Back home in their tiny apartment, she was invaded by inconsolable thoughts about the baby, who was sitting in a deep pool inside her, its shape mutating. Was she going to lose all these moments, the bicycle along the Hudson, the plans to go back to Mexico – all the moments she didn’t yet know but which now she felt as both abstract and sharp – with a child? She didn’t think it was the baby’s fault. It was all her.
If her dreams in Mexico had been vivid, in New York it was as if the foetus was a tab of acid. Elise would fall asleep and find herself back in her early teens, in the years immediately after her mother’s death. The river of her hometown glowed like a rainbow and the municipal lime trees seemed to pulse. At night she swore she saw a girl walking round their room, and on her shifts in the diner, as she fed pastrami subs to the men in angular suits, she believed the girl was her unborn daughter. Her face was clear to Elise, and she was alone, and always on the move. She did not mention these visions to Matt.
*
Matt’s attitude to the unborn baby was also mixed. He was solicitous about how Elise felt, nervous for her. He focused more on Elise than on the baby, shying from hypotheses about the future – the baby’s gender, where they would live, whether it would look more like him or her. He kept wanting to help Elise – but you can’t help a person to be sick much more than holding back their hair, and Elise felt this to be very much something she was enduring on her own. She felt a physical boundary between them. What was happening to her was something Matt could never understand. He did what he could, beginning to look for an apartment with two bedrooms, which meant they’d have to move to somewhere even more rundown than where they were living now.
Like many areas in Brooklyn at this time, Ridgewood was falling apart. Once-beautiful buildings were derelict and condemned, their nineteenth-century grandeur long gone. Action was being taken to preserve the old dwellings, built when the area had been booming, but everything was still in a bad state. Elise saw how artists and African-American communities were claiming these vacated spaces in order to stop them falling down, but equally she’d see the crack addicts, the strung-out women left to fend for themselves, kids as young as five or six being sent to buy their parents’ drugs. Meanwhile, Wall Street was doing very nicely.
Where will we live? she asked Matt, but he told her not to worry. He made sure she ate well. He built a small bookshelf, ready for small books. She watched him drilling screws into holes, methodically measuring the distance between the shelves, deciding how low to the floor the first shelf should be, for the short arms soon to come.
They never talked about their relationship, nor stopped to question if they even had one. It was as if to question the viability of this union might crack them open at a time when they needed to be watertight. They still slept together, they cooked and ate together, and yet both of them knew that what they had was a completely different creature to their relationships with Shara and Connie. Some days, Elise couldn’t believe they’d ended up like this. She grew despondent sometimes. Their story had become less a case of rescuing each other, and more one of deserving each other. An adulterer, a marriage-wrecker. Depending on the time of day, this could easily be their story.
‘Do you think Connie told Shara about the baby?’ she asked him one evening as they were lying in bed.
‘Yeah, I do,’ said Matt.
Elise turned on her side to face him. ‘Do you feel bad?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
‘Sometimes, I think we could give her our baby,’ she said.
Matt turned his head towards her. ‘What?’
‘We could give the baby to Shara.’
‘Are you serious? “Here, Shar, take a baby I had with another woman – it’ll grow up to look like me as a lovely reminder of how shit your life was in ’83.” Elise, sometimes I wonder what goes on inside your head.’
They lay in silence for a few minutes. ‘Elise?’ said Matt.
‘Yes?’
‘Does this mean you’ve thought about giving it up?’
Elise closed her eyes. Before her death, her mother had always been frank: the addition of a child – the addition of Elise – had not been an extension of what Patricia already had. What she’d had was gone. People were crazy to think otherwise. It was a completely new building and there were weeks, months, years, when you didn’t know where you’d put the keys. An altered life, my love. And it’s where I had to live.
Elise had asked her mother, Were you happy to live there? And her mother took her in her arms and said, Yes. She said it had taken a while, but eventually, she could not remember what had come before.
The experience of forgetting oneself like that had seemed terrifying to the young Elise, but after her mother’s death she had felt as if she was floating in pieces anyway, losing bits of herself. Even now, the act of self-vanishing held an alluring and macabre appeal.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I just thought about giving it to Shara.’
‘I don’t think Shara’s ever going to be your friend again, El,’ Matt said heavily. ‘Even if you do try and give her your baby. We’ve made our bed.’
Elise thought again of the dream she’d had, her walking daughter, the roof of her house caving in. She reached for the chain of her necklace and tugged it absentmindedly, slipping the gold E over her chin and letting it drop back to her chest.
‘Things are going to change,’ said Matt more gently. ‘Even more than they already have. But I’ve said it before. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here for you.’
‘When will you tell your parents about the baby?’
Matt paused. ‘They’re old-fashioned,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘We’re – not married.’
‘So let’s get married.’
Matt was quiet. Elise knew there’d been no enthusiasm in her voice, and that such a prospect was unlikely to take place. He began to rub his forehead, pressing his closed eyes as if to push the tension out. ‘They loved Shara a lot,’ he said.
Elise felt her panic rising. ‘That’s a cruel thing to say. You make it sound like they could never love me.’
