‘I expect she regards it as an idiot board,’ Dr Chen had told Nina and William at that time. ‘Many patients find it offensive at first, before they grasp it as a lifeline. Phoebe doesn’t want to use letters right now, and she certainly doesn’t want to push them around with her feet – she wants to use her hands, and she wants to talk.’
Now, sitting beside her sister in the rose garden, Nina put an arm around her shoulders. Phoebe felt so thin and fragile, no surprise given that she barely ate enough to maintain any kind of strength. Her red hair, uncut since she’d been in Arizona, was tied back off her pale, unmade-up face, and Nina had asked her several times if she wanted the Waterson’s resident hairdresser to call on her, but Phoebe had shaken her head, as if she were too exhausted to be bothered.
‘Now don’t go upsetting her with your own problems,’ William had cautioned Nina before he’d left the clinic. ‘You don’t want to risk making things worse for her. Stick to news about Zoë and how well the book’s still selling, that sort of thing.’
This afternoon, however, Nina was suddenly assailed by the realization that things could hardly get worse for her sister. Maybe if she started treating Phoebe like Phoebe instead of an invalid stranger; maybe if she stopped excluding her from what was happening in the real world, her world, Phoebe’s traumatized subconscious – or whatever it was still causing her aphonia – might even be jolted, shocked into allowing the real Phoebe to return to them fully.
She removed her arm from around her sister’s shoulders.
‘Phoebe?’ she said.
Phoebe nodded slightly but went on looking at the rose beds.
‘Phoebe, look at me.’
Her sister turned her head.
‘Dad thinks it’s wrong to burden you with things that have been going on at home.’ Nina paused, then plunged on. ‘But I don’t think I agree with that any more. I think we’ve been keeping things from you for too long, and I think it’s time you started hearing about them, even if you can’t talk back.’
A nurse walked slowly past their bench, pushing an old man in a wheelchair. He looked very frail, but he and the nurse were chatting, and as they moved further away along the path, Nina could hear him laughing. She thought about the way her sister’s laughter had always warmed her, even when she’d been in the depths of her own drink-related problems. She had not heard her sister laugh since the early summer.
She’d wasted enough time.
‘We need you back, Phoebe,’ Nina began. ‘But none of us needs you as badly as Nick.’
The green eyes flickered, became wary, but questioning.
Nina took a deep breath.
‘Nick’s in trouble, Phoebe,’ she said. ‘Bad trouble.’
Chapter Seventy-one
Seven days before Thanksgiving, Holly wakes up in her bedroom at 1317 Antonia Street feeling cramping in her abdomen and wetness between her thighs. She turns on the bedside light and throws back the covers.
And sees the blood.
‘Help me,’ she says to the emergency room receptionist at Pacific General Hospital. ‘I think I’m losing my baby.’
She tells them her name is Barbara Miller and that she lives in Richmond and that the bleeding started while she was shopping for baby clothes on Fillmore Street. With her pregnancy at risk, no one troubles her with insurance questions; they’re too busy getting her to lie down, taking vital signs, asking medical questions and getting a doctor to check her out. They’re swift, efficient and kind, but Holly’s terror at this point is beyond their comfort.
‘Be careful,’ she urges the young, fair-haired, bespectacled doctor examining her. ‘Please be careful.’
This is exactly what she didn’t want, what she’s been so determined to avoid, but she no longer has a choice.
The memory of the paintbrush, wrapped in the vest, flashes through her mind. Oh, Nick, she flails silently, what have you done to me now?
The doctor’s sterile glove emerges stained with blood.
‘Please,’ she begs him, ‘Please do something!’
Oh, please, God, let her live.
‘It’s okay,’ he soothes her. ‘Try to relax.’
She sees the frown between his brows, and her heart races.
‘Please help my baby,’ she cries softly. ‘Don’t let her die.’
‘Who told you you were pregnant, Ms Miller?’ he asks a while later.
