He said it into his arms. It was so quiet that I almost did not catch it. I sat there on the floor of a maternity corridor, at five in the morning, with the sound of my newborn son’s cry coming faintly through a door, and I heard my husband say the words as one reads out a thing in a language one has never learned.
“I killed my brother.”
“Gid. You were—”
“I was seven.” He lifted his head. His face was gray and streaming. “I was seven years old, Nadia. He was four months. Mum had to take the laundry down. She said, sit with him, darling. Just sit. I’ll be two minutes. And I did. I sat on the floor, by the cot. I had a cookie. It was oatmeal. She’d just baked them.” His voice cracked. “I was looking at the cookie. I wasn’t looking at him. I looked up, and he’d gone blue.”
I could not speak.
“She was gone twelve minutes,” said Gideon. “I’ve been over it. I’ve counted it every night of my life. Twelve minutes. And I was just sitting there, with a cookie, eating, and my brother stopped breathing, and I didn’t notice.“
“He was a baby. It’s not—”
“Dad came in. He ran up the stairs, he was still in his work boots. He took one look and he said, you were supposed to be watching him.” Gideon’s face twisted. “He said, you were supposed to be watching him, Gideon. That was all. He didn’t ever say another word about it. He didn’t need to.”
It went through me like a knife.
All of it. All of the years. I saw it in an instant, in a sort of terrible clarity, as one sees a room when the lights come on. The cot, and the breath-checking, and the monitors. The way that he could not be in a room where one of the girls slept without a hand on the door. The lifeguard.The cookie that he would not eat.
The name.
“The last of the Fenns,” said Gideon. “Dad said it at our wedding. Do you remember? He raised a glass. To the last of the Fenns. He said it was a joke.”
“I remember.”
“I’m the only one. After Danny. And I’m the one who—” He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “If I had a son. If I had a boy. And I kept him alive. I thought that if I could just have one, and keep him safe, and watch him grow, then it’d be, then I’d have paid it back.”
He looked at me.
“Four times, Nadia. Every time I looked at the girls, I thought, I love them, and I thought, it’s not yet. And I hated it. I hated it. And I couldn’t stop.” He gave a small horrible laugh. “And now he’s here, and he’s got his face. He’s got his hair. And I looked at him, and I thought, he’s going to die. And it’s going to be me.“
THE FOURTH.
I should say what I did, during those four years, because it is not nothing.
When the third girl was born, in the spring, in a rain storm, Gideon stood at the end of the bed and said, in a loud cheerful voice for the benefit of the midwife, “Well, that’s the girls’ team complete. Next time it’s the boy.” He said it in a tone of pure jollity. It was a joke. It was his joke.
I laughed.
I laughed a third time. I do not know why. I think it was the same reason that I had laughed the first time: because it was easier than the alternative. I had learned, in those three years, that when Gideon made his joke, there was a kind of pressure in the room, as before a storm, and that a laugh let it out. I could not bear to see his face when it was not allowed.
It was my four-year-old, Josie, who said it.
It was a Sunday, at the kitchen table. She was eating a boiled egg. She put down her spoon and said, in her high, level, solemn voice, to nobody: “Dad says he wants a boy.”
“He doesn’t mean it, darling,” I said.
“Is it because I’m the wrong one?”
I do not think that I have ever felt anything like it. I stood in my own kitchen with a dish towel in my hand, and I looked at my small daughter with egg on her chin, and I could not say anything at all.
I held her. I said that she was never the wrong one. I said that nobody was. I told her, quite fiercely, that Daddy loved her with his whole heart. And I did not go into the next room and say one word to Gideon.
I want you to know that. I want it on the record. I comforted my child, and I protected my husband, and I did not once put the two things in the same room.
When Lottie was born, a year ago, he said it again.
**I was so tired. I had been pregnant, or nursing, or both, for seven years. I lay in a bed with a fourth daughter on my chest and I thought, with an exhaustion that went down to the bone, I do not think that this man will ever be satisfied. I rang my mother and said it. I think he’ll go on until we’ve had a football team.
But I did not say it to him.
DELIVERY ROOM 4. 5:40 A.M. THE DOOR.
