You always knew she would.
Mum started to plant a Madame Carriere rose in a ceramic pot next to your grave. “It’s just temporary, till the angel arrives. It looks too bare without anything.” I filled a watering can so we could water it in and remembered you as a small child trundling after Mum with your mini gardening tools, your fingers clutched around seeds you’d collected from other plants—aquilegias, I think, but I never really took much notice.
“She used to love gardening, didn’t she?” I asked.
“From the time she was tiny,” said Mum. “It wasn’t till I was in my thirties that I started liking it.”
“So what started you off?”
I was just making conversation, a safe conversation, that I hoped Mum would find soothing. She’s always liked talking about plants.
“When I planted something, it became more and more beautiful, which at thirty-six was the opposite of what was happening to me,” Mum said, testing the soil around the rose with her bare fingers. I saw that her nails were filled with earth. “I shouldn’t have minded losing my looks,” she continued. “But I did then, before Leo died. I think I missed being treated with kindness, with leeway, because I was a pretty girl. The man who came to do our rewiring, a taxi driver once, were unnecessarily unpleasant; men who would normally have done a little extra job for free were aggressive, as if they could tell I had once been pretty, beautiful even, and they didn’t want to know that prettiness fades and ages. It was as if they blamed me for it.”
I was a little taken aback by her, but only a little. Shooting from the hip as a style of conversation was getting almost familiar now. Mum wiped her face with her grimy fingers, leaving a streak of dirt across her cheek. “And then there was Tess growing up, so pretty, and unaware of how generous people were to her because of it.”
“She never played on it though.”
“She didn’t need to. The world held its door open for her and she walked through smiling, thinking it would always be that way.”
“Were you jealous?”
Mum hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “It wasn’t jealousy, but looking at her made me see what I had become.” She breaks off. “I’m a little drunk. I allow myself to get a little plastered, actually, on Leo’s birthday. The anniversary of his death too. And now there’ll be Tess’s and Xavier’s anniversaries, won’t there? I’ll become a drunkard if I don’t watch out.”
I held her hand tightly in mine.
“Tess always came down to be with me on his birthday,” she said.
When we said good-bye at the station, I suggested an outing together on the following Sunday, to the nursery at Petersham Meadows, which you used to love but couldn’t afford. We agreed we’d choose a new plant that you’d like for your garden.
I got the train back to London. You’d never told me that you visited Mum on Leo’s birthday. Presumably, to spare me the guilt. I wondered how many other times you visited her until the bump started to show. I already knew from the phone bill that I’d been cruelly neglectful of you, and I realized it applied to Mum too. It was you who was the caring daughter, not me, as I’d always self-righteously assumed.
I ran away, didn’t I? My job in New York wasn’t a “career opportunity”; it was an opportunity to leave Mum and responsibility behind as I pursued an uncluttered life on another continent. No different from Dad. But you didn’t leave. You may have needed me to remind you when birthdays were coming up, but you didn’t run away.
I wondered why Dr. Wong hadn’t shown me my flaws. Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray–style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are. But that’s unfair to her. I didn’t ask the right questions about myself; I didn’t question myself at all.
My ringing phone jolted me out of the self-analysis. It was Christina. She made small talk for a while, which I suspected was because she was putting off the reason for her phone call, and then came to the point.
“I don’t think Xavier’s death and this other baby’s death can be linked, Hemms.”
“But they must be. Both Tess and Hattie were in the same trial at the same hospital—”
“Yes, but medically there isn’t a connection. You can’t get something that causes a heart condition serious enough to kill one baby, and kidney problems—most likely total renal failure—which kill another baby.”
I interrupted, feeling panicky. “In genetics, one gene can code for completely different things, can’t it? So maybe—”
Again she interrupted, or maybe it was the bad connection in the train. “I checked with my professor, just in case I was missing something. I didn’t tell him what this was about, just gave him a hypothetical scenario. And he said there’s no way two such disparate and fatal conditions could have the same cause.”
