Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [153]
“She did?”
“She did. I think it made her sad.”
“I’m sorry.”
Hannah shrugged again. The universal gesture of adolescence.
“Don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t, like, very sad, very often. She was a pretty fun person.”
“She was, wasn’t she?”
“That’s what I miss most. Dad’s fun, too, I know that. But the funny they made together, the funny only the two of them could make—that’s gone, and I miss it.”
Jennifer put her arm around Hannah and hugged her.
“You’re a wise old head, on young brown shoulders, aren’t you, Hannah?” she said softly.
“I am. With the odd fuck-up in between…” This Hannah seemed much more like the old one. “Get that from my mum! The wisdom part. I know things.”
And there are things you will never know, Jennifer thought, but didn’t say.
“What things do you know?”
“I know that you seem much happier, lately.”
Jennifer smiled. “I am actually.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
She sat for another moment or two, feeling a giant grin spread across her face, not wanting, or needing, to conceal her joy for a minute longer.
“I do know one little thing you don’t know, missy.”
“What?” Hannah sat forward. The grin was contagious, before she even knew why she was grinning.
“That I’m pregnant.”
SO, THE THING WAS, THAT WHEN YOU’D TRIED TO GET PREGNANT and it hadn’t worked, and hadn’t worked for long enough that it was time to get it investigated, you forgot about birth control. Obviously. There’d been a while, back there, where it was redundant anyway; they’d made love so infrequently. But since the ski trip before Easter…well, that was no longer the case.
A missed period was nothing new for Jennifer. She’d never been especially regular. That had been noted, written down on the charts. Sometimes she was so late she wasn’t sure whether the period was the last one or the next one. She’d been tired. Dead tired. The kind of heavy, sudden tiredness that makes sleeping facedown on your desk, or standing up in the underground, seem a suddenly attractive proposition. She’d wondered whether she might be anemic, and started buying dark green leafy vegetables, which was unlikely to help, since she hated the taste of them, and, although they got steamed and served up, they were seldom eaten in any great quantity. Sore boobs should have been a sign—indeed they might have been, if she’d been looking for one. But babies, and all things baby, had been so definitely shelved, so removed from the agenda of this relationship she and Stephen were rebuilding from the ground up, that it quite honestly never occurred to her that she might be pregnant.
Until she started to throw up. Blessed with the constitution of an ox, inherited by all four of them from their mother, this almost never happened. Amanda hadn’t been sick once in India, for exactly the same reason, even after eating watermelon sold at the roadside and taking ice in her Coke. They were all roller-coaster, choppy-sea, stop-start-traffic proof. But one morning, she awoke feeling as unfamiliarly sick as the proverbial parrot. As she sat legs akimbo, pajamas awry, on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, clutching at the pedestal of the toilet for dear life, a new and awe-inspiring thought slowly dawned.
Stephen had been away at a two-day sales conference in Manchester. Jennifer resisted the strong impulse to phone him and tell him. She wanted to see his face. She’d gone to the chemist and bought four tests, and done them, one after the other, until she’d perfected what she judged to be midstream urine. Even then, she had the sense of entering some new and alien world. She’d never considered the length or time span of a stream of her urine before.
They each obliged with an affirmative blue line. Peering from test to box and back again, Jennifer thought pregnancy tests would be better if