Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  Rowena leaves and goes down the stairs to the office.

  Addie goes to the art room. He trusts Mr. Hyman, loves him even. But he’s afraid of matches, and he’s never lit one before, isn’t sure how to do it.

  Rowena has time to listen to Annette’s inane chatter, hardening her alibi.

  Adam gets a match to light. He stands well back and throws it at the volcano because he’s afraid of fire, even a sparkler.

  And the bucket, full of accelerant, pauses a second, as the flame catches, and then it explodes, flames leaping out. Addie is terrified and runs.

  I know, darling, I want to have been with him then too. Made it all right for him too.

  Maisie is coming out of the ladies’ toilets, the alarm sounding, and she sees him as he runs from the art room.

  Adam dashes down the stairs, past the secretary’s office, and out of the main exit.

  And the two films collide now because Maisie sees Rowena.

  “I saw Adam coming out of the art room,” she says. “Oh God, what have you done, Ro?”

  And Jenny hears their argument, sees Rowena hit Maisie.

  So Rowena tells her that Adam is looking for her up in the medical room.

  A single sentence and our family is destroyed.

  Because Jenny goes up to the third floor, looking for Addie.

  She smells smoke, but it’s not too bad, not yet, and maybe she hears flames, but nothing yet to see.

  She doesn’t know that the fire is traveling through the wall cavities and ceiling spaces and vents.

  Outside, Rowena has her arm around Adam. Next to them is the statue of herself as a child.

  And I think it’s now that Rowena texts Jenny. I think she tells Jenny that Adam is still in the school, to keep her in there. I see her fingers quickly pressing the pads on her mobile.

  By the side of the school, near the discarded water bottles, Jenny’s mobile beeps with a message. But no one hears.

  Because the fire explodes. Flames ricochet along walls; heat tunnels along corridors and through ceiling cavities, punching through into rooms and blowing out the windows; and the school is drowning in choking smoke.

  On the playing field I see the thick black smoke and start running.

  Next to the bronze child Rowena tells Addie that it’s all his fault.

  ——

  Jenny had opened that fire door into her memory, and it was terrifying. She was shaking violently.

  “I’m in the fire. Addie must be here too. And it’s everywhere, the fire, burning, and …”

  I put my arms around her and told her that she was safe now. I helped her to come back to me.

  Rowena was still sleeping.

  We left her room, neither of us could bear to be near her now. But we could still see her through the glass in the door.

  Her sleeping face looked like the blank slate of a person’s character.

  “Addie was outside all the time, wasn’t he?” Jenny said. “I mean, that’s what Annette’s statement said, and Rowena’s, that he was outside straightaway.”

  “Yes.”

  They’d both been outside; for a minute, maybe two, both had been safe.

  But Jenny had been by the kitchen exit, at the side of the school.

  And then she’d gone back in.

  Behind us, the doors to the burns unit opened and there was a sudden frenzy of noise and activity as a trolley with a patient was wheeled in surrounded by medical staff. The lights were up full now and you couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I remembered Jenny being brought here, that first afternoon, the horror of it.

  The noise disturbed Rowena. She stirred in her sleep.

  “She planned to kill Addie,” Jenny said. “Must have done.”

  I remembered Rowena describing the white spirit and accelerant in the “volcano,” and the cans of spray mount stacked up behind. Brilliant at science, Rowena would know which chemicals explode and burn and poison.

  “It was meant to blow up in his face,” Jenny said. “She must have been terrified when he was OK—then thought it was bloody Christmas when he couldn’t speak.”

  “Yes.”

  “She only had one injury, the burn from an iron. It was an accident, just like she said.”

  Jen needed to see this picture in its entirety while I wanted to turn away, but I made myself look at it too.

  “I don’t think her dad ever hurt her before,” Jenny continued. “Just that one time. Because he knew what she’d done to us.”

  I remembered back to that scene in Rowena’s room. I remembered Donald grabbing her hands, because he knew. He knew.

  “He realized she’d only gone into the fire to look good,” Jenny said.

  I remembered Rowena walking towards Donald and his look of hatred and fury. “You disgust me,” he’d said.

  “She probably just went as far as the vestibule,” Jenny continued. “Then lay down knowing the firemen were coming. Annette said the fire engines were already coming up the road by then. Rowena was just making sure no one suspected her.”

  “Quite the little heroine, aren’t you?” Donald had said, and his fury was shocking.

  I remembered another time and Maisie’s voice, the sadness in it.

  “You shouldn’t condemn someone, should you? If you love them, if they’re your family, you have to try and see the good. I mean, that’s what love is in some ways, isn’t it? Believing in someone’s goodness.”

  It was her daughter, not her husband, she’d been protecting all this time.

  Had Rowena planned, from the start, to blame her mother?

  “She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur-Mum to the fore!”

  I don’t suppose there was anything wrong with the tubes.

  Through the glass, I watched Rowena getting out of bed.

  “You need to get better, Jen,” I said. “And then you can tell everyone what you heard and saw.”

  She half smiled at me.

