The Good Mother

Chapter One

The chart said the patient was ninety-one and had been on the same dose since October, and Nadia read it twice before she picked up the phone to the ward, because the number in the third column was wrong by a factor of ten and somebody was going to have to be told that in a way that let them keep working.

It was a transcription error. They almost always were.

She said so to the nurse without any particular weight on it, and asked her to check the paper order against the entry, and stayed on the line while she did it. On the other end she heard the moment the nurse found it.

"God."

"It's fine. It hasn't gone anywhere. Just amend it and initial it and I'll sign off this end."

"How did you even see that."

"I read the column," Nadia said. "That's the whole job."

She hung up and wrote the amendment in the log and put the time next to it, 10:52, because you put the time next to it. Then she went back to the fourth-floor order, which was hydromorphone and needed a witness for the count, and Yolanda came over and they did it together the way they'd done it four hundred times.

"You've done that count face three times."

"Have I."

"You do it when your head's somewhere else. I've watched you do it for years." Yolanda didn't look up from her own tray. "Everything all right at home?"

"June's not sleeping great."

"They go through phases." Yolanda counted the last of hers and squared the tray. "Ours went through eight months of it at that age. Ended as suddenly as it started. You stop noticing it's stopped for about a week before you realize."

"That's reassuring."

"It's meant to be."

The dispensary phone rang at twenty past eleven, and Yolanda answered it and then held it against her collarbone and said it was the school.

Nadia finished the count before she took the receiver, because you finish the count. The woman on the other end introduced herself as Corinne Deller and then apologized for interrupting her at work, which meant she had been told where Nadia worked and had thought about whether to call there.

"June's had a difficult morning," Deller said. "She's all right. I want to say that first. She's had a difficult morning and I wondered whether you could come in."

"Difficult how."

"She was distressed when she arrived. She's settled now. I'd rather do this in person if that's all right."

Nadia looked at the clock above the door. Two discharges, which could go to Yolanda, and the family meeting at two, which could not, because the family in question had four adult children and three of them had flown in and one of them was a lawyer.

"I can be there in twenty minutes."

The drive took eleven. Salt had dried white across the windscreen and the wipers only smeared it, and at the lights on Ainslie she sat behind a bus and watched a woman in a parka cross with two children who were arguing about something.

The school smelled the way schools smell in January, wet wool and floor cleaner and the ghost of somebody's lunch. Deller met her at the office and took her down the corridor past the kindergarten cubbies with their laminated name cards, and June's was third from the end, and her boots were in it with the snow melted off them into a little gray pool.

"She's in the reading corner," Deller said. "I'll get her in a minute. Can we sit."

The chairs were the small ones. Nadia sat on one and her knees came up and she didn't care.

"She came in this morning holding onto her father's coat," Deller said. "She wouldn't let go of it. That's not unusual on its own, they do that, but she was shaking. Not cold shaking. And when he left she went under the table by the window and stayed there for about forty minutes."

"Did she say anything."

"She said she was tired." Deller had a folder in front of her and she hadn't opened it. "Mrs Whitlock. This is the third time in three weeks."

Nadia heard it and it went in cleanly, the way a number goes in, and she sat with it before she trusted her voice.

"Nobody told me about the first two."

"You were told." Deller's face changed slightly. "I mean, we mentioned it. Your husband picks up on Wednesdays and Fridays and I spoke to him both times, at the door, the way you do. I understood he'd pass it on. I'm not saying he didn't. Things get lost."

"What did you tell him."

"That she'd come in upset. The first time it was the eighth of January and she cried for about ten minutes and then she was fine. The second time was the fifteenth and she was quieter, she wouldn't do the calendar with us, she does the calendar every morning, she likes it." Deller turned her hands over. "I've got twenty-three of them and I know when one of them stops doing the thing they like."

Outside the window a boy in a hi-vis vest was walking the perimeter of the yard with a bucket of salt, throwing it in flat arcs.

"I ask everyone this," Deller said. "Is there anything going on at home. Anything at all, a move, an illness, somebody staying with you. It's usually something like that."

"We're doing a home study," Nadia said. "For an adoption. There's been people in the house asking questions since October."

