The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

When Tess is sent to photograph Greg, a high profile paediatric heart surgeon, she feels instantly drawn to him. Their relationship quickly deepens, but then Tess, already mother to nine-year-old Joe, falls pregnant. Before she knows it, Tess is married and relocating to the States. But as the baby's birth looms, Greg grows more and more unreachable, and Tess is sure that someone is watching her. Something is very wrong, Tess knows it, and then she makes a jaw-dropping discovery…

Release date: June 4, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 528

Sample

Greg had warned her that Boston summers were hot, but he never said it would be like this, sweltering and humid – like Bangkok, like suffocation. Joe will boil if she leaves him for long, even with the car doors open. There is a silvery line of drool trailing from the corner of his mouth, a babyish touch on his nine-year-old face, but she resists the urge to wipe it away. She has to look at the house before he wakes up. She has to prepare herself for whatever lies behind this astonishingly unattractive mock Tudor frontage so that she can convey confidence and optimism, show him that this move is a great adventure, not a reckless mistake.

The house is on a corner plot in a wide, deserted street. Its front garden curves round one side of the property, with a wooden swing set and a drive leading down to a garage under the back of the house. Greg described the street as ‘almost a cul-de-sac’, but it is not a cul-de-sac really, it is a curved residential road that joins two other residential roads that lead to more residential roads. She recognizes it all from Greg’s grainy Skype tour, but in the flesh everything looks broader, taller, heftier.

She had imagined them renting a picturesque New England home with white cladding, a wooden porch – a porch swing perhaps – an apple tree and a mailbox with a little red flag. This house has none of those features. It has a porch, but it is red-brick with a pitched roof that dominates the front. The upper half of the building is stucco, hatched with Tudor-style timbers. There are tall, dense, prickly-looking trees, possibly leylandii, separating it from the house next door. Greg is very clear that this place is ‘a find’. Family-sized rentals, he says, are a rarity in a suburb where people buy and stay.

She touches her belly, resting her fingers on its new slopes. This will be their baby’s first home and when they are old they will look back at photos of them all standing on this porch, frozen forever against these dark-red bricks.

*

‘It’s perfect,’ he’d said when he called from Boston to tell her that he’d given the realtor a massive deposit without consulting her, without even emailing her a picture. His face blurred in and out of focus on her phone screen. He was in a public place, probably the cafeteria at Children’s Hospital. She could see people in the background carrying trays or coffee cups, many wearing scrubs. ‘You’re going to love it, Tess, I know you will. There’s a great elementary school, a big park, a cute little main street with a couple of cafés, a bar, an artisan bakery, a market, a yoga studio. It’s all very green and pleasant, absolutely no crime and only twenty minutes from downtown on the freeway. It’s the perfect little town.’

‘I thought it was a suburb?’

‘We call suburbs towns.’

She noted the ‘we’. After fifteen years in London, Greg had seemed to feel no affinity with his homeland. His only remaining American traits were his accent, his handwriting and an ongoing despair at British customer service. But now, suddenly, it was ‘we’.

‘You weren’t answering your mobile, but I had to grab it.’ A baby wailed somewhere near him, an abnormal, plaintive sound, disturbingly thin and off-key. ‘There were three other families due after me this morning; it was going to go. But you’ll love it, honey, I promise. It’s not too far from Children’s – maybe a fifteen-, twenty-minute commute max. There’s three beds, three baths, a big yard for Joe. A ton more space than we have now—’

‘Three baths?’

He grimaced, his eyes half shut, and it took her a moment to realize that the connection had failed, leaving his handsome face frozen in a sinister, pixelated rictus, halfway to a smile.

She had always thought Greg liked her tall house on the outskirts of town, with the cornfield behind it and views of the Downs, improbably green in springtime, lightening to biscuit through summer and, as autumn wore on, darkening and thickening into wintery browns. When he moved in he had been charmed by the sloping floors and the wood-burning stove, her own photographs hanging next to her father’s paintings, shelves crammed with books, old Polaroids tucked behind ceramics, Joe’s pictures peeling off the fridge, things balancing on other things and the light pouring in. He had said he did not want to change a thing.

