The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  Simon nods once, then laughs. “I think you’re set,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Laura and I meet at the Gondola after her first day at work. Her hair has caught the sun during the heat wave. Her body, her face, they have the relics of the hippie she used to be—I can see it in her casual body language, in the earring I know to be hiding halfway up her ear, underneath her hair, but most of the traits have been bleached out, as if they’ve been left out in the sunlight.

  She knows about Reuben and is stirring her drink thoughtfully. We’re sitting outside, the air humid and thick-feeling, like a winter duvet over our shoulders.

  “I’ve spent the day freezing,” she says. “Offices overdo it in heat waves.”

  “Do they?” I say vaguely.

  We pause. It’s awkward. It has never been awkward.

  “How’s Tabitha?” I say, sounding spiteful.

  Laura shrugs. “She’s well.” She looks at me. “You’re sad about it.”

  “Oh, I’m not. I know,” I say. “We couldn’t be—we couldn’t be friends. Not properly. While I was inside.”

  “No.”

  “But it seemed like you—well, maybe like you were a bit ashamed. Like you wanted to move on.”

  Laura exhales through her nose. “It was hard, Jo. You know? It was tough.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry that it was, but it was, for me. It felt like everything had changed.”

  “It did.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She holds up her hands, palms to me. She’s still wearing all her rings. “There’s no excuse. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t a good enough friend.”

  “It is kind of unprecedented,” I say. “Prison. In the—in the circles we move in.”

  “You’re telling me,” she says with a little laugh. “We all—I don’t know. We all struggled. It was a big adjustment, for everyone.”

  “I know,” I say quietly. I tilt my face to the sun again. “I’m glad we’re here and not there.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, holding my gaze, her expression sincere.

  “Let’s moan about Reuben instead,” I say, thinking, Come on, Joanna. Be an adult. Forgive. Alan would say I ought to. And maybe I can. Reuben wasn’t perfect. Laura wasn’t perfect. And I certainly wasn’t perfect.

  Laura pauses for a moment. “Reuben,” she says. “Maybe you actually broke up two years ago.”

  “What? What, about what he did?”

  She holds up a hand and says, “Did it feel like you were together? Last year?”

  I think of Reuben’s aged face as he shouted at me two nights previously. I think of the empty feeling I carried around with me in prison. I think of Reuben’s serious expression, across the table in the visitors’ center. How he came at all the times he could but never really said anything.

  “Nothing in prison feels very real,” I say.

  Nothing could be real. Those moments in the visitors’ center were so weak, as though real life had been distilled and distilled, over and over, ending up with a homeopathic remedy: take two drops for a relationship. One for a friendship. Three for a normal Christmas dinner. Everything was displaced from reality to such an extent that it was hard to remember if reality continued beyond the prison walls.

  “The reason I ask,” Laura says, bobbing the straw up and down in her drink, just like she did that Friday night, “is because I think maybe he’s just reacting how he wanted to two years ago. Now.”

  “He shopped me,” I say.

  “He’s a child.” She nods.

  “I have never felt so betrayed. In all my life.”

  “I think he’s very angry with you. But he has been . . . contrite. You know? He missed you so badly. He sang this song, in the jazz club. He cried during it.”

  “You went to see?”

  She nods. “He had—he had hardly anybody, Jo. Without you.”

  “What was the song?”

  “It was all about your life together, I think. There weren’t many lyrics. But it was called ‘Our Blackboard.’”

  My eyes fill with tears. “Well,” I say thickly. “You can’t always have what you want.”

  She squints up at the sun. The canal is still in the heat, the flower-covered barges looking like ornaments. “I miss my barge,” she says.

  “You didn’t have to give it all up. The whole hog. Give up the art. Get the corporate job. The house in suburbia.”

  “I did,” she says quickly. “It . . . legitimized it. For me. I have to buy into it. It has to be so.”

  “A house. A Volvo. Three kids.”

  “Maybe,” she says, spreading her hands wide.

  I feel a wave of jealousy. Reuben and I would have been brilliant parents. I know we would. I would have taught our kids about imagination, and people, and the power of dreaming. He would’ve taught them about politics and art and classics and economics. They would’ve been ours. Little socialists, no doubt.

  “What I meant was that the way he reacted came from . . . who he was,” she says.

  “Reuben?”

  “Yeah. He’s an idealist. Isn’t he?”

  “Of course.”

  “But maybe he hasn’t really grown up. We’re all idealistic in our twenties.”

  “He’s the most mature person I know.”

  “Is he, though?” She looks across at me, playing with a splinter in the wooden table. “Is that true?”

  The Gondola seems so completely different in the summer to how it was that winter, years ago. Almost like the peculiar displaced feeling you get when you go to view a house, and then you move in, and it seems utterly different in ways you can’t describe or justify.

  I didn’t even know it had a beer garden. I can just about see inside, through an old-fashioned window, to the bar. It’s smaller than I remember. Insignificant.

  “Maturity is flexibility,” she says. “Look at me. I wanted to be an artist. It didn’t work out. That’s life. It’s not perfect—and people aren’t perfect. I think he’s childishly angry with you.”

