Authors: Isabel Ashdown
Laura told her that she was just tired out; that she should tell Rob how she felt, get him to help out a bit more with the baby. ‘All new mothers get tired like this, Wrenny. Honestly, it will pass.’
Wren hung up and went to Rob, who was sitting in the living room watching some American sitcom, laughing hard as he massaged a foot through his sock. ‘You should watch this,’ he said, ‘it’s very funny.’
‘Can you see me?’ Wren asked.
Rob took a second to look away from the screen. ‘Huh?’
‘
Am I fading?
’ She knew how mad she sounded, could hear it from far away; she could even see herself, pale and dishevelled, viewed from a distance: like watching some strange play.
‘Fading? Don’t be daft!’ He rose from his seat and wrapped his arms around her. ‘How could you fade – you’re as beautiful now as the day I met you.
More
beautiful.’
‘I don’t mean – ’ she tried to say, but her voice was muffled against his cable-knit jumper, and at any rate she couldn’t get the words out if she tried.
Phoebe closes her eyes and takes a long, deep breath. She turns to look at Wren with a smile, her face wide and trusting. ‘You know, I think I’d be a calm person if I lived somewhere like this. If I walked on the beach every day the way you do, to have time alone with my thoughts.’
Wren’s timelines are tangled, thoughts and memories tumbling across one another in cables of disorder. Gulls fly overhead, towards the ocean, their sharp eyes on the water, on the feast below. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not – whether Phoebe is really standing here beside her,
gentle in her tone. In the distance a figure clambers up the rocks, the old ghost of her, out on her daily walk, having come the right way, the usual way, along the path and across the sand. She reaches the upper pool and rests her hands on her thighs, peering into the rippling water. She’s looking for starfish, Wren knows. Bloody Henries, cushion stars, spinies and brittlestars. Black ones and orange ones and yellow and red. They were all in there if you searched long enough, if you kept your eye on the shadows.
Wren looks back at the girl – at Phoebe – her eyes searching for the gentle curve of her pregnancy, hidden beneath layers, a life waiting to happen. She sees herself cradling an infant; is it Phoebe, or Ava, or the new child? The thought of the new child fills her with light. ‘It is calming,’ she eventually manages, plucking deep to come back into the foreground again. ‘I’ve walked almost every single day since I arrived here twenty years ago. The same route, the same distance, every day. Even when I was expecting you, right till the end, I still walked.’
The girl’s expression crumples in confusion. ‘Me? But you’d already had me by the time you came here.’
The fog of Wren’s mind clears and she blinks at Phoebe, looking back out towards the horizon where she had once stood on the rocks. Out across the wide expanse of beach she sees them, Laura and Rob, and she knows it’s time to face them, time to face her past. More than that, it’s time to face her future, whatever that might bring. She rises and holds her hand out to Phoebe, a mother to a daughter. ‘There’s so much to tell you, Phoebe,’ she says. ‘There’s so much to tell.’
Helpless to fight back, Wren clung to the rear seat of Arthur’s truck as he pleaded with her to put her head down, to calm
herself and let him help. The sky was dark, dotted with summer stars; he must have come back for her, she managed to piece together as she drifted in and out of conscious thought. Her rucksack landed in the footwell below her head, hastily thrown together by Arthur. She could hear his words breaking through her dreams:
What do you need, love? I’ve packed your keys – your purse – a few clothes. What else?
‘You need help, love,’ he insisted, pulling a rough blanket from the parcel shelf and tucking it around her shaking body. And he was right: she was ill, her fever so high she couldn’t speak coherently, and she couldn’t make him understand that she had to stay put, that the only course of action was for her to crawl back inside her fortress and pull up the drawbridge.
Arthur’s truck started away from the house, kicking up gravel against the stillness of the humid night. ‘I’ll die if you take me,’ she screamed like a crazy woman.
‘You’ll die if I leave you,’ he replied.
At the hospital he drew up at the emergency entrance, wanting to go in with her, pleading with her to let him stay, to make sure everything was alright. But as the porter helped her into a wheelchair she turned her eyes on him, ferocious clarity shining through. ‘Go, Arthur,’ she said, her voice now low and controlled. ‘
Go
.’
The child was born not an hour after Wren arrived on the maternity ward, and despite her late appearance she was fine: a daughter, seven pounds, one ounce. The place was overrun, so none of the nurses or midwives on duty were around for long enough to notice Wren’s silent tears, or to check on the false details she gave them when filling in their forms. She was there on holiday, she said, and her name
was Anne White. Her husband would be coming with her antenatal booklet soon; he’d been called away to London on business and hadn’t been able to make it back in time.
‘What a shame he missed the birth!’ the midwife said as she completed the initial paperwork. ‘You poor love. Still, he’s on his way, that’s what matters. So, do we have a name?’ she asked, pointing a pen towards the baby she had deposited in Wren’s arms just moments before. She was scribbling down details at speed, checking her watch fob, whispering to her assistant to check what time her replacement would be coming on duty.
