If You Knew Her

by Emily Elgar

  Cassie watches Jonny walk away across the lawn, Dennis jogging by his feet. He takes his car keys out of his pocket just before he turns around the front of the cottage. He shouldn’t be driving after all that wine, but no one else seems to notice and Cassie reminds herself that the rules are different in the country. Jack carries some dirty glasses into the kitchen, asking who wants coffee and Nicky starts stacking the plates on top of each other. Cassie takes another sip of wine, feeling it slide, silky around her mouth and she’s not sure why but as she listens to the sound of Jonny driving away she shudders, cold suddenly.

  ‘Oh, someone must have walked over your grave,’ Nicky says, turning away from Cassie towards the kitchen, a pile of plates in her hands.

  Cassie smiles at the old schoolground superstition. She hasn’t heard it in years. Typical Nicky to remember these things.

  Cassie shakes again, harder this time, the spring chill spreading into her bones, and she thinks that Nicky’s wrong. It doesn’t feel as though whoever it is strolling around in the future is walking over her grave; it feels like they’ve stopped and they’re standing on it.

  7

  Alice

  By 4.38 a.m. resisting the urge to get up is more exhausting than still being awake. I gently move David’s arm from around my waist and pad to the little alcove desk he grandly calls ‘The Office.’

  I love the bottomless peace of early morning; it reminds me of sitting with Frank. The chime of the computer as I turn it on is a shock in the silence, and my fingers freeze over the keyboard. What should I search for? I type ‘Woman, coma, pregnant’ into the search bar. The words look crazy together, but I think of the scan image, remember what I saw, and bite my lip and smile as I press search.

  There are two reported cases, both in America. One of the women – Tiffany Prescot in Phoenix, Arizona – had been in a head-on collision. She was sixteen weeks at the time. The baby, a little boy called Noah, was delivered naturally for fear the drugs used for a caesarean at that time would harm Tiffany. A comatose mother giving birth naturally doesn’t sound possible, but Noah is the proof. He’s now four years old and living with his older sister and father. Tiffany died last year. Her heart, already weak before the accident, withered and fragile, finally disintegrated after his birth.

  There’s less information on the other woman, only a brief article in Nebraska News. The baby, a little girl this time, stopped growing and was delivered by C-section prematurely. She was too small and her lungs were undeveloped. She died a week after delivery. Her mother, at the time of writing, seemed to be recovering. I imagine what it must be like, to discover your body had nurtured and given birth to a little girl, that she died without ever leaving the blankness of the hospital rooms, and all the while you were fast asleep, a red scar grinning up at you, the only proof of her existence.

  Sharma thinks Cassie is about twelve weeks. We’ll know for sure in a few hours. I’ve never got that far so I don’t know how it feels, but I’ve imagined it. The swelling, sore breasts, the hormone surges, jeans feeling tighter. I can’t imagine not knowing at twelve weeks. But then, if she did know, why didn’t she visit her GP? Tell her husband?

  ‘Every woman is different,’ I parrot to myself, thinking of the countless gynaecologists and fertility experts who have said those same words to me. I think of the fair man, who I know now is Jonny Parker, Cassie’s neighbour who ran onto the ward last night. I see distressed, reactionary friends and family every day; people are always trying to visit out of hours. But Jonny was different; he said he had to tell Cassie something, and when I wouldn’t let him get close enough to her, he told me at least a part of what he wanted Cassie to know. Just before the security guys took him away, he said, ‘She was scared.’

  And I saw in that moment in his eyes that Cassie feeling scared was worse than any other punishment he could suffer.

  I’ll have to write about Jonny’s visit in Cassie’s notes later today. I’ll tell Paula to play it down to Jack and Charlotte. The last thing we want is for them to worry he’ll come back. I shut the computer down and decide not to share my internet research findings with Sharma; he wouldn’t like the odds.

  I get back into bed – my side is still warm – and I listen to David gently snoring and stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, like a patient, before curling myself around his sleeping back.