There was a small sound at the end of the corridor.
It was the double doors, swinging. A figure came through them, quickly, in a navy coat and sensible shoes, with a handbag held in front of her in both hands. She was a thin, straight woman with white hair in a plait. She was out of breath. She had been running.
It was Agnes.
She had been at our house. She had come the night before, as she had for every one of the five births, to stay with the girls, and she had been sitting up in the kitchen with a cup of tea and the telephone. The neighbor had brought her, and gone back to sit with the sleeping girls. She had a rain hat on, over her plait, and it was crooked.
“I’ve been told it’s a boy,” said Agnes.
She looked at her son.
He was on the floor, with his knees up, in his green scrubs. He was looking back at her, with his wet and ruined face, like a child.
She did not say anything. She stood quite still in the middle of the corridor, with her handbag. And I saw her do something that I would not have thought possible: I saw her lose, for a moment, the whole of the composure that she had worn for thirty-one years, like a coat that she had never taken off.
“Oh, Gideon,” said Agnes. “He’s got his face.”
“Mum,” he said. His voice shook. “I can’t. I can’t.“
“I know, my love.”
“I was supposed to be watching him—”
“No,” said Agnes.
She said it very clearly. She put down her handbag on the floor of the corridor, and she knelt, stiffly, in her good coat, in front of her son, and she took his face between her two thin hands.
“No,” she said. “You were not. And it’s time that you were told.”
THE LETTER.
She took it out of the handbag.
It was an envelope. It was a long, cream, slightly soft one, soft at the corners as paper goes when it has been carried. It had Gideon’s name on the front, in her fine upright hand. It had been, I could see, opened and closed a great many times.
“I’ve had it in here since January,” said Agnes. “Since you told me she was expecting. I thought: if it’s a girl, he’ll need it. If it’s a boy, he’ll need it more. I’ve carried it every day.” Her mouth twisted. “I’ve been a coward for thirty-one years, Gideon. This is the least that I can do.”
She put it in his hands.
He did not open it. He sat there with the envelope on his knees, and he looked at his mother.
“Your father,” said Agnes, “was a very proud man.”
She sat back on her heels. She was speaking to the floor between them, in a low, level, careful voice, as if reading from a document that she knew by heart.
“When Danny was six weeks old, I took him to the clinic for his check. The doctor, a young man, Dr. Ferris, listened to his heart. He said that he could hear a murmur. A soft one. He said that it was probably nothing. But he wanted a scan. A little look, with a camera, at the heart. He wrote it all down on a form.”
“I came home and told your father. He was in the garage.” She drew a breath. “He said, no. He said that doctors found things to find. He said, the child’s fine. He’s feeding. He was always sure. He’d never in his life been wrong about the things that mattered, and he was not going to be told by a boy in a white coat that his son had a bad heart.”
“Mum,” said Gideon.
“He signed the form,” said Agnes. “He wrote declined. And his name.”
There was no sound in the corridor. Somewhere, a very long way off, there was a telephone.
“Danny died of a heart defect,” said Agnes. “It was there when he was born. It’s called critical aortic stenosis. They found it at the post-mortem. The doctor, Dr. Ferris, he came to the house, and he sat at the kitchen table, and he said that the baby would have died. Within a few weeks, a few months. He said that even with the scan, it would have been a very, very small chance. He said, there was nothing that anyone could have done. Nothing, Gideon. It was a question of when. It wasn’t a question of you.”
Gideon had gone completely still.
“I told your father,” said Agnes. “That same night. I said, it wasn’t the boy. And he looked at me. He had that look.” She shook her head slowly. “I think that he knew, then. About the form. I think that he could not bear it. If it wasn’t Gideon, then it was him, and he’d signed. And he was not a man who could be wrong.”
“So he let me think—”
“He told me that it would be a kindness. To leave you with it. He said it would teach you care.” Her voice cracked. “And I let him. I let him. I thought that if I told you, there’d be a war. And you were only seven. And then you were ten. And then you were fifteen, and it was too late, you’d built it into a wall. And then he died.” She put her hand to her mouth. “And I thought that I’d tell you at the funeral. And I couldn’t.”
