Together

by Julie Cohen

  ‘He’s not going to look,’ Robbie said, dully. ‘We can’t stay here forever, hoping that one day he’ll come back. I’ll keep on trying; I’ll send new addresses. But . . . he’s not going to look.’

  ‘We couldn’t tell Adam,’ said Emily. ‘If we’re going to start again and pretend this never happened, we can’t tell him anything about it at all. Never even tell him he’s adopted, because what if he grows up and decides to find out the truth? How would he feel about himself? About us?’

  ‘Another thing never to talk about,’ Robbie said, and he felt Emily flinching beside him. ‘We can add it to the list.’

  ‘Is this what we’re going to do?’ she asked. ‘Move on, when things get tough? For the rest of our lives?’

  ‘If necessary, yes.’ His jaw was set. ‘Places aren’t important. You and Adam are important. You’re all that’s important.’

  ‘But we’re not, Robbie. You have a son. Adam . . . he might have other parents.’

  ‘It’s the three of us.’ Robbie put his arm around her shoulders and held her tight. He was still thirsty; he’d always be thirsty. But when he held Emily, it didn’t matter.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Emily. ‘I don’t think it’s just the three of us. I think it’s lots of people, all of them involved. We could be hurting someone by going.’

  ‘But we’d hurt us by staying.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. She leaned against him, but her eyes were looking out into the dark night. As if she could see something if she tried hard enough.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In the morning they went to the beach on Key Biscayne. Emily packed a picnic and Robbie packed the toys and towels. Sometimes they borrowed a boat for the day but today they didn’t.

  Robbie had made up his mind, she knew. Maybe it was simpler for him: he’d lost a child already, and he didn’t want to go through that again. For Robbie, love was always enough of an answer. But for Emily, things were more complicated. She saw the way their decisions reached out to affect other people. How a chance encounter – in an airport, a train station, a gust of wind from nowhere – could create rippling circles all around them. Change everything forever.

  They spread a blanket out on the sand. School was back in session and, on a weekday morning, the beach was nearly deserted. There was a woman walking along the shoreline in the distance and a group of teenagers, presumably skipping school, lounging and smoking on the sand near the car park.

  Adam sat on her lap to eat his peanut butter sandwiches. He laughed and pointed with a sandy finger at a pelican standing with its legs in the surf. She bent her head to smell his hair, which was still sweet from the shampoo she’d used last night.

  He might not, by any rights, be hers.

  She thought about the orphanage where they’d first met their son: all the photos on the walls of children and no parents. Where they assigned names to children according to the alphabet. She’d always been grateful that Adam would never remember that place. What if he’d only been placed there because he’d been stolen from his real parents? What if Robbie and she had done him an enormous wrong, just because they loved him?

  Her eyes filled with tears and she felt Robbie touch her arm. ‘Why don’t you take a little walk,’ he said to her. ‘Adam and I are going to build a sand castle, aren’t we Adam?’

  She nodded, not trusting her voice, and set Adam on his feet. He immediately toddled over to Robbie, who gave him a plastic bucket and spade. Before either of them could see her tears fall, she turned and walked quickly towards the sea. The pelican spread its wings and flapped off with its strange prehistoric grace. When she reached the water, it was warm on her bare feet, hardly colder than the tears she wiped from her face with her sleeve.

  How was she supposed to decide what to do? Every choice she could possibly make was wrong.

  ‘Dr Brandon?’

  A woman had approached her and was standing a few feet away, up to her ankles in the water. Emily thought it was maybe the one who’d been walking by herself. Her hair was scraped back from her face; she wore rolled-up jeans that hung off her skinny frame.

  Emily quickly pulled down her sunglasses from the top of her head and put them on. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t recognise me,’ said the woman. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t disturb you.’

  ‘Not at all. How do we know each other?’

  ‘I was one of your patients. Back in May? Bev Schulman? With the twins. Born at twenty-four weeks.’

  She said it matter-of-factly, but as soon as Emily heard the word ‘twins’ she knew who this was. Mrs Schulman had given birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, prematurely. Emily had seen her as an emergency.

  Both children had been born alive: tiny, curled up, too small for their wrinkled skin. Each of them could fit into the palm of one of Emily’s hands. She was able to give Mrs Schulman only a glimpse of them before they were rushed away from their mother to the tubes and machines of the neonatal ICU.

  The boy died within twenty-four hours. The girl hung on for two days.

  ‘Oh,’ said Emily, instinctively stepping forward and holding out her hand to the other woman. ‘Mrs Schulman. I’m so sorry I didn’t recognise you.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’ve changed a lot.’ The hand she gave to Emily was thin and cold. ‘I’m Bev Hirsch now. Back to my maiden name. Jonny and I split up.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Bev tilted her head so that she could look out at the water. ‘We weren’t strong enough to last after we lost Matthew and Miriam. He blamed me, and I blamed him. But I’ve been walking on this beach every day since he left, and I’m coming to see that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just the way it happened.’

  ‘Loss can split up families,’ said Emily. ‘We see it all the time as doctors. I’m sorry it happened to you.’