Her chest tightened at the thought of everything she’d be leaving behind.

‘Greg? Are you still there? Greg?’ But he didn’t respond: FaceTime had definitely hung.

*

She is sweating already as she walks up the path. The effort of moving oxygen into her lungs feels overwhelming, as if a hot hand has closed over her mouth and nose. Close up, the brickwork is haphazard, with some bricks sticking out at angles and some larger than others. She remembers Greg zooming in on this feature in his after-the-fact Skype tour, saying that the technique was fashionable in the 1920s, when the house was built. It looks to her like a structural defect, but he will have read about Massachusetts architecture somewhere, probably when he was at medical school here, and stored this fact away in his massive mental database.

She is going to have to trust him that this house is a find. Perhaps he is picking up cultural nuances that she can’t. The front door looks like something out of a fairy tale: oversized, its dark wood studded with brass. She rifles through her bag for the keys. Somewhere behind her a bird rasps a repetitive ha-ha . . . ha-ha . . . and a mower hums. She feels as if she is hovering above herself, bewildered at how she can possibly be standing here, on the brink of this new life.

The speed of it all has been dizzying. In just a few months she has gone from the secure routines of Joe’s school runs, play-dates and Saturday football, and her own photographic assignments and projects, to estate agents and house movers, flight bookings, school places, visa forms, paediatricians, ‘OB/GYNs’, health insurance, American bank accounts, rental agreements. And now it is done. They are here.

Joe’s school place has been taken by a child from Somerset; a Dutch family will move into their house today; her studio in the collective has been taken by a feminist conceptual artist who fills handbags with lard; and her old Ford is now owned by a maths teacher. This is what death must be like: your space in the world simply closing over, like a pool of water when you lift out your hand. A wave of nausea rises through her: morning sickness, heat, jet lag – perhaps all three.

She really can’t find the keys. She straightens, her head spinning, and looks back at the hire car. It squats like a silver insect, wings spread as if it is about to buzz and hum and take off with Joe inside. Behind it, on the other side of the road, a heavy red-brick house sits on a plot hacked out of the hillside. Steps zigzag up a steep rockery to the front door. She imagines it creaking, heaving, sliding off its foundations and cruising over to flatten the car, the fence, the mock Tudor house, before moving inexorably down the slope, through the leafy streets beyond.

She bends back to her bag, digs deeper. Her T-shirt is sticking between her shoulder blades now, and her jeans have shrink-wrapped themselves to her thighs, the waistband already too tight, even worn low like this, under her belly. At eighteen weeks she is already much bigger than she was at this stage with Joe. She should have travelled in something cooler, but it was raining when they left England, the kind of August day that makes British people dream of emigrating.

Nell was there to wave them off in the taxi – they both knew an airport goodbye would be too hard. ‘Look after yourself,’ Nell’s voice wavered, ‘and Joe – and this baby. I can’t believe I’m not going to be there when it’s born.’

‘Just come and visit soon, OK?’

‘I will.’ Nell pulled back, swiping at tears. ‘And if it doesn’t work out, if for any reason it doesn’t work out, just remember you can always come home. Nothing’s irreversible.’ She stopped herself and tried to smile, pushing back her dark curly hair, the dimples on either side of her mouth deepening. ‘But of course, you know, it’s going to work out just fine! It’ll be great!’

It was the first time that Nell had let any doubts show. Over the past few months she had made a phenomenal effort to be a supportive friend. But from the outside, this whole thing must seem reckless and impulsive.

When she agreed to marry Greg she had not even known him a full four seasons.

For a moment this small fact yawns up at her, exposing the lunacy of standing here, alone and keyless, thousands of miles from home, while he is at a conference in San Diego.

