The Other Child (3 page)

Joe is at the breakfast bar with the iPad. Greg must have fixed up Wi-Fi on one of his preparatory visits. He looks solid and definite and her chest unclenches at the sight of him. She kisses his head, but he doesn’t look up. At home it would have depressed her to see him plugged in like this with the sun shining outside, but today any predictability feels welcome. You could take him to the top of the Empire State Building or dangle him over Niagara Falls and he would still pull out a screen.

‘What time did you wake up, love?’

‘I don’t have a clock.’ His tawny hair sticks up in waves and hillocks, his T-shirt is inside out, his hazel eyes wide and accusatory. ‘You didn’t pack my alarm clock.’

‘No, I did – it’s in your bag . . .’ She stops herself. There is no point in arguing with a displaced and jet-lagged nine-year-old. ‘You know all our stuff is arriving this afternoon, don’t you?’

She needs to walk around and decide where everything will go. She can already see that their furniture will not fill even half the space in this house. ‘It’s coming in a huge container, all our furniture and your clothes and toys and all our books, everything we packed up six weeks ago in England has travelled all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to here.’

Joe still doesn’t look up from his screen. He is a small, round-faced version of David, and when he is concentrating like this, he not only looks like his dad – even-featured, solidly built – he feels like him, self-contained and absorbed in something to which she has no access.

‘Maybe we should call your dad and tell him you’ve arrived?’

‘Is Dad coming?’ He looks up. ‘Today?’

‘Oh, no, love, not today, no. He’s working away, remember, he told you? But he’s going to come the moment he’s back – in about three weeks, he thinks. I know he can’t wait to see you. He wishes he could come sooner.’

Joe’s face falls. She shouldn’t have said anything. Just because David is now based in New York does not mean that he is actually there. He will still spend most of his time travelling. She can’t even remember where he said he was going this time – Kigali? Mogadishu? Baghdad?

‘Greg’s plane gets in soon though,’ she says. But Joe is engrossed in his game again and does not even look up.

Greg has decided not to be pushy, but she sometimes wonders if he is any different with Joe than he is with his patients. He is genial, kind and approachable, but always slightly detached. But perhaps that’s unfair – it’s early days and Greg has been away so much lately, criss-crossing the Atlantic, setting things up, finishing off at Great Ormond Street. It is too much to expect him to have bonded with Joe. But surely this baby will change that. This baby is their shared biological tie. When it is born it will knit them all together.

A trilling sound fills the kitchen, making them both jump and look at each other, big-eyed. She spots a cordless phone next to the fridge. She didn’t know it was connected – Greg didn’t say; she doesn’t even know their number here. She picks it up. ‘Hello?’

There is a hollow buzz.

‘Hello?’ She waits. ‘Hello?’ The back of her neck begins to tingle. She can feel someone there, behind the white noise, listening but saying nothing.

‘Greg?’ she says. ‘Greg? Is that you?’

There is a click and the line goes dead. She replaces the handset.

‘Who was it?’ Joe asks.

‘Oh, nothing, nobody at all.’ She tries to sound breezy. ‘Just a wrong number.’

‘Can I have something to eat? I’m hungry.’

‘OK, I know, me too. Breakfast!’

She shakes herself back into action, opening the cupboard above a shining Gaggia espresso machine that still has its tags on. The cupboard contains two plates, two cups, two glasses, a pouch of disposable cutlery and a new, serrated kitchen knife. A Post-it has fallen off the door – she picks it up.

Bagels, butter, milk and jam in fridge.

His writing is not a doctor’s scrawl; it is clear and neat with each line, angle and curl thoughtfully spaced. There are no kisses or ‘love you’s’ – but that doesn’t matter. He has thought of everything they’ll need for their first morning, until their belongings arrive. A small part of her love for him, she knows, is rooted in his no-nonsense practicality, his efficiency – perhaps in simple gratitude that he is so unlike David.

