While I Was Sleeping

by Dani Atkins

  I’m sure he read the distraught look on my face, because he quickly composed himself and reached for humour to disguise his reaction. ‘I feel like I ought to be saying, “Honey, I’m home.” ’

  I smiled nervously, still not sure if I should be apologising. But for what? For not being Maddie?

  ‘How has your day been?’ Ryan asked, carelessly dropping his briefcase and coat onto the settee and walking towards us. Hope pushed against my restraining hands, craning her entire body towards her daddy. Her little arms were outstretched; a miniature superman preparing to launch through the air to reach him. He plucked her from me and folded his arms around her in an enveloping cuddle. He burrowed his face against the top of her head, breathing her in as though they’d been separated for years instead of hours.

  ‘You’ve no idea how much I missed her today,’ he said, his eyes looking suspiciously bright when he finally raised his head. My heart melted as I saw and felt the love between them. ‘But I bet she didn’t miss me one bit,’ he said with a rueful smile.

  ‘No, she definitely did. She kept looking for you,’ I lied, just to make him smile again. And he did.

  ‘And what is that smell?’ asked Ryan, sniffing in an exaggerated fashion.

  ‘Oh no, I only just changed her,’ I lamented.

  Ryan laughed and began to literally follow his nose towards the kitchen, inhaling deeply as he went, like a bloodhound on a mission. ‘That smell,’ he declared, stopping in front of the cooker.

  ‘Oh. Oh, that’s something I made for your dinner tonight.’

  Ryan crouched down, still holding Hope, and together they peered through the glass door at the bubbling French dish, which would be ready in about fifteen minutes’ time.

  He rose up in one fluid movement. ‘Who knew my oven could do that?’ he joked.

  Ryan walked back into the lounge and flopped down on the settee, shrugging off his suit jacket before settling Hope into the crook of his arm. Her long dark eyelashes fluttered slowly down, resting on her cheeks and then flying open, as she fought an unwinnable battle with sleep.

  ‘Has everything been all right today? Did you find everything you needed?’

  ‘Everything has been great. We went for a walk this morning, did some shopping, and then spent the afternoon with Maddie at the hospital.’ Ryan nodded, and there was a very thoughtful expression on his face.

  ‘Was it a good conference?’

  ‘It was okay. It felt a bit like I was testing the water again after so long out of the office. Still, it was nice to engage in some intelligent conversation for a change.’ He realised his gaffe as soon as it had fallen from his lips. I laughed, not taking offence in the slightest.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ I teased, thinking of the countless conversations we’d had in Maddie’s hospital room over the last four months.

  Ryan’s blue eyes twinkled in amusement. ‘Male conversation,’ he amended.

  For a second his face sobered, and I could see an earnest look upon it. ‘I think I needed this trial run, almost as much as Hope is going to need hers at the day-care place. As much as I enjoyed being back in a business environment today, I don’t think I could have done it without you.’

  ‘Me?’ I questioned, my voice a surprised squawk. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You gave me peace of mind. I knew Hope was in safe hands. As much as I wanted to be with her, knowing she was here with you was the next best thing – well, second only to Maddie being here and being able to look after her.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Actually,’ said Ryan, drawing the word out. Are you in a hurry to dash off anywhere, Chloe?’ his eyes went towards the kitchen, and I was pretty sure he was about to invite me to join him for dinner. I certainly hoped that was what he was thinking, because the smell of cooking red wine had been making my mouth water for the last hour.

  ‘No. I’ve no plans for this evening.’

  He smiled and looked pleased. ‘Well, if your delicious dinner could possibly be reheated, would you mind staying on a while longer so I can spend a couple of hours with Maddie at the hospital? I rarely get the chance to see her in the evenings any more and it would be great to say goodnight to her, the way I used to do.’

  My features were all to be commended. They betrayed none of my disappointment; but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel it.

  ‘Of course. I’d be happy to stay with Hope until you get back.’

