by Dani Atkins
Mitch’s eyes crinkled when he smiled, and it transformed his whole face into something that wasn’t conventionally handsome, but was still quite startlingly attractive. He was lit up from within, in almost the exact same way that Ryan had been whenever he spoke of Hope. Clearly it was a dad thing.
‘You’ve got a good memory.’
‘Not really. For me it was only a couple of months ago.’
Mitch shook his head in fascination, as if I were performing some kind of mind-boggling illusion. ‘Well, that baby you’re talking about isn’t a baby any more. Sam is six now.’
‘Six?’ I said wonderingly, as though it was a number I had never heard before. I had a sudden vivid flashback of Mitch fishing out his mobile phone to show me a photograph of his newborn baby boy, held in the arms of its mother.
Perhaps Mitch shared that memory, for his face suddenly sobered as he added: ‘Colleen and I aren’t together any more. We were divorced four years ago, so now I only get to see Sam every other weekend.’
I tried to think of something appropriate to say, but came up blank every time. Instead, I stopped worrying about whether or not it was appropriate, and for the second time that day I laid a hand lightly on his arm. I was out of step with so many people, but here, in this place that was soon to be my new home, beside the man who was soon to be my new landlord, I felt I’d found a kindred spirit. Someone who understood. We had so much more in common than I had realised and while I might not be superstitious, I couldn’t help feeling there was a reason why our paths had crossed once again today.
Chapter 6
I moved into Mitch’s grandmother’s flat the very next day after viewing it. I could probably have moved in that same night if I’d wanted to. As Mitch walked me to the door he was already sliding a front door key from his keyring.
‘Don’t you think we should wait for the paperwork?’ I’d asked, reluctant to take the key he was holding out to me in a hand roughly the size of a bear’s paw. ‘Won’t you need to take up references, or something?’
‘I know where you’ve lived for the last six years,’ he said with a sympathetic smile. ‘And where you last worked. I have all the references I need. Take the key,’ he urged, pressing it into the palm of my hand. It was still warm from his touch, and my fingers closed around it, as though I was afraid he might suddenly change his mind.
But he hadn’t. And a few days later, the paperwork was all signed and his grandmother’s home was officially mine, or at least it was for the next six months.
And now, one week later, I was sitting at the table in my new kitchen, wearing an attractive but incredibly itchy bright red jumper, and drinking far more coffee than was good for me, as I prepared to meet my daughter for the very first time.
Ryan had sounded momentarily thrown when I’d phoned him to confirm I was willing to let him introduce me as a cousin. There’d been a long moment of silence which had stretched on and on. ‘Are you still there?’ I’d eventually had to ask.
‘Erm, yes. All right. That’s, erm . . . that’s great.’
Something told me he didn’t think it was great at all, and it was only then that it occurred to me that he’d never thought I would accept his suggestion. He’d thought he had more time. ‘I’ll . . . I’ll need to talk to Chloe and get back to you about the arrangements.’
Irritation had frizzled through me like an electric shock, because couldn’t they have already discussed that?
‘I’m not going back on my word, Maddie,’ Ryan promised, uncannily picking up my secret thoughts as though they were projected on a screen. ‘I want you to meet her. I want you to see what an incredibly special little girl she is.’
But only as a distant relative. The words were screaming to be let out, but I gritted my teeth and allowed them no exit.
To be fair, Ryan had phoned back later that evening with a plan. My heart had jumped annoyingly when I’d seen his name on the screen of my new phone. Would it always do that? Was I always going to feel those emotions whenever we were in a room together? Could he see or sense them? I certainly hoped not. This whole situation was far too uncomfortable for everyone as it was.
‘Does Saturday work for you?’ he’d asked. ‘We thought it was better not to do it on a school day.’
Five days was nothing, I supposed. Not when we’d waited years for this moment. ‘Where should we meet?’ I asked, panicking that I had no idea how five-year-old girls liked to spend their time.