David was useless in practical terms but prone to expansive, romantic gestures. Once, when Joe was eight months old, he showed up after six weeks in the Sudan with tickets to the Opera in Verona. They couldn’t afford the flights. Before Joe was born she would take this sort of thing in her stride, but at home with a new baby, the finances and practicalities throttled the romance and David’s absences began to feel wilful and irresponsible. Nell has teased her about choosing another man whose profession takes him away a lot, and perhaps unconsciously that is what she’s done. But Greg’s way of loving – generous, fiercely organized, protective – never feels careless, and his absences are usually brief.

Sunlight pours through the French windows making the steel appliances gleam. She opens a few cupboards. There are, of course, no supplies yet – no herbs and spices, flour, baking powder, salt or pepper or cling film or paper towels or sponges. Without this domestic infrastructure, the kitchen feels precarious, like a film set that could be dismantled at any moment.

The shippers are due to call with their estimated arrival time. It will feel better once their things are here. In the end, almost all the packing and organization had fallen to her because Greg was going back and forth between London and Boston, trying to sort out the job and the house. Other than the paperwork – which was substantial – his main contribution to packing had been to bring his four sealed boxes down from the attic and stack them in the hall.

The boxes were not labelled, but she recognized them from when he had moved in. They contained his old university things, some visa paperwork and essential documents like his birth certificate. They are wrapped in masking tape and it is clear that he does not want them opened so she got the movers to put them in crates marked ‘basement storage’. If Greg wanted to carry four sealed boxes wherever he went, that was his business.

She slices bagels and slides them into the toaster. Then she texts Nell:

Alongside the kitchen there is a deck. It is painted white, peeling in places, shaded by the towering leylandii that divide their house from the neighbours’. She fiddles with the locks and hauls the French windows open. A mesh bug-screen stays in place. She drags this back too and it wobbles on its castors. The air smells of cut grass and summer holidays. It is warm and muggy, even this early in the morning. She peers through the branches into the neighbours’ backyard. It is modest for such a large house, mostly paved, with shrubs and woodchips but no flower beds.

She can see a low wooden building at the back with floor-to-ceiling windows. She is leaning over the railings to get a better look when her eye catches a movement by the house. It takes a moment for her to understand what she is looking at.

The woman is leaning against the wall, camouflaged by shadows. Her long hair is loose, and she is wearing a vest top and yoga pants with her arms folded, holding a mug. She is staring over, but her round face is unsmiling.

Tess feels a tiny shiver pass across her skin and turns, walking to the furthest end of the deck, gripping the railings and looking down over the driveway at the back of the house. There is a basketball hoop.

Maybe she should have waved or called out hello, but there was something in the woman’s stillness that suggested an almost targeted hostility. She remembers her face at the kitchen window in the middle of the night, unnaturally still, as if watching for movement in the downstairs rooms. She takes in a lungful of humid air. The neighbours’ marital problems are nothing to do with her.

She looks at the branches of the trees. The house doesn’t feel like part of a massive suburban sprawl, with the cut-grass smells, the birdsong, the whispering leaves all around. She tries to imagine Joe playing basketball in this driveway with new friends. And then, tentatively, as if biting into a potentially unripe fruit, she imagines sitting here, on this deck, with her new baby. She can feel the weight of its dense little body, tiny fingers curled around hers, hair so soft that it seems imaginary, and that new-baby smell – of green shoots, sweet dough. But of course when this baby is born she won’t be sitting out here, because it will be January, the dead of winter. And Boston winters, Greg has warned her, are brutal.

She feels a faint flickering in her belly and closes both hands over it. She is beginning to feel the baby, even at eighteen weeks, but perhaps it is unfair to expect Greg to connect with it. He was adamant from the start that he didn’t want to be a father. He even mentioned it the first time he told her he loved her, as if the two statements were inseparable.

They were on the late train back from London, maybe a month after they had met; the carriage was empty and he held her chin and looked into her eyes. ‘I’m completely in love with you,’ he said. And it hadn’t seemed ridiculous, because she felt it too. They fitted together beneath the surface; she already knew that she belonged with him and nobody else. Then he said, gently but firmly, ‘I’m happy to have Joe in my life but I don’t want another child. Is that going to be a problem for you?’

