“He’s a pharmaceutical rep,” she said after a slight pause. “He loves Christine very much.”
I looked at her sharply, noting her use of the present tense. Loves. Beating wings grazed my right ear. The room dimmed and brightened.
“Does he?” I said.
“Yes, he does. He’s become like a father to her. I’m sorry, I know that might be hard for you to hear.”
“No, no. It’s fine. So, Christine…” It hurt just to say her name. “She’s…”—I looked at the closed door down the hall—“in her room then?”
“Actually, she slept over at a friend’s last night. If I’d have known you were coming…”
I looked around, seeing no more evidence of a twelve-year-old girl in the house than I’d seen of a husband. “What’s her name?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Christine’s friend. What’s her name?”
“Charlotte,” Meredith said, her voice tight.
“And what was your husband’s name again?”
“Michael.” She set down her cup. “You know, I should really give him a call and let him know that—”
“Stop it,” I said, abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“This whole charade. You can stop now.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Why are you acting so nervous?”
“Is that a serious question?” She gave an incredulous laugh. “You show up without warning after all this time. You tell me you’re unmedicated. You start asking about Christine’s friends…”
I didn’t believe her for a moment. At first I’d thought she was trying to protect me, but her insistence on pretending that nothing had happened to Christine had begun to feel malicious. “Let me see her room.”
“What?”
“Her room. I want to see it. What did you do with her things? Did you keep them? Or give them away?”
“Felix—”
“I’m not stupid, Meredith. I know what happened. I know that Christine is gone.”
“Gone?” Meredith’s face softened. “Oh, Felix. What have you been thinking all this time?”
“Stop lying!” I shouted, and at that precise moment, the front door swung open. A chubby girl in a pink bomber jacket and neon toque stepped into the house. Her eyes went between me and Meredith, a silent question in her eyes.
Meredith went pale. “Honey. You’re back.”
“I forgot my phone.”
“Your phone?”
“Yeah. Have you seen it?”
“I don’t… I think it might be in your room.”
“Okay.”
The girl slouched over to her room, staring straight ahead. Her hair was short and some of her features had become more prominent, but it was unmistakably Christine. My baby, resurrected and moving casually (if suspiciously) through the room, close enough to touch. I couldn’t tell if she knew who I was. She must have seen photographs, but I’d grown out my hair and beard since leaving, and it might have been enough of a disguise.
“Well,” Meredith said, once Christine had closed her door. “I think we were just about finished here, weren’t we?”
I heard the warning in her voice and understood what she wanted me to do. I might have found Christine again, but I would not be allowed to keep her. She had adapted to life without me. She had friends. She had sleepovers. She had a mom and a stepdad who loved her. They’d carried her this far. They’d kept her safe. I looked at Christine’s door, briefly tempted to barge in and reveal myself, but the impulse passed and Meredith must have seen it go, because her face relaxed and she stood up, regarding me with genuine warmth.
“It was good to see you again,” she said.
I followed her to the door, where she pressed my hand in gratitude—the first physical contact I’d had in nearly a decade. Muscle and bone. The blood coursing through her veins. I marked that moment, savouring it, promising myself I would return to it often, then turned and made my way down the icy porch. Meredith shut the door behind me. I fished out my new phone. An autocab responded to my pickup request with an estimated arrival time of ten minutes and asked if I wanted to be tracked through the GPS on my phone. I said that I did, and started walking, trusting that they would find me wherever I happened to go.
On the night Christine was born, I sat by Meredith’s side, wondering if I was saying the right things, holding her hand the right way, if the nurses approved or disapproved of my performance. The younger of the two was gorgeous, commanding my helpless gaze whenever she crossed in front of the bed. “Oh!” Meredith said, wincing as another contraction gripped her in its teeth. Teeth, I thought, was the accurate metaphor. She looked like she was being devoured. “Okay,” she moaned, reasonably. Then, “Stop-stop-stop-stop-stop,” in a strained voice, whether to me or to the creature fighting its way out of her body I couldn’t tell.
Her grip on my hand loosened as the contraction passed.
“Good!” the older nurse said in a bright voice, the way a teacher congratulates a student on solving a not-too-difficult math problem. “Wonderful!”
Meredith shut her eyes. I looked at the clock on the wall, my stomach burning with a sudden powerful desire to shit. Her hand spasmed around mine and her eyes snapped open. “No,” she said. “Not yet. Oh god—”
The contraction came and went, the old nurse making encouraging noises, while the young one did something with the monitoring equipment, her uniform hugging her generous curves. In a fleeting moment of calmness, Meredith squeezed my hand and smiled at me weakly, gratefully. I tried to smile back, my bowels cramping.
“Do you have any idea how much longer this is going to be?” I asked the old nurse, who ignored me. I lowered my voice to Meredith. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
She lay with her eyes closed, in some other place.
“Mer…”
“Just go,” the old nurse snapped. The young one looked at me blankly, as if at an empty chair. I slunk over to the room’s private bathroom and sat down on the toilet, lowering my head to my hands. It was four in the morning. We’d been at the hospital for nearly sixteen hours. All I wanted to do was sleep. The bathroom fan hummed, drowning out any noise from the adjoining room. I let the shit come, then sat for a while, my eyes shut. The next thing I knew, someone was knocking at the door. “Just a minute!” I yelled, quickly finishing up, before coming out of the bathroom. The scene had changed dramatically in my absence. A doctor had come into the room and was teasing something bloody and awful from between Meredith’s legs. For a moment I thought it was the baby, then I noticed Meredith holding something a little more human to her breast—a red, cheesy-looking thing in a pink knit cap. From the clock on the wall, I saw that I’d been gone for more than an hour.
Conscious of the sewer-like smell wafting out from the bathroom behind me, I shut the door and edged over to the bed, past the doctor holding what I assumed to be Meredith’s placenta. Meredith looked up at me with a smile.
“She’s here,” she said hoarsely.
“I’m so sorry.”
“About what?”
“I missed everything.”
Meredith reached for my hand and gave it a pat. “It’s all right.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s fine.”
The baby gazed steadily at Meredith as she fed. If I’d have left the room at that moment, she would have never known who I was, what I looked like, what it felt like to be held by me. What it meant to lose me. The doctor had carted the placenta off somewhere and the nurses were tidying up the mess between Meredith’s legs.
“You should hold her,” Meredith said.
My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t want her. I didn’t deserve her. I worried that by touching her, I would ruin her, infect her with my sickness. But looking at her ancient little face, and her big dark eyes, I felt the first hooks of tenderness lodge into my heart. I was lost. Meredith handed me the swaddled heap as the old nurse watched on with a stern eye, and the young nurse turned down the lights. The baby regarded me solemnly. I slipped a protective hand behind her head as I’d been shown, and she fussed for a moment, then settled as I began to rock her with a motion that came from some primal place. Meredith watched us with a fond smile. Even the old nurse seemed pleased.