The Girl Next Door (40 page)

Ed was working. He’d started going back, for a few hours here and there, a couple of days before. Eve had encouraged him – they didn’t both need to be there, she said. She was the one who had to pump milk, and he was the one with a job, so it made sense. She knew he was relieved to be gone for a while each day. God knows she would have been. She couldn’t leave.

Earlier that day, she’d been talking to one of the nurses – Deidre – who’d started talking about the future, just a little bit forward from now, about a world where Eve would go home at night to sleep, come back in the day.

Violet had been in at lunchtime. She’d brought a bag from Eve’s apartment, with some clean underwear and a change of clothes. After she’d changed, they’d walked around the block – the first fresh air Eve had had in two days. It was always a surprise, when she left the hospital, to see that the world was unchanged. Everyone was doing what everyone always did. The Thanksgiving decorations had given way to Christmas, and everything was festooned in red and green. Everyone else looked normal.

‘Hope will still be here for Christmas.’

Violet looked at her, and then smiled. ‘Of course. It’s only nine days.’

‘It’ll be a strange Christmas.’

‘I’ve had a few of those myself.’

‘Where will you be?’

‘At home. As usual.’

‘Will you come in? See us?’

‘I will. Of course. Hope’s first Christmas.’

She said it with such conviction, Eve wanted to hug her. Hope’s first Christmas. Who cared that she’d spend it spreadeagled in the incubator? There were going to be more – so many more. The story of Hope’s First Christmas was going to be become part of their family legend – told and retold under the tree every year. Told so often that it wouldn’t even sound, any more, as scary as it had actually been.

That day, after her talk with Deidre and her walk with Violet, Eve began to look, for the first time since Hope had been born, forward beyond the next hour, the next night. Forward further than that. This might be all right. She told herself she had a feeling. For the first time. So it was real, not something she made herself feel because everyone rattled on about the power of positive thinking as though it was a wonder drug. A real feeling of optimism for Hope’s future. She almost rang Ed to tell him, but told herself to wait – he’d be back at 6 p.m.

Violet clenched her fists in the back of the cab that took her home. She was tired – more tired than she remembered being for a long time. She hoped she was right – she hoped that preaching optimism about Hope was the right thing to do.

It happened at 4 p.m. She was sitting right there. Hope didn’t move. Hope didn’t look any different. The machines told them. She had suffered a massive bleed into her brain. Painless, swift, and life‐threatening. Of all the bumps and troughs of the last three weeks, this was the biggest. Their faces told her, but she knew it anyway.

Deidre asked if she wanted her to call Ed – get him back sooner. It was 4.45 p.m. Eve said no, that she was going to pump some milk. Pumping meant privacy, and privacy meant she could cry alone. She’d done a lot of crying since… since it had happened, but she’d never really grown used to crying in front of all of them.

She didn’t know how to tell him that this had happened. She didn’t even want to say it out loud.

Charlotte

When Charlotte answered the quiet knock on her door, she wasn’t sure who she was expecting. Madison never came these days, and she had barely seen Emily since her mother had been over. Maybe it was the porter with some dry cleaning. She didn’t expect Jackson.

She still wasn’t quite used to Jackson looking the way he did. She’d never seen much about him, when Madison had gone on about him, or even when he and Emily had been together. But up close, in her doorway, clean‐shaven and well dressed, he looked good.

‘Hi.’

This had to be about Emily. She smiled, stood back, and ushered him in.

‘I’ve come about Emily.’

Well done, Inspector Poirot. A guy like Jackson Grayling did not knock on the door of a woman like Charlotte Murphy to talk about Charlotte Murphy. There was always an Emily in the wings.

‘Sit, please.’

Jackson sat. Charlotte took the chair opposite.

‘I thought you might know what the hell is going on?’

Charlotte shrugged, unwilling to betray a confidence.

‘You know, I guess, that she isn’t seeing me any more.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, I heard. I’m sorry. For what it’s worth.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Specifically?’

‘Specifically, generally, instinctively. I’ll take whatever you’ve got, Charlotte. Because, frankly, I’m a bit of a mess, and I need to understand it.’

‘I’m not sure I understand it myself, Jackson.’

