she sleep?’
What Izzie knew about small children could be written on the head of a pin with room left over for the State of the Union speech, but she knew that sleep patterns were as important to mothers as New York Fashion Week was to her.
‘She’s getting better,’ the mother said, warming to her theme. ‘She went six whole hours last night, didn’t you, honey?’ she cooed to her baby. ‘You got kids?’ she asked Izzie.
Izzie felt the prickle of tears in her eyes.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Not everyone wants ‘em,’ the woman agreed.
Izzie nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She pushed her barely touched latte away from her. ‘Bye,’ she gulped and ran out.
It was too late for her to have a baby, she thought, wild with grief. It wasn’t that her eggs were too old or that her body was too decrepit: it was that her heart was a dried-out husk and you couldn’t nourish another human being when there was nothing left in you.
‘Don’t go yet, Gran,’ she whispered up to the Manhattan sky. ‘Please don’t go yet. I need to see you one last time, please.’
Izzie’s in-control façade had stayed in place throughout the entire flight, the roller-coaster turbulence of their descent into Dublin airport, and the long march through the glass hallways of the airport to the baggage reclaim.
She travelled so much for business that she could adopt her woman-business-traveller look easily. With her pink silk eyemask for sleeping on the flight, her moisturiser to cope with the dryness of the cabin, and her flat shoes (socks in her carry-on bags), she had travelling down pat.
It was only when the airport double doors swept open and she was suddenly out of the international-no-man’s-land of the airport and into the actual country of her birth that it all hit her.
This wasn’t a routine work trip or even a planned trip home: this was an emergency visit because her beloved grandmother might be dying.
Directly outside the doors, standing right in front of lots of moving human traffic crossing the road, Izzie Silver stopped pushing her trolley and started sobbing for herself. A hundred miles away, Anneliese sat at her aunt-in-law’s bedside and talked softly about how she felt, and how she simply wasn’t able to cry.
‘It’s like I’ve this black hole inside me,’ she whispered, even though there was no need to talk so quietly. There was plenty of noise in the bustling ward where Lily had been moved earlier that morning. They needed the bed in the intensive care unit and with no change in the old lady’s condition, and no sign of any change, the small hospital couldn’t justify keeping her in a vital ICU bed.
‘Crying would be better,’ Anneliese went on. ‘Therapeutic or something. But I can’t. It’s like being full of nothingness. No matter what I do or how I try to buoy myself up, it’s hopeless. Grey, dismal desert only with blackness everywhere. Oh, Lily,’ she sighed to the still, silent figure in the bed. ‘I wish you were here so I could tell you – well, you are here, but not in the same way.’
Lily’s pale, lined face didn’t flicker.
Anneliese didn’t know if she was present or not. Were people in comas there? Even so, talking to an almost-not-there Lily still surpassed talking to everyone else.
‘The oddest things occur to me about it all. Like the fact that Nell was so bitter,’ Anneliese whispered. ‘She said I must have known about her and Edward. That was almost the worst thing. She kept insisting that I knew and allowed it to go on. I didn’t. I swear on the Bible, Lily, I didn’t. How could I let Edward have an affair and not say a word to him about it? I wouldn’t, and not with Nell.
‘She was my friend. Was,’ Anneliese added bitterly. ‘Nobody’s going to believe me if she’s my best friend and she says I knew all along. I won’t be believed and, if I deny it, she’ll say I’m just a vengeful ex. She might even tell Edward that she and I had talked about it. She could tell him anything, and how would he believe me over her?’
It wasn’t a relief to say these horrible things. They hurt as much in the telling as they did in the thinking. The ache was still there, the ache of aloneness.
What was worse was how she’d become alone.
The evening before, she’d sat on the verandah and stared out at the sea, trying not to think about the beautiful trapped whale still circling sadly in the harbour, and she’d thought about her Worst Case Scenarios.
It was a trick of hers when she felt depression looming: to think of the very worst things that could happen and visualise herself coping with them. A person could cope with anything, she knew, making herself think of people who’d gone through every pain possible from torture to seeing people they loved murdered.
Edward’s death was one of her Worst Case Scenarios.
She remembered seeing an interview with a woman who’d been widowed in the World Trade Center attacks and it had almost hurt to watch it. The woman’s pain was so raw, so open and she spoke of how her life had changed and now, she expected the worst.
Her words had resonated with Anneliese for two reasons: because she was speaking of widowhood, and Anneliese knew too many widows of her own age not to fear it, and secondly, because Anneliese had felt that sense of fear all her life: that pain was just round the corner, waiting its time. She’d felt like that for ever. Waiting for the blade to fall.
She’d been so cautious, pushing Edward with his healthy heart and his healthy diet to have blood tests every year at the doctor’s. She’d cooked giant lumps of broccoli, bought him fish-oil tablets, stocked the fridge with blueberries. She’d done everything to keep him with her, warding off disease.
He’d been taken anyway. He might as well have died. It was like he had died, in a way.
‘How did you manage, Lily?’ Anneliese asked. ‘How did you manage when Alice and Robby died? Forgive me, but I keep thinking that death is almost easier. You can grieve. How can I grieve?’
And then she checked herself: Lily had done her grieving privately because she’d had to keep calm for Izzie.
‘Forgive me, Lily,’ she said now. ‘That was terrible of me. Nothing could be worse than losing Alice. I’m sorry. There’s no comparing my loss to yours. I’m sitting here whining and I haven’t had as much taken from me as you. But I can’t help feeling devastated. I only wish you were here. You could make sense of it all for me before I go totally crazy.’
‘Good morning. How are we all doing here?’ said a cheerful young voice.
Anneliese looked up, startled by the interruption. A nurse hovered and from the ultra-friendly set of her face, Anneliese guessed she’d heard the end of the monologue. Anneliese was too sad to feel embarrassed. She guessed that nurses were used to hearing people murmuring hidden thoughts at hospital bedsides.
‘I just want to check on your mother-in-law’s vitals,’ the nurse said, still smiling.
Anneliese
