Pieces of Me

by Hart, Natalie

  He returned to the sofa and I sat cross-legged, facing him, running a hand down his back. I knew not to smother him, but I needed to keep touching him, grounding myself to the man who had returned. He took a swig of beer and turned towards me, feeling my gaze. He reached out a hand to stroke my face and I felt the rough callouses of his palm against my cheek.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I dunno. Tired, I guess. Like I don’t want to think about anything for a while. What about you? What have you been up to today?”

  I’ve been waiting, I wanted to say. Waiting, waiting, waiting, as I have been every day for months.

  “Oh, you know, just sorting stuff out here. Running a few errands,” I said. It sounded so trivial, so boring. I tried to see myself through his eyes. Who was this person I had become? We sat in silence as he finished his beer, then I got him another one.

  “Steady,” he said. “I haven’t had a drink in a while. You trying to get me drunk?”

  I laughed and traced my fingers down the muscles of his back again, my fingertips rediscovering the once familiar terrain.

  “How’s Kate?” he asked.

  “Coping,” I said. “I don’t know how, but she is.” Images flashed through my mind of the coffin as it was carried off the back of the plane, of me bottle-feeding Charlotte the day Kate couldn’t look at her, of the small grainy photo of Dave in the newspaper that Kate threw in the bin only for her mother to retrieve.

  “I need to drop by and see her,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “She’d like that.”

  More silence.

  The house felt transformed by his presence. It was no longer the place that I had inhabited alone for almost eight months. That place was already a blurry memory. The house felt full again, of him and me and us. But we filled it awkwardly, with a new sense of caution that I hadn’t anticipated. Did he feel it too?

  Adam put his bottle down onto the coffee table. He reached over and pulled me towards him. Onto him. I took his face between my hands and kissed him, gently, testing and teasing his lips. I had waited eight long months for this, but now it was happening it felt strange, like we were moving through a performance of what was supposed to happen.

  Then Adam’s kisses became deeper. His teeth grazed my lips and I drew in my breath. He stood up, lifting me easily with him, and carried me up the stairs, surprising me with this increased strength. In the bedroom my hands fumbled awkwardly at the buckle of his belt. He moved my hands away and undid it himself, then pulled at my clothes, stripping them from me. I felt unexpectedly self-conscious at my nakedness.

  “Hey, slow down,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he breathed and continued.

  We didn’t make love, not in the way we had done before he left. The body that moved against mine felt different. Distant. The hands moved in a way I remembered, but the fingerprints of a stranger branded my body. I searched Adam’s face but I couldn’t find him there. He looked through me with empty eyes.

  He came quickly and lay on top of me, his body heavy and hot. I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him close, overwhelmed. I wanted to keep him on top of me. Inside me. As if somehow, with our bodies intertwined, I could fix what had been broken.

  Adam put a hand either side of my body and pushed himself up. His lips touched my forehead in a fleeting kiss and then he walked to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. I lay naked, my body cold, and listened to the sound of the shower.

  Later that night I struggled to sleep. I thought that when he got back I would sleep deeply, that I would finally be able to relax, but I was wrong.

  At first we lay facing each other, our bodies intertwined. I draped my leg over his hip the way I used to. He put an arm around me and pulled me into his chest, his cheek resting against the top of my head. For a while I felt comfortable, secure. His breathing became deep and regular and I listened to his heartbeat and was thankful that he was home. But then his arm started to feel heavy and his hipbone dug into my leg and the air I breathed was hot from his lungs as it entered my own. His body became suffocating.

  I tried to get space without disturbing him. I lifted his arm and slid carefully out from underneath. He stirred but did not wake. I moved as far across the bed as I could and sucked in the cold air, leaving only a foot stretched out to touch his leg. The smallest bit of skin-on-skin contact.

  Sometime in the night he pulled me back towards him. I was faced away this time, with my back pressed against his chest and his breath on my neck. I felt my body weigh heavily on the arm that was beneath me. I shifted. Repositioned. Became frustrated with myself. Adam was home. Why was I not asleep, curled against him, as I had imagined I would be? This was what I had been waiting for.

  When Adam first left, the bed felt huge. Each night it spoke to me of his absence as I reached out an arm to feel the cold space on the sheets where his body should have been.

  But eventually it shrank. I learnt how to inhabit the space and enjoy the freshness of the sheets as I rolled from one side to another. Now he was back and I wondered how long it would take for the bed to expand once more.

  In the kitchen, Adam finishes his sandwich.

  “What have you been up to?” he asks. He has forgotten. Who is this version of my husband that forgot that Kate was leaving?

  “Kate left.”

  “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck. Why didn’t you remind me?”

  “I did, last night,” I say. I look over at him and see the anguish in his face. “Don’t worry, it’s fine. I helped her.”

  I lower my head into my hands and rub at my eyes. I am exhausted. I feel like we are losing everyone. Ali. Dave. Now Kate.

  Adam watches me from the kitchen. He comes over and sits on the couch next to me. He puts an arm around me and then draws me into his chest. I clutch his shirt between my hands. He is my anchor, this man. Whatever happens, he is what I need to cling on to. Somehow we will get through this together. He strokes my hair and my breathing slows. I am calmer.

