The Fallout (24 page)

Sasha.

Chapter 24

“Okay, prepare for a shock, Mum. Prepare to be amazed. I'm pregnant. Yes, again!”

Hannah smiled and for the first time in what seemed like months, she felt herself relaxing. This was exactly what she needed. She felt a powerful sense of unburdening and calm.

“Don't go too far, Lil,” Josh called from his position a few feet away from her.

Lily was playing in the grass in the wintry sunshine, picking at the weeds that grew around the low stone walls. She was making a bouquet, Hannah saw. From the way she kept stealing sly glances in her mother's direction, Hannah could tell the posy was intended for her, and she felt a rush of tenderness. It would be all right, she thought suddenly. All of it. The new baby would cement them together as a family.

“Bet you never thought I'd be able to look after myself, let alone two children,” she laughed, leaning back to give her mum a better view of the still nonexistent bump under her thick sweater.

Josh was looking uncomfortable, as he always did. Would it kill him to chill out for once? Sometimes when she thought about how much she put up with from his mother, with her endless underhand digs that only Hannah ever seemed to notice, she felt like screaming at him to make an effort for her, too.

“Shall we go, darling?” he asked.

Despite the watery sunshine, the wind was biting and Josh was looking cold and underdressed in his thin leather jacket. Hannah frowned, desperately not wanting to leave, but aware it was unfair to expect Lily and Josh to hang around for too much longer. On summer days the graveyard was a joyful place to be, full of wildflowers and people enjoying picnics on the grass between the tombstones, a kind of quiet festival atmosphere. But in the depths of winter, it was damp and grey and eerily still.

Yet still she lingered, loath to tear herself away, nervously rearranging the flowers she'd brought to replace the ones Gemma had laid when she'd been there a couple of weekends before. She knew Josh thought it was creepy, the way she and Gemma kept gravitating back to their mother's grave, but he'd never understood the sort of closeness they'd had with her. By the time Josh met her, she was already ill with the cancer that eventually killed her, so he'd never known her in the days when she could throw her arms around you and hold you in an embrace so warm and heartfelt you genuinely felt nothing bad could ever happen to you. He didn't get it, of course. He'd accused her before of “sanctifying” her mother, reminding her that things hadn't always been easy between them.

“What about those episodes?” he'd demanded, referring to the bouts of black depression her mother had been prone to throughout her life. Not many, but intense and terrifying even so. Her mother's twisted, murderous face at the hospital
—
no, she wouldn't think of that now. That's why their father had eventually walked out on them, because he couldn't handle the down times. He'd stayed in periodic contact, but Hannah and Gemma had little respect for him. There was a Marilyn Monroe quote Hannah had once read—“If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best”—and immediately it had made her think of her parents. Her father was already long gone by the time Gemma was injured and Mum was finally diagnosed and given medication to keep her moods level. Maybe he'd have stayed if he'd known, but having turned his back on her at her worst, he certainly didn't deserve her at her best, when she could make you feel like the most loved, cherished person in the world.

But Josh had never seen that side of her, which is why he'd accused Hannah more than once of being “ghoulish” for insisting on coming here. He'd been supportive at first, but his enthusiasm quickly waned in the face of the long and, for him, tedious hours spent here waiting for her to finish a conversation with her mother. “You're always so moody afterward,” he would complain. “It's not helpful for you.” As if he had the first clue how to help her!

She was being unfair. She knew it. But she and Josh had drifted so far apart, she struggled sometimes to imagine them ever being close again. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, but everything he did at the moment irritated her. Yesterday he'd come home from work feigning illness and, after disrupting her work, had taken himself off to bed, leaving her sitting at the table fuming and unable to get back into the feature she was writing. She was sure he wasn't really ill at all. In fact she suspected it was a ruse to try to get her to drop her plans to come here this weekend. She couldn't imagine Dan doing that. Dan would just come straight out and say if there was something bothering him, not sneak around inventing illnesses that didn't exist.

