“Good luck!” she called. I didn’t reply, because I couldn’t say the only thing I was thinking: “How much did you see?”
The paramedics sat me next to Molly and said, “There we go, now Mum can hold your good hand while we get you to hospital to have a better look at the sore hand, eh?” It took fifteen minutes for us to drive to the hospital. It took fourteen minutes for me to push my hand toward Molly’s and pat it, lightly, twice. She had stopped crying. Snot crusted her top lip in a sandy trail.
The hospital was a rush of cubicles and beds and men in blue pajamas. One of them showed me the X-ray of Molly’s wrist, and I saw the snapped bone surrounded by empty black space. I wanted to ask, “Is that normal? Would another kid’s X-ray look like that? Surely that’s not what all people are like—not full of empty space like that. Is it because she’s my daughter?” I didn’t ask anything. I didn’t say anything. Static hissed in my ears, as though the waves from the beach were breaking against the sides of my skull. Once the doctor had explained about the fracture he left us alone in a cubicle for a long time. I fed Molly chocolate buttons from the purple packet I kept in my bag for emergencies. She seemed happy to lie on the bed and let me put them on her tongue one after another, and if I was feeding her it meant I could keep the sweets coming in an unbroken chain, without pauses we might have felt we should try to fill with words.
Just as I was starting to think we had been forgotten, or left to rot in the cubicle as punishment for what I had done, a different doctor swept in with a nurse. He sat opposite me with a clipboard while she wrapped Molly’s wrist in plaster.
“So,” he said, “could you tell me again exactly how this happened?”
“She was walking on the wall,” I said. “She’s not allowed. She knows she’s not allowed. She just got up there when I wasn’t looking. But I’m usually looking.”
“I see,” he said. He wrote something on the clipboard, but he had it angled upward, so I couldn’t see. “Walking on the wall. And then what?”
“She tripped,” I said. “I was telling her to get off, and she just tripped. I tried to catch her but I couldn’t.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I think she just put out her hand to catch herself,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
“She’s not allowed on the wall,” I said. “She knows she’s not. She’s never climbed up before. I think it’s because she just started school, just a few months ago. Other kids do stuff she’s not allowed to do and she copies. She’s never been hurt before.”
“Sure,” he said, but he wasn’t writing anymore. He was giving me a strange, slit-eyed look. He kept his slit-eyes on me when he said, “Molly? Is that right, what Mum’s said? About how you hurt your wrist?”
“What?” said Molly. The nurse had given her something to play with—a watch in a ladybird case with wings that snapped open and shut—and she had been too busy snapping to hear what I had said. I was suddenly aware of the snot on her lip, and the way most of her hair had worked free from its plaits, and the stain on the neck of her school jumper.
“How did you hurt your wrist?” the doctor asked, wheeling his chair so he was closer to her.
“I just told you,” I said. Something steely bubbled up my throat. He turned to me as if his neck was very stiff and he was very angry with me for making him turn.
“I know,” he said. “Just want to hear it from Molly as well. Just to be sure.”
“I was walking on the wall,” she said. “Then I fell off.”
“What made you fall off?” he asked.
“Just did,” she said. “Just tumbled off.”
He scribbled on the clipboard. He was disappointed. I could tell. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that Molly had lied or horrified that she’d known she needed to. I looked at my hands, knotted in my lap, and pretended one of them was hers.
We stayed in the cubicle until her cast was set and harnessed to her chest with a sling. The nurse lectured me about keeping it dry and staying off sports and going to the GP if her fingers started to swell, and I nodded, zipping it inside her coat and pretending it wasn’t there.
By the time they let us go it was nearly eight. The outside world was dark. I hadn’t looked at my watch since I had collected Molly from school, which was probably the longest I had gone without looking at my watch since she was born. We hadn’t got back to the apartment at three forty-five, or had a snack at four, or read the reading book at four thirty, or watched Blue Peter at five, or had tea at five thirty. Our fragile, sugar-work schedule was fractured, and so was Molly. That was what happened when I stopped concentrating.
• • •
Do you know how I know it’s the first day of spring?” asked Molly. “Because Miss King told us. That’s why we made them flower crowns.”
“Ah,” I said. “Yes.” She had come out of school the day before wearing a gummy halo of sugar paper and cotton balls, which had slipped down her head as we walked until it hung round her neck like an ugly, ineffective scarf. I hadn’t risked asking what it was. It had taken her a long time to forgive me for thinking her papier-mâché Christmas tree was a volcano. “It
