My Name Was Eden, page 2
No, she can’t. I blink away the image of Eden being pulled from the water, a wet, lifeless mannequin. It’s too hot in here, and the sound of other people’s chatter all around is deafening: Fractured rib, they said. Had to discharge her in the end. Not been the same since the stroke.
I feel myself slide toward the radiator, down the wall. “Oh!” Anna says. “Oh!” Someone grabs me—James, I think. I’m not sure. Then I can’t hear anything but my heart, galloping in my ears.
And everything goes black.
I come around slowly, to the murmur of concerned voices. There’s an odd buzzing sound too, which I think is coming from inside my head until I sit up and realize it’s my phone, vibrating in my pocket. James is crouching down with a plastic cup of water in his hand, and there’s a matronly-looking woman there too, wearing a white apron and cap—someone who works here, presumably. Most of the diners are flicking inconspicuous glances in my direction, apart from the old man on the table in the corner, who is gawping at me with all the subtlety of David Attenborough discovering a new species. “Lucy,” James says, and turns to the woman in the apron. “Thank you. Drink some of this. Do you want to go outside?”
“Don’t ask her, just take her,” Anna says. “It’s too stuffy in here. Are you alright, love?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m okay.” I struggle to my feet, taking the cup and slopping some of the water over myself. “Can we get out of here? I want—I need . . . to go and see Eden.”
This time, we take the lift. The other two people in the queue wave us in ahead of them, and when the doors close behind us, I see my face in the mirrored paneling, pale as buttermilk, thin strands of blonde hair stuck to my damp face. James’s hand is clamped to my own, his chin raised, as though willing the lift to ascend faster. Anna catches my eye and then looks away, too quickly. She blames me, I know she does. I have never been a good enough wife or mother. When the lift pings, I look up again and her expression changes; she grabs at James’s arm. “I haven’t paid,” she says. “Oh, goodness.”
“Parking?” He steps out of the lift. “Do you need some money?”
“No, no. You go. I’ll catch you up.”
And as the two of us make our way along the corridor to learn of our daughter’s fate, I think: What does it matter? A parking ticket. What the hell does that matter?
A woman with a clipboard is standing beside the nurses’ station, chatting to a shorter woman in a pale blue uniform. They both smile as we approach, and the clipboard woman holds out a hand. “Eli Hamilton’s family?” she asks, and I hear the sharp intake of my breath. “No,” I tell her. “Her name is Eden.”
“Oh,” she says, glancing down at her folder. “Ah. I’m sorry. Shall we talk in here?”
We lower ourselves into mismatching plastic chairs as she introduces herself as Dr. Oke, one of the consultant neurologists. “Is Eli another name she is known by?” she asks.
I’m aware of the weight of the bag on my shoulder suddenly, the strap cutting into my skin. Beside me, James shakes his head. “No. No, it isn’t.”
“Right. Okay,” she says, and scribbles something down. “Okay. Well, I’ve had a chance to review El—Eden’s results,” she says. “There is no evidence of anoxic brain injury, which was our main concern after admission, and she is no longer hypothermic. All her other signs are good, although I will have a chat with the community psychiatric nurse team, given that she’s asking to be called by a name you don’t recognize.”
Oh, but I do recognize the name. Of course I do. I’m falling backwards through time and lying on a bed like the one in the corner of this room, with a sonographer rolling a ball of jelly around my naked belly and studying the black-and-white screen with curious intensity. “Oh,” he said. “You were expecting twins.” And his use of past tense slammed into me, while James kept nodding and smiling, completely unaware, enthusiastic as ever. It was tragic to watch, the way his face fell, a reflection of my own, as the doctor said he was sorry, like a shopkeeper apologizing for giving us the wrong change. He was sorry. And then he tried to dress up the words, curl their hair and make them presentable with platitudes, as though it would lessen our pain. “The other one looks very healthy though, nice strong heartbeat.” It wasn’t his fault. It was ours, for expecting it to all be okay, for planning the future path of our perfect, ready-made nuclear family to perfection. “Two of everything,” we exclaimed after the first scan revealed twins. We’d been through the Mothercare and Maman Bebe catalogues, drifted into the baby section in supermarkets, marveled over the pastel-colored array of nappies, creams, bibs, bottles, blankets, toys. I could see them both, clear as glass, a boy and a girl. “It might not be,” James said. “It might be two boys, or two girls.” But it wasn’t. I knew, I just knew, in the same way you get shivers sometimes and know that someone’s watching, without even turning around. The names Eden and Eli came to me as I was drifting off to sleep one night, one leg hanging out of the covers. Eden. Eli. It was like they were planted there, cottonwood seeds taking root in the recesses of my subconscious mind.
