In Falling Snow (25 page)

She'd called David then to see how Mia was. She was sleeping peacefully now, he said. Neither Grace nor David mentioned the morning's appointment with Ian Gibson and when Grace thought of it, it seemed a million years ago. But Ian had said that they needed to bring Henry in. He hadn't said it was urgent but he hadn't agreed with Grace that it could wait. He'd wanted her family history. Why would he want that if he wasn't thinking anything? Grace had done a paediatric term during medical school. Leukaemia, that was the one you dreaded, but Henry wasn't bruising any more than you'd expect. There was cystic fibrosis and spina bifida, but he didn't fit the profile for those either. And, at any rate, the inherited conditions weren't in either family.

Henry had been the easy baby, that was the thing. Grace didn't even labour to have him. They'd been in Canada for David to finish his perinatology training. She and the girls were living in Banff for six months while David went back and forth from Edmonton. They were planning to have Henry in the hospital in Banff.

Grace had just dropped the girls at school. Walking back through town to their condo, she'd slipped and fallen and hit her head hard on the ice. She fell into unconsciousness briefly and then woke and felt what she thought might be blood oozing onto the ice. She imagined it freezing there and her hair sticking to the ground if she tried to get up, then imagined her tongue stuck to an ice cube, then noticed that the side of Mount Rundle looked like a series of faces, Banff's Mount Rushmore, except the faces wore sunglasses. The blue sky. A single cloud.

Grace tried to focus. Heavily pregnant and prone on the ice, she knew she shouldn't move. It was a cold morning and the streets were quiet. She lay there for several minutes more watching her smoking breath until a boy walked by on his way to school. “Are you asleep?” he said, backing away from her, thinking to go around her.

Somehow Grace managed to convince him to go to the nearest house for help. By the time the ambulance arrived, Grace was in and out of consciousness. She grabbed the paramedic's shirt. “The girls are at school,” she said. “Tell them to ring Nan Hughes to pick the girls up. Mia and Phil. Their names.” The paramedic, who'd responded by asking her what her name was, what the date was, where she was, told her everything was okay; they were going to lift her one two three, as if he hadn't heard what she'd said. She grabbed his shirt again. “You're not hearing me. My daughters are at school. They're babies. Please.”

“Nan Hughes,” he said, “I got it, it's okay, I know Nan. We'll call the school right away. But for now I need you to keep calm and don't try to move.” Nan Hughes was the mother of a girl in Phil's class and a singer. They'd met in the corridor and agreed to have a coffee. Later, Grace had heard her sing at a concert at the Whyte Museum at Christmas. The feeling she could put in a song. Nan was the only person Grace knew in the town. Someone who could sing like that would look after children.

The next thing she remembered was waking up, David in a chair beside her, talking to someone's baby in his arms, the smell of a hospital. She remembered thinking how sweet he looked holding a baby, how much she was looking forward to having another baby. Grace closed her eyes and when she woke again, he was still holding a baby but it was screaming in his arms now. David had stubble on his chin and looked a mess. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Oh Grace, Grace it's you. You're back.”

“Whose baby is that?” she said.

“This is Henry, Henry our son.” David was crying for some reason. “And he's pretty keen on getting a feed.”

“What?” she said. She couldn't understand. Totally unaware of what she was doing, she took the baby David was holding—whose baby was it?—and placed it at her breast. Immediately, it became focused on feeding. She noticed her breasts were engorged.

“You had a fall,” David said. “You've been unconscious.”

Grace felt a stab of panic. “You have to pick up the girls. They're at school.”

He smiled. “No, they're still in Banff. One of the other mothers picked them up. They're staying with her. Everyone's been wonderful.”

“Where am I?”

“Calgary. You had a brain bleed. They delivered Henry to reduce your blood pressure.”

“I've had a caesar?” The baby continued to suck happily as Grace shifted position, sitting up. She looked down at him, and then it hit her. “This is Henry? Henry our son?” David nodded, tears streaming down his face again. And then Grace was crying too. “He's got your forehead,” she said finally.

