How have they been so deceived? At first, Marisa seemed so perfect. She seemed sweet and willing to help; a pure rural milkmaid with a wide-eyed wonder about the world. She even wrote fairytales for a living, for Christ’s sake. And the whole process has been smooth, as though it is somehow meant to be. How could this be happening? Why did they not step in sooner, when she started acting oddly?
But it has been tricky trying to pinpoint why her behaviour has been weird, Kate reasons with herself. And they’ve wanted it so badly, haven’t they? As if, through the strength of their desire, they could make it all right. If they just went along with some of Marisa’s eccentricity and explained it away to each other, then it was OK, wasn’t it?
Maybe they haven’t questioned her motives as deeply as they should have done. Maybe they didn’t do as much due diligence as the agency suggested. Maybe they didn’t want to listen to Carol when she kept sounding a note of caution about how quickly they were moving. But was that so wrong? With everything they had been through, was it so wrong to allow hope to silence any passing moment of doubt? Why shouldn’t something be easy for once? Why should they be the ones forever forced to pick away at the surface certainty? Why did they have to despair when other couples had their self-satisfied faith rewarded with easy pregnancies and straightforward births and happy families? Why couldn’t they too believe that Marisa was the answer to their prayers. This time, why couldn’t it be them?
By now Kate is crying, wiping the tears away with the cuff of her jumper. She reminds herself of why she came into this room. She knows exactly what she’s looking for. It’s not on the desk. So Kate gets down on her hands and knees and turns her face to search under the bed. It is the most basic and obvious of hiding places, and Kate already knows it is where Marisa will have put her diary. For weeks, she has noticed Marisa writing furtively in a black Moleskine notebook and Kate is driven by a forceful need to know what the diary contains.
The carpet under the bed is covered at irregular intervals with dust balls. It is dark down there and Kate can’t see clearly, so she reaches out her arm and starts to sweep it along the floor. Nothing. She is about to stand when she has another thought. This time, instead of sweeping her arm against the carpet, she repeats the same movement against the mattress and the bed frame. Her fingers brush against the soft edges of something trapped in between the bottom of the mattress and the wooden slats of the frame. Kate levers it out and it drops onto the floor. There it is. The notebook.
She takes it with her out of the room, leaning over the landing banister to check on Jake. He sees her and smiles. She gives him a thumbs-up sign and he nods. Marisa is still lying on his lap, her breathing more regular. He is stroking her hair with one hand and although this is exactly what he should be doing, Kate feels a pang of jealousy so sharp it startles her. She brushes it aside, sits on the top stair, and starts flicking through the pages of Marisa’s diary.
It starts: ‘The house is perfect’ and as Kate reads, she realises Marisa is recounting the day that she came to visit Richborne Terrace and Kate showed her around, and they’d been interrupted by a magpie flying in through the kitchen doors. Except for this incident, Marisa remembers the event differently. She barely mentions Kate or the surrogacy, and does not use her name. Turning the pages, Kate sees the pattern repeating itself again and again: entire scenes from their life told from Marisa’s warped perspective, where she has written Kate out of the narrative, referring to her as ‘the lodger’ in her own home. Marisa has invented a whole relationship with Jake that doesn’t exist. Their meeting in the cafe is depicted as though it were a date. Marisahas even written about Jake fucking her, which can’t be true given that she is sure, even without checking, that every single night she refers to in the diary, Jake was in bed with Kate, not Marisa.
The more she reads, the more Kate feels the ground disappearing beneath her. She is appalled by what she discovers, and simultaneously compelled to read on. There is a ghoulishness to her fascination. She cannot believe the lengths Marisa has gone to in order to protect the integrity of her lies. Her story is so convincing that at one point, Kate begins to question whether some of it might be true. Maybe Jake did fall in love with her, she thinks. Maybe they were having an affair? But she banishes that thought too, almost as quickly as it floats to the surface. Nonsense, she tells herself. It’s the melodrama of the situation that is making her think this way. Jake would never do that. He’s a good man. Besides, where and how would he have found either the time or the opportunity? Kate and Jake were always together.