I told the sonographer to check again. It wasn’t just that there was no heartbeat—the baby wasn’t there at all—it had completely disappeared. “It’s known as Vanishing Twin Syndrome,” the sonographer explained. “Often, the baby is absorbed by the surviving twin or mother and there is no expulsion of fetus.” I still couldn’t believe it. Even when Eden was born at six minutes to twelve—my little lunchtime Cinderella—a perfectly formed, seven-pound package, wrapped up in the soft lemon blanket that I feared would never leave its wrapping, I still thought they must have got it wrong. Beneath the sheets, someone tugged at my insides; it felt like a snake being dragged from its lair. I wondered fleetingly if perhaps the vanished twin was in there after all, if he had been hidden from sight and not absorbed by this rose-lipped beauty on my breast, but when I craned forward to look, there was no second baby. It was just a fat, red bag of veins oozing into a silver bowl like a mythical sea creature.
Now, Dr. Oke is talking about adopting a “wait and watch” approach, keeping her in for observation. “The brain is a complex machine. Scans can give us a snapshot of what’s going on, but they can’t tell us everything. Quite often, it’s the patient herself that can provide the best answers.”
“May we see her?” I ask, because the need is becoming visceral. I want to touch her skin, breathe her in, feel the realness of her.
“Of course. She’s a little sleepy, but she’s awake.” Dr. Oke stands up, and we do too, halting as she pauses at the door. I get a whiff of something herby, drifting through the open window. Cut grass. “Just try not to be too concerned if she seems more tired than usual. These things can take time, and it’s only been a few hours since she regained consciousness, so she’s doing really well.”
“Can I just ask—did she tell you why . . . what happened?”
“Yes.” Dr. Oke closes her folder. “She said she was trying to collect frogspawn.”
Of course she was. Eden has a thing for observing wildlife—when she was nine, she found a mouse with a damaged foot, and stuffed a shoebox with grass, torn-up toilet rolls and crushed cornflakes to create a temporary home. I’d gone mad when she left it open and the bloody thing escaped—Eden’s fascinations with pets, just like her hobbies, were always fleeting—and was sure I could hear it skittering underneath the floorboards for weeks afterwards. My lovely, lively daughter: a tempest, a maelstrom of fury and sound, but underneath it all, a girl with a good heart.
“Try not to worry,” Dr. Oke says again, smiling now. “Your daughter has been very lucky.”
4
Eden’s eyelids are closed, her hair curling in thin damp cords against the pillow. She looks serene, china-smooth and so beautiful that something swells inside me and then pops. The ward is full of sick children: on the bed opposite is a girl with her arm in a sling and in the far corner, a boy of around five is smiling over a bar of Dairy Milk, and it’s only when he turns his head that I notice his hair is shaved; there’s a thick seam of red stitches running above his right ear. At fourteen, Eden is older than all of them and she looks out of place in this room with its peeling Winnie-the-Pooh transfers and gaudy primary colors. I imagine her talking to her friends about it later: The food was totally minging, and—oh my God!—I couldn’t even get a Wi-Fi signal.
I hope she’s okay. Please let her be okay.
There’s only one chair beside the bed, so we spend far too long having a ridiculous discussion, with James offering to get another chair while Anna insists that it doesn’t matter, she can stand, until we both practically push her into it. And then I perch on the other side of the bed and James leans over it, so close that I can feel his breath in my hair.
