The Game You Played

by Anni Taylor

  I headed downstairs. Nan sat watching a morning variety show. Two presenters were discussing funeral plans. Morning television was filled with advertisements for funeral plans and life insurance. The advertisements must seem like a constant reminder for someone nearing eighty, like Nan.

  “There’s porridge in the pot,” she told me.

  “Thanks. I’m not hungry.”

  She shot me a brittle look. “Are you going out again?”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d—”

  “With the new man?”

  “No, Nan. I won’t be seeing him again.”

  “Oh? It didn’t go well last night?”

  What if I needed to make the excuse of having dinner with him on another night that I wanted to watch number 29?

  “It was fun,” I answered. “I just meant we’re not dating. It was just dinner.”

  “So, just what sort of thing is it?”

  “It’s not a thing.” I exhaled, shoving my hands in my pockets. “I’m going out for a walk. Do you need anything?”

  “Bring back some bread. Light rye. None of that stuff with seeds in it.”

  “Okay. I’ll grab some.”

  Stepping outside, I began walking.

  I found myself down at The Domain. I walked through the wide pathways of the park. Bright displays of flowers punctuated the expanses of grass.

  Parents tugged small children along, the children clutching balloon animals. There must be some kind of event happening.

  Jazz music saturated the air. I remembered then seeing a poster for a coming jazz festival.

  I used to take Tommy to the outdoor festivals in the city. Didn’t matter what it was. Tommy just enjoyed the music and people and energy. He used to be one of those children nursing a balloon animal.

  Tommy’s tiny bare feet had once walked here. He might have walked in the exact spot where I walked now, on his dimply toddler legs. His eyes used to open in round wonder at the sound of the St. Mary’s church bells pealing. He’d danced on the pavers to the tunes of the street buskers in his uncoordinated way—he couldn’t decide whether to clap or to bob up and down or to wiggle his bottom like Beyoncé. So he’d do all three at once.

  A couple strolled towards me with an exuberant little boy running alongside them.

  Involuntarily, I held my breath.

  Tommy’s size.

  Hair like Tommy.

  Not Tommy.

  I averted my eyes like a priest stepping through a bikini parade.

  I didn’t want to see any more happy parents and their happy toddlers.

  Threading my way through the crowds, I found an out-of-the-way spot on the grass. I sat myself down.

  Once I felt strong enough, I’d walk home again. It was stupid coming here, where there were so many people.

  I remembered then Luke telling me that Detective Gilroy had been trying to contact me. I took out my phone. There were four missed messages from Trent.

  I returned the call.

  “Hi, Phoebe,” came Trent’s voice over the phone.

  He sounded normal. I was right—there was nothing out of the ordinary that he had to tell me.

  “How are you,” he asked, and he sounded like he cared.

  “I’m doing well. It’s Sunday again. We seem to be making a habit of these Sunday catch ups.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll be off at a family barbeque later, but I’m just chilling now. So, still no more sleepwalking?”

  “No. No sleepwalking.”

  “Good to hear.”

  He seemed to be lingering on the phone. It began to make me uneasy. If enquiring after my health was all he’d called me for, he should be winding things up now.

  “Phoebe, you know that we have a team continuously working on Tommy’s case, right? That process hasn’t stopped since December.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, the team has brought something to my attention. A phone call.”

  “A phone call?”

  “A call that you received. According to our data, it was right at the time Tommy went missing.”

  I froze in the silence that followed.

  “Phoebe?”

  “I don’t know about any call.”

  “It’s right there on the printout in my office. I can show it to you on Monday. In the exact space of minutes in which Tommy disappeared, you answered a call. I don’t have any record of a call in your statement to us, but small things are easily overlooked when you’re dealing with traumatic events. There was a woman at the scene who told a reporter that she witnessed you on the phone. We dismissed it back then. Reporters sometimes throw things in that aren’t exactly true, just trying to find a different angle for their story. But, in the end, it checks out.”

  “But, didn’t you talk to that woman yourself and she denied it? I don’t remember her name.”

  “Elizabeth Farrell. She was the first person to call the police and report that Tommy was missing.”

  “The red-haired woman with the baby.”

  “Yes, that was her. When we interviewed her back then, she said you and Tommy had been in her view just before she saw you running around looking for him. She didn’t mention that you’d taken a phone call. But after our team checked your phone records, just yesterday, they found the call. I paid a visit to Elizabeth personally, yesterday afternoon. She had a slightly different story.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. She told me that