Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (35 page)

“Is he …”

If Cordy asks me outright, I will tell her. That’s the deal I made with myself: if anyone asks me outright, I will tell them.

“Is he happy?” she asks, sinking down into the bed, punching the pillow. “Is he happy in his life? I know I speak to him all the time, but is he really happy?”

“The last time I spoke to him, he seemed to be,” I say, sinking down, too.

“Good,” she says. “Good. He should be here, though. He should be here.”

Bleep-bleep. Bleep-bleep
, sounds my mobile. I snatch it up and call up the text message.

I text him back that I love him, relieved now I can sleep for half an hour.

“All I care about right now is Leo,” I say.

“Yeah, course,” Cordy agrees. “Course.”

I
see there’s a family history of hemorrhaging, particularly in the brain,” the doctor says to my assembled family.

He had originally come into Leo’s room to ask to speak to me alone, not realizing that once we got a nurse to sit with Leo, “alone” meant speaking to six people. We all crammed into the relatives’ room, Mum and Aunt Mer sat on my right, Keith sat on my left, and Dad and Cordy stood behind us as the consultant started to speak.

Knowing what I am about to unleash in the room, I hesitate before I say, “His paternal grandfather died of a brain hemorrhage twenty-something years ago. An aneurysm that ruptured and became a fatal hemorrhage.”

Mum gives a small, fragile intake of breath; my father puts his hand on her shoulder to comfort her or to steady himself, I’m not sure which. Cordy takes a deep, deep breath and exhales loudly. Keith becomes a rigid form beside me at the reaction of my family—he hasn’t realized until this point that my family don’t know. He has always assumed that we don’t talk about Leo’s father because I changed my mind about the surrogacy and it must have hurt Mal, not because I have never told them.

I’m not a natural liar, and not owning up to something makes me feel as though I have lied. And spending the last eight years with this pact to tell only if someone asks directly has been difficult, weighing heavily on my conscience. I wanted to tell,
but I couldn’t because as soon as I did, they would have asked questions until it came out about the surrogacy agreement.

From there, the conversations that would have started—the rebukes, the recriminations, the being silently told I was stupid to even agree—would have been unbearable. After that, I would have had to tell them why I kept the baby. Even after all this time, I still found what he did, how he did it, something too hard to think about, let alone talk about. I had seen how hard he had become, inured to anything except going through with what he had decided. I didn’t want to relive it, nor to visit it upon my family. And knowing Mum, knowing Cordy, they wouldn’t have left it after hearing the story. They would have known best; they would have tried to talk to Mal. They would have tried to set us up, thinking that this could all be fixed with a little staging, a few correct words and a reminder to him how much we mean to each other. I knew that wasn’t true, I’d done all that: I had engineered those meetings, I had tried to talk to him, I’d broken down in front of him and none of it mattered. Mal and his wife didn’t want Leo; Mal wanted nothing more to do with me. I did not want to expose that hardened, uncaring Mal I had experienced to Mum and Cordy. It was a decision I had made that was best for all concerned. I had basically decided to lie by omission, all the while knowing that the longer I avoided admitting everything, the more hurt it would cause them.

I have hurt the people who care about me most by trying to protect them.

“And his father?” the consultant asks. “Has he suffered any sort of hemorrhaging?”

“About ten years ago he had a brain scan,” I reply. “They found nothing.”

Aunt Mer probably knows the answer to that; however, I don’t
dare look at her, which would implicate her in this. And I don’t want my parents and Cordy to feel any more betrayed, which the knowledge that Aunt Mer has always known would do.

“He’s fine,” Aunt Mer says. “He had another scan last year, when he started to have headaches and blurry vision, but they found nothing.”

Another almost inaudible gasp from Mum, physical shock from Dad and Cordy. I hate what this is doing to them. I never wanted any of them to find out like this.

The consultant, one I don’t know, one I probably won’t see again, makes a note on his clipboard with his expensive-looking black pen. He is writing down this new piece of medical information, and probably adding: “Fucked-up family, half of them don’t even know who the child’s father is. Mother clearly has been telling porkies.”

The doctor’s sandy hair lies lightly on his forehead and I notice how young he is. I never realized that certain things, such as the age of the doctor whose hands in which the life of my son rests, would be important. He isn’t seventeen, but nor is he that much older than me. Shouldn’t he have lived a bit more to be able to diagnose things? Shouldn’t he have seen more of life to be able to stand there and talk to me about things going wrong?

Which is, of course, what he is doing.

