Together Apart (22 page)

35.

A
dam lifted one of the loose, torn sections of newspaper from the box and unfolded it. A frown spread across his face as his eyes scanned the paper in front of him.

Police appeal to mother of abandoned baby boy.

He looked at Sarah, but she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. Why did she have this stuff ? He picked out another paper clipping.

Dead baby discovered outside Hallamshire Hospital.

South Yorkshire police concerned for baby’s mother . . . May be in need of urgent medical assistance.

Memorial service to be held for abandoned baby boy, named Alfie.

His blood ran cold. He’d always thought it was just a saying, but it really did feel like every bit of his body had just been blasted with ice.

‘Sarah?’ His eyes flicked from the newspaper clipping in his hand to Sarah and back again. ‘What is all this?’

‘His name was Jack,’ Sarah whispered.

Adam screwed his eyebrows together and shook his head. ‘It says his name was Alfie.’

‘Alfie was the name of the nurse who found him.’

‘Are you telling me that
this
’ – he held up the paper in his hand and swallowed – ‘is about
you
?’

The steady thump of his heartbeat echoed in his ears as he looked at her. Out of all the scenarios he could ever have dreamt up to try to guess what her secret was, it definitely wouldn’t have been this. But when she looked up at him, he knew. It was written all over her face – in the tears streaming down her cheeks and her wobbling chin.

Jesus.

‘I don’t understand,’ Adam said, rubbing his hands over his face. There were too many things going round in his head all at once, and he needed to make them stop. ‘I mean, I don’t get how this could be about you and how the hell I didn’t know about any of it.’

‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’ She wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her pristine towelling robe. ‘But then I found out I was pregnant, and then I heard about Richard and . . .’

‘Did he know?’

Sarah shook her head and bit the inside of her cheek. ‘I never got the chance to tell him.’

‘Did he even know you were pregnant?’

‘No.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. ‘He moved away. You know that from reading my diaries.’

‘You still could have contacted him.’

‘I know that now, but back then, I couldn’t. Whenever I’d start to get upset about him leaving, I’d tell myself it was only a few hundred miles away and that we’d write to each other and speak on the phone. That he’d come back to see his grandparents – it wasn’t like I’d never see him again. We’d spoken about it and promised
to sta
y together until we could be together, you know? But when I’d lie in bed at night, I’d panic. It wasn’t just a few hundred miles. It was three thousand, eight hundred and thirty-seven. I’d
looked it
up in the library. I had Claire, but I didn’t know how I’d survive without him being there. Mum was losing herself in booze every night, and Peter went from being overbearing to acting like I didn’t exist at all.’

‘Okay,’ Adam said slowly, shaking his head. ‘But what does that have to do with—’

‘You know, this would be a lot easier if you just let me talk.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded and she exhaled loudly.

‘It took years for me to realise how angry I was back then. I hated Peter because he wasn’t my dad, and I made Mum’s life
hell. I
knew that with Richard gone, I’d have to spend every day dealing with the crap at home with nothing to look forward to and no one to make me feel better. He’d become the most important person in my life so quickly, and then, one day, he was just gone. I spoke to him on the phone the morning he left, and it was the last time I ever heard his voice. For all our intensity, it fizzled out almost straight away. For him, at least.

‘I used to sit by the phone every night, hoping he’d call. I’d stay up for as long as I could. New York is five hours behind, and I didn’t want to miss him when he called. But he never did.
And jus
t when I started to think he’d forgotten all about me, I got a postcard. It didn’t say very much, but for the first time since he’d left, I had a smile on my face. The world could have ended that day,
and I w
ouldn’t have cared. I wrote back to him straight away. I was so fuelled on adrenalin that I can hardly even remember what I wrote now. That was the last contact we had.

‘Looking back, I can’t blame him. I mean, he’d just moved to one of the coolest cities on earth. He would have been making new friends and having fun, but I couldn’t see it like that at the time. All I knew was that it felt like my world had ended. I’d sit on my bed listening to music with tears streaming down my face, trying to understand what I’d done wrong – what was wrong with me. Why I wasn’t good enough to keep him interested even for a few weeks after being apart. I started to question whether I’d imagined how our relationship was.’

Adam nodded. He knew the feeling well. He might not have cried himself to sleep, but he’d asked himself the same questions since he proposed.

‘I went wild after that,’ Sarah continued. ‘There’s a whole chunk of time where I can barely remember anything. I’d go out, even when I had nowhere to go, and I started drinking. I put everyone through hell – Mum, Claire, even Peter. I’d go to school, bunk off for most of the day and come home drunk and stoned, way past my curfew. I was a nightmare, and I knew I was taking things too far, but I couldn’t stop. I was so blinded by how I felt that nothing else mattered. Even Claire couldn’t get through to me. We’d become so close, but I just wasn’t interested in what she had to say.

