The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  * * *

  —

  Mum called,” I say.

  I am sitting by the breakfast bar while Reuben chops an onion. How many thousands of onions have I watched him chop, sauté, serve? I usually love it. The warmth of it. The distraction of the cooking. The smells and the creativity and his flair, that piano-playing flair he sometimes demonstrates. It’s one of the many reasons we won’t move: we love the closeness, the proximity our tiny flat affords.

  He doesn’t answer. This is his way. He lets me talk, if I want to. Or not, if I don’t.

  “The landline,” I say.

  Reuben glances up, catches my eye, smiles briefly. “Of course.”

  She always telephones the landline. I wish she would get the hang of emails, of texts, so that I could politely ignore them, or that she would call my mobile so that I could screen it, but she never does. I answered unthinkingly, hoping it was good news—from the police, from my lawyer, from the victim, saying he wanted to drop the charges—but it was her.

  “She didn’t apologize. But she invited us again, this weekend.”

  He looks up at me at this. “Why would we go back to their house when they were rude to us?”

  “Because they’re my family. I might need them,” I say uselessly, my mind spiraling over past news stories I have ignored but whose details have entered my psyche somehow. Alienated prisoners, released with nowhere to go. Not just because the probation system has failed them, I bet, but because their families have, too. I can’t let it happen.

  “You don’t need them,” he says. “Bunch of twats.”

  “I think she understands—a little bit.”

  “She’s a woman,” Reuben says, nodding. He gets a second onion out of the bag.

  I am sure he ordinarily wouldn’t, if he weren’t angry. It’ll be too strong, whatever he’s cooking. An onion husk skitters to the floor, and he picks it up and puts it in the bin, then bends down and picks up a tiny, almost invisible piece and bins that, too.

  “Don’t be such a misanthrope,” I say. It comes from nowhere.

  “I am a misanthrope.” He shrugs as he says it, the knife jarring in his grip.

  Outside it’s sleeting. We have a round window in our kitchen. When Reuben’s not around I pretend our flat is a ship, narrate the shipping forecast as the kettle boils. I love to watch the weather through it, that portal. In the summer, the outside world looks like a terrarium, and I pretend I am a lizard.

  He looks at me now and adds, “Don’t go if you don’t want to. Do what you want.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I say, though I don’t explain. Things are simple in his world. Things that are right are right, and things that are wrong are wrong. Nothing is ever tangled. I look up at him as he tops and tails the onion.

  He looks tired as he rubs his beard. On another day—in another life—I would have poked fun at that orange beard, said he looked like he’d been eating too many carrots. He would have smiled his small smile, shot me a mock-warning look.

  “Who have you told now?” he says, sidestepping my irrationality like it is a smear on the pavement he wishes to avoid.

  I am grateful for it, though it seems distasteful somehow, too. His words remind me of a very specific period of my life, when I was seventeen.

  Who shall we tell? Dad said when I got the letter. It was our favorite thing to do. He came up to my bedroom with the cordless home phone and his address book and we went through every contact he had. Joanna’s got into Oxford, he said, over and over again. It was nice, that night, that one tiny night in my teenage years that’s come to define them.

  I look at Reuben now, his gaze wary, his body language braced. “Laura,” I say. “That’s all.”

  He nods, his mouth turned slightly down, his eyes on me.

  He understands, I think. My shame.

  “What else did you do today?” he says, making small talk, so unlike him.

  He’s moving the conversation along like it is a reluctant child who doesn’t want to go to school, who’s being hurried along against their will.

  “Went to the police station. That’s about it. It takes ages.”

  His expression changes. It’s just a flash, but I see it. Judgment.

  You know how he can be.

  I turn away from him, unable to look at that expression anymore. For the next six months I will have to check in. After we go out for brunch on a Sunday. Instead of work. It is where I will go every single day. Through winter colds and flu and vomiting bugs. And he will know about it.

