‘What were the symptoms?’
Slowly she lifts her head and blinks me into focus. ‘There are many. With your brother, it was vision loss, seizures, and then forgetfulness… childhood dementia.’ Two words that should never, ever go together.
My throat is so tight I can barely squeeze my next words out. ‘What about clumsiness? Motor skills…?’
‘Yes, those too.’ She shrugs, as if it is a matter of indifference, but I can see how deeply she is hurting, her body seeming to fold in on itself, her head bowed as she remembers her grief, the grief that has never left her.
My mind is racing down dark alleys, then turning around and skittering back, because I don’t want to go there. I can’t go there, and yet I have to. For Alice, I have to. ‘And this is a hereditary condition?’
She nods. ‘Both parents have to carry the gene.’
Both parents – which means Jack has this awful gene as well. If Alice has it. And yet already I know that she does, she must, and I can’t bear it. How on earth can I give this kind of news to Milly and Matt? How on earth can I live with it myself?
‘Is there treatment?’ I ask, a bit desperately. ‘Medicine? Something…?’
My mother shakes her head. ‘There’s nothing.’
‘But this was a long time ago. Perhaps things have changed…’ It feels like the smallest, faintest ray of hope in this otherwise impenetrable darkness. Surely science has moved on loads in the last thirty-five years. There might even be a cure now.
‘There isn’t, Anna,’ my mother says, as if I’ve
said all of this out loud.
‘How do you know?’
‘Don’t you think I care?’ Her voice throbs with pain. ‘Don’t you think I’d know? That I’d find out?’ I stare at her, the wild grief in her eyes, the way her arms are wrapped around her body as if she needs to hold herself together, and I realise I’ve never known my mother at all.
After a long moment, I nod towards the photo album, my body and heart aching with the weight of my new knowledge. ‘May I see it, please?’
Wordlessly, my mother hands it to me. Despite everything she’s already told me, the first photos are a shock – a tiny, shrivelled newborn, a smiling, chubby baby. He has the same green eyes I do – the eyes of my father – and honey-blond hair that curls about his face, making him look like the proverbial cherub.
Silently I go through the first two years of his life, all the milestones, as well as the little moments. Chocolate cake on his first birthday, tottering steps in a garden. It is strange to see my parents laughing and loving together, a happy family that I have absolutely no memory of.
And then the photos stop, sometime after my brother’s second birthday. The rest of the pages in the book are blank.
I glance up at my mother, and she shakes her head. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to have pictures then.’ I frown and she continues heavily, ‘He went into the care facility right before he turned three.’ She swallows, more of a gulp. ‘He lived another year after that.’
‘Did you visit him?’ The question slips out unbidden, and my mother suddenly glares at me, her eyes screwed up, her mouth twisted. She is ugly with outrage.
‘Did I visit him? Did I visit my own son, my firstborn child? What kind of question is that?’
I shrink back under the force of her rage – except it isn’t rage at all, it’s grief. Her face crumples and her shoulders shake and I realise she is sobbing – great, heaving sounds of deepest grief that I’ve never seen her make before.
‘Mum. Mum, I’m sorry.’ I haven’t actually hugged or even touched my mother in years, yet now I kneel in front of her and put my arms around her. She submits for a few seconds, but then she pushes me away – which, I realise, has been happening since I was a child, or even a baby. The whole story of my life, encapsulated in this moment.
I sit back on my heels as she continues to sob, choosing to be alone in her grief, to shut me out. Why? Why didn’t she or my father ever tell me the truth? Why didn’t they include me in their grief? I am angry, but more than that, I am deeply, profoundly sad, for so many reasons.
I think of my brother, and then I think of Alice. Alice. My heart breaks all over again, cracking right down the middle; soon it will be nothing but a handful of jagged splinters.
‘Why didn’t Dad want to tell me?’ I ask quietly when my mother’s sobs have subsided to hiccoughs.
She shrugs and wipes her eyes. ‘It was too painful. When something like that happens… you don’t want to be defined by it, and yet you are. Of course you are. Richard couldn’t see that. He thought if we moved from London, if we built this new life for ourselves, with you, it would be better. A fresh start for everyone, but there never could be any such thing.’
‘Weren’t you afraid I might have it, too?’
My mother doesn’t look at me as she answers. ‘Of course we were. We hadn’t intended…’
‘I was an accident,’ I say flatly.