The Family Gift Page 26

I realise that even though I will always be Lexi’s true mother, there is some part of her connected to the woman who actually gave birth to her.

  It’s part of life, part of the great tapestry of one woman giving birth and another woman taking care of that child.

  I think I always knew this great fact but I was so caught up in rage against Elisa that I forgot it.

  I reach into that universal mother lode inside me and come up with the goods:

  ‘Darling Lexi, when Elisa gave birth to you, she was very young and immature and she wasn’t able to look after you. Giving you to your dad and me was the most selfless thing she has ever done in her whole life, the kindest thing, the best thing she could have done for you.’

  ‘I know all that but aren’t I special to her? This new baby thing is on Facebook and Instagram and everything, where she talks about this baby as if she’s never had a baby before and . . .’

  Again I try to choose the most careful words I can.

  ‘Lexi, sometimes girls in your school get pregnant and sometimes they have lots of support and bring up the babies.’

  She nods. Lexi knows that teenagers have babies because her school is very hot on sex education and the reality of what youthful sex really is.

  ‘When they have those babies very young, they haven’t matured. Do you know, the human brain does not fully develop until you’re twenty-five?’

  ‘No,’ she looks at me astonished. ‘I thought once, you know, you left school, you were officially a grown-up, and you could go out and vote and do stuff?’

  ‘You can vote, you can get married, you can drive a car, you can do lots of things,’ I tell her. ‘But until your brain is fully developed, you’re liable to make a few mistakes. We all make mistakes, at all ages,’ I add. ‘Adults make mistakes all the time. But the responsibility of having a child is huge and when Elisa was pregnant with you, she wasn’t ready for that responsibility, because she was very young.

  ‘Now she is. It doesn’t change the fact that you are the first beautiful little baby she gave birth to. But, it might be hard for you to see it that way when she’s telling everyone about this new baby.’

  ‘She never told anyone about me,’ Lexi says in a rush. ‘Me and Aisling talked about it at lunch break. I was nowhere, nowhere on any of her stuff or her posts or her Instagram or anything. It was like she just appeared from Spain and had no children. She lied. Do you know, she says she’s thirty-two.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, doing my best to sound surprised. ‘Lots of women try and pretend they are younger than they are and in Elisa’s world maybe that’s very important. So how about you show me some of these messages and posts and we can talk about it again, think about it again. Now we have a different prism to see it through. You have me and Dad and Liam and Teddy. You have six grandparents if you think about it: my mum, Dad’s mum, Great Granny Bridget, Great Granddad Eddie, and Granddad Lorcan, though he’s not well. Plus . . .’ A brilliant idea occurs to me but I have to plan it.

  ‘Elisa has a mum and dad too, and brothers, so you have other family.’

  Lexi ignores this.

  ‘Granny Bridget cries a lot. And Granny Betty’s nervous,’ says Lexi as if she wants to find flaws in this excess of relatives. The relative she wishes would care, simply doesn’t.

  ‘I know, but if you had Dad and Zed as sons and they always wanted to do triathlons and things – you know how Zed is into parachute jumping – you might be a bit nervous, too.’

  Lexi manages a small laugh.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ I add, now that I was on a roll, ‘I will be stressed out of my head if you decided that you want to do rock climbing or parachuting when you are older.’

  ‘Ugh,’ she says with a shudder. ‘I don’t want to do anything like that. I want to dance.’

  ‘Perfect, lovely you want to dance. And don’t forget you’ve got Scarlett, Maura, Pip, Zed, Caitlin, Gilly and everyone.’

  ‘Why can’t Scarlett have babies?’ she asks me suddenly and I’m taken aback at this sudden volte face.

  ‘Because not everyone gets what they want in life,’ I say ‘and for poor Scarlett and Jack, they tried so hard and they haven’t been able to have babies.’

  ‘And people like Elisa who had me when she was young, they get babies but they can’t look after them?’ she questions.

  Out of the mouths of babes.

