Nicola looks up at her sister from the pillows, the sweat-damp hospital gown clinging to the soft ruins of her body. She’s never felt so depleted or, paradoxically, so defiant. ‘You wanted a baby, so I’m giving you a baby,’ she replies, her voice trembling.
Paul pops his head tentatively around the door. His face is pallid, eyes flitting from Penni to Nicola. He looks like he wants to intervene – he always does – in his half-measured, chronic-people-pleaser kind of way. Penni says he’s not like this in business. That, apparently, he’s tough – ruthless, almost. A different person. But Nicola can’t imagine it. She only knows this version of her brother-in-law. Penni flicks her hand towards the corridor, shooing Paul out as though he’s a fly. The door clicks softly behind him. It’s just them now. Like it always was. Like maybe it always should have been.
Nicola grits her teeth. Her sister clearly thinks it will go better if she speaks to her alone. But she’s made up her mind. She won’t be swayed on this, no matter how many tears Penni cries. She should be grateful, not guilt-tripping her, after she’s just had a hellish nine months of sickness, swollen ankles, and pre-eclampsia, followed by an emergency C-section.If she’d known what pregnancy actually involved, she would never have agreed to go through with it. But then Nicola glances over to the crib by her side. No. That’s not true. She wouldn’t change it for anything.
After agreeing to have a baby for her sister, Nicola had been stunned to discover she was carrying twins. This wasn’t what she had signed up for. Being pregnant with one child was enough of an adjustment, but carrying two... She assumed that having twins must be a genetic thing, berated herself for not having anticipated it, what with her and Penni being identical twins. But the doctor disagreed. Explained that it was rare to be an identical twin, and even rarer for a twin to give birth to identical twins. That it was nothing more than a fluke. Well, whatever the reason, it had happened to her. Nicola was pregnant with twins.
She’d been apprehensive about telling her sister. What if they reneged on the deal? What if they couldn’t handle two babies? The thought of them leaving her in the lurch with a couple of newborns made her sick with anxiety. But she needn’t have worried. Penni and Paul were thrilled.
Not anymore.
Penni’s nostrils flare, and her jaw tics up and down as if she’s chewing on all the words she wants to throw at Nicola. ‘You’re giving me a baby!’ she parrots back. ‘That’s what you think this is? A fucking gift? You’re splitting them up, Nicola. Splitting up twins! Do you even hear yourself?’
Nicola does hear herself. She hears her sister, too, but mostly she hears the drumming in her ears, the high-pitched whine of adrenaline still spiralling through her system from the emergency C-section that ended only hours ago. Her whole body floats in a chemical stew of anaesthesia, morphine, and residual terror. It’s a miracle she can even talk straight. But there’s a kind of clarity that comes after you’ve been cut open and sewn back up for the sake of someone else – you realise you don’t have to be just a conduit, a vessel, a means to someone else’s end.
The whole experience has been traumatic. From having the doctor carry out the artificial insemination, where the sperm was deposited directly into Nicola’s uterus, to the birth itself, there was nothing about it she enjoyed. Even worse was the sickening joy she witnessed from Penni and Paul when she told them she’d fallen pregnant. Honestly, her sister turned into a complete stranger. She fussed over Nicola like a mother, which would have been nice, but Nicola knew she was only doing it to ensure their babies were taken care of. After they got their hands on them, she had no doubt they’d go back to keeping her at arm’s length. They wouldn’t want to be reminded of where their children came from.
Nicola couldn’t wait to get her body back, her life back, and enough money to buy her own place. The only thing that kept her going was obsessing over property sites in search of her perfect pad. That, and the fact she was able to cut down on her work hours. Although she’d have taken double shifts over the morning sickness, which made her feel like she was going to die.
Penni drags a chair over and sits right up close to her. Too close. ‘Think back to when we were younger, Nic. Think back. It would have been unbearable if we hadn’t had each other. And yet that’s what you want to do to our babies. You want them to be alone!’
Nicola knows she’s right, but pushes away the memories of the two of them together. She’s too filled with bitterness and spite. She doesn’t know where this fury has come from. She doesn’t know why she wants to wound her sister so badly. She tries her best to sound reasonable. ‘Yes, but this will be different because they’ll each have a mother who loves them. We didn’t have that.’
Penni’s voice splinters. ‘We agreed, Nic. We agreed that Paul and I would take them both. Everything’s been arranged. We’ve bought two of everything. I’ve already fallen in love with them. Both of them. But...’ She pauses. ‘I’d rather you take them both than split them up.’