  “Thank you for helping her, babe,” he says.

  “We keep losing them, Adam. I don’t want to lose you too.”

  42

  When he came home, he brought back sand. Not fine white sand from the beach or colourful sand in a bottle with my name. Dirty sand. Dusty sand. Brown sand. It is the kind of sand I have seen before.

  The sand got everywhere. It spilled out of his rucksack and started covering the floorboards. It filled every crevice and crack in the house. Then it filled the space between us grain by grain by grain. Now it is rising up around our ankles and knees and waists and we have to wade through it to try and reach each other.

  “Is this why you left so much of yourself out there?” I ask. “To bring back all this sand?”

  He shrugs and rubs a hand around the back of his neck. I think I see sand fall out of his earlobe too.

  43

  The day that Dave died I put down the phone and drove straight over to Kate’s house. Kate was not there when I arrived. I banged on the door and the windows and shouted her name, but there was no reply. A neighbour emerged from the house next door. He had a beer in his hand and was wearing a plastic apron shiny with turkey grease. I had already forgotten it was Thanksgiving.

  “An ambulance took her away early this morning,” he said.

  “An ambulance?”

  “Yeah. A couple of soldiers turned up. Only saw them because my wife was up to brine the turkey. Next thing you know there’s an ambulance at the door and they’re taking her out in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask.”

  “And Noah?” I asked, trying to control the shake in my voice.

  “The boy? He went in the car with the soldiers.” He paused for a moment. “Is everything okay?”

  He must know, I thought. After so many years of losing soldiers, the image of the black sedan and two death notifiers in their class-A uniforms had become etched in the nation’s imagination. The vehi
cle had crawled through films and TV dramas and into the dreams of spouses, parents, friends and even children.

  “I don’t know,” I said. He nodded, holding the beer can awkwardly at his side.

  “We haven’t lived here long. I don’t really know her, otherwise…” He trailed off.

  “I’d better go,” I said.

  “I hope she’s okay. And, er, Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh. You too.”

  I felt the man watching me as I turned around and got back into my car. From the corner of my eye, I noticed movement at the window of his house and saw other family members gathered there, watching. A young man stood with his arm around the shoulders of a woman who must have been his mother. She turned away when I caught her eye. It was not their tragedy.

  I do not remember much about the drive to the hospital, except that I stopped the car twice to open the door and vomit. It was like moving through a sludgy dream. I prayed that there had been a mistake, that everything was okay and they were all going to come home. Like my father before he died, I bargained with a God I didn’t know I believed in.

  I think I ran into the hospital when I arrived. I might have shouted her name. A man and a woman in uniform found me, or I found them. One of them was holding Noah’s hand. He was wearing an eyepatch and swinging a sword that Kate had bought him to match Dave’s. I had bought him a toy parrot as a gift, which now lay forgotten on my sofa.

  The first thing I did was bend down and hug Noah tightly. He said “Ouch, Emma” and looked at me with large confused eyes. It was the first time he’d said my name properly. I stood up and spoke to the people in uniform.

  “I’m Emma McLaughlin, a friend of Kate,” I said. “My husband is on Dave’s, I mean, Master Sergeant Jenkins’ team. I… I heard what happened.”

  I didn’t say Adam called me. I didn’t know whether he was supposed to call me yet.

  “Oh, Mrs McLaughlin. Yes, someone was supposed to be contacting you. Mrs Jenkins asked for you.”

  I looked at my phone and saw missed calls from an unknown number, which must have been someone from the unit.

  “I’m sure she’ll be glad you’re here. She’s in the maternity unit at the moment. They’ve found her a private room… given the circumstances.”

  “The maternity unit?” I asked. “The baby… is the baby okay?”

  “She’s fine,” she said. “Tiny, but fine.”

  I put out my hand to hold onto the back of a chair, steadying myself.

  “She’s… She’s had her...?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Mrs Jenkins went into labour after receiving the notification of death.”

  I imagined Kate opening the door, seeing the uniforms, standing aside and letting them into the living room. Sitting down. Watching their lips move but not hearing their words. Not needing to hear them. She’d been through it in her head a thousand times since Dave joined the army.

  Adam said if you imagine a scenario enough times you would be prepared for it. I don’t think it prepared Kate for this.

  “I have been asked to inform you, Mrs Jenkins, that your husband has been reported dead in Baghdad, Iraq, at twenty-two hundred hours on November 24, 2011. On behalf of the Secretary of Defence, I extend to you and your family my deepest sympathy in your great loss.”

  The lips keep moving. They must be asking if there is someone they can contact for her. But she cannot focus. Something else is happening. The oxygen is leaving her body. A pain radiates out from her lower back. The baby is coming.

  A nurse walked past us and the woman in uniform called her over.

  “Nurse Rubio, this is a friend of Mrs Jenkins. Is she okay for visitors?”

  “Of course, come this way,” said the nurse.

  As we walked through the corridors of the hospital, I noticed how quiet it was. Everyone was at home, eating turkey, celebrating with their families. The smell of chlorine and antiseptic filled my nose and no longer brought with it the comforting associations of my father – it smelt only of grief and fear. Now I understood what hospitals meant for other people.