‘Here, of course,’ Ryan replied, as though the location had never been in question.
‘At your house?’ My voice had come out with a revealing squeak. I knew Ryan had moved out of his old flat not long after Hope was born. We’d always said it wasn’t a suitable place to raise a baby, but it was unsettling to discover the decisions we’d made together, he’d eventually carried out alone . . . or with someone else.
My next question was unavoidable. ‘Will . . . will Chloe be there as well?’ Her name still burnt my tongue every time I had to say it, but it looked as though I was going to have to get over that. Fast.
‘Of course she will. Hope would only be suspicious and unsettled if she went out, and what we want to do is to make this all as natural and casual as possible.’
A supposedly deceased mother comes to visit her five-year-old daughter for the very first time, and Ryan was talking about making it natural? Was he serious?
We set a time for the meeting and Ryan gave me his address, which I wrote down carefully in a small notebook. It wasn’t until later that I noticed I’d been gripping the pen so tightly, his address was gouged through almost half the sheets in the pad.
Although my father had wanted to come with me, I’d gently turned him down. I wasn’t nearly as adept at pretence as the rest of them so clearly were, and I didn’t want to give the game away. Not yet, at least. ‘I’ll slip up and call you “Dad”,’ I told him, softening my words with a smile. ‘And then if Hope’s as bright as you say she is, she’ll work out straight away who I am.’
Unable to deny the very real possibility of one of us tripping up over the truth, my dad had reluctantly agreed to stay away. ‘I just thought it would be easier for you if there was someone there who was on your side.’
I swallowed the uncomfortable lump in my throat, as his words served to confirm what I’d suspected. There would be sides, as in a battle. There would be gains and there would be losses, and possibly casualties. It just wasn’t possible to predict yet whose they would be.
Although Ryan had offered to pick me up, I had quietly insisted that I’d prefer to make my own way to his home. That at least spared me the embarrassment of having him look at me the way the taxi driver had done, when I’d made him drive around the block three times before I’d finally said in a shaky voice: ‘Okay, this time you can stop. I’ll get out now.’
I’d had plenty of opportunity on my circuits past his front door to assess Ryan’s new home. It was a large detached property, with a neat front garden featuring an impressive willow tree. I’d told him once, a long time ago, that they were my favourite trees and I wondered if it was sheer coincidence that the house he’d bought had one growing in its front garden. It was a question I knew I would never ask.
The drive was deeply gravelled. I could feel the block heels of my black leather boots sinking into the stones like quicksand, sucking me down. I crunched my way towards the door, my heart hammering so loudly beneath the damn itchy jumper that the sound of the gravel seemed strangely muted and distant. All I could hear was a vague whooshing noise as my blood rushed frantically through a thousand veins and capillaries, doing a passable impression of the sound made by a conch shell. I stepped from the gravel onto a paved porch. The sun had abandoned its position in the sky, which was now thick with heavy grey clouds. It looked cold and unwelcoming. In contrast, the house gave out a warm yellow glow from the many lights shining through its windows. It seemed to be reaching out, beckoning me to come closer, but suddenly I felt like I was about
to make a dreadful mistake. I didn’t belong here. My chance to be part of this world had come . . . and then gone. I should just leave.
And yet my feet refused to move from their porch. And somehow – without being instructed to do so – my hand was lifting up to the small bell set into the brickwork. I stared unblinkingly at the front door, whose top half was glazed with milky-white glass. It felt like I had been standing out there for minutes, although in reality I’m sure it could only have been seconds. It was too soon to press the bell again, and yet my hand was already on its way to do so, when suddenly the glass revealed a shape in the hallway beyond. A figure approached the door; too short to be Ryan; too tall to be Hope. I heard the rattle of a security chain and the sliding of a bolt.
It was her. She was on the other side of the glass. And when she opened the door, nothing was ever going to be the same . . . for any of us.
