I nod. The seal in my throat tightens.
He heads for the door. The flap in my chest becomes something else, something heavier. More like a heavy, sinking pain. When his hand is on the door, he turns back.
‘Can you do something for me?’ he says.
I nod.
‘Remember what I said about your sister.’
He doesn’t wait for me to respond, just turns and lets himself out.
Living with Rose isn’t so bad. She buys new sheets for my bed (100 per cent bamboo) and makes space in the living room for me to do my yoga. And in the evenings, we spend quiet time together watching movies or reading books on the couch. I have heard that pregnancy makes you tired, and, as it turns out, it is no joke. Luckily, I find plenty of opportunities to nap – on my yoga mat, in the children’s section of the library on the beanbag, in Gayle’s car when I go out to fetch a lemon. I sneak these little kips as often as I can, and when I do, I have dreams. Unusual dreams in vivid colour. Usually about Wally.
I’m unprepared for the relentless way I miss Wally. All day, every day, I miss him. It is a gnawing pain in my chest, a pain that makes me want to crawl out of my skin. It reminds me of the way I missed Mum after her overdose – enough to make me howl. I’d learned somewhere along the way that you were supposed to miss people silently. Missing people aloud upset people. It made them feel like they weren’t enough, that you didn’t care about them. Rose, in particular, felt like this.
You only care about Mum! I’m the one who has looked after you all your damn life!
I don’t want anyone to feel like I don’t care about them. So I grieve silently, invisibly. It’s worked for me so far, in this life. But there’s another loss coming my way, very soon. My baby. And that one, I fear, might be the one that topples me.
The morning sickness reaches its peak at around eight weeks. I feel constantly nauseated and the smell of food is often enough to make me weak. When borrowers approach me at the library, I don’t even bother pretending someone is calling me, I simply keep my eyes forward and keep walking. One lunchtime, Trevor reheats some leftover Chinese food in the microwave and the smell is so overpowering I have to remove the food, put it into a plastic bag and take it immediately to the outside rubbish bin, ignoring his cries of protest. When Trevor tries to question me about it, I’m still feeling too sick to talk, so I merely hold up a palm and head for the secret cupboard.
I become acutely aware of every change to my body. The tenderness of my breasts, the patterns of my hunger, the length of time between visits to the bathroom. It’s a nonsensical puzzle for which there are few answers. In fact, the more I read about having babies, the more I realise that the process is primitive and dated. It is astonishing to me that with all the medical advancements of recent times, they haven’t come up with a better way to do it. For goodness sake, not only does a woman have to house the fetus in her uterus for nine months and then push it out of a inadequately sized orifice (or, even worse, have it cut out of her if it won’t come by itself), she is then expected to care for the baby on an hourly basis, feeding it fluids from her still-healing body. Lunacy! There has to be a better way. But no matter how much I research it, I am yet to find an alternative.
At twelve weeks, Rose and I go to the baby’s first scan. Rose introduces herself to the sonographer as the ‘mother’, and I find myself with the title ‘surrogate’. I’m taken aback by the emotion I feel when I see movement on the black and white screen. I imagine the hormones are to blame. The sonographer shows us the baby’s head, the baby’s spine, the four chambers of the baby’s heart. She even flicks a button so the picture becomes three-dimensional – turning the baby a reddish-pink colour and giving it a look of ET. That’s how I know it must be the hormones that are behind my feelings. No-one but a mother could love something that strange-looking.
But then again, I’m not the mother. I’m the surrogate.
‘Is there a dad in the picture?’ the sonographer asks, as we are finishing up. ‘I can print out a photo for him, if so.’
‘Dad would love a photo,’ Rose says. ‘He’s out of town on business at the moment.’
According to Rose, Owen will be coming home as soon as he finishes up his work assignment. Last week, he even posted a Paddington Bear book from London along with a printed card saying he couldn’t wait to read it to the baby. That had made me smile. Owen was going to be a great dad, and my baby – Rose’s baby – would be lucky to have him. Still, as I watch the picture of the baby on the screen – as the surrogate – I feel an ache in my chest that makes me finally understand that feeling people call ‘a broken heart’.
‘What are you up to over there?’ Rose asks me. She’s in her jogging clothing, on the way out the door, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my book, and the library’s ‘What’s On’ catalogue which details upcoming events in the library. I also have my hospital admission paperwork.
I was impressed by the promptness with which the hospital admissions paperwork arrived, following my twelve week ultrasound. It arrived the very next day. Apart from appreciating the efficiency of their system, I was pleased to find that it
