The Broken (36 page)

‘Hello, sleepyhead,’ he whispered, out of habit, even though she looked far from sleepy.

She turned her face to him and his heart flooded with love at the quick blast of hot, sweet, small-child breath on his cheek as she put her still-chubby arms around his neck and pulled him in close.

‘Daddy has to go to the hospital to see Mummy now,’ he murmured.

She tightened her grip and shook her head.

For a few seconds, he buried his nose in her soft skin.

‘I have to, Liliput. Mummy isn’t very well. She needs me to cheer her up.’

He prayed she wouldn’t ask about the baby.

Luckily Lily wasn’t in the mood for asking questions. ‘Don’t want you to go,’ she said.

‘I know, sweetheart, but Sienna will be looking after you and September. Won’t that be fun?’

Lily shook her head.

‘She says she’s going to make a gingerbread house with you this morning – for Christmas.’

‘Please, Daddy.’

Josh felt a lump in his throat like a brick. Struggling to keep himself together, he pulled away gently. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

He tried to ignore the agonized ‘Daddy!’ that followed him out of the room. But minutes later, when he started the car, it was still ringing in his ears.

Hannah was awake and – the giddy relief – pleased to see him. Seeing the light go on in her eyes made Josh realize just how long it had been since that happened, since his arrival had produced any reaction other than apathy or mild irritation. The empty, echoey feeling that had dogged the last twenty-four hours was washed away in a sudden wave of love. This was his wife. This was Hannah. The woman he’d loved from their very first weekend together, when they lay in bed reading the papers in silence and there was no awkwardness at all, just a real sense of release – and relief that he’d found her.

‘I’m sorry about the baby,’ she said.

She looked so desolate, he dropped down next to the bed and folded his arms around her. ‘Don’t be daft, Hans,’ he tried to say, although the words struggled to get past the huge lump in his throat. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘But it was. I didn’t want her enough. I thought she’d get in the way. I killed her, just like I nearly killed Gemma.’ Her voice splintered into fragments on the last word.

‘Shush, darling.’ He stroked the hair back from her grief-smudged face as if she was a child – as if she was Lily. Of course, he knew – had known from the beginning – that this car crash would bring back to her that earlier accident, the night that still threaded itself snake-like through the shadows of her mind and dragged her screaming from her dreams.

‘It’s nothing like what happened with Gemma. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t even your fault back then, Hans. You know that.’

But now Hannah was pumped so full of guilt that it just had to escape, like gas through a valve.

‘It was, though. Mum was so ill at that time, you’ve no idea. It was her worst episode ever. She was so down and so paranoid. Every time we set foot out of the door, she thought something would happen to us – we’d get knocked down by a bus or mugged or stabbed by a random crazy person. She wouldn’t let us out of her sight. You can’t imagine what it was like.’

It was as if she was trying to convince him, but Josh had heard this before, so he
could
imagine it. The two teenage girls going stir-crazy with boredom. The headstrong younger sister pacing the walls of the little terrace house like something caged.

‘But it wasn’t your idea. Gemma thought of it.’

‘Yes, but it was me who was driving. I went along with it.’ Though Hannah was the older sister by thirteen months, she’d always been the appeaser, the one who tried to keep Gemma level. Josh, who’d first heard the story near the beginning of their relationship, when Hannah was spilling her secrets with the zealousness of a condemned man confessing his sins, could see exactly how it had gone. Hannah was seventeen and had been having driving lessons for three months. Gemma, desperate to go to a party in a village just a few miles away, full of pent-up hormones and resentment, somehow persuaded her that they should sneak out, take their mother’s car. She was in bed – well, wasn’t she always? She wouldn’t even know they were gone. And anyway, she was such a bitch at the moment. Their lives were draining away in front of their eyes. And it was all quiet country roads, after all.

‘Gemma can be very persuasive,’ said Josh. ‘No one could blame you.’

‘But they did!’ Hannah’s pale eyes seemed to be dissolving in tears she had yet to shed. ‘I blamed myself – of course I did. I’d never driven in the dark. I completely misjudged that bend. And Mum blamed me. You should have seen her face, Josh!’

This part of the story was new to him. Always in the past, Hannah had skimmed over her mother’s reaction, so protective was she of her mum’s memory, so determined that he should think only the best of her.

