The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  “Right, good job there, Frank. That’s fine.” Daisy extends her hand to collect the sponge, and my stomach sinks with the realization that the moment is over. I wonder if Maggie recognized my hands.

  “So, what is she like, then?” Daisy asks as she empties the basin. “Our Maggie?”

  God, what a question. I have no idea where to start. How do you go about explaining someone who is everything to you, so much a part of you that you haven’t needed the words to describe them for four decades?

  “What did she do?” Daisy prompts gently, upturning the bowl on the trolley to drain.

  “She was a nurse . . . like you. Well, not quite like you. She worked in a GP’s surgery. Minor illnesses, vaccinations, that sort of thing. She loved it. She really did. She was so good with people, not like me . . .”

  I look up and see a glimmer of a smile dancing at the corner of Daisy’s lips.

  “She was fun, wild, even. Again, not like me. Chalk and cheese, huh?”

  “They often are—the best couples.”

  Is that how Daisy sees us? It was never a competition for me. With Maggie, I knew I had already won. My eyes zone out, flashing through stills of our life together like slides under a microscope, blurry and then getting brighter and sharper until the image drops altogether.

  “How long have you been together then?”

  “Forty years.”

  “Wow.” Daisy’s eyes widen, and I notice the tendrils of red at each corner. I have an overwhelming desire to tell her to get to bed. She and Eleanor might even be the same age. “And you spent all of that together?”

  I nod. “There was the odd conference, a month here or there when I was away, but otherwise . . .”

  “Well then, I better let you get on.” Daisy smiles. I catch a flash of her top teeth, one incisor slightly overlapping the other. “Keep it up, Frank.”

  There is a rattle as Daisy begins to nudge her trolley toward the door.

  “I didn’t realize there was that much bathing to be done.”

  “You know what I mean, Frank. I don’t know if you were much of a talker before, but now is the time. You have to use it. I’m sure you have plenty things Maggie wants to hear about from all those years together.”

  The door clicks shut, and we are alone again with that same sense of fear and relief that makes my bowels turn.

  “So where were we then, Mags?” I reach for her hand, using my thumb to wipe away a drop of water that has come to rest in the crevasse between her index and middle fingers. “Eleanor arrived. She changed everything, in ways I didn’t even know were possible . . .”

  It wasn’t until I had her in my arms that I really understood it—why I had been so scared. I couldn’t admit it before then, not even to myself. I had spent your pregnancy with everything—the excitement, the joy, the anticipation—undercut by a fear that met me the minute I woke up and occupied me until the second I went to bed. I loved you so fiercely that I didn’t know if there was space left in my heart for someone else. I was a house rammed to the rafters and straining under the weight of everything I felt for you, terrified that there was no room at the inn for another. Until Eleanor. A whole new annex, without her saying or doing a thing.

  Once we had Eleanor home, I really came into my own in the midnight shifts, the rest of the world cloaked in darkness, aside from the glow of the owl-shaped nightlight in the corner of Eleanor’s room. I would scoop her up and out of her cot and into my study at the back of the flat where we could do a little beginners stargazing. We covered Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper—Eleanor liked that one; it always generated a chuckle or a second or two of awed silence.

  As she grew bigger, together we would take her outside in the evenings in that mad papoose my sister sent over, Eleanor’s body strapped to yours and her head bobbing against your chest as we made our way to Port Meadow. We must have spent twenty, thirty minutes pointing out the ponies, the bike lights flashing as they laced through the bridge railings. Nothing but the odd whine at the injustice of the fresh air. Then, with great ceremony, she would jab her chubby digits up at the first sight of the stars. It made my heart swell with pride. She was smart, yes, but more than that she was so curious, so perceptive. There was so much of you in her, Mags, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  Eventually, we’d reach the kissing gate at the edge of the field. By this stage, with Eleanor asleep, it was almost like the old days, me stopping to kiss you and your wellies squeaking with the effort as you got up onto your tiptoes. Only now there was an additional happiness dangling between us. Before we shut the gate, we would take it in turns to kiss the top of Eleanor’s head, at the spot where the fragile, fiery tufts of red hair peeped out from beneath her hat. With Eleanor there, happy and healthy, we had our own third dimension. Everything felt rounded, whole. I could breathe out fully again.

  Well, nearly fully. I could see how it took its toll on you, motherhood. In the early days at least. I had worried about this during the pregnancy, in the exhilaration just after. It wasn’t a reflection on you as a mother, not at all, it was just that I knew you, Mags. I’d seen the soaring highs, but for you they meant nothing without the unshakable sense that we were perpetually teetering on the brink of a fall. There were times when she wouldn’t stop crying and I could feel the panic radiating off you. What are we doing wrong? Is it something serious? All the heartache and there we were, threatened with falling at the final logistical hurdle of how you actually went about raising a child. You wouldn’t dare move until she was calm again, even if that took six, seven, eight hours.

