I watched Anna whenever she was around children. She didn’t seem to coo and caw like other women. I saw her hold the baby of a friend once, and she cradled the infant so awkwardly, like a careless Mary in a nativity play. After she had returned him to his mother, I saw her discreetly wipe some of the baby’s saliva on the back of her trousers.
“Yes, really,” Anna said, biting her lip nervously. “During lunch today, I was thinking about your dad and how much I love going there for Christmas. Just that warmth of being in a family. And I really want to have that, as well, to make that my own.”
I pulled her close to me and kissed the top of her head. Loving Anna was like a secret that no one else knew. A secret you kept close to you, that you would never reveal. Because I was the only one, the only who that she let in. We stood like that for a while, on the side of the road, gently swaying in the moonlight.
* * *
I think we conceived that night, or perhaps the morning after when Anna’s parents were at church. A couple of weeks later, Anna called me into the bathroom. She was sitting on the side of the bath, examining, up close, in various angles of light, the clear blue line on the pregnancy test. I read the instructions, to check that we were reading it right. Yes, it was really there, irrefutable, a thick blue stripe.
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“I know,” Anna said. “Let’s not celebrate yet, though. We still don’t know for certain.”
She saw my face drop and put her hand on my arm. “This brand, by the way,” she said, “has the lowest rate of false positives on the market. I chose it precisely because of that.”
I didn’t say anything, and she put her arms around me and buried her face into my neck. “I just don’t want to get too excited, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and we stood and looked at the strip, the blue line now brighter and clearer than ever before.
durdle door
it wasn’t the water, you said, that made the big hole in the rock. it was batman with his batarangs and his blaster. we looked down at the cliff jutting into the sea, a rubber boat full of kids going under the arch, and then you started running and jumping through the grass, dodging the rabbit holes, shouting at the top of your voice, so I started chasing you, trying to catch you, and we were laughing so hard as we ran and ran, kicking up rainbow showers in the leaves.
3
A blue line. In the end that was all it was. I remember the doctor’s pause. I thought that the ultrasound monitor had frozen, because the little gray-white shadow wasn’t moving. I could feel Anna next to me, holding her breath, trying to decipher the shadows on the screen above her.
“Hmm, I’m afraid I’m not picking up a heartbeat, right now,” the doctor said, moving the wand across Anna’s belly. Where we had once seen a heartbeat, an electronic wobble, a quiver of white, now there was nothing.
She began to measure the size of the fetus. Has it grown, I said? It’s small, eight weeks, the doctor said, but Anna was ten weeks gone. So it’s small, I said, because I didn’t understand these things. He’s underweight?
Anna did understand these things. Without prompting, she wiped down her stomach with a piece of paper towel and sat up on the side of the bed, her eyes fixed on the monitor on the wall.
The second time Anna miscarried, it was at thirteen weeks.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “We’re just not seeing the growth we would have expected at this point.” This time, it wasn’t just a little cluster of amniotic cells, but it had a human form, with limbs, a heart, a mouth. The baby had eyelids. That child, which had to be evacuated from Anna’s body, could have been held in the palm of a hand. Even though we didn’t know the sex, Anna later told me she had named her Lucy.
Anna grieved silently. She didn’t tell her mother; she didn’t tell Lola, who wore her own miscarriage on her sleeve. Because that was Anna’s way, that was how she had been taught. Stoicism, above all.
Growing up in Kenya, a latchkey kid in a poor, dusty parish, the locals greeted her every morning on her walk to school with stones and insults, calling her a white devil and a smelly buffalo cunt. When Anna told her parents, they said she was complaining, spoiled, was not prepared to suffer for the Lord.
We kept things to ourselves. Our lost babies were our secrets. They bound us together. Yes, those secrets were devastating, but they were ours and ours alone.
She told me everything, even the feelings she said were shameful. She thought she was being punished, but she could not say for what. She said she could not bear to go to the supermarket and see young moms because she thought they had taken her babies away. She said she did not believe there was anything wrong with her eggs, the fetus we had created together, but the fault was in her ability to carry the child. She thought she was damaged, that her body had a mechanical defect. Mis-carriage. I had never thought of it that way, the carriage part.
Anna, however, wasn’t to be deterred. She applied herself to having a baby in the way she had got her first-class honors. We went to see specialists on Harley Street and they ran tests, tests galore, but they found nothing wrong with her. Just one of those things, better luck next time.
So we kept on trying, refused to give up, because that was how Anna saw the world: as a fight, your guard up, backs against the wall. It was where we converged. The