“Eden,” he says. “Eden,” and her eyes open. They are almost the same green pools of light as my own, except for the single splash of brown in Eden’s left iris. Bex once found an article online which claimed the condition—heterochromia—could be attributed to the absorption of tissue from another fetus. “Due to the melanin production being disrupted or changed,” she laughed. “Probably a load of rubbish, but how cool is that?”
Cool. A permanent reminder of the brother Eden lost.
There is a tiny smile on Eden’s lips, and we fall upon her now in desperate relief. She lies there, stiff, as I wrap my arms around her neck and feel the tears come. She smells musty: dank, like wet dog, mixed with a familiar, fruity fragrance that usually loiters in a room long after she has left.
“Are you okay?” I ask, pulling back, and then I see that something is missing behind her eyes, as if a connection’s come loose or been sliced from inside. Her smile is different too—it’s raised in a polite half-crescent that doesn’t quite reach the top of her face.
James is oblivious to this and so, it seems, is Anna. She is patting her hand and telling her how worried we’ve been, over and over. “Oh,” she says, wiping away a tear with a neatly folded tissue. “I can’t . . . oh I can’t. I’ll give you all a moment. I’d better go and call your father.”
She disappears, leaving only a dent in the soft plastic chair.
“Eden,” James starts, and she turns her head, looks directly at her dad with a puzzled expression.
“Eli,” she says.
James and I exchange a glance. “It could be a mispronunciation,” he’d said, when we left the room after seeing Dr. Oke, but it’s now clear that it wasn’t.
“That’s not your name,” I tell her. “You’re not—”
“My name was Eden,” she says firmly. “She is—”
“No,” I say, then stop when James squeezes my thigh. “What happened? Can you remember what happened?”
“Yeah.” That smile again, except this time it’s more of a smirk. “Eden died.”
We both fall silent. Be patient. The doctor warned us that it would take time. She’s been through an ordeal and may not be herself, not for a while.
“Granny’s gone to phone Grandad,” I tell her, after a pause. “She’ll be here in a minute. We’ve all been so worried, love.”
“Why?”
Why? I should be strong for my daughter, but I can’t stop the tears, the bloody tears, hot and wet, from dripping onto her covers. I turn and glance at James, and then feel for Eden’s hand under the covers, wrap it inside my own. “Because you—we thought we might lose you.”
I expect her to break eye contact that way she does when she’s embarrassed, maybe pull up the sheets to cover her mouth and eventually mutter something about us being cringe, but she doesn’t. “What do you mean, lose me?” she asks. “I’m not lost, I’m here.”
She looks at us both, deadpan, before dissolving into helpless giggles, which is so unexpected, so—as she would say—random, that I start to snigger too. She’ll be okay. She will. The family opposite glance at us over their shoulders, and I dip my head to blot the tears on my sleeve, realizing that I must appear slightly unhinged. James offers her a glass of water and as he pours, I twitter on, eager to keep the conversation going. “Bet you can’t wait to get out of here, love. They said you’ll have to stay in tonight, but I’ll get you something nice for when we get home. How about a takeaway? Or I can do your favorite—all-day breakfast.”
“Okay,” she says, suddenly rolling over onto her other side, away from me. “I’m tired.”
We tried so hard, James and I. And trying for a baby shouldn’t be hard—it should be fun: giggling under the duvet covers, the stroking and kneading of warm skin, a sense of something building, rising, the Big Bang, so to speak, of atoms colliding, a life being made.
It was like that, for a while. And then every month, with the rush of blood, or—on the rarer occasions where I read too much into sore boobs or a couple of days’ delay on the menstrual front—I’d hold up the pregnancy test, with its single line like a mocking middle finger, and the disappointment would settle inside me like wet cement.
“Don’t worry,” James said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “We’ll keep trying. It’ll be worth the wait.”
Only three years earlier, I was in the final year of my marketing degree when we met at a friend’s wedding. I was surprised to have been invited, given that I only helped out the bride on Saturdays at the vet’s where she worked, and was in two minds about going. I didn’t much fancy the thought of faking an all-day smile for group photographs, feigning an interest in strangers who had nothing much to say, or watching horny middle-aged men pressing up against drunk, sweaty women on the dance floor. I still can’t remember why I changed my mind.
Perhaps it was fate.
James had been placed beside me on an intimate round table seating eight, which had been decorated with huge cream bows. At first, I wasn’t sure about him. He was so relaxed, so gregarious. He was confident in that way that men are when they’re entirely comfortable in their own skin, assured of their looks and success. We’d done the whole “how do you know the bride or groom” thing, and after that the drinks continued to flow, along with the conversation. We’d recently split from casual partners—in my case, a commitment-phobe who preferred the company of his dogs to me—and raised a glass to them both for what they were missing, before folding into simultaneous laughter. And then, several more drinks in, we raised a glass to each other. To us. To infinite possibilities.
Much later, when we’d been out for five or six dates, he told me that he’d found me intimidating at first. “I thought you were so mysterious,” he joked. “An ice maiden.”
After we married, it seemed my ovaries thought so, too. My reproductive system seemed to be frozen, incapable of performing the one task I asked of it. When tests showed “unexplained infertility,” I realized that perhaps we weren’t being proactive enough. It was time for proper planning and targeted measures: ovulation tests, sex on specific days, monitoring my temperature daily on a wall-mounted chart, a change of diet. When I came home with a pack of “cooling” underwear for James, he burst out laughing. “Cooling pants? That’ll just make my knob shrivel.”
It was essential, you see. Essential to keep his privates cool. Essential that we tried everything. We couldn’t fail, if we did everything right.
But we did fail. No matter what we tried, we failed.
After two years of nagging, when his business was just taking off, James agreed to try IVF. We didn’t go on holiday, we stopped buying useless things for the sake of it. On the third attempt, it worked. Two embryos were implanted.
And there, on the six-week scan, were two beating hearts, pulsing with life. We couldn’t believe it. We really couldn’t believe it. We cried and screamed and laughed, and then straightaway, I texted my friends: IT’S TWINS!
Except it wasn’t. One twin vanished, and the only proof I have of his existence is the single black-and-white photograph of the two of them curled together inside my womb, like speech marks. An empty space between them. Nothing more to say.
5
Bex turns up a few hours later. I’ve come down to the vending machine to grab another coffee, and she sweeps into the corridor like a warm wind, her long red coat flapping out like a cape behind her. “How is she doing?” she asks, grabbing me into a hug. “And you. Are you okay?”
I’m grateful: she’s the first person to have asked me that. We haven’t been as close since she had her two boys—Lucas and Brogan, now two and three—but if we need one another, we’ve always dropped everything in a heartbeat. When we first met, she was newly qualified in massage therapy, and the smell of patchouli on her hands, now clasped around my neck, reminds me of a time when it was just us and the girls. All of us, entwined like ivy. I was only too happy to help her out, taking turns to collect the girls from preschool and then primary school, as well as providing childcare during the never-ending merry-go-round of school holidays. And then, that long cold winter when Charlie’s dad left Bex for another woman; she’d spent so many weeks at my kitchen table, dissecting the value of her reduced worth. “I gave him a blow job the night before,” she said, as though ingesting his fluids would guarantee lifelong commitment. “And I let him watch Robot Wars, even though Strictly was on.”
“Not at the same time, I hope.”
“No.” She laughed at that. And even though James moaned about her always being around, he wasn’t, so the days that would otherwise have been filled with Eden’s agonized cries of When will Daddy be home? were suffused with laughter, tears, the occasional furious outburst and shared confidences. I liked that she needed me. I was her safe haven. She thought I’d always had it all, and I was happy to indulge the myth.
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” I admit now. I indicate some empty chairs at the far end of the corridor. “Shall we go and sit down there?”
“Yeah, okay. Is James with Eden?”
