I want to be me, but even as I think it, I see myself as a past tense, and that scares me, because that can’t be good, can it?
Not really, my darling,Mum’s voice tells me.
And I’m back to spiralling again, battling to conceal it as I move around the set to Ana’s instruction, saying my lines over and again.
The tenor’s off, Ana says. The pitch is awry. We try different blocking, variations on timing, the lines themselves (‘Hello, Iris … ’ ‘Hello again, Iris … ’ ‘Iris, hello … ’), and even though Ana declares herself happy with where we finally get to when, at midnight, she calls an end to the entire sorry exercise, we all know she’s lying. Everyone’s muted, leaving the set: the crew heading exhaustedly to their assigned trailers; me, Nick, Jeff, Ana, and Naomi returning to the house.
Nick and I barely talk as, zombified, we shower, brush our teeth, and fall into bed. Nick has to be up again first thing, even though it’s a Sunday. We’re filming six days on, one day off, and since Emma’s unfortunately no better, but has now been diagnosed with an E. coli infection (not a twenty-four-hour thing after all: that was the news Naomi was getting on thephone earlier), Naomi’s once again reshuffled her meticulously planned schedule so that Nick, Tim, and the rest of theMabel’s Furycrew will spend tomorrow and Monday filming inside their plane’s cutaway.
Knowing how shattered Nick is, I expect him to go to sleep instantly when our heads hit our pillows. But his breathing doesn’t deepen. His body doesn’t take on that tell-tale heaviness. He remains tense and alert, and I can tell without looking that his eyes are open, fixed on nothingness, staring into his unspoken thoughts.
I can guess all too easily what those thoughts are.
My own keep pulling me the same way: back to who we were; what we so nearly had. I can’t keep my mind in check, like I normally do. It’s impossible, now I’m spending all this time with him.
You remind each other of what you lost, Mum said to me, up on Parliament Hill.
She’s right, we do.
I suspect she’d try to convince me that that’s a good thing. That we both need reminding. To face up to things.
But it doesn’t feel good.
It feels really painful.
It’s at maybe one, or perhaps two – I can’t bring myself to check the time – that Nick moves, on to his side, looking down at me. He shifts his arm, the sheets rustling, and I feel his hand, hovering in the blackness above my shoulder. I hold myself still, biting my lip, waiting for his touch.
But it doesn’t come.
It’s only when he moves again, back away from me with a heavy sigh, that I realise he was waiting for me to turn to him; reassure him that I wouldn’t push him away.
I think about doing it now.
Reaching out to him.
I tense, almost,almostready to.
Then he sighs again, and it’s somehow easier to remain where I am.
Thinking about myself as a past tense.
Remembering our tiny little boy.
With the tears I’ve been containing all afternoon, leaking silently from my eyes.
Nick wasn’t in Los Angeles the night I miscarried. He was in New York, working. I drove myself to the hospital when the pain started, and didn’t telephone him, or Mum, because I knew what was happening and I was terrified to make it real by involving them. But my OB had Nick’s number. She summoned him back.
‘He’s on his way,’ she told me, as they wheeled me into the delivery room.
At twenty weeks, you have to go through labour.
It’s the loneliest and most scared I’ve ever felt.
All I wanted, was Nick.
It’s a long flight to LA from New York, though.
It was all done by the time he arrived.
