Truly Madly Guilty

by Liane Moriarty

  'Oliver is a freaking hero,' she said out loud, even though she knew Vid probably didn't need to hear any more about Oliver's freaking heroism.

  'He is a good man,' said Vid patiently. He yawned. 'We should have them over.' He said it automatically and now he must surely be lying there thinking of the last time they'd had them over.

  'Hey, I know! Let's have them over for a barbeque!' said Tiffany. 'Great idea! Wait, haven't they got some really nice friends? Isn't one of them a cellist?'

  'That's not funny,' said Vid, and he sounded profoundly sad. 'That's not even a little bit funny.'

  'Sorry,' said Tiffany. 'Sick joke.'

  'For coffee?' said Vid sadly. 'We can have Erika and Oliver over for coffee, can't we?'

  'Go to sleep,' said Tiffany.

  'Yes, boss,' said Vid, and within seconds she heard his breathing slow. He could go to sleep in an instant, even on those nights when she knew he was upset or angry or worried about something. Nothing ever affected that man's sleep or his appetite.

  'Wake up,' she whispered, but if she woke him he would keep talking and he'd been up since five that morning with the aquatic centre project. One of his boys had got sick and he was worried he'd underquoted. The man needed his sleep.

  She turned on her side and tried to calmly sort her way through all the things that were churning through her mind.

  Number one. Finding Harry's body today. Not a nice experience, but get over it. Harry was probably happy to be dead. He seemed like a man who was done with living. So move right along.

  Number two. Dakota. Everyone - Vid, Dakota's teacher, Tiffany's sisters - all said that Dakota was fine. It was all in Tiffany's head. Maybe it was. She would continue to monitor.

  Number three. The Information Morning at Dakota's new school tomorrow. Feelings of resentment (don't you send me emails reminding me that ATTENDANCE IS COMPULSORY, how dare you talk to me in capital letters) probably related to subconscious feelings of inferiority over the snooty school and other parents. Get over yourself. It's not about you. It's about Dakota.

  Number four, but perhaps overriding everything else, were her feelings of guilt and horror over what had happened at the barbeque. Like the memory of a nightmare you can't quite get out of your head. Well, yes, Tiffany, we get it, all very distressing, over and over it we go, not achieving anything, just stop thinking about it, you can't change what you did or didn't do, what you should and shouldn't have done.

  The problem was that every item on her list was so nebulous. Impossible to pin down. She remembered the days when her worries were always related to money and solutions could be calculated.

  To comfort and distract herself, she worked her way through a conservative estimate of her current net present value: Property. Shares. Self-managed superannuation fund. Family trust. Term deposits. Cheque account. Doing this always calmed her. It was like imagining the protective walls of an impenetrable fortress. She was safe. No matter what happened. If her marriage fell apart (her marriage wouldn't fall apart), if the stock market or property market crashed, if Vid died or she died or if one of them got a rare disease requiring endless medical bills, the family was safe. She'd constructed this fortress herself, with Vid's help, of course, but it was mainly her fortress, and she was proud of it.

  Go to sleep then, safe in the financial fortress you built on a transgression and yet still it stands.

  She closed her eyes and opened them again instantly. She was tired but wide awake. She felt all pop-eyed like she was on coke. So this was insomnia. She'd always thought she wasn't the type for it.

  She felt a sudden need to go and check on Dakota. She wasn't the type for that either. She hadn't been one of those mothers who go in to check her sleeping baby is still breathing. (She'd caught Vid doing it a few times. He'd been a little shamefaced. Mr I'm-So-Cool-and-Casual and This-Is-My-Fourth-Kid.)

  She got out of bed, her arms outstretched, and expertly shuffled her way to the doorjamb, which always turned up sooner than she expected. It was much easier to see once she got out on the landing because they always left a light on, turned down low, in case Dakota got up in the night. She pushed Dakota's bedroom door open and stood there for a moment letting her eyes adjust.

  Tiffany couldn't hear anything over the rain. She wanted to hear the even sound of Dakota breathing. She tiptoed forward, past the crammed bookshelf, and stood next to the bed looking down at Dakota, trying to make out the form of her body. Dakota appeared to be lying flat on her back just like her father, although usually she slept curled up on her side.

