by Carrie Adams
“I took my injured pride and decided to act all self-important and convince myself that my job was bigger, harder, and more of a self-sacrifice than yours,” said Jimmy, throwing tea bags into mugs. “If I was half the person you are, I would have suggested I stay at home and you go back to work. At least we’d have had a chance then. Remember the offer from the FT?”
I tried not to.
“I knew I was doing it, too. I drove you to this.” He put the kettle down without pouring the water. When he turned to look at me, there were tears in his eyes. “If there’s blood on anyone’s hands, it’s mine.”
I stood up and went to him. “No, Jimmy,” I said, putting my arms around him. “No.”
He leaned into my embrace, but he wouldn’t be swayed. “You’ve always protected me, haven’t you? But this was my fault, not yours.” I could hear his heartbeat. It matched my own. He brushed a hand over my hair. “No wonder you hated me,” he whispered.
“I never hated you.”
“Yes, you did.” He searched my face. “You couldn’t even look at me. And I understand why. I’m just so sorry I pushed you into that lonely place.”
“But I was determined to stay there. However much you loved me, I wouldn’t let it be enough. I didn’t deserve anyone’s love after what I’d done.”
“That’s your mother talking, and it isn’t true. You are loved, by everyone who knows you. The only sad thing is you don’t realize it.”
I wanted to stay there and listen to the reassuring thump of his heart forever. Perhaps it could beat for both of us. Because mine was broken.
“They say that the fetus might be able to feel pain—” My voice was strangled. I started to cry.
“Oh, my darling, no one knows that.”
“But I read—”
“It wouldn’t be allowed if that was the case.”
“They’re trying to change it.”
“Who? The Daily Mail? Religious fanatics? We didn’t want four children. My regret isn’t that we didn’t have the child, it’s that we didn’t make the decision instantly and save you from all this unnecessary pain. The guilt is mine now. You did nothing wrong.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“I’m devastated I didn’t let you. There are so many things I’d change if I could.”
“Me too,” I replied. We stood holding each other against the cheap kitchen cabinets for a long time, my cheek resting against his chest, his arms encircling me. I felt safe. “I didn’t know it was a boy until afterward,” I said.
“What difference would it have made, Bea?”
“You always wanted one.”
“I haven’t wanted a boy since the second the doctor handed Maddy to me. I’m ecstatic with what I’ve got. Our girls are perfect dragon-slayers in the making, which is mostly thanks to you, since my input has been negligible.”
“Dragon-slayers?”
“I’ll explain another time.”
“Your input is vital, Jimmy. Jesus, why do you think I feel so guilty about walking out on you? On top of everything else, you’re the first and most important relationship our girls will have with a man. I’ll happily do all the ironing if you hold Lulu’s hand and tell her she’s brilliant and study Maddy’s drawings as closely as you would a van Gogh. And I’ll cook a million fish fingers if you promise to spend time with them that doesn’t equate to that strange combination of spoiling them and neglecting them.”
He held me away from him. “I’m not going to do that anymore.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy to be a part-time father. In fact, it must be one of the hardest things in the world. Of course you want to spoil them when you haven’t seen them for days, but I know for a fact that the girls would rather you do join-the-dots with them than take them somewhere exciting.”
“Tessa said much the same thing.”
Tessa. The bubble popped and I withdrew my arms from around my former husband. I poured water onto the waiting tea bags and sat down again at the kitchen table. “I did wonder about the clean uniforms that came back those Sundays.”
“All Tessa.”
“Does she know you’re here?” I asked. I wasn’t shit-stirring. I genuinely didn’t want to think Jimmy was sneaking off behind her back after everything she’d done for me. I wanted to win, but I wanted it to be a clean fight. Jimmy looked at me. Isn’t it funny how sometimes you can scream silently in your head at your partner and they don’t sense even a tremble, yet at other times the tiniest murmur of a thought and a ticker tape appears across their forehead, sending you a “receiving loud and clear” message?
