That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  Joe looks at him. Maybe it’ll be okay. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘We had no adrenaline or anything, obviously. It was hopeless.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Plus, he seemed not to respond as well as I would have expected.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The whole thing is a blur,’ Joe says. Despite himself, despite the circumstances, it’s nice to discuss this with somebody else, somebody not in his family, not interested in the dynamics. ‘We were probably too late. Frannie left it too long.’

  Evan’s mouth falls open in shock. Oh, shit, Joe thinks, looking at him. He’s said too much, as he often does, the relief of Evan’s understanding making him deflate and leak information. And Evan’s forensic, scientist mind won’t be able to let this go. ‘Why?’

  Joe says nothing, which seems to be the best and only option these days.

  ‘How long had she left it? Like – hours?’

  ‘No! Half an hour.’

  ‘Half an hour,’ he says incredulously. ‘You can do a lot in half an hour.’

  ‘I know,’ Joe says. And he can’t explain it. The panic, the fear, the shock of it. How the events are not cemented in his mind, even now. The smell of the blood. Frannie lit up in the headlights. ‘It’s a blur,’ Joe explains again. ‘Anyway,’ he adds, ‘will you review the X-ray, then call the family?’

  ‘Sure,’ Evan says easily. ‘Sure, Joe. You’re the boss.’

  47.

  Cathy

  ‘Can I stay?’ Cathy says.

  ‘Of course you can stay,’ Cathy’s father says to her as they cross the wet lawn. ‘Bed’s made up.’

  It’s late. Friday night. Cathy’s seeking refuge at her parents’ house. She wants to call 999. To falsely confess. To end the nightmare for all of them.

  She came here instead of doing that.

  Tom has called her twice, but she didn’t answer either time.

  ‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ Owen says. Cathy turns to him in surprise in the darkness.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says.

  ‘Well,’ Owen says, and then he reaches out to clasp her shoulder. ‘You seem down.’

  She looks at him. How could she tell him? She thinks of the days, weeks and months after Rosie’s death. They never, ever mentioned Cathy’s role in it. Cathy was waiting for them to. They came home from the hospital without Rosie. They arranged the funeral. The topic was dropped, a radioactive family secret they unsuccessfully tried to bury even though it throbbed underneath the earth. And their behaviour towards Cathy changed, cooled, became resentful, in some ways. She was struck by the distinct feeling that her mother was acting around her.

  Three months after Rosie’s death, it was Cathy’s birthday, and they got her a card and a voucher. That was it. Cathy still has the voucher. Unspent, kept forever, a gruesome memento of what happens when you make a mistake.

  ‘Well, you know,’ she whispers to her father now, desperately wanting to ask, suddenly, in the aftermath of her sister’s mistake, about her own. He holds her gaze for a few seconds, saying nothing. ‘Do you think sometimes good people just – pure and simple – mess up?’ she says in a low voice.

  ‘Of course they do.’ His eyes seem to harden in the night air in front of her, and she has a sudden feeling that she is crossing some point of no return that she isn’t ready for. ‘Why?’ he asks.

  ‘Just asking,’ she says softly, through tears. She’s sure she sees his eyes shining too.

  ‘Did something happen on the holiday?’ he asks. All around them, Cathy can hear the drip of rainwater falling off the plants. She’s surprised by the direct question. He is usually repressed, usually feels it would be better to say nothing than something, no matter what. She looks up at him.

  ‘This and that.’

  He would be one of the last people she would tell, she thinks sorrowfully. He wasn’t there for her during that most crucial part of her life, and now she is damaged forever.

  ‘Well, I hope nothing serious.’ He holds her gaze for a second and she wonders if he knows. He can’t. But perhaps some parents can just sense certain things.

  ‘Since you’ve come back you don’t seem as – as close. And – you know. It’s a tough week for us all. I thought I’d see if you were all right.’

  Cathy almost takes a step back. It’s Rosie’s birthday. Cathy has been over her late sister’s features so much that she can hardly recall them now, needs photographs, all of which she’s already seen. She can’t imagine the adult she would have become. Perhaps she would have been Cathy’s ally, perhaps the triangle would have been a square instead.