‘She arrived at the hospital just after we were brought in, and it was like she hated me, like she wasn’t even my mother. I kept telling her I couldn’t stop the car, but she was too angry to listen. She kept saying if Gemma died I’d have to live with it for the rest of my life. Then afterwards she went completely the other way, insisting it was all her fault for making our lives so miserable, slapping her own head again and again, asking, “What have I done?” which was way worse than the anger. And now it’s happened all over again.’

Hannah’s voice had risen as if about to take off, and Josh instinctively put his arms around her again to tether her to the ground and to him.

‘You did nothing wrong, Hans. Don’t forget, Gemma’s accident was what finally got your mum to seek help. And this wasn’t your fault. You didn’t make Sasha crash that car.’

At the mention of Sasha’s name, Hannah’s mouth hardened into a tight line. ‘She did it on purpose, you know? She knew exactly what she was doing.’

The rest of the morning was a nightmare. By now Hannah’s bleeding was much worse, and she lay in her bed with tears streaming down her face. The hospital was short-staffed and operating on a note of suppressed panic. At one point a senior doctor they’d never seen before bustled into the cubicle where Hannah lay still waiting to go down to surgery, took one look and called to someone else outside, ‘No, can’t come right now, I’ve got a bleeder.’ Josh had never in his life wanted to hit someone so much.

Hannah was by turns angry and then, barely a minute later, convulsed with sorrow and self-reproach. She raged against Sasha, particularly when Josh explained what they’d found at the house.

‘She’s always been selfish,’ she said. ‘People go through tragedies. That’s life. They don’t have to drag everyone else down with them. They don’t have to have such a public unravelling.’ Then her whole face crumpled. ‘Josh, she could have killed Lily, as well as the baby.’

At other moments, she was almost normal, like when another woman on the ward came out of the loo and remarked conversationally, ‘You should see the size of the blood clots I’m passing. One just fell out on the floor and I thought it was my liver.’ After she’d gone, Hannah and Josh looked at each other and burst out laughing, quite as if they weren’t in a hospital going through one of the most heartbreaking events of their lives. As if, in fact, they might never stop.

Mostly, though, she was wracked with sorrow and guilt, lurching from blaming Sasha to blaming herself. ‘I never made the baby feel loved,’ she sobbed, and Josh stopped contradicting her and instead just held her and tried to absorb some of her pain, because that was all he could think of doing.

After she was finally taken down to surgery, Josh paced the paved area outside the hospital, breathing in great lungfuls of fresh, non-institutional-smelling air. Outside the main entrance with its desultory Christmas tree, patients in dressing gowns or anoraks over their pyjamas, their bare legs purple with cold, dragged desperately on silent, lonely cigarettes, and for the first time in his life, Josh wished he smoked. Just to give him something to do, some distraction. When he returned to the little waiting room off the ward, his mind heavy with thoughts of Hannah and what she was going through, he remembered the bargain he’d struck on the way to the hospital. He would have to tell her, it occurred to him suddenly. After weeks, even months of estrangement, the events of the last twenty-four hours had brought him and Hannah vividly, clashingly back together. And if they were to have any chance of staying that way, he needed to come clean about what had been going on at work. He would have to scrape out the contents of his mind, just as her body was even now being scraped clean. She needed to know.

Later, after it was all over, he pulled a padded chair with yellow sponge poking through a hole in the cushion up to the side of Hannah’s bed and watched her while she slept, overwhelmed with tenderness for her and with grief for the baby they’d lost, and gratitude that at last they felt like a couple again.

When she awoke, he admitted finally, his heart swollen with dread, what had been going on at work – the accusations, the anonymous call he now knew with absolute certainty had been made by Sasha. ‘But where have you been going all day?’ Hannah asked him, too stunned by a mixture of shock and the after-effects of the anaesthetic to react. Then, without waiting for a reply, she held him for a very long time.

It was tea time, while she was sitting up drinking a cup of tea so stewed it looked orange (‘Your tea’s been Tangoed,’ Josh joked weakly, which set them off again, though it wasn’t remotely funny), when she said, ‘I want to see Sasha.’

