What's Yours Is Mine (28 page)

“You knew?” she cries. “You
knew
?”

“Afterwards,” I say wearily. “Not until afterwards.”

“You couldn't tell me? You had to let me find out like
this?
”

Slowly, feeling about a hundred years old, I get up and put the kettle on the Aga and spoon sugar into two mugs because I don't know what else to do.

“Is it still going on?” she demands. “Is he still seeing her?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. Michael says she hasn't seen him for ages.”

“Michael knows, too?” Suddenly the fight goes out of her. She gropes for a chair. “You all knew, and no one thought to
tell
me?”

“
You
knew,” I reply. “Not about Susannah, but you
knew about the others. You stayed with him anyway. How would it have helped to tell you about Susannah? What difference would it have made?”

The kettle boils, and I pour each of us a mug of hot, sweet tea. I put one in front of her and sit down with my own, too tired and heart-sore even to wonder what comes next. We both curl our hands around the warming mugs, waiting for the steaming liquid to cool, waiting for someone to tell us what to do.

“I know you don't understand why I stay,” Claudia says, after a long silence. “I'm not sure I understand myself. I don't know if it's love, or cowardice. I don't want to be left to bring up three children on my own, or to sell our house and go back to work; I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of it. But it's more than that. I know Blake. There are things in his background, things that have happened to him—I'm not making excuses,” she adds quickly. “It's not OK, what he's done. I'm not saying that. But there is more than one way to love someone. It's not always black and white. Black and white is easy. It's the gray that's difficult.”

We listen to the clock ticking in the hall. I think of my father sitting for hours every day next to my mother's bed; before she got sick, the two of them would go all day without exchanging a word.
There is more than one way to love someone
.

She pushes her mug away, as if it was that easy to be rid of the past. “You and Tom, you had the fairy tale,” she accuses. “But for most of us, marriage isn't like that. It's a
compromise. Blake and I have a lot that's good. The children, for one. And we have
fun
. That might not seem important to you, but it matters to me. When he's with me, he's with me a hundred percent. I know I'm the only person who matters. I'd rather that,” she says passionately, “than the kind of sleepwalking marriage so many women have.”

She means me. I can't remember the last time Tom and I had fun. Sleepwalking? I suppose we were.

Claudia shoves her chair back from the table, then picks up the creased letter, folds it in half, and then half again, and shoves it in the pocket of her Barbour. “The baby isn't his. You don't need all these tests.”

My marriage may not have been very exciting, but at least it
was
a marriage, I think suddenly. Claudia can dress it up any way she likes, but the fact is that Blake has lied and cheated on her for years. He may love her, but it's a child's love, selfish and demanding. There's nothing
gray
about adultery.

“Claudia,” I say softly, “I wouldn't have put you through this if I didn't have to. Without a test, there's no way of knowing if Blake or Tom is Ava's father. Even Susannah doesn't know.”

To my astonishment, Claudia laughs. “No, Grace. I mean he
can't
be. Literally. Blake had a vasectomy as soon as we found out I was pregnant with Kiefer. He didn't want any more kids. He had the snip months before he even
met
Susannah. There's no way Ava can be his.”

I digest this in silence.
The baby is Tom's
. Which means that if he hadn't just left me, she could have been mine, too.

“Grace,” Claudia asks, “where
is
Tom?”

“He's gone,” I say flatly.

“Gone? Grace,
why?
That man would walk over hot coals for you!”

“It seems I offended his moral sensibilities,” I say coolly. “He was happy to go along with things while they were easy, but when they got tough, he didn't want to get his hands dirty. Don't tell me what he would and wouldn't do for me.”

“I heard about your … 
deal,
” Claudia says, “with Susannah. You pushed him too far, Grace.”

“What would you rather?” I demand, my temper getting the better of me. “You want me to go and give Susannah a kidney, so she can keep on fucking your husband whenever the mood takes her?”

“Yes, if it stops Tom leaving!” Claudia shoots back.

She storms from my kitchen as abruptly as she entered it. I watch her leave, and don't try to stop her. Somewhere deep inside, I know she's right. But my rage is implacable. For as long as I can remember, I've protected and covered for my sister. I've bailed her out more times than I can count, and made excuses for her even when I've known she's not just wrong, but reveling in the chaos she's causing.
Enough
, I think bitterly. Susannah has gone through life thinking only of herself, heedless of the impact of her
actions on everyone else. Now she needs to learn what happens when she has only herself to rely on.

But I'm the one who is taught a lesson, not Susannah. I discover that anger doesn't keep you warm at night. I miss Tom more than I could ever have imagined. It is as if my heart has been cut out, my right hand cut off. The only thing that keeps me from rushing to his side and begging him to come home is the knowledge that if he refuses, all hope will be gone, and I don't think I could bear that.

A few days after he leaves, as suddenly as it descended on me, the red mist clears. The fury that's sustained me for so long has blown itself out. I don't hate my sister anymore. I can't quite find it in me to forgive her, either, but in a way, that doesn't matter. The destructive rage has gone, and for the first time in nearly a month, despite my grief, I'm at peace. Love trumps vengeance every time.

I realize it's time to value what I have left. Regardless of her behavior, Susannah is my sister. I can't hold her health ransom over Ava. Of course I have to help her. I pick up the phone, and call the transplant team; quickly, before it's too late.

When they tell me what my sister has just done, I'm more shocked than I've ever been in my life.

The baby freaks me out. Ava. It doesn't even look like a baby. Its head is way too big, and it's all scrawny and wrinkled, like a skinned rat. The body is covered with white fur, and it doesn't have any proper hair: no eyelashes or eyebrows or anything. The skin is transparent, so you can see all its veins; you can even see its heart beating like a dark plum in the middle of its chest. The wires and tubes and machines make it look like some kind of sick science experiment. It's disgusting.