“I see,” I said. This had been Tessa’s idea. “She didn’t throw you out, did she?”
“No, it was all very gently done. She asked me to work it out, once and for all. I have fallen in love with her, Bea, but she made me realize that if I don’t change, she and I are heading down the same path. I couldn’t have been more in love with you, yet it went wrong, and that scares the shit out of me. I thought about everything she said, putting my head in the sand, switching off, taking criticism as a personal attack, refusing to see that I’m biased toward Amber, and, frankly, doing the bare minimum with the younger two and expecting applause every time.” He looked out over the garden. “We went on a long walk and talked it through.” He closed his eyes briefly, remembering something I wasn’t part of. “I swore to her I’d change. And I will. As of today.”
I was grateful he was looking away, afraid he’d see the hurt in my face. He hadn’t been able to make these changes for me. Yet it was all I’d ever asked for. I had to be very brave now. And brave for a long time afterward.
“I know that Tessa is concerned because of how she and I deal with our children. It’s the only thing we’ve ever argued about.”
I swallowed hard. This was the bit I feared most. “What about Tessa having some of her own? Does she want kids?”
“I’m fairly sure she does.”
“You haven’t talked about it?” I asked, surprised.
Jimmy faced me. Then he shook his head. “It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I’ve sort of ducked the subject.”
“Do you want more?” I asked. I waited for his reply. It took a minute.
“Can’t say I’m longing for them, no.”
“Have you told her?”
“I think she’s afraid to ask.”
“Jimmy!”
“I know.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I like where we’re at with our girls. Let’s be honest, the baby years weren’t a barrel of laughs, were they? Do I want to go back there, now, at my age?”
“You loved it when Amber was a baby,” I insisted, coming to our children’s defense, Tessa’s defense.
Jimmy nodded. “But then I had no idea what lay ahead. We were young, I wasn’t working, and, of course, I knew her so well.”
“You have to know them all.”
“I physically wasn’t able to.”
“You don’t have to be physically there, Jimmy. You have to be mentally there. That’s what I’m telling you. You have to want to be there, or she’s right, it will happen again. Jimmy, you have to tell her or you’ve lost her anyway.”
“How can I say, ‘It’s okay for me to have kids but, sorry, do you mind if you don’t?’”
I placed my hands on the table, wanting to make my point. “Maybe she doesn’t want them. Maybe you’re assuming too much.”
“What woman in her late thirties doesn’t want kids?”
“I don’t know. By the end of your thirties you might have seen enough to know it’s not all gurgles and talcum powder. She has quite enough kids in her life as it is, what with Cora and Caspar and whatever the rest are called. Either way, you have to tell her.”
“It was tough, wasn’t it, having them so close?” he said.
“My perineum has never been the same,” I replied.
Jimmy laughed, but seconds later he was serious again. “It’s funny talking to you two. Y
ou both keep defending the other when I expect the opposite to happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tessa told me that if I could change for her, shouldn’t I be prepared to change for the mother of my children? The truth is, I’m here because of her, Bea.” He reached over and took my hand. “But I’m glad I am.”
I blinked at him, unable to gauge the fathoms below me. Had she told him I wanted him back? Or did I have to do that for myself? It was possible he was just clearing the air so that he could go back and tell her, “Job done.” Or maybe he was finished with the lot of us, and a bachelor life was what he sought. Women were complicated, there was no denying it, and he had quite a few in his life. “What are you saying?” I asked. The time for second-guessing was over.
Jimmy rubbed his face. “I don’t want to get this wrong again, Bea. I don’t want to mess up your life, Tessa’s life, or, God forbid, the girls’ lives, and I don’t want to fuck up mine either. I don’t want to regret doing or not doing something. I don’t want to fix something that should have been left alone and I don’t want to leave something alone that should have been fixed. None of this is Tessa’s or the girls’ fault. The responsibility is ours and we need to sort it out.”
