Before You Say Goodbye

Chapter 17

Because she believed it was important for her child to know his family and where they had come from, Autumn agreed to go back with the Whittles to England, promising a sullen Walter that they would continue their weekly telephone conversations just as they had before. No doubt believing it was where she would be most comfortable, Emma and Ben put her back in the bedroom she had shared with Bowie, and she hated it. The bed was new, but she couldn’t bear to sleep where Bowie had once slept. Where she had watched him die. For weeks, Autumn sat herself on the cold floor behind her bedroom door every evening and waited until everyone had gone to bed, before dragging her duvet to the sofa to get some sleep. A horrified Pip returned home early one morning to find her sniffling and crying on the couch. She was almost five months pregnant. He led her upstairs by the hand and insisted resolutely that she take his bed, waking Marley in the process. The next day, they offered to take Bowie’s bedroom and give her theirs.

“You can’t do that.” She shook her head at Marley. He’d yet to set foot in there. There was no way he’d be able to sleep.

“I can,” Marley said. “And I will.”

He lasted all of fifteen minutes. Autumn took herself upstairs for an early night, choosing Marley’s bed as her own because the smell of him was a comforting reminder of Bowie, but he knocked on her door before she’d even shut her eyes properly. He’d been crying.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I know this might be weird, but can I sleep in here with you?”

She nodded sleepily, holding her arms out to invite him to climb under the duvet and accept her comfort. She held him close, stroking away his tears with her thumbs. It was the only time she let him sleep with her, but she found herself gazing longingly at him more than once during her pregnancy. Most of the time, it was because she yearned for Bowie’s touch. Other times, she was ashamed to admit, it was Marley she longed for.

* * *

As a family, the Whittles had had the best of times trying to decide on a name for the baby. Though the discussion descended into argument more often than not, it was everybody’s favourite topic of conversation. Their suggestions were varied and, at times, ridiculous.

“What about Astro?” Bluebell had asked more than once.

“No!” they’d chorus every time she tried to suggest it.

“But it’s such a good name,” she said.

“What about Apple?” Pip asked, making Autumn laugh. He smiled at her. Laughing was not something they did an awful lot of anymore, and he looked pleased with himself.

“Molly?” Maddie suggested. Bluebell rolled her eyes.

“With parents called Bowie and Autumn, you can’t possibly be suggesting she’s called something plain like Molly?”

“This is Autumn’s decision,” Marley told them all.

“It has to be the perfect mix of weird and . . . not weird,” Bluebell said musingly. “Like Fern. Or Wilf. Or Ivy.”

“I like Ivy,” Autumn said. Marley scrunched his face up.

“I thought it was my decision?” She biffed him with a rolled-up newspaper.

“It was, until you suggested naming your baby after a fucking plant,” he said.

Bluebell frowned. “I’m named after a fucking plant.”

“I rest my case,” he said.

* * *

Time was — very slowly — healing Autumn’s heart. She cried for Bowie constantly in the months after his death, but the baby she was growing was most certainly helping her to heal. She’d kept her promise to Emma and was seeing a therapist. She’d thought she would hate sifting through the inner workings of her mind with a stranger and was genuinely surprised to find that the weekly sessions helped her feel calmer. Together they were talking through not only her grief over Bowie’s death, but how rejected and inadequate her family made her feel. They’d discussed how this might have given her a frantic and desperate desire for control and had almost certainly contributed to the issues she had with eating. It might also be why she had shunned friendships and relationships for so many years. They hadn’t yet figured out why Bluebell and Bowie had been different. Autumn wasn’t sure they ever would. Marley had found a therapist that was helping him too. He’d insisted, at first, that the sessions weren’t easing his agony at all, but his depression had been lifting, little by little, over time. Autumn knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were days when her baby was all Marley was living for, but she’d noticed, after a while, that he took part in family frolics again. He would tease her and the others, and say things he knew would make them smile. But Emma could not relax.

“I want to hear him laugh again,” she whispered to Autumn one afternoon. “When that happens, I think that’s when I’ll know he’s really on the mend.”

Autumn was thrilled to be beside him when that happened. It was a Saturday morning and they were reading their phones in their separate beds.