As soon as she’d spoken the words, Josh realized he’d been waiting for them all along. Throughout that endless morning, awareness of Sasha’s presence just a couple of floors away had been like a constant shadow in the room.

They looked into each other’s eyes and then he nodded.

A text from Dan told them which ward Sasha was on, and after Hannah had been officially discharged they made their way to the lifts.

‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’

Hannah was as pale as Josh had ever seen her as she huddled in the lift, swaddled in an old hoodie of his and baggy sweatpants. She walked slowly and falteringly after the morning’s traumas, holding on to his arm as they made their way towards the ward. At the entrance, the door was being held open by a woman in a pink dressing gown, her skinny legs plunged into outsized furry pink slippers complete with grubby rabbit ears, who was deep in conversation with an awkward-looking young man. ‘You tell him, promise?’ the woman was saying. Her hand, which still had the cannula for a drip taped to it, was clinging to his arm, holding him back. ‘Promise me,’ she repeated as Hannah and Josh shuffled past her.

The nurses’ station was unmanned, but there was a whiteboard up on the wall behind it with a list of patients and corresponding bed numbers. Sasha Fisher, bed 14.

Josh stopped still. Now that they were here, he found his nerve failing him. Over the last few days and weeks, the Sasha of his imagination had passed from troubled, cast-off wife to the very incarnation of evil. He’d spent night after night lurking outside her house, incubating his hatred until he was so full of it, it hurt to breathe. He’d driven himself to the very brink of madness. But now that he was vindicated, he was finding it hard to hold on to that hatred – it turned to dust when he tried to grab on to it. Hannah, however, was as determined as he’d ever seen her, leading the way into the inner ward without hesitating.

‘Oh!’

The sound escaped him before he had a chance to check it. Although he’d been told about the marks on Sasha’s arm, he still wasn’t prepared for this. The ugly weals of blood. The stark undisguisable letters scored into her flesh.

Sasha herself looked terrible. As if someone had opened a valve and let all the air out of her. Standing awkwardly by the side of the bed, Josh found himself thinking of a hologram, wondering whether, if he went just a little too far to the side, she might disappear altogether.

Her eyes filled with tears when she saw them. ‘Oh fuck, I’m so happy to see you two. I’ve been going crazy in here. Well, crazier anyway!’

She reached out a hand towards Hannah, but Hannah refused to take it.

‘Hans, I’m so sorry. About the baby. Dan told me. There was nothing I could do. The car was out of my control.’

‘You did it on purpose.’ Hannah’s voice was unemotional, flat, as if she was passing comment on the weather.

Sasha’s face crumpled.

‘We know, Sasha. OK?’ Sasha’s self-pity had infuriated Josh. ‘We know what’s been going on. We know it was you who did all that stuff – you staged the break-in at your house, you keyed Dan’s car and smashed the window and made up lies about him being violent and into disgusting, sick pornography. That’s your daughter’s father! What were you thinking? And then when we wouldn’t take your side against him, you turned on us, too. You could have ruined my career, you know?’

Sasha was staring at him, her eyes huge in her shrunken face. She was shaking her head slowly, tears silently flowing down her hollow cheeks. ‘No. You’re wrong. I wouldn’t hurt you two. I’d never hurt you. You’re my friends.’

‘Exactly,’ Hannah broke in. ‘We’re your friends. Or rather, we
were
your friends. Yet you nearly killed me – and Lily – and you did kill the baby. All to try to get back at Dan, to try to make him feel guilty.’

‘Hannah.’ Sasha tried to grab Hannah’s hand, but she moved out of the way. ‘This is me you’re talking to – Sasha. I would never hurt Lily. I love Lily, you know that. Look, I know I’ve been going off the rails these last few months. Dan leaving brought back everything from my childhood and I admit I’ve struggled to cope. I know I’ve done some really stupid things.’ She winced as she swallowed, as if it was painful. ‘You’re right, I did that thing to Dan’s car and smashed the window of that woman’s flat. I couldn’t stand it, don’t you see? I could see the four of you in there laughing and it felt like I’d been completely erased, like I didn’t exist. And Dan never hit me, or left porn on the computer. I shouldn’t have said all that stuff. I’ve just been so crazy with grief.’

She looked at Josh, as if for sympathy, and he felt another twinge of anger.