  “Yeah.” I shrug. “He probably is childish. He—he robbed me, Laura.”

  “I know,” she says, nodding rapidly. “I know. But he did miss you.”

  “I know that, too.”

  It’s true. I know both things, and both things are true. Reuben is good and bad, all at once. So is Laura. And so am I.

  I look down into my lap, away from the window. “Let’s not talk about him,” I say with a wan smile.

  Her phone lights up. I can see it’s Tabitha. She doesn’t look. She places it in her handbag. Later on, she texts me. Just a funny meme. I send one back.

  * * *

  —

  Wilf asks if I want to go and see Mum and Dad at the end of June. “I’m going next week,” he says.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  The new relationship, forged in prison, feels too delicate to bring out into the open yet, like a loaf of bread only just beginning to slowly prove.

  We’re walking side by side to a restaurant in Covent Garden. It’s almost empty, the cobbled streets speckled with puddles. Everyone’s gone inside, the early summer already ended. A couple of smokers stand underneath a dripping awning. Wilf waves at one of them—a colleague, he tells me.

  “Doesn’t really matter either way,” Wilf says. “You can do what you like.”

  “I might come,” I say tentatively.

  “Good,” Wilf says, linking his arm through mine as we walk. “I’ve been meaning to show you something,” he says.

  “What?”

  He gets his phone out. “You probably don’t even want to know now,” he says. “But I thought I would . . .”

  I take the phone from him. They’re texts. Texts between Reuben and him.

  How was sh
e today? Reuben has said. Wilf fills him in, and he asks again, two days later.

  And then, one of the latest texts. They stopped when I got out. It’s too hard to go, Reuben’s written. I miss her too much.

  Wilf shrugs. “He did really miss you,” he says.

  “I know.”

  He puts an arm around me.

  And it’s not a fair trade-off, and it’s not a consolation prize, and I may have lost Reuben, but if I hadn’t handed myself in, I wouldn’t have Wilf. And that seems, somehow, to be right. Just.

  41

  CONCEAL

  It’s time.

  I remember his address. Of course I do. I’ve never been, but he spoke about it all the time. Ed was one of those people who would tell you all aspects of his life: his uncle who liked fishing; that he was struggling to find a table to fit in his round dining room; how well his garden plants were blooming. He used to refer to his house by name—Oakhalls—as though it was a person.

  Oakhalls, Chiswick. It was easy to find. I’m surprised I’ve never been, when I come across it. It’s a house to have gatherings in, with a trellis up one side, the wide, arched doorway framed with flowers. It’s enormous. Somehow, in all his sharing, he had never quite conveyed to me how nice it was. Set back from the road, with a white frontage—in Chiswick. It must be worth more than a million pounds. They bought well, he would say—I can see it now—with a wave of his hand.

  It’s only just after eight o’clock in the evening, but the street feels quiet and isolated, as though it will be antisocial to ring the bell. I do it anyway, although my hands are shaking.

  It’s time. I’m ready. I take a deep breath as I see a shadowy form moving beyond the frosted glass, magnified and then remagnified, refracted over and over.

  A woman opens the door. His wife. I recognize her immediately from the hundreds of iPhone photographs Ed showed me every Monday. Of barbecues and days out ice-skating and visits to National Trust properties. She probably liked me, once, I think, as I study her face. There’s recognition. A dawning, eyebrows up, an almost-smile.

  “Is Ed around? Sorry to call so late,” I say.

  I wonder at my own politeness, considering what I am about to do. I’m breathless. I’m always breathless, but it’s particularly bad right now. The nerves, I suppose. It’s as if my body slowly disintegrated, during the accident. And, even though I’m better now, the scans clear, all fixed, put together again, it’s like I am cracked, fractured, less able than I was to sustain all the things a body should be able to rely on: nerves, a quick run for a bus, adrenaline.

  “Yes,” she says.

  She’s wearing a skirt that touches the floor and a long necklace, which clunks like a wooden wind chime as she steps aside. I marvel at these people who do not wear pajamas on Friday nights in their own homes. Perhaps they dress for dinner. Ed was always oddly formal, in some ways, eating leftover pasta salad with a knife and fork brought from home on the counter of the library bus every lunchtime, wearing beige pullovers and matching shirts underneath.

  Ed appears behind her, and I’m shocked by how much he’s aged. By how much everybody seems to have aged. He’s much more tanned—a recent holiday?—and has lost absolutely all his hair, his bald head covered in liver spots. He’s more stooped, too; I notice a prominent hump, see the curvature of his spine. He is . . . he’s old, I realize with a start. My Ed.

  “Joanna,” he says. Or rather, he doesn’t say it; he mouths it. Joanna. His lips form the o and then the a of my name.

  “Ed,” I say simply.

  His wife steps aside and—to my surprise—he comes out the front and shuts the door behind him, using a hand behind his back. He knows, and she knows, and they all know, I find myself thinking—the thought as automatic as my own heartbeat. But it doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter anymore. I have to keep reminding myself.