‘What’s wrong with my baby?’ Holly sits up a little way on the hard emergency room bed. The curtains are drawn around them. ‘I’m still cramping,’ she says. ‘I’m still bleeding.’
‘Yes, you are,’ the doctor says. ‘But you’re not pregnant.’
‘Oh, God,’ Holly whispers. ‘I’ve lost her.’
She can feel her heart beginning to break.
‘There’s no baby to lose, Ms Miller.’
‘Of course there’s a baby.’ Holly’s hands fly to her stomach. Anguish gives way to outrage. ‘Are you blind?’ She stares at him for a moment, then lies back again, staring at him. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a hospital. I thought you were supposed to be a doctor.’
His smile is an effort. ‘I was when I last checked.’
‘Get me a proper doctor,’ Holly orders. ‘An obstetrician.’ Her voice is growing harsher. ‘I need to see a real doctor, one who knows a pregnant woman when he sees one.’
The young man is unfazed.
‘Who is your regular obstetrician, Ms Miller?’
‘I don’t have one.’ Holly sees the look on his face. ‘I just moved to California. Which is why I came to the nearest hospital.’ She sits up again. Her heart is still racing. ‘Because I thought they’d have real doctors.’
She reaches down between her legs with her right hand, pushes away the sanitary pad he’s placed there, and then holds up her fingers.
‘You see that? You do have eyes? I’m bleeding, damn you.’
‘Yes, I see it.’
He leans towards the trolley to Holly’s right, pulls two Kleenex out of a box and wipes her fingers, and then he replaces the sanitary pad.
‘When did you last have a period, Ms Miller?’
‘April,’ Holly answers. Her hands fold protectively over her stomach. ‘I started morning sickness in May. I’m getting bigger all the time.’
‘You don’t look seven months’ pregnant,’ he comments gently.
‘I’m a small person,’ Holly says, ‘who’s going to have a baby.’ She pauses. ‘Unless your negligence makes me lose it.’
The doctor regards her for a moment. ‘I’m going to arrange an ultrasound for you, Ms Miller.’
‘Okay,’ Holly says. ‘About time.’ She reaches out and grabs hold of his arm. ‘But no instruments – no probes. I don’t want anything that’s going to hurt my baby.’
Still gently but firmly, the doctor disengages her fingers from his sleeve. ‘It’ll be a straightforward abdominal ultrasound, nothing invasive,’ he reassures her. ‘But I have to say, Ms Miller, that I think it’s just going to confirm that there is no pregnancy.’
She looks at him with contempt. ‘And I know it’s going to confirm that you’re a jerk.’
The doctor steps away from the bed towards the curtain.
‘I think you’re just having a period, Ms Miller.’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Holly says.
They give her five glasses of water to drink until she feels her bladder is going to burst. A woman in a white coat rubs cold jelly over her abdomen, speaks kindly to her, then performs the examination, watching the screen beside the bed as she moves the scanner back and forth across Holly’s body.
Holly lies very still, her eyes closed, focusing on her desire to pee.
‘Is my baby all right?’ she asks when the equipment is turned off.
‘The doctor will talk to you about that,’ the woman says gently.
‘Is my baby all right?’
‘You’ll have to ask the doctor.’
Holly opens her eyes. ‘It’s my baby
we’re talking about, not the goddamn doctor’s.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman tells her. ‘I’m not allowed to answer your questions.’
Holly stares up at her.
‘The hell with you,’ she says.
And lets her bladder go.
She waits a long time. She’s still bleeding, still cramping, but no one seems to care. The doctor she told to go fuck himself does not return to see her. Holly doesn’t miss him.
Finally, another doctor arrives. A woman in a suit. No white coat. A psychiatrist. They’ve sent her a shrink. Her baby is in danger, and they’ve sent her a goddamned shrink.
The woman is talking psycho-bullshit about false pregnancy. Saying how uncannily the condition can often mimic the real thing. How there can be a number of reasons for it happening to a woman, physical and emotional, and suggesting that Ms Miller should ask her own doctor to arrange some further investigations and counselling.