  I pull into the hospital car park an hour before my shift starts. The sun rises lazily this morning. Kate’s sits on the horizon like a grey arachnid, absorbing any colour from the surrounding fields, smudging the dull January surroundings. I always think she’d fit in nicely in Soviet Russia. Kate’s once featured in an ‘Ugly buildings of Britain’ book – one of those books full of pictures people like to keep in the toilet. We have one in ours, with the top corner turned down on Kate’s page. Even if she’s a bit rough round the edges, for me, the hospital is like the ultimate mother, beckoning most of us into the world, patching us up when we’re scuffed and bruised, and when the outside has tripped us up too many times, she’ll see us on our way for the last time. The big, real-life stuff happens inside her sterile walls.

  I feel buoyant, too buoyant, as I get out of my car, so I give myself a talking to, as if I were a relative. I cross the car park, reminding myself of the hundreds of possible complications, of the delicacy of Cassie’s pregnancy. The automatic hospital doors open with a sound like the breaking of a seal on a vacuum.

  The receptionist looks up briefly from his newspaper as I call, ‘Good morning’, but he just turns back to his paper as I start walking down the long corridor, where the walls are decorated with watercolours of wheat fields, towards 9B.

  Cassie lies just as before, impassive to night or day. Unlike the peacefully sleeping coma patients in films, her face is twisted, as if she’s absorbed by a difficult problem, and she thinks no one can see her. I place my hand back on her abdomen, picture the scan images again, suffocate a quick, familiar twist of envy, followed by an inevitable thump of shame, and before anyone notices anything strange, I pull my hand away and walk back towards the nurses’ room.

  ‘So how are you doing, Jack? Did you manage to get any sleep last night?’ I lean towards Jack who sits opposite me in Sharma’s office, catch myself biting my lip and force myself to stop. I don’t want him to know I’m nervous.

  He shrugs; he doesn’t care about his sleep. He’s in jeans and a navy knitted jumper today. The jumper suits him. I wonder if Cassie bought it for him. He looks as though he’s already lost weight with stress, his skin dulled by exhaustion and worry. He’s broad but lean, dark and handsome in an obvious kind of way, like nature’s blueprint for ‘a handsome man’.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet us a bit later. Mr Sharma will join us in a moment; his meeting is running over a few minutes, but I thought it would be good for us to have a chat. How are you doing?’

  He shrugs again and rubs the side of his temples. In hospitals people let their guard down quicker than in normal life; I doubt Jack would ever normally be so crumpled in front of someone he doesn’t know.

  ‘I think I’m still in shock,’ he admits.

  ‘That’s totally normal. Let me know if at any time you feel you need more support. We can put you in touch with a therapist if you’d like to talk about how you’re feeling …’

  ‘No, look, my wife’s in a bloody coma. I can’t think straight, why would I want to talk to a stranger, a therapist about it?’ He looks directly at me. ‘Sorry.’ His voice crackles. ‘It’s just that, no, I haven’t slept, and frankly I …’ He clears his throat.

  In the pause I say, ‘I don’t blame you. If I was in your position I wouldn’t want to talk to a stranger either. I just want you to know the offer’s there in case you change your mind.’ He reads between the lines beautifully, possibly too tired to realise what he’s saying.

  ‘It’s been over forty-eight hours now and I still don’t believe it. Maisie’s run off before, I kept thinking Cas would come home any minute, tak
e the piss out of me for freaking out over nothing.’ He leans forward, his elbows on his knees and rubs his hands over his face like a flannel before clasping them together in his lap.

  He closes his eyes,

  ‘Every time I shut my eyes I picture her in that stream, how cold she must have been.’ He shakes his head, his voice cracking like ice. ‘She must have been so scared to be hit and just left, left like that.’ He impatiently wipes away a tear with the back of his hand before it reaches his cheek. I thought he would be the kind of person to be ashamed to cry; I’m pleased I was wrong. We should have met in the family room where it would be all right to squeeze his arm. Here, there’s a desk between us.

  I lean forward towards him. ‘It would have happened so quickly, Jack, a split second.’

  With a sharp breath, he pulls himself together and raises his head again; he wants to talk.