  ‘Rosie,’ Cathy says. Her father stops walking and nods. ‘You never usually do anything in the week of her birthday,’ she adds softly.

  ‘Your mum doesn’t,’ he says simply. Something slots into place for Cathy. Maybe now because she’s seeing Tom, she has a different perspective, a relationship perspective. Her mother is the one driving their behaviour, the anxiety, the reclusiveness, maybe. Her father puts up a front to avoid revealing that.

  ‘I see,’ Cathy says. ‘Well, we all … we’re all flawed, aren’t we?’ she says, thinking whether she deserved those perfunctory birthday presents, the lack of joy, the shortage of love. Thinking about whether anything can be done now to undo it.

  ‘We are,’ her father says, and his hand trails softly down her arm to grip her hand. He squeezes gently. ‘Your mother is. I am.’

  ‘What about me?’ she says.

  ‘You’re perfect,’ he whispers. His eyes dart to the house. He grasps Cathy’s hand tighter and pulls her in for a hug. ‘She would have been thirty this year,’ he whispers in Cathy’s ear.

  ‘I know,’ she says. The quiet and dark of the garden, lit only by the reflections of lights from the house, makes the conversation easier. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You don’t need to be,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to be.’

  ‘But I do,’ she says to him. ‘We never – we never discussed it.’

  ‘We don’t need to,’ he says.

  ‘I think we did,’ Cathy says to him. He turns his mouth down in a show of what might be agreement or ambivalence. It’s not perfect, but it is something. Cathy nods, releases his hand and walks towards the house. It’s the best she will get.

  As she leaves him downstairs, she hears him call up to her. ‘Have a look in the trunk,’ he says. She knows exactly where he means.

  She walks upstairs, alone. Owen and Maria have kept each of their children’s bedrooms almost exactly as they were when they left. This is more her mother’s impulse than her father’s. She cleans the rooms each week, irrespective of guests, like a well-kept museum.

  Cathy’s room is the last, the door at the very end of a long corridor with wooden, uneven floors. She creaks it open. The bedroom is cold in that way of unoccupied rooms, and she reaches down by the bed to turn on the old brass radiator, the metal tap cool under her fingers. She used to tuck the duvet behind this radiator and lie right next to it when she was a child, her legs slowly cooking.

  Somebody has left a pair of folded pyjamas on the trunk. Cathy rubs the soft material. They’re an old pair of hers. She must have left them here ages ago. She moves them and opens it, a kind of ottoman, with a creak. Inside is a box. On it is her name, written in calligraphy-style print. She opens that, and finds all her old school reports, a few Babygros, a few photographs of the four of them, and a few of just her too. One of her having dropped an ice-cream, a shocked expression on her face. One of her and Rosie wading in a lake – something their mother would never have let Cathy do after Rosie died. She closes the box after a few minutes and sits with the notion that her mother cares enough to at least keep hold of this stuff, even if she created it before Cathy’s mistake.

  She goes into the en suite. It’s perfunctory. Just a shower, toilet and sink, but Cathy always liked it. Sometimes, on the bad days after Rosie’s death, she’d pretend this room was a self-contained apartment, one where nobody coul
d come and bother her.

  She changes into the pyjamas, putting her clothes in the laundry hamper, like the Plants still do here. Laundry is forever changing hands. Even though they have all left home, none of them quite has altogether, like they are actual plants whose roots still tangle.

  And why haven’t they? Cathy swipes off her make-up in the mirror, looking into her own eyes. They are so like Frannie’s. So like Joe’s. So like Rosie’s. The shape, the colour, the size. All identical. She thinks of what her father said. How, twenty years on, she got a grain of truth out of him. How it is so little, so late.

  The Plants must seem so functional to outsiders. Cathy finishes taking off her make-up and piles up the dirty cotton balls. They’re covered in the lightest amount of make-up. But we’re not functional, she thinks, as she watches herself emerge, her face red and new-looking from the chemicals, from the wiping.