She has been waking at dawn every day lately, her head crowded with doubts about the wisdom of moving Joe, leaving all her work contacts, giving birth in a foreign medical system, in a country in which 90 per cent of the population owns a gun. And as Greg slept next to her, she would try to calm herself by going back over the reasons she had chosen to do this – other than loving Greg.

With David posted to New York, it made sense for Joe to be in the same country as his dad. And it was surely good for any child to experience a different culture. She would build up new photography contacts in America, the hospital had world-class obstetricians and Greg was right, this suburb was officially one of the safest places to live in the whole of the United States. But despite this list, in those early hours, there seemed to be so many possible fracture points, so many things that could go wrong.

She shoves objects around the bottom of her bag. She can picture the key envelope on the kitchen counter as she did the final walk-through this morning. Greg is not flying into Boston until tomorrow. She straightens her shoulders. If she has left the keys at home, then she’ll just have to deal with it. She has a credit card. This is civilization. She imagines getting back into the hire car and driving Joe around, looking for a hotel, motel, B & B, trying to make it all seem like fun.

She glances at her watch. It is mid-afternoon in California. Right now, Greg will be in a room full of cardiac surgeons and he will not hear his phone even if it is switched on. She tips her bag upside down. Tissues and cereal bars spill out on the doormat, a Simpsons comic, her paperback, her scarf, receipts, lipstick, hairbrush, hair ties, hand cream. And then there it is, the smooth envelope. It must have been lying flat on the base of her bag.

KEYS. Greg’s assertive capitals feel somehow accusatory. Get. A. Grip. Tess.

She scrapes everything back into her bag and fits the biggest of the two keys into the lock. It is stiff and she has to wiggle it around.

She pushes open the front door. The harsh scent of cleaning fluid hits the back of her throat and she is thrown straight back – it is the smell of her childhood, of clinics, of institutions; she can feel her father’s warm hand around hers, hear their shoes squeaking as they walk down too-quiet corridors. For a second she stands very still, waiting for these feelings to subside. It has been a long time since this happened. She shuts her eyes.

Then opens them. The hall is cool and dim with white tiles, white walls, a steep wooden staircase ahead, a vast, parquet-floored room on her right with a wide brass fireplace, another room – a dining room – on her left and a tiled corridor leading past the stairs to the back of the house, presumably to the kitchen. Hot air is seeping in behind her. Joe really will boil in the car. She has to get him out.

She turns and steps back through the porch and out again into the heat, blinking under the white sun. She hurries back down the path away from the silent, waiting house with all the empty, disinfected rooms that she has yet to enter.

Greg calls from San Diego as she is brushing her teeth in the pink and grey en suite. His voice is pumped with conference adrenalin, fast and staccato. ‘Hey! Honey! You made it. You found the house OK? The directions worked? What do you think?’

‘It’s . . . I don’t know, it feels very weird right now, all empty and echoey. It’s so big – it’s enormous, Greg.’ She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror: ghostly, shadow-eyed, lips white from toothpaste, hair scraped back, neck crooked to the phone.

‘I know, right? Space at last!’

‘It just feels a bit odd here without you.’

‘Of course it does, it’s bound to. I miss you so much, Tess. I should be there with you – first night, no furniture, no me. I don’t like to think of you and Joe alone there like this. I really wish you’d checked into a hotel.’

‘I know, I kind of wish I had now too. You were right. So how’s the American Heart Association?’

‘Fine – full on. Shit, dammit, sorry – someone’s . . .’

She hears a woman’s voice, but can’t make out any words. ‘Greg?’

His voice has muffled. She pictures him standing in a conference centre lobby, tall and handsome in his dark suit, next to yucca plants or a little marble fountain – and then he is back. ‘Sorry, sorry. I have to go right now, someone’s here that I have to talk to . . . I love you, OK? I love you so much – I’ll be there first thing tomorrow. Sleep tight. See you tomorrow. Stay safe.’

‘Wait. I can’t remember what time your flight—’

But he is gone.

*

There are no blinds or curtains anywhere on the top floor and even though she knows that nobody can see her as she climbs onto the blow-up mattress with the lights off, she can’t quite shake off the feeling of exposure.