‘I’d been on an almost constant binge for about four months when I realised my periods had stopped. They weren’t regular anyway, but I knew it wasn’t normal, and I’d put on weight. At the time, I thought it was all the alcohol and junk food. I just didn’t think it could be anything else. We’d used condoms, but I guess we were just unlucky.

‘I was terrified. I was only fourteen and I was pregnant, and all I could think about was how disappointed Mum would be. Never mind the booze and the drugs; this was something on a whole new level. I thought that at least if Richard was there, we could have faced it together. So, I wrote to him. I wrote a stupidly long letter, telling him how much I loved and missed him. I didn’t say anything about the baby. It’s hardly something you tell someone in writing, is it? But I thought that if I poured out everything that was in my head, it would get him to remember what we had. That it would get him to remember
me
.

‘I stopped drinking and smoking. I really cleaned myself up, and I knew how relieved Mum was because, from the outside looking in, it must have looked like I was almost back to my normal self. I’d decided not to tell anyone about the baby until I heard back from Richard. I guess I needed to know that he still loved me and I wouldn’t be alone, because it would make disappointing Mum and having everyone think I was a slag so much easier.’

Adam grimaced. Richard never came back. She would have gone through the pregnancy by herself.

‘Didn’t anyone notice?’ He frowned. ‘I mean, a bump must get a little hard to hide.’

She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t exactly skinny to begin with, and I’d been living in baggy jeans and oversized hoodies for ages.

‘I started to realise that I wasn’t going to get a reply. I tried to tell myself that my letter must have got lost in the post, but I knew, even then, that it was a stupid excuse, because I didn’t write to him again. It was like I was stuck in this weird place where it wasn’t really happening. Nobody else knew about it, and I started to think that maybe it was a good thing because things like that just didn’t happen to people like me. Stuff like that only happened to other people, and if it had to happen to me, then I wanted to be able to say that I wasn’t alone, that Richard would stand by me one hundred per cent – and I couldn’t, so the best thing for me to do was ignore it.

‘Then Hannah let slip that Richard had been in touch with Daniel. Apparently, he was having a great time going to parties, making new friends and he had a new girlfriend. I felt like such an idiot. I went home that day and I came this close to telling Mum.’ Sarah held up her hand and pinched her thumb and forefinger together. ‘I knew that I’d screwed up in a big way, and I didn’t know what to do about it, but I couldn’t say anything. For the first time in a long time, she seemed like she was happy. I didn’t want to be the one to wreck it, and going by how Peter had reacted when I started seeing Richard, I was too scared to say anything. I thought he might kick me out, and I’d be on my own with a baby to look after. So, I decided not to say anything about the baby until it was too late. My skewed logic told me that once I’d had the baby, it would all just work out somehow.’

Adam shook his head. ‘You were just a kid, Sarah. There’s no way they’d have thrown you out. They love you – even I can see that, and I’ve only met them once.’

‘I know that now. But I couldn’t think straight. All I knew was that I was fourteen and pregnant and alone. They were born again Christians. Sex before marriage just wasn’t acceptable to them. They’d told me and Claire that plenty of times.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Claire? She would have stuck by you. I barely even know her, but I know that much.’

‘Because she would have made me do something about it. Tell Mum, have an abortion – something. She’s always been the ‘doer’ out of the two of us.’

‘And you just wanted to stick your head in the sand?’ Adam looked out of the window.

Claire had been right about Sarah. Imagine keeping something so big from everyone and hoping it would somehow magic itself away.

Sarah shrugged and picked at a loose thread on her towelling robe. ‘Basically.’

Adam puffed the air out in his cheeks and looked at the tin box sitting in the vast space between them on the bed. Who knew something so small could contain something so big? But it still didn’t explain how the baby she’d given birth to had ended up dead.

36.

I
 could really do with a cigarette right now,’ Adam said, tapping his fingers against his legs. He would never describe himself as a smoker, not really. He only smoked when he was drinking. Come to think of it, he could do with a drink too.

‘I know it’s a lot to take in,’ Sarah replied, and Adam half-laughed to himself. Slight understatement. ‘But if it’s any consolation, it’s just as hard for me admitting all this as it is for you to hear it.’

Adam shrugged. She had a point. ‘So, what happened? You had the baby and then what? The paper article said he was . . . you know.’

