“Bloke from television. Absolute wanker, as you can imagine,” she said.
“After work?”
“Early Christmas party, yeah. November party. Went back to his.” So she was on self-destruct.
“Oh, Becky,” I said.
She just shrugged again, her eyes misty.
But, since then, she and Marc have never instructed solicitors to divorce them, and they have never quite moved into hostility, either. He sits too close to her at the family barbecues he still attends, laughs too loudly at her sardonic jokes.
Now, in the court foyer, Marc holds the door to the meeting room for Becky, and she throws him a look.
It’s a look I’ve seen them exchange before, one they’ve never stopped sharing. A kind of mutual understanding. Their eyes scrunch up at the corners. Each of them, perhaps, is in sharp focus to the other, the backgrounds blurred around them.
I wonder how Marc’s coping with Xander.
I wonder how Becky’s coping without Xander.
I want to keep looking at them, as they gaze at each other, walking into the meeting room together, oblivious to me, but they close the door behind them.
* * *
—
It’s another neighbor’s turn next. Theresa, my sister’s neighbor since forever, is about to take the stand. I have known her—in a sort of once-removed way—for years. She’s probably more similar to me than to Becky. She has a serious, quiet way of talking. She goes for a run twice a day, extremely early in the morning and late at night. So late that, even in the summer, while Becky and I have been scoffing takeout, I have seen the streetlights catching her reflective running gear. Illuminated and then in darkness. Illuminated and then in darkness.
She and her husband have no children, but they have three dogs. A huge one, a medium-size one, and a little one. Becky and I called them the Three Bears.
I’ve only ever observed her from a distance. From afar, she is statuesque, looks like an athlete, pounding the streets. Up close, she looks different. Doesn’t everybody? Don’t we? And now, here she is, a witness.
She has been observing us, too. And she is about to tell us what she has seen.
22
Theresa Williams
9:10 p.m., Thursday, October 26
Ian was away, in Bratislava, at some bachelor party. No, go, go, she had said, smiling broadly. Let him see the strippers. Let him drink himself unconscious. If you tried to control them, they played away. Hadn’t she learned that lesson once?
She faced the fridge, the chilled air bringing goose bumps out across her arms and legs—she was in a vest top and pants, the heating turned up as high as could be—and scooped a dollop of Marmite with her breadstick. It was disgustingly rich, the Marmite tarry in her mouth. She almost felt self-conscious, as if, even though she was alone, people might be able to look in on this private moment of hers.
She vowed to make this her last breadstick, putting the Marmite back in the cupboard. She drank a glass of water poured from the jug she kept in the fridge.
She checked her phone, standing in the living room, her bare feet on the old tiles she had restored last summer.
Ian hadn’t texted her. She checked WhatsApp and scrolled to his name. Last seen: 21:05. Five minutes ago. He could have texted. Perhaps he was . . . no. She wouldn’t go there again. This wasn’t then. This was now. That’s what the counselor said they had to say to themselves. He was sorry, after all. If they wanted to move on, they had to actually move on. Ian had seemed especially keen on that approach, in the counseling. Somehow, it had become her fault.
No. She was just in a bad mood tonight. Too much time alone, too many carbs. She would sleep it off.
She went to lock up. She didn’t like locking up when Ian was away. Their old Victorian house seemed to loom larger, somehow. She would never admit it, but she always expected to see a face peering in through the dark glass, as she reached to turn the key.
She took a peek. No face. She was alone.
As she turned the key in the door, she heard it. A strangled shout. “Shut up! Just shut up!” she thought she heard.
Really? she asked herself. Surely not.
Her stomach clenched anyway, the anxiety of being alone. It was Becky, she thought. It seemed to come from the left. Becky was by far her loudest neighbor—since she had complained about the reggae-playing neighbors, anyway. Becky played rap music at weird times; she seemed to work from home. Theresa heard occasional hoots of laughter when her ex-husband, Marc, came over. That was so weird.
They were so friendly, still. She didn’t understand it. Sometimes, she thought her fantasy man might be based on Marc. That openness, the way he looked at Becky, the way they laughed . . . Theresa hadn’t complained yet, about the noise they made, though she might soon.
Maybe he was over there now. She cocked an ear. Maybe they were arguing.
Even if Becky was shouting at something else, would she shout like that if she was totally alone? Theresa thought not. Those sorts of outbursts were for one thing only: sympathy. She listened again.
Was that . . . She could hear something. A faint murmur. She stayed completely still. No. She must have imagined it.
She stepped away from the door, but the keys were still swinging, and she held them so they were silenced.
The noise came again. “Oh, honestly, if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll—”
That was definitely Becky. But that was where it ended. The shouting. The threat hung in the air. Who was it aimed at?
She didn’t hear anything else after that. Only the sound of wind in the trees, a hooting wood pigeon outside, her own breathing.
She didn’t think about that uttered shout for days afterward. Until the police came. And then she remembered it and—oh God. The significance of it. It made goose bumps appear all over her arms and legs, just like when she had been standing in front of her fridge. When that little baby had still been alive, and she could have still stopped it, if she had known.