The cloying heat envelops her body. Cicadas tick rapidly in the trees outside, like the mechanism of a wind-up toy – she wasn’t expecting cicadas in the suburbs – and somewhere in the distance she hears an anguished yipping, yowling sound. Shadows spread from the corners, swelling from the walk-in closet and the en suite, as if her loneliness has burst out of her to fill the room with its dark, inappropriate blooms.

Something is rustling below the window, somewhere in the trees and shrubs that divide this house from its neighbour. It sounds big. She sits up, unsteadily. The rustling stops and the rattle of the cicadas rises up again.

It feels wrong to have Joe across the landing in his own room, but he insisted – showing a new streak of independence that she had not expected in such a strange situation. Perhaps he is instinctively distancing himself to make room for the baby. If so, she is not ready for that. He is only nine years old. He is still her baby really.

They waited until after the twelve-week scan to tell him, and his reaction was thoughtful, if slightly concerned, as if they had announced that a distant relative was coming to stay.

‘Is it a boy?’ He didn’t even look up from his Lego.

‘We don’t know yet, love.’

‘When will it be born?’ He pressed a brick back into his Lego ambulance.

‘In the middle of January, after Christmas, when we’re in America.’

‘Will it have to share my new room?’

‘No, buddy,’ Greg said, ‘you’re going to have your very own room, way bigger than your room here.’

‘But then where will the baby sleep?’

‘Well, at first it will be in with me and Greg.’ She reached out and stroked his hair off his forehead. ‘Like you were, when you were little. And then it’ll go in its own cot in a bedroom of its own, next to yours.’

He had not wanted to talk about the baby since then. Whenever she mentioned it, he looked politely uninterested and changed the subject. Sometimes she wonders if he is picking up on Greg’s feelings, their deep, subconscious male brains siding against this tiny interloper.

*

When she told Greg she was pregnant, he was bending down to pull on a sock, and it was as if someone had pressed a pause button. She watched the smooth strips of muscle across his back quiver as he lowered his foot, then turned to face her. His dark hair, still wet from the shower, was swept back from his forehead, giving his face a looming severity.

She held up the test stick.

‘Jesus. How is this possible?’ he said. ‘You’re on the pill.’

‘You’re the doctor, you tell me.’ She tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite work. She was expecting shock, but not this – not accusation. Suddenly she felt as if she were teetering above a dark space, knowing she must fall, but not knowing how far.

Greg sat down, heavily, on the bed next to her, staring straight ahead. ‘Wow,’ he said, in an odd, flat voice. ‘Tess. I mean . . . Shit.’

‘I didn’t plan this,’ she said. ‘I have no idea how this has happened.’

He took her hand then, as if realizing how unfair he was being. ‘God, no – I know. I know, but . . . Jesus, Tess. What do you want to do?’

She pulled her hand away. ‘What do you mean, what do I want to do?’

‘Well, it’s early, right? We have options.’

‘Are you talking about abortion?’

‘Termination is one choice.’

She felt the anger rise inside her and got off the bed, standing in her pyjamas, staring down at him. ‘How could that be your first thought?’

‘But we were both very clear,’ he said. ‘We weren’t going to have a baby.’

‘I didn’t plan this, Greg!’

‘No, I know you didn’t.’

‘Then . . .’

He looked at his watch suddenly. ‘Fuck, Tess – if I don’t go now, I’m going to miss the train.’ He stood up, facing her, reaching out his hand, his voice rising. It was not his fault. She had chosen a very bad moment to tell him. Fifty miles away, in London, sick children were waiting for him. He could not miss the London train that morning, even for this.

He yanked on a shirt. ‘Listen – we’ll talk about this later. I love you. I’m sorry – this is shock, that’s all; you must be in shock too . . . This is not . . . we didn’t . . . Look I’ll call you later, when I’m done – OK? I love you.’ He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, looking into her eyes for a second, before pulling away. His fingers moved swiftly down the buttons of his shirt. ‘We’ll figure this out,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘We’ll talk tonight.’

