The Fallout (28 page)

A little muscle at the side of Dan's mouth twitched as if he was pressing his teeth together to stop the words from coming out.

Only September's room was in some semblance of order, the clothes neatly put away, the duvet pulled up over the pillow.

“I tidy my room like Mrs. Mackenzie says,” she explained proudly.

“I think she means when they have tidy-up time at school,” Josh explained.

Sienna had kneeled down then, crushing September to her and burying her face in the little girl's hair. Meanwhile Dan was puzzling over the splits in the wood of the door and the dark marks around the bottom.

“What happened here?” he asked, running his hand over a patch where the wood had chipped completely away.

September snuggled in closer to Sienna, and for a moment her eyes looked frightened, as if she was anticipating being told off.

“I don't like it when Mummy locks me in,” she said in a small voice. “Sometimes I try to get out.”

No wonder Dan needed to go check on her, even while she slept. Josh couldn't even imagine the guilt he must be feeling at leaving her in Sasha's care all this time.

“He'll never get over it,” Sienna said now, as if she could read his mind. She had resumed her position curled up in the white chair in Dan's oversized robe, her bare feet tucked under her. Josh felt a stab of pain as he watched her rubbing her belly in that automatic gesture Hannah did, too. Or rather, Hannah used to do. He didn't want to talk anymore. Didn't want to think or feel. Didn't want to look at Sienna's hand on the still nonexistent bump, or think about Hannah's voice saying “just go.” Didn't want to think about the blank space in his memory where last night should have been.

“Aren't you worried about Hannah?” Sienna was staring at him fixedly, and Josh felt a rush of confusion.

“Of course I'm worried about her. She's lost the baby. We both have. God knows how she's going to get through tomorrow.”

Sienna frowned.

“Not because of that,” she said abruptly. Then she saw his face and immediately modified her voice. “I know you're worried about her because of the baby. We all are, but what I meant is, aren't you worried about her being in the same hospital as Sasha? The woman nearly fucking killed the lot of them.”

Again that sick feeling. The black hole in his memory.

“We don't know for sure she did it deliberately...”

Sienna wasn't having it.

“Josh. Stop being so nice for once.”

“I'm not being nice. It just seems so far-fetched.”

“Oh, and claiming to be pushed down an escalator isn't?”

He dropped his head into his hands.

“You're right. It's just all so fucked up.”

All of a sudden, he was conscious that Sienna had moved and was standing next to his chair. He felt her hands gently stroking his hair.

“You'll be all right, Josh.”

He closed his eyes, willing himself to believe her.

“You'll be all right,” she said again.

The silk cushion he was clutching was soaked before he even realized he was crying.

* * *

Surprisingly, Josh slept well in the pale grey-and-white-painted guest room on the ground floor of Sasha and Dan's house. For the first time in weeks, he didn't lie awake while worry burned a hole through his stomach lining, or wake up after just one or two hours with violent dreams still crashing around his head.

The rest of the household was still asleep when he awoke so he got dressed and showered as quietly as he could, grateful that Sasha's particular brand of crazed housekeeping hadn't made it as far as the guest bathroom, and then crept upstairs to find Lily. Pushing open the door of September's room, his eyes fell once again on the cracks in the wood and the horror of yesterday's discoveries returned. Sasha had locked her daughter in this room, for long enough that the girl had tried to kick her way out. He remembered Hannah's fear that there had been no babysitter the night she and Sasha had gone out. He'd never found out what happened, but he knew something had gone seriously awry that night. In the dim light he could make out the prints of a small hand on one of the door panels. His stomach clenched imagining Lily in that situation, the terror she would feel.

September had one of those high beds with a sofa underneath that opened up into a spare bed for sleepovers. In the past, both girls had insisted on sleeping together in that sofa bed, keeping each other awake for hours, squealing with pleasure when their toes tickled each other's legs. But now only September was down there. Lily lay in the top bed, her big eyes wide open.

