People LIke Her(39)
I’m tempted to cry, or laugh, or scream.
Instead I simply say I’ll mention it to her. My editor looks delighted. What tempts me on the dessert menu? she asks. I tell her I’ll probably skip dessert, actually, that I have perhaps overestimated my appetite.
Offhand, casually, as we’re waiting for the bill to arrive, I ask her what she thought of the chapters I sent through. She tells me she’s not had a chance to properly look at them yet. Sorry about that.
Outside, it’s raining. When I take my phone out of my pocket to summon an Uber, I see I have a WhatsApp message from Winter.
There’s been an accident.
Chapter Nine
Emmy
The voicemail was hurried, panicked, garbled. Several seconds of muffled crying, then Winter telling me that she and Coco were in hospital, that I needed to come quickly, then Winter asking someone at the other end of the line for a reminder of the name of the hospital they’re in.
An accident, Emmy. Coco. Hospital. Come now.
It’s impossible to explain to anyone who does not have children quite what it feels like hearing something like that.
As I run out of the awards, as I am stepping out into the street and waving one arm over my head to hail a black cab, I keep listening to the message, over and over, for some clue as to what has happened, how Coco is. And through all of it, I’m bargaining with a God I don’t believe in, promising that if Coco is okay, I don’t mind dying. Anything that has happened to my baby, let it happen to me instead. Which sounds like the kind of thing people just say, but it’s absolutely, viscerally true.
I lose sight of it sometimes, how lucky we are to have two happy, healthy children, when I’m treading on a tiny, spiky princess crown or she’s angling for an extra story at bedtime. But the thought of my daughter—of either of my children—hurting is worse than anything that could ever possibly happen to me. She’s my child, my first child, who I held in my arms before she even knew what hurt or fear was. I remember when she was a newborn and Dan and I had to clip her tiny nails and he somehow caught the end of a finger. I remember her puzzled yowl and watching that crescent of blood appearing on her fingertip and the look she gave us, as if we’d somehow betrayed her, and realizing that was the first time she’d ever experienced pain and that it was our fault.
I remember Coco twirling to impress me once on a raised platform at a play park, and stumbling and falling, and catching her chin on a bar as she fell, cutting her top lip with a tooth, and feeling just as vividly as Coco herself that abrupt transition from joy and exhilaration to sudden hurt and sadness. And nights when Coco was ill and feverish and not knowing how best to help, and whether we should take her to the hospital or just let her sleep. Knowing that something has happened to her now is like experiencing all of those moments again simultaneously, and the whole thing is worse because I don’t know what has happened and I don’t know how serious it is.
Every time I spot a cab approaching, I start waving more energetically before it gets closer, and I see its light is off and it’s already carrying a passenger. The nearest Uber is somehow seventeen minutes away. When, finally, an available cab does stop, I then spend twenty minutes in traffic calling Winter repeatedly with no response.
Barging past the people in front of me in the queue at reception with Bear’s buggy, I physically grab the first nurse I see and demand she take me to my daughter.
“Calm down, Mum. You’re looking for Coco Jackson? She’s fine. Come this way.” She leads me down the corridor. It is only when she puts her hand on my arm that I realize I am shaking.
“Take a minute, Mum, before you see her,” the nurse says, stopping by a little table with a jug on it and pouring me a plastic cup of juice. “There’s no color in your face—you’ll give her a fright.” I take a couple of deep breaths and a few glugs of weak orange juice while the nurse explains what’s happened.
When we arrive at her bedside, I find Coco happily propped up with pillows, watching Octonauts on Winter’s phone, having apparently dispatched my PA for snacks. She has a tube bandage on her right wrist. I can’t help but burst out laughing.
“Pickle, what on earth did you do?” I ask, leaning down to her and pressing my lips against her forehead. “You gave Mama a scare!”
“Mama, Winter was looking at her phone like you do, but I wanted her to look at me going high on the swings. I stood up on the seat so she could see me, but I fell off and bonked my hand,” she explains. “I didn’t mean to. It was a naxident.”
I can tell she’s secretly a bit proud of herself and is probably quite enjoying her first-ever trip to hospital.
Winter arrives back on the ward with what appears to be the entire contents of the vending machine. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees me, probably assuming that she’s about to get her size-eight arse handed to her. I can see that her eyes are red and bloodshot, and mascara is streaked down her cheeks.
“I’m so, so sorry, Emmy. I don’t know what happened—one second she was on the swing, and the next she was on the ground. I was only looking at my phone for a second, I promise, and then I . . . I . . . ,” Winter stutters as she starts to cry.
“The nurse said she thinks nothing’s broken, but they need to do an X-ray to check. She’s . . .” Winter can’t get any more words out before she breaks down into great big, snotty sobs.