He kissed her and then put a hand on top of Beth’s black curls. Both of them smiled at Rachel, with their matching dimples.
“It was,” he said. “I don’t know what happened, but she fought it off. Or it was something else. Who knows? She fussed a bit. We walked around the house, and I gave her some medicine. And then she settled and fell asleep on me. I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to be alert around her, so I just sat right here, drinking coffee and listening to the radio, with Beth sleeping on my shoulder until the sun came up. There was a World Service program about the anniversary of the plane crash. I could tell you anything you wanted to know about that. Apart from what really happened, I guess.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to know anything the government has to say about anything. Thanks. Do you think my milk made her better?”
Al stroked Beth’s hair again. “Probably.”
Rachel had, until last night, attributed the fact that Beth hadn’t got sick to the fact that she was breastfeeding her. And now, if Beth had been attacked by the virus, she had overcome it instantly. Rachel had peered back into the abyss, then woken up and found it wasn’t an abyss at all. It was just a pothole, and it was already filled in.
Poor Al had to go to work, and she walked to the door with him, as she did sometimes, and waited while he wheeled his bike out of the hallway. It was cold outside. Icy. The blast came into the house, and she knew it would linger because they couldn’t afford to use the heating very often. However, that didn’t matter because Beth and Billy were well. They were all well. The things that had bothered her before the epidemic were negligible trivia, because she was looking at them differently.
“You stayed up all night,” she said. “And now you’re going to work. Will you be OK?”
Al reached out and hugged her, and she pressed herself into his chest, holding him as tightly as he held her.
“Of course I will,” he said into her hair.
Al was her world. She had never expected to meet someone new when she was forty-one, and yet here he was, living with her, hugging her tightly to him, father of her baby, stepfather to her older children. They made an unusual couple, she white and forty-three, he black and thirty-five; she a divorced and stressed mother, he an eligible bachelor when they met. Yet it worked. It actually worked. Everything about it worked. She adored him, and somehow he loved her, too, and their baby was perfect, and she was healthy.
* * *
• • •
Later that morning, Rachel was sitting on the floor with Beth, admiring the baby’s effortless good health. They were pushing toy cars around, Rachel saying, “Brmm-brmm,” and Beth giggling and blowing raspberries. Eight months, Rachel thought, was a wonderful age to be.
“Here are Mummy and Beth,” said Billy, and Rachel stifled a scream. He was right there, standing in the kitchen doorway. Billy, who still needed her to support him to the bathroom, who had not walked more than a step on his own for weeks, had come downstairs.
“Billy!” she said.
“Delfy said I must come down.”
Rachel looked up. He was thin and wobbly, but he was there, upright, in his pajamas. He had walked all the way down the stairs alone. She had not expected him to get out of bed for another four days. That was what it said online. Now she would be able to tear that plastic right down. It could be properly over.
She was on her feet in a second, and a moment after that, he was in her arms, warm and sleepy and, at last, smelling more of little boy than of illness. Beth clapped her hands, delighted at the sight of him. If she could, she would have been yelling his name.
“You got up!” Rachel said when she could. “How did you even do that?”
“I did get up because Delfy said. I just told you.”
“Oh, my darling. That’s amazing. Clever Delfy! How do you feel? You made it all the way down the stairs on your own. You should be resting.”
“Resting is boring, though, Mum.”
Beth shouted and waved both arms. Billy wriggled off Rachel’s lap and sat carefully next to her.
“Red car, Beth,” he said, picking one up and holding it out to her with a trembling hand. He was making an enormous effort. Rachel could see what hard work this was for him.
The kitchen was tatty, the house rented and neglected by the landlord. The cold found its way around the edges of the windows. The oven worked at twenty degrees cooler than it said it did and often didn’t work at all. Everything needed replacing, and they couldn’t afford to do any of it. Most of their technology was thirty years out of date. Rachel looked at the children playing together and wondered what their future would hold.
Beth had stayed with Rachel and Billy throughout the illness. They had wondered whether to send her away to live with Rachel’s mother, but Rachel couldn’t do it, and not just because her mother would probably have baptized her into her weird church. She wanted to carry on feeding Beth and decided that she would trust in the immunities that the milk gave her. Until last night’s scare, it had worked, and she supposed that it was probably her own breaching of the sterile zone, on the night when Billy hadn’t died, that had brought the virus to Beth. Well, no harm seemed to have been done. They were lucky.
And now that Billy had come downstairs, the quarantine was over. Those were the rules. Nina could come home, too. Rachel looked for a phone. She needed to let her know right away.
* * *
• • •
At four o’clock the front door opened, and Nina said: “Hey! I’m back!”
Rachel was standing at the stove, cooking. She turned to Nina and pushed her long hair back from her face (her hair was half gray now, she had noticed, and she didn’t care) and said, fake casual: “Oh, hi! How was school?”
They laughed as Rachel opened her arms and Nina flew into them. Rachel held her tightly. She buried her face in her daughter’s hair and smelled the Nina smell mixed with Henry’s house, Henry’s shampoo, Henry’s washing powder. She pulled Nina’s skinny body close and savored everything about her darling child. They hadn’t seen each other properly over the past six weeks (Rachel had only half-noticed her on the night when Billy didn’t die), just talking on the phone while looking at each other through the front window, Nina standing outside the house, both of them pressing their hands to the glass. They had texted every day. But still, apart from that one night, Nina had been absent, outside the cordon.
And now here she was. She was back, and the nightmare receded a little further.
“Are you hungry?” said Rachel.
Nina threw her schoolbag down in the corner. “Starving,” she said, and she picked up Beth. “Bethie Bethie Bethie. Look how you’ve grown! Oh, I like what you’ve done with the paintings.”