How I Lost You

by Jenny Blackhurst

  “Do you think my phone’s been tapped?”

  Nick looks impressed that I’ve thought of the possibility.

  “It’s something you have to think about. I mean, I don’t want to be dramatic, but the photo is a relatively harmless—albeit unpleasant—trick to play. But trashing your house? It escalated quickly. Maybe whoever it was knew you were meeting me.”

  I sit back in my seat, the mug of tea warming my hands and providing a much-needed sugar kick. “The police officer I spoke to suggested that people round here wouldn’t want a child killer in their town. He’s probably right.”

  Nick purses his lips sympathetically. “It does happen, I’m afraid. Some people hold grudges because they have nothing better to do with their lives. They might not know you from Adam, just what you did.”

  My head is hurting again. It’s all a bit surreal for me. I don’t live in a world where things like this happen. This is my life, not boredom relief for some desperate housewife. I sigh and rest my head in my hands, covering my tired eyes. When neither of us has spoken for five minutes, I look up to check Nick is still there. He’s flipping through a notepad he already had out on the table when I arrived at the pub.

  “What’s that?” I ask, too curious to stay quiet any longer. Nick holds out the pad for me to take. It’s a roughly scrawled chart, the word “Evidence” written at the top of one column; another is headed “Follow up.” In the evidence column are four points: the photograph I received, the newspaper in my handbag, the disappearance of Dr. Riley, and the break-in at my house.

  “Wow, someone’s organized,” I remark, unable to explain why this annoys me so much. “Let’s face it, it’s much more likely I sent the photo to myself because I’m still as crazy as the doctors said I was.” I stop short at the look on his face. Guilt. Of course, how stupid am I? “You’ve already thought of that.” It’s a statement, not a question. It doesn’t need to be a question; his face tells me all I need to know. “You think I did this. You think I’m crazy.”

  “It crossed my mind,” he admits. “For about two seconds. I saw how upset you were about what happened at your house, Susan, and I know you didn’t fake that.”

  “How can you be so sure? You don’t know me, you don’t know anything about me.” I’m taunting him, daring him to deny that I could be unhinged.

  “I just am.” His eyes don’t leave mine for a second.

  I’m too exhausted to argue. My mind is screaming for just one small white pill to take the edge off this feeling of helplessness. Maybe I have some left at home; there’s no way I can ask the doctor for more so early in my parole. I can’t admit I might not be coping.

  When breakfast is done, I don’t think we can avoid going back to my house any longer, so I’m happy to hear him suggest we have a coffee in the pub garden.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  He’s trying not to look too eager. What does he think I’m about to confess? “Of course, anything.”

  Now I’ve said it, I can’t refuse to tell him. “I thought I saw Dylan yesterday.”

  “What? Where? You didn’t tell me this.”

  “I was embarrassed. There was a boy in the street in front of me and he looked so much like the boy in the photograph, I just thought . . . Of course he didn’t look anything like Dylan when I got up close, but from a distance, and I’d just seen the photo and . . .”

  “Hey, hey, calm down.” My eyes are cast downwards and he dips his head to look into them. “You’d just had a shock: people make mistakes like that all the time. I used to think I saw . . . Everyone’s eyes play tricks on them.”

  “Maybe, but not everyone chases kids down the street and grabs them. I honestly believed it was Dylan. If I was wrong about that, if I can’t trust myself . . .” My words trail off.

  Nick stays quiet for a long time, then looks at me like there’s something he’s dying to ask. “Got any brothers or sisters?” I don’t think that was it.

  I smile. “How come you get to know everything about me and I know zero about you? Apart from the dubious choice of vocation.”

  He leans back in his chair, looking amused. “Well, what do you want to know?”

  “Married?” The question comes out too quickly and my cheeks burn. “Sorry, too personal.”

  He holds up his ring finger. “Not married.”