‘Anne White,’ Wren repeated, swallowing back the raw terror that she wasn’t believed.
The midwife laughed, a full-bellied guffaw.
‘Not you, Mummy! We know your name. I meant the
baby
.’
‘Oh,’ Wren replied in a whisper. ‘It’s Ava.’
‘Very nice – like the actress.’
‘It’s a bird name.’
‘Lovely. Unusual.’ Without warning, the midwife put down her papers and crossed the room to Wren’s bedside, where she began wrestling the baby’s head into a feeding position, delivering practical instructions on how to angle her nipple towards the infant’s mouth.
‘I can’t – ’ Wren tried to object, but the midwife had zoned out as she grappled with her hand, forcing her to cup her own breast, the baby to suckle. In a gulp of air the baby was latched on, drawing deep, sharp tugs that blunted Wren’s mind and left her numb with shock. She sank back against the hospital-starched pillow and gave in, helpless. Over the next few hours she was visited constantly, as the baby was checked, as she was checked – blood pressure,
pulse, temperature, stitches, cord stump, vitamin jabs, hip tests – endless prodding and poking, endless questions. These things appeared to be happening to someone else, and Wren was quite separate from events, floating nearby, responding to all that was asked of her, lifting her shirt here, rolling back a sleeve there, her mind as blank as a smooth pebble. By early afternoon a student doctor was perched at her bedside, talking her through handfuls of leaflets and explaining how it was now their policy to send new mothers home as soon as possible, for the health and happiness of both mother and baby.
‘Do you have someone to pick you up, Anne? We’re happy that you’re both fit and well enough to go home this afternoon – as soon as we’ve seen your antenatal booklet and filled in all the relevant sections.’
Wren was still in the crumpled shirt she had arrived in, and she rummaged through her rucksack to see what Arthur had packed during their hasty departure last night. To her relief she discovered a fresh set of clothes: a sleeveless vest, shirt and leggings, along with her wallet and keys. She nodded. ‘My husband’s coming with the book. I’m going to meet him where the taxis pick up. Do you know where that is?’
‘We’d like him to come up to meet you in the ward. So we know you’re in good hands. Why don’t you get yourself dressed – no rush – and, once he’s here, we’ll finish up the forms and get you and baby off home!’ The young doctor provided her with a small supply of maternity pads and left her behind the curtain to change.
Alone behind the screen, Wren glanced down at the loose folds of skin that hung from her torso. It seemed to belong to someone else, silvery and thin as petals. There
was now a lightness in her movement, as she raised a knee to step into the disposable maternity knickers the midwife had left for her, able to twist and stoop properly for the first time in weeks. Her lungs were fuller, her breathing deeper, and for a moment her mind cleared. As she paused to gaze into the face of the sleeping infant, a bolt of fresh understanding shot through her like a sign, and it became clear what she had to do – she knew why this baby had been brought to her. This beautiful child wasn’t hers at all; this baby was Laura’s – long-awaited, dreamed-of, lost already many times over – and Wren must send her home. Smoothing out the clean white napkin that came with her breakfast toast, she leant against the bedside cabinet and wrote, her words bumpy and uneven on the rough grain. As her pen raced across the paper she fought the mental paralysis that threatened to seize her, finding herself unable to draw on some of the simplest of details from her past, from the past she’d once lived. Her old address, the name of her husband’s school – these things were quite inaccessible to her in the driving urgency of the moment. She did the best she could, writing down her message in
heart-shuddering
haste, her hand shaking every time she heard footsteps behind the screen. Reaching inside her bag for her wallet, she retrieved her most treasured photograph, taken in a passport booth in Camden a lifetime ago. These two things she slipped inside the child’s bedding, visible enough to be seen between the clear plastic cot and the hospital regulation blankets.
With Ava asleep in her crib, her letter and photo in place, Wren placed a hand on the child’s head and prayed to all the powers on earth and in the universe and the heavens above that this baby would make it home – that she would
be returned to the heart of her people, to Laura and Rob, a family at last. With a single last glance, Wren slipped through the curtains that surrounded her bed, to vanish along the bleach-scented corridors and stairwells, out into the light beyond.
The meeting place Robert suggested is just over an hour away, in the tea rooms of the Metropole hotel in Padstow. It’s a place I’ve never been to before, and last night I checked and double-checked the route on Dad’s road map to make sure I know exactly where I’m going today. When I start off from home, the midday sun is high and bright in the sky, and I drive up the coast from Gwithian, overlooking the clean light of St Ives bay until it drops away from view, and all I see ahead is the journey I’m making to meet my family.
My family
. What strangely ordinary words for something so completely extraordinary.
To meet my family
.