  She stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, thinking about how funny families are. That they are still here, sharing pyjamas, combining their laundry. Regardless of everything. Cathy isn’t sure whether that is a positive or a negative. Isn’t that what families do? Paper over the cracks, still love each other regardless of the black holes trauma leaves in their past? Some of them have tempers, like Joe. Some of them are blissfully unaware, like Frannie. And some of them are like Cathy, cold workaholics, frightened of new experiences. Of any experiences.

  After Rosie died, the family seemed to mould itself into new shapes, like clay that had been softened again to make something new. Joe and Frannie joined together. Her parents too, her father in his repression, her mother in her anxiety. And Cathy, culpable Cathy, had been left alone. But had that been fair? She thinks of just now, in the garden. How they came closer to the topic than they ever have before. Her father’s hand-squeeze. Her tears. His apparent forgiveness. It might be enough. It might still be enough for her.

  She thinks about how the circumstances now seem to mirror that. That, deep down inside, she has a painful gut feeling that she is alone once more, the vulnerable one on the point of the triangle, about to be betrayed. That she feels she should act before she is forced to.

  She pads back into the bedroom. The rainy night is blackening and charring the window. The radiator creaks and hisses as it fills. She lights a candle by the bed, a candle she bought a lifetime ago, when she was sixteen. It’s an old-style church candle. A big, fat pillar of dusted wax. She lights the others on the windowsill too. Dark-green wax sticks in old silver candlesticks. Like a little vigil, just for her.

  She stares out at the street down below as she imagines her mother gathering the photographs, sifting through them.

  A soft knock at her door, which then eases open. Cathy turns and is surprised to see Frannie. ‘Dad said you were up here,’ she says with a small shrug.

  ‘Oh,’ Cathy says, standing there in pyjamas. The room smells of burnt matches and the hair-straightener smell of the central heating. It’s slowly warming up, her limbs relaxing in the pyjamas, in the warmth. ‘How come you’re here?’

  ‘Paul’s being such a pain – he’s just fractious, I think it’s because he’s learning so many words. Mostly dinosaurs. I thought we’d come and stay,’ she says. She wraps her slim arms across her waist. ‘Great minds. How’re you?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ Cathy says.

  ‘Really?’ Frannie says, her brow wrinkled. They hear the sound of Paul’s cries downstairs, and Frannie stiffens, looking watchful. Then they hear their mother. They can’t make out the words, only a high kind of babbling, a happy sound, and Frannie smiles wanly.

  She moves Cathy’s bag and sits on the blue cloth ottoman at the end of the bed. ‘Joe told me they’re searching the woods by the track road.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy says. ‘I wish … I don’t know. Hopefully … we’re not suspects …’

  ‘Yeah. Hopefully. How are you really?’

  ‘I’m fine, Fran,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t want us to turn against each other,’ Frannie says. ‘I know Joe’s name on that document is … it doesn’t make sense to me either.’

  ‘We’re not turning against each other – who said that?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Frannie says, louder than Cathy was expecting. ‘I’m just – I don’t know. You’re not yourself.’

  ‘Why do you think his name was on the document, then?’

  ‘I have no idea. It doesn’t make sense, like I said.’

  ‘So much of this doesn’t make sense.’

  A question flashes across Frannie’s features. ‘Like what?’

  Fuck it, Cathy thinks, remembering her dark eyes in the mirror, thinking of Tom, every lie she’s told, how they are now fractured, because of Frannie, unable to form the kinds of relationships they formed before. And all for this, a momentary act of altruism that Cathy suddenly, and for the first time, truly wishes she could take back.

  ‘Do you really think Joe is –’ Cathy says.

  ‘I think he hasn’t got a clue.’ Frannie brings a pink hand to her breastbone. ‘I know Joe, and he isn’t lying.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cathy plucks at the poppers on the duvet cover. ‘They’ve had this since the eighties,’ she says, picking up the end of it and flapping it.

  ‘At least,’ Frannie says. ‘They never fucking buy anything.’

  Cathy laughs at that. ‘I know. They used to, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Used to go every Saturday. Mum would go to town – take us.’

  A globule of wax tracks its way down the side of one of the green candles. Cathy watches it gain momentum, leaving a wet trail behind it like a snail.

  ‘I can’t believe we have to keep it forever,’ Frannie says. ‘Tell nobody. You know?’