  I managed to bring Edie in, and with her assistance, the darkness did lift. With something approaching your usual aplomb, you announced your decision to put your nursing on hold until Eleanor started school. It was nine months or so after she was born, not long after I’d taken that new job at the university. Although the pay was better, this would mean things were still tight. I was totaling everything up in my head, all the beads whirring on my mental abacus, while you talked nineteen to the dozen about how you didn’t want to “miss any time with her.” I did wonder if this was you compensating for the months when you had been struggling? Either way, I decided it was best not to ask. There was such excitement in your voice that I ended up emphatically agreeing before I had any idea if the sums worked out.

  Luckily, we made it add up. I still loved my work: that thrill of the unknown, the potential breakthrough, the odd glimmer of recognition. But it was the evenings and the weekends that I lived for. In those first few years, Eleanor was changing day by day. It was like a flip-book, all the individual images so familiar, but run them together and suddenly the passage of time floored me. I wanted to catch hold of as much as I could.

  There was nothing better than coming home to you both. Eleanor would be propped on your hip, or once she was too big for that, on the kitchen counter, pajamas on and her head leaning against your chest. You would be giddy with the show you had lined up for me—some rock Eleanor had painted and repurposed as a paperweight or a collage still gummy with glue. Sometimes I would barely have the chance to get my coat off before I was chased up the stairs and onto Eleanor’s bed, where she would be sitting, still warm from the bath, awaiting a bedtime story.

  Your voices just didn’t cut it, I’m afraid, Mags, so you were relegated to the rocking chair, with whichever members of the furry menagerie had been evicted from the bed to make room for me on your lap. I was never very good at saying no, which meant we did some stories two or three times before Ellie began to doze off at my side. If I’d really delivered a lackluster performance, you would drift off as well and I would be met with the sight of two sleeping beauties when I returned the book to its shelf. I could never work out how I had got so lucky.

  There was a real structure to those evenings. We could have been the example in a parenting-book exercise, our routine polished to perfection. It wasn’t so much us driving that, though, as Eleanor. She was so sensitive to change. Even the
slightest difference would set her tiny internal barometer plummeting. If I was so much as ten minutes late, she’d be peering at the window, her face blotchy and contorted with the distress. We had to keep to the same stories, to my side of the bed. At the time, I assumed that was all children. I didn’t have much experience to go on.

  Looking back now, I wonder if that was the first sign that maybe she wasn’t as resilient as she should have been. But then it was such a small issue in the grand, happy scale of our family that we could brush it off, at least until she started school. She was going to be the youngest in her class, a given for an August baby. Still, when I saw Eleanor coming down the stairs in her uniform, just four years old, her socks pulled right up, the skin above the elastic still chubby and dimpled, she looked so small that I couldn’t believe she was ready for it. I snapped a few photos with the camera, all the while wishing that the shutter button pressed pause and that we could keep her like that forever. Most days, I still do.

  I don’t think either of us would call that first morning a success. She was sandwiched between us, a hand each, and she wouldn’t let go. Such a viselike grip for such a tiny hand! Trying to leave was a trauma—for Eleanor, for us both. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the sound of her crying, Mags, those great big, snotty sobs that broke us in two. “Don’t leave me,” she said, over and over, her voice hoarse from the tears. The teacher managed to prize her away, but that was all I heard for the rest of the day, a loop of her pain at the forefront of my mind as I ran through my lecture notes.

  When did she settle at school? Now, of course, there is the temptation to say never. Hindsight has a horrible habit of distorting everything through the lens of the present. I suppose once she made a few friends. That took a while. The teachers were forever telling us that she was behind, socially, as if that was a kind way of saying that she was the child left reading in the playground while the rest roamed in tribes. Does she have these problems at home? Who does she socialize with there? Well, us. We would try to explain that our friends’ children were older, that she was happy and chatty at home. Every time, the same tilted head, the same skeptical smile.

  Eleanor got there eventually. Katie arrived, what, two terms into that first year? Our savior—all three feet of her. Her family had come over from America, which might go some way toward explaining why she gravitated to another quiet outsider. Within the space of a day, they were thick as thieves. It got the school off our back, given there was little else they could find to query. Eleanor was the brightest in her class. So what if she struggled to open up to the other kids at school? At home she was kind, thoughtful. Highly sensitive, yes, but we told ourselves that if it wasn’t a phase, then she would grow to reframe it as a strength. She hadn’t even turned five. She had all the time in the world to toughen up or branch out or whatever else the school had suggested.

  With Eleanor at school and you back at work, it was time for the three of us that became rationed. Holidays took on a new meaning. I remember the fervor of planning that accompanied our first trip abroad as a family. If I close my eyes now, I can still see you poring over the travel brochures every evening after work, one hand cradling the bowl of your wineglass, the other circling apartments and flights and pointing them out to me with an enthusiasm so infectious that I would have agreed to a trip to the moon in a heartbeat. In the end we settled on Portugal, in February, perhaps not the most obvious choice, but we had just bought this house and we needed somewhere cheap. Or at least as cheap as it ever is when constrained by school terms.

