Читать книгу The Night Olivia Fell - Christina McDonald - Страница 12

5

ABI

october

As the hours bled into each other, I alternated between numbness and sorrow, each as intense and debilitating as the other.

‘I need to know what happened,’ I said to Sarah.

She was so still, barely moving since we’d settled in the family waiting room the doctors gave us. I couldn’t hold still, pacing the floor, counting the ceiling tiles, pouring water from one cup to another. I needed to move, to do something. My analytical brain needed to make sense of things, to question the facts and frame the story, to make the columns align, the numbers add up.

‘You should go home. Get some rest,’ she replied.

I glared at her. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Olivia and I were linked by birth, by life. I wouldn’t leave her in death.

More time passed. ‘Why does she have bruises on her arms?’ I asked Sarah, slamming an empty cup to the ground. I sucked my lips over my teeth, trying to steady myself. ‘Do you think somebody hurt her?’

Sarah looked startled. ‘I don’t know. The police – they’ll investigate.’

Tears tumbled down my cheeks, sliding into the hollow of my neck. I could barely breathe, whimpers racking my body as I sank into a chair. Sarah came to me, slid her arms around my shoulders. We held each other like that for a long time, our bodies shaking.

‘I wanted to keep her safe!’ I sobbed.

‘This isn’t your fault, Abi,’ she replied, her voice raw with pain.

I pulled away and looked into her reddened eyes.

‘What if it is?’

× × ×

Night washed over Olivia’s room. The hospital lights turned on one by one, and still I didn’t move from my seat next to her bed, the intermittent bleeps and swooshes keeping Olivia connected to this world a bizarre lullaby to my pain. Despair swirled inside me, a relentless fog that made me incapable of anything: eating, drinking, moving.

I stared, lost, at the bruises circling Olivia’s wrists. They were ringed with blue and purple, as if someone had grabbed her, staining her beautiful skin with the color of anger.

I laid my forehead on the edge of her bed, grateful to be alone with her. All day the doctors had encouraged me to go home, get some rest. Sarah had brought me a ham sandwich, left untouched and eventually tipped into the garbage, and then relentless cups of coffee. But it just made me need to pee, and I didn’t want to leave Olivia. So I stopped drinking altogether.

My head pounded from tears and dehydration, but I couldn’t leave. Not yet. I felt like I was living inside a tear in the fabric of time, the real world outside on pause.

Two days had passed since my dash to Olivia’s broken body, time shuffling past with excruciating slowness. More doctors trundled in, more reports, another CT scan, an ultrasound showing a fetal heartbeat. Cautionary whispers that she might miscarry and more whispers that if her heart held up long enough, they could save the baby.

Save the baby? I wanted them to save my baby.

I slept in fits and spurts, my forehead pressed against Olivia’s stomach. Night inched by. Alarm bells rang intermittently, and I imagined the people being told their loved one hadn’t made it. I imagined what would happen when it was Olivia’s turn.

I awoke with a start when somebody shook my shoulder.

‘Mrs Knight?’ Dr Griffith held a cup of water out to me. ‘Why don’t you have a drink?’

‘It’s Miss,’ I corrected him. ‘I’m not married.’ My voice rasped, my throat barren of any moisture. But still I refused the water.

He slid a chair across the room and sat next to me, the cup clasped between both hands. ‘Miss Knight. You need to take care of yourself. You need to eat, drink, get some rest.’

‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ I burst out. Pain ripped through me, undiminished by the passing hours, and I pressed my fingers hard into my temples.

‘You have a long road ahead of you.’ He glanced at Olivia. ‘All three of you.’

I stared at him for a long moment, tried to lick my cracked lips.

‘Olivia isn’t coming back,’ he said gently. ‘But there’s a chance your grandchild could survive.’ It hurt him to say this, I could tell by the tightening of his eyes, and it made me like him. Or at least respect him.

‘How long?’ I finally said.

‘How long what?’

‘How long does Olivia have to be on life support for the baby –’ I broke off, the words skewering my heart.

‘We’d aim to get her to thirty-two weeks’ gestation.’

I did the math quickly. Eighteen more weeks on life support.

‘Is it possible?’

Dr Griffith hesitated. ‘As far as I’m aware, it’s never happened before. But I think it’s possible.’

I tried to breathe, but a solid lump had formed in my chest, squeezing all the oxygen out. I clenched my eyes shut, then opened them.