  I won’t be able to get up at eleven in the morning and have a shared bath. It has become the linchpin of my day.

  I go and sit in Reuben’s office, opening my laptop uselessly. It springs to life, and there’s an application for an arts grant open on it that I evidently couldn’t even finish. I was going to try to write a literary fiction novel. I had even opened Word, written a “1” at the top of a blank page, and nothing more. It’s embarrassing, and I shut the laptop again, turning in the chair and looking at the spare bed. I can hear Reuben in the kitchen, and then I can hear him coming along the hallway to me.

  “Fancy a walk?” he says. “While things cook?”

  I catch his eye through the slice in the hinge of the door. One of his green eyes is visible, half an eyebrow, but nothing more.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s freezing,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  He opens the door. “Got your thirty coat?” He looks past me at the laptop.

  He has probably seen the arts grant. We use the same laptop. But he would never say, would never want to embarrass me, says he’s happy if I simply do sudoku for the rest of my life if I want to.

  “Forensics have it,” I say. The coat he bought me for my birthday. That beautiful coat.

  He winces, like he’s made an awkward faux pas at some work event, not offended his wife of two years, his partner of seven. “Sorry,” he says, shifting imperceptibly away from me.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I say, trying to reach out to him.

  I step toward him, but he steps back farther. His eyes are wary as they meet mine, his head tilted back slightly. I wonder if he fears me, too. If everybody does. If they are all secretly wondering what else I am capable of.

  Suddenly, there in the spare room, I want to feel his skin on mine. His hands around the back of my waist in their protective way. His warm cheek against mine. His soft, full lips—I love those lips, the way he speaks right before he kisses me, sometimes, and it’s as if the gravelly, quiet words are just for me, breathing his air out into my mouth. I step toward him, placing a hand on his arm, wanting him to step forward, open his arms, his body, and hold me tight despite everything. For him to love me in spite of myself.

  And he does hold me. But before that, there’s just a beat. It’s hardly noticeable, but I spot it. He hesitates. He doesn’t want to. But he weighs up his options, and he knows that he should.

  His body feels stiff against mine. Unimpressed. Unyielding. Conditional.

  When he’s holding me, I feel his head moving. I can see it, too, in the mirror that hangs above the bed—the mirror I bought when I read it would make the room look much bigger, when I wanted to do up the spare room in a minimalist Scandi style after reading a spread in Elle about it.

  “What’s up?” I say.

  “Nothing,” he says predictably. “Nothing.”

  15

  CONCEAL

  I am 122 pounds.

  I have started weighing myself regularly, watching with a strange fascination as the secrets build up inside me and the weight falls off. I stop looking at the numbers and go to work, eventually.

  It should be my dream job, being a librarian. I have loved reading forever—there is always a curled-up paperback on my bedside table—but I have always wanted something . . . more.
Something more than books and checking people’s fines and remembering to fill the bus up with petrol at the end of the day. Loving books isn’t enough.

  I have driven to work. The clothes are back in my car, transferred to the boot. I have decided I want to hide them in the library’s offices.

  The coat. Scarf. Gloves. I have decided I am going to put them into the lost property, like laundering money through an otherwise clean system. Nobody checks the lost property; Daisy just bins it annually, every summer, without looking. As long as I bury them deep, nobody will know. My coat is warm, with its filling, but isn’t distinctive looking, and if they ask me if it’s mine, I will deny it. None of them has ever seen the shoes, so it doesn’t matter that they are distinctive. They were brand-new. Are unconnected to me. So they’ll be thrown away eventually and, until then—well. I know exactly where they are, but they are not in my house, and not discoverable by someone with the ability to connect them to me. But I can keep an eye on them. I do not have to worry about them being discovered by a stranger, uncovered, found by the police: They are hidden in plain sight.

  The winter is rushing by, but the animal on my chest isn’t diminishing. If anything, it is growing in size. Maturing. Becoming the biggest animal in the world. A blue whale on my chest.

