People LIke Her(55)

I hold her gaze, shake my head.

“No, Emmy,” I say.

“You don’t want me to call Irene?”

“I want her off the internet,” I say. “I want Coco—I want both our children—off the fucking internet.”

Emmy takes a deep breath. I know what she’s about to say. That this doesn’t just happen to influencers. That it could happen to anyone who has pictures of their children online. That the internet is just the internet. It’s not real. It has always amazed me, Emmy’s ability to shrug off online criticism, her ability to ignore all the people out there who don’t like her, who rant and rave about how much they hate her, what a bad person she is; all those random strangers with their burning opinions about the way she dresses, the way she looks, the way she writes, the way she mothers.

This is different, though. This is clearly different. This—this, I think, tempted to poke the actual screen with my finger, lest the point be missed—is my child.

“Keep reading,” I say. “Just look. There are loads. Fucking loads of it. Picture after picture. Post after post. Whoever this person is, they’re fucking obsessed.”

She settles down next to me with a sigh, and I can feel the heat of the shower still coming off her in waves. She starts to read. She scrolls down and stops reading. She scrolls down again. From time to time her lips contract. From time to time her nostrils flare. I watch the words reflected in her eyes, her face lit by the phone’s pale glow.

All of a sudden, abruptly, she half chucks it onto the table, as if she cannot bear to have it near her, and clamps her hands to her mouth and folds her legs up under her. I reach a hand out to her and she ignores it.

“What?” I say.

She’s shaking her head. Her eyes are wide.

“What is it?” I ask again.

I’m tempted to pick the laptop up and open it. I go to do so. She grabs my wrist.

“Dan,” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “What is it? You’re scaring me a bit now.”

“Those photos.”

“Yes?”

“Some of those photos, the most recent ones on that account, the RP account.”

“Yes,” I say encouragingly.

“They’re not photos that we’ve ever posted online.”

I saw him the other day, Jack. Grace’s Jack. I had just been over to the house, checking up on everything, mowing the front lawn and the little bit of verge in front of the hedge, trimming the foliage back around the FOR SALE sign, checking that the place looked okay, and on the way back I popped into the supermarket, the big one on the outskirts of town, to get some milk and a newspaper. Jack looked like he was picking up supplies for the week. He was pushing a loaded shopping cart with one hand, checking his phone with his other. There is a new kid now, of course. A little boy. A new wife, or at least girlfriend. Pictures of them all pop up every so often on Facebook. A birthday party. A trip to the zoo. I’ll not lie. It used to upset me to see him looking so happy, to see them all looking so happy. I thought for a while about muting him, unfriending him even. Why was he always smiling? I kept wondering. Did he never think about the baby, the daughter he had lost? The wife he had lost? And then I remembered, of course: it’s just social media. Who posts a picture of themselves crying, with puffy eyes and snot on their chin? Who posts a picture of themselves feeling blue? Who posts a picture of themselves going through the slow, dull, unphotogenic business of mourning? A snapshot of one of those passing moments on the bus or waiting for one or just walking along when suddenly out of nowhere a sharp pang hits you? A reminder, the sense of something missing, the sudden realization that there are things you will never be able to tell someone, things you experienced together that you are now the only person in the whole world who remembers.

It is a double grief in this case, of course: it wasn’t just baby Ailsa who died; it was also the person she could have, would have been. The fact that she will never go to big school or university or leave home or have a boyfriend, a husband, a family of her own. That the silver christening necklace we got for her to wear when she was older will now never be worn. The baby clothes of hers that Grace kept, that I now have, that I used to look forward to showing her when she was older so she could see how little she used to be—I don’t suppose I will ever show them to anyone now. They are still there, in the attic at my house, carefully wrapped up—and one day when I die and someone comes to clear out the house, it will probably puzzle them for a moment if they even bother to look inside the box.

He did not look particularly happy or sad when I saw him, Jack. Mostly he just looked tired. I watched him going up and down the baby aisle, scanning the shelves, looking for something. I did think about going over and offering to help. Perhaps that would have been the normal thing to do—but, of course, things can never really be normal between Jack and me, not now, not ever again. And so I lurked at the end of the aisle and peeked around the discounted bread and watched him pick things up and read the packet and frown and put them back again.

I’ll always remember their wedding day—the dress, all the speeches. The way they looked at each other.

He must be nearly one now, the new kid, little Leon. Does Jack still think about Ailsa? He must do. It must haunt him. To know that whatever you do, however careful you are, sometimes it is just not possible to keep your baby alive. That sometimes just when it feels like you have everything, life comes and swats you and scatters you and stamps on everything you have worked for and strived toward and treasure. What can you say to someone who has lost a child? What can you possibly say? Even if the child was also your grandchild?