‘I was about seven and a half months pregnant when I went into labour. I’d woken up feeling awful, and at first I thought it was flu or some kind of bug. I went to school, but I felt sick to my stomach and my back ached. I made it through until the second-to-last period – French class. I sat there telling myself that I couldn’t be in labour. I’d seen films with labour scenes, and this was nothing like that. I actually told myself that because I didn’t feel the need to push, nothing was happening. In fact, it actually felt like period pains to begin with, but then, after class, I went to the
toilet
,
and m
y waters broke, and it was like someone had slapped me across the face. It was real and it was happening, whether anyone knew about it or not.

‘I grabbed Claire before she went into her next lesson. I didn’t know what else to do. All I knew was that I had to get out of there, and I couldn’t do it alone. When I told her what was going on, she got so angry, but when I doubled over, she took charge like I needed her to. I was in a complete panic. I hadn’t looked into childbirth at all. I still had over a month before I was anywhere near due, and it wasn’t like it is now – there was no Google or YouTube video
to w
alk me through it. I don’t know what I would have done
without
Claire.

‘She took me to The Rec – an old cricket pavilion in a park. It was where the sixth formers and cool kids used to hang out in the summer. It was raining and cold, and I guess Claire thought it was the best place to go.

‘I hadn’t been timing my contractions. I hadn’t thought to, but they were getting pretty regular. I felt like I’d tripled in weight, I was so heavy. Every contraction got worse than the last, and I didn’t know how long it would go on for, or how long
I
 
could go on for, but Claire was fantastic. We were totally unprepared – we didn’t have anything. I was lying on my school blazer and Claire had a bottle of water. That was it.’

‘That’s insane.’ Adam shook his head. ‘Christ, you could have died, Sarah. Why didn’t you just go to the hospital?’

‘She wanted to call an ambulance, but I begged her not to. The nearest phone box was at least twenty minutes away, and I was too scared to let her out of my sight. I wanted to be anywhere else but there, but if that was where I had to be, then I needed her with me.

‘It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had. It was the day before my fifteenth birthday, and I was about to give birth in a falling-down cricket pavilion in the middle of a park, with only my sister there to help. To this day, I still don’t know how she held it all together, but she did. I could see in her eyes that she was just as scared as I was, but she kept me calm. We had nothing to go on except for films and TV shows we’d seen, and that meant pushing. And even when I knew I had to, when my body was begging me to, every instinct I had wanted to do the exact opposite. In the end I had to. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, and for a minute, I really did think I was going to die. And then . . .’ Sarah wiped her eyes and smiled for the first time in what felt like forever. ‘And then, he came.’

‘Jesus.’ Adam ran a hand over his mouth and swallowed. It was barbaric. It was the kind of thing he would expect to hear about in a third-world country, not Yorkshire.

‘Something was wrong, we knew that straight away,’ Sarah said, shaking her head with her eyes focusing on the wall behind him. ‘The look on Claire’s face . . . I’ll never forget it. It was like she’d literally seen a ghost. She looked terrified, and for a minute I wondered if there was something wrong with me until I saw her holding my baby in her coat.

‘His little face . . . It was so tiny. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, with skin so fine, like glass. But he wasn’t crying. He wasn’t moving at all, and his eyes were closed.

‘I’d never seen a dead body before. Not even Dad’s. Mum said we were too young to see him when he was at the funeral home.
But I
knew my baby was dead. All my energy rushed back at
once, an
d I grabbed him from her. When his head lolled back, I got this feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was like a ball of every bad feeling you could imagine, all rolled into one, like the worst kind of sickness. I could hear this noise, like an animal trapped in barbed wire, and it wasn’t until Claire put her arms around me that I realised it was me.

‘I don’t know how long we stayed there for. We just sat there, holding him, and all I could think was,
It’s my fault.
All the drinking and smoking – it was my fucking fault. I’d killed him because I was too fucking drunk and drugged up to even realise I was pregnant in the first place. I’d killed the last bit of Richard I had. I didn’t know what to do. It would have been hard enough telling Mum and Peter about the baby anyway, but telling them that I’d killed him was something I couldn’t do. No way. I’d burn in hell for all eternity. I didn’t need Peter to tell me that – I knew it for myself.

‘I called him Jack. I hadn’t thought about names at all until then, but when I held him, I knew that was his name. His skin was so soft. I ran my fingers over his eyebrows, his little button nose and across his cheeks. I buried my face in his head with his downy baby hair tickling my nose, clinging to the hope that he was just asleep and he’d open his eyes. But he didn’t. They say that a person’s eyes are the windows to their soul. I never got to see his.