  Ryan looked as though he’d been given a perfect gift, and I felt guilty that all I was thinking about was the stupid beef dish in the oven. He carried Hope into his bedroom and settled her in her cot, winding up the musical mobile fixed to its bars.

  By the time he emerged from the bedroom, he’d tugged off his tie, and undone a second button on his shirt, but hadn’t bothered changing. ‘Please don’t wait for me,’ he urged, nodding towards the kitchen. ‘Eat yours now; it really does smell wonderful.’

  ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ I said brightly, hoping my false cheery voice masked the fact that I’d suddenly lost my appetite.

  A librarian is always prepared: train delays; long queues at the post office; busy doctors’ waiting rooms; meals for one in a restaurant. A librarian always has at least one ongoing book with them to while away the time. I didn’t bother turning on Ryan’s truly enormous television after he left. As soon as I’d checked that Hope was still fast asleep and that the state-of-the-art baby monitor was switched on (it even had a camera, for goodness’ sake), I pulled the latest bestseller I was reading from my handbag. I plucked off my boots and settled at one end of the black leather settee, where the pool of light from the table lamp would fall perfectly on my open page.

  I read the same paragraph at least three times, and yet still would have failed miserably if you’d asked me a single thing about it. The words were dancing tipsily on the line and nothing was going in. My eyes felt heavy, as though weighted down with lead. Just for a few minutes, I promised myself foolishly as they gave up the battle to stay open. Just a few minutes.

  The smell of toast woke me. I could smell it everywhere. My eyes opened, but I saw nothing except a vibrant collage of orange and purple. I blinked at the garish kaleidoscope of colours, my brain taking several moments to recognise and place them. They were the pattern on the throw on the back of Ryan’s settee.

  I pulled the cover from my face. The room was bathed in light, and it wasn’t coming from the overhead fitment. Because it was no longer night-time.

  ‘Ah, you’re awake. Just in time for toast and coffee. Only instant, I’m afraid,’ Ryan apologised, placing a plate and a mug on the small table beside me.

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ I protested, struggling to get into an upright position. Someone had slipped one of the soft satin pillows beneath my head and covered me with the throw, and I very much doubted it was Hope.

  ‘I got back later than I’d said, and you were fast asleep,’ Ryan replied with an easy-going shrug. He reached for the mug and put it in my hands, and I caught a fleeting whiff of shampoo and shower gel. His hair was a couple of shades darker than normal, still damp from the shower. I glanced down at my watch and saw it was after eight o’clock.

  ‘I never sleep in this late. Never.’

  Ryan’s laugh was sympathetic. ‘You don’t normally look after a very demanding infant for an entire day either. They take it out of you. Believe me, I know.’

  I took a long reviving gulp of the coffee and looked up at him through lowered lids. ‘Well you still should have woken me, however late it was. I would have happily got a cab.’

  ‘Ah, but I couldn’t risk having you wake up to discover my guilty secret.’

  I smiled, liking the friendly banter between us. ‘What secret?’

  ‘I ate the bourguignon. All of it,’ he confessed.

  I gave a tiny splutter into my coffee. ‘No! The recipe said it should feed four.’

  He gave an easy shrug. ‘After cardboard British Rail sandwiches, it was t
oo tempting to leave.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked it.’

  ‘And I’m glad you’re awake, because I have something important I’d like to discuss with you.’

  Afterwards we never could agree whose idea it had been. I always claimed that Jerry had given me the first nudge towards suggesting it. But Ryan said it was when his employer had mentioned at the conference that he might be able to work from home for two days a week that the idea had begun to germinate.

  The solution to so many problems is often right there under your nose, you just need to let it form and crystallise in its own time. Ryan needed someone to look after Hope for three days a week; the library was asking for staff to cut their hours or take voluntary redundancy. The salary he was offering me for the job was twice what I was earning at the library. But it was never about the money.