Marley moaned. “I’m hungry.”

“Want some breakfast?” she asked, sitting up.

“You’re pregnant,” he said.

“And? That doesn’t mean I’m suddenly incapable of making a cracking breakfast.”

Marley was watching her uneasily. She rolled her eyes, annoyed. She was sick of everyone treating her like a piece of crêpe paper.

“Do you want breakfast or not?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. She knew he wanted to ask her if she was sure, but he didn’t dare.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Sausage sandwich, please. Brown sauce, plenty of it.”

“OK, coming right up.” She pulled on her dressing gown and headed to the kitchen.

She returned twenty minutes later with his sandwich and a cup of decaf coffee for each of them. Marley sat up in bed, dramatically licking his lips.

“There’s a condition to this sandwich,” she said, holding it over his head.

“I knew this was too good to be true,” Marley muttered. “Go on.”

“You need to give me the best bit.”

“The best bit?” He stared at her quizzically.

“The bit right in the middle,” she said. “The bit where the melty butter meets the perfect bite of sausage. The bit with all the sauce and the softest bit of the bread. The bit everyone makes sausage sandwiches for. That bit.”

He gasped theatrically. “You can’t take my best bit. Why didn’t you make your own sandwich?”

“I can’t eat a whole one,” Autumn said. “I feel sick. I just want that bit. That one tiny little best bit.”

“But that’s the bit I want!”

“That’s my condition.” She held the sandwich higher. Marley sighed, the corners of his mouth curling into the start of a smile.

“Fine,” he said.

She handed him the plate and perched on the edge of his bed, watching him eating the crusty edges of the bread and waiting, expectantly, for him to stuff the rest of it in his mouth before she could stop him, but he didn’t. He held the best bit out for her to take from his plate.

“Think very carefully about this . . .” he said. She grabbed it without a moment’s hesitation, jamming it into her mouth before he could say anything else. He stared, aghast, at the empty plate in his hand. She collapsed in a fit of giggles, chewing her way through a mouthful that was far bigger than she could swallow. In the end, her high spirits won him over. Once he started laughing, they found they couldn’t stop.

* * *

Throughout her pregnancy, Autumn and Marley spent all of their time together. He’d become fiercely protective of her. He wouldn’t tolerate anyone telling her off, asking for her help or doing anything she might not like. If they did, Marley would leap to her defence. He watched her constantly and never stopped asking if she felt OK. Nobody said anything about it. She expected they all believed he was doing the right thing by his brother’s baby. Autumn did sometimes wonder if it were more than that though. She suspected Marley thought the baby was his. One evening, six weeks or so before her due date, they were sitting on the porch with cups of tea and watching the sun set over the trees — their smoking and drinking days far behind them — and she’d dared to ask him how he was feeling about the paternity test.

“I don’t really want to think about it,” he said. “What’s the point? Whatever happens, the baby wins. If he’s Bowie’s, we don’t have to tell anyone about what happened and he gets to know his father was an absolutely amazing man. If he’s mine, he gets to have a living father. We’ll have to tell everyone what we did, but it’ll be worth it if he gets to have his dad.”

Autumn was ashamed to admit that she hadn’t thought about it like that. She’d always hoped her baby was Bowie’s, but if he were Marley’s, it would most certainly be better for him. Or her. Autumn had decided not to find out the baby’s gender, but somehow the Whittles had concluded she was having a boy. Now, Autumn too had defaulted to referring to her baby as he and him.

“You have to stop calling it a him,” she said. “What if it’s a girl?”

“It isn’t.” He shook his head. “I can feel it.”

* * *

Autumn’s baby boy decided to arrive a month early. Nobody was surprised by his prematurity. He’d already shown them that he had a real attitude problem by giving her endless complications. At times, it had felt as though he hadn’t been sure that coming into the world was what he wanted to do after all. That had been sheer torture for Autumn. From the moment she’d made the decision to keep him in that dingy hospital canteen that night, she’d wanted him with a ferocity that was terrifying. She was already so overprotective and irrationally cautious that she’d spent the last six months of her pregnancy traipsing to and from the hospital, sometimes because there was blood in her knickers, sometimes because he’d not made a single movement for more than twenty-four hours, sometimes because she just ‘had a feeling’. Everything had always checked out fine. Still, she’d wondered if she might deserve to lose him. What if the universe was against his existence? What if he too was taken from her now? She’d chewed herself up about it every single day. Luckily, Marley had become her main source of strength. He’d worked tirelessly to help her to keep calm, though he had later dared to admit, once the baby was swaddled safely in his arms, that he’d been seized by the same fears.

