn’t know the name Elizabeth Collins. If only I had answered him with a question. Or poked him in the ribs and laughed at him as I had countless times before. Or just kissed him, like I wanted to—would it have been so bad? But I didn’t. I chickened out. I said, “Let’s go home”—put it off, sleep on it, think about it, delay it, run from it, anything other than face it.
What we had to face instead was a cyclist, lying twisted on the ground, sixteen feet from where we’d stepped out of the passageway. She’d been racing downhill on the pavement; she had no lights and no helmet. We hadn’t even stopped to look for pedestrians, let alone cyclists. She hit Ben at full pelt, smashing his leg to pieces. I watched her jettison off the bike and fly over Ben’s body as he crumpled to the ground. I watched her head miss a lamp-post by a millimeter. She skidded across the cement, shearing off the skin on her face, then rolled into the gutter. Ben let go of my hand and started to rock with pain. Whatever moment there had been evaporated. The real world had come back to remind me that there is nothing so brutal as life and you mess with it at your peril.
The girl was so concussed she didn’t know her name, so I stayed with her. Ben was taken away in another ambulance. By the time I got to him, Mary and her family were lodged alongside him in the hospital room. I couldn’t get near him, and when I did, it was awkward and uncomfortable. I couldn’t get rid of the image of the cyclist’s head streaking past the lamppost. Any closer and she’d have been dead; I would have killed her. It was a stark warning to leave Ben well alone. Two weeks later our plane landed in Hanoi and I spent the next few months learning how to pretend to forget.
As I said, a lot of my life lies in that break.
At six o’clock the next morning I heard a key in the door. I sat up as Al walked into the sitting room. He didn’t look like he’d slept much either. I hugged him. I told him Claudia was still asleep, that the doctor had given her some sleeping pills, but that she’d been crying out in her dreams. Then I left and drove home through London. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the photo of Ben in traction was still in my pocket. I slipped it into my bedside drawer, pulled back the covers and climbed into bed. Curled in a ball, with the duvet pulled high over my head, I fell asleep sucking my thumb, wishing that none of this was happening.
9
comfort blanket
I didn’t know what Claudia would feel like eating, if anything at all, so I brought everything: bacon, eggs, yogurt, organic muesli, fresh bread, kiwis, juice, almond croissants, green tea and caffe mochas for all. I rang the doorbell and listened to Al’s heavy footfalls as he made his way downstairs. He opened the door a fraction with a fierce expression. I watched his brain recognize that standing on his doorstep was friend not foe; his face softened, his body relaxed and finally the door opened wider. Instinctively, he took the bags from me. Ben and Al are cut from the same cloth in that respect.
“I don’t know how to ever thank you,” said Al, wrapping the plastic bags around me in a bear hug. “Thank God you were here. Come in. She’s sleeping.”
I followed him down the hallway into the kitchen. On the staircase wall was the faint grimy outline of a missing photograph. I swore silently in my head. The photograph was still back at home, though that was not what I was swearing about. I stared at the step and watched again, as I had a thousand times during the night, a kiss that had come nearly twenty years too late. I put my fingers to my lips and the memory made me giddy with yearning.
Al poured the coffee into mugs, put them in the microwave to reheat and pulled out a croissant each. Neither he nor I had slept a great deal and what we craved was a hefty dose of sugar. I’d make something sensible and slow-burning in a while, but what we needed right then was a hit. I dunked the croissant into the caffe mocha and sucked. Al did the same.
“You think of everything, don’t you, Tessa? I couldn’t believe it when I saw you’d repainted the…” Nursery. Spare room. Constant reminder of their infertility.
“I couldn’t have done it without Ben. He chose the paint.”
“You are the best team of friends anyone could wish for.”
I kissed Ben on the steps. I used your personal tragedy to cross a boundary. What kind of frie
nd does that really make me? If Claudia hadn’t cried out…Once again, my face registered my thoughts because Al looked concerned.
“I’m so sorry, it must have been horrible,” he said.
I dismissed his concern. “What are you going to do?”
“Get out of here,” said Al immediately. “It’s all organized. I just haven’t told Claudia yet.”
“Move house?”
“No. I mean get out of the country. I still have a job in Singapore. We’ve been put up in a sister hotel of the one we’re working on. It’s stunning. Claudia can rest, spend her days in the spa, swim, recover at whatever pace she can. The work isn’t taxing. We’ll be able to have lunch most days, travel around the area on the weekends, go island hopping. My bosses know the situation and are happy to be flexible, not for ever, but for a little while.”
“How long would you be away?”
“A couple of months. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”
“I think it’s a great idea, I just don’t want you to go. But you should absolutely, definitely go.”
“I’m going to try and sell the house too. I booked an agent to come and see it tomorrow while Claud is at the doctor’s. I know this is a bit cheeky, but I thought maybe you might oversee the sale.”
“Of course I will,” I said. “Consider it done.”
He reached over and placed his hand on mine. “Thanks, Tessa, I knew I could rely on you.”
The feeling of satisfaction rose up inside me faster than the dampening reminder of why Al was asking me to sell his house for him. I couldn’t help it. I had always done a great deal for my friends, they were my family, so it was reaffirming for me that Al and Claudia felt they could rely on me. Although this was happening to them, we were, as I’d always suspected, in this together.
“You really have got it all organized,” I said, when Al retracted his hand.
He stirred his coffee. “I’ve learned to fear the worst.” He rubbed his eyes. It was an involuntary movement but it reminded me of the incredible strain Al had been under all these years. You can’t be the strong one indefinitely. Somewhere, something has to give.