  ‘So, you’ll do it?’ asked Ryan, and for just a second he looked like a much younger, almost schoolboy version of himself. ‘You’ll be my Mrs Doubtfire?’

  ‘I will,’ I said happily.

  And for the first two years of my employment that was exactly what I did.

  And then we fell in love . . . and I took on another, far more important role.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 12

  Maddie

  It was too big. It looked too try-hard. And it was wrapped in the wrong sort of paper. The expensive silver-foil gift wrap had been a mistake. All the other presents were wrapped in colourful paper with Disney princesses or cartoon characters on them. The large square box, with the bright red ribbon around it just showed more than anything else that I knew nothing at all about six-year-old little girls. Somehow I suspected it wouldn’t be the only mistake I made that day.

  This was nothing like the childhood birthday parties I remembered. There was no clumsily drawn donkey waiting for his missing tail to be pinned into place; no newspaper-wrapped bundle for pass-the-parcel. This was slick and efficiently organised. Almost as though they’d hired a professional party planner. Perhaps they had. Maybe that was a ‘thing’ these days. From my unobtrusive position on a small padded bench, I looked across the large converted barn (the kind of place people might book for a wedding reception) and watched Chloe efficiently masterminding the event. No. She looked as if she’d need no help in organising something like this, she was clearly a natural.

  From the moment I’d woken that morning I’d felt a peculiar sensation building within me. More nerves than excitement; more fear than anticipation. When I’d stood before the full-length mirror in my bedroom, still trying to decide what to wear, I’d run my hands over the smooth white skin of my stomach, that was still just a little bit concave, and tried to imagine it stretched and swollen with the child I’d given birth to six years earlier. I’d shaken my head, as though dismissing the idea as some kind of improbable myth. If it hadn’t been for the photographic evidence in the memory book, I would truly have doubted it had ever happened. My fingers slid over the unblemished skin, longing for a single whispery silver thread of a stretch mark, but there wasn’t one. I was probably the only woman in the world to feel sad about dodging that particular bullet.

  But of course there was evidence, real irrefutable evidence, that I’d been a mother. Was a mother. For there was Hope. And today was about celebrating that she was here, that she’d been born against the thousands of odds stacked against her. It wasn’t about me, I told the sad-faced reflection in the mirror with a decisive nod. She nodded back at me, so I guessed she got it.

  Ryan had phoned during the week to give me details about the party. ‘There’s going to be about thirty kids there,’ he said, his voice making that sound like a problem.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I just thought you should know; these parties tend to be a bit full-on.’

  ‘In a rock and roll, and too much alcohol kind of way?’ I joked.

  There was a pause, and then suddenly the familiar sound of his laughter travelled down the phone and filled my head with a million memories I would do far better to forget.

  ‘More in a too much sugar, and someone throwing up on the floor kind of a way,’ he said, still sounding amused.

  ‘Well, I’ve been to that kind too . . . although obviously not for a while,’ I said, my thoughts running away on a tangent as I tried to remember the last party he and I had been to together. My grip on my mobile tightened as I realised when that would have been. Our engagement party.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure you knew what to expect.’

  I paused for a moment, waiting for him to say something more, but there was only a long moment of silence on the other end of the line. Sometimes it’s easier to work out what someone is thinking by the things they don’t say, rather than the things they do.

  ‘Have you and Chloe changed your mind about me coming to Hope’s party?’

  Ryan’s answer was too quick, too vehement and a little too hearty to be entirely believable. ‘No. Not at all. Absolutely not. We’re all looking forward to having you there. So . . . I guess we’ll see you on Saturday then.’

  The taxi driver smiled cheekily. ‘This’ll be the place,’ he said with a wink, his head nodding towards the rows of virtually identical four-by-four vehicles. ‘No self-respecting mum would drive anything else for the school run.’