‘What has she said?’

‘Not much that makes sense. She’s scared, I think. I don’t know if you know much about her background, all of that…?’

‘Some…’

‘Well anyway, it seems to me that she has serious trust issues. She’d rather be alone than take risks, I think.’

‘But it was going brilliantly. That’s the part I don’t understand. It was like flicking a switch. Do you know what happened?’

Charlotte couldn’t lie. His distress seemed utterly genuine to her, and she had never agreed with Emily in the first place. So she told him about Halloween. About Madison Cavanagh and her stupid drunken insinuations.

Jackson shook his head incredulously. ‘But we’d sorted all that out…’

‘I know. And I don’t think, for what it’s worth, that she actually believed her. It was a peg to hang all her anxiety on. The way you started out – all the grand gestures. Your background. The girls… all of it. She was overwhelmed, I think.’

Jackson rubbed his temple. ‘But none of that matters. None of it.’

‘I know.’ If she was braver, Charlotte might have touched his shoulder.

He sat for a moment.

‘Do you think it’s all over then?’

A slow smile broke across Charlotte’s face. ‘Hell, no! If you’re giving up that easily, Jackson, you aren’t who I think you might be. I’ve watched you, over these last months. People don’t see me, I’m that kind of girl.’ Jackson opened his mouth to protest politely, but she stopped him with a hand. ‘They don’t. And I’m okay with that. I don’t want to be noticed by everyone.’ Just someone. ‘But I see everything. And I see you. If you want her, fight for her.’

Old habits died hard and slowly. The rest of the line, memorized from several readings of a Harlequin Romance about a medieval princess with purple eyes was: ‘Fight with every last breath in you, and every last drop of blood. Fight with all that you have. Fight.’ She didn’t give the whole quote, of course.

But Jackson got the picture.

Ed

Violet went to the hospital each day. They knew her now, in the NICU. In the absence of other family, she seemed to have been granted grandparent privileges. She had grown familiar with the process. You took off your jewellery, washed your hands thoroughly, then slathered yourself in that ghastly Purell stuff. Then you could go in, admitted to the locked unit. There were six or seven babies who’d been there even before Hope. She recognized their parents, and they would nod and smile at each other, gently, but they didn’t speak. Everyone was on their own in the NICU. It wasn’t a race or a competition. You couldn’t judge your baby’s progress alongside another. A lower birth weight, a shorter gestation – there weren’t any rules. It was just a lottery. They were all on their own.

Eve seldom left. She went home to shower and change her clothes every two or three days. She took short walks in the blocks around the hospital. Picked up lattes from Oren’s Roast and sandwiches from the deli. She phoned Cath. She pumped milk – enough milk for five babies. It was literally the only proactive thing she could do for Hope – fill bottles that she couldn’t even feed her, so that the nurses could drip the milk into her – and she did it like a woman possessed. Her milk had come in fast and furious – she hated her body, she told Violet, for getting this right when it had so failed Hope inside of her. And she sat beside Hope’s incubator, waiting for doctors and nurses to come and update her. It was a long day. Boring, exhausting, as stressful as anything Violet could imagine, uncomfortable and frightening. So Violet went every day, to do what she could. Sometimes she sat with Hope while Eve took a walk. Sometimes they walked together. Violet knew fully how much she was needed here, and, though she would have done anything in her power to have changed the course of events that had led her here, she was glad to be useful.

This particular evening, just hours after she and Eve had talked about Christmas, she saw Ed sitting on the chairs in the entrance, with his head in his hands.

She sat down beside him, and touched his shoulder.

‘Ed.’

He turned to face her, ashen. ‘Hope’s taken a turn for the worse. The very worst.’

Violet put a hand to her throat. ‘Oh no, the poor thing. What’s happened?’

‘She’s had a massive brain bleed.’

Violet caught her breath. She thought she knew what that meant. ‘My God! What are the doctors saying?’

He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t look good. They haven’t said, they won’t know for a while, but we were told, back at the beginning, that this was the biggest thing she’d face.’

‘I thought the danger time for that had passed.’

‘So did we. We’d started to believe we were out of the woods.’

‘I know. Eve was talking like that, the last time I saw her.’