‘We had no idea what to do. It was late, it was freezing cold and eventually we decided that the hospital would be the best place for him because they’d know what to do. All we had was Claire’s gym bag, but I couldn’t put Jack in there myself. I just couldn’t. I had to sit there as Claire took him from me and put him in the bag. My mind was starting to scramble. I was worried he’d suffocate, and all I could think about was him wondering why he was being stuffed into a smelly old bag in the dark where he couldn’t breathe.

‘I didn’t look when she zipped the bag up, and she had to physically manhandle me to get me up off the floor. I must have looked a complete state, but nobody paid us any attention. We were walking down the street with my dead son in a bag, and nobody noticed.

‘When we got to town, Claire left me to go to the hospital, and I carried on home. It sounds really heartless to say that out loud,
but I cou
ldn’t have gone with her. I got home, and Mum and Peter were asleep. It’s funny. If I’d come home that late a few months earlier, there would have been hell to pay, but as far as they were concerned, I’d sorted myself out, was back to my normal self. I didn’t even have a curfew anymore. And you know what? I would have really loved one. I would have loved to have walked through the door and seen them waiting for me at the table, because then they would have known something was wrong. But I didn’t. I had a bath and went to bed and cried like I’ve never cried before. I cried so much I made myself sick.

‘When Claire finally came home, she got into bed with me, and we just held each other. She told me she’d left him outside the hospital and called the reception from a payphone. She promised me he’d be looked after, and the doctors and nurses would know what to do. I don’t think I could ever tell her how much it meant to me that she did what she did. It was the early hours of our fifteenth birthday, and it had been spent covering up the death of my secret baby. Because of me, we’d never be able to celebrate a birthday again without thinking about what happened.

‘The next day, it was reported on the morning news. They said he’d been dumped, as if I’d never wanted him. As if I didn’t care. It was in the newspaper too. The way they reported it made me sound like a monster, because they weren’t sure if he’d died
before o
r after being left at the hospital. That really hurt. I loved him. There’s no way I’d have dumped him to die; he was already dead. It didn’t excuse what I’d done, but sitting there, watching it on TV, it felt like a witch-hunt. I already knew it was my fault that he’d di
ed, and
they did too. I was scared I’d end up in prison or something, and Claire too. So we made a pact. Neither of us would tell what
had happe
ned. We wouldn’t say anything to Mum, Peter or the police. And we’ve never spoken about it since. Even now, we always talk to each other on the day it happened, but we never actually speak about it, and we never mention his name.

‘We might never be the closest of sisters, but she was the one person I could rely on. She’d held it all together so well, but I was weak. I always had been. We got tattoos a few years later to remember him by. It was Claire’s idea, actually. She acts so strong, but I know how much it broke her. I was the only one who knew why she’d zone out sometimes. I knew that when she’d go quiet, she was thinking about him.

‘I’ve tried to make it better ever since. That’s why I became a social worker. It sounds so cliché, but I didn’t want what
happened
to me to happen to anyone else. At the time, I convinced myself Mum and Peter would throw me out and disown me, but seeing what I see every day at work, I know they’re nothing like that. Going back today was . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I underestimated them. Maybe we’d have coped if I’d told them the truth, even if the end result would have been the same.

‘Work was a way to try and make it all better, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want to get involved with anyone, fall in love again or have a family. And then I met you. And even though I knew I was getting in too deep, I couldn’t stop myself. For the first time in fifteen years, I felt happy. I didn’t want to let that feeling go, but when you proposed, I went into panic mode. How could we get married? You’d want to have kids, and there was no way in hell I could go through that again. I couldn’t do it to myself, to you, or to a baby. I couldn’t go through all that pain again to have the same thing happen. I couldn’t go through having another stillbirth. It would kill me. That’s why I said no. It was never because I didn’t love you; it was because, deep down, I knew that being with you would cause more heartache in the long run. I know you want kids eventually, and I simply can’t do that. I didn’t want to inflict all this on you.’

Adam blinked and rubbed his face. She was looking back at him, and the room was silent after the almost constant barrage of confessions.

‘I knew it was a risk to tell you,’ she said, picking at a nail. ‘But so much has happened that you had to know. And at least you know now why I can’t go through with this pregnancy. I can’t have it happen again. I’ve already lost one baby, Adam. And then when I went for the consultation, they told me that I’d been carrying twins, and one of them died. I can’t do all that again.’

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and every nerve in his body tingled as he tried to hold onto everything she’d told him. Blood pounded in his ears, and a vein pulsed with his heartbeat in his throat. His insides felt like they were shaking.

‘I can’t do this.’ He shook his head, and before he could stop himself, he stood up, tightened the belt of his towelling robe and walked out of the room.