Ghosted: A Novel

The drive is one of the longest half hours of my life. By the time I hit the A417, I’m frantic.

Alex would have loved a niece or nephew, I think, as I wait on a roundabout. (And: How can this light still be red?) She would especially have loved a niece or nephew related to Hannah.

And me? Of course I want a child. I’ve known for years, I think, but it’s not something that ever felt possible—at least not until I met Sarah. Then it stopped feeling like a remote fantasy and started feeling like an obvious desire.

I love her, I think, as I accelerate ferociously out of the roundabout. She made everything seem possible.

Sarah Harrington has been carrying my child, all these months. Along with her grief, and her sadness, and the loss of her grandfather. She’s moved to the other side of the world, back to a place to which she thought she’d never return, and has somehow patched up the scar that was riven down the center of her family. All on her own. Knowing I didn’t want even a friendship with her.

I recall the unbearable sadness in her eyes when she talked of Hannah and her children, and I wonder again how it has been for these two women, trying to rebuild their relationship in such extraordinary circumstances. I hope it’s made Sarah happy. I hope the fact that Hannah is with her for the birth means that they’ve become as close as they deserve to be. As close as sisters should be.

HOSPITAL 1 MILE, says a sign. One mile too far. I pass under a railway bridge and climb a hill, cursing the traffic. I drive, far too slowly, past a fish-and-chip shop. A man stands outside it in the fading light, a plastic bag of warm paper packages swinging from his wrist. He’s on his phone, laughing, completely oblivious to the desperate man stuck in slow-moving traffic in a Land Rover.

A minute or so later there’s a sign saying the hospital is half a mile away, but that’s still not close enough. Another traffic light turns red. I seem unable to stop swearing.

The Land Rover is silent, save for the old-fashioned ticker-flicker of the indicator. I imagine Sarah, my beautiful Sarah, exhausted on a bed somewhere. I think of all the labors I’ve seen in films: terrible screams, panicking midwives, doctors shouting, emergency alarms going off. It’s like someone’s taken an ice-cream scoop and hollowed me out. I am weightless with fear. What if something goes wrong?

I turn left, reminding myself that problem-free labors happen all day, every day—they have to: the human race wouldn’t have survived, otherwise—and the brown hulk of Gloucester Royal slides finally into vision.

The hospital’s busy. Illness, I suppose, is a 24-7 business. Several people cross the roadway in front of me. There are speed bumps everywhere. The first car park is full and I want to scream. I want to hurtle to the nearest entrance and abandon my car there.

And I know, finally, how Sarah felt the day she set off in pursuit of her boyfriend and her little sister. I know the terror that gripped her, the instinct that sent her spinning off the road to prevent a car crash Hannah would never have survived. I know she didn’t swerve because she didn’t care about Alex. It was love and fear that made her wrench that steering wheel. The same love and fear that, right now, I am feeling for her. I would do anything to keep her safe. I’d block a hospital car park. I’d break the speed limit. And I, too, in that same situation Sarah found herself in, in 1997, would have swerved left, if it meant saving the person I loved most.