  ‘Life is very strange, darling,’ I say to her, ‘never quite works out the way we want it to. But when we have people who love us and when we know we can talk to those people, tell them all our fears and know they will always love us no matter what, we can get through most things.’

  She throws her slim arms around my waist and squeezes as tight as she can and I bury my lips in her gleaming dark hair. I can’t cry, not yet, although I want to. My beautiful girl is having to deal with so much.

  ‘Now let’s think about what you might say to Elisa next time you see her and—’

  ‘I don’t want to see her again,’ says Lexi suddenly, pulling back from me.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  But she needs to, says Mildred.

  Mildred is being surprisingly helpful.

  ‘I think it would be great to see Elisa. In fact,’ and I don’t know where this idea comes from, ‘I think we should visit your other Granny and Granddad, her mum and dad, have them to dinner. Nothing fancy and she can bring whoever she’s going out with.’

  I’m still not entirely sure who the baby Daddy is.

  ‘He’s a musician,’ says Lexi.

  ‘OK,’ I say, vowing then and there to seriously cut down on Lexi’s time on social media. I know it’s going to be like fighting against the sea, but still. She needs a little bit more childhood before she has to face up to the weird and wonderful world of the internet. ‘So let’s organise that. I’ll ask Granny Adele.’

  ‘Elisa says they’re nice, really rich though. They have a dog, Coco. We could get a dog.’

  I grin. ‘Have you and Liam been planning this?’ I say, suddenly feeling my feet on very familiar territory. ‘It’s a plan isn’t it? Everything that’s going on, just to get a dog.’

  Lexi laughs and suddenly she’s back, my beautiful girl, not so little anymore, growing up, facing difficult things, but her eyes are shining as she looks at me.

  ‘We could get a small dog. I promise to walk it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about you walking it all by yourself,’ I say, ‘but certainly you and Liam can be involved in,’ I grin, ‘picking up the doggie poo.’

  ‘No,’ she shrieks.

  ‘Yes, doggie poo, it’s the only answer,’ I say. ‘Now, don’t look at any more Elisa videos – in fact, text Caitlin to say that everything’s all right and I might hold onto your phone for the rest of the evening? We’ll figure out how we’re going to invite Elisa over and say we’re pleased for her news. And Dad will be happy that she’s happy.’

  Lexi looked at me with a sceptical gaze.

  ‘I don’t think Dad likes Elisa very much.’

  This time I burst out laughing.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I ask, trying really hard to make my voice sound normal.

  ‘Mum, I can tell,’ she says. ‘Hello! I’m fourteen. I’m not a baby, even if my brain isn’t grown up yet.’

  ‘Uncle Con’s brain isn’t grown up yet and he’s nearly thirty,’ I point out and she giggles. ‘OK, you’re not a baby, right, got that. And we can talk about the dog thing.’

  ‘Really, Mum?’ she says, sounding like Liam.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but not just yet. We’ve still got a few hurdles to jump over. We need the right dog. We have to plan this. Have discussions but yes, let’s get a dog.’

  While the children screamed with excitement about the dog and Liam got out an animal book to look up exotic breeds that Teddy would no doubt terrori
se within their first five minutes in the house, I hid in the pantry, rang Dan and I filled him in on the details.

  ‘I’ll kill bloody Elisa,’ were his first words.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘What do you mean, no,’ he growls. ‘Stupid cow was the one who wanted to talk to Lexi and now this—’

  I interrupted him.

  ‘Let’s face it, Dan,’ I say. ‘Elisa has never been exactly emotionally mature and we should have expected something. We just have to be grown-ups in all of this and I have a plan.’

  ‘A plan to blackmail Elisa to go back to Spain and never darken our door?’

  ‘No, a more grown-up plan than that and possibly one that will keep us out of jail, because we have three children to take care of and a mortgage and it would be handier if we weren’t locked up.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I could put up with jail for a little while. Stupid, stupid cow and it’s all my fault.’

  I could practically hear him running frantic fingers through his dark hair.