Ed smiled a grim, tight smile. ‘Too soon. We let ourselves believe it too soon.’

‘Where is Eve?’

‘She’s in the hot room, with Hope.’

‘And you’re out here?’

Ed’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I came to call Cath.’

He hadn’t been on the phone.

‘Then I just couldn’t go back. I can’t do it, Violet. I can’t sit there in that gruesome room, just waiting. I can’t keep sitting there. I can’t fix it. There isn’t a damn thing I can do. I’ve never felt so utterly helpless in my life.’

‘You can be with Eve.’

‘I don’t even know if she knows I’m there or not half the time. She’s so focused on Hope. And so tired.’

‘Of course she’s tired. You’re both exhausted.’

‘She doesn’t need me.’

‘Of course she does. Listen, Ed. Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn. But you don’t have a choice. This has all begun, and I wish to God it had happened differently. But it didn’t. You’re in it, and you’re in it till the end now, whatever the outcome is. You can’t walk away, from either of them – Eve or Hope. Eve
does
need you. Like she’s never, ever needed you before.’ She’s needed you all along, Violet thought. You’ve been the one not seeing.

Ed sniffed angrily. ‘It’s not bloody fair.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s shitty, Ed. Shitty and awful. But you need to pull yourself together and be Eve’s husband. You need to be Hope’s father. Even if it is the last chance you’ll get. You’ll regret it forever, if you let them both down. Believe me.’ She stood up, and gave him one last pat on the shoulder. ‘Are you coming?’

Eve

Hope died at 11 a.m. on 19th December. At 10.15 the nurses unhooked her from all the tubes and machines that she’d been attached to since she’d been born, took her out of the incubator, and wrapped her in blankets. Ed and Eve sat side by side on the large striped sofa in the Family Room and waited. The Family Room. It seemed a cruel name. She and Ed couldn’t feel like a family, after today. They had tried to make it as normal, and unhospital‐like as they could – there were fabric blinds at the windows, and boxes of toys and books for siblings. There was a big television in the corner, with a plaque attached to it announcing which wealthy New Yorkers had donated it to the ward. But it wasn’t normal. There was nothing remotely normal about today, Eve thought. Today my baby is going to die. It’s over.

They’d told them the night before that there was nothing else they could do, or try. That Ed and Eve needed to sign papers and agree to the suspension of treatment, the withdrawal of the life support that was keeping Hope alive, filling her lungs with the only air she’d ever known, and moving the blood around her tiny body. One of the nurses, Marcia, held her hand tightly. They explained, kindly and gently, that it was only the machines. There was nothing of the person that Hope might have been, or become, left in that body. They would stop them – they needed to do that. Unplug and unhook and undo everything. And that it would only take a few minutes after that for her to slip away. Eve hated those words, even as she nodded, even as she signed. Slip away. Hope was going to die. Not slip away, or pass. Die. Be gone forever.

When she woke up the next morning, the morning after they had signed, she found it hard to breathe. She wanted to die with her. It was as simple and as clear and as real as that. She wanted to die with Hope. She lay in bed, refusing to open her eyes and acknowledge that morning had come, and listened to Ed making tea in the kitchen. When he brought it to her, she smiled weakly at him, waiting to see what he would say. He kissed her cheek, but didn’t speak. The night before, he hadn’t held her. They’d lain in the bed, side by side, each one lost in their own thoughts. She wanted to reach out for him, but she couldn’t. She felt utterly alone in her grief. In the bathroom, Ed put the radio on while he was shaving. She pushed past him, and switched it off angrily. She couldn’t bear to listen to the sounds of a normal day, not today, and she hated him a little because he could.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think.’

Of course he didn’t. She meant to push back past him, but he caught her, and held her, her arms rigid at her sides at first. They stood like that for ages, the hot tap still running, shaving cream in her hair.

And now they were here in the Family Room, waiting to stop being a family before they had ever really started. She’d read about families who took their children to the chapel to die. Or out to the park. That sounded nice. But she couldn’t. She was totally dependent on their help at this point. The nurses, and the doctors, and the machines. Even though there was nothing more they could do for Hope, she couldn’t take her away. She had to stay here.