Holly isn’t listening. Her ears are hearing, but she’s paying no attention. This person is talking to Barbara Miller, after all, who doesn’t even exist. Not Holly Bourne, who is carrying Nick Miller’s baby girl.
The main thing, the important thing, is that the cramps do seem at last to be lessening. And if that dunce-doctor creep didn’t seem bothered by the bleeding, maybe she doesn’t need to be too scared by it either. She’s taken care of herself up until now without help from them, after all, and clearly she’s been right to do so.
One thing is for sure. It’s time to get the hell out of this place. If she stays here much longer, they’re probably going to try to talk her into getting rid of her baby.
She’ll kill them before she’ll do that.
Needing to calm down, settle herself before going back to the house, she takes a cab to Dottie Doolittle on Sacramento Street and asks the driver to wait for her while she goes inside and spends a king’s ransom on a cream silk christening gown. She pays cash, has just enough on her to manage that and the cab fare home. She’s been so careful until now with her no-credit-card, steal or pay cash, no-trail policy, and distressed as she has been this morning, she has no intention of screwing up now.
Back in the cab, Holly leans back, drained, trembling a little, the little silk gown, beautifully packed, resting on her lap. Her womb is cramping again and she’s certain that she’s still bleeding, but the gown is there, all soft silk and lace, like a talisman, proof that her daughter will be safe, will stay with her.
‘I’ll go to bed,’ she murmurs to herself. ‘I’ll rest for a while, and everything will be okay.’
The memory of the paintbrush comes back again, but she pushes it forcibly from her mind.
‘No, you don’t, Nick Miller,’ she says out loud. ‘No, you don’t.’
In his rearview mirror, the cab driver checks out the woman in the back seat. She’s a looker, even if she is talking to herself. All kinds of people talk to themselves in the back of his cab. This one seemed upset when he picked her up outside the hospital, but the visit to the kid’s store has boosted her colour. He chuckles to himself, thinking of his wife. Women and shopping.
Holly knows she’s taking a chance, coming back to Antonia Street in broad daylight, but she’s too tired to tramp around the city all day and, so far as she knows, Nina is still in Arizona with her sister and Nick is still living at the Art Center, so the hell with it. She checks out the Miller place from inside the cab, sees no sign of life, pays the driver and gets out.
Just as the door of 1315 opens and Nina Ford Miller comes out of her house. For an instant, Holly freezes, and her purse and shopping bag fall to the ground.
‘Need some help?’
Nina is coming towards her.
‘I’m fine,’ Holly says quickly.
Nina has already picked up her things and is glancing at the Dottie Doolittle bag. Automatically, Holly’s right hand moves to her stomach.
‘Don’t they have gorgeous things?’ Nina says, nice as pie, smiling at Holly. ‘When’s the baby due?’
Holly takes the bag and her purse.
‘It’s going to be a while yet,’ she says.
‘Are we neighbours?’ Nina asks. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met.’ She puts out her hand. ‘I’m Nina Miller.’
‘Sorry,’ Holly says. ‘My hands are full.’
And without another word, she hurries up the steps into her own house and shuts the door.
She’s trembling again and feeling nauseous.
‘It’s okay,’ she says to herself and the baby.
She walks up the stairs, past the second floor, on up to the third.
She goes into the nursery, opens the shopping bag, takes out the christening gown, hangs it on its padded hanger in the wardrobe.
‘There,’ she says. ‘Everything in its place.’
And then she goes into her secret room, lies down on the bed and smiles at Nick in his photographs.
‘The baby’s fine,’ she tells him. ‘Everything’s fine.’
She knows that’s the truth. Even if Nina mentions their little encounter to the nanny, and even if Vasquez forgets her promise of silence, there’s nothing much she can tell her boss, except that their neighbour’s name is Barbara Rowe and that she’s pregnant and in hiding from her wife-beating husband. By evening, Nina will probably have forgotten all about her. All will be well. Still going to plan. Nick has already left Nina. Holly is going to have his child.
