What's Yours Is Mine (27 page)

Grace rubs her hands with antiseptic gel, and goes into the ICU. I follow and watch as she tenderly leans over her sister, and strokes her hair out of her face.

And then Grace speaks, and I realize I have understood nothing at all.

“I'll give her mine,” I say. “I can do that, can't I? You only need one to live. She can have one of mine.”

Next to me, I feel Tom stiffen. “Grace, this is a big decision—”

I shake off his restraining hand. “She's my
sister
. It's not a decision. Of course I'll give her my kidney. I'll be a match. We have the same blood group. I'm sure I'll be a match.”

I have to be
, I think desperately. It's my fault Susannah's sick. If it weren't for me, she'd never even be pregnant. If she dies, I'll never forgive myself.

I should have supported her when she decided to keep the baby. I wasn't thinking straight. I was so blinded by how
I
felt, I didn't think about what was best for her, or best for the baby
—her
baby. I didn't believe she knew how to be a good mother, or was even capable of it, but she's proved me wrong. Michael says she's turned over a new leaf: she's given up cigarettes, she's stopped drinking, she's
eating well and getting plenty of rest; she's stopped pining for Blake. A child belongs with its mother. I can't fight Susannah, even though it breaks my heart.

Dialysis. Transplants
. My baby sister, so ill she can't even hold her new daughter.

“How did this happen so fast?” I whisper, feeling sick. “I know she's had problems with her kidneys before, but how can she suddenly need a transplant? Was it because … of the baby?”

“It sometimes happens this way. Certainly the stress of the pregnancy will have played a part,” the doctor says.

A sixth sense tells me she's hiding something. My stomach goes into free fall. I heard the nurses talking earlier: cerebral hemorrhages, hypertension, organ failure. You can live without functioning kidneys, but if the liver breaks down, there's nothing anyone can do. Septicemia. Brain bleeds. Heart failure. Ava could lose her mother before she even knows her.

“Is there something else?” I ask sharply. “Is something wrong that you're not telling us?”

For a moment, the doctor says nothing. Finally, she looks me in the eye. “Your sister's blood alcohol level was rather high when she came in.”

It takes a minute for me to process what she's said.

Your sister's blood alcohol level was rather high
.

In other words, she was
drunk
.

A bitter, savage rage sweeps through me. Susannah nearly lost her baby—she nearly
killed
her baby—because
she was drunk. She's the same person she was when she abandoned her sons. She's incapable of thinking of anyone but herself.

My anger congeals into cold, hard fury. I was right all along. Susannah isn't fit to be a mother. I should never have let Nicholas Lyon talk me into giving her a second chance. I should have trusted my instincts and forced Tom to see the truth.

He has to see it now. I smile grimly. She's shot herself in the foot this time. We will get Ava back. It's just a matter of time.

The doctor leads us to the ICU to see Susannah. I look through the viewing window at my sister, and feel nothing but contempt. I don't give a damn about the tubes and wires going into her body in a dozen places. I don't care if she's on dialysis for the rest of her life. She's brought this on herself. She deserves it. It wasn't just her life she was gambling with, but her daughter's. If Ava survives, she could be permanently brain-damaged or disabled. Her life may be over before it's even begun. How could any mother worthy of the name do this to her own child?

Susannah smiles as we walk into her room, and I lean over her bed and gently stroke her hair out of her face. She looks ten years older than she did this morning, but even sick and exhausted, she's still beautiful. Like a Venus fly-trap. Beautiful on the outside, but rotting and foul within.

“I understand you need a new kidney,” I say tenderly. “Been a bit careless with the old one.”

“A bit,” she whispers.

“It's going to be OK, Zee. I'm told you only need one kidney to get by, and I'm probably a perfect match, so you can have one of mine. We can share.”

“Grace … I don't know what to say …”

“Share and share alike, isn't that what Mum always used to say? So I'll give you my kidney,” I say, still smiling, “and you'll give me the baby. What's mine is yours, and what's yours is mine. Share and share alike after all.”