"There you are, then. That'd do it." Deller wrote something down, and it was one word, and Nadia watched her write it. "Children pick up on process. They can't tell the difference between a social worker who's there because everything's fine and one who isn't."

"Is that what you think it is."

Deller took a moment.

"I think a five-year-old came in shaking three times in three weeks," she said. "I think I'd be doing my job badly if I only wrote down the times I thought it was nothing."

There was an incident. It wasn't at night. It was in a shop, and it was me. It was one time. Four sentences, and a mark that lasted four days, and a nurse who had glanced at it and written a line and moved on. Nadia sat with the shape of it in her chest, in the same place it had been sitting since the fourteenth of November.

"Can I see her," she said.

June came out of the reading corner with a book against her chest and stopped a meter away and looked at her mother the way she did lately, like a person checking the weather before deciding on a coat. Then she came the rest of the way and put her forehead against Nadia's shoulder and stood there.

Her hair smelled of the school. Nadia held the back of her head and felt the small hard curve of her skull under her hand and counted four breaths before her daughter's shoulders came down.

"Bad morning," Nadia said.

"I'm tired," June said, into her sleeve.

"I know. Are you tired now or were you tired this morning."

June thought about it, which she did with her mouth slightly open, and said, "Both," and then wriggled to be let go, and went to get her boots.

In the car she was already better. She wanted to know whether they were going home or to the hospital, and when Nadia said home she wanted to know if that meant she'd missed gym, and it did, and she was pleased about it and said so at length. The heater took until Coronation to make any difference.

"Can we get chips."

"Not today, love."

"Why not."

"Because we're going straight home."

June accepted this with the particular grave disappointment of a five-year-old denied chips, and stared out the window in silence for almost a full minute, which for June counted as a genuine sulk, before something else caught her attention and the whole subject was abandoned as suddenly as it had arrived.

"Junie. This morning. Do you remember what made you sad."

"I wasn't sad." She was looking out the window at the salt trucks. "I was tired."

"You can be both."

"I was tired," June said again, in the voice she used when she had finished with a subject, and then she said something about a girl called Aviva who had brought in a snail, and that was the end of it.

Elliot came home at six twenty with milk and a bag of the pears June liked, and Nadia told him about the phone call while he was still in his coat. He listened without putting anything down.

"Third time," he said.

"That's what she said. She told you the first two."

"She mentioned it." He set the milk on the counter and looked at it. "The eighth, was it. Yes. I remember she said something at the door, and I was going to tell you and then it was that week, you had the thing with your mother's stone, and I thought, this is not what she needs on Wednesday. And then it went out of my head. That's not an excuse, that's just what happened."

"And the fifteenth."

"The fifteenth I honestly thought I had told you." He rubbed his eye with the back of his wrist. "I'm sorry. That's a bad one. That's a genuinely bad one and I'm not going to talk my way round it."

There was nothing in it she could argue with, and she found she didn't want to. He was standing in the kitchen in his coat looking as tired as she felt, and the milk was going to warm up if one of them didn't move it, and she moved it.

"Should we be worried," she said.

"I think we should be paying attention." He took the coat off finally and hung it on the newel post, which she had asked him not to do for seven years. "She's five. There's a woman coming to the house every three weeks asking her what she'd think about a brother. Kids fall apart about less."

"Deller said the same thing."

"Well, then." He put his hand flat on her back between the shoulder blades and left it there, warm through her shirt, and she leaned into it before she'd decided to. "Two people who spend all day with children think it's the adoption. I'd take that."

Later, after June was down, Nadia stood at the sink and ran the water hot and did the pans, and out the kitchen window she could see the Prewitts' upstairs light on and the shape of somebody moving behind the blind. Her hands ached in the heat. There was a jar of paracetamol and a jar of ibuprofen on the sill above the tap and she took two of the ibuprofen for her shoulder, which had been bad since December, and drank the water straight from the tap, which she had been told not to do since she was six.

Elliot was on the sofa with his laptop and the house was quiet.

She dried her hands and went up.

Chapter Two

She came to standing on the stairs.