  I stand awkwardly outside his front door while he stares up at me. He’s shorter than he was. It’s something more than his hunched form. He has lessened, somehow.

  “I . . .” I say.

  He stares dispassionately at me, his eyes huge behind his glasses, saying nothing. He’s making it hard for me. I contacted everybody except Ed after I left. I didn’t contact Ed once, not even when I needed a reference. Even though he had been a friendly colleague for six years. Even though he was Ed. I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough.

  “Joanna,” he says again.

  I scrutinize his face, trying to tell.

  He shrugs helplessly, looking up at me. “I . . .” He holds his hands out, then shrugs again. Smiling and looking sad.

  “You left,” he says eventually.

  “Yes.”

  He stares at me for a long time. Two, three minutes. His eyes are roving over my features. “I never thought you’d leave,” he says softly.

  His dark brown eyes are on mine, and our gaze is speaking a thousand words that we can’t verbalize.

  “Did you . . .” I start to say, but the words dry up in my mouth, like an outgoing tide that cannot reach the same spot on the shore. I am reaching, and reaching, but after two years, three in December, countless losses, an accident, I cannot bring myself to say it. I can’t articulate it. It is as if my crime has moved to a sad, unspeakable, black part of my soul. The shame and the noise and the panic would be too much.

  He reaches for me then, and I see, after the shock and the sadness my rejection must have caused him, underneath all that is sympathy. Of course. Of course he’s sympathetic. He’s Ed. I was so certain I knew how the people in my life would react that I didn’t bother even trying to tell them.

  He meets my eyes now, and he knows. I grasp it so fully, it’s as though the knowledge has materialized, fully formed, on his circular driveway in front of us. It’s not the hazy paranoia of two years ago. It is knowledge. I think that perhaps he didn’t know then, but he does now, somehow.

  He steps toward me, and I back away, a horse about to bolt with fear. He reaches a hand out to touch my arm, then stops, his fingers steady in midair. He’s wondering what to say, I see, as he scrutinizes me.

  “You know,” I say.

  He nods, once. Less a nod and more a certain, downward confirmation. I can’t say another word.

  “I figured it out,” he says. “I asked some questions after you left in haste. After you behaved so strangely on that day in the office. I asked some questions, and I pieced it all together. Nobody else knows,” he adds.

  I’m grateful for that. It spreads through my bones like the sun on the first hot day of the year, warming me.

  “The clothes.”

  “I didn’t tell Reuben anything. All he knows is that you dumped your clothes. And that you lied about Wilf, of course.”

  “I can’t . . . I’ve come back to do some things but I . . . I can’t stay here,” I say, still reeling from the shock of his admission.

  He nods again, not saying anything, just looking up at me sadly. A letter’s sticking out of the top of a wooden box fixed to the side of his house. The envelope looks dry, parched in the heat. I focus on it, not looking at him, not able to.

  “Thank you,” I say to him.

  He nods, once, in acknowledgment.

  He kept my secret for me. How can I ever truly thank him?

  “She stopped coming to the library,” he says softly.

  His voice is huskier than it used to be. Or perhaps he is just upset, speaking quietly to me, outside his house, so his wife doesn’t hear, so that she doesn’t know our secret, too. Once again, I find myself wondering what happened that night I left him in our offices. I went home and dumped Reuben, as though he was a dress that had to be returned because I needed the money badly, looking for short-term solutions to my problems. But what did Ed do that day? I wonder. And what did he do when he heard about me?

  “Did she?” I say, ready to face things.
To stop avoiding them. “When did you last see her?”

  “That time with you,” Ed says with his Ed-like laugh. He brings a hand self-consciously to his mouth and covers his lips, then exhales again, another little laugh. “She never came back. And the police stopped investigating.”

  “Oh,” I say quietly. “I’m here to . . . that’s why I’m back.”

  Ed shrugs, not looking at me.

  Nobody ever came for me. He never told anybody. I wonder how much of it he had to cover up. Did he ever look at the CCTV?

  “Are you really?” he says. He places his hand on the doorknob, and I see it’s my time to go. He may know, he may have kept my secret, but the friendship’s over: Of course it is. “Does it matter? Now?” he says sadly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s over, Jo,” he says. “You’ve . . . you have suffered. Haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Who would it help?”

  I look down at my feet. It’s as though he knows about my novel. It’s all ready. It’s all ready to go. The book I have written about a woman who commits a crime but chooses to hand herself in, and all about the man she pushed and who he was and what he liked. It’s all ready, so that I would be ready. But I’m not so sure I am now. The reasons for handing myself in that seemed so clear this morning are hazy now.

  “I’m sorry,” he says to me. “I’m sorry it’s this way.”

  He opens his door with a loud click.

  I look at him for one last time. Of course it is this way. I’m a killer. He is forced to live with my secret—I wonder if the animal’s on his chest, too. And I left him with it as I bolted. Abandoned the scene.

  “Me, too,” I say. I turn away from him, momentarily not feeling the guilt or the shame or the paranoia or the panic, but just the sadness. That I was there. That it happened. That I made it happen, and how I acted afterward.