I sensed a waver. Could it be he still loved me? If I could use the children, our history, as bait, and reel him in. But what about the person who’d returned him to my table? What did I owe her?
“You know she loves you very much, don’t you?” I blurted out before I changed my mind.
“Yes, I do. It hurt leaving her, Bea. It hurt watching her try to do the right thing. This is a fucking nightmare, but I’ve always told Tessa I loved you and you left me and that broke my heart.” He flattened his hand on his chest. “I can’t look her in the eye now and tell her I never loved you.”
I waited for him to put me back in the past. But he didn’t. He just stood there, his hand on his heart, searching my face. My throat tightened. I could feel the tears coming again. Were there still more? “I’m so sorry I left you, Jimmy. I’m so sorry I took the kids away from you.”
“Don’t cry, Bea, please.” He came and knelt at my feet. “In a weird way it might have been for the best.”
I wiped away the tears with my palms.
“Our divorce gave me our children back. Because you weren’t there doing everything, I had to focus on them. I do know them now and, I tell you, every other weekend isn’t fucking close to being enough. I hate having to get to know them all over again every two weeks. Tessa may think I do the bare minimum with the little ones, but we have fun together. We make each other laugh. But, God, their lives move quickly. I spend a weekend talking to Maddy about one girl, and two weeks later it’s a completely different name. I think Tessa might be right about Lulu. She might need to see a specialist about her letters and numbers.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Actually, I think I might have worked that out. It was something she said to Liz. Lulu is a lot slower than the other two. Particularly Amber. Because I’m always on my own with them, she has to hurry up all the time. It’s not like you can make supper while I do reading. She makes mistakes because she’s trying to work at my pace rather than me letting her work at hers. And it’s not just work. It’s walking, biking, playing…She moves in a slower orbit, with her head in the clouds. I need to find more time for her or at least let her continue at her own pace.”
“No more ‘I,’ please. We’re in this together. They are our children, our responsibility, whether we live with one another or not.”
Live with one another. Or not.
Jimmy took my hands again. “I forced myself to get over you. I told myself my wife had died. I learned to live with the woman who looked and sounded like her but wasn’t her, because she didn’t love me anymore.”
I wanted to tell him I’d never stopped loving him. But that wasn’t true. I hadn’t loved him. For a long time, I hadn’t even liked him. I had fallen out of love with him. Then fallen back. Harder. But the damage had been done by then. I bit my lip. I wanted to hurt myself as much as I’d hurt him. I tasted blood. But it didn’t come close.
“So, I suppose what I’m asking is, are you really back from the dead, Bea?”
I stared at his hands, then looked into his eyes. “If I were, would you come home?”
Jimmy chewed the inside of his cheek.
I heard the key in the lock and withdrew my hand. “Amber!” I exclaimed. Jimmy stood up. Shit. I peered down the hall and saw our daughter dump her coat on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hi, Mum!”
“Someone’s here to see you,” I said, feeling as if I’d been caught doing something naughty.
She frowned.
“Daddy.”
“Daddy!” she yelled, and ran down the hallway. She flew into his arms and was immediately firing questions at him, ten to the dozen. “When did you get back? Did you find that Juicy Fruit lip gloss? Have you seen Tessa? Is Liz okay?” Without waiting for him to answer, she kissed his cheek. “I’ve got so much to tell you. First”—she blushed—“I’ve got a boyfriend.”
Jimmy pretended to be surprised.
“You knew?”
“Well, a little bird told me.”
Amber smiled, then glanced at me and rolled her eyes. “Tessa. She’s such a gossip.” She cackled happily. Suddenly, she stopped and looked seriously at her father. “We’re going to have to look after her and Liz now. Tessa likes to pretend she’s brave all the time, but she isn’t. No one is. Isn’t that right, Mum?”