She’d kissed him and reassured him that she was happy just with Joe too. When Joe was smaller she’d wanted another baby – she felt guilty that he didn’t have a sibling; she didn’t want him to feel the sort of loneliness or responsibility for a parent that she had felt as a child – but then David left, and gradually that longing passed and then they’d been content, just the two of them. But sometimes, now, she wonders what would have happened on the train if, instead of kissing Greg, she had pulled away, shaken her head, said that she did want another baby, that she longed for one – that she wanted his baby. Would he have pulled away too? Changed his mind? Stopped loving her?

She thinks of the twelve-week scan, when they held hands while the sonographer picked out a hand with tiny, identifiable fingers, the tight plait of a spine, a jawbone, a nose, two sharp leg-bones and then, in the darkness, the squeezing knot of a heart. As she watched the map of their baby take shape on the screen all her doubts evaporated and she felt a rush of pure love – of joy. But Greg said nothing. She wanted to believe that he was overwhelmed too, feeling the same things, but she wasn’t sure. When the sonographer zoomed in on the baby’s heart again, clicking, taking stills and measurements, Greg stepped closer, scrutinizing the images for abnormalities.

He will come round when he holds this baby in his arms for the first time. He has held thousands of infants but never his own – he has no idea how powerful it is to look down at your baby’s face for the first time. She hears her phone beep in the kitchen: a text – Nell probably. Joe will be waiting for a bagel. She walks back down the deck, keeping her eyes fixed forward. Her neck tingles as she steps inside. She knows she is being watched.

*

After breakfast, she goes onto the front porch. Greg said there were families in the street, but it is the end of the summer holidays, gone eight in the morning, and the lawns are empty and silent except for the whirr and hiss of sprinklers. There are no flower beds, only shrubs and rockeries and mown grass. Theirs, she realizes, is the only house with a fence.

A lawnmower buzzes nearby and sunlight bounces off the windowpanes. She lifts a hand to shield her eyes. Perhaps the neighbours are looking out at her right now – but it is impossible to tell. She walks over to the fence and peers back at the house next door. It is a proper New England Arts and Crafts home with wooden cladding painted a subtle green, a full-length porch and – yes – a porch swing. Just the sort of house she’d imagined living in. All the blinds are drawn.

Then the front door bursts open. She shrinks back so that she is almost inside a tall shrub, then parts the branches and peers through. A man is on the porch, with a satchel, cropped brown hair. ‘Girls!’ he yells over his shoulder. ‘Now!’ His voice is unmistakable, but it is more impatient than angry today. She watches him hop down the steps, pulling out a mobile and scrolling through messages as he beeps open the locks of a car she can’t see. He is wearing a pressed blue shirt and khakis, no tie. He is average size, attractive, clean-cut. She wonders what time he came back last night, and where he went after yelling at his wife.

He glances up, as if he has sensed her, and she shrinks back. The leaves are prickly, a branch is digging into her ribcage and dust coats her lips and eyelids. She moves her leg and a twig catches her ankle, then something trails across her face. She swipes up a hand and pulls something sticky off her cheek – a big, brown, flickering spider drops down the front of her T-shirt. She jerks away, yanking herself off the branch, hearing the fabric rip; bits fall out as she flaps her shirt. A silver people carrier is reversing out of the next-door driveway, and she finds herself standing by its open passenger window.

‘Hey.’ The man leans over the passenger seat, grinning. ‘Everything OK?’

‘I was . . . I was just . . .’ She brushes herself down, unable to think of a reasonable explanation for hiding in a shrub. ‘We just moved in.’

‘Oh, you’re English! I think I’ve seen your husband coming and going a few times – at least, I assume he’s your husband? Tall, dark hair?’

‘Yes, that’s Greg. He’s been out here setting things up.’

His smile stiffens. ‘My wife’s met him.’

Greg talked about signing the lease, getting keys, doing inventories with the realtor, blowing up mattresses, but he never mentioned meeting the neighbours.

‘Well, I’m Josh.’

‘Tess.’

‘Nice to meet you, Tess. Welcome to the neighbourhood. And now I have to get my girls to music camp.’