Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (36 page)

W
hen the door to Leo’s hospital room opens, I brace myself to tell whoever it is to leave. I want to be alone with my son, to talk to him, to sit with him, like it was for all those years when it was him and me.

The smell of fresh lilies and green Palmolive soap tells me that it is Aunt Mer. I relax a little, unable, like the rest of us, to be snippy with her. The only person who ever snipes or rages at her is Victoria, because she has her own unhealed pain and she never wants Aunt Mer to forget it. She actually wants Aunt Mer to relive and remember the hell she put them—Mal and her—through, as often as possible. Fair enough, I suppose. Despite all our best efforts to help her, Victoria clings to her hurt and thinks only Aunt Mer can ease it by feeling guilty every moment of every day for the rest of her life. No one can convince her otherwise.

The rest of us, Mal included, have always made allowances for Aunt Mer, would never be as harsh to her as we can be to each other, would never think of being offish or unpleasant. I wonder—for the first time—if she minds. We are constantly, unintentionally, treating her as though she is something fragile that the wrong word will break. Isn’t that like what Victoria does? We don’t mean it to hurt her, but it must in some way be a reminder of her illness, make her feel singled out. It’s never occurred to me before that she may mind.

“Everyone is pretty upset,” she says, coming to stand behind me.

“With what the doctor said or with what they found out?”

“Both,” Aunt Mer replies. “Your mother and Cordy both haven’t stopped crying. Your father’s trying to comfort them, Keith has gone for a walk. I came here.”

“I’d rather be alone, to be honest, Aunt Mer,” I say, still staring at Leo. I am mapping his face, noting the way he has changed and stayed the same in the last month. His hair has grown back a little more, fine bristles covering the top of his head because they haven’t operated on him in two weeks. His nose seems a little bit wider, so it looks even more like mine. His mouth hasn’t changed. The creases in his eyelids haven’t changed. The dark circles under his eyes, however, have deepened.

The doctor is wrong, of course. Leo is only sleeping. Look at him: his eyes are only closed because he is only sleeping. Like every night since he was born, he is only sleeping. Resting. Taking a time-out. Healing. He will be back.

“I know you want to be alone,” she says. “I just wanted to … You have to tell him.”

I don’t have to ask who she means. Even though we have never properly, openly discussed it, always talking around it, knowing that any information, visits, and pictures I give her would be, at the very least, relayed or shown to Mal, we have never said to each other that he is Leo’s father. The closest we have come to that was the time I asked her to stop giving me money and expensive presents for Leo. I knew Aunt Mer, like my parents, had very little—the odd two hundred quid she kept trying to slip me was obviously coming from Mal and I didn’t want it. I might have needed it, but not wanted it. We had to struggle on because, as I had previously told Mal, if he wanted to give Leo money, he should put it into an account for when
Leo was eighteen. I didn’t want to accept cash from him that could be seen as condoning what he had done. Not even through his mother. That was the closest brush to that forbidden subject we had ever come. It was enough that she knew, and to talk about it would be to further betray Mum, Dad and Cordy. If Aunt Mer and I never said it aloud, then we weren’t technically lying to my family.

“There’s nothing to tell anyone,” I say. “He’s going to be fine.” The hollowness of my words echoes around us, ringing loud and clear in my ears. She places her hand on my shoulder, just like Dad had done to Mum a few minutes earlier. Stillness and calm flow through me, from her to me. Peace. Calm. Aunt Mer has always had a raging soul; for as long as I can remember she has always been fighting the two sides of herself, I never knew that at her core she has this … this serenity. I never knew that she could be like the sea, could make me feel as lifted and tranquil as I did whenever I could sit and stare at the sea.

“He would like to know,” she says. “He needs to know.”

“Mal hasn’t needed anything from me in a million years,” I say.

“That is not true,” she replies. “The pair of you were so close. I’ve never known two closer people. Ask your parents or Cordelia, they will say the same thing.”

“Were. We
were
close. He hasn’t wanted anything to do with me in eight years, why should he care now?”

“Of course he wanted something to do with you, he just couldn’t.”

“Yes, I know, because I had his baby. So why would he care now?”

Aunt Mer doesn’t say anything for a few moments, I sense she is wrestling with herself about something. Whether to say it or to keep it to herself. “I saw Stephanie last week,” she says.

Every nerve in my body leaps up in protest. Her name … It is like running one long, sharp fingernail down a blackboard, it is like scoring my back with a red-hot blade. Every time—
every
time—I hear that name, every nerve in my body leaps to attention; my muscles tense, my teeth grit against each other.

That woman robbed me. She robbed me of being pregnant. Of enjoying that time at the beginning of being pregnant. Touching my baby, wondering at it growing, knowing that the any-time-of-the-day sickness, swollen ankles, exhaustion, miscarriage terrors would be worth it because at the end of it I would have a baby. I had been so careful not to bond, not to get involved, not to think of him as my baby because I was going to give him to his “real” parents, I had missed all those months. Even later on, a little part of me was still removed, still thinking that maybe Mal and she would change their minds. She had taken that from me. I knew it was she who had changed their minds. Mal shouldn’t have gone along with her, but she had been behind it. I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that.