  ‘Young guys are totally led around by their—’

  I interrupt him again. ‘When it comes to your ex-wife, I do not want to know what part of your anatomy was in charge, but I can figure it out. Let’s deal with what’s happening right now.’

  It’s strange but I feel totally in control.

  ‘You can do this,’ Mildred keeps saying in the background.

  There was something cheering about having Mildred on my side. Even Mildred knew I was a good mum and could work things out.

  Getting bashed to the concrete floor of a parking garage had rattled me more than I could ever say. But, I was handling that and I was going to handle this.

  Stuff happens, as Mildred says. You’ve got to live with it. Somehow.

  Energy surges through me.

  I think of my mum and how she’d dealt with some unbelievably hard things – Dad disappearing into the dark caverns of his mind and being there only in body; witnessing the pain of Scarlett going through years of infertility treatments and then falling apart. Mum had been able to cope and I was made of the same stuff.

  21

  Ask someone how they are really feeling. Not how they’re pretending they’re feeling. The result will surprise you

  Adele Markham sobs on the phone when she hears my voice.

  ‘Freya, I was waiting for you to phone. It’s Lexi, isn’t it, she’s heard the news?’

  This is a million miles away from the tough, hard as nails woman I’ve always felt her to be at our brief Christmas meetings. Funny at how you can look at people and have one impression and then find out they are something totally different behind it all. Another useful thing to put in my bag of tricks. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

  Now you realise this, Mildred says.

  ‘You’ve got it in one, Adele,’ I say.

  I decide to cut the small talk: ‘Unfortunately Lexi found out through Elisa’s social media and she’s devastated.’

  Adele starts crying loudly now. She sounds as if she’s talking through a tissue.

  ‘I didn’t know until one of the women I work with told me. I don’t keep up with Instagram. Elisa never told us. She never tells us anything. I thought we had time to figure out what to do – please, Freya,’ she begs, ‘let us see Lexi. Don’t stop us now. I love her, even though I’ve seen her so rarely.’

  At this, I feel guilty.

  ‘William says a year between meetings is so long and her uncles are dying to see her. She’s so special. I’ll never forgive myself for letting Elisa try to take care of Lexi . . . when I think of what happened in that restaurant . . .’ She’s almost incoherent now. ‘I never told you this but I wanted to raise Lexi myself—’

  ‘You’re not losing Lexi,’ I say, surprising myself.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ sobs Adele. ‘I’ve never known how to make it better. She has a trust fund, we set it up and my aunt died and there’s this seed pearl necklace left to her that she’d love and—’

  ‘Lexi needs family, not money,’ I say firmly. ‘When she’s a grown-up, you can hit her with trust fund stuff and Teddy will probably play her at poker to win it off her. You need to welcome Teddy and Liam too – we have to be a family.’

  I had thought this out.

  ‘Dan’s father is dead, mine is . . .’ I pause. ‘He had a stroke, he’s not coming out of it, so Lexi’s missing a grandfather, although they have their great-grandfather, Eddie, who is both fabulous and eccentric at the same time, and a great-grandmother too. You’ll have to meet them all. You already know Betty, Dan’s mum. But now – Elisa and how to make things right for my daughter. Are we on the same page, Adele?’

  ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ she says tearfully. ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Freya, except that I’m so sorry. You must have thought we were the worst parents in the world to bring up Elisa the way she was but the boys are great, they have families, they have responsibilities. They are such fine men except that Elisa was always wild and—’

  I interrupt her.

  ‘Adele,’ I say calmly, ‘I’m not ringing to fight with you or to demand to know why you didn’t do x or y so that Elisa would turn out in a particular way. Let’s just deal with what we have got to deal with. Lexi is a very young fourteen. She is having a very hard time with Elisa never admitting she had another child first. Now Elisa is saying this pregnancy is the most amazing thing to ever happen to her. I tried to explain to Lexi that when Elisa got pregnant the first time she was very young, very immature and now she’s ready to have a baby and that feels like the first time for her.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Adele, I don’t know if I can ever trust Elisa, but let’s try and make this as right as we can.’