  ‘I know.’ Cathy could almost tell her now about Tom. Look what you have taken from me, before it could even begin, she would say. But she can’t.

  ‘But this must be the worst part of it. Right?’ Something about Frannie’s tone brings to mind their childhood. Frannie, as the new youngest, asking for reassurance from the elders.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Cathy says. Her chin trembles as she says it. ‘Fran,’ she says softly.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Is there anything I need to know?’

  ‘What?’ Frannie says. Her mouth parts in surprise.

  ‘I just – I’m feeling … I don’t know. I met this guy,’ she says, the pull of sibling intimacy too great for her to resist.

  ‘A guy?’ Frannie says, a quick smile spreading across her features like a sunrise. ‘You?’

  ‘Me,’ Cathy says laughing. ‘I met him at the baggage claim.’

  ‘From Italy?’

  ‘Yeah – he’d been over too.’

  ‘Why?’ Frannie says quickly. Cathy frowns, not following.

  Frannie says nothing. And then: ‘You haven’t –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You haven’t told him, have you?’

  ‘Oh – no,’ Cathy says. ‘No.’

  ‘You just never know –’

  ‘What?’ Cathy says, fiddling with the ancient plastic poppers on the duvet cover.

  Frannie stands up, which is what she does when she wants to move on the conversation. ‘Isn’t it so weird that our rooms are just the same?’ she says. She runs a finger over the chest of drawers. It comes away completely clean.

  ‘What do you mean – about Tom?’

  Frannie looks directly at Cathy. ‘You just – how do you know he’s who he says he is?’ she asks.

  Cathy almost laughs in horror. ‘What?’ she says. ‘What – you think he’s an undercover cop?’

  It’s a joke, but Frannie doesn’t laugh. ‘I just find it weird that he was in Verona. And you’ve – I don’t know. We’ve not been back long –’

  ‘Oh, so it’s too quick, is it?’ Their eyes meet, and then Frannie looks away, eyes glassy.

  ‘No,’ Frannie says. ‘Do what you want. I’m just trying to help you. I just – you have helped me. A
nd now …’

  Cathy lets out a breath. Finally. Finally. Finally. A thank you, of sorts.

  ‘Do you need to hit up ASOS? If you have a boyfriend?’ Frannie says.

  Cathy can’t help but laugh. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I really do.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Frannie says.

  Cathy agrees, and they sit in companionable silence for a while.

  ‘I know Evan knows,’ Frannie says. ‘Joe told me.’

  ‘I know,’ Cathy says. ‘It’s … hard to be optimistic.’

  ‘It is.’

  The warmth of the central heating, the dancing flickers of the candles and their reflections in the window, her sister’s belated thank you. They all combine within Cathy, and she forgets herself, just for a second, real Cathy oozing through a crack like melted chocolate. ‘Do you ever think you might want to end it?’ she says, thinking of that triangle again, of how she can’t bear the waiting.

  ‘End it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cathy prevaricates. ‘Like –’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘I could say it was me. For you. And it’d end it. I’d be out in ten years, maybe, and no more lies.’

  Frannie is looking at her in shock, and Cathy adds a smile, a split-second after the sentence is uttered, and she thinks she just about saved it, just about caught it, just about pretended she didn’t mean it.

  ‘It’s so quiet here,’ Tom says. He texted her. Fancy a walk someday soon? Can do mornings, evenings, weekends, whatever to suit you. And she couldn’t resist replying, despite everything.

  And now he is standing outside Cathy’s front door wearing his parka. Cathy likes that he is wearing the same coat today as the other day. Something about it comforts her, as though he is living his life completely honestly, no continuity errors.

  It’s cloudy today, the relentless rain paused. It feels almost autumnal out here, Cathy thinks, as she locks her front door behind her. The bite of wood smoke on the breeze, the slight chill across her shoulders.

  It’s nice to be doing this and not that. Nice not to be thinking about the search of the woods.

  She raced into the shower after work, washing off the antiseptic. She’s blow-dried her hair like Frannie’s, and now here she is, feeling strange dressed up, wearing make-up, in the evening, in the twilight.