“For thirty-one years,” said my husband. His voice was a thing that I did not know.
“For thirty-one years.”
“You knew.“
“I knew,” said Agnes. “I’ve known every day. I watched you not eat a cookie. I’d like to say that I have never hated myself more.”
He opened the envelope.
WHAT WAS IN IT.
There were three sheets.
The first was a letter. It was in his mother’s handwriting, four pages, and he did not read it. He laid it on his knee. The second was a thin, yellowed, official sheet, from a pathologist, stamped, with a cause of death in capital letters. The third was a printed form. It had a red logo at the top, and boxes. At the bottom, in a sloping and emphatic blue ink, there was a single word, and a signature.
***DECLINED. —R. FENN.***
I put my hand on his shoulder.
He did not move. He looked at it for a long time. I watched his lips move. He was reading, I think, the whole of the thing again, the cause, the date, the word. I watched it go through him, very slowly, like a stain going through cloth, only in reverse.
“It wasn’t me,” said Gideon.
It came out quite flat. Not triumph. Not even relief. It was the voice of a man who has been carrying something very heavy up a very long stair, and who has just been told, at the top, that it is empty.
“It wasn’t me.”
“No, my love,” said Agnes. “It never was.”
He folded in half. I do not know how else to put it. He bent forward from the waist, with the three sheets in his hand, until his forehead was on his knees. And he wept. It was not the controlled and apologetic crying that I knew. It was a deep, terrible, wrenching, bellowing noise, the sound of a boy of seven, and it went on for a long time. His mother knelt beside him with her arms round his shoulders. I sat on the other side, on the cold floor of a hospital corridor, with a blanket round me, and I held on to his hand.
It was a nurse who found us. She stopped in the doorway, quite still, at the end of the corridor. She had a clipboard. She looked at the three of us, the man in green scrubs, the woman in the gown, the old lady in the rain hat, all in a heap against a wall under a poster about hand-washing. She turned round, very quietly, and went the other way.
WHAT I SAID.
I would like to tell you that I was gentle.
I was, for about an hour. I sat with him. I did not say a word. I let him put his head on my shoulder, and I stroked his hair, and I was, I think, as good a wife as I have ever been.
But there was something that I had to say.
It was about seven, in the gray, in a small room with a sink. They had brought in a tray of toast. The baby was asleep in a plastic cot, wrapped in a blue-and-white blanket, with his fist against his cheek. Gideon was sitting in the chair beside it, looking at him. He had not yet held him again.
“Gideon,” I said. “I have something to say, and you’re going to listen.”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry about Danny. I’m so sorry that you carried it. I’d give anything, I’d give years, for it never to have happened.” I took a breath. “But I need you to hear the other half. I need you to hear it today.”
He looked up.
“Our daughters,” I said, “have been told for seven years, in different words, that they weren’t what you wanted.”
He opened his mouth.
“Don’t. Let me finish. I know why. I understand it. I do.” My voice shook. “But Josie asked me, at four, if she was the wrong one. She was four.And I said you didn’t mean it. And that was a lie, Gideon. You said it a hundred times. You said it on the day that Lottie was born. You said next time. And you said it in a voice that they could hear.”
He had gone gray.
“I’m not saying that you’re a bad father. You’re the best that they could have. But I laughed,” I said. “I laughed, every time. I should have stopped you. I should have said no. I should have said it in the delivery room with Hattie in my arms. And I didn’t. That’s on me.”
“Nadia—”
“And now it’s on you, too.”
I looked at the sleeping baby.
“I want you to tell them. Today. Tonight. All four of them. I don’t mean the story about Danny; they’re too small, they’ll get that later. I mean this. I mean that you never wished that they were anything else. I want you to say it to each of them by name.” I swallowed. “And I want you to go and see somebody, a proper person, about the cot. About the checking. Because that little boy is not Danny. He’s going to be a loud, difficult, sticky, ordinary child, who falls off things. And you will have to let him.”
He was silent for a long while.
“I’ll do it,” he said. His voice was wet. “All of it. I swear.”