“You are an exceptional man, Al. Claudia is lucky to have you.”
“You think? She’d probably get pregnant like that”—he clicked his fingers to demonstrate—“with somebody else. She’d certainly have been able to adopt.”
“Don’t think things like that. It’s you, only you, and it will always be you,” I said.
“But we all know that’s not true. People lose husbands and wives and find new people and are just as happy, sometimes happier. People are heartbroken and go on to find new people to love. There isn’t just one person. Claudia would find someone else.”
He was scaring me. “Al, is this about you, or her?”
“Her. She’s the one upstairs, drugged up with opiates so she doesn’t feel the pain that I’m causing her.”
“You didn’t do this to Claudia, in the same way that Claudia didn’t do this to you, or herself,” I said. “This is just some terrible shitty thing that has happened to you both. I know Claudia wants children, but not without you. That would be too high a price.”
“This is already too high a price, Tessa,” said Al. “I can’t watch her do this again.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t want to go through this again. What about going back to adopting again?”
“We can’t. My record.”
“Not here, abroad, where papers aren’t so strictly adhered to. China, Africa, Estonia, Russia. There are orphanages everywhere, Al. Countless children who need a home.”
“Maybe it is time to look into that,” said Al. Frankly I was surprised they hadn’t looked into it before.
“It could be exciting,” I said, trying to sound positive.
“Maybe. But Claudia has to accept that the IVF has failed and she will never be a mother to our child.”
“And you?”
“If Claudia is happy again, I can live without children. But her survival mechanism throughout all of this has been that ultimate failure was not an option. She had to believe that it would work. If not this time, then the next. She had to believe that or else she wouldn’t have been able to get up in the morning. How do you undo that steadfast faith? It’s like telling someone not to believe in God any more.”
“So you would consider it?”
“We went for adoption before we went for IVF because they told us our chances were so slim. We went for adoption first and they screwed us. I screwed myself. I screwed us.”
“Stop it. Let’s not go back to that. The drugs had fallen through the lining of your bag, it could have happened to any of us. We were all guilty.”
“But I knew it was missing. I could have looked harder. How is it possible that one second in time, almost twenty years ago, can still make my stomach clench into a knot and leave me unable to breathe?”
Let’s go home. “I don’t know,” I said, feeling the familiar sensation of my heart pounding in my chest and my airway contract. But it could.
I sat on the side of Claudia’s bed. The bed I had stripped and remade the day before. I glanced at the carpet. I could still see the faint trace of pink from the single drop of blood. I wondered if I always would. Out, out, damn spot. Maybe Al was right. This house had too many sad memories. Al and Claudia needed a change. Singapore was as good a place to start as any. Claudia moved her head on the pillow. Very slowly she opened one eye and looked at me. She smiled and closed it again. It opened again as she yawned and I watched her force her other eyelid, prising it open; she blinked a few times in a battle to keep her eyes from closing again. It was like watching her come round from the anesthetic all over again. It was like watching the twins wake up after the christening.
“Hey, you,” I said softly.
“Hey,” Claudia croaked.
“I brought you some fresh juice and some green tea.”
She smiled and started to prop herself up in bed. Within seconds she’d slumped back down on the pillow. “Where’s Al?”
“Downstairs. Do you want me to get him?”
“Is he all right?”
I stroked a strand of her hair away. “He’s worried about you. How are you feeling?”
“Numb. No, not numb. Empty.”
I took her hand.
“Did they tell you why?” she asked me.
I nodded. This was hard. “The placenta had come away from the uterus wall.”
“My baby starved to death.”
“No, Claudia. You can’t think like that.” I moved round the bed and lay next to her. “Once the oxygen supply was lost it would have been very quick. She would not have felt a thing.”
“I thought I felt her move while we were painting. How could I not have sensed that something was wrong? Shouldn’t I have felt something? What sort of mother would I make?”
“Stop it. This isn’t going to help you or change what has happened. You have suffered a medical problem, one that isn’t even that uncommon. The doctor said there is no reason to think that the IVF won’t take again and this time they will monitor you and keep you in bed. He will explain it all at your visit tomorrow.”
Claudia let out a long breath. We lay there in silence for a while as I stroked her hair and waited for some words of comfort to come to mind. None did. Al found us there some minutes later. Claudia’s tea had gone cold. She propelled herself off the pillow and fell into her husband’s chest. He wrapped her up like the precious parcel she was and rocked her gently side to side. I could hear Claudia was crying and I could see that Al was too.
It was time for me to go. There are some things that friends are for. There are others when only husbands will do.
I was halfway down the stairs when I heard Al. He ran down after me, held me for a moment in a tight embrace, then kissed me quickly on the lips.
“From both of us,” he said. “We love you.”
He hugged me again for a split second then returned to his wi
fe. I stood on the step. It was unnecessary to thank me but I was grateful, except for one thing: any notion that what had passed between Ben and me on the same steps, in the same circumstances, the previous evening was purely platonic was ludicrous. What had just happened with Al was platonic. More than that, it was familial, brotherly, fatherly. What had happened between Ben and me was something else entirely and I had no idea what to do about it. I pulled the front door behind me quietly and walked to my car, heavy with sadness and guilt. Whatever terrible outcome kissing Ben at eighteen may have had, it could not be worse than this.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Ben’s home number. I looked at it. If I ducked his call it would be tantamount to admitting something was really wrong. I had never ducked a call from Ben in my life. If I answered it, was I going to make it worse? Could I pretend nothing had happened? I stared at the phone…Who was I kidding? I’d been pretending for years.