‘Grandpa will be better before we know it. Right, we’d better get going or all the good seats will be gone.’
Hailey pushes her glasses up her nose and nods at Ed. Her arms link behind my neck and she gives me a nose-to-nose kiss. ‘Bye, Mummy.’
‘Bye, pudding.’ I kiss her on the head.
Oscar is still in his Batman pose by the door. ‘I’m Batman,’ he reiterates, then runs from the room.
‘Say bye to Mummy!’ Ed shouts after him.
‘Bye!’ His voice chases after him, Hailey following. She gives me a concerned smile and leaves the room. I stand and tuck my hands into my back pockets. Ed rubs the tops of my arms, leaning in and touching his forehead against mine.
‘I love you.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow after I drop the kids off. The doctor’s appointment is at ten.’ He pulls me towards his chest, pushes a kiss onto my scalp, and leaves the room.
When I wake, I’m disorientated. Red coat, red boots, emerald ring and then, this time, Hailey’s face: eyes wide, skin pale.
I should have died.
The words inside are deeper. I close my eyes and picture the capital ‘I’: it looks more determined than yesterday, more elaborately looped. The sentence is becoming stronger . . . and more beautiful.
I sit up and pull my phone towards me. Outside, the clouds have covered the sun and rain has begun to tap against the window. There are messages from Ed, photos on WhatsApp of him and the kids in the cinema and another of him holding a burnt piece of toast with a confused look on his face. I smile and reply that I miss him.
My parents are in the kitchen. Dad is stirring instant gravy in a glass jug and Mum is setting the table.
‘Pie and chips OK, love?’ Mum asks.
‘I’m not really hungry, I think I might—’
‘Sit down, Jennifer.’ As usual, Dad’s voice is insistent but somehow not confrontational, and I do as he says.
I wait until the dinner is plated before I try to make small talk. ‘They say the weather is taking a turn for the worse.’ I concentrate on chasing the gravy around the plate with a chip.
‘We don’t want to talk about the weather,’ Mum says calmly. ‘We want to talk about you. Now—’
Dad reaches for the salt, which Mum takes from him with a shake of her head; he sighs in response.
‘Start from the beginning. When did you first start seeing Kerry?’
I push my plate away and stare at the pattern beneath the track I have made in the gravy. It’s blue and depicts a horse and carriage and a woman wearing a bonnet. ‘I don’t know. At first I thought they were just memories, you know? But then somewhere along the line they stopped being memories and started being . . . Kerry. When she first died, I kept talking to her, I couldn’t see her then, but I just wanted to know she was . . . OK. Even though she is dead. Crazy, right?’
‘No, love. We’ve all done that. I asked her to move the curtain.’ Mum cuts into her pastry. ‘That’s what you do when you’re grieving.’
‘Did she?’ I ask. My eyes are focused on the woman in the bonnet but I raise my eyes in time to see the look that passes between them.
‘No.’
‘I see her move things.’ I look up to where Kerry is stealing a chip from my plate and dipping it into the gravy. I watch as the gravy swirls around it; I watch as a drip falls from the end as it disappears into her mouth with a grin.
I blink.
Kerry has gone and a skin has formed inside the gravy boat. Mum reaches her hand towards mine and holds it tightly.
‘What is she doing?’ Mum’s face is full of hope, for a snippet of ‘the afterlife’.
‘Dipping a chip into the gravy boat.’
Mum grins but Dad’s cutlery clatters beside the plate. ‘There is nothing to smile about, Judith, what Jen is seeing is a hallucination, she is—’
‘But what if Jen isn’t sick? What if it really is her? We had the girls baptised, we—’
‘Enough.’ His tone is serious.
‘It’s not her, Mum.’
‘How do you know? How do you know that she hasn’t come back, that she doesn’t want to, you know, move on?’
‘Because she was vegetarian and would never have dipped her chip into the gravy. She never saw half of the movies that I hear her quoting from. Because she would never have come back and have me talking to thin air and be the cause of me losing my family.’
I push back my chair and scrape the food into the bin and go back to bed.
Ed’s fingers land on top of mine and I realise they are tapping nervously on the tops of my thighs. Dr Faulkner leans back, tips her head to one side and pushes her large, fashionable glasses further up her nose.
‘What I think we ought not to do is jump to conclusions. Mr Jones, I’ve no doubt that you’ve been Googling?’ She smiles kindly and Ed nods guiltily. ‘The internet is an incredible thing, but it can make hypochondriacs out of us all. I’m guessing the internet threw up some pretty scary diagnoses?’ Ed nods.
‘He thinks I’m schizophrenic,’ I clarify as she gets up and fetches her water bottle, taking a few sips as she sits back down.
‘I don’t, I’m just saying that is one of the things it could be.’
‘Is there any family history of schizophrenia? Mrs Jones?’
‘Jen is adopted,’ Ed interrupts.
‘I see.’ She swivels on her seat and taps this information into her computer. ‘Have you ever had any hallucinations like this before your sister died?’ She spins the seat back to face us.
I shake my head.
‘Can you see your sister now?’
My eyes flick over to Kerry, who is sitting on the examination table, raising her hand like she’s in school and saying ‘Here’. I nod.
‘Do you believe your sister is actually there?’
I clear my throat. ‘No. I mean . . . I know she’s not actually here, but I also know that I can see her, if that makes sense?’
‘How do you know she’s not really there?’
‘Because the top she is wearing is hanging up in my wardrobe at home. She shrank it and gave it to me over a year ago.’
‘Oh yeah!’ Kerry pulls at the black sleeves.
‘People with schizophrenia are usually convinced that what they can see is actually there. I’m not saying that it isn’t the case here, but . . . I think it is probable that your hallucinations are being caused by something else. Grief is a powerful emotion, Jennifer . . . tell me about how your sister died?’
‘She was hit by a car . . . saving me. It should have been me, I should be the one who is dead. It was my fault.’
Her head tilts to the side; her sympathy for me is palpable.
‘Jennifer, deep grief can make the most rational of people become irrational and guilt . . .’ her head nods towards me, ‘guilt can eat you alive if you let it.’ She returns her attention to Ed. ‘Now before we can go any further with a diagnosis, we need to rule out any medical reasons for your wife’s hallucinations.
‘Are you taking any drugs?’
Kerry snorts. Ed does the same. ‘As if!’ Kerry states.
‘What’s funny?’ the doctor asks.