The hall light was on below her and the cold was on the backs of her legs, and her hand was on the rail, and she was three steps from the bottom facing down. The house had that ringing quality it gets at the wrong hour, the fridge cycling, the radiator ticking somewhere behind the wall.

The clock on the microwave said 3:40.

She didn't move.

Her feet were bare on the runner and the runner was cold, which meant she had been standing there long enough for the wool to give up her heat. Her right hand was closed on the rail. When she opened it the ridges stayed printed white across her palm.

The side door was four steps from the bottom of the stairs, off the kitchen. She went to it because it was the nearest thing to look at. The deadbolt was thrown. The chain was hanging straight down against the frame.

She hooked it back into the runner. It took two tries because the plate had been painted over years ago and the chain caught on the lip.

"You're all right."

Elliot was in the kitchen doorway in a T-shirt and the shorts he slept in, not startled, one hand on the frame.

"How long have I been down here."

"Not long. Ten minutes maybe." He came in and filled a glass at the tap and gave it to her, and she drank it because he'd given it to her. "You were talking. Not to me, you were sort of doing your list, the one you do. Bicarb and something. I didn't want to grab you, they say not to, I looked it up ages ago. So I put the light on and waited."

"Was I on the stairs the whole time."

"You were in the hall and then you went up two and stopped." He shrugged with one shoulder. "I've seen you do it before, love. Not for a while. It's not a thing."

"The chain was off."

He looked at the door and then back at her, and there was a half second in it.

"Was it. I might have done that." He said it easily. "I came down for water about one and I stood outside for a minute, I do that, I don't know why. It's a habit. I probably didn't put it back."

"You went outside at one in the morning."

"Two minutes. It's the only time it's quiet." He put the glass in the sink. "I'll stop doing it if it bothers you."

"It doesn't bother me." It did bother her, faintly, the way a picture hung slightly wrong bothers you, and she couldn't have said which part. "I just want to know which things are mine."

"That one's mine." He said it kindly. "Come up."

She went to June's room first. The door was open the width of a hand, and the nightlight was doing its slow rotation across the ceiling, fish, fish, whale, fish. June was on her front with one arm off the edge of the bed and her hair stuck to her cheek. Nadia stood in the doorway and did not go in, because going in wakes them, and she watched her daughter's back rise and fall eight times before she stepped away.

In the bedroom Elliot got in and turned toward the wall and was asleep in about ninety seconds, which he had always been able to do and which she had never once resented until that year. She had told him early on that it seemed like evidence of a clear conscience, and he'd laughed and said it wasn't virtue, it was genetics, his father had been the same, could sleep through anything including, once, a small kitchen fire two rooms away.

She lay on her back.

The furnace came on and ran and stopped. A car went along the top of the street and its lights came round the ceiling and left. She thought about the runner, and how long wool takes to lose the warmth of two feet, and she could not make it come out at ten minutes.

At half four she gave up and went down and did something she was not going to tell anyone about, which was that she walked the ground floor. Kitchen, front room, the little room with the boxes.

The back door was bolted. The front door was deadlocked and had the mail cage on it that June had once got a finger stuck in. She stood in the front room in the dark and looked out at the drive and the street and the Prewitts' hedge, and there was nothing out there but the streetlight and a wheelie bin somebody had left out from last week.

Then she felt ridiculous and went and put the kettle on.

It had happened before. Not often, and not for a long time, and Helen had said years ago that it was a thing bodies did, and that people who slept badly did it more. She was sleeping badly. Her shoulder woke her most nights and she'd take something at two and drift, and the drifting was where it lived.

She wrote it down anyway, in the back of the pad she kept beside the kettle for shopping. Tues 21st, up at 3:40 approx. Hall. E says talking.

Then she looked at it for a while. She scratched through it hard enough to go into the page below and wrote the shopping over the top of it. Milk, coffee, the yoghurt June would eat, cat food for Wardeh's.

June came down at ten to seven, early for her, dragging the fleece blanket.

"You're up before the birds," Nadia said.

"There's no birds. It's winter." She got onto the chair by pulling herself up on the table, which she had been told about. "Why is the light on in the hall?"

