The Crane Wife(44)
Author: Patrick Ness

She knelt there for a chilly second, waiting to see if there was more to come. She hadn’t drunk anything this evening or eaten anything dodgy. She still felt slightly feverish, true, but there’d not been any nausea over the week and–

She stopped.

Then she forced herself to complete the thought.

And she’d used a condom with Henri.

(Hadn’t she?)

Yes.

(Yes?)

She sat back. Yes, of course she had, there’s no way they’d risk a thing like that, it was automatic. Wasn’t it?

When was her last period? It had always been an irregular guest, but surely she’d–

‘Okay, now you’re just freaking yourself out,’ she whispered into the moonlit darkness. She couldn’t quite remember her cycle this late at night and they had used a condom. Of course they had. This was just a tummy thing. That was all.

She waited to see if she needed to vomit again, but didn’t and got up. The violent opening of her mouth had made her cold sore ache, so after she swished some mouthwash to get rid of the taste, she reached for the anti-viral cream.

That’s when the sound came, so unexpected and so quickly over it was like being doused with ice water.

She froze.

There was only silence now, and she wondered if she’d imagined it. And then got annoyed with herself because who ever imagined a sound? It was one of those idiotic things people said in movies when they were about to be killed by a bear-trap-carrying torturer.

No, she had heard something, something loud, outside the building.

But what?

An animal’s call? She looked out the window framing the beautiful moon, a window that unfortunately overlooked a less beautiful car park and too-busy street beyond. She was on the fourth floor, and even with the silence of a city at 3.47 in the morning, it seemed quite a distance over which to hear a fox, which it hadn’t really sounded like anyway. Foxes were like silent film stars about to be ruined by the advent of sound, beautiful but with the most affronting croak.

She put her face close enough to the glass to catch the steam of her breath. There was nothing out there, just the usual grazing cars in the car park, lit by a single yellowish streetlight. Nothing stirred in the road beyond either, not even the hourly nightbus that took her three months to learn to sleep through. She leaned over the bath to look out the other window, which really only showed another corner of the same car park and the roof of a building that had held a series of fleeting, dodgy-sounding businesses.

Nothing. All she could hear was her own breathing and the ticking of the radiator.

What could it have been? It had felt oddly sorrowful, like a cry of mourning or heartbreak. Or perhaps a cry for a lover who would never answer–

‘Oh, please,’ she said to herself, shivering. ‘It was a fox. Not an operetta.’

Nothing continued to happen, so she gave up and left the bathroom, pausing only when she felt her stomach rumble again, queasily poking at her like a separate person down there–

No! Not like a separate person. Not anything remotely like that whatsoever. Just queasiness. That’s it, that’s all, queasiness. Aside from the whole having-sex-with-his-ex-wife-while-his-girlfriend-was-tending-to-her-mother thing, which, granted, wasn’t exactly a plus for him, Henri was a responsible and considerate man. He wouldn’t have dreamt of risking something like that. Besides, she’d seen him put it on.

Had she?

‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered.

She tried to picture it happening, tried to see him doing it that night on her sofa, and yes, there he was in her mind’s eye, his hand rolling it down over himself as she unhooked her bra. But the whole episode had been so quick, so unhinged, that had she really seen it or had he just been stroking himself in the way that men seemed such prisoners to when they had their erections out in the open? And where would he have got a condom anyway? She didn’t have any in the flat and why would he be carrying one if he’d been with Claudine for the past couple of years–

‘Stop it,’ she said to herself firmly. ‘Just stop.’

Annoyingly, she couldn’t even call him to clear things up because they’d been quarrelling as well. Over JP, naturally. Henri wanted him to come to Montpellier for two whole weeks so he could be ‘properly introduced to France’.

‘No way,’ Amanda had said.

‘You cannot just say no way, Amanda,’ he said. ‘That cannot be how this conversation begins.’

‘He’s four. He gets homesick if we’re gone for a long afternoon. When he’s older–’

‘When he’s older, I will already be a stranger. I am a stranger now–’

‘No, you’re not. I can’t get him to shut up about you– ’

‘You see, you are trying to shut him up about me!’

‘Henri,’ she’d growled in frustration. ‘He is too young for a two-week trip–’

‘One week, then.’

‘He’s too young for a one–’

‘This is about me. You must admit this at least, Amanda. You are angry with me over what happened–’

Then she said, somewhat ironically given the current circumstance, ‘Oh, God, why are men so endlessly stupid about sex?’

They’d then spent a few minutes swearing at each other in French before hanging up with the issue of JP’s visit completely decided on her part and ‘still to be discussed’ on his.

She stopped by JP’s room now and looked in on her son. Still far too small for his new big-kid bed, he was sprawled as much as he could across a Wriggle duvet and even then he barely occupied more than a tiny corner of it. She went in and re-covered him.

‘Ce sont mes sandales,’ he mumbled, without opening his eyes. ‘Ne pas les prendre.’

‘I won’t, booboo,’ she said, kissing him on his sweaty little forehead, avoiding her cold sore. ‘I promise.’

He nestled back into his Wriggle pillow and was soon deep asleep once more. He was so beautiful there in the moonlight, Amanda found herself near tears again.

‘For God’s sake,’ she whispered.

At least being pregnant would explain all this weird emotional stuff lately. The jealousy of her father over Kumiko. The inexplicable yet tremendously upsetting feeling that somehow Kumiko was being taken away from her. It might even explain the intoxicating memory of Kumiko feeding her the rice pudding, the feel of Kumiko’s fingertips in her mouth, a connection utterly unexpected, utterly – as far as Amanda was concerned – taboo and surprising, but a connection that pulled at her very guts, so much so she occasionally put her own fingertips in her mouth to replicate it.