  We knew it wasn’t going to be scorching, but our packing was still far more optimistic than the reality, scenes that felt far closer to a wet winter in Wales than the year-round sunshine the Algarve tourist board would have you believe. The day we arrived, the rain lashed down outside the apartment and you were in a tailspin about Ellie’s clothes. She was seven and still far too small to borrow anything from you. Where can we buy tights? A proper anorak, not one of those flimsy bin-bag things? I wasn’t so bothered with excursions; all I wanted was time with you both, numbing our brains with cartoons and playing Uno until I ended up brandishing a Draw 4 card in my sleep. And after a little persuasion and some cajoling on my part, that was exactly what we did. With both of you bundled up on the sofa against me, I couldn’t have been any happier, Mags. Honestly, I couldn’t.

  On our last night, we had supper out, in that restaurant where they had all fallen under Eleanor’s spell. It was fortunate for us, as we ended up with the best table in the joint—just by the door, so we could see the sun setting on the ocean but without the full wind chill. By the end of the meal, you were giggly, the best part of a bottle of rosé down, your feet tapping on the floor tiles in time to the music floating up from the beach below.

  You reach for my hand. “Come on, Frank . . . dance with me!” Eleanor is so engrossed in her book that she doesn’t even look up. “You want to, really . . .”

  “Fine! Just one,” I say. “Eleanor?” She glances up, her finger running along the line of text she is on. “We’re going for a dance—do you want to come?”

  She shakes her head.

  “We’ll just be down there, darling.” You are pointing, but she already has her nose back in the book.

  The makeshift dance floor isn’t far away at all, but it is more crowded than it looked from the restaurant. Still, with the beat and the sand and the wine, I ease into it, my arms wrapped around your waist. We call it a day after three songs; it’s late, and the flight is early the next morning. I give you a piggyback up the last few meters of beach, the two of us in stitches as I try to avoid blinding myself with the heels of your cast-off shoes swinging in my eyeline.

  We get back to the table, and you slide down with a thud.

  Eleanor’s book is there. But she isn’t.

  “Where is she?” you ask, dropping your shoes.

  “I don’t know. The toilet, maybe?”

  Around us, other diners look up from their meals.

  “You go check the bathroom, ask the staff. I’ll stay here, see if anyone saw where she went.”

  I try the table next to us, the one behind. They’re both German, and my O-level efforts don’t get me very far. Fear has a way of cutting across the language barrier, though, either that or my desperation, and they do their best to try to calm me down until you burst your way back from the bathroom.

  “She’s not there. They said they thought she went with us.”

  My tongue feels dry, a huge fat slab stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Frank, what the fuck are we going to do?” I have never seen you so afraid. I want to fold you in my arms and hold you and rock you and tell you that this will be OK. Only neither of us knew that, did we?

  “She can’t have got far. Let’s keep calm. Divide and conquer. You head to the shops, ask everyone there. I’ll take the beach.”

  It hits me then. The water. That Ellie could be somewhere in it. Somewhere under.

  “You have your watch, right?”

  You nod.

  “Right—so fifteen minutes searching, ask everyone. Then we meet back here at nine. If we haven’t got her back by then, well . . . then . . . we phone the police.”

  The gravity of what I have just said makes my stomach turn. I have never phoned the police in my life. Nearly five decades as a law-abiding citizen and now this. An image of Eleanor’s face as the opening shot on one of those gratuitous, late-night crime programs comes to mind, and a bolt of heat spreads up the back of my neck.

  I scour the beach with that action you see on the news when there is a missing child—the relentless push forward, combing the ground for clues. But in the footage, there is always a thick line of volunteers, not a solitary father zigzagging the shallows in a daze and a group of bewildered customers trying to keep up. I keep thinking I see a knot of red curls. But in the end it is just my mind playing the age-old trick of wanting something to the point of hallucination.

  The end of t
he seafront is marked by a cluster of rocks and huge boulders, most of them bigger than me. There’s no way Eleanor could be beyond there, not if she was by herself. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. A giant wave breaks to my left, crashing like a cymbal, so loud that for a second, one blessed second, it nearly drowns out the shrieks of my own panic.

  “Frank! Frank!”

  I turn, and there you are.

  “Daddy!” Eleanor releases your hand and runs toward me. I’ve never known relief like it, the noose loosened just as the drop comes into sight.

  Even in the dark, I can tell she’s been crying because when I fall to my knees and we hug, her whole body slammed flush against mine, I can taste the salt from her tears as I press my lips against her forehead. Soon, Eleanor starts to squirm. It’s cold, and we’re near enough to the sea for the spray to catch us. Only I can’t let go, not when I’ve stared into the depths of everything we stood to lose.

  You garble something over our heads about Eleanor trying to join us and losing her way. How you found her round the back of the music tent, someone was looking after her . . .

  “It’s OK. It’s OK,” I whisper.

  I’m not sure which of us it was designed to comfort.

  Chapter 10

  Over the last few months I have come back to that moment time and time again. The wind whipping the sand up into my eyes and the dampness everywhere—the seawater soaking through my trousers, Eleanor’s tears, my own. I had been up to my neck in the riptide of every parent’s worst nightmare, and it was enough to drown me. It scared Eleanor, our response, you could see that. As her parents, it was our job to keep it together, to be fine and strong and constant even when our world was about to fall apart at the seams. Only it wasn’t possible, was it? For the first time Eleanor was forced to see us as we really were: human. We felt fear just like her.