But why was she thinking about Dan all of a sudden?

She knew exactly why she was thinking about Dan. Since their conversation yesterday morning he'd been much on her mind. He'd been so concerned about her, so worried that she'd hold him accountable for his lawyer using Josh's email. “You're one of my favorite people in the whole world, I couldn't bear you to think badly of me,” he'd said to her. She'd got the definite impression the honeymoon might be coming to an end for him and Sienna, now that she was pregnant. “She doesn't really like me leaving her on her own,” he'd said. “It's very cute in a way, but it makes it a bit difficult to earn any money.

“I should have chosen someone like you, Hannah,” he said later. “Someone used to being independent and paying her own way.”

Lily had stopped picking weeds now and was wandering around aimlessly, running her little hands along the tops of the newer headstones, with their smooth, shiny marble surfaces. Josh had a face like a wet weekend, as her mother would have said. He'd been in a vile mood since yesterday. Again Hannah found herself comparing him to Dan, whose moods were famously writ large on the surface of his open face, impossible to misinterpret. For a second she weakened, allowing herself to remember the thing she'd promised herself to forget.

After saying what he said about choosing someone like her next time, Hannah had made some self-deprecating comment comparing herself unfavorably to Sienna, and he'd said, “She's jealous of you, you know? She knows you mean a lot to me and she's jealous.” Hannah had laughed it off, but when she'd gotten off the phone, her cheeks were burning.

Now Josh had gathered their things together—Lily's coloring book and crayons, and the canvas tote in which Hannah had brought the trowel and pruning shears she used to tend her mother's grave—and was standing, shuffling the bags from hand to hand in a pointed manner. Meanwhile Toby the dachshund, who had to be kept on his lead in the graveyard for fear he would start indiscriminately digging, had grown tired of lying at Hannah's feet and was sitting by a neighboring grave, whining plaintively.

“I'm sorry, Mum, it's time to go.”

But even as she said the words, her eyes were filling with tears. It never got any easier. Even all these years after her death, Hannah still was no closer to coming to terms with losing her mother.

“You rushed me,” she said once they were in the car and on the way to Gemma's house. “You know how much I was looking forward to seeing Mum, and you just couldn't let me have that time with her, could you?”

Josh, who was driving, swung around to look at her, then immediately turned his head back, shaking it from side to side as if he couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

“We drive for an hour and a half so I can spend a day freezing in a graveyard and it's still not enough for you,” he countered.

“It wasn't a day, it wasn't even a couple of hours. Admit it, you don't like me coming here.”

Josh slapped his hand down loudly on the plastic wheel.

“All right, I admit it. I don't like you coming here. I don't think it's healthy for you to spend hours talking to your dead mother. I think you need to move on, Hannah, and maybe start paying a bit more attention to the people around you who are still alive.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Me. Lily. You're so wrapped up in yourself and your grief and bloody Sasha you don't care if your family is falling apart around you.”

Hannah turned to face him.

“What do you mean, falling apart?”

“Nothing.”

“No, come on, you must have meant something.”

“Forget it. We're here now.”

“We're here!” sang a little voice from the backseat. Hannah had completely forgotten Lily was even there.

She shaped her features into a smile before turning around.

“Come on, baby. Let's go and see Auntie Gemma.”

Gemma's flat was the usual chaos. Shoes, bags, clothes, books and ashtrays all seemed to live in a permanent state of homelessness, migrating their way in piles and clusters around the three cramped rooms.

“I miss Gem like crazy,” Hannah's former brother-in-law, Sam, had said the last time they met for a drink, just after the divorce was finalized. “But I don't miss her clutter, or her last-minute panics, or always being late because she's left something essential behind.”

Hannah knew what he meant. It was tiring being around so much disorder. She was disorganized, but her sister took it to a whole other level. In the end, Sam was effectively saying, it was only a matter of time before the mess
in
their lives became the mess
of
their lives.

“How did it go?” Gemma asked.