PART TWO
Chapter 7
Chloe
My legs were shaking as I walked towards the front door. No, scratch that. My whole body was shaking. I always knew it would feel like this. Whenever it happened, wherever it happened, this was always going to be the way my body reacted.
‘I’ll get it,’ I’d said, leaping to my feet before Ryan had a chance to answer the slightly-longer-than-necessary buzz of the doorbell. He’d looked up from his position on the floor, where he and Hope were busy building yet another sprawling Lego structure. It was Hope’s favourite pastime, and endless residences had been built, demolished and then reconstructed for her Barbie dolls and cuddly toys. ‘That girl’s going to be an architect, for sure,’ her granddad was fond of saying, his chest swelling up with pride, the way it did whenever he looked at his daughter’s daughter.
I like Bill, I always have. And it wasn’t just because of the gentle patience and love he freely showered on Hope. Bill was a generous man in all things – not financially, but then Ryan has a good job, so we didn’t need that kind of help. No, Bill has a generous heart. It was big enough to love not only his wife, his injured daughter and his grandchild, but Ryan too. I don’t think there are many people in this world who would then have held that door open a little bit wider to also invite me into their lives. But Bill had, and he’d never once made me feel like an outsider, or as though I don’t belong. But would that all change now? Would the balance of everything be thrown wildly off-kilter after the thing they’d all been praying so very long for had finally come true?
Whenever I watch Bill playing with Hope, and see his gentle patience as he drinks endless cups of invisible tea from miniature plastic beakers, or the love on his face as he sings the theme tune from her favourite animated film – his voice off-key, but knowing all the words – I feel like I’m witnessing an echo from the past. This was the father Maddie had been lucky enough to grow up with, and secretly I’ve always envied her that. My own dad died when I was so young my memories of him are a curious collage of faded photographs and stories told to me by my mother. I can no longer tell which I genuinely recall, or which I have simply imagined.
‘Are you sure?’ Ryan had asked when the doorbell had rung, his eyes searching mine, full of warmth, concern, and love. I nodded, and hoped he didn’t notice my nervous swallow.
Someone appeared to have stretched the hallway of our comfortable four-bedroom house. Surely it didn’t usually take this long to reach the front door? I felt as though I was walking on one of those travelators, the kind they have at airports, except I was walking on it the wrong way. I glanced at the large oak-framed mirror hanging in the hallway, for one last check, and then instantly wished I hadn’t. My hair was no longer smooth, and the grey shirt, which I’d thought looked so smart with my new black trousers, made me look as if I was going to a board meeting. I shook my head, watching the poker-straight shoulder-length blond hair fall back into place. There was no time to do anything about the pink flush to my cheeks, or the dryness in my mouth, because suddenly the door was before me. I could see her silhouette beyond the glass, ill-formed and shadowy; a ghost from the past, seeking to slip through the veil into the present.
My fingers trembled, making them clumsy on the bolt. From the lounge behind me I heard the crash of falling bricks and a child’s laughter as she exclaimed in exasperation, ‘Daddy!’ I wanted to run back towards them, because that was my life, they were my life. And none of it was ever going to be the same again once I opened this front door. But change was coming, inexorably, like an approaching hurricane. All I could do was hope the foundations my life was built upon were strong enough to withstand the onslaught. In my head they were unbreakable, but in the quiet secret places in my heart, I saw them tumbling into ruins, like a house made of Lego.
I opened the door.
She was so much taller than I had been expecting. I’d seen her a thousand times before, but always lying down. She would easily be able to look Ryan in the eye when they stood face-to-face, whereas the top of my head scarcely reached his jaw. He had to bend down to kiss me; with her that wouldn’t be necessary. It was a bad thought to have in my head as I faced my husband’s former lover.
I held out my hand, as though I really was at that board meeting. ‘Hello. I’m Chloe.’ My subconscious urged me to add Ryan’s wife to the end of that introduction, but I shot it down. She knew that already; it was there in the twin fires burning in her deep blue eyes. They too surprised me. I had never seen her eyes open before, and yet the colour was achingly familiar. It was the colour of my daughter’s eyes. Her daughter’s eyes, I silently corrected.