No, it is Marisa who is the dangerous one, the unhinged one, the hysterical one. These were the hallucinations of a mad woman. She flicks through the remaining pages and her mood shifts from shock to pity. How unhappy Marisa must be to have done this. Not just unhappy, Kate corrects herself, butunwell. They need to get her help and make her better. Or if not better, then reliably stable for the remaining five months of her pregnancy. And they need to do this privately, with the least amount of outside interference possible.
Kate checks her watch. 9.30 p.m. Annabelle and Chris should be here in the next hour. She is about to put the diary aside and go downstairs when something falls out of the back pages. Kate retrieves it from the floorboards. It is a pressed daisy, its petals mottled and flattened, turning brown at the edges. It touches her, this little flower and the value someone has accorded it and the memories it must inspire. She wonders, then, about Marisa’s past and whether anything she told them is true. Marisa said that she was close to her parents, and that her own mother suffered several miscarriages before giving birth to her sister, who is seven years younger. Kate and Jake were moved by this story and reassured that Marisa, despite her relative youth, knew first-hand what infertility meant and the cost it exacted from a couple.Marisa said that she and her mother had talked about it as adults. But perhaps that was invented too? Perhaps nothing they thought they knew about her, or the agency thought they knew about her, was true? Perhaps she lied on all the forms and forged all the documents detailing her upbringing, her education and her medical history? Perhaps they have invited an unbalanced stranger into their home to carry their baby and now there is no retreating from the terrible mistake they have made?
Bile rises in her throat and she feels she is about to be sick. She slides the daisy back into the notebook and as she does so, the pages fall open again. She notices a small pocket inside the back cover, which expands when she pulls it to reveal a square of paper, folded over several times. When she unfolds it and spreads it out, Kate sees it is a prescription. She squints to make out the typed letters.
Risperidone, it reads,1mg tablets.
It is not a drug she has heard of, so Kate looks it up on her phone. Her fingers are clumsy and she is short of breath as she taps on the search engine icon. Then the results come up: ‘Risperidone is licensed to treat the following conditions: schizophrenia, psychosis, mania.’ She checks the name on the prescription. It is made out to Miss Marisa Grover and dated six months before.
‘Fuck,’ Kate says.
The prescription is unused. They did the embryo transfer just over four months ago and when Marisa’s behaviour became more volatile, Kate and Jake attributed it – naively, she now realises – to pregnancy hormones. Could it be that Marisa was on these anti-psychotic drugs but stopped taking them so that they did not interfere with the pregnancy?
‘Fuck,’ she says again.
The doorbell rings.
Jake’s parents are here.
25
Kate runs downstairs, with the notebook still in her hand. The sound of the doorbell has agitated Marisa, who is now fully awake and sitting up, whimpering and screeching, asking Jake repeatedly what’s happening.
When Kate walks gingerly past them, Marisa flings her arms around Jake’s neck.
‘Don’t let her hurt me, don’t let her hurt me.’
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Kate says, as calmly as her fear and fury will allow. ‘You hurtme, remember?’
Jake makes a shushing sound, although whether it is directed towards her or Marisa, she isn’t sure. Kate opens the door. Chris is standing there in his familiar tweed jacket, a half-smile on his face as he sees her, and she experiences a rush of gratitude and relief so acute she feels her legs buckle.
‘Come in, come in.’
He steps inside.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks, his voice low. ‘That gash looks nasty.’ He points at her forehead.
‘Oh this – no, it’s fine. Looks worse than it is. Where’s Annabelle?’
‘Parking. I thought I should leave her to it and come straight here. Sounded urgent from what you said on the phone.’
In the porch, Kate reaches out and holds the sleeve of his jacket.