And she had done it because she never wanted me around. Despite my best efforts, she had never changed the decision to get rid of me she made when she first met me. I can recall the moment vividly in my mind because I saw it happen: I said to her I would like us to try to be friends, and she, rather than answer, had glanced at Mal. That had unsettled me, had made a cold chill slip down my spine—as it did again the day she asked me to have a baby for them—but I had dismissed it as paranoia. As me being silly. What I didn’t do, as I should have done, is protect myself from her. She wanted to fill all roles in Mal’s life and she did not like my place as someone important to him. The only time she had started to like me was when I agreed to do something for her, and even then, I realized over the years, that was because she understood a part of me better than Mal
did. She knew that I would not be able to stay around too long after the baby was born, that I would disappear for a long while afterwards and I probably wouldn’t be as close to them because of the baby. When she asked me to have a baby for them, it was the perfect way to get the perfect life she wanted—Mal and a baby, with me gone. I don’t know what made her change her mind about the baby, but she got the result she wanted in the end: Mal finished with me.

The irony, of course, was that the depth of her dislike for me was matched by the depth of my like for her. I couldn’t help myself. Not only because she made Mal happy, like Jack made Cordy happy, but because underneath the disguises and masks, I knew there lay a good person. A person with a good heart and a troubled but beautiful soul. Now, of course, I did not feel that way about her. After she had robbed me of being pregnant, taken my closest friend, almost forced me to have an abortion and maneuvered me into lying by omission to my family for so long, I have nothing but dislike for her.

Sometimes, I think I hate her.

I certainly cannot talk about her, or hear about her.

Aunt Mer’s hand curls into my shoulder, her thumb stroking along its brow, trying to get the knots of tension that name has caused to untie themselves. “She … she told me everything. What you agreed to do for them. What they did to you.”

She didn’t tell Aunt Mer everything. How could she? She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that I had begged Mal, that I had lost all self-respect and had been so scared that I had begged him not to do what he did. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that I had almost gone through with the abortion. I didn’t feel the baby move and then change my mind about a termination. I actually went to the clinic, changed into the gown, and was about to undergo
sedation when I asked them to stop. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that sometimes—for months after Leo was born—I was slightly distanced from him because I had brainwashed myself so well into believing that he was their son. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer that sometimes I would take Leo down to the seafront in the middle of the night and, with him asleep in the pram, I would sit and cry over how my life was such a mess because I had tried to do something I thought was right for someone I loved and I was scared of being alone and I missed Mal so much I felt physical pain. She didn’t tell Aunt Mer about the cavern that had opened up inside me when I realized that for someone I loved to be able to do something like Mal had done to me, love was not the be-all and end-all. That at that moment of realization I stopped believing in love for a long time. Even when I got back together with Keith, I was waiting for him to prove he didn’t love me.

If she didn’t tell Aunt Mer any or all of that, then she hadn’t told her “everything.” She had, in fact, told Aunt Mer virtually nothing.

“She hates herself for what she did,” Aunt Mer says. “When I showed her pictures of Leo, she started to cry.”

I don’t like the idea that she has shown my little boy to
her.
Those are pictures I gave to Aunt Mer because of who she is. They are private pieces of our family, not to be shown to just anyone. And
she
is just anyone.

“To be honest, Aunt Mer, those two are the last things on my mind,” I say, to be diplomatic. I want to say that talking about them, not being able to reveal how I truly feel because of who they are to Aunt Mer, is painful.

I feel her inhale deeply; she is upset. I can understand that she is only doing what she feels is best for her son; I would be
the same if it was Leo. “You can tell Mal if you want,” I say to appease her.

“I couldn’t do that, dear,” she says. “He needs to hear it from you. And you need to see his reaction.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to see, when you tell him, how much he still loves you, and how much he loves that little boy.” She pauses. “And, so does Malvolio.”

T
he door of number 11 Pebble Street has not changed in over two hours.

I know, because I have been watching it. Mr. and Mrs. Wacken are in, but they do not know that I have been sitting in my car, observing them. Waiting for the moment that I will cross the road to go and see him.

The last time I spoke to Mal was about five years ago. Yeah, five years ago, six months after Cordy’s wedding. I came to London on the train and talked my way into his office by saying I was Cordelia. I briefly flattered myself by thinking that he lit up when he saw me step into his office, but anything he did feel he hid straightaway behind a mask of caution. Obviously fearing I’d break down or beg him again.

“I was wondering why Cordy would come to see me,” he said, standing up. “Have a seat.”

On the low filing cabinet behind him and below the large, blind-covered window stood a host of pictures: his wife smiling radiantly at their wedding; Victoria and her husband on their wedding day; Cordy and Jack on their wedding day; Aunt Mer, Mum, Dad and Cordy in front of a heavily decorated Christmas tree in my parents’ house. No pictures of him, no pictures of me and, of course, no pictures of Leo.

“Please stop giving me money,” I said gently, as I perched on
the seat at the opposite side of the desk. I had come to see him because the week after Cordy’s wedding, every month money had started to appear in my account. Whenever I returned the money, it—and the next payment—would reappear on my bank statements. I wanted to see him face-to-face to tell him to stop; I wanted him to look me in the eye and know that I was serious.