“Hello, sleepyhead,” he whispered, out of habit, even though she looked far from sleepy.

She turned her face to him and his heart flooded with love at the quick blast of hot, sweet, small-child breath as she put her still chubby arms around his neck and pulled him in close.

“Daddy has to go to the hospital to see Mummy now,” he murmured.

She tightened her grip and shook her head.

For a few seconds, he buried his nose in her marshmallow-soft skin.

“I have to, Lily-put. Mummy isn't very well. She needs me to cheer her up.”

He prayed she wouldn't ask about the baby. Luckily Lily wasn't in the mood for asking questions.

“I don't want you to go,” she said.

“I know, sweetheart, but Sienna will be looking after you and September. Won't that be fun?”

Lily shook her head.

“She says she's going to make a gingerbread house with you this morning—getting in practice for Christmas.”

“Please, Daddy.”

Josh felt a lump in his throat like a brick. Struggling to keep himself together, he pulled away gently.

“I'll be back before you know it.”

He tried to ignore the agonized “Daddy!” that followed him out of the room. But minutes later, when he started the car, he could still hear it.

* * *

Hannah was awake and—oh, the giddy relief—pleased to see him. Seeing the light go on in her eyes made him realize just how long it had been since that happened, since his arrival produced any reaction other than apathy or mild irritation. The empty, echoing feeling that had dogged the last twenty-four hours was washed away in a sudden wave of love. This was his wife. This was Hannah. The woman he'd known he loved from their very first weekend together, when they'd lain in bed reading the papers in silence, and there'd been no awkwardness at all—just a sense of release, and relief. He'd found her. He could stop looking.

“I'm sorry about the baby.”

She looked so desolate, he dropped down next to the bed and folded his arms around her.

“Don't be daft, Hans,” he spluttered, as the words struggled to get past the huge lump in his throat. “It wasn't your fault.”

“But it was. I didn't want her enough. I thought she'd get in the way. I killed her, just like I nearly killed Gemma.”

Her voice splintered into fragments on the last word.

“Shush, darling.” He stroked the hair back from her grief-smudged face as if she was a child, as if she was Lily. Of course he knew, had known from the beginning, that this car crash would bring back that earlier accident—the night that still threaded itself snake-like through the shadows of her mind and dragged her screaming from her dreams.

“It's nothing like what happened with Gemma. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't even your fault back then, Hans. You know that.”

But Hannah was pumped up so full of guilt that it just had to escape, like gas through a valve.

“It was, though. Mum was so ill at that time, you've no idea. It was her worst episode ever. She was so down and so paranoid. Every time we set foot out the door, she thought something would happen to us—we'd get knocked down by a bus or mugged or stabbed by a random crazy person. She wouldn't let us out of her sight. You can't imagine what it was like.”

It was as if she was trying to convince him, but Josh had heard this before, so he
could
imagine it. The two teenaged girls going stir-crazy with boredom. The headstrong younger sister pacing the floors of the little house like something caged.

“But it wasn't your idea. It was Gemma who thought of it.”

“Yes, but it was me who was driving. I went along with it.”

Though Hannah was the older sister by thirteen months, she'd always been the appeaser, the one who tried to keep Gemma calm. Josh, who'd heard the story for the first time near the beginning of their relationship, when Hannah was spilling her secrets with the zealousness of a condemned man confessing his sins, could see exactly how it had gone. Hannah was seventeen and had been taking driving lessons for three months. Gemma, desperate to go to a party in a village just a few miles away, full of pent-up hormones and resentment that exploded out of her, somehow persuaded her that they should sneak out, take their mum's car. Their mum was in bed—well, wasn't she always? She wouldn't even know they were gone. And anyway, she was such a bitch at the moment. Their lives were draining away in front of their eyes. And it was all quiet country roads, after all.

“Gemma can be very persuasive,” said Josh. “No one could blame you.”

“But they did!” Hannah's pale eyes seemed almost to be dissolving in tears she had yet to shed.

