People LIke Her(65)
Grace let out a sigh.
“How has she been?” she asked.
“A little restless,” I told her. “I’ve been up a couple of times to settle her and give her some milk and she went back to sleep eventually each time.” Eventually being the key word. A couple of times being an understatement.
Don’t get me wrong, I have every sympathy for what Grace was going through. Knowing that even after you have finally put your child down the slightest sound, or shift in temperature, or fluctuation in air pressure, will wake them up. Always on edge. Always listening out for a plaintive cry. Getting more tired and frazzled by the night, by the hour, by the minute. Feeling that this will never end and that there is nothing you can do. Resenting things. Resenting each other. Resenting the baby, sometimes.
I don’t blame Grace for what happened, and I have never blamed her for a minute. She would never have done anything deliberately to hurt that baby. The truth is that she agonized about it for ages, the cosleeping, the risks, the safety issues. She researched it online and she asked her GP, and she talked to me about it and she talked about it with her friends. She ummed. She aahed. She kept reading things that put her off the idea and then reading something else that said it was absolutely fine. But it was what Emmy said that nudged her over the line. That I am sure of. That it was thanks to Emmy that Grace eventually came to the conclusion that she needed sleep and the baby needed sleep and there was only one way she could ensure that.
It was Jack who called and told me what had happened.
He had been sleeping on the couch in the living room, as I gather he had been doing quite a lot, to let Mum and baby have the whole double bed to themselves. It was six o’clock on the Saturday morning when he woke up, and he told me later the first thing that struck him as odd was that he couldn’t hear Ailsa crying. He couldn’t hear a thing from the bedroom. He checked the time on his phone and then he closed his eyes and when he opened them again it was seven thirty. Seven thirty! Still no sound from the girls.
This was not how he conveyed the news to me, of course. It was only afterward that I managed to piece it all together. When I answered my phone all I could hear at the other end was Jack sobbing so hard he could barely get a word out and a sort of keening noise in the back ground. “She’s dead” was what he eventually managed to get out, and it wasn’t even clear to me at first which one of them he was talking about.
He had tiptoed along the corridor, crept up to the door, turned the handle very slowly to prevent it squeaking, let the door sort of fall open in the way that it did under its own weight, that particular door. He had a bottle of lukewarm milk for Ailsa in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other, had to put one of them down to turn the handle, was still half-bent over when the door swung open enough to reveal the bed.
Later on, he told me the whole thing, talked me through it all, second by second. It seemed necessary to me to know, to understand the details, to be able to get a grip on as much of what had happened as I could. It seemed to help him to share it. Grace could not bear to hear it and left to go for a walk, closing the door with a slam behind her.
The first thing he saw was that Grace was still asleep. She looked completely peaceful, he told me. There was sunlight coming in around the curtains; she was lying on her back, out cold, as rested and relaxed as he had seen her in months. Maybe over a year, if you counted how impossible it had been trying to get a proper night’s sleep late in the pregnancy. Everything was all set up just as they had left it, when he had kissed the girls good night the previous evening. The cushions arranged so that Grace could sleep with Ailsa resting against her, arranged so that there was no way she could roll over and squish the baby. The blankets were gathered and tucked so they did not ride up.
Even from the doorway, even before he took a step closer or opened the curtains, Jack said, he could tell that something was not right with Ailsa. The way she was lying. How still she was. The color of her. The sort of bruised-looking, mottled color of her little hands.
At first he thought it was just a shadow, but when he did take a step forward he could see something around her throat. Something dark wrapped around her throat.
Grace’s hair.
Her long, thick hair.
Afterward, at the inquest, when they talked about how it must have happened, Jack had to walk out and stand in the corridor. Grace and I stayed. I was holding her hand tight in mine, and we were both sobbing as they described in detail how Ailsa must have snuggled in closer to her and wriggled, and snuggled in closer to her and wriggled, and snuggled in closer to her and wriggled, and each time she wriggled the bit of Grace’s hair that was accidentally tucked under her chin would have wrapped itself tighter around her neck and throat. It would have started contracting her windpipe a little more and allowed a little less oxygen to her brain each time, but it was a process too gradual to wake either of them. She was too tiny to struggle. Grace was too fast asleep to know. Apparently this was a thing that happened very occasionally, the reason they sometimes advised that if you were cosleeping you tied your hair back. Grace must have known that, all the research she had done, must have forgotten that one night, or perhaps she had remembered to tie her hair back and it had somehow come undone. It was not something we ever talked about, she and I, that night, in much detail. There were some questions I could never bring myself to ask her.
Jack told me that waking Grace that morning was the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life. It was clear Ailsa wasn’t moving or breathing, and that she hadn’t moved or breathed for a long time—when he felt the back of her neck it was stone-cold. Grace was still asleep and smiling, and when he first touched her arm and said her name she was still smiling. He patted her gently on the shoulder and said her name again and she mumbled something to herself—his name, Ailsa’s name—and then she opened her eyes.