  “Good try, Mum. But Addie will tell everyone it was Rowena who made him do it, without any help from me.”

  “But—”

  “It’s just a fluke that Dad still thinks it’s Maisie, not Rowena. But Adam will tell him properly.”

  “Yes, and Dad will believe him. And so will Aunty Sarah, but no one else will. Maisie will have given a full confession by now.”

  “You know I’d do anything for Rowena,” she’d said quietly. “Don’t you, Gracie?”

  “And if Donald was going to say anything, he’d have done so by now.”

  “But the police might still believe Addie,” Jenny said.

  “They’re not going to believe an eight-year-old against adults. Maybe they might have listened to him at the start. Not now though, when it’s taken him so long.”

  “But they might,” she insisted.

  “Oh God.”

  “Mum?”

  Thoughts were circling around something so horrible that I couldn’t bear to look at it; but they were getting inexorably closer.

  “Rowena will think that too, that the police might believe him.”

  The circling thoughts spiraled downwards into a single memory.

  “I’d really like to see him, tell him it wasn’t his fault,” Rowena had said. “I mean, he probably won’t want to see me, but I’d really like to.”

  Jen shook her head as I told her, as if that would stop it from being true.

  “You need to get better,” I said to her. “To make sure Adam is safe.”

  And I hated blackmailing her like that. But it was the only way. As I said, the life of your child trumps everything.

  “You can do that,” she said.

  “I can’t because—”

  “Mum—”

  “Let me finish. Please. OK, let’s say that by some miracle I can speak. Let’s just play that one out—what could I say? I didn’t hear the conversation you heard. I was still at sports day. I can hardly say that we chatted like this, can I? What
judge will believe that? I have no proof at all that it was Rowena, not Maisie.

  “But there won’t be any miracles. I believe in a lot of things now that I didn’t before. Fairy stories, ghosts, angels. I think they’re all real now. But I don’t believe I’ll get better.

  “I have no cognitive function, Jen. I’ll never recover from that.”

  I didn’t know if that was a white lie or not. I still don’t.

  “I can’t protect him,” I said. “But you can. You can live and give him an adult’s voice.”

  In her room, Rowena was disconnecting her drip.

  “Angels, Mum?” Jenny asked, trying to smile. “You think that’s what we are now?”

  “Possibly. Maybe angels aren’t really good or special, just ordinary, like us.”

  “And the wings?”

  “What about them?”

  “Wings and a halo. Basic kit for an angel.”

  “The earliest painting of a Christian angel, which is in the Catacomb of Priscilla, third century, doesn’t have wings.”

  “Only you could say something like that at a time like this,” she said.

  And then her voice was quiet and ashamed. “I want to live so much.”

  “I know.”

  “I will never love anyone the way you love me.”

  “You stayed looking for Addie in the fire. You didn’t get the text, but you stayed anyway.”

  Rowena left her room and went out into the corridor towards the exit. A nurse saw her.

  “Just going for a cigarette,” Rowena said.

  “Didn’t think you were the type.”

  Rowena smiled at her. “No.”

  Jenny and I followed her out of the burns unit.

  So quiet out in those midnight corridors.

  ——

  We followed her as she went to the ICU.

  Inside, the lights were full on, the ward as busy as ever; no day-night rhythm here.

  She rang the buzzer.

  A nurse answered the door.

  Rowena’s voice sounded fragile. She drew her dark blue, hooded dressing gown around herself.

  “I’m a friend of Jenny’s. Is she all right? I can’t sleep for worrying.”

  “She’s very ill.”

  “Will she die?”

  The nurse was silent and sad.

  Tears welled in Rowena’s eyes. “I thought you’d say that.”

  So she’d come to make sure.

  I couldn’t bear to look at her face.

  But Jenny did.

  “I am going to live,” Jenny said, and her voice was loud with hope, a promise.

  But Rowena turned, as if she’d heard a whispered threat.

  Mum left the hospital and I went with her. The night was still heavy with heat. In the block of flats opposite the hospital, I saw people sleeping outside on their tiny balconies. That film of Wednesday afternoon kept playing, looping, over and over again, with me powerless to change anything that happened.

  As I watched it, I knew that I should have looked at that police painting-by-numbers portrait of Maisie. I should have found the courage to do that. Because if I had, I would have seen the spaces they hadn’t filled in with criminal suspicions, the ones that were already colored in with livid bruises.

  And then I would have overlaid their suspicions with strong colors of knowledge from the years of knowing my friend.

  But I had no doubts with Rowena. It was shocking it was her, not only because she’s a teenage girl, but also because it was so transparently and quickly the truth. Search and replace “Maisie” with “Rowena” and the story revealed is vile but clear. Her acting wasn’t that remarkable. She knew how to play the part of victim, who carries on loving her abuser, from years of watching her mother.

  Rowena makes sense of it all, she connects to everything—to Silas and to the school and to the fraud and to domestic violence—but in none of the ways I’d imagined.

  But I don’t think she’s entirely evil, wicked even.

  She went into a burning building to rescue me and Jenny.