But they didn’t talk properly that night because when he came home he had been contacted about the Boston job and he was elated, towering. It was an honour, an astounding opportunity. He had never planned to go back to the States, but Children’s had one of the best paediatric cardiology programmes in the world, and a faculty position at Harvard Medical School – he’d be insane not to at least consider this, to fly out there and meet with them.

And now, just three months later, the job is secured, the move has happened, but the existence of this baby still feels subtly fraught. They don’t seem to be able to talk about how they feel. Instead they talk about practicalities: setting up antenatal care, the obstetrician – ‘OB/GYN’ – whom Greg knew at medical school, the choice of maternity care, the dates of all the check-ups and scans, her physical sensations. What they never discuss is the actual baby – their child – who will be born in less than five months, changing their lives forever.

*

There is the sound again below the window – the rustling noise. She stiffens. The Boston Marathon bombers were gunned down in a leafy street just a couple of miles away. One was found bleeding in a boat in someone’s backyard only fifteen minutes’ drive from this house. She imagines what Greg’s reaction would be if she were to admit that she was worried about fugitives in the shrubbery. When you spend your days treating gravely ill children, this sort of fear must seem pointlessly self-indulgent. She hears the yipping, yowling again – a dog, a coyote? – and the distant hum of traffic, the neutral buzz of lives stretching out for miles in all directions.

‘Fuck you!’

She jumps.

‘No. I mean it, really, fuck you!’ It is a man’s voice, close by. He spits each word. She sits up, the mattress swaying beneath her.

‘I am not going to take this manipulative shit from you. Not again.’

He sounds as if he is standing below her window, but of course he must be in the house next door.

‘Wait – are you laughing at me now? Are you actually laughing? Seriously? I know what you’re doing and I’m not going to take this again – I mean it, no fucking way, not again.’

Then she hears a woman’s voice. She can’t make out words, just a low, persistent monotone. A door slams then, and she hears footsteps on a path, a car door, an engine, tyres on tarmac, passing the front of the house, growling round the corner and vanishing into the streets beyond.

If Greg were next to her on the blow-up mattress, they’d probably grab each other and laugh. She kneels up and peers over the window ledge. The neighbours’ house is shielded by the jagged trees, but through the network of branches she can just see into their kitchen. There are hanging copper pots and wooden cabinets, green mosaic tiles, shelves of cookbooks, a stainless-steel blender, photos on the fridge door – there are children in the house. She hopes that they are sleeping.

And then a figure appears at the kitchen window: a woman’s face, round and pale, lit from above, features blurred, eyes like coals, hair massed on her shoulders. She stares out as if she is looking for something, or someone, in the trees – or perhaps in their downstairs rooms.

Tess lies back on the blow-up bed and pulls the sheet over herself, even though she is too hot. Greg was right: it was a spectacularly bad idea to spend the first night here alone. It had seemed silly to pay extra for a hotel when they had this huge expensive house just sitting empty, but now she can see that this is not a good start. When his conference date changed she should have booked into a hotel. They should be starting this life together.

She feels a sudden wave of longing for him, to feel his arms around her, his body weighing down the mattress next to her. She is used to his absences and, before she met him – not so long ago really – to being alone with Joe. Usually when Greg is away she misses his company, his conversation, his laugher, his touch, but a part of her expands contentedly into the space that he has left. Tonight feels different. Right now the longing is uncomfortable and uneasy, a metallic taste in the mouth, an ache behind the breastbone. She recognizes this feeling from long ago; a crumpled letter from childhood shoved beneath the door.

She glances at the clock. She has now been awake for almost twenty-four hours. No wonder she is feeling insecure. The man next door sounded positively demented. It occurs to her that she and Greg have never had a full-blown argument like that. Greg saves his passion for sex, and she certainly has no taste for hysterics. Nell and Ken, married for eighteen years, yell at each other openly, shamelessly, even in front of her sometimes, but they forget about it moments later, and while there is outrage and frustration in their voices, there is never menace or hatred.