  It is the shortest day of the year, which I would be pleased about if it wasn’t also the longest night. The shortest day would be welcome, gone in a few seconds, and the next, and the next, too.

  December’s always been a good month for me, and December 21 a good date in particular. Don’t we all have lucky dates? As each year wheels around, I spot them.

  Good things seemed to happen time and time again. On December 21, I passed my driving test—a sweaty, gung-ho girl on my first attempt. It was when I was good, back then. I was the straight-A student. Everybody knew me; I was off to Oxford the next year. I played Sandy in Grease at school, won the swimming competition, was captain of the hockey team. I was an all-rounder. Now I am a jack of all trades, but a master of none. Everyone’s interests seem to have narrowed to one, except mine. Mine have widened, dispersed, to almost nothing. I do nothing. I am nothing.

  And then, on December 21, almost a decade later, Reuben proposed. I’m glad it was after all that, and after Oxford, that Reuben asked me to marry him in my second guise and not my first. That his love seemed—to me—to be unconditional.

  And now here we are, and the wheel has turned again, and everything is different.

  It’s sleeting, hardly daylight, and the traffic is slow moving. It takes us longer than usual to get to Brentford. Sometimes, when traffic is bad, I pretend I am a celebrity in a slow-moving convoy. Reuben thinks it’s ridiculous; Ed doesn’t know.

  * * *

  —

  It’s 11:03 A.M. when it happens. We’ve just pulled into our stop and there’s somebody already waiting. A tall woman holding a little boy’s hand. He has floppy dark hair, a turned-up nose. Plump cheeks, like a hamster. She’s wearing bright green trainers and a black leather jacket that’s spattered with sleet.

  I think I know immediately, but I pretend not to, organizing library cards in their filing boxes, ignoring it. Ed opens the door, letting in a blur of cold December air. And then they’re here, on the bus, and I can’t ignore it any longer.

  “All right,” she says, clambering up the stairs, the boy behind her. She has long, angular legs, like a grasshopper, and takes the steps two at a time.

  I am standing against the counter, listening to the sleety rain on the skylight. Deliberately looking up. Up, up, away from her. When I glance back, she’s looking at the boy, who’s standing on the top step, holding his tiny hand, palm up, to feel the flakes on it. Slightly impatiently, she reaches out and grabs him, like pulling on a dog’s lead when it wants to stay and sniff the grass.

  The child joins her, and when she turns her face to me, I have to acknowledge it. Those dark eyes. That mole. Her grief, worn like a layer of foundation slicked across her skin. Underneath her eyes. Across her forehead, which is furrowed, more lined than before.

  And, as if my body remembers, too, it’s as though there is a Catherine wheel of fire in my stomach. It churns so much I feel as though I might vomit, but it also creates a heat of its own, radiating outward. Sweat forms in strange places. The small of my back. My upper lip. My sides, trickling down from my armpits in rivulets. She is here for me. It is over.

  Ayesha. The surviving relative of the man I killed. And a child. Whose child?

  * * *

  —

  Hi,” Ed says, stepping toward her. He glances at me.

  It’s only a momentary look, but I know what it means. He’s wondering why I am standing, stock-still, on the bus, instead of serving our only customer. He is probably wondering why I am staring so intently at her. Perhaps he’s caught my expression. He is very perceptive. Spends his time, like me, people watching. We used to discuss people together. Before.

  I don’t care what he thinks. I have to get off the bus. Away from her. Out into the cold air again.

  “I’ve been sick, and I’m going to be sick again,” I say in an undertone to Ed, which isn’t too far from the truth.

  “Um,” Ed says, dithering. A book of mindfulness is splayed open on the counter behind us, which he’s been reading during the quiet stops—now that I don’t talk to him, I suppose. “Do you need to go outside?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  I clamber down the steps and out into the cold. What’s she doing here? Who’s the boy? My breath clouds up the wintry morning air. Sleet pours down, as cold as snow but as fast and needle sharp as rain. I’m cold, but I don’t care.