Jimmy and I caught each other’s eye. The divorce had given Jimmy his children back, but I owed that most precious gift to Tessa. Like Jimmy, I didn’t want to get this wrong. Can you really come back from the dead? Or was a little exorcism required? Was reentry as dangerous as the flight out had been? How many times could you ask children to adapt? Was I prepared to make someone else pay for my mistakes? Could we live with that? But if we could, I knew we’d be happier than we’d ever been. Well, I would. Amber yawned. “Mummy, can you put me to bed?”
I was taken aback. Amber, so keen to be a grown-up, was asking to be put to bed, like a child. Perhaps she’d seen a little too much of the adult world recently and had decided she liked it where she was, for the time being.
“Of course, darling,” I said, and took her hand. She kissed her father good night and pulled me out of the room.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she whispered, then grinned.
I smiled back. She didn’t have to tell me anything. My daughter had been kissed. Properly. That was why she wanted me to put her to bed: so she could tell me. Not Jimmy. Not Tessa. Tonight she wanted me. Her mum. These occasions would become more rare. She was growing up fast. I wrapped my arm around her and squeezed. She giggled. I had to pay attention. I had to know when it was my turn and not miss it, because childhood doesn’t come twice. I turned back to Jimmy. He was watching us. Then again, neither does life. But love? Husbands? Chances? We had a lot still to talk about.
“Will you stay?” I mouthed.
“I’d like that.”
Twenty
Boundless
“YOU DID THE RIGHT THING,” SAID MY MOTHER, STROKING MY HAIR AS she had been doing for the last twenty minutes.
“Then why do I feel so terrible?”
“You get the payoff later.”
“When?”
“When Saint Peter lets you into heaven,” said my mother.
I opened my eyes, checked she was smiling, and closed them again. “You have a warped sense of humor.”
“Your father is still upstairs in our bed. I must have.”
“So when do I get this payoff? I’m nearly forty…You know the statistics. More likely to be killed by a terrorist and all that jazz.”
“It’s rubbish, a male conspiracy to make sure we conform and remain ever-grateful. You don’t want to keep a man from his children just to overturn statistics. And ill-gotten goods are light in the hand. You’
d find a way to ruin it even if you didn’t realize you were.”
“What do you think he’ll do?” I asked my wise witch of a mother.
“The right thing.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know.”
I finally sat up. “Now your third eye lets you down?”
My mother didn’t say anything for a while. “Do you know what’s possible?”
“Go on.”
“It’s possible that all you’re doing is deflecting your grief over your father’s death onto James. It’s easier to be sad about a man who might come back than a man who never will. I think you did the right thing, because knowing about the abortion when James didn’t was too much baggage to carry. Still, telling him is one thing, pushing him away is another. You’re allowed to love him too, you know. It’s not like you broke them up. They did that to one another and when you met him he was single. You’re allowed to stake your claim.”
“But we don’t have children, and children need their parents. Isn’t that what we’re told every day on the news?”
“In a perfect world, maybe, yes, children need two parents, but not necessarily at the same time. Amber, Lulu, and Maddy might get lucky. If Bea sorts herself out, they might get more than two parents. They might get two families, each one providing something that the other doesn’t. One with a little more space, one with the safety of boundaries, one with a little more independence, one with a little more unity. Best of both worlds. As long as no one falls between the two stools, as it were, I think it’s a pretty good model. Divorce can be the best thing for a child. And I, for one, am very proud of how you’ve dealt with your part in this. Just think, you might get to be that very rare thing.” My mother paused. “A good stepmother.”
Right then, I didn’t think I’d get that chance. “I don’t think he’s coming back, Mum,” I said. If I was brutally honest with myself, I’d have to admit I was still a little shocked that he’d left. I’d thought he would stick to his long-held watertight argument that the past was the past and the future was ours. But it seemed that the bucket had been leaking all along, and now, when I held it up to the light, I could see the hairline cracks I’d allowed myself to believe weren’t there.