I HAD NO
idea what I was going to say until the words were out of my mouth. But once uttered, I can't take them back. And the truth is, I don't
want
to. Susannah is asking a huge thing of me, a huge sacrifice. All I'm asking in return is that she honors our deal and does what's best for Ava. I think I'm being more than fair.

I'm so filled with bitterness, I have no room for anything else. I watch Tom collect his things from the bathroom and move into the spare bedroom, and I feel nothing. He's fallen under Susannah's spell, as everyone does, eventually. My sister ruins lives: her own, and those of everyone she touches. My mother didn't even know I was alive, she was so wrapped up with Susannah. My father came second in his own home. My nephews are being brought up by strangers because their mother was too busy chasing men halfway around the world. And the baby who should have been mine is fighting for her life in an incubator, unable even to breathe unaided because my sister thought a few beers were more important.

The next morning, Tom returns to our room to get dressed. I lie in the bed listening to him stumble around, his movements as heavy and slow as those of an old man, and I don't even trouble to feign sleep. I hold on to my bright, shiny anger as tightly as if it were a diamond.

The bed sinks heavily as Tom sits down to lace up his shoes. I sense him turn towards me, and I feel his hand hovering above my shoulder, but I don't move, and a moment later, the hand is withdrawn and the bed heaves again as Tom stands.

“She's your sister,” he says helplessly.

“I don't have a sister,” I say.

I wait until I hear the front door slam, and the sound of Tom's feet crunching down the gravel drive. I know I've driven him away for good this time. He won't forgive me for this.

I shower, and pick out a severe charcoal skirt suit that matches my mood, and a pair of low-heeled black court shoes. I don't switch on the radio and listen to John Humphrys slow-roast a mendacious government minister as I usually do. I don't even turn on the television for some news-lite. Instead, I dress in total silence, enjoying the freedom from having to think. I'm pleased to note my hand is steady as I put on my makeup and fasten the row of pearls Tom gave me on our wedding day. The worst has happened. I have lost my mother, my sister, and my husband. I will soon lose my best friend. Whatever it takes, I will not lose my child.

Nicholas Lyon is expecting me when I arrive at his
office a little before nine. I give him the paperwork he needs to set the paternity test in motion, which has Tom's signature on the bottom. Tom didn't sign it, of course. After living with him for seventeen years, I can replicate it with authenticity. I have never knowingly committed fraud in my life, I haven't even overrun a parking meter, but I'm no longer worried about the rights and wrongs of stupid rules. Time enough to deal with the fallout when we have established if Ava is Tom's child.

I sit down and balance my Birkin neatly on my lap. “What happens now?”

“Letters will be sent to your sister and Blake Stabler requiring them to comply with the order to produce a DNA sample. Once we have the results, and assuming that your husband is indeed the father, we can discuss how to proceed.”

“What if they refuse?”

“There is legal recourse, but let us hope it won't come to that.”

I feel sick at the thought of the letter landing on Claudia's doormat. She is my dearest friend; she has been more of a sister to me than Susannah ever was. This will destroy her life.

I harden my heart.
Collateral damage
. What choice do I have?

A week later, my sister is discharged from the hospital. I'm not surprised when, later that day, she turns up at my back door. I expected this. Susannah always thinks she can charm people into seeing things her way.

I study her through the window. She has lost weight, I notice: more than suits her. She looks tired and haggard, and her skin still has a yellowish tinge. She stands in the drizzling autumn rain, waiting like a supplicant for me to let her in, her pretty blond hair dulled by the rainwater to the color of putty. In the flat light of an English October afternoon, even her striking blue eyes no longer look remarkable. If I didn't know better, I'd think she actually cared.

I open the door. “Have you changed your mind?” I ask politely. We might be discussing an invitation to dinner.