Even if I was allowed to hold it, I wouldn't want to. It's a … a
thing
, not my daughter. It makes me want to hurl. It's not human. It's not even properly alive.

The nurse leans over my wheelchair. “What is it, love? You feeling bad again?”

“Can we go now?”

She releases the hand brake, but doesn't move my chair away. The incubator's at eye-level with me. I can see this big vein throbbing like some kind of snake in its head. I have to close my eyes so I don't throw up.

The nurse pats my hand sympathetically. “I know, love, it's all a bit scary to begin with, seeing them like this. All those tubes and wires. But you're not to worry. She's a fighter, your little one. She's in good hands. I've seen kiddies much worse off make it. You just need to concentrate on getting yourself better now.”

I don't want this “kiddie” to make it. I wish it'd never been born
.

I hate Grace. She knows me too fucking well. I feel like a fox in a trap, faced with the choice of eating off its own leg to escape or starving to death. I can give her the baby and spend the rest of my life a crippled freak of nature: the mother who sold her child for the price of a kidney. Or I can keep it, and say goodbye to any kind of life at all.

Fuck it. I should've stuck to the original deal. Grace would be the one stuck with this freaky cabbage kid, and I'd be the selfless heroine who'd granted her sister her heart's desire. She'd have owed me forever. Donating a kidney would've been the
least
she could do. She'd have been
begging
me to take it, and tossing in a lung and a pancreas, too. But now, if I hand it over, everyone will know I'm selling out. This surrogacy crap was supposed to make up for all my fuckups, not reinforce them. What will Donny and Davey think when they find out? It'll screw any chance I might have had of putting things back on track with them. I'll lose
all
my kids.

I may not be winning any Mother of the Year awards here, but I loved my sons from the minute they were born. When they handed me Davey, I remember this amazing
gush of feelings, all tangled up together: awe and tenderness and curiosity and absolute fucking terror. I never gave my kids up because I didn't care.

Looking in the incubator now, I feel nothing. It's as if it's got nothing to do with me, like it's some stranger's kid. I mean, I know it's genetically mine. I may not be sure who the dad is, but even
I
can figure out the mother.

Well, you'd
think
. The truth is, it doesn't feel like mine at all. If I believed in karma or voodoo or whatever, I'd start to wonder if this whole surrogacy thing hadn't screwed things up from the moment sperm met egg.

THE KIDNEY DOCTOR
gets a bit nicer once he hears about Grace. Clearly having your sister try to hijack your kid in exchange for a body part wins you a few brownie points around here. At this stage in the game, I'll take them where I can find them.

“We need to look at your options,” he says, sitting cozily on my bed. “You're Stage Five, which gives you priority on the transplant list, but I have to warn you, it's not going to be easy to find a match with your blood group. I don't suppose there's any way we can get your sister to reconsider?”

Trust me to be special in a way that sucks.

“Give it up,” I say.

“I'm sorry?”

“Grace. She's not going to change my mind. And I haven't got any other brothers or sisters.”

“Perhaps another family member? Are your parents still alive? Would either of them consider it?”

Dad would cut out his heart and eat it in front of me first. But I suggest Mum might have a kidney or two going spare, especially since she's still doing a mean impression of a vegetable herself. A few days later, the doctor comes back with the results. Good news: she's a perfect match. Bad news: Dad'll give permission for the hospital to raid her for spares over his own dead body.

Except
, I think, as they hook me up to the fucking dialysis machine for the third time in five days,
Dad doesn't have power of attorney. I do
.

I don't need a fancy lawyer to explain it to me: even I can see there's a conflict of interest here. But I'm running out of options. I could be stuck on the transplant list for
years
. There's a really pretty blond girl who comes in for her dialysis every other afternoon, the same time as me. She's twenty-one, and she's been coming here three times a week for six years.
Six years!
She's still a fucking virgin, for chrissakes! I'll go mad if I have to wait six years for another shag. I'd rather kill myself.

If only Grace hadn't backed me into a corner in front of everyone. We could have worked it out. She gives me a kidney, I sign the adoption papers, she hands me a one-way ticket to Hawaii, and everyone's happy. It's not as if I even want the … 
it
.

I manage to avoid visiting the NICU again. Every time one of the nurses offers to take me, I say I'm feeling sick, or tired, or stressed. They're very understanding.

“I think you're right, love,” one of them confides. “Best not to get too attached until you know the little one's going to be OK.”

A week later, when they discharge me from the hospital, I go straight over to see Grace. It's pissing with rain, and I still feel like shit, to be honest; the scar from my C-section hasn't had time to heal, my boobs are engorged and ready to explode because I can't breast-feed, and I ache all over from the dialysis. It's like they wash my blood and replace it with water. But this can't wait. I've got to get Grace to back down. I need my life back.

Grace watches me through the window, taking her own sweet time while she decides whether to grant me a royal audience.

Finally, she opens the door. “Have you changed your mind?”

“Grace, please.” No point finessing this. I might as well play the guilt card up front. “If you won't do it for me, please, think of Ava.”

“Ava?”

“She
needs
me. I'm her mother.”

No response. “She needs me,” I repeat weakly.

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

Damn it
, Grace! I think crossly. Can't you give me a little wiggle room here? If she'd only meet me halfway, let me save face! I can't go through life with my boys thinking I'd sell them for a new pair of eyeballs. She's got to throw me a bone!

To my utter disbelief, my sister shuts the door in my
face when I say no. I can't believe she can be this cold! This is
Grace
. My sister, Grace. The same Grace who's looked after me all my life, following me around like a nursemaid, making me wear my coat and checking I've done my homework and handing me tissues when some boy's broken my heart. How can she do this to me when she knows how much I need her? I'm her sister!
How can she do this to me?