What's Yours Is Mine by Tess Stimson Page A

wants to fall pregnant. She should take a leaf out of Susannah’sbook and try to relax more. I know how proud David is of the fact that she takes after him, but a career isn’t everything. I managed fine without one.
    Tom puts a supportive hand on his wife’s shoulder. To look at them now, they seem like the perfect couple; though I’ve never been quite so sure. They have the perfect life, which isn’t quite the same thing.
    But still: Grace is flanked, supported, by her husband and her father. And Susannah has no one.
    WE ONLY CONCEIVED Susannah because David, a lonely only child, wanted Grace to have someone to play with. Even before she was born, her existence was secondary to her sister’s.
    Unlike my first pregnancy, I had a very difficult time when I was expecting Susannah. They’d withdrawn the drug that’d given me Grace by then, and so I worried constantly that I’d lose the baby. I was tired all the time, had appalling morning sickness, couldn’t sleep, and my blood pressure fluctuated wildly. Grace had been born at home with just a midwife in attendance, but clearly that was never going to be possible with Susannah.
    In the event, my water broke five weeks early. After fourteen painful hours of labor, Susannah went into fetal distress, and had to be delivered by forceps. I bled very badly. They told me then there would be no more children. No son to carry on the family name.
    Right from the start, David didn’t bond with the newbaby the way he had with Grace. He rarely picked her up if she was crying, and insisted she sleep in her own bed rather than share ours. The only time he photographed her was when Grace was holding her. My mother said it was only to be expected, that all men found small babies boring; but I remembered how besotted he’d been with Grace when she was born, and it hadn’t just been the novelty of new fatherhood. He was
devoted
. Overly so, my mother said. He got up to see to Grace in the night, he soothed her when she was teething and rubbed her back when she had colic. He even took her into work for father-daughter day when she was all of nine months old.
    Grace, however, was thrilled with the new arrival; a month shy of her third birthday when Susannah was born, she was old enough to take her new duties as big sister very seriously. She loved helping me bathe or feed her, carefully spooning apple puree into Susannah’s gummy smile, her own mouth opening and closing in the unconscious mimicry of mothers the world over.
    But as David’s indifference coalesced into cool detachment, Grace picked up on it, and, naturally, aligned herself with her father. She still loved her sister, but the feeling was tempered with a faint sense of disapproval; even before there was anything to disapprove of. I’ve found it very hard to forgive David for that.
    I had hoped the divide that had opened up in my family, with David and Grace on one side, and Susannah and me on the other, would eventually heal of its own accord.But then, when Susannah was four, she suddenly got sick, and I realized things were never going to change.
    DAVID IS LOOKING straight at me; or would be, if he could see me. His eyes are dry, but I can tell from the tightness around his mouth that it’s an effort. David cries often, in secret, something his daughters would never guess; but I can’t remember the last time he cried in public. His mother’s funeral, perhaps.
    He squeezes Grace’s shoulders, and, watching him, I exclaim with frustration. “Why is it always Grace?” I demand, knowing he can’t hear me, as tears sting my eyes. “What has Susannah done that makes her so unlovable to her own father? She’s your daughter, too! Why can’t you let the past go?”
    His head turns sharply. I don’t know if it was coincidence, or if, somehow, I’m reaching him.
    The doctor coughs for our attention, and the moment is lost.