‘Hey, hey,’ he said, putting his hands on her exposed shoulder. ‘Of course they could love you. They will love you. It’s just taking them a while to get used to the fact I’m not with her. I love you. You do believe me, don’t you?’
‘I believe you.’
Elise didn’t tell him that she loved him back. She felt that one of them, at least, needed to be honest.
39
Heavier and heavier, Elise grew. The sickness and bone-dead tiredness abated by the fourth and fifth months of her pregnancy. She had not once taken a day off work at the diner, and had become friends with her new co-worker, Yolanda, a woman in her forties, who was sending money back to Puerto Rico where her elderly parents lived. Yolanda had no children and no husband. She said, ‘El tipo está muerto,’ delivered with a shrug. The guy’s dead. Yoli would bring sweet little cakes for Elise, almondy balls of baked dough, dusted in icing sugar. Yoli was the only person apart from Matt who Elise let pat her belly. Yoli would get to where she guessed the baby’s head was and talk to it. ‘Hola, mi cariño. Pronto nos vemos.’
Hello, my darling. We’ll see each other soon.
Elise wanted to be near Yoli all the time.
*
One day, a woman came into the diner and sat straight down at a table by the window. She had red hair, like Connie’s, and was about the same height. She had a white woman’s redhead skin: so pale as to be almost translucent, the telltale freckles over her nose. Elise couldn’t stop staring. ‘You OK, mija?’ said Yolanda. ‘You look like you seen a ghost.’
After the woman had drunk her coffee, read half of her New York Times and gone, Elise snuck into the staff restrooms and cried. She put her hands ferociously against her face as if to press the tears back in. She missed Connie so much. She missed her like a limb.
That evening, Elise lay alone
in the bed in the tiny apartment, watching the street light coming in the window. She imagined if Connie had walked through the diner door today, as she’d once walked through the doors of Seedling. Tall Connie, neat and elegant Connie, wrapped up in a long wool coat. What would Elise have said to her? Their last encounter had been like something out of a Greek tragedy, wailing on a beach, sand everywhere, accusations too. What was Connie doing, right now, this minute?
Matt was still at work. He was often late these days, working on a new show called, of all things, Mamma and Me, a sitcom about an Italian-American newly married young couple who are trying hard to establish an independent life for themselves in NYC despite the best attempts of their respective families. ‘It’s like The Godfather meets Happy Days,’ said Matt.
‘Is it funny?’ said Elise.
‘Bits of it. The bits I write,’ he said, grinning.
He’d had a small promotion at the network and was writing several of the episodes. The pilot had been successful, and the first series was due to air soon. He was writing all hours, and now they’d begun filming, he was often at the studio working out last-minute drafts and watching the recordings. He seemed enthused again for life, and bigger bags of groceries were turning up when he came home from work. ‘We need to feed you up, good and proper,’ he’d say.
*
Eventually, Elise could take the absence of Connie no longer. It pressed on her heart like a dying thing, calling to her, begging her to keep it alive. One day, alone again in the apartment, Elise lifted their telephone receiver to call Connie’s house in London. Her hand was sure, her mind was made up. It felt right, it felt important. It was the only number in the world she’d memorized. The telephone did not ring for very long, which caught her by surprise.
‘Hello?’ said a voice. It was Mary O’Reilly.
Hearing the Irishwoman’s tone took Elise straight back to the early days, the sense of languor and excitement that had flooded her daily. She closed her eyes. ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘It’s Elise. Is Connie there?’
There was a pause on the line. ‘She is not.’
Elise knew that Mary was lying. ‘Please let me speak to her.’
‘She’s not here. Where are you, Elise?’
‘I’m in New York. I need to speak to her.’
There was a pause. ‘You’ve done damage, Elise,’ said Mary.
‘I’ve done damage?’
‘You’d better not be coming back now,’ said Mary. ‘You’re not coming back, are you?’
‘No,’ said Elise. ‘I’m not coming back.’
‘Because it’s the last thing she needs.’
‘Is she OK?’
There was a scuffling on Mary’s end, and Elise couldn’t hear what the woman was saying. ‘Connie?’ Elise called. ‘Connie, is that you?’
‘I’m sorry, that’s a wrong number,’ said Mary, and she hung up.
*
Elise sat back against the arm of the sofa. Outside, the traffic flowed and honked. She sat in the dark and listened to the dialling tone, hot tears welling in her eyes, splashing down her cheeks and pooling into the telephone speaker. She didn’t move for hours. But when she heard Matt’s key in the door, she rose and went to bed and pretended to be fast asleep.
40
The last two months of Elise’s pregnancy exhausted her. She felt like her body was eighteen times its normal size. She couldn’t sleep for longer than half an hour at a time, because to turn herself over required several manoeuvres. She couldn’t see her feet. Parts of herself were literally disappearing before her very eyes whilst one part – her stomach – never seemed to stop growing. She thought that perhaps the baby would never actually come out, but would stay inside getting bigger and bigger until she either levitated or exploded.
