Lucy and the Sheikh(62)
They greeted each other formally and then Aakifah drew up a couple of chairs beside the woman.
“This is Hala. Her husband is—”
“She has a husband at her age?” Lucy interrupted. “She can’t be more than, what? Seventeen?”
Aakifah shrugged. “It’s not unusual in our culture. Her husband is overseas earning money and she’s living with his family but they don’t understand why she cries all the time.”
Lucy’s hesitation was only brief. “Tell her that I cried all the time.” She sucked in a difficult breath. “When I had my baby.”
Aakifah raised her eyebrows in surprise but didn’t say anything other than translate Lucy’s words.
The young woman turned her large, stunned eyes to Lucy and spoke rapidly.
“She wants to know if your husband’s family helped you.”
Lucy’s mind flew back to the teenage boy whom she barely knew and whose family she had certainly never met. She’d wanted love and, it turned out, the boy had just wanted sex. He’d moved on to someone else by the time she’d realized she was pregnant.
“No. They didn’t.”
“She says that that is sad and wants to know who helped you with your birth if your family didn’t.”
“Tell her, I was in hospital. I was very young—younger than her—but I had my sister with me.”
Aakifah opened her mouth to translate Hala’s reply but shook her head instead, her eyes full of unspoken sympathy for Lucy.
Lucy placed her hand on Aakifah. “It’s OK. Tell me what she says.”
“She wants to know what color eyes your baby had. Were they green like yours?”
Lucy swallowed back the pain and closed her eyes as if in thought. “Umm, let me see.” But she could only visualize her baby with eyes either closed in sleep, or scrunched up as he screamed. And he’d been crying hard when she’d seen him the last time. She’d just left him in the bassinet, screaming, and she’d walked away and hidden in a remote corner of the hospital. She hadn’t been found for hours. She gasped in a raw breath. “They were blue.”
“And now? She wants to know if they’re still blue.”
If the first question had pierced her, this one probed deep within the wound. “Yes, still blue.” Sometimes a lie was better than the truth. Harder for her, but easier for the young woman.
“She wants to know whether you hated your baby.”
Lucy swallowed hard. “I…” It was too hard. But the young woman’s eyes continued to bore into her with a desperation she recognized. “Hate is one word for it. I was scared. I didn’t want it. And I hated myself as much as the baby.”
Aakifah translated, her brows knit in confusion, her innate courtesy refusing to allow her to question Lucy herself.
“She wants to know how long the hate lasted.”
Lucy bit her lip. “Not long. Tell her she has to take each day as it comes, accept help, look after herself and she’ll soon find she looks on the baby with love. And that that love will only deepen.” Lucy rose and curled her hand around the baby’s rounded cheek before dropping her hand to the woman’s arm. “And tell her she’s not alone. Many, many women suffer like her with these feelings after birth and she will recover.”
Lucy watched relief fill the women’s face.
Aakifah turned to Lucy. “She says she thought she was alone in these feelings.” Lucy shook her head and the young woman smiled. “She says to thank you for your words.”
“She’s welcome.” Lucy stood up. “I need to go now. There are things…” She shook her head helplessly. The truth was that she’d had to dig deep into the hurt she carried around with her and her own grief now tore at her heart, demanding attention. She had to go before she broke down. “I think I need some air.”
They walked in silence for a few moments until they reached a door out into a leafy courtyard. Aakifah turned to Lucy. “Is it true? All that you said?”
“Sort of. I stopped hating the baby all right, but it was too late for me. I never stopped hating myself.”
“Then I think it’s about time you stopped, isn’t it?”
Was it? Thinking back to the young, terrified woman, she suddenly saw herself, sitting there, terrified and hurting. The girl wasn’t guilty of anything except honesty, just as she hadn’t been guilty of anything. Was it too late to start really living?
Lucy hesitated in the shadows and her heart went out to Razeen, who stood, unmoving, on the stone balcony. His hands were thrust in his pockets, weariness was evident in the tension of his shoulders, as he gazed blankly out to the violet sky, where the white vapor trail of the plane Lucy should have been on, could still be seen.