  ‘You know, I keep finding myself thinking all these stupid clichés like, “this is a living nightmare”, and wondering why this is happening. It’s the sort of stuff you hear about on the grapevine, and think, “Thank God that’s not me, not happening to us” and then wham!’ He claps his hands together, ‘Here we are. Here we fucking are.’ His hands rub either side of his face as if trying to hold his head together. His eyes stare down at Sharma’s desk. He doesn’t look up as he says, ‘You know the police have arrested our neighbour, Jonny?’

  I shake my head, and keep my eyes on Jack as he keeps talking.

  ‘He’s been saying his ex turned up at his place when he got back from the party, that she was with him when Cassie was hit, but she’s not corroborating his story.’

  I realise now is not the time to tell him about the pregnancy; he’s too exhausted. I want to think of an excuse to leave for a minute, to tell Sharma we have to wait until Jack’s slept before we tell him, but it’s too late. There’s a gentle knock at the door and Jack stops rubbing his temples and looks up as Sharma strides behind the desk to stand next to me, a large envelope under his arm. Jack stands to shake Sharma’s hand.

  ‘Mr Jensen,’ Sharma says, his face blank.

  Jack nods his head, and I bite my lip as Sharma sits next to me. I move my chair a few inches away; I don’t want Jack to think we’re a double act.

  ‘Mr Jensen,’ Sharma repeats. Jack looks at him but his gaze is lazy, as though he doesn’t have the energy to focus.

  ‘Our test results show little change in Cassie’s condition at present. The swelling to her brain is, I’m afraid, still substantial and doesn’t appear to have decreased. That’s not to say it won’t, of course. Time will tell on that front.’ He sounds like a newsreader; enunciating every word, he talks with practised empathy. Jack just stares at him, still frowning, Sharma seems to interpret the silence as an invitation to continue talking, so he does.

  ‘There is another matter of some delicacy that has come to light during the course of our tests on your wife.’

  Jack’s eyes flick from Sharma to me and back again to Sharma.

  Sharma coughs gently before speaking. ‘Now, this may come as a shock but she is, it transpires, pregnant.’

  It’s as though the words fly across the desk and sting him. Jack stands up immediately, to his full height. He’s a tall man; I hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘She’s pregnant, Mr Jensen.’ Sharma opens the envelope and starts to slowly lay the scan images of the baby on his desk. Jack has his hand over his mouth. He starts moving recklessly around the room, turning in circles, as if we’ve trapped him in here and he’s desperate for a way out.

  He stops suddenly and fixes his eyes on me. ‘Cassie’s pregnant?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘How … how many weeks?’

  ‘She’s twelve weeks.’

  ‘Jesus! Twelve weeks!’ He spits the words out like wasps. ‘Twelve?!’ he shouts.

  ‘Yes, Jack.’

  He rests both of his large palms on the desk and hangs his head; he exhales long and heavy. I think he might be crying but he’s shaking his head as he looks at the images.

  ‘These are from a scan we did this morning, Jack. The baby is healthy and seems to be causing Cassie no extra stress.’

  Jack squints at one of the images. The little bolts of the baby’s spine are visible and one of its hands floats in front of it; it could almost be giving a thumbs up.

  ‘No extra stress?’

  ‘Ms Longe, a senior consultant obstetrician, who you’ll meet, gave Cassie a thorough examination this morning,’ Sharma interjects. ‘From what we can see everything seems to be fine with the foetus and Cassie is naturally producing all the hormones needed to keep her pregnancy progressing. It does, of course, mean that we need to be more sensitive about the drugs we use for Cassie’s comfort to protect the foetus. We’re increasing her vitamin intake but, other than that, we don’t really need to do anything apart from let nature run its course.’

  No one speaks for a moment or two. I stare at Jack’s dark head as he bends forward over the desk. When he looks up, his face is flushed under his two-day-old stubble, the capillaries on his cheeks full of blood. He looks directly at me. He’s picked up one of the scan pictures. He’s holding it so hard the edges crumple and fold towards each other. I want to tell him to be careful.

  ‘But … but why didn’t she say?’ He looks to me again for an answer.

  ‘Jack, many women don’t know they’re pregnant, even at twelve weeks.’ I want him to feel better.

  Jack frowns, his eyes desperate. ‘She didn’t know she was pregnant, did she?’