“Grace, please.” She steps forward, but I start to close the door, and she stops. “Please,” she begs, spreading her hands. “If you won't do it for me, please, think of Ava.”

“Ava?”

“She
needs
me,” Susannah pleads. “I'm her mother. She needs me,” she says again.

“Do we have an agreement? Are you ready to share?”

“Share?” She laughs disbelievingly. “
Share?
She's my child, not a box of sweets! Have you completely lost it, Grace? I'm not swapping my baby for your fucking kidney! Of course I haven't changed my mind! I'm never
going
to change my mind!”

“Then we have nothing to discuss,” I say, shutting the door.

Susannah hammers on it with her fists. “Do you know what you're doing to me?” she screams. “Have you got any idea what my life is like now? I'm chained to that
machine for four hours every other day! I'm thirty-four years old, and I barely have the energy to walk upstairs! How can you
do
this to me? I'm your
sister
!”

“I'm not doing anything,” I say coolly. “You could change this in a moment. You're doing it to yourself.”

I VISIT AVA
in the hospital every morning before I go to work, and every evening before I come home. Susannah hasn't been to see her except for once, two days after she was born. She's shown no interest in her child. I knew it would be like this. She's only hanging on to her to spite me.

The only moment I weaken is when Tom moves out. Three weeks after Ava's birth, I come down to breakfast one morning to find him loading up the back of his Range Rover with clothes and books and fishing rods—fishing rods, I think irrelevantly: since when did Tom
fish?
—and emptying his study of all his files and folders from work. I walk silently through the house, thinking that the gaps on the walls and the bookshelves are mirrored by those in my heart. Tom nods at me as he staggers back out to the car through the mud with a cardboard box filled with papers, but says nothing. I nod back. What is there left to say?

Stop him! Stop him before it's too late!

I can't
. If he doesn't understand why I have to do this, he's not the man I thought he was. He's not the man I fell in love with.

He returns for the last box, and stands clutching it on
the doorstep. “I'll be staying at the B&B for a few days,” he says awkwardly. “If you need me or anything.”

Tell him you need him
now.
It's all he wants to hear
.

One word from me, and this nightmare would be over. We could go back to the way we used to be. Tom&Grace, the ampersand couple. Finishing each other's sentences, mirroring each other's thoughts.

I know I'll never be given custody of Ava without Tom. And he will never seek it, regardless of whether she's his child or not. There's no point fighting him any longer. I might as well yield now, and accept that Ava is lost. No need to sacrifice my marriage, too.

Suddenly I'm eight years old again, and staring at the broken pieces of my mother's treasured jade dragon, her last gift from her father before he died. In my mind's eye I can still see it falling from my clumsy hands, even though it already lies in a dozen shards at my feet. I keep staring at them, my eyes straining with the effort of trying not to blink. I can almost see the pieces leaping back together and re-forming in front of me, like a film being rewound. It's not too late. If I will it hard enough, I can make it happen.

Except it is too late, of course. The moment I disobeyed my mother and picked up the dragon, long before it had even started to slip from my grasp, it was already too late. Once you set a chain of events in motion, there's no going back.

We were never that perfect couple
, I think dully.
We had the perfect life, which isn't the same thing
.

“I'll be back for some more things in a week or two,”
Tom says, his voice bleak. “When I've found somewhere more permanent to stay.”

The door closes behind him. I sit neatly at the kitchen table, my hands in my lap. I have no idea what to do, or how to be, without him. So I sit.

An hour later, perhaps two, the door opens again, and I look up. Claudia stands trembling in front of me, clad only in her pajama sweats and her coat. On her feet are a muddy pair of flip-flops. Her eyes are red-rimmed and swollen.
Not today
, I think.
Not Tom and Claudia in one day
.

She flings a crumpled ball of paper on the table. I pick it up and smooth it out, though I already know what it is. Nicholas's letter, demanding her husband take a DNA test to see if he fathered my sister's child.