  At the same moment she registered the twin shimmers of Dakota's eyes staring up at her, she heard Dakota say in a perfectly clear, wide-awake voice, 'What's the matter, Mum?'

  Tiffany jumped and yelped. 'I thought you were asleep,' she said, pressing her hand to her chest. 'You gave me the fright of my life.'

  'I'm not asleep,' said Dakota.

  'Can't you sleep? Why are you lying there awake like that? What's the matter?'

  'Nothing,' said Dakota. 'I'm just awake.'

  'Is something worrying you? Move over.'

  Dakota moved over and Tiffany got into bed with her, feeling an immediate comfort she hadn't known she craved.

  'Are you upset about Harry?' said Tiffany. Dakota had responded to the news of Harry's death in the same impassive way she now responded to everything.

  'Not really,' said Dakota flatly. 'Not that much.'

  'No. Well. We didn't know him very well and he wasn't ...'

  'Very nice,' finished Dakota.

  'No. He wasn't. But is there something else?' said Tiffany. 'Something on your mind?'

  'There's nothing on my mind,' said Dakota. 'Nothing at all.' She sounded absolutely certain of this and Dakota had never been able to lie.

  'You're not worried about going to Saint Anastasias tomorrow?' said Tiffany.

  'No,' said Dakota.

  'It should be interesting,' said Tiffany vaguely. She could feel sleep tugging at her consciousness like a drug. Maybe it was nothing. Prepubescent stuff. Hormones. Growing up.

  'Shall I just lie here until you fall asleep?' said Tiffany.

  'If you want,' said Dakota frostily.

  *

  Dakota's mother lay sound asleep next to her, not snoring exactly but making a long, thin whistling sound each time she breathed out.

  Long strands of her mum's hair floated across Dakota's face and tickled her nose. She had hooked one leg over Dakota's leg, locking her close, like she had her in a leg-cuff.

  Holding her breath, Dakota inched her leg free. She pulled back the covers and got up on her knees and flattened herself against the bedroom wall like Spiderman. She slid her way down the wall to the end of the bed. It was a covert operation. She was escaping her captor. Yes! She'd done it! She tiptoed across her bedroom, avoiding the landmines in the carpet.

  Stupid stuff. Don't think stupid, little-kid thoughts like that, Dakota, when there are real wars happening right now and real refugees in tiny boats in the middle of the ocean and real people stepping on landmines. Would you like to step on a landmine? She sat on her cushioned window seat and hugged her knees to her chest. She tried to feel gratitude for her window seat but she felt nothing about her window seat. Instead, she actually thought the terribly rude, ungrateful thought: I don't give a shit about this window seat.

  Dakota had not properly understood until recently how her brain was a private space with only her in it. Yesterday she'd looked at her teacher and screamed the F-word in her head. Nothing happened. Nobody knew she'd done that. Nobody would ever know.

  Everybody else probably worked this out when they were like, three years old, but it was a revelation to Dakota. Thinking about it made her feel as if she were alone in a circle-shaped room: circle-shaped because her head was circle-shaped, with two little round windows, which were her eyes, and people tried to look in, to understand her, by looking through her eyes, but they couldn't see in. Not really. She was there, in her circle-sh
aped room, all on her own.

  She could say to her mum, 'I love my window seat,' and if she said it just the right way, not so enthusiastically that she made her suspicious, her mum would think she meant it and she'd never know the truth.

  So if Dakota could do that, if Dakota could think shocking, kind of angry, hard thoughts like, I don't give a shit about window seats, then probably grown-ups had shocking, angry, hard thoughts too, which were probably much worse because they could watch R-rated movies.

  For example, her mum might say, 'Good night, Dakota, I love you, Dakota,' but inside the circle-shaped room of her brain her real self was thinking: I can't believe you are my daughter, Dakota, I can't believe I have a daughter who would do what you did.