  The other woman nodded. ‘You were kind to me. I was really scared, and you were kind. I meant to send a letter to the hospital after I got home, but I couldn’t. It was too hard. So when I saw you, I just wanted to say thank you.’

  Behind them, there was a roar and a child’s shriek. The two of them instinctively turned to see what had happened: Robbie was lying on his back on the beach, with piles of sand on top of him. Adam held an empty bucket and Robbie was laughing and brushing sand out of his eyes and hair.

  ‘They’re your family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emily remembered how she used to feel, walking along this beach before Adam and seeing all the children playing. How she used to feel around pregnant women, despite her job. The way she hated herself for being envious of them, for having to turn away sometimes. But Bev, who had lost so much, didn’t turn away.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she said to Emily. ‘Hold on tight to them, OK?’

  She squeezed Emily’s hand again and went on her way, along the tide line in her bare feet.

  Emily went back to where they’d spread out the blanket. Adam was digging up a spadeful of sand to dump on to his father. The child looked up as she approached and she saw the simple gladness on his face.

  ‘We should go,’ Emily said. She ruffled Adam’s hair and sat beside Robbie, who looped his arm around her waist and pulled her down on to the sand with him.

  ‘You want to go home?’ he asked her.

  ‘No. I’m talking about going. Living somewhere new. It doesn’t matter where, as long as it has a coast and a hospital, right? We can make anywhere our home, as long as we’re together.’

  She looked along the beach, to where her former patient was walking along the edge of the turquoise water, alone.

  PART FOUR

  1972

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  August 1972

  Miami, Florida

  Miami was hot. After the thin air at La Paz’s high altitude, the atmosphere f
elt almost solid and soupy. Sweat sprang out on to Emily’s skin, dampening her shirt as soon as she stepped out of the plane on to the stairs leading down to the tarmac. The surface, ablaze with heat, penetrated the soles of her shoes soon after she stepped off the stairs.

  Christopher carried their coats and their smallest suitcase as they walked to the waiting bus. Even so, he touched her elbow as she stepped up into the vehicle, as if she needed steadying.

  In less than an hour they would be meeting her family at the holiday villa they’d rented in Miami Beach. Emily hadn’t seen any of them for over a year; she hadn’t even spoken to them on the phone for weeks, as service was patchy in Bolivia at the best of times. But as the bus motored its way to the terminal, she wasn’t thinking about her father and her mother and Polly. She was thinking about Consuela Diaz.

  Consuela Diaz was fourteen years old and a street child. She lived under a bridge in La Paz with a loose group of other orphans who lived by stealing, begging, scavenging and selling themselves. She had thick black hair that was tied tightly in plaits around her head. She was eight and a half months pregnant and her belly protruded from her skinny body.

  She also had a suppurating foot, blackened and swollen, the result of a rat bite that had gone untreated.

  When Consuela had come into Emily’s antenatal clinic early yesterday morning, Emily had seen Consuela’s smile first, and then her elaborately plaited hair, and then she had smelled the rot.

  ‘How much of her foot did you need to take?’ she asked Christopher, now, as they embarked from the bus. The terminal was air-conditioned and it chilled her skin.

  ‘Whose foot?’ Christopher was busy looking for the signs pointing them to passport control.

  ‘Consuela Diaz.’

  ‘The young girl with gangrene?’ He shook his head. ‘You saw how far advanced it was. We couldn’t risk the baby as well as her. I had to take it off mid-shin.’

  Emily stopped walking on the polished floor. The other passengers streamed around and past them. ‘Mid-shin?’

  She had held Consuela’s hand and told her: ‘I’m sending you to my husband, Mr Knight. He’s a good surgeon, and a good man; he’ll do everything for you that he can.’ And Consuela had nodded trustingly and her baby had kicked, and a beautiful smile had blossomed on her face. She had a gap between her two front teeth, which made her look even younger than she was.

  ‘Mid-shin?’ Emily repeated. ‘How is she going to survive, where she is, without half her leg? How is she going to cope with having a baby?’

  ‘With any luck, she’ll get a prosthesis. I spoke with Randall.’

  ‘I don’t think we should have left.’

  Christopher put down their suitcase. He touched her chin, tilted up her head. ‘Darling. We did a lot of good, but our time there is over.’

  ‘We could have stayed. They’re not even getting a replacement OB/GYN for two months, at earliest.’

  ‘Our visas ran out. We can discuss going back. We have plenty of time to talk it over, once we go back to England. But this is our holiday, now. It’s time for us to relax. We’ve earned it.’

  ‘It’s difficult for me to think of us having a nice holiday in Florida while all of that is still going on back there without us to help.’

  ‘We can only do so much,’ he said, gently. ‘We have to think about ourselves, as well.’

  She gazed at her husband’s kind, narrow face; his blue eyes behind his spectacles. His time had been worse than hers. Post-operative care in La Paz could be dire, and she knew that he often operated knowing that even if the surgery was a success, the patient might well die anyway. At least she had the compensation of delivering healthy babies.

  He deserved a rest. He deserved a successful, lucrative career, and to make a name for himself as a surgeon. There was no reason why Christopher should have to share her dread at going back to England, to a normal life. An empty life.