David tried to smile through his tears. “He's very glad you're awake too. The nurses keep coming up here from the nursery with bottles of formula. He's pretty hungry.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Two days.”

“You let him go two days without feeding?”

“I've put him on the breast now and then. You wouldn't be producing milk before now anyway.”

“I need to see the girls.”

“Yes,” David said. “We'll get them today. You're all right. That's what I can't get over. You're all right.”

Grace had recovered fully and Henry had been fine. They'd escaped potential tragedy, both of them, she'd thought later. And then at two, Henry had fallen off their first-floor verandah onto the driveway. Grace had seen it happen, had seen him climb up the balustrade and was going out to stop him when he went over. He'd fallen face up and been knocked unconscious. Grace saw immediately that he'd stopped breathing. Looking back, she couldn't say how she'd done what she'd done. She rushed down to him, cleared his airway, and started to breathe air into his tiny lungs, counting out the seconds. A neighbour emerged from his house. “Get an ambulance!” Grace called. “Get an ambulance now!” She kept count of the breaths, remembered exactly how to perform CPR on a young child, how often and how much pressure on the chest, how much breath into the lungs. By the time she heard the ambulance siren in the distance, her little son was breathing. His eyes were wild with pain. We need to stay very still, she was saying, not knowing if he'd broken his spine. We're going for a ride in an ambulance. But right now, we need to stay very very still, nodding as she held him down. Grace heard something behind her and looked up and around. There was Mia, all of six, looking terrified. “It's all right, honey,” Grace said. “Henry fell over. He's going to be all right,” as if saying it would be enough. It wasn't until she'd seen Mia's face that she realised she'd just resuscitated her own son and felt the terror.

Henry had surgery to repair a kidney—he'd hit a wooden garden stake on the way down. It had probably saved his brain by breaking the fall. Ian Gibson had been the paediatrician. He'd come across to the hospital specially. Grace liked that he didn't pull punches on that occasion, told them the truth that even the surgeon had been unwilling to tell them, the blow to his kidney, the possibility it wouldn't heal. But it had healed and Henry had been fine.

She thought of these things now as a fog settled over the city. What if she'd harmed Henry, when she fell, when she let him fall? What if there had been some damage to his foetal or two-year-old brain that was only now coming to light? She realised that this was what she was dreading, why she hadn't wanted to take Henry to see Ian Gibson. She would blame herself. This is what she was avoiding. It wasn't enough.

She went into the house and telephoned Ian Gibson's rooms from downstairs, leaving a message. “Ask Ian if he can fit Henry in.” She was about to hang up when she realised she hadn't given a name. “It's Grace Hogan here, I'm Henry Ravenswood's mother. We need to see Ian as soon as possible.”

It was before seven o'clock in the morning when Grace turned up at the door, knocking loudly enough to wake the entire neighbourhood and calling my name. I hadn't slept well, having fallen off the afternoon before and then up half the night with my silly old thoughts. When I heard her calling, I closed my bedroom door—the contents of the box still spread all over the floor—and went out.

Grace charged in and said she wanted to know what the GP had said about travelling but she was agitated, couldn't sit still.

“She says I'm fit for anything,” I lied, but my heart wasn't in it. I was exhausted. I couldn't even muster the energy for the shop, and the idea of fixing breakfast was impossible. I wasn't hungry anyway, I felt as if I hadn't been hungry for months.

“I found some two-for-one flights to Paris in November,” Grace said, walking from the kitchen to the dining room and back. Where did she get the energy? “If I came with you, we've got a better chance of getting you there and back alive.”

“Have a cup of tea, dear, for goodness' sake. You're making me nervous.” And then a strange thing happened. Grace burst into tears. And not just tears. She started sobbing, rather loudly. “Oh my Lord, Grace, whatever's the matter?” I couldn't remember a time she cried like this, not since she was small.