‘Why haven’t the police come? Where are they?’

Dr Griffith looked surprised. He took his glasses off and polished them on his lab coat.

‘The hospital doesn’t report . . . accidents.’

‘Accidents? This wasn’t an accident!’ My voice pitched high, anger and pain surging through my body. ‘You’ve seen the bruises on her wrists!’

‘My apologies.’ Dr Griffith shook his head vigorously. ‘I just mean that the hospital isn’t legally required to report anything other than gunshot or stab wounds, and this is likely why you haven’t heard anything from them.’

I pressed my palm to my forehead, a tingle of panic buzzing in my fingertips. But this time I won, pushing the anxiety away. I would report it myself.

‘Olivia’s a good girl. What happened?’ I asked.

I heard myself using the present tense, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want her to slide into the past yet. She was still here.

His eyes were kind but calculating, the eyes of a lawyer rather than a doctor.

‘I don’t know. But I promise you this’ – he held the cup of water out to me – ‘you’ll need your strength to find out.’

I took the water and gulped down every drop.

× × ×

It started raining as soon as I left the hospital. It was almost night, black clouds edging over the horizon.

I turned onto my street, slowly rolling toward my Victorian-style three-bedroom. Mine was the smallest house on the street, perched at the end of a row of grander ones.

My neighbors were middle-class professionals, lawyers, doctors. Their wives stayed home and raised chubby-cheeked toddlers. They had playdates and did hot yoga and went for coffee dates. I, a single working mother, pregnant at eighteen, stuck out like a sore thumb.

I never would’ve been able to afford the house on my own. But everything I did was for Olivia, to give her a better chance in life: middle-class neighbors, a good school, low crime rate, and right by the beach. I wanted her to have all the things I’d never had. So I couldn’t regret any of it. Not now, not ever.

I imagined Olivia on our last morning together. I’d watched her swaying to silent music in the living room, her eyes closed, the earbuds of her iPhone pressed deep into her ears. A scarf I’d never seen before was draped around her neck. It was silk, scarlet, like a flame around her throat. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt, loose-fitting sweats. Dark circles were smudged like half-moons beneath her eyes, her face pale as a tissue.

‘Are you feeling okay?’ I’d pressed the back of my hand to her forehead, concern washing over me. It was smooth and cool. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and drew her close for a hug.

‘I’m fine. Just studying.’ She pulled away sharply, her brow crinkling.

I caught the undercurrent of her words: Would you ever just stop asking? My mom used to tell me that I never let things go. Sarah said that too.

I almost started questioning Olivia. Everything was something to be worried about. She was sick, she had cancer, she was being bullied. My stomach gave a panicky spasm. I did that sometimes: worried and questioned and analyzed until I found a rational reason. I needed the whole picture to understand the details. The problem was that it never changed anything. Like when my mom died.

Get a grip, Abi, I said to myself. She’s just being a teenager.

I busied myself with my laptop bag, the cold slice of her rejection smarting.

‘I know it’s Saturday, but I have to go into work for a bit.’ I hated leaving her alone, but as a single mom sometimes I had no choice. ‘You know the rules. No riding in your friends’ cars. Don’t walk on the main road.’

I waited for her to point out that I never worked on the weekend. I wanted to tell someone about a new case I was working on at my CPA firm, Brown Thomas and Associates.

It was the first time I’d felt excited about work in years. Accounting wasn’t what I was supposed to do with my life. Once upon a time, I’d been a journalist. I’d had fire, ambition, ideas. I loved the buzz of investigating, seeing my byline under a headline.

But the antisocial hours of a journalist didn’t work for a single mom with a baby who battled severe ear infections. I was a mother first. I would never abandon my daughter the way my mom had abandoned me – loving me, then turning away; being there, then . . .

So I’d switched to accounting. It allowed me regular hours and more time with my daughter. I’d come to accept the trade-off years ago.

‘Do you want me to stay?’ My smile slipped a notch. ‘You know you come first.’

‘No, honestly, it’s fine, Mom.’ She’d already dismissed me. ‘I have to study for this calculus test anyway.’

I looked at her, feeling strangely lost. I wondered suddenly when the last time was that we’d talked properly. I opened my mouth to find out what was going on. We were closer than other mothers and daughters; we told each other everything. But Olivia stood abruptly and stretched, yawning big.