Labour was nothing like she’d thought it would be. She’d expected everybody to jump into action the second she told them she had a contraction, but they hadn’t believed her. For an entire afternoon, she’d felt like the lead character in a horror movie as she tried desperately to alert everyone to a lurking danger, but nobody would listen. It was too early, they’d said, sure that overcautious Autumn was overreacting after so many false alarms. With more than four weeks until she was due, everyone seemed adamant that this was just another mini drama.

It was Maddie who believed her in the end. She implored her family across the dinner table to pay attention to Autumn, who was plainly terrified and had been struggling through labour pains all day. Emma told Autumn she was sorry she hadn’t listened to her earlier, and bundled her and Marley into her car. The others all wanted to wait at the hospital, but Autumn asked them not to come. They were all disappointed, but Ben, in particular, was noticeably crestfallen.

Autumn and Ben had grown even closer than before. She felt as though he was pouring all of the love he had for Bowie into Autumn and her unborn baby. The depth of his fatherly love was helping Autumn to heal. The little things he did mattered the most to her, things her own father had never considered important. Knowing how old she was without having to check, asking her how her writing was coming along, and talking to her about articles he’d read that he knew would interest her. She had never been sure what it was she was yearning for when it came to her own father because he had never really given her anything much at all, but now she realised that all she’d ever wanted was for him to take an interest in her as a person. That would have been enough. Ben had promised her more than once that she would never want for fatherly affection or support again. He had adopted her into his heart, in the same way he’d adopted Bowie, Marley and Bluebell.

None of that meant she wanted him to be there when she pushed a baby out of her vagina. Emma would be there, but that was different; she was a woman and she’d been through this. Autumn needed her. She wasn’t particularly thrilled about Marley being there, but as he might well be the father of her child, she told herself he should be, even though his presence made her feel self-conscious.

“I need a bra,” she told Emma as they rushed through hospital corridors. Her heavy breasts flapped uncomfortably as they hurried and she was anxious about being topless in labour because of Marley.

“Let’s have the baby first, Autumn,” Emma said.

“I’m going to need one though,” Autumn said. “I can’t do this without one. Please.”

“Marley, can you go home and get Autumn a bra?” Emma asked her son. He looked mortified by his mother’s suggestion. “Or maybe you could nip to the twenty-four-hour supermarket and buy her one? It’s just along the road.”

“Um, OK . . . What size?”

“30C,” Autumn said curtly.

“If I say that to someone that works there, are they going to be able to sort it out?” he asked nervously.

“Yes!” they said together, with growing exasperation.

“Will they think I’m weird?”

“Probably!” Emma said. “Go on, go!”

“Any particular colour?”

Autumn sighed irritably. “Marley, go and get me a fucking bra.”

* * *

He bore the brunt of her anger throughout that evening. She screamed, scratched and bit her way through the first hour of pushing as though she were possessed. She dug her nails into his hand as he held hers and told him, irrationally but in no uncertain terms, to leave her alone whenever she caught him looking at her. Eventually, he moved away from her vicious despair to stand by the window, calling out supportive comments to her as and when he judged them welcome. This had been a happy compromise for both of them, until the midwife gave her a status update she hadn’t been expecting.

“I can see the crown of your baby’s head now, Autumn,” she said encouragingly. Autumn had stopped pushing, her face furious.

“Only its fucking head? I can’t do this.” She collapsed back onto the pile of pillows.

“You can do it,” Marley said. Autumn grabbed his sleeve and dragged him closer to the bed.

“Almost there now, darling girl,” Emma said. “Just a few more big pushes.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” Autumn whimpered, looking desperately at Emma in reply. “I don’t want it anymore.”