23
Martha
I am making a scene in the public gallery, but I can’t help it. I knew it would be hard to hear Theresa’s testimony, but I didn’t anticipate this. This huge bolus in the back of my throat, this heaving feeling. My baby daughter’s last moments. Being shouted at. And the phrasing, the swearing: It is undoubtedly Becky, whatever happened afterward. My hands shake as I reach to wipe the tears away.
“So that was the night of baby Layla’s death, but you had another encounter with the defendant and baby, did you not?” Ellen says. “The previous day?”
“Yes, I did. I don’t know the exact time.”
“And what happened then?”
“Becky was just getting out of the car, on her drive. Layla was in the car seat. Becky explained their arrangement to me. Layla was crying.”
“How much?”
“A lot. Enough for me to ask if she had been fed.”
My cheeks heat up. Had she been fed? I can’t even contemplate that. Of course Becky had fed her. My fingernails dig into my palms. She would have. She just would have. Please let her have been feeding Layla properly.
“And what did the defendant say?”
“Oh, she just huffed. She was a bit defensive, you know.”
“But you were concerned enough to ask if the baby had been fed.”
“Yes.”
“And then on this night, when you heard shouts . . .”
“Yes.”
“The defendant sounded . . . frustrated?”
“Yes.”
“Did you consider going over?”
“Well, I didn’t know. I . . . didn’t think. And, anyway, you can’t, can you?”
Ellen shrugs, looking regretful. She adjusts her robes. “I don’t know, Ms. Williams. But that’ll be all from me.” She sits down.
Har
riet rises. “Do you have other neighbors, Theresa?” Her angle is clear, and she is homing in on it like a bird of prey.
“Yes.”
“On the other side?”
“Yes. It’s a row of terraces.”
“How many in the row?”
Theresa looks up, thinking. “Six?”
“So your house is flanked on either side. And then . . .” Harriet pulls out a photograph of the rows of houses.
Our lives have become merely legal evidence. My sister’s house, exhibit. Her neighbors, witnesses.
“. . . turn to page four of your binder, please, jury. Your house,” she says to Theresa, “has three on one side, two on the other.”
“Yes.”
“So are you telling me that, standing inside, and equidistant from each of your neighbors’ living rooms, you are one hundred percent sure that the voice you heard was the defendant’s? Despite these five other houses?”
“Yes.”
“Even though there is both a house on your left and your right. At equal distance?”
“Yes.”
“One hundred percent.”
“Well, I can’t be one hundred percent because I didn’t see her, but—”
“Yes,” Harriet says, cutting her off. “So it might easily have been other neighbors. Somebody outside. It’s a city. People must walk by all the time—do they?”
Theresa says nothing, looking confused. “Do people walk by all the time?” Harriet says again.
“Often, yes. They do.”
“Is it fair to say that you know the defendant better than your other neighbors?”
“Oh, yes,” Theresa says. “A lot better. I would know her—”
Theresa walks right into the trap.
Harriet opens her mouth to speak. “And so you’re more likely, aren’t you, to assume that the voice you’re hearing is that of the person you know best? When really it could have been anybody . . . a stranger. Another neighbor. A neighbor’s friend?”
“Maybe,” Theresa says, battered on the witness stand.
How clever they are, I find myself thinking, these lawyers.
How they can take something that is virtually certain, and turn it inside out, so it becomes unformed and unsure of itself. Turning a truth into a mess, into lies and falsehoods and incorrect memories. A beam of pure white light, refracted into a complicated rainbow.
I am certain Theresa did hear Becky, painful as it is for me to admit it. They are her speech patterns, peppered with her swear words. She sounds just like that when she is . . . when she is angry.
“Did the anonymous shout sound— How did it sound to you?”
“Angry.”
“In its words or its tone?”
Theresa looks up at the lights, which makes me look, too: strip lights, garish ones. She takes a while before answering. “Both,” she says.
“So then,” Harriet says, “I’m afraid I have to ask . . . you knew the defendant had a babysitting arrangement with the mother of Layla?”
“Yes.”
“And you were struck by the menace in her voice—if, indeed, it was even her—which was, conceivably, directed at the baby.”
“Yes.”
“And yet, what did you do? You did nothing.”
“No,” Theresa says softly.
“So I’m inclined to wonder, Ms. Williams, whether you really were as worried as you say. Perhaps, really, you thought this was quite usual. A woman frustrated at bedtime by her child. We have all been there, have we not? Perhaps, now, with hindsight, you remember it differently. Incorrectly.”
I study Theresa. She isn’t looking at Harriet. Instead, she is looking down at her hands, which rest on the wood of the witness stand.
“Maybe,” Theresa says. “Yes.”
I look down at my hands, folded neatly in my lap. Half-moon-shaped dents are at the center of my palms. Shouting at bedtime. I have been there. I certainly have. I can’t bring myself to look up at Becky, or across at Scott. They have both seen the worst of me. I know Becky will be looking at me, wondering if I have done as she did. Of course I’ve felt angry. Of course I’ve shouted.
What I once said to Scott keeps returning to my mind.
It was two and a half weeks after Layla was born.