“Say it,” I said. “To them. Not to me.”
THE GIRLS.
They came at ten.
The neighbor, who had turned out to be a saint, had brought them in her minivan, with Agnes in the front seat: four small girls in a row in winter coats, in descending order of height, like a set of Russian dolls, holding hands in the corridor, with their hair flattened by hats. Hattie, seven, in front, with her solemn gap-toothed face. Josie. Bea, who was three, with a stuffed bear under her arm. And Lottie, on Agnes’s hip, with her thumb in her mouth.
“Is it the boy?” said Hattie.
I could see her trying to keep her face blank. It was such a determined little face. It was the face of a child who had been bracing, for seven years, for the answer.
“It’s a boy,” I said.
“Good,” said Hattie, with enormous dignity. “Then Dad can stop saying next time. It was making Josie cry.”
I laughed, and could not stop. I laughed so hard that I had to put my head back on the pillow, and the tears ran sideways into my ears.
Gideon was standing by the window. He had not moved. He was looking at his eldest child with a face that I will remember until I die.
He crossed the room. He knelt on the floor, in front of the four of them, in his creased green scrubs, with his hands at his sides.
“Girls,” said Gideon. His voice shook. “I need to say something. And I need you all to listen. Hattie. Josie. Bea. Lottie.”
He said their names slowly, one at a time, looking at each. He said them as one says a prayer.
“I’ve said something to you, for a very long time. It was a wrong thing, and it was unkind. I said that I wanted a boy.” He took a breath. “I’d like to tell you that that was never, ever about you. It was about something that happened to me, a long time ago, when I was little. And I’ve been very sad about it. And I put it on you. And I’m so sorry.”
“I want you to know that I would not change one of you. Not your hair, not your noses, not one of your tempers.” There was a stifled sound from Josie. “You are exactly the right ones. You were always the right ones. I should have said it every day.”
Nobody said anything.
Then Josie, who is five, who has a boiled egg face and a very straight stare, took one step forward.
“Dad,” she said. “Can we hold the baby?”
He laughed. It cracked, halfway. He put his hand over his eyes.
“Yes,” said Gideon. “Yes. You can. You can all hold him first.”
THE LAST THING.
His name is Theodore.
The girls chose. They took a vote at the foot of my bed, with a great deal of procedure, and the bear that Bea had brought, a small ancient blue one with a button eye, was nominated, seconded and elected. His name was Teddy. It seemed, as a matter of simple justice, that it ought to be Theodore.
We gave him a middle name, too.
It was Gideon’s idea. He suggested it in a very small voice, a fortnight later, in the kitchen, with the baby against his shoulder. He said that he did not want the boy to be Danny, and that he never would. He said, I don’t want him to be a replacement for anything. But he said that there ought to be a place, somewhere, for the first of them.
So he is Theodore Daniel Fenn.
He is eight months old now. He is loud. He is difficult. He is sticky, and he spits his carrots, and he has recently, with enormous determination, pulled himself up on the leg of the kitchen table and fallen off it twice. I have watched my husband, each time, take half a step. And stop. And put his hands in his pockets.
He goes on Thursdays, to a small gray office on Mill Street, to a quiet woman with a box of tissues. He has not told me what they say. I have not asked. But I have noticed that he no longer stands in the nursery doorway at two in the morning.
On the mantelpiece in his mother’s cottage, the photograph is still there. But last month, Gideon took it down. He held it in both hands, for a long time, with his thumb on the glass, over the little dimple. Then he put it back, in the middle, where it could be seen.
On the first Sunday of December, in his mother’s long kitchen, with the girls at the table, and a great, cheerful, cinnamon-scented clamor, and an enormous tray of oatmeal cookies, still hot from the oven, I saw my husband stand in the doorway, with his coffee, with his back to the cold.
He did not go out into the garden.
He looked at the tray for a long time. Then he walked across the kitchen, and he took one off the sheet, with his fingers, burning them, and he stood there, in front of all of us, in the steam, with a cookie in his hand.
“Dad?” said Hattie.
He bit into it. He chewed. He swallowed.
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“I know it is,” said Agnes, and put her apron over her head.
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