  ‘I just can’t stop thinking about Consuela,’ she said.

  ‘I understand.’ He kissed her forehead and they continued on to passport control, where Christopher explained to the immigration official why they were in Miami, and had a polite few minutes’ chat about their work in Bolivia. In the luggage hall, Emily grabbed her own suitcase off the belt. It was light: hardly heavy enough to contain everything she’d lived with for two years. But then, all the important things she’d lived with in Bolivia couldn’t be carried in a bag.

  Every day there had been a new emergency, a new problem, new lives. The clinic was over-used and under-staffed. For two years she had barely slept for more than four hours at a time. She worked closely with a number of Bolivian midwives but there were endless complications, and programmes to be developed for antenatal and postnatal care, for disseminating and educating about contraception when possible, for SDT testing and treatment. Christopher could help individual patients, but the changes she could help to make in this desperately poor area could help the next generation, and the one after that.

  It had been inspirational and heartbreaking and exhilarating and depressing, and for two years she had barely had enough time to think about herself.

  Whenever she thought about two weeks’ holiday with nothing to do, her mind shied away from it.

  Christopher fetched a trolley and put their suitcases on it. He stowed their passports safely away in the breast pocket of his jacket, smoothed back his neat sandy hair. He smiled at her.

  ‘I can’t wait to get to the villa,’ he said. ‘I feel as if I could sleep for a week.’

  Emily thought about Consuela Diaz, fourteen years old, pregnant, penniless, missing a family and half her leg, lying in the clinic, feeling her baby kicking beneath her hands.

  Emily didn’t know if she was going to sleep at all, and if she did, what dreams would come.

  She followed her husband through customs, out to the arrivals hall.

  Robbie tucked his flask back in his pocket and popped a Wint O Green Life Saver. If his breath smelled of Jim Beam he wouldn’t have five minutes of peace before they got home and he could escape to his shed. And he didn’t want to have to escape; he wanted to play Hot Wheels with William and tuck him into bed. While William and Marie had been gone he’d set up the kid’s bedroom with an elaborate track for the cars to go on, hills and curves and loops.

  Marie was going to go crazy, of course. She’d been gone a week and Bob had made another mess she would have to clean up. But he couldn’t resist making the track bigger and bigger until it reached from the bed to the door and covered nearly the entire room in an orange plastic tangle. And William wouldn’t see it as a mess. He’d see it as heaven: something that his daddy had magically created for him.

  Robbie couldn’t wait to see his face. The two of them would spend a long, happy time zooming the cars around, racing, adjusting the track so the cars could go faster. Two peas in a pod, Marie would say, in a disapproving tone, and Robbie would try not to think about the times that his own mother had said exactly the same thing about him and his father.

  He pulled out the flask and unscrewed it before he remembered his resolution not to smell of bourbon, and put it back into his pocket. He lit a cigarette instead.

  Their plane should have arrived already, but the lady at the counter had said it had been delayed in Chicago by bad weather. So he stood at the arrivals gate with the crowd of people waiting, and watched the people coming through the doors. All the little dramas going on around him, with people flying from all over the world and arriving home. A family came through, mother and father and a toddler and a baby, and the elderly Latino couple standing next to him cried out in joy. The toddler wobbled over to them to be scooped up and fussed over. A slender young man with an Afro emerged, looking anxious, until he spotted a tall young woman in the crowd and the two of them ran to each other and hugged so hard they looked as if they were going to meld together. A grey-haired w
oman in a flowing caftan wafted through the door and the expression on her face when she scanned the crowd was almost angry. It set into grim resolution as she approached another grey-haired woman, in a pants suit, and the two of them leaned forward to kiss each other on the cheek with the minimal possible contact.

  He’d used to love this. Arrivals and departures showed you what you really needed to know about people. He used to pause when he was travelling and notice these hellos and goodbyes around him.

  Recently, not so much.

  He remembered his own arrival at this airport six years ago, unshaven and covered with mosquito bites, in civilian clothes that didn’t fit him any more, looking for sunshine and quiet, and his brain skipped ahead and his hand automatically reached for the flask again.

  He was midway through his sip, the liquor’s bite a welcome taste, when she came through the door.

  Ten years had done nothing to her. She was the girl he had seen on the station concourse, the girl he had kissed in the rain, the girl who had said goodbye to him in her father’s car. Robbie’s heart paused and then it thumped two beats at once and happiness rushed through him, a physical presence more than an emotion, grabbing hold of him and stopping his movements and his breathing, the bourbon pooled in his mouth waiting to be swallowed.

  Her hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail. Her face was tanned. She had small gold earrings in her ears and she was wearing a white blouse and khaki trousers and flat shoes. The way she moved was the same. Even if he could not have seen her face he would have recognised her from her walk. She emerged whole, from his memory, into the arrivals area of Miami airport, the girl he tried never to think of, the girl he thought about all the time.

  Emily.

  His body came unstuck. He gulped down the whiskey, dropped his cigarette and shoved the flask back in his pocket, stepping forward to greet her, to touch her.