She ate a lot. Yolanda brought food back from the diner, where Elise had had to stop working – or sometimes she brought food she’d cooked at her own apartment. Elise met Yoli often, and the two of them would take inching walks round the neighbourhood, the slowest Elise had ever taken in her life, arm in arm round Irving Square Park, pausing on benches, soaking up the sun. It was July, and New York had left behind its pleasant weather, sliding into unbearable humidity and trapped heat. They window-shopped, never going in, until one day they passed a bookshop and Elise stopped outside it, and saw how dark and cool it was, how polished the old floorboards.
When she saw it, she wondered if she’d known it might have been there all along. A pile on a table near the door, under the heading ‘New Releases’. Elise waddled over and stood before it like a child at an altar, hardly daring to touch the top cover. It was a green line drawing of rabbit, seemingly morphing into a woman’s silhouette. I’m writing about a green rabbit. How strange to see Connie’s name like that again! She was a far cry from Brixton library. To see the words Green and Rabbit put together in a new way, thousands of miles from where Con first mentioned them, swinging around on her office chair in London, frowning as she reluctantly alluded to what she was writing. Connie was here again – in words, not a voice on the telephone, or a face on the pillow next to her – but here in the bookshop, nonetheless. Connie had made her presence known again. She too had made a map of herself, and Elise had found her. She caressed the book with something akin to fear.
‘What’s that?’ said Yolanda.
‘It’s a book my – friend wrote,’ said Elise. She put it down and placed a hand on her stomach.
‘Your friend wrote that?’ Yolanda’s eyes widened. ‘What’s it about? A green rabbit?’
‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ said Elise.
‘Green’s a bad-luck colour,’ said Yolanda.
‘I always thought it was the colour of hope.’
‘Jealousy,’ said Yolanda. ‘Whose rabbit is it?’
Elise flipped open the book and read the synopsis on the inside jacket. ‘I think Rabbit is the name of the main character, Yoli.’
Yolanda’s eyes twinkled as she glanced at Elise’s stomach. ‘¿Ah si? Se multiplica.’
Elise laughed. ‘That’s right. She multiplies.’
Elise took the book to the counter and handed over her money.
*
She and Yolanda embraced on the stoop of Elise and Matt’s apartment, and Yoli said she would come round tomorrow with some more food. She only lived four blocks away so the walk was easy.
‘You don’t need to do that, Yoli,’ said Elise. ‘How will I repay you?’
Yolanda batted the air with her hand. ‘You need to eat,’ she said. ‘The niña will be coming.’ Yolanda had long been convinced it was a girl.
Elise rested her hand on the top of the huge bump, watching Yolanda make her way down the long street, her denim skirt flapping against the backs of her toned legs, her worn-down mules slap-slapping the hot stone of the sidewalk. Elise had painted her toenails for her, cherry-red, and Yoli had done Elise’s. Elise wondered what Yoli would do for the rest of the day, what she herself would do. They’d become close. Loneliness had done it, the trials of the diner, the growing bump. Stay with me! Elise wanted to call after the other woman. Please. I don’t know what I’m doing!
Instead of calling for her, she pulled Green Rabbit out of the brown-paper bag the bookseller had wrapped it in. She read the synopsis on the inside jacket again. ‘Happy, arrogant and always in charge, Rabbit lives in her own world – until one day she falls in love. Rabbit must learn when to let go and when to hold on – because when you don’t know what freedom looks like, it’s hard to tell when it’s gone. A beautiful, timeless fable of transformation, passion and regret from the bestselling author of Wax Heart.’
Beneath this were some reviews: ‘Constance Holden proves yet again she is the mistress of human emotion.’ ‘Sparkling, wise and strange.’ ‘A weird tale of a weird woman and how love makes fools of us all.’
Elise rolled her eyes and lumbered up the stoop, unlocking the front door. She made it up the narrow flight of stairs to the second floor, and
moved slowly to the living-room couch, where she lowered herself and opened the book.
For Shara, read the dedication.
Elise read on.
She kept reading until the sun had set behind the rooftops, and the street came alive with the night-goers; the young women of Elise’s age, all dressed up and ready to go to a club; the kids on their way to the basketball court, the hard and rhythmic thump of their ball like a heartbeat taken from a body for everyone to hear. The prose of the book was strange – slightly detached, yet more detailed and psychological than any fable ought to be. Rabbit’s lover had no name; it was not always possible to intuit whether the lover was a man or a woman, but regardless they wrought havoc inside the large ego of Rabbit’s head. The setting had a mystical quality, but it was London all right; Elise just knew. It was quieter than Wax Heart, fewer dramatis personae, more interior, almost poetic and bare. The tenderness and brutality of love. Rabbit, skinned alive.
Elise didn’t hear Matt come in. He came towards her and leaned over, placing a kiss on the top of her head. Elise felt completely away from him, away from everyone, just a pair of hands clutching a book, when usually her body was weighted with fifty anchors to the seabed of the couch. As she turned the pages, she felt she would never move again, and one day they would discover her, covered in barnacles, if the waters ever took Brooklyn. She felt a desire to be older, because if I was older, she read, I would not feel like I am nothing. I would be as solid as a stone sculpture that has been left on a cliff by a tribe of druids, revered and protected, in the free air, awesome in my lichen-covered skin.
The Confession Page 27