Nadia looked down the hall. It was still burning, yellow and pointless in the gray coming through the door glass.

"Because I put it on in the night."

"How come."

"I came down for a drink."

June considered this and accepted it and asked for the yoghurt, and ate it very slowly, and told a long story about Aviva's snail which had either escaped or been released depending on whose account you took. Her hair was flat on one side. She looked, in the good light, entirely fine.

"Plaits or bunches?"

"Plaits. One plait." June turned around on the chair and presented the back of her head, and Nadia worked the brush through from the ends up, holding the hair above each stroke so nothing pulled.

It was the one job June would not let her father do. He'd tried, across two mornings in the autumn, and produced something June had worn as far as the door and no further, and it had been agreed by everyone, formally, at the level of household law, that hair was Mommy's.

"Aviva has clips with strawberries on."

"Does she."

"You can see them from across the whole carpet." June sat through the parting with her chin lifted, a professional being attended to. "I don't want strawberry ones."

"What would you want, then?"

"Cherries," June said, as though it were obvious, and Nadia divided the hair into three and worked down it, over, over, over, and June's head moved with each crossing, loose and trusting, the whole warm weight of it rocking under her hands, and for four minutes the kitchen held nothing else.

She tied it off with the red elastic from the drawer. June reached back, checked the work with two fingers, and delivered her verdict, which was nothing, which was approval.

Wardeh rang at half seven for the third time that week.

Wardeh: are you eating

Wardeh: dont answer that. is she better

Nadia called her instead, because texting with Wardeh took an hour and a phone call took four minutes.

"She's fine. She's eating a yoghurt."

"Good. And you."

"Tired."

"Mm." Down the line Nadia could hear the radio and the tap running, her aunt doing three things. "Your mother was tired that whole winter and none of us said one word about it."

"Wardeh."

"I'm only saying. There's tired and there's tired. Are you taking everything."

"Every day. I've got bloods in March."

"Good girl." A pause, and the tap went off. "That woman coming again this week? The adoption one?"

"Not till the fourth."

"You know what I think."

"I know what you think."

"I think you have a beautiful girl and a good husband and you're thirty-eight, and there's a reason God stops at some point," Wardeh said comfortably, "but nobody has ever listened to me, so."

After she hung up, Nadia stood with the phone in her hand and looked at the hall. From where she stood she could see the side door and the chain hanging in its runner where she'd put it back, and the light coming gray through the glass, and June's boots by the mat with the salt drying on them in a tideline.

She reached over and turned the hall light off.

At work there was a message waiting from Basia Kowalczyk, whose father Henryk was on the palliative list on the fourth floor, asking, again, whether his dose had changed. It hadn't, Nadia told her, reading it off the chart. He'd been on the same dose since March.

"He's not right," Basia said. "He wasn't right yesterday either. He didn't know me for a minute, and my dad's never not known me."

"I'll flag it for the doctor to look at when they round."

"You said that on Tuesday."

She had said that on Tuesday, and made a note of it, and the note sat in a system that nobody but her appeared to have read since.

She had a discharge to check as well, a woman of fifty-one going home with nine medications and a husband who had written all nine on a piece of paper in the wrong order. Nadia sat with him in the little room off the ward and rebuilt the list. Morning ones down one side. Night ones down the other. The one that had to be four hours clear of the calcium got a box around it and a line to the margin, and she made him read the whole thing back to her.

"You're the first person who's written it down like a timetable," he said.

"That's because it is one."

He folded it into his inside pocket instead of the fridge, which everybody did, and she let him.

At four she made an error.

It was not a dispensing error. She had gone into the wrong patient's record to check an allergy, seen the name at the top, come out, and gone into the right one, and the whole thing had taken about nine seconds and touched nothing. But there was a log, and the log had her code on it, and there was a form for that.

She filled it in herself before anybody asked her to. Wrong record opened in error, no data amended, no intervention arising. Time. Signature.

Yolanda watched her do it over the top of a screen.

"You know they only look at those if something happened."

"Something happened. I opened it."

"Nothing happened."

"Then it'll take them nine seconds to read." Nadia put it in the tray for the clinical governance folder. "It's better it's written down by me than found by somebody else."