Five(13)
“I am!” Emma cries, stunning Anne into silence. “I am listening,” she says, quietly.
After a beat, Emma asks again, “Did you lock the baby’s door?”
“Yes,” Anne sighs. She pulls on one rubber glove, then the other.
“Sit by the window, that’s the best light,” Anne says, opening an antiseptic pad. She removes Emma’s makeshift bandage, a cocktail napkin held on by several superhero plasters.
Anne cleans the wound and finally says, “It’s not too bad, I don’t think you need proper stitches, I can just glue it. But Em, this is your face, you should really have someone in plastics look at it, to make sure the edges of the wound—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Em—”
“No more doctors, Anne. Too many questions. It’s just a little longer, Annie, they said they’ll even take him at seven and a half, I don’t have to wait until he’s eight, at that school, the one in Surrey,” Emma says desperately, words spilling out of her like running water.
“Boarding school? He’s so young, Emma, God, he’s not a handbag you put on eBay, he’s not a car, you can’t just trade him in.”
“It’s not like that, it’s a special school, for kids like him…” Emma stutters at her sister’s proximity to the truth.
Anne works in silence on Emma’s wound. She is surprised by the depth of it, by the force Gideon must have used. But kids are stronger than people think. It isn’t the worst injury she’s seen a child give a parent. If it were not Emma in front of her, she would recall that those other injuries she’s seen in hospital were different. They were accidents. Balls thrown too hard, elbows to eye sockets while roughhousing on the living room rug, scooters spun into ankles.
Even though Anne has forgiven her sister for how she conceived Gideon when she saw them both nearly dead in hospital the night of his birth, even though Emma confessed what she had done to her because she thought she was dying, even though motherhood has turned Emma inside out, Anne still does not trust her, not even a little, although she pretends to. If Emma were Phoebe, Anne might have been alarmed at what she was seeing, she might have wondered about her nephew, taken it more seriously, she might have believed something was wrong with Gideon. But Emma is Emma. She always has been.
Anne peels off her gloves. “Kids are hard, Em,” she says. “He’s not exceptional, kids are just hard. I know it’s not what you thought it would be when you got pregnant—”
“How many times can I say it?” Emma interrupts. “Sorry, Anne, that I was such a bitch to you at the worst time in your life. Thank you for helping me with Gideon because I don’t know how to do anything. I’m sorry, and thank you, I’m sorry, and thank you, I’m sorry, and thank—”
“Auntie Annie, Auntie Annie, help me!” Gideon suddenly screeches as he runs through the kitchen, chased by Ollie on all fours, pretending to be a monster. Emma watches her son clamber onto Anne’s lap, throw his arms around her neck, and scream into her hair as Ollie, the monster, approaches and then launches a tickle attack.
Emma watches the three of them laugh and giggle and carry on. It is a happy, idyllic scene in the farmhouse kitchen with the copper pans hanging from the iron ceiling rack and the butcher block table; it could have been a photo shoot for a parenting magazine or an interior design brochure. There is no place for her in the photo, of course.
She touches her mended eyebrow, looking for something to do with her hands until this performance of ease with her child is over, this show of instinctual lightness that she should have with him but doesn’t. She considers pelting her sister’s yoga terrorist husband with avocados, but instead she says, “All right, Gideon, that’s enough,” calmly, reaching for his arm, taking back control, doing what a mother is supposed to do. Or what she thinks a mother is supposed to do. She has never known what a mother is supposed to do.
“Oh, don’t spoil our fun, Mummy,” Anne says gaily, picking Gideon up, his body curled around her, spinning him round and round. They laugh, and then Ollie grabs one of the surgical gloves from Anne’s kit and blows it up. “Hello, young man,” he says in a silly voice, “I’m Charlie Chicken, cock-a-doodle-doo!”
“Goddamn it, that’s the sound a rooster makes, not a fucking chicken, and I said enough!” Emma exclaims as she stands and everything stops. The dog pants, a bird sings outside. The kitchen is silent.
Anne puts Gideon down and says, “Why don’t you lie down, Emmy, let me sort the guest room,” and leaves.
Ollie says, “I’ll get out of your way,” and leads the dog outside.
They are alone now in the kitchen, mother and son.
Gideon says, “Emma?”
She falls into a hard wooden kitchen chair, stares straight ahead and doesn’t answer. Gideon says, “Mama?”
She still doesn’t answer. Taking a step closer to his mother, Gideon strokes the side of her face, strokes the new bandage over her eyebrow, and says, “Feel. What. You. Did.”
* * *
The doorbell rings. Emma’s throat catches, her heart stops. Through the door viewer she sees the delivery man. She hopes it’s the gown she ordered last week. She’s been waiting for it.