  I gave a slightly uncertain smile, not sure exactly which side of the fence he thought I might be on. To be honest, I wasn’t sure myself. I tried to imagine waiting at a school gate for Hope; buckling her safely into the car, and hearing her chatter excitedly about her day. The image kept fading out of view, like a station you couldn’t quite manage to tune in to.

  I shivered when I climbed out of the cab, as the December wind found the places where my soft wool tunic and leggings didn’t provide sufficient coverage. ‘Do you need a hand with that?’ the driver asked, watching me reach towards the back seat to retrieve the enormous red-ribboned gift.

  ‘No thank you. I’ve got it,’ I said, adjusting my hold on the cumbersome box. I was half expecting him to ask me what on earth I’d bought, which was a question I would prefer not to answer, because I was already worried enough about my chosen birthday present for Hope.

  ‘Well, enjoy the party,’ the driver said cheerily, before heading back down the long gravelled drive. I wobbled a little on my way towards the barn’s entrance, feeling the stone chips sucking hungrily on the heels of my boots with every step I took. I might have been a bit steadier if I’d been able to see my own feet, but they were lost beneath the enormous gift, the one that was probably a colossal mistake. I should have asked Ryan what to buy her . . . although Chloe would probably have been the one who best knew the answer to that. Perhaps that was why the question had remained unasked.

  I passed beneath a canopy of bobbing pink balloons that had been carefully tied to the oak-beamed porch, but the very first thing I saw in the foyer stopped me in my tracks. It was a photograph, a recent one I guessed, that had been enlarged and pinned to a felt-covered board in the barn’s reception. My fingers itched to reach out and trace every feature of the dark-haired little girl who wore my face and a happy grin. There was a cartoon-style caption beneath the image: ‘Today is my birthday,’ says Hope.

  ‘I know it is, baby,’ I said softly to the empty foyer.

  Before I could break the hold the photograph held on me, I felt a sudden rush of cold air at my back. I half turned around, expecting to see a late-arriving party guest.

  ‘Maddie,’ cried a voice that my senses hadn’t yet learnt how to ignore. My breath still quickened, my heart still began to race, and palms that moments earlier had been perfectly dry, suddenly felt damp enough to drop the present I was carrying. Perhaps Ryan thought that too, because he reached out and took the heavy box from me without bothering to ask.

  I was rather glad we had an obstacle between us, because it prevented any of that awkward indecision as to whether it was appropriate to hug, air kiss, or just pretend to ignore the fact that once – a very lon
g time ago – we had scarcely been able to keep our hands off each other.

  ‘You made it!’ Ryan cried, with a little too much false enthusiasm to sound natural.

  ‘Of course. I’ve been looking forward to it.’ My voice sounded peculiar, as though someone was doing a fairly good impersonation of me, but hadn’t quite got it right.

  ‘Hope’s really been looking forward to seeing you again.’

  ‘Has she?’ The simple delight in my question seemed to touch him, and for a moment neither of us knew where we were, except that the ground beneath our feet felt nowhere near as steady as it should.

  ‘Well, come on in and meet everyone,’ Ryan said, taking one hand off the box he was carrying and placing it lightly at my back.

  There was a time – which felt so very recent to me – when a room full of people wouldn’t have fazed me in the slightest. But things had changed for me in ways I was still discovering, and something else I appeared to have lost along the way was the ability to walk confidently into a room full of strangers. Even when the majority of them were only six years old.

  I’m sure the eyes of all the other parents, who were chatting sociably in one corner of the room, didn’t actually swivel in unison in our direction. It just felt like they did.

  The junior party guests were nowhere near as interested. They were far too busy engaging in something that might have been either hardcore aerobics or dancing – it was difficult to tell which. Standing to one side of the wooden dance floor, apparently judging their efforts, was Chloe. She was laughing happily as she surveyed Maddie’s little school friends, handing out consolation prizes to every single loser, rather than the winner. It was a novel idea, and seemed to be going down well with the children.