  “Hmm, Cassie said that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Nick frowns. He picks up a fork from the stone wall. It’s obviously been there awhile; it’s rusty and dirt-encrusted. He looks like he’s studying it for the meaning of life, but I can’t see what’s so interesting. Finally he speaks. “What’s her problem anyway? Cassie, I mean. She’s so bloody suspicious, it’s like she thinks I’m going to run off with your life savings or something.”

  That’d get you a bus ticket to Manchester.

  “I told you before not to worry about it. Cassie just doesn’t trust people. She’s like that with everyone.”

  “Wow, how flattering,” Nick remarks. “Nothing special, eh?”

  I grin despite my rotten mood. “She might seem all brassy highlights and F-words, but she’s the best friend I’ve ever had. When you’re in a place like Oakdale you have to accept that your life as you knew it, your old friends, your old house, it’s all gone. You start to realize that the life you’ve been forced into doesn’t have to be anything like your old one.” I let out a snort. “I can just imagine Mark’s face if I’d brought someone like Cassie home from mother and toddler group.”

  He looks blank. Surely he doesn’t need me to spell it out for him? The press were all over it, the have-it-all Stepford Wife who killed her baby son. The worst thing was, they were spot-on in most of the things they said about us.

  “Mark is loaded,” I explain, my cheeks reddening again. “We ate at the best restaurants, I wore clothes once, then threw them away—yes, I realize now how it sounds.” He’s barely masking the disdain on his face but I don’t hate him for it. I know the person I used to be. “I wasn’t used to mixing with people like Cassie, her angry tirades and her pack-a-day habit. Then I went to Oakdale and for the first time in my life I was the lowest of the low, not someone to be mollycoddled and looked after. I didn’t have friends; no one wanted to be associated with a . . . with me.”

  I’ve never spoken about my time at Oakdale with anyone, but Nick’s cool blue eyes have locked onto my face, and now that I’ve started, I can’t stop.

  “Cassie was unlucky enough to be stuck in my room. She tried everything to make me talk. She lent me magazines and makeup—God knows why she was so keen to befriend me, but she wouldn’t give in. It wasn’t that I thought I was too good for her—that ship had long sailed. No, I didn’t think I was good enough, for her or anyone. I actually just wanted to be left alone to die.”

  “How did you get better?”

  “She kept at it. When the magazines and makeup didn’t work, she started smuggling me food. I wasn’t on a hunger strike exactly, but I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to get up to eat; I barely got up at all except to use the toilet. Every day Cassie would bring me food, but not from the cafeteria—chocolate bars, and sausage rolls. She always managed to get her hands on the best of everything. She had a deal going with the wardens most of the time; sometimes other patients would help her out. One day the smell of a bacon sandwich was too much for me and while she wasn’t looking I just started to eat. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it until it was all gone. Cassie just winked at me. Ever since then, when the going gets tough, the tough get food.”

  “I had wondered”—Nick laughed—“about the monstrous appetite.”

  As he checks his watch and indicates that it’s time to leave, I realize that once again the conversation has switched around to me, and he’s managed to answer a grand total of one question in the time we’ve been out here. Either he’s deliberately avoiding talking about himself or he was an armchair psychologist in a past life.

  14

 
; JACK: 18 OCTOBER 1987

  He’d done a pretty good job, even if he did say so himself. Billy had finally emerged from his bathroom smelling like the aftershave counter at Boots and wearing an outfit that would have cost his own parents a week’s wages.

  “About fucking time. You want some of this?” He poured a shot of vodka and held it out.

  Billy screwed up his nose. “Nah, I’m okay.”

  “Seriously?” Jack laughed. “You nicked it and you’re not even going to drink it? Come on, don’t be a pussy.” He shoved the drink towards his friend again, some of it sloshing onto his fingers. Billy took it, gave it a sniff.

  “Just knock it back, it’ll taste better the more you have,” Jack promised.

  Billy swung his head back and threw the drink down his throat. Jack laughed as he put his hand to his mouth, coughing and retching.

  “That’s the way,” he said as there was a knock on the bedroom door. “C’min.”