  The nurse was talking as we walked. She was a short woman with wide hips that rolled with each step. We walked slowly and I was grateful. I wasn’t sure my limbs would have let me move any faster.

  “You know normally we wouldn’t have visitors this soon, especially as you’re not next of kin, but it’ll be good for her to see a familiar face, poor thing. It’s not surprising she went into labour, given the news. A shock that big? That far along?” The nurse tutted and shook her head. “Poor thing,” she said again.

  When we got to Kate’s room, we stopped outside and looked in through the rectangular window. I noticed the smear of a handprint on the glass and wondered who had stood in that spot before me, reaching their hand towards someone on the other side of the transparent barrier.

  Kate was lying on her side, facing a Perspex box in which I could just about make out the outline of her tiny daughter. I was glad that she had her own space, away from the other new parents, fathers cooing and wiping sweat from their partners’ foreheads. But in that room together, the two of them looked so alone.

  “She can’t hold the baby on her own while she’s sedated, in case she falls asleep,” the nurse explained.

  “She’s sedated?”

  “Yes, she was in a bit of a panic when she came in, poor soul, not that you can blame her. The doctor gave her a dose to calm her down. That level of stress isn’t good for the baby.” The nurse flicked through a clipboard of notes as she spoke.

  “But apart from the sedation, she’s okay?” I asked.

  “Physically, yes. The doctor said she’s doing as well as can be expected. Emotionally, she seems like a strong woman, but the sedation will numb everything for now. It’s too much for her to deal with all at once.”

  I saw the baby stir slightly, one miniature foot pushing into the air. Kate reached out to touch the edge of the box.

  “Can I go in?” I asked. The nurse nodded. I wasn’t sure that I was ready, but I knew I must.

  The metal of the door handle felt cold under my hand as I pushed it down and I realised that my palms were sweating. As soon as the door opened, my ears filled with the steady bleeping of the machines attached to Kate and her baby, reminders of their continuing life.

  Kate turned her head at the noise of the door opening, but it took a moment for her to tear her gaze away from her daughter.

  “Kate,” I said.

  “Emma… You heard?”

  I nodded, not trusting my ability to hold back the tears if I were to say anything else. I had to be the strong one now.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

  I sat down on the bed beside her and held her hand tightly.

  “Of course I’m here, Kate. I’m just… God, I’m so sorry.” Over the following weeks I would hear these words of apology and condolence repeated to her until they were empty of meaning, but they were the only words I could find. Kate nodded, tears running down her cheeks. I felt a tight band constricting round my chest. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. It wasn’t just grief. It was guilt. Guilt at the relief I was feeling, that it was her not me.

  “Did you see her already?” Kate asked, turning towards the baby. “Did you come in while I was asleep? I think they’ve given me something. I just feel so tired.”

  “I haven’t,” I said, and moved around to the other side of the bed and looked into the case where a tiny but perfectly formed girl was lying, attached to wires and tubes. She had a mop of dark hair, darker even than Noah’s, and a small square nose. Her eyes were closed, but one minuscule hand opened and closed as if reaching for something or someone through her dreams.

  She looked so much like Dave that it took my breath away. I never thought that babies really looked like anyone. I thought it was something that people just said to placate proud but exhausted parents. But I could see Dave in every millimetre of her tiny features.

  “Kate, she’s
perfect,” I said. “She’s just beautiful.”

  Kate smiled an exhausted smile. Her face was pale and clammy. Her own dark hair was stuck to the sides of her face with dried sweat.

  “Do you think she looks like him? I look at her and just see his face, but I don’t know whether that’s just because… you know…”

  “No, she does,” I reassured her. “She really does.”

  “I can’t believe he’s gone, Emma. I can’t believe it’s really happened.”

  “I know, Kate. I know. Neither can I.”

  The small figure next to us stirred. We both watched her.

  “Do you have a name yet?” I asked.

  “Charlotte. It was Dave’s grandmother’s name – we decided on it as soon as we found out we were having a girl.”

  “It’s a lovely name,” I said.

  “He always wanted a daughter.”

  “He’ll be so proud, Kate,” I said. “You must know that.

  He’ll be so proud.” I couldn’t yet bring myself to talk in the conditional perfect, in the language of would have beens and could have beens and a world where Dave no longer existed.

  She nodded, her eyes closing. I wondered whether I should leave her for a while to let her rest. But then her eyes opened quickly, as if some distant memory had pierced though the haze of exhaustion.

  “Adam. What about Adam? Is he okay? Was he with him?”

  “He called me. He’s fine… He’s…” I realised I didn’t know. The phone call was short, fuzzy. I didn’t know what had happened or whether he was injured or anything other than the fact that he was alive and Dave was dead. “He’s fine,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m so glad he’s okay.”

  Again, that wave of relief and guilt swirled through me. Adam was okay. Dave, with his son and new baby daughter, was not.

  “Emma?”

  “Yes?”

  “I need to close my eyes for a while. Will you watch her for me?”

  “Yes, of course I will, Kate.” I stroked her forehead. “I’m not going anywhere.”