Nicola hates how sanctimonious her sister sounds.I’d rather you take them both than split them up,she mimics in her head. ‘I know it’s not how we planned it,’ Nicola replies. What she really wants to scream is,It’s not how you planned it for me.
‘But... I can’t look after twins on my own, and I can’t bear to let them both go. I’ve made up my mind, Pen. They’ll be sisters. They’ll know each other. But one of them will be mine.’
‘Can’t you think aboutthem, rather than aboutyou?’ Penni spits. Her voice breaks and she falls silent, pleading with her eyes.
The room is so quiet, Nicola can hear the plastic tubing of her IV line flexing as she clenches her fist. She thinks about the contract they signed, about the solicitor’s thick, officious glasses and the way he scratched his beard as he explained the legalities: ‘The law is clear in the UK. The gestational mother is always the legal mother at birth. Intended parents must apply for a parental order.’ She nodded back then, pretending his words didn’t apply to her. Pretending it was all perfectly arranged. That the scribble of ink on paper would keep her heart in check. But those words he spoke wormed their way into her subconscious.
Nicola thinks she already knew deep down that she was never going to be able to give both babies away. She just didn’t know she would say it out loud, didn’t know she would torch her sister’s faith in her so completely in a high-dependency hospital room with a view of the car park and the constant shriek of ambulances as background music.
Now, seeing Penni’s face – her body rigid, her soul lodged somewhere between horror and heartbreak – she almost wants to take it back. Almost. But then she looks at the white swaddled shapes cradled in the Perspex crib beside her bed, and the fierce, latent thing she never thought she had in her – maternal instinct, maybe, or just the urge not to be a pawn – roars up and pins Nicola to her decision.
Penni wipes a sleeve over her cheeks, smearing mascara in thick clumps. ‘You’ll ruin everything, you know that? They’ll never forgive you. And neither will I.’
‘I don’t need forgiveness,’ Nicola says, but the words taste sharp and metallic, and not quite true.
Penni’s eyes are bloodshot, her chest heaving. ‘Fine,’ she spits. ‘I hope you’re happy, Nic.’ She turns and walks out, shoulders hunched, head bowed.
Nicola listens to her footsteps recede, the noise of her departure loud in the hush. She doesn’t know if they’ll ever recover from this.
It’s not until the room is empty that she allows herself to really look at the white-swaddled lumps in the crib. They’re tiny, smaller than she expected, with faces that are both familiar and completely unknown. She reaches for one, and the effort makes her incision burn, but she doesn’t care. She wants her. She needs her.
The nurses come in and out, sometimes offering congratulations, sometimes only checking her blood pressure or refilling her water jug. One of them, a round-faced woman named Sima, looks at both cribs with a kind of professional sadness. She doesn’t ask questions. She just pats Nicola’s hand and tells her she’s brave.
After the initial whirlwind, after the paperwork and the phone calls and Penni’s scene in the hospital room, it’s suddenly astonishingly quiet. Paul and Penni’s baby, who they name Bella, is wheeled out to the nursery, and Nicola is left with... hers. With her. Her daughter.
She names her Jade. She likes the sound of it – bright, sharp, and precious.
The next few days in the hospital tumble out like a deck of cards, shuffled and unpredictable. Penni doesn’t visit, but Paul comes sometimes, usually when Nicola’s asleep. She wakes to a faint waft of his aftershave or to the sound of him murmuring in the hallway to a nurse. He never comes in when she’s awake, only stands on the threshold, looking at Jade like she might break into a dozen pieces if he steps closer.
When they finally discharge Nicola, it’s raining. She wraps her daughter in two blankets and takes a taxi back to her flat. The driver, an old guy with a battered Honda and a generous silence, doesn’t comment on the fact that she’s alone, or on the way she keeps looking sideways, expecting Penni to materialise next to her in the back seat with a court order. He just drives, and when he pulls up outside her peeling, yellowing block of flats, he helps her with the carrier without being asked. She wants to thank him, but the words stick in her throat.
Inside, everything is exactly as she left it – the half-packed suitcase in the hallway that she didn’t have time to bring, the dirty dishes in the sink. There’s a note on the doorframe from her new friend, Leila, who she met at antenatal classes, offering to pick up groceries and nappies. She wants to call her, to tell her everything, but she also wants to crawl into bed and sleep for a decade.