He began this conversation by taking me away from Leo. If he was going to tell me Leo was going to wake up soon, he would have told me in front of Leo, knowing that the knowledge would help the little boy. Would somehow filter through and let him know exactly what he is meant to be doing. Taking me away means what he has to say is for adult ears only.

It was like that when I brought him in with the nosebleed. They had stopped it, but then had taken me into the relatives’
room to tell me that they needed to send him for an emergency MRI scan, because I’d noted down there was a history of hemorrhaging in the family and that Leo had mentioned he had headaches and blurry vision every so often. Then they’d said what they found on the scan, that they needed to go in and operate because one of the blueberry aneurysms was so close to rupture. Every time they told me these things, it had been away from Leo, information they felt he didn’t need to hear.

So I had known when the consultant, who is a stranger to me, asked to speak to me—to us—in here, that he wasn’t going to deliver the news that I wanted. The news that I needed.

With his head still bowed, only the doctor’s eyes move away from his clipboard and seek out mine across the room. His eyes are a deep, dark blue that house an old soul. He is young, but he has lived. Maybe seeing lives hanging in the balance day after day does that to you; maybe you age on the inside and only those who look close enough can see it.

“Mrs. Kumalisi,” he says, straightening up and looking me in the eye.

“Yes?” Mum, Cordy and I all reply.

“
Doctor
Kumalisi,” the doctor tries again, after looking pointedly at Mum and Cordy, asking them silently,
Why on earth would I be talking to either of you?

“Mr. Consultant,” I reply, a small corner of my mind agreeing with him—whose son is in this hospital?

“We’ve been monitoring your son’s condition for the past four weeks.”

“Yes.”

“He hasn’t shown much improvement.”

“ ‘Much’ means none at all, doesn’t it?” I reply.

I feel Mum, Dad and Aunt Mer stiffen: young he may be, but
he is still a doctor, and speaking to him as I would anyone else is not something of which they approve.

A little spark of respect ignites in the doctor’s eyes. I suppose most parents would be hanging on to his every word, hoping he will tell them what they want to hear, all the while knowing that they probably won’t get what they’re longing for. I am clinging to hope, too. But I have also seen their repeated and failed attempts to revive him, I have seen the doctors’ faces, I know he isn’t improving.

“The current course of treatment doesn’t seem to be as effective as we had hoped. Keeping him in the coma was not meant to be a long-term plan. However, attempts to bring him out of the coma have proved unsuccessful.”

He is recapping this, I realize, for my extended family, to make them understand that they haven’t simply adopted a “wait and see” approach; they
have
tried.

“Doctor …”

“Mr. Consultant.”

His eyes hold mine, an intimate, unique type of understanding solidifying between us.

“Leo’s condition is, in fact, deteriorating.”

Mum and Cordy both burst into quiet tears. Keith reaches over and curls his large hand protectively over mine. Dad moves to the corner of the room. Aunt Mer is the only person to react like me: to become completely immobile.

“There is no improvement, nor any constant stability,” the consultant continues. “We’re not sure how long it’s going to take, but it seems, at the present, there is only one conclusion.”

Slowly, I get to my feet. The crying, the silence, the attempt at comfort from my husband, is all too much. Stifling. Crushing down on my throat, into my lungs, into my arteries, into every blood vessel in my body.

Once, Leo dropped a rock on an earthworm because he wanted to see what would happen. He had called me out into the garden to show me the crushed beast. When I told him it was dead and that being dead meant it would never wake up and move again, Leo had stared at me in complete horror. “I’m sorry, Mum,” he said, close to tears. “I’m really sorry. Please don’t let it be dead forever. Please don’t let it never wake up.” To calm him as much as I could, we’d had a funeral for it, with a matchbox for a coffin, and buried it at the end of the garden. Two years later, Leo still visited the little grave to say sorry to the earthworm.

All I want is for Leo to be OK. It’s only a little thing. In the grand scheme of things, wanting for a quiet, kind, beautiful little boy who hasn’t ever hurt anyone to be OK doesn’t seem too much to want.

There are millions of not very nice people out there. There are thousands and thousands of nasty people out there. There are hundreds of truly evil people out there. And they are OK. All of them are OK. But this boy, my boy, my Leo, isn’t going to be. That’s what this man is telling me. Someone who is sweet and kind and beautiful is not going to be OK.

Keith stands to come with me, I presume. “I want to be alone with Leo,” I say to stop him.

He nods, sits down again.

The consultant has gone back to staring at his clipboard.

“You’re wrong, you know,” I say to him as I head toward the door. “That’s not going to happen. Not to my boy.”