It’s only a matter of time.
Chapter Seventy-two
‘I met our new neighbour when I went out,’ Nina told Teresa in the kitchen on her return from buying fresh coffee beans from Spinelli’s on Fillmore. ‘Have you ever met her?’
Teresa turned away towards the sink to hide the warmth on her cheeks. ‘You mean Mrs Rowe?’
‘She didn’t tell me her name,’ Nina said, putting beans in the grinder. ‘She seemed in a hurry.’
‘She is always rushing,’ Teresa said, washing up the same plate twice. ‘She is expecting a baby.’
‘Yes.’ Nina turned on the grinder, and for several seconds the shriek of the gadget prevented further conversation. She switched it off, knocked it gently a couple of times, then turned it back on for another second or two.
‘She is living alone,’ Teresa said when the noise had stopped, and then, swiftly, aware that she had already said more than Barbara Rowe wanted her to, she added: ‘I met her once, when we were both going to the market at the same time.’
‘I wonder if she’d like to come in for a cup of coffee some time.’
Nina tipped the fresh ground coffee into a paper filter. ‘She might like getting to know Zoë, if she’s going to have a baby of her own.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Teresa said, a little too abruptly.
Nina glanced up, surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘I think perhaps she’s a very private lady,’ Teresa tried to explain. ‘She’s not friendly like you, Mrs Miller.’
Nina nodded. ‘She did seem rather edgy when I ran into her.’ She shrugged. ‘Ah, well, she probably has problems of her own.’
She went on making coffee.
Chapter Seventy-three
Phoebe lay awake in bed in her room in the Waterson Clinic, staring out of the windows at the dustings of stars in the night sky. It was the second night in a row she had been unable to sleep.
Not that insomnia had been much of a stranger this past two-and-a-half months, in this place, in these circumstances that had seemed – until Nina’s last visit – so surreal, so wholly unconnected with her real life. Phoebe had felt, at times – many times – like a kind of machine: a soft-fleshed robot, broken down and out of synch, waiting for some mysterious missing component to be reinstalled.
The broken and smashed bones in her arms and hands had caused her great pain and even greater frustration, yet that had not seemed to her to be the source of her strange detachment from the rest of the world. It was what had accompanied those injuries, the condition – the thing – Phoebe felt
she had brought up with her out of her initial unconsciousness like a bizarre, unfamiliar item of baggage. The thing that had stolen away, stifled her ability to speak. To communicate. The thing that had cut her off from her loved ones, from normality.
Aphonia.
Aphonia.
Phoebe longed to say the word. She had lain in this bed sometimes for hours at a time striving to say it, to produce its soft consonants and flowing vowels. It had become almost symbolic to her, the trophy she would lift one morning when a nurse came to check on her first thing, and she would sit up in her bed and just say it out loud:
‘Aphonia.’
But it had never happened. She had acted it out in her mind, she had strained towards it; she’d gone the opposite route and tried to forget that the damned word even existed, to forget that her muteness mattered. She had decided that perhaps this condition was something like a desperately sought-after pregnancy, where a couple strove so valiantly for so long that their bodies somehow went on strike, and it was only when they gave up, only when they acquiesced to the fact that it was never going to happen for them, that they were suddenly rewarded. But that hadn’t worked for her either.
Phoebe realized now that she had, in fact, truly acquiesced to her new, dumb state, that she had, perhaps, grown almost to enjoy her silence. There was a strange peace about being voiceless, about not being expected to participate in conversation and, therefore, in any of the decision making – important or trivial – of everyday life. She could not opt out altogether, of course; she was still able to nod or shake her head about what she was going to eat for breakfast, or whether she wanted to go for a walk before or after lunch. But there were no real problems. Everything of consequence had been suspended. The outside world had ceased almost to exist: even when visitors came from beyond, they seemed to enter wholly into her new world, her mute bubble. No one told her their troubles; ergo, no one had any troubles.
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