“Come on, Autumn.” Marley stroked her hair back from her face lovingly. “You can do this. I know you can. You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever known.”

She braced herself and bore down, feeling more movement now. The midwife, presumably of the belief that Marley was her baby’s father, motioned for him to stand beside her, but he pretended not to notice.

“You can watch — if you want to.” Autumn gasped in a breath.

“Are you sure?” he asked. She nodded and he moved to stand at the bottom of the bed. Autumn was pushing again.

“How are you doing this?” he asked her.

“Marley, darling, that’s really not very helpful,” Emma murmured. Autumn cried out then, pushing harder. She’d had enough. She just wanted the baby out. And then, all at once, he was. He’d rushed from her insides and she’d never felt relief like it. She’d given Marley permission to cut his cord, and watched as the midwife passed him her son. Marley stared at the tiny pink miracle in his arms, his mouth opening and closing at the wonder of this new person, his eyes blinking back tears. Autumn would never forget the look on his face when he dragged his adoring eyes off the wriggling newborn he was holding to tell her she had a son. In that moment, Marley looked more like his brother to Autumn than he ever had before. A deep sob escaped her throat. How she wished Bowie was here. She called out his name, collapsing back onto the bed. Beside her, she heard Marley burst into tears. He stepped forward, laying the baby on Autumn’s chest.

Bowie’s brother and mother wrapped their arms around Autumn and her baby son, and they’d cried and cried, all three of them together, over his tiny blonde head.

Emma had tried, many times, to describe the way Autumn would feel the first time she saw the child she’d created, but she had been right when she’d eventually concluded with the words, “I can’t even explain. Just wait.” Before she’d held her baby boy that first time, Autumn had been entirely deluded. She’d believed that she could imagine what Emma had gone through when they’d lost Bowie. As she stared at her son in her arms, the true reality of Emma’s loss smacked her in the face. In that moment, she couldn’t fathom how she would ever survive if anything happened to this tiny little person. She had been embarrassingly ignorant. She didn’t know how Bowie’s mother was still standing. When Emma drew closer to give Autumn a hug before she held her grandson for the very first time, Autumn held her much tighter than usual.

“Thank you,” Emma whispered. She ran her fingertips through the baby’s wispy blonde hair. Autumn, weary but deliriously happy, told her that she was welcome. Emma paced the room with the baby, her face frozen in a grin, chattering happily to the bundle of joy she was holding, telling him all about the family he had waiting for him and how badly they were going to spoil him. Autumn reached for Marley’s hand, overwhelmed with emotion.

“We’re going to be OK,” he whispered, leaning in to kiss her forehead. She nodded. In the past six months, they’d become experts at speaking openly to one another about something nobody else knew anything about, and braver when it came to showing each other affection. They knew they didn’t have to worry about his family. The Whittles had no reason to suspect anything untoward had occurred between the two of them. Marley had loved Bowie with unabashed ferocity and, as far as they knew, would never do anything to hurt his brother. The idea that her child might be his would not cross their minds. Marley would die to protect his brother’s baby as readily as he would a child of his own. His protectiveness of Autumn would be chalked against that and they both felt safe in this knowledge. The Whittles knew that what Autumn and Marley had gone through together in New York had given them a unique closeness.

They were best friends. She was closer to him than she was to anyone else. Still, their bond did not come close to the bond that the twins had shared, and Autumn knew — though her own heart was on the mend — his would never heal. Bowie’s absence was at the forefront of his mind every minute of every day. Their mother’s loss was similar in a way and Emma and Marley had become ever more inseparable as a result. Autumn reasoned that it was only possible to feel such pain if you’d lost someone who was woven into the very fabric of who you were as a person.

Over the course of her healing, Emma started to suspect Marley, Autumn and Maddie might have helped Bowie along. She became obsessed with the notion, asking Marley about it at least once a day.

“You can tell me the truth,” she would say. “I know that your commitment to Bowie was a complicated love story, that you really meant it when you said you’d do anything for him. And I know you’re liberal monsters. I raised you that way. I won’t judge you, I just want to know.”

She was convincing, but Marley never faltered.