  ‘That seems likely.’ I nod back at him, thinking the opposite.

  He opens up his hand and the scan image floats like an autumnal leaf to the floor. He clutches clumps of hair between both his hands and looks at the image by his feet. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he says, and I feel Sharma bristle with every ‘fuck’.

  Sharma stands up, opposite Jack. ‘We know this is a lot to take in, Mr Jensen, but you need to …’ Sharma is doing his two-handed ‘calm down’ gesture, stroking the air with his palms turned to the ground, but it doesn’t work on Jack.

  ‘Don’t tell me to calm down, Doctor, please. My wife is practically fucking dead and now you tell me there’s a living baby?’

  He sits heavily in his chair and looks at both of us for a moment, his eyes still wild, as if we just punched him, and then he rakes his fingers through his hair, bows his head and howls into his hands.

  An hour later, Jack and I are sitting in the family room with two styrofoam cups of hospital coffee in front of us. He takes a sip and winces.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘You think that’s bad, you should try the food.’

  He nods his head with a tired smile. The rawness around his eyes accentuates the maple syrup brown of his irises; they’re flecked with gold flakes like frozen petals. It strikes me as improbable that such a practical part of anatomy could be so beautiful.

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have got so upset earlier,’ he says.

  ‘Please don’t worry about that at all, it would be strange if you weren’t upset, all things considered.’

  ‘I told my mum, you know, about the baby. She burst into tears. She’s on her way in now.’

  I nod. ‘It sounds like it’s a shock for you both.’ I want to hear Jack say neither of them knew about the baby, but he just nods in an absent way. He looks as if he’s trying to figure out how much to tell me. I smile and let him take his time to decide.

  ‘We’ve been trying for a baby since we got married just over a year ago. We used to talk the whole time about the kind of parents we’d be. Cassie had irregular periods and stuff so we knew it might take a little while. She was pregnant over the summer, you know; we had a miscarriage just two days before the scan. It was just one of those things the doctors said. I still can’t believe she didn’t know she was pregnant.’ Jack shakes his head and smiles in the same tired way again.

  I feel a sisterly tug towards Cassie, as
I always do when I hear a woman has had a miscarriage. I like how Jack uses ‘we’ when he talks about their miscarriage.

  ‘That’s so Cassie, though. She can be spontaneous, forgetful. She’d never keep a track of her periods and things. I think she got that from her mum. It drove me crazy sometimes but I still loved her for it.’ Jack takes a sip of his coffee and opens his eyes wide, as if trying to wake himself up, before he starts talking again.

  ‘To be honest, she’d been going through a bit of a rough patch just before the accident. She was frustrated with her painting, and not sleeping well. Sounds so stupid to say that now, doesn’t it?’

  I shake my head. ‘How do you mean “a rough patch”?’

  ‘Oh, she could just get a bit down sometimes; nothing like depression, just a bit of a low mood. She’d always lived in London before we moved to the country. She found the change tougher than she thought she would, and she doesn’t drive so she felt a bit isolated. I tried to cheer her up, but she sort of went a bit insular, distanced herself from her friends, that sort of thing. Cassie told me April could be the same; she could get pretty low even before the cancer diagnosis. I always think that must have been tough on Cassie, growing up with just her depressive mum, never knowing her dad.’

  ‘Cassie never met her dad?’

  Jack shakes his head. ‘Cassie never knew who her dad was. April barely knew herself. He was some Norwegian guy April met in Mexico. I’ve seen photos of April back then when she was travelling and, if they’re anything to go by, I’ll bet Cas’s dad was a proper hippie. Anyway, it was way before the internet and without a full name April couldn’t track him down. Come to think of it, I remember Cassie saying April didn’t know she was pregnant until she was pretty far along. The Norwegian doesn’t even know Cassie exists. I always think that must be tough for Cassie, but she always said she didn’t know things any different so it didn’t affect her too much. I think it’s why she’s so family-focused, why she’s so close to my mum. She used to talk about how we’d have loads of kids, how things were going to get even better. She wanted what she never knew when she was growing up. Anyway, it’s typical Cas not to think about doing a test or anything.’