“I blamed myself—of course I did. I'd never driven in the dark. I completely misjudged that bend. And Mum blamed me. You should have seen her face, Josh!”

This part of the story was new to him. Always in the past, Hannah had skimmed over her mother's reaction, so protective was she of her mum's memory, so determined that he should think only the best of her.

“She arrived at the hospital just after we were brought in, and it was like she hated me, like she wasn't even my mother. I kept telling her I couldn't stop it, I couldn't stop the car, but she was too angry to listen. Then afterward she went completely the other way, insisting it was all her fault for making our lives so miserable, slapping her own head again and again, asking ‘what have I done?' which was way worse than the anger. And now it's happened all over again.”

Hannah's voice had risen as if about to take off, and Josh instinctively tightened his arms around her as if to tether her to the ground and to him.

“You did nothing wrong, Hans. Don't forget, Gemma's accident was what finally got your mum to seek help. And this wasn't your fault. You didn't make Sasha crash that car.”

At the mention of Sasha's name, Hannah's mouth hardened into a tight line.

“She did it on purpose, you know. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

The rest of the morning was a nightmare. By now Hannah's bleeding was much worse, and she lay in her bed with tears streaming down her face. The hospital was short-staffed and operating on a note of suppressed panic. At one point a senior doctor they'd never seen before bustled into the cubicle where Hannah lay, still waiting to go down to surgery. He took one look and called to someone else outside, “No, can't come right now, I've got a bleeder on the table.” Josh had never in his life wanted to hit someone so badly.

Hannah was by turns angry and then, barely a minute later, convulsed with sorrow and self-reproach. She raged against Sasha, particularly when Josh explained what they'd found at the house.

“She's always been selfish,” she said. “People go through tragedies. That's life. They don't have to drag everyone else down with them. They don't have to have such a public unraveling.” Then her whole face crumpled. “Josh, she could have killed Lily, as well as the baby.”

Other moments, she was almost normal, joking with him about the hard-faced nurse in the squeaky white shoes they'd nicknamed Nurse Ratched, after the
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
character, quite as if they weren't in a hospital going through one of the most heartbreaking events of their lives. As if, in fact, they might never stop.

Mostly, though, she was racked with sorrow and guilt, lurching from blaming Sasha to blaming herself. “I never made the baby feel loved,” she sobbed, and Josh stopped contradicting her and instead just held her and tried to absorb some of her pain into his own body, because that was all he could think of to do.

After she was finally taken down to surgery, Josh paced the paved area outside the hospital, breathing in great lungfuls of fresh, noninstitutional-smelling air. Outside the main entrance, patients in robes or windbreakers over their pajamas, bare ankles purple with cold, dragged desperately on silent, lonely cigarettes and for the first time in his life, Josh wished he smoked. Just to give him something to do, some relief. When he returned back to the little waiting room off the ward, his mind heavy with thoughts of Hannah and what she was going through, he remembered the bargain he'd struck on the way to the hospital. He would have to tell her, it occurred to him suddenly. After weeks and months, even, of estrangement, the events of the last twenty-four hours had brought them vividly, clashingly back together. And if they were to have any chance of staying that way, he needed to come clean about what had been going on at work. He would have to scrape out the contents of his mind just as her body was being scraped clean of the things that had nurtured their baby. She needed to know.

Later, after it was over, he pulled a padded, plastic-covered chair, with spongy yellow stuffing poking through a hole in the cushion, up to the side of Hannah's bed. He watched her while she slept, overwhelmed with tenderness for her, with grief for the baby they'd lost and with gratitude that they at last felt like a couple again, a unit that functioned with rather than against each other.

When she awoke, he admitted, finally, heart swollen with dread, what had been going on at work—the accusations, the anonymous call he now knew had been made by Sasha. “But where have you been going all day?” Hannah asked him, too stunned by a mixture of shock and the aftereffects of the anesthetic to react. Then, without waiting for a reply, she held him for a very long time.