She hears the metallic clang of a window closing. All couples fight: fighting is normal. She and Greg will fight one day too, and when he does unleash his anger it will be impressive, she is sure of that.

She knows the darker side to Greg. The damage from what happened to him as a teenager manifests itself sometimes in introverted silences or the need to exert control. But this is what drew her to him in the first place. She had felt a vulnerability in him the first time they met, when she looked at him through the camera lens and, beyond the handsome architecture of his face, caught something haunted and pent-up. She fell in love with him because of it. Maybe the fragile part of her recognized something similar inside him. She felt as if she knew his secrets.

The mattress undulates as she shifts onto her side. She closes her eyes, feeling nauseous again – travel-sick, homesick, heartsick, morning-sick, night-sick. The only thing to do is sleep, but sleep will not come, even though in England it is now dawn. She turns over and feels the baby flutter like a moth deep in the velvet darkness of her womb.

*

She wakes to the same repetitive bird she heard the evening before, a rasping, rhythmic sound like mocking laughter. Sunlight, diffused by the leaves outside the window, throws watery shapes across the hardwood floor. She is staring at a ceiling fan that somehow – God only knows how – she failed to notice the night before. She could have had it turning all night instead of sweltering on the rubber mattress. Her sheets are tangled and damp. She is thirsty, queasy and her head aches. She gulps lukewarm water from the glass next to the bed. She urgently needs to pee.

‘Joey?’ Her voice echoes off the ceiling as she wobbles up off the mattress. She pulls a pair of drawstring linen trousers out of her suitcase, along with some underwear and one of the expensive T-shirts that Greg bought her before they came. He brought them back from Boston in a Nordstrom bag, four, in different colours, tissue-paper thin.

‘You’re going to need lightweight things,’ he said. He seemed to have forgotten the reality of her changing body. Already the T-shirts are almost indecent over her swelling breasts and in just few weeks they will be riding up on her belly, unwearable. But she pulls on the white one, glad, for now, of its lightness against her hot skin.

‘Joey? Where are you?’

‘I’m here.’ His voice is high and echoey, coming, she thinks, from the kitchen.

*

The en suite is so cramped you can almost touch the sink from the toilet. As she pees, she notices a dark crack in the ceramic. She peers closer, but it is not a crack, it is a single hair, very long – nothing like her own fine, wavy, shoulder-length blonde hair. She holds it up between her finger and thumb then drops it into the sink, turning on the tap. It clings to the shining side. She gets off the loo and swirls the water so that the hair is sucked down the plughole.

The empty stairwell amplifies the slap of her flip-flops. She tries to ignore the smell of cleaning fluids. She will wash the floors today to dilute it before the container lorry arrives.

Joe is at the breakfast bar with the iPad. Greg must have fixed up Wi-Fi on one of his preparatory visits. He looks solid and definite and her chest unclenches at the sight of him. She kisses his head, but he doesn’t look up. At home it would have depressed her to see him plugged in like this with the sun shining outside, but today any predictability feels welcome. You could take him to the top of the Empire State Building or dangle him over Niagara Falls and he would still pull out a screen.

‘What time did you wake up, love?’

‘I don’t have a clock.’ His tawny hair sticks up in waves and hillocks, his T-shirt is inside out, his hazel eyes wide and accusatory. ‘You didn’t pack my alarm clock.’

‘No, I did – it’s in your bag . . .’ She stops herself. There is no point in arguing with a displaced and jet-lagged nine-year-old. ‘You know all our stuff is arriving this afternoon, don’t you?’

She needs to walk around and decide where everything will go. She can already see that their furniture will not fill even half the space in this house. ‘It’s coming in a huge container, all our furniture and your clothes and toys and all our books, everything we packed up six weeks ago in England has travelled all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to here.’

Joe still doesn’t look up from his screen. He is a small, round-faced version of David, and when he is conce. . .