‘I’m sorry?’
‘Her mother’s dead. She’s been dead for near on fifteen years.’
Stunned, I pick my phone up then, to show him the message.
‘But she sent me this.’
John snatches the phone, holds it in his hands, staring at it, his fingertips shaking. Then, he drops it like a stone, as if he is too frightened to hold it any longer.
‘Have the police seen this?’
‘Of course.’
He is agitated now. ‘Whoever sent that message, Helen,’ he says, with a tremor in his voice, ‘it wasn’t Rachel.’
40 WEEKS
HELEN
I know they say not to count the days, but what else is there? For nine months I’ve been repeating the date to people, who ask me endlessly when I am due. The question always seems to me to mean, when are you going to stop taking up so much space? When are you going to get on with it?
I’ve had dates before, of course. Dates I’ve never reached. This one always felt different to me, though. When I went to see the doctor to tell him I was pregnant, he put his glasses on. Let me see, he said. I’ll just calculate the date for you. There’s no need, I told him. I’ve done it already. There were tools online.
The doctor looked disappointed. Oh, he said. Did I want him to have a look anyway? I got the feeling he liked doing it. That it was one of the few nice moments of his day, in between the rashes, the hypochondriacs, the dying.
So I said all right, and he retrieved a little tool from his desk drawer, two interlocking cardboard circles, and moved them so that the first little window showed the date of my last period, and the bottom little window showed the due date. 26 November. An unremarkable date. No clashes, no thirteens, no lucky or unlucky omens. This time, I thought. This time.
Now the date is finally here, I should be excited. Something I have wanted for so long. It will happen, I tell myself, any moment now. I will have a baby. But it’s no use. There’s nothing. I feel as if I’ve been anaesthetised. I can’t seem to feel happy, or sad. I try to think of holding a little baby in my arms, dressing him in his first outfit, the one with little penguins on it, packed neatly in my hospital bag with its matching hat. But I just feel like I’m searching for answers in an empty room.
I wish I hadn’t agreed to Daniel working late this week. I know I’ll need him most when I finally go into labour, when the baby is here. But the days are getting shorter and shorter, the nights longer and longer. Serena isn’t returning my calls. And the police keep coming round, checking and rechecking our statements. I feel alone with the ghost of Rachel rattling around the empty house, half our furniture still coated in white dust sheets.
I watch the news endlessly, but they just keep going over the same few facts we all know already. There are no answers. Only questions. What happened to Rachel? Where is she? Where did she go?
Every hour now seems to stretch into the longest of my life. There are flurries of snow, the first of the year. The flakes whizz around, cartwheeling, but not settling. Just a few of them catch in the gaps between the paving stones, on the bare branches of the hawthorns. The house is cold. With some effort, I make a fire, piling the last of the coal on top of some kindling, some scrunched-up balls of newspaper.
I sit in a comfy chair in the front room while it crackles at my feet, staring out of the window, over the front garden. I try to read, but really, my focus is pointed inward. I am waiting for a sign, the slightest shift, the slightest twinge.
I start to become desperate for it – for the drama of birth, the cataclysm everyone talks about – the end of one part of your life, the beginning of another. Nothing will ever be the same, people say. And that’s what I want, more than anything. To be transformed, to shed the skin of this dead time I am stuck in, with nothing to fill my time but thoughts of Rachel. Thoughts about where she might be, what might have happened to her. And others, that I try to push away. About what I might have done, by sending her away. What I might be responsible for.
Yesterday, I went to the hospital for my full-term appointment. Daniel came with me. They said they were going to examine me. I held on to Daniel’s hand, stared at the cheap ceiling tiles and tried to count them. Ten across, fifteen down.
‘You’re doing really well,’ Daniel said soothingly as I breathed in and out. His voice was flat, like something rehearsed. When I glanced over at him, he had his phone in his other hand and was checking his work emails.
‘You’re already one centimetre,’ the nurse said. ‘That’s a really good sign. I’m sure it won’t be long. Shall I give you a sweep, try and get things moving?’