Labor had been . . . God. Like something else entirely. Almost medieval. I remember every moment of it. There is actually a place where you can go where pain is unbelievable. And everybody is casual about it, and will leave you in that state for hours, will tell you to pull yourself together and push, after thirty hours of it. There are laws about hurting people’s feelings in the workplace, but there are no laws about this, this brute force, forceps, a cold hand, reaching unexpectedly and urgently right up inside me.
After nineteen hours of contractions, I was one centimeter dilated. I went in, but they sent me away again. At home, I could only sit in one position: on the floor, with my left leg cocked on the bed. After labor I had hip pain for almost as long as the bleeding lasted.
The contractions came and then they went but they would surely come again, and perhaps they would never end, I thought, as I stared at the wall. The problem was I had been ambivalent. So on the fence that I could have teetered either way. My only evidence for going forth and procreating had been that most people seemed to rather enjoy it—in a kind of grim in the trenches way, admittedly—and that most people had more than one child. Never mind that I lacked the urge and the hormones and, seemingly, the inner grit. Never mind all that.
After thirty hours, she was born, by forceps, and at that moment, with the metal inside me, I no longer cared. Cut me open, I thought. Kill me.
They handed her to me, but I don’t remember it. After an hour, a nurse took me to the toilet to wee and brush my teeth. She combed my hair for me. While I was in there, they got a cleaner to come in and mop the floor. They mopped the blood away, the water turning burgundy in the bucket that I saw as I emerged from the toilet.
Ten o’clock at night came, and Scott had to leave. (“Visiting hours are over,” a bewildered-looking nurse said to me.) And there I was, alone in the hospital bed, with my daughter—my daughter!—to my right. And the decision—that tiny decision, it seemed to me—to ditch the pill and to tip ever so slowly onto the other side of the fence and drift slowly downward loomed so large it almost seemed to sit inside the room with me.
It got easier, of course. The disorientation faded. Once I got home and I’d had a bath and a cup of coffee, it was all right. But what helped bring me back from the medieval world, as I called it, was seeing Becky, who said, “I didn’t want to have to tell you about the labor bit—but Jesus!” Classic Becky. “You’re doing all right, though, here?” she said, as though she knew. Here. The new world I inhabited. It was different. I was forever changed. And I was glad she was there with me. Here.
And then the love came. Like my milk, it took a few days, but it arrived, as though somebody had taken my soul and replaced it with something much bigger, much more inclusive.
Scott had taken two weeks off work, and we spent them sequestered together. Days blended into nights. He made sure he was awake every minute that I was. I protested, but I loved the company. Somebody to hand Layla to while I made toast for the two of us. Somebody who got it, whose bones ached, too, with tiredness. After a week or so, we were both—remarkably—in bed, Layla asleep in her Moses basket across the room, and he pulled me toward him. It had been like returning home after a long stint away. Here we were: on the other side of it.
Scott went back to work, though, and by then the love for Layla was no longer new. The novelty of changing nappies had worn off, too. I was in the en suite, sitting on the floor. I don’t know why I was in there. I was in a rare petulant mood where I wanted to demonstrate how unhappy I was, and how shocked I was, and how I didn’t realize it could be this w
ay. I chose to do so by sitting on the bathroom floor, five minutes before Scott was due home.
He arrived, shirtsleeves rolled up, and there I was with Layla. Screaming Layla.
The floor of the en suite was dusty and I think it was making Layla snuffle and sneeze. She had been crying for over two hours.
“She’s been like this all day,” I said.
Scott made a funny kind of gesture. A sort of what can you do? Meant well, of course, but I didn’t take it that way.
“I wish we’d never had her,” I said spitefully.
Scott didn’t react. He stopped looking at me, looking instead down at the sink. He wiped away a smidgen of yet more dirt, then inspected it on the end of his finger. He was trying to distract himself. “Give her to me,” he said.
“I don’t wish we hadn’t had a baby,” I said.
“Right?” he said.
“I wish we hadn’t had her,” I said. “Layla.” It came from a nasty, hollow place inside of me. It was a statement meant to hurt him. To worry him. So that he would help me more. After that blissful paternity leave, his career had returned to how it had always been—as if he’d merely gone to Italy for two weeks, not changed his life forever—while mine floundered, calls from assistants unanswered for days as I ran on the treadmill of feeding, changing, settling Layla to sleep. Over and over. When one finished, the next began.
He took a step back. His eyebrows drew together in surprise. “What?” he said, though I’m sure he didn’t want me to say it again.
“I can’t think of a worse baby to have,” I said. I stood up and handed her to him. Even as I did so, my arms missed the weight of her: the paradox of motherhood.
He never mentioned it again, and neither did I. But sometimes, in the dark days that followed her death and Becky’s arrest, I wonder what he really thought then, and what he thinks now, too. Motherhood was such a tangled knot, and I had only just begun unpicking it. Most people had years to unspool it, to inspect it. To come to terms with life changing for the worst, and the better, all at once. To understand that life was much harder, but strangely more fulfilling, because I had split my life in two—into mine and Layla’s.
The Good Sister Page 13