Despite it being midafternoon, Gemma was still wearing a pair of pajama bottoms with an old grey T-shirt that looked like it must have shrunk in the wash. No bra, Hannah couldn't help noticing. And Gemma was not a petite girl.

“Oh, you know,” said Hannah uselessly, horrified to find her eyes filling with hot tears.

Josh looked at her sharply, then looked away. She could read the expression on his face as clearly as if he'd spoken.
I knew it. I knew we shouldn't have come.

“What's up?” Gemma was lying back on the sofa with Lily wrapped around her middle, so she couldn't move, but she hadn't missed either the tears or Josh's reaction.

“Nothing,” said Hannah, overbrightly. Gemma's hair was pulled back with an old, rather grubby, pink hairband, and the scar on her forehead that she usually kept hidden was exposed, curved and raised like a fossil under her skin. Hannah's stomach turned over and she quickly looked away. “I'm just overemotional. It's the hormones, I expect.”

She allowed a moment for the implications of what she'd said to sink in.

“Oh, my God,” said Gemma, catching on. “You're not?”

Hannah nodded. Gemma exclaimed in excitement.

Was it Hannah's imagination or did Gemma sound a little flat?

“You going to have a little baby brother, sweet pea?” Gemma asked Lily, nuzzling her face into her hair.

“Not brother, silly. Sister. But I'm the big girl so I'll have to look after her.”

Gemma remained with her face buried in her niece's hair, so Hannah couldn't see her expression.

“Actually, I've got a bit of a headache,” Hannah said eventually. “Have you got anything I could take?”

“There are painkillers next to the bed,” said Gemma, gesturing with her head toward a door that led directly off the living room.

Gemma's bedroom was in as great a state of disarray as the rest of the flat. Hannah winced as she recognized her own slovenliness magnified in that of her sister. Was this what it was like for Josh, she wondered, sharing a house with her, this sinking feeling walking into a room where nothing was calm?

The bed looked like a Tracey Emin art exhibit—all rumpled sheets and overflowing ashtrays and old bunched-up tissues.

“Gemma, when was the last time you changed this duvet cover—and what's this gross brown stain? Eugh—it
stinks
!”

Hannah thrust the offending cover away from her. Her sister was a slob. No doubt about it. It was quite disgusting how she lived, and yet looking around at the chaos of her bedroom, a part of Hannah felt jealous. She envied her sister's freedom to leave yesterday's knickers on the floor, knowing that no one would use it against her in some unspoken war of attrition you didn't even know you were fighting until your transgressions were flung at you all at once in some late-night argument.

There was no sign of the painkillers on the crowded bedside table. Hannah nudged aside a teetering pile of books, sending them all crashing down onto the wooden floor. As she picked them up, she noticed a photograph tucked inside one of them—that giant tome,
Wolf Hall
that, to her shame, Hannah had never managed to finish, growing confused about who was who and who was talking. It was a picture of Josh. She remembered Sasha's remark about September seeing Gemma taking a photo from her flat. She'd dismissed it instantly as troublemaking, but now she sat on the edge of the unmade bed with the picture in her hand, her mind blank. There was a squeal from Lily, followed by the thud of something hitting the floor, and then Gemma appeared in the doorway.

“Did you find them?”

Hannah didn't look up, just carried on gazing down at the photo of Josh. It was one she'd always loved, slightly overexposed so his skin was bleached and his smile seemed dazzlingly white as he squinted up into the sun. He was wearing the mustard-colored sweater he'd owned when they first got together and she'd spent ten years persuading him out of. Funny how she missed it now that she saw it again, like seeing a picture of an old friend she'd lost touch with.

“What's that?”

Gemma picked her way toward Hannah over the discarded clothes and books that littered the floorboards.

“It's a photo,” said Hannah eventually. “Of Josh.”

Gemma, now standing next to her, glanced down at it as she pulled off the pink hairband and shook out her unruly curly hair—brown, not red, to Hannah's lifelong jealousy.