  Her mother probably thought the reason Dakota had turned out to be such a disappointment was because she was 'growing up with money', although funnily enough she didn't actually have any money, except for some birthday money in a bank account she wasn't allowed to touch.

  Dakota's mum did not 'grow up with money' (neither did Dakota's dad, but he didn't go on about that; he just really loved spending it).

  When Dakota's mum was Dakota's age she'd gone to a 'rich kid's' party and fallen in love with her house. It was like a castle, she said. She could still describe everything about that house in pretty boring detail. She'd especially loved the window seats. She was obsessed with window seats. They were 'the height of luxury'. For years and years her mum had dreamed of a two-storey house with marble bathrooms and bay windows and window seats. It was a really architecturally specific dream. She had even drawn pictures of it. So when she and Dakota's dad had talked to the builders about this house they'd said: Window seats, please. The more the better.

  The funny thing was that Dakota had once said something to her Auntie Louise, who was one of her mum's big sisters, about how their family had grown up 'poor', and her auntie had burst out laughing. 'We weren't poor,' she said, 'we just weren't rich. We had holidays, we had toys, we had a great life. Your mum just thought she didn't belong out here in the lower-class suburbs.' Then she'd gone and told the other aunties, who'd all teased her mum, but her mum didn't give a shit, she just laughed and said, 'Whatevah,' like she was an American girl on a TV show.

  Anyway, Dakota still tried her best to love and appreciate her window seats but she wasn't very good at it. She got, like, one out of ten for appreciation.

  The blind was down and she didn't want to risk opening it and waking up her mum, so she pulled it over her head like a tent.

  It was raining outside, so she couldn't see much. Harry's house was just a blurred, spooky shape. She wondered if Harry's ghost was in there, muttering angrily, kicking stuff with the toe of his foot and occasionally turning his head to one side and spitting in disgust, Why did it take you people so long to find my body? Are you stupid or what?

  She wasn't glad he was dead but she wasn't sad either. She didn't feel anything. There was just a big nothing feeling in her head about Harry.

  She'd told her mum the truth when she'd said there was nothing on her mind. She was trying to make her brain like a blank piece of paper.

  The only thing allowed on her piece of paper was school stuff.

  Nothing else. Not sad thoughts, not happy thoughts, not scary thoughts. Just facts about Australia's indigenous culture and global warming and fractions.

  It was good that she was going to the new school next year. They had a good 'academic record'. So hopefully they would stuff her brain full of more facts so there wouldn't be any room to think about it, to remember what she'd done. Before, she'd felt a bit nervous about starting somewhere new, but now that didn't matter. Remembering her old worries about making friends was like remembering something from when she was only a really little kid, even though the barbeque had only happened back at the end of term two.

  Her parents still loved her. She was sure of this. They probably weren't thinking secret angry thoughts.

  She remembered her dad the day after, standing in the backyard, swinging that big iron bar over and over like a baseball bat, his face bright red. It had been terrifying. Then he'd come inside and had a shower without saying a single word, and her dad liked to talk. Things had to be serious for her dad not to talk.

  But then, after that, slowly, her mum and dad had returned to their normal selves. They loved her too much not to forgive her. They knew she knew the hugeness of what she'd done. There had been no punishment. That's how big this thing was. It wasn't kid stuff. Not like, 'No TV until you tidy your room.' Actually Dakota had never got many punishments, or 'consequences'. Other kids did heaps of little wrong things every single day of their lives. Dakota just saved it all up and did one giant wrong thing.

  It was up to her to punish herself.

  She had thought about cutting herself. She'd read about cutting in a YA book that the librarian said was too old for her, but she'd got her mum to buy it for her anyway. (Her mum bought her any book she wanted.) Teenagers did it. It was called 'self-harm'. She'd thought she'd try out self-harm, even though she really, really hated blood. When her parents were busy on their computers, she'd gone into their bathroom and found a razor blade and sat on the edge of the bath for ages trying to get up the courage to press it into her skin, but she couldn't do it. She was too weak. Too cowardly. Instead she hit herself as hard as she could on the top of her thighs with closed fists. Later, there were bruises, so that was good. But then she had come up with a better punishment: something that hurt more than cutting. Something that affected her every day and no one even noticed the difference.