  Jenny thinks she did it to appear courageous and deflect suspicion. But I don’t think that. I don’t want to think that.

  I hold on to this one action as hugely courageous and honorable. I choose to see it as dramatic contrition, whatever went before or comes afterwards.

  Because I need to believe she has some goodness, one color in the acrid smoke.

  Rowena herself talked about the angel and devil in a person. We’d thought she meant Silas Hyman or her father, but I think she was describing herself.

  I don’t believe in gray anymore. I think black and white, good and evil, coexist but don’t mingle together; a world not of nanny voices but of devils and angels.

  As the film loops again, and I watch her running into the burning building, I imagine that her angel is yelling at her loudly enough to drown out the devil. Really. An angel. Not one with a frilly dress and silver wings like the one at the top of the Christmas tree, but a muscular Old Testament one, a Raphael or Michael—a bold, strong angel as the good in her takes a shape and finds a voice.

  Because I cannot leave this world thinking there is nothing redemptive in a teenage girl. I do not want to have hatred inside me when I die.

  We arrived home. Mum went to bed, exhausted, and I was the only one awake. It was almost the witching hour, the house silent, everyone asleep. The last time I’d been up on my own like this was when Adam was a baby.

  I went to Jenny’s bedroom. I’d left her with Ivo in the garden, promising I’d see her again in the morning. No good-byes yet.

  “What’s it like to have a teenage daughter?” a mum at school whose eldest child is the same age as Adam asked me once.

  “There are always boys in the house. Huge great boys with huge sneakers in the hallway,” I said, because I always trip over them. “You’re always out of food in the fridge because the same boys are always hungry. The girls eat nothing and then you worry about anorexia, and even if your daughter seems fine and eats fine, you worry about bulimia.”

  “Does she borrow your clothes?”

  I laughed. As if. “It’s the contrast that’s hard,” I said. “Her skin glows. Mine is wrinkling. Even my legs look wrinkled next to hers.”

  The school mum pulled a face, thinking it wouldn’t happen to her, not realizing that it probably already had, but without a teenage daughter for comparison she wouldn’t know.

  “The main thing,” I continued, warming to my theme, “is sex. It’s everywhere when you’ve got a teenager.”

  “You mean they … in your house?” She sounded horrified.

  “No, not exactly,” I said, wondering how to explain that sex comes into the house and takes it over; wafting through the corridors and loafing on the stairs, hormones funneling out of the windows.

  The scent of it lingered there, in Jenny’s room.

  Not sex or hormones, I realized, but great quantities of life still to be lived.

  I sat at her desk and saw that there were virtually no books, but a whole shelf of Ordnance Survey maps for hiking and climbing. As far as I could tell, her desk had mainly been used to paint her nails. I could see little smudges of shiny red on it.

  Did I tell you that a few weeks before her A levels she said she’d rather “live my life now, than revise for a future one”? So different from me at that age, desperate to get to university, swotting the whole way through sixth form.

  I thought university would be wonderful for her too. I thought she’d do the full three years and love every moment of it. I was going to make certain she didn’t get pregnant at the end of year two.

  It wasn’t that I wanted her to live out the unlived part of my life, but that I thought what made me happy would make her happy too.

  And I was cross with you when you didn’t try and stop her from going climbing in the Cairngorms instead of doing that revision course, or when she swapped a French exchange visit for canoeing in Wales with Ivo. I was so sure that
she was being childish, not thinking of the future—not realizing that she was living a life choice right there in front of me. An outdoorsy person, like you, my darling, she prefers canoeing and climbing to Dryden and Chaucer.

  I should have looked at her life from her perspective, climbed up a mountain with her and seen the surrounding landscape of other ways to achieve fulfillment and happiness.

  Or just come in here and properly looked around.

  I’m lying next to you on Adam’s top bunk—a new perspective on his so-familiar room. From up here, I can see that the top of his globe lampshade needs dusting; Iceland is just a smudge. “A tidy house is a sign of a wasted life,” Maisie once told me, kindly, knowing my antipathy to housework, and that’s good, because from up here mine’s clearly been very profitably spent.

  I’m actually really proud of my mothering now, of both Jenny and Adam, if I had any hand in the making of the people they’ve become.

  And I have no regrets about my choices, even the default ones. Other people can write the great book, paint the wonderful painting, because I don’t need a work of art to speak for me after I’ve gone; my family will do that. There is no need to throw something into the void, because it is full of people I love.

  I go down to Addie’s bunk.

  I’ve always known how much you love him. But until the fire, I didn’t know how much he was loved by Jenny and Mum and Sarah, too. Between you, there’s enough love to inflate a lifeboat for him.

  And look at you. You survived both your parents dying—more than survived it: You grew up to be this wonderful, confident man. And Adam can too. I hold his hand. I walk into his dreams, and I tell him how special he is.

  “The most special boy in the whole world,” I say.

  “The galaxy?”

  “The universe.”

  “If there’s life out there.”

  “I’m sure there is.”

  “There’s probably another me out there, exactly the same.”

  “No one could be exactly the same as you.”

  “In a good way?”