  ‘OK.’

  She is definitely crying again, I realise.

  Adele insists we come to her for lunch.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘I want you to see us here, let Lexi know that she is our beloved granddaughter, not just an hour at Christmas in a restaurant.’

  ‘That sounds good.’

  Elisa, who has been busy with her social media and posing, sticking her skinny belly out, for society shots in newspapers, has not been in touch with Lexi since news of her pregnancy broke.

  Lexi is tearful sometimes so we’re spending a lot of time together. She’s missed a few days of ballet and she’s helping me with my new cookbook.

  Pain in Your Heart Vegan Quiche!’ she says, finally coming up with the name for our newest dish.

  ‘I like I Wish I Hadn’t Done That But Hey, What’s Done Is Done salad,’ I say, checking my quinoa to make sure it’s fluffy enough.

  ‘Thank you for helping me,’ I say to Lexi, ‘it’s so much more fun when you’re here.’

  She beams at me. ‘I love being here,’ she says. ‘Can we have No, You Don’t Understand How I Feel chicken nuggets for dinner?’

  ‘How about Insomnia Salmon, I say?’ and feel the familiar ache of guilt.

  I’m still sleeping thanks to half a sleeping tablet but I feel so guilty about them. I need to tell Dan, I can’t keep this secret from him any longer. Speaking truth in my support groups makes me aware that I need to speak it to my beloved Dan too. But what if he hates me for keeping it secret? Dan barely takes a painkiller if he falls off his bike: he hates drugs. He’s been going on about the sleeping tablets for a long time and I now make sure he never sees me take them, so I am more or less pretending I no longer do.

  What will happen when he finds out I still am?

  ‘Mum,’ roars Lexi up the stairs, ‘come on, we’ll be late!’

  God forbid you’re late to the lunch of the century, coos Mildred. Teddy has packed a small rucksack of cuddlies in case she’s bored and Liam has his drawing things.

  We drive along the city towards one o
f the poshest pieces of real estate in the whole country. Houses here regularly sell for sums that involve more digits than I can possibly count. But since I’m quite bad at counting, that isn’t hard.

  ‘Wow,’ says Lexi, looking out the car windows. ‘This is so cool, it’s like lifestyles of the rich and famous.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say brightly,’ but it’s not about the big houses, it’s about the people inside . . .’

  ‘Hungry,’ shrieks Teddy at the top of her voice, ‘hungry!’

  ‘Give her some raisins, maybe,’ says Dan, who has a hint of strain in his voice. I look at him.

  ‘Raisins are so over,’ I say.

  ‘Ice cream, cereal,’ shouts Teddy. Liam giggles. Teddy then kicks the back of my seat.

  ‘Stop it, darling,’ I say, knowing she is bored.

  I lean closer to Dan, who is driving.

  ‘Do you think this is a good idea?’ I whisper. ‘I was trying to give Lexi a sense of family . . .’

  ‘Brilliant,’ he says.

  I grin at him.

  ‘OK, thank you.’

  ‘You’re a genius,’ he says. ‘Lexi needs this.’

  We turn into the biggest, most fabulous house on the street: a massive red brick Victorian, flanked by two gates with – I kid you not – stone lions on top of them and from what I can see, an actual fountain in the front circle of lawn. The driveway runs like a horseshoe around from one big gate to the other, in and out. I’d bet a lot that the gates were electric.

  Wow. This is certainly not what we are used to. I felt very glad Adele hadn’t come to our house. I love it but we haven’t done anything with it yet and then, I stop myself.

  Dan and I have brought up Lexi, taken care of her, made sure she slept at night, was safe, loved, adored. We went to her dance recitals and brought her to ballet classes, not Elisa, not any of the Markhams. We’d taken care of her when she had vomiting bugs, had nits, had laboured over homework. We’d done it. So I wasn’t going to be intimidated by all this money.

  If I could deal with life after a mugging – well, thanks to my support group, which was proving invaluable – I could deal with the Markham family’s obvious wealth.