Every day I feel something different. I’m a bundle of nerves one minute, an excited child the next. Dad says I’m driving him bonkers, but I know he’s pleased for me all the same, glad that I will get to learn more about my birth parents – about where I come from. I would have tried earlier, if it hadn’t been for Mum. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about it when I broached the subject on my birthday all those years ago, and so I never mentioned it again. And for a long time I didn’t mind. I was lucky they chose me, and, although I could never have put her through that while she was still here, now that she’s gone I don’t feel guilty or disloyal, not even a little bit. I feel excited, and hopeful, and certain that Mum would be OK with it if she could see what this means to me. I think about Dad, hugging me fiercely before I got in the car to leave. ‘Go knock ’em dead,’ he told
me, his voice muffled in the pink wool of my scarf. ‘They’ll love yer!’
Will they love me, though? Or will they be disappointed? I’ve watched enough films and documentaries on this subject to know it’s not always straightforward – and I’ve braced myself for the possibility that it might not work out, that the reconciliation could be an anticlimax. But some kind of faith drives me on, even after all these months of waiting since first finding Robert. He’s stalled over meeting face to face, but we’ve never broken contact, and I feel as if I will know him the moment we meet. We’ve spoken on the phone just about every week, gradually growing more familiar, until now, on this mild June day under a mackerel sky, we will see each other for the first time, for real.
What will I call you?
I asked him in one email.
Let’s decide when we meet
, he replied, and I was glad of that, not in any hurry to use the word ‘Dad’ for anyone other than the man who hugged me on the doorstep this morning.
Robert has answered the endless questions I have about my sister – about Phoebe – and we’ve exchanged stories of her childhood and mine: compared holidays, pets, school achievements, birthdays, Christmases. He says she’s kind and warm, and sometimes a bit stubborn; that she’s desperately clever, but often wilfully absent-minded. I told him my dad says she sounds a bit like me. I talked about my friends and past boyfriends, about my relatives in Penzance and Bude, about how my parents couldn’t have children and so they chose me – and, after a couple of months of communicating like that, he told me that Phoebe was pregnant. The strangest thing: I felt a sharp pang of envy. Why? The last thing I’d want is a baby myself, and yet the news pricked me, and I felt bad for feeling that way. Perhaps I wanted Rob and Phoebe
to myself for a while. The baby is here now, though, born just last month, and I cried when Robert phoned to tell me I was an auntie. It’s incredible to me that soon I will hear Phoebe’s voice and thoughts, this person who shares my genes, who shares a father
and
a mother with me.
My mother is the one who is still a mystery.
Every Sunday I look forward to Robert’s emails, filling me in on the news of his week, but in particular I love to read the stories of his past, the past he shared with my mother and with Laura. Sometimes those stories are so funny and touching, they make me want to cry. I seem to do a lot of that lately. It makes me ache to meet Wren, to look into her eyes and know her for myself. But there’s so much to fear in this too. Robert has told me about their history. From our emails and conversations I know this has been difficult for him, as he tries to come to terms with what she did, not just leaving him like that, but taking me, robbing him of my childhood. It’s something he can never forgive, he says, and I understand that, although I wish it wasn’t that way. If I can come to terms with all this, I hold out hope that they might also make peace – that we might in some way, even at a distance, share our lives. But so far, he says, they’ve barely spoken a word, apart from the one occasion, when he confronted her about leaving, and about me. I phoned him when I read that, desperate to know what was said, how she reacted. Was she sorry? Did she ever think of me? Was I the reason she left?
Was it my fault?
Robert was horrified to think he might have put those thoughts in my head, and in the end he told me all about the argument.
The first time they spoke was at her cottage, when Robert drove down to deliver Phoebe for a visit, perhaps a month or so after they’d found her. He asked Phoebe to wait in
the car while he went ahead to see Wren, but he said when she answered the door she treated him like a stranger. To me, Robert seems so calm and rational, but he told me he said things she didn’t want to hear, that it got heated when she wouldn’t acknowledge him, or the things she had done. Apparently he demanded answers, some kind of explanation, but Wren could barely look at him, let alone talk.
I was expecting Phoebe
, was all she said in return, and she left him standing in the kitchen as she went out to her garden. Robert told me it left him feeling as if he had meant nothing. As if my life, given away, had meant nothing. I didn’t know how to respond to that. Perhaps things might improve, given time, but Robert’s not so sure. He’s certain she will be different with me, just as she has been with Phoebe, but all this unfinished business makes me nervous about meeting her, more than I ever thought I could be. Yet despite my nerves I’m glad he has told me the full story; it makes me feel closer to him, to know his anger and distress and to see how he feels for Phoebe, how I hope he will feel for me. I know he wants to see me, and there’s a warm certainty about being welcomed in. But Wren sounds unpredictable; a closed book. My fear, my greatest fear, is that she’ll reject me too and I can’t say how I’ll cope with that.