Was the hand she lifted to join mine a little hesitant and slow to respond? Perhaps it was, just a fraction. I thought I saw a slight tremor in the long thin fingers before they connected with mine. It made me feel slightly better to see that she was as nervous as I was.
‘Come in,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded more natural to her ears than it did to mine. ‘You found us okay?’ I asked, suddenly overcome with a need to plug any conversational void with meaningless babble. ‘People often get lost. Did you drive yourself?’
Maddie shook her head, and a long silky black curtain of hair moved with her, like a swirling matador’s cape. I’d brushed that hair; I’d combed it off her porcelain-white forehead and even plaited it. It was something I was sure she didn’t know, and would probably be horrified to discover. It was yet another secret that I’d be keeping to myself.
‘I’m not allowed to drive yet. I came by cab.’ For years I’d wondered about her voice. And now that I heard it, I could see how well it suited her. There was a soft huskiness in her throaty tones, which made my own sound too high and reedy in comparison.
‘Oh, of course,’ I said, wondering if she could hear the chipmunk-quality of my reply. ‘Can I take your coat?’ I held out my hand to take it from her, feeling happier to be back on familiar territory. When visitors came to your home, you greeted them politely; you enquired about their journey; you took their outer garments . . . and then you invited them in, to see if they wanted to destroy the happiness you’d thought was yours forever. I was still grappling with the realisation that I might only be a temporary custodian of the life I’d thought was mine.
Maddie was still catwalk-thin from the coma. I could see that despite the chunky bright red jumper, whose colour suited her pale skin and dark hair. It was obvious that she still had a way to go before she reached the end of the road to full recovery, but even so she appeared far healthier than I’d ever seen her look before. For a moment we stood facing each other, unable to stop ourselves from conducting a very natural comparison, in a very unnatural situation. My curves, versus her slender frame; her long dark hair, and my shorter blond locks; her eyes the colour of sapphires, mine the smoky-grey of moonstones. We were nothing alike for two people who had so much in common.
‘Ryan and Hope are through here,’ I said at last.
Maddie nodded, but didn’t move.
‘Does she know—’ She broke off, as though uncertain how to complete her sentence.
>
My voice dropped to the same whisper she’d used to ask her question. ‘All we’ve said is that a distant relative might be dropping by today. We kept it deliberately casual.’ I saw her wince at the word ‘distant’, and knew at once it wasn’t one Ryan would have chosen.
‘Okay.’
I stepped in front of her, expecting her to follow me, but two steps short of the lounge door I realised I was alone. I turned around, and was surprised by the lance of pity I felt at her clearly terrified expression. For a moment I forgot that standing in my home was the woman who could so easily destroy my life.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ Maddie said, her eyes darting to the front door, the way a cornered animal might do, scoping out its nearest escape route.
I retraced my steps until once again I stood before her. ‘Yes you can,’ I assured her, wondering how many times I would lie awake at night regretting those words.
A great many, as it turned out.
Ryan got to his feet in one fluid movement as I ushered the first woman he had loved into our lounge. I was watching Maddie carefully, and saw her eyes flash briefly to him before flying towards the dark-haired little girl kneeling on the rug in front of the fire. I felt relief . . . and then terror.
‘Maddie, welcome,’ said Ryan, walking over to where we both stood. Was that weird for him, I wondered, to see us standing there side by side? The wife he had, and the wife he could have had. It invited comparisons, it had to. And despite the fact that she’d only recently been discharged from hospital, I still thought that if it came to a contest, physically I’d be the one to come out wanting.
I saw Ryan hesitate for a moment before placing his hands lightly on her shoulders, and grazing one perfect white cheek with his lips. She flinched as though he’d burnt her. I flinched too, for an entirely different reason.