  Lucy’s face appeared in the doorway. From behind the door Billy made an obscene gesture that made Jack scoff. Poor lad wouldn’t know what to do with a girl like Lucy. He was fifteen, for fuck’s sake, and he’d never even kissed a girl. Ah well, maybe tonight was his night.

  “Your friends are downstairs.” She eyed Jack suspiciously. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Yes. Do you want one?”

  She moved further into the room, noticing Billy for the first time. “Oh, hey.” Spotting the shot glass in his hand, she smiled. “Well, I’m impressed. Even Jack won’t shoot vodka.”

  Billy widened his eyes at Jack, who shrugged unapologetically. “Tastes like shit. Come on, Shakespeare, let’s go.”

  Jack moved to leave the room but Lucy stepped in front of him, blocking his way. She was close enough for him to smell her subtle flowery perfume. Even at three years younger he was at least two inches taller than her. “Aren’t you going to invite me to your party?”

  “I don’t need a chaperone, thanks.” He reached out to place his hands on her waist, pulled her slightly closer, then moved her to the side. “Come on, Bill.”

  15

  I hate the idea of seeing my house again, but I can’t live out of the Travelodge indefinitely.

  We stop at the police station to collect my keys and they confirm I can go back into the house. When we get back, there’s a figure sitting on the doorstep. Nick groans.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Cassie’s shrill Manchester accent hits me as soon as we get out of the car. “What’s he doing here? Why’s there red paint all over your doorstep?”

  I fill her in on the night before, her face darkening with every word she hears.

  “You need to drop this,” she warns me, her finger close to my face. “This is serious now, Suze. Being watched? Spied on? People in your house? Give. It. Up.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t give up, I just can’t. Even if it’s some kind of hate campaign by locals, how can I live just waiting for the next person to break into my house, or attack me in the street?” We’re still outside and I’m trying to keep my voice low. Cassie isn’t.

  “If this is some sicko out for revenge, you don’t have to go through it on your own! You can come stay with me, or I’ll stay here. Let’s just forget that photograph and go back to normal.”

  “What’s normal? Normal for us is . . .” I can’t say it. I can’t say that normal for us is three square meals a day served on a plastic tray still encrusted with part of yesterday’s meal. Normal is sharing a room the size of my old laundry room with a woman who talks about bodily functions as easily as my old friends compared Yankee Candles.

  Now that I’ve started, I can’t give up that easily. The part of me that has always wondered—that tiny inch of me that remembers making it all the way to the bus stop while my baby screamed relentlessly inside the house—has to know the truth. I have to wade back into my past, knee deep in crap, to see what’s underneath. Do I deserve this? Am I crazy?

  When I enter the front room with drinks, Cassie and Nick are sitting in silence. I hand Nick his mug of coffee and take my place on the sofa next to Cassie. I get the feeling they’ve been arguing.

  “What?” I ask, looking between them. “What?”

  “The journalist wants to poke his nose in where it’s not necessary.” Cassie’s voice isn’t so much tinged with venom as saturated with it. I look at Nick.

  “I was just wondering if it would help if I were to, um, if I saw some, if you have any . . .”

  “He wants photos of Dylan.”

  My throat fills with bile. Photos? I have them, of course; they sit in the bottom of the pine dresser, encased in a brown leather album that has remained unopened for nearly three years. My father brought the album on one of his visits to Oakdale, but I have never had the courage to lift the cover. I took almost three hundred photographs of my newborn baby in the weeks following his birth: Dylan with his first teddy bear, Dylan’s first windy smile, Dylan on a Wednesday. I guess from the size of the album that it doesn’t hold all three hundred; I never wanted to find out which ones my dad had chosen to include.

  “Why? They won’t tell you anything; we know it can’t be him. Besides, all babies look alike.”