Now, the grand shadow of the Metropole looms over me as I pull into the driveway and park the car, switching off the engine and breathing deeply as I look out across the harbour and gather my courage. At last, I am here. I’m afraid, but finally, I’m here.
Robert must have been watching out for me, because he appears in the hotel entrance, his expression transparent, and when he wraps his arms around me it feels like being welcomed home. Somehow I know his face, his voice, his
arms, and we shed tears together and laugh, and when we pull apart we find it hard to keep from reaching out to touch one another, to check that we’re both really there.
‘You’ve got my eyes,’ he says, looking at me intently, swiping away the tears that streak his face. ‘You’re a lot like my sister.’
‘Sorry about the hair – ’ I feel embarrassed and run my hands through the rough crop that’s grown back through over the past few months, since I shaved it on an impulse soon after Mum died. Dad went mad at me; I only regretted it when I realised we’d found Robert a few days later.
‘I like it,’ Robert replies, and he leads me to a bench at the side of the hotel, overlooking the beach. ‘We’re all here,’ he says. ‘Phoebe, Wren, Laura – baby Bobby. Everyone is so excited about meeting you. So excited, but naturally a bit nervous too.’ He laces his fingers, pressing his thumbs together until the nails turn white, and a small crinkle appears between his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long, Ava. I hope you understand? There’s been so much to get our heads around – all of us.’
I nod, anxious to race inside to find the rest of the family, but at the same time wishing I could just stay here like this, listening to Robert’s voice, taking in the details of his face.
‘After you’d made contact it seemed my whole world turned upside down, for all sorts of reasons – finding you, finding Wren, discovering Phoebe was pregnant. Don’t they say these things come in threes?’ He hooks an arm over the back of the bench, shifting his position to face me full-on. ‘I wanted to make sure things were sorted with Phoebe first, and the baby, so that I could really focus on getting to know you when the time came. It’s meant so much, talking with you on the phone and sharing emails…’
He reaches out to me again, and I see the pain behind his eyes, fresh and sharp.
‘How are things now with Wren?’ I ask.
‘She still behaves as if I’m not in the room. It’s strange, but I hope some day we’ll get past it. She’s not the same person she was – but then I suppose neither am I. When we go inside, you’re bound to notice some tension between us, and it’s important you know it’s not aimed at you, Ava. Wren’s been living alone for the past twenty years, and she’s out of practice with all the social stuff, so don’t be surprised if she’s not as upbeat as the rest of us. Remember, Phoebe has just been through the same thing as you, meeting her mother, and she says you just have to go slowly.’ Robert lays a hand on mine, and looks at me steadily through his amber eyes. ‘Now, speaking of Phoebe, she’ll skin me alive if I keep you from her any longer. Ready?’
My heart races. ‘Ready.’
The hotel lobby is quiet and Robert tells me we have a room off the café to ourselves. At the entrance he hugs me once more, before standing aside to let me enter first.
So here they all are; my family, a portrait of anticipation and uncertainty in the soft blue light of the room.
Time seems to stand still; my hearing is muted, like the colours of the room, and my movements feel slow as I take in the faces of the two women who sit at either end of the sofa, their amazed eyes fixed on me, and Phoebe, my sister, who springs up from the armchair, to throw her arms around me and clasp me tight. When she releases me she doesn’t say a word, just takes my hand and steps back to look, to really look at me, as if I’m a rare creature of great interest, and I laugh as I realise I’m doing the same in reflection. I see my mother, Wren, who remains seated; I feel the distance
between her and Robert as their eyes meet in a flash of shared hurt, and I know that somehow they’re held together by this other woman on the sofa: Laura. I recognise her from her curls, just as she looked in the passport photograph, and as she smiles at me I feel her warmth.
Wren appears startled, ready to bolt from the room, and she holds tight to the tiny baby swaddled in her arms, glancing at me intermittently, though her focus is drawn to the safety of the child.
‘Wren?’ Phoebe says, stepping back, her fingers still looped over mine.
Robert moves away from me, his hand rising to pinch at his lower lip as he perches on the arm of the sofa beside Laura. The room feels as if it might explode with the pressure of so much feeling, and, just as I think Wren might never stir, Laura turns to her, and scoops the baby from her arms. With a gentle jerk of her head she indicates for Wren to stand, and after a pause she does, cautiously, as I release Phoebe to extend a hand, wanting Wren to come to me; wanting her to want it too. In a moment we are in each other’s arms, and I feel the rise and fall of her breathing as she clings to me, her wet cheek pressed to mine.
‘
Were you happy?
’ she whispers so that only I can hear, and I pull back and look into her eyes, so full of hope and longing, and I nod. That’s all, I nod my head, and through her tears and pain Wren’s face breaks into a smile that lights up the room.