She continued to pace around the kitchen sobbing. I'd have got up to her if I could but I was just too tired. “Iris, I think I killed a child.”

“What do you mean?” And I was confused then. I thought she was talking about Tom. “You didn't do anything to him.”

“What? No, at the hospital. I missed something I shouldn't have missed. It led to a baby's death. And then Mia broke her arm, and I wasn't even there.”

“Mia?” It took me a moment to remember who Mia was.

“Yes, she fell off a verandah at school. She was all right but I wasn't there. And the baby. I should have seen . . .” She looked as if she might fall over on the spot.

“You come here,” I said. I must have said it loudly and sternly, for she came immediately and sat down opposite me, sobbing all the while. I put out my hands and waited until she gave me hers. “Grace, one thing I know for sure. You've always been too hard on yourself, right from when you were little. If something didn't go your way from the beginning you threw it across the room and called yourself stupid. I never knew how to help you develop patience and compassion towards yourself and I still don't know.

“But one thing I do know better than you is that doctors make mistakes just like everyone else. Even Miss Ivens, Grace. Now, did you mean to kill a baby?” I thought that's what she said she'd done. She shook her head between sobs. “Will you know next time?” She nodded yes. “Then stop your silly crying. Won't do you any good anyway. I'm certainly not having tears if you're coming to Royaumont with me.”

She sniffed and wiped her nose with her arm. “Do you mean it, Iris? Do you mean I can come?” She was taking the short breaths of a child.

Get ahold of yourself, I wanted to say. “I suppose,” I said. “As long as you let me do what I need to and don't organise me and as long as we don't have any more outbursts like that.”

“Of course,” Grace said. She wiped her face, produced a tissue from somewhere deep in her jacket, blew her nose loudly, and proceeded to do exactly what I'd asked her not to do. She was organising me. “We'll fly first-class so you'll be more comfortable. And we'll have a stopover on the way. It'll be fun—and I can find out what you were like when you were young.”

Here was Grace crying about a death for which I was almost sure she couldn't be held responsible no matter what had happened, cheered by the fact she could chaperone an octogenarian on a trip to France. The poor girl needed an easier life.

And then it hit me. If Grace came with me to Royaumont, I would have to tell her the whole story. I would have to tell her everything. I wasn't sure I'd have the courage to do that. For if she was unforgiving when it came to herself, Grace had always been even more unforgiving when it came to me.

He looked up towards her. The tilt of his head, his grin, the way the light shone in his hair; she felt as if her heart would burst. She breathed in sharply. What? he said.

Nothing, she said, letting the breath out slowly.

What's the worst thing you've ever done? he said, leaning back on the bed, one hand behind his head, the other holding a cigarette.

The worst . . . She screwed up her nose in thought. She went and sat on the end of the bed and had to look back to him. You, she said finally, I think you're the worst thing, but maybe losing my school blazer? I don't know. Hard choice.

Seriously, he said.

Ah, seriously. She stood up and walked over to the window, pulling the robe around her. Let's not talk seriously.

The war? he said. Is the war what's too serious? She could see he really didn't understand. But she nodded. The war, yes, now that you mention it. And the drapes. The drapes are just too serious.

He looked even more confused. I have never met anyone like you, he said. I thought I was in love once. But you're like another language.

She turned away from him, looking past the serious drapes out at the Luxembourg Gardens. We shouldn't talk like this.

Why not?

Because. Because we don't know how we feel really. It's all so fraught.

Fraught. How?

The war. That's what I was trying to say. I don't know what I think or feel. And there are complications. I ought to tell you.

I know what I feel, he said. I've known since the very first time I met you.

We live worlds apart.

Only if we decide we do, he said. He got up and went over to where she stood, put his hands on her shoulders. He swept her hair aside and kissed her neck softly. Slowly she turned around to face him. She saw there were tears in his eyes again.

Oh my heart, he said. Oh my heart.