  It made her feel less guilty but at the same time it made her feel desolate. 'Desolate' was the most perfectly beautiful word for how she felt. Sometimes she repeated it over and over to herself like a song: desolate, desolate, desolate.

  She wondered for a moment if Harry had felt desolate and that's why he'd been so angry with everyone. She remembered how that afternoon she'd sat on this window seat, reading, and she'd looked up and seen a light on in a room on the second floor of Harry's house and she'd wondered what Harry was doing up there, and what did he do with all those rooms in that house anyway, when he lived there all alone?

  Now Harry was dead and Dakota felt nothing about that, nothing at all.

  chapter twenty

  The day of the barbeque

  'Here they come,' Tiffany called out to Vid in the kitchen as she stood at the front door and watched Dakota walk up the driveway, hand in hand with Clementine's pink tutu-clad daughters who were skipping by her side. As Tiffany watched, the littler one toppled over in that slow-motion toddler way and Dakota tried to carry her. The child was about half Dakota's height, so her legs dragged on the ground and Dakota tilted to one side, staggering under the little girl's weight.

  'Dakota is being such a good sister!' said Tiffany as Vid appeared at the front door wearing his striped apron, smelling strongly of garlic and lemon from the prawns he was marinating.

  'Don't even think about it,' said Vid.

  Fifteen years ago, when he proposed, while Tiffany was still admiring her engagement ring (Tiffany for Tiffany, naturally), Vid had said, 'Before you put it on, we need to talk about children, okay?' With three volatile, angry teenage daughters, Vid had no desire for more children, but Tiffany was a young woman, so of course she would want children, it was only natural, he understood this, so Vid's compromise, in order to close the deal, was this: Just one baby. A one-child policy. Like China. He couldn't take any more than that. His heart and his bank account couldn't handle it. He said he would understand if one baby was not enough, but for him it was not negotiable. Take it or leave it, and by the way, if she walked away, the ring was still hers and he would always love her.

  Tiffany took the deal. Babies were the last thing on her mind back then, and she really did not fancy stretch marks.

  She had never regretted it, except sometimes, like right now, she felt a kind of twinge. Dakota would have been a loving, responsible older sister,
just like Tiffany's own older sisters had been. It seemed wrong to deny her that, especially as Dakota never demanded anything except more library books.

  'Maybe we should renegotiate our deal,' said Tiffany.

  'Don't even joke about it,' said Vid. 'I am not laughing. Look at this face.' He pulled a mournful face. 'Serious face. Four weddings will bankrupt me. It will be the death of me. It will be like that movie, you know, Four Weddings and a Funeral. My funeral.' Vid chuckled, delighted with himself. 'Four weddings and my funeral. You get it? Four daughters' weddings and Vid's funeral.'

  'I get it, Vid,' said Tiffany, knowing that she'd be hearing this joke for months, possibly years to come.

  She watched Erika and Oliver, Clementine and Sam, approach the house behind the children. There was something odd about their formation, there was too much space around them, as if they weren't two couples who knew each other well but four individual guests who hadn't met before this day and had happened to arrive at the same time.

  'Hi!' called out Erika, timing it just a bit wrong; she was too far away. Their driveway was very long.

  'Hi!' called back Tiffany, walking down the steps to meet them.

  As they got closer, she saw they all had identical glazed smiles, like people who have recently got into drugs or religion, or a new pyramid sales scheme. Tiffany felt a hint of trepidation. How was this afternoon going to pan out?

  Vid walked straight past her towards the guests, his arms outstretched. Jeez Louise, Vid, you peanut, you would think they were beloved relatives returning from a long trip overseas.

  Barney thought the guests were his beloved relatives too, and rushed to ecstatically sniff everyone's shoes as though it were a race to get them all sniffed in record time.

  'Welcome, welcome!' cried Vid. 'And look at these beautiful little girls! Hello! I hope you don't mind me sending Dakota over to fetch you. I didn't want the meat to be overcooked. Barney, calm down, you crazy dog.'