  That’s a lie. My baby didn’t look the same as other babies; other babies were screwed-up, wrinkly little things that barely resembled anything. My baby was beautiful, a perfectly smooth face and huge eyes that had changed from the darkest blue to the deep brown I had fallen for in his father years before. A fine sprinkling of dark hair that grew so fast in those first few weeks that I’d had to brush it lightly with a soft-bristled white brush every morning, a present from my brother and sister-in-law. His tongue so adorable, even while it trilled its shrilling war cry deep, deep, deep into the night.

  “You’re right, I’m sorry, it wouldn’t help anyway.”

  But Nick thinks it will help, and if I’m going to put myself through this ordeal, if I’m going to relive the twelve short weeks of Dylan’s life one day, I may as well start here. I stand; Cassie takes in a sharp breath.

  “You don’t have to do this, Suze,” she warns. “You’ve had enough shocks for this lifetime.”

  “But if you do want to, it’s better to do it when we’re with you,” Nick presses.

  “It’s okay, Cassie, I want to.”

  Both of them watch silently as I slide open the door at the bottom of the dresser and lift out the pristine album. I pass it over to Nick, but as he reaches out to take it I can’t let it go.

  “You don’t have to.” Nick echoes Cassie’s words gently.

  I pull the book back towards me slowly and sit down next to Cassie with it on my knee. She places a hand on mine and together we ease open the front cover.

  On the first page, under the shiny transparent stick-down paper, is a single photo. In it I am sitting in a hospital bed, pillows propping me upright, looking more exhausted than I have ever been in my entire life. I’m wearing not a scrap of makeup, my blonde hair is slicked back, and my son—by the time this was taken, I’d at least admitted he was my son—lies wide awake in my arms. I remember it as though it was this morning: our first family photo. He wriggled so much, like a slick little fish unused to being handled, that we struggled to get a picture, Mark beaming and saying “That’s my son” over and over again. My eyes fill with fresh tears at the memory, and at the questions it causes. Was I already depressed when this photo was taken? The nurses told me not to worry about the baby blues—that was what they called it, but it felt so much worse.

  Shouldn’t they have done something?

  Cassie’s hand squeezes mine. I don’t have the strength to squeeze back.

  After what feels like an hour, my hand reaches out and turns the page. The absence of a photograph shocks me almost as much as the photo on the first page did. A sheet of notepaper sits under the adhesive sheet. Printed on it, in my dad’s spidery handwriting, are the words I hope this will make you see. I read them out loud and they don’t make any more
sense when they are floating in the air than they do in my mind.

  “Make me see? What does that mean?” I ask no one in particular. “What does it mean?” My voice rises to somewhere between hysterical and a pitch that only dogs can hear. “Why would he say that?” I’m on my feet, holding the album away from me as though it might burn me.

  “Calm down.” I’m not too hysterical to see the look Cassie throws at Nick, a clear “now look what you’ve done.” Three years of hard work in Oakdale and I’m right back to a volatile, shaking mess again.

  “He probably means see how much you loved Dylan,” Nick offers. My heart slows down slightly. That does sound like something my dad would say. Make me see how much I loved my son. That has to be it.

  “You don’t think he meant see what I’d done? See what I’d lost?” My voice is almost a whimper.

  Cassie shakes her head vehemently. “No. No way. It has to be what he said. Your dad stood by you all the way through the trial. He came every day to see you in the hospital before you were arrested. He adores you; why would he send you something malicious?”

  I nod numbly. They’re right. Cassie puts her hand on the page to turn it and looks at me to check that I’m ready. When I don’t respond, she slowly flips it over.

  On the next page is a photo of Dylan dressed in a pure white onesie and lying serenely in my arms, the only thing visible of me an elbow and a forearm. That’s the way things go when you become a mother: you’re always there in the background, a pair of legs or a hand, but you’re not the focus anymore. Did that bother me? Was it the fact that I wasn’t the center of attention in my husband’s or my father’s life anymore? Mark had no family close by; all we’d ever wanted had been the two of us, until we’d made the decision to become three. Did I wish that Mark would stop staring at him sometimes and do the washing-up? Yes. Was I jealous of my baby? I never thought so.