He stuck to their story like glue and so did Maddie and Autumn. They never talked about it, but Autumn assumed they’d concluded — like she had — that Emma would torture herself if she knew the truth. That she would never forgive them, never look at them the same again, never respect the fact Bowie had been more than ready to die. The truth wouldn’t help her, it would only hurt her. It was better if she never knew.

* * *

“I want to call him Ben,” Autumn said. Marley smiled at her in the rear-view mirror. It was the afternoon after the birth and they were going home. They’d dressed him in a tiny white all-in-one and matching hat. Despite sending him an obsessive stream of texts to remind him, Marley had forgotten to bring the scratch mittens. Autumn was sitting in the back seat, holding his hands carefully to prevent him poking his beautiful little eyes out. She thought it best not to mention this to Marley.

“I thought you hated traditional names?” he said.

“I don’t hate them,” she said. “I just think they’re boring. But ‘Ben’ isn’t. ‘Ben’ has meaning. To you, to Bowie, to me. Benjamin, maybe, so we don’t get confused.”

It just felt right to her. She desperately wanted them all to know how important they were to her. She knew that the family must be terrified that she might take the baby away from them, but Autumn had never wanted anything more than to stay. She was well aware that having a baby would be hard work and was already completely overwhelmed. She needed them. All of them. All of the time.

She’d expected them to be with Marley when he came to pick her up, but he’d been alone and she felt a little disappointed. She knew they’d be excited and she’d been looking forward to seeing them all delight in her son.

“They’re all as high as kites,” he said ruefully. “I told them they’d overwhelm you and could wait one more hour. I had to scream at them to make them listen, so they won’t be talking to me when we get home.”

She knew that his solitude was not just for her sake. He’d walked into her room with his arms already open and ready to receive her son. He wanted him to himself for a while longer. He’d been crying, she could tell, but didn’t ask him about it. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how conflicted and overwhelmed he must be feeling. She’d watched him carrying the baby to the car. His eyes not straying once from her son’s perfect little face.

“This is easy.” Marley grinned. Autumn raised her eyebrows at him and laughed. Benjamin, if that was to be his name, was sleepy and satiated now, but Marley had not yet had the pleasure of hearing how loud he became when he wasn’t.

“They’re going to fight over him,” he said. She looked down at her newborn, peeping out at her from under his hat. His eyes were big and blue, like Bowie’s. They made Autumn feel as though she were in a dream.

“What a lucky little person you are,” she told him, “to have so many people who love you so much already.”

* * *

Marley sat Autumn in an armchair opposite the sofa so that she could watch his family carefully pass her baby between them. She had to fight the urge to snatch him back. She reminded herself that he was in the hands of people who would give their own lives for him. It didn’t make her feel any better. Marley handed her a coffee and perched himself on the arm of her chair. He couldn’t take his eyes off Benjamin either.

She was suddenly afraid of everything. Scared that the baby might be hurt, that something might be wrong with him, that she would do something to harm him without meaning to, that somebody else could upset him, that he might disappear as quickly as he had appeared.

“Well, hello there, little Astro,” Bluebell said when it was her turn to hold him. Everybody laughed.

“Actually, Autumn has a name for him,” Marley said. They turned to look at her and she swallowed hard, unsure anymore if this would actually be all right. Ben was not her dad, he was theirs. Perhaps Maddie would want to name a child of hers after him. Or Pip. Or any of the others. She faltered, but Marley nudged her.

“I’d like to call him Ben,” she said, her eyes darting to the man who was the closest thing to a father she had ever had. He looked utterly astounded.

“Benjamin, actually. If it’s all right with all of you, of course?”

One by one, wide smiles spread across their faces. Emma blinked tears from her eyes. Marley winked at his mum.

“Oh my . . .” Ben cleared his throat. “Well . . . Oh my goodness.”

“I think it’s a great idea.” Maddie nodded. “A really beautiful sentiment.”

“Me too,” said Pip. “Bowie would love it.”

“He does look like a Ben.” Emma kissed her teary husband on the cheek.

“I still think he looks like an Astro.” Bluebell smiled playfully. “But Ben? OK. I think I’ll allow it.”