‘I’m gonna take a shower, Mom. See you at the barbecue later.’

She’d plucked up the red scarf from where it lay on the table, turned, and walked away, the slip of silk dragging like a discarded teddy bear across the floor.

Within seconds, she’d disappeared into the shadows at the top of the stairs.

× × ×

The memory sliced through me. It seemed so obvious now. Of course she was pregnant. I hated myself for not seeing it, for walking away when I should’ve stayed. Guilt suffocated me, pressing down on me like a crippling fog.

I slowed outside my driveway as lights flashed around me. Cars and vans overflowed along the street outside my house. A microphone was shoved in my face as soon as I opened my car door, and people started shouting my name.

‘Abi! Rob Krane, KOMO-TV. Can you tell us more about Olivia’s condition? Will her doctors try to keep her on life support? Will they be able to save the baby?’

‘I-I-,’ I stammered, edging toward my front porch. How did they know? My elderly neighbor, Mrs Nelson, stared at me from across the road, her mouth hanging open, the evening newspaper in her hand.

‘No comment,’ I said, my voice wobbly and unsteady.

I raced up the steps and let myself inside, black dots dancing across my vision from the flashbulbs. Exhaustion swept over me and I leaned against the door, the voices now muted to a dull mumble.

Finally I staggered to my feet. I needed a distraction from the creeping anxiety threatening to overwhelm me. I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. I poured a finger into a glass and swallowed it fast. It burned, but I poured another and took it upstairs to Olivia’s room.

I snapped on the light. It was still messy, like an explosion in a clothes factory. It smelled of lemony shampoo and dirty socks. Her blankets trailed off the bed.

I set the glass of vodka on Olivia’s dresser and draped the blankets neatly over the bed, then sat on the edge. Something on her bedside table caught the afternoon light. Olivia’s cell phone. It was attached to a charging cord, but when I picked it up, the plug dropped out. The battery was dead.

The sound of a knock at the front door startled me. I slipped Olivia’s phone into my hoodie pocket as I went downstairs. I looked through the peephole, expecting it to be a reporter, but instead it was a tall, broad-shouldered teenager wearing a wrinkled blue shirt halfway untucked from his jeans. His fair hair was disheveled, his hazel eyes so raw and swollen I almost didn’t recognize him.

The football build of Olivia’s boyfriend looked like it had been put through the washing machine and shrunk. I took in his red eyes – the dark circles, the tear tracks trailing his putty-colored cheeks – and felt a swell of compassion. This inexorable tide of grief was his as well. It was something we shared.

I opened the door and flashbulbs instantly started popping, reporters shouting questions. I ignored them, pulling Tyler inside. Word traveled fast in a town as small as Portage Point, and it looked like every major Seattle media outlet was on this story.

‘Is it true what they’re saying about Olivia?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ I pressed my fists into my eyes. ‘There was an accident.’

Tyler swayed on his feet. I grabbed his elbow and directed him to a chair at the kitchen table, pressed a glass of water into his hands. He gulped it down.

‘An accident?’ he echoed.

‘I don’t know. The police . . . I have to report it . . .’

‘What happened?’ he asked thickly.

‘Nobody knows. She might’ve fallen off the bridge. But . . .’ I hesitated, unsure if I should share my suspicions. ‘Did she leave the barbecue with anyone?’

‘No. She was by herself.’

‘Madison didn’t drive her?’

‘I’m pretty sure she walked.’

Olivia knew she wasn’t allowed to walk home alone in the dark. It was a firm rule of mine – one she’d never broken before.

‘What time was that?’

‘Like, ten thirty? Maybe more like ten forty-five?’

‘Tyler, there’s something I need to tell you.’

He stared at me. Waited.

‘Olivia’s pregnant.’

His arms dropped to the sides of the chair, heavy and limp. He looked like I’d punched him in the stomach.

‘Did you know?’ I needed information. Anything he could tell me mattered intensely.

He swallowed, then balled his hands into fists and stood. He turned away from me and hunched his shoulders.

‘Tyler?’ I walked to him, touched his back with my fingertips. ‘I promise I won’t be mad. Did you know she was pregnant?’

The muscles under his shirt jumped, and he pulled away from my touch. When he finally looked at me, his eyes were wide, the whites dominating his face.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Knight. There’s no way that baby’s mine.’