Callie shuddered. She wouldn’t have believed it, and if she’d talked to Jason, he’d have fired Brenda.
There was silence. Brenda lit a cigarette and Callie got to her feet.
‘You have hot chocolate anywhere?’
Brenda opened the correct cupboard, and Callie made speedy hot chocolate in the microwave.
She couldn’t talk anymore. Didn’t want to hear anything else that could hurt. To imagine that her husband would just abandon her and Poppy to the police was too hard to bear because it meant she’d been wrong about him all along. That he hadn’t been a safe harbour.
And if he wasn’t, what sort of idiot did that make her? Because she should have known.
Upstairs, Callie knocked on Poppy’s door. There was no answer. She pushed in past the suitcases and found her daughter curled up on the sofa bed with her headphones on and tears dried on her face.
Callie put the mug of hot chocolate on the floor, sat down on the sofa bed and Poppy allowed herself to be pulled into her mother’s embrace.
‘Mum, what’s going to happen?’ sobbed Poppy.
Callie held her tight, relieved that Poppy had let her guard down finally. ‘I don’t know, honey, but I know Daddy’s going to fix it. He loves us, loves you so much, like I love you. It’s going to be fine. You wait and see.’
‘Promise?’ said Poppy, hiccupping because she’d cried so much.
Callie hesitated a beat. She couldn’t say that she really had no idea if things would be fine. She was terrified things would be the opposite, but Poppy was just a kid. She had to be handled gently, not hurt with a lightning bolt of harsh reality. ‘Promise,’ she agreed, scared she wasn’t telling the truth.
She found her daughter’s make-up remover and gently cleaned away the layers of make-up until, once again, Poppy’s fresh fourteen-year-old face was revealed. Sorting through the bags, she found pyjamas and the small cuddly toys that Poppy still kept on her bed. Callie arranged them carefully, then pulled the covers back.
‘I’ll fix your pillows, sweetheart,’ she said softly, ‘and then have your hot chocolate.’
Like a small child, Poppy dutifully got into bed, held on to her favourite soft toy, a much-loved and grimy bunny with a once-pink velvet ribbon round his neck, and hugged him.
Callie leaned down and, taking Poppy’s face in both hands, kissed her daughter on the forehead. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘It will be fine.’
Was she lying? she wondered as she left the room, turning off the light.
In the spare bedroom, Callie took out a Xanax and swallowed it with some water. She needed to be able to sleep, and if she didn’t have some help, she’d just lie there thinking, imagining the worst.
Although, the worst had already happened, hadn’t it?
Sam
Sam watched Ted hold their baby daughter cradled close to him and she could hear him crooning, almost purring at India.
‘What do you think of India as a name?’ he’d said that first night in the hospital when they both sat there blinking, astonished, watching the baby sleep for what felt like a few blessed minutes. Sleeping did not appear to be something that babies did.
In fact now, after a night and a morning in the hospital listening to the roars and the screams of what felt like every child in Ireland, Sam decided that sleeping like a baby was a concept that had been badly misnamed: babies did not appear to sleep at all.
They dozed, then woke at the slightest noise to shriek at the top of their tiny lungs. And wow, the noise that came from those lungs.
‘We’d always planned to visit India,’ went on Ted. ‘It’s such a beautiful name ...’
‘India, I like it,’ said Sam truthfully, although she knew her mind was still hazy: giving birth to India – yes,India – she’d been so fearful that something was going wrong. She still hadn’t recovered from that fear. And as for the pain. Wow.
In no way could childbirth be compared to breaking eleven bones in the body. A mere eleven? More like twenty-two, she decided. Yet perhaps such a miracle needed pain because itwasa miracle: she had produced this living being from her body. The enormity of it was staggering.
‘Yes, India, it’s the perfect name,’ Sam had said, ‘because it’s totally unknowable. The great mystery of the glorious, beautiful subcontinent we are not going to be able to visit for quite a while now,’ and Ted had laughed with her as they stared down at their tiny baby daughter. Unknowable summed up the whole baby experience pretty well.
She loved looking down into the small bassinet attached to her bed and staring at the tiny baby, their baby. India seemed so fragile, as if her skin was only a filament thin and anything could break her. When she’d been lying down earlier and a nurse had put India on her chest to try to get her to breastfeed, the nurse had been called away suddenly and in that precious moment Sam had gloried in the sense of her tiny baby lying on her, this tiny form on her breastbone, skin to skin, heartbeats melding. Despite the crazy noise all around her, Sam felt calmer than she had since India had been born.
This she could do: this lying with India on top of her, like mothers since time immemorial. It felt peaceful and natural.