  I can hear Ed serving her. I cock my head, trying to listen.

  She’s trying to get the boy—Bilal—into reading. They’ve had some family problems recently, she explains in her South London accent. I’d forgotten how husky her voice is. “Very recently,” she adds as I listen. “Only two weeks ago, but it’s never too soon to try new things, is it? Maybe reading picture books will help him to—forget?”

  Ed is silent as she talks, which is his way.

  “So you’d like picture books?” Ed eventually asks, mildly. His voice is more muffled than it should be. He’ll be squatting down, his knees clicking, as he tries to find the right age books for Bilal. I’d deal with them much better than Ed is doing. For all his compassion, his calm silence is unnerving. I’d find out what Bilal liked. Adventure. Colorful picture books. Escapism.

  “My brother was—well. We don’t know what happened,” she says. “Bilal wants—his uncle was—I think he should be . . . aren’t books supposed to be a great distraction?”

  Blood pounds in my head. Bilal’s uncle. Guilt and regret hit me like a first frost. I feel myself withering underneath it. I think of all the things he might miss out on, with the uncle he’ll never really know. The sharing of a cheese platter late at night while they watch The Godfather together. Phone calls about things he couldn’t tell his parents. Those things. Those adult, uncle-nephew things. I can picture the scenes so vividly, they may as well be playing out in front of me. Poor Bilal, I think, my back to them as I look out across Brentford, feeling sick and repulsive.

  “Distraction sounds good to me,” Ed says.

  “Yes,” she says softly, so quietly I can barely hear it.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps she is not here for me. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Maybe it really is simply about books, and the things they can do for people. I would turn to a library in grief, in tragedy. Why not her?

  To my frustration, Ed says nothing back to Ayesha. Couldn’t he console her, where I can’t? But then, this is not Ed’s way. How many times has he sat silently, munching on Pick ’n’ Mix, back when I have had problems, and said nothing? (He loves sweets and is one of those people whose preferences seem to dominate, and so all we ever eat on the bus is pear drops and bonbons and foam
bananas.) Hundreds of times. He just listens, does Ed. Without judgment, and with compassion. I am never usually irritated by it.

  I keep breathing in the winter air until I hear them coming down the steps. Bilal’s clutching two picture books. Ayesha has a few more. She glances at me, just briefly, but I see it. Ed waves them off, then perches on the top step where Bilal had stood, catching flakes of sleet, looking at me carefully.

  I avoid his gaze, walking up the stairs and squeezing past him. My bad hand brushes the doorframe, and I wince in pain. Ed leaves it. He’ll choose his moment. He tilts his head back, and I see his huge, thick glasses blanch white as they catch the reflection of the skylight. We are both silent for a moment.

  And then, suddenly, she has appeared again, right at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me, her nose scrunched.

  “Hey,” she says, her tone upbeat, her voice higher than usual, for just a second.

  I freeze, knowing almost before it happens what’s to come.

  “How’s your brother doing?” she says.

  Ed looks at us, his head moving left and right, from her to me and back again.

  “I thought it was you, when I saw you—when we were coming out,” she adds.

  “Oh,” I say, wondering if I can deny it.

  I had my scarf around my hair in the mosque. Perhaps I could get away with pretending not to know her. No. I can’t. She hasn’t asked if I’m the same person: She knows. I can’t lie. I won’t get away with it. The sweat is back, the heaviness on my chest, and I shift, gulping as I loosen my scarf. The same scarf. Stupid Joanna. Why did I go? How could I have been so foolish?

  “My brother,” I say.

  She’s nodding encouragingly, a faint frown crossing her features. She wishes she hadn’t asked. She has embarrassed me. And that’s what stops me from lying—trying, and failing, to be good. It’s not fair to pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. It is strange, this new world I inhabit with its contradictory rules.