What Lies Between Us(37)

The hinges creak before the door suddenly stops. Something is blocking it from opening completely. I inch towards it and that’s when I see Sally Ann Mitchell. She is staring right at me, her big blue eyes as wide open as they can be. She is clearly as shocked to see me as I am to see her and for a moment neither of us moves, each waiting for the other to react first.

I have little choice. Fingering the vegetable knife in my pocket, I move swiftly towards her.





CHAPTER 30





NINA


TWENTY-THREE YEARS EARLIER, ONE WEEK LATER

I can’t think in straight lines any more. My brain zigzags instead, leaving me muddled. It’s like a shaken wasps’ nest with angry, uncontrollable thoughts flying in all different directions. Everything is such a blur right now – it’s like the world is still moving as normal but I’m in slow motion, unable to speed up and rejoin it.

When I’m awake, Mum is never far away and she chats to me but I can’t process everything she says. My mind is as weak as my body and I don’t have the energy to ask her to repeat herself, so I just nod and fall back into my own little confused world. Sometimes I wake up and I think I hear noises and hushed voices, but I’m never sure.

I don’t know how long I’ve slept for today or how I even got into the bathroom, but I’m assuming Mum helped me. I find myself sitting inside a warm bubble bath that smells of mint. My back is facing her. She is shampooing my hair, and flashes of memories appear of Dad doing this when I was a little girl. I briefly tune in to what she’s saying and she’s naming people she saw when she went to get a prescription for me at the chemist.

She asked if I remembered Dr King coming to visit. I honestly don’t. When she saw it was stressing me out not being able to recall it, she said not to worry and filled in the blanks for me. She hadn’t told Dr King I’d lost a baby; instead she said I was struggling to come to terms with Dad leaving us. The doctor diagnosed me with ‘major depression’ and told Mum it’s as if my brain is struggling to cope with loss, so it’s protecting itself by shutting down for a while. It’s like when an electrical device overheats; sometimes it has to be switched off and left to rest before it’s turned on again.

If I don’t take the tablets he prescribed for my depression and anxiety, I want to curl up into a ball and die. But when I do take the tablets, they create a fog that’s so dense, I can’t separate what’s real from what I’m imagining. When I explained this to Mum, she admitted Dr King tried to talk her into sending me to stay in a special hospital that might help to sort me out quicker. I know the one she means, it’s St Crispin’s on the other side of town. Everyone knows that’s where they put the nutters. We learned about it at school – when it opened decades ago, it was a mental asylum for insane kids. And while it’s not used for that any longer, if I’m sent there, I’ll never shake the stigma. I begged Mum to look after me and she promised to, as long as I help myself and keep taking the pills.

Mum turns the shower attachment on, waits until the water is nice and warm and rinses the shampoo from my hair. When she opens the bathroom cabinet and reaches for the conditioner, I spy the breast pump on the shelf. She says I need to use it a few times a day because my stupid, insensitive body is producing milk for a baby it killed. It’ll dry up soon enough, she promises.

The grief appears in waves and I can’t control when or why I start crying. Like now. I’m suddenly overcome with emotion and start to weep again. Mum doesn’t say anything, but she places her hand on my shoulder as if to reassure me. I put my hand on hers. I used to think that I was so grown-up, but I’m not. And I’m certainly not strong enough to carry this pain alone. I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have her to share it. Actually, I do. I’d be throwing myself from the roof of the Grosvenor Centre car park.

Guilt continues to eat me up: guilt at what my stupid body did to my daughter, and guilt for letting Mum take her away without me even holding her first. When she wrapped Dylan’s tiny body up in towels, all I saw of her were five pink toes poking out. I wanted to reach out and touch them. Only now do I acknowledge that I never said hello or goodbye to her. She just sort of left my body and that was it.

Part of me wishes I’d felt her warm skin against mine, even if just for a second. I owed it to her to look at her properly, even though Mum thought it best I didn’t. I guess she was right because this way, she can be whatever I want her to be. In my imagination, she is a beautiful, perfect little girl who wasn’t strong enough for this world.

Like Mum said, perhaps it’s best she died before she was born as I’d hate to think of her suffering, even for a second. I hope she slipped away while she was sleeping inside me and that all she felt during her short life was the love between me and Jon.

‘Where is she?’ I ask.

‘Don’t you remember?’ Mum says. I think hard, but shake my head. ‘I chose a really nice spot in the garden because if we tell anyone about her, they’ll take her away from us. This way, she stays here and we can visit her whenever we like.’

‘I want to see her now.’

‘Why don’t you wait until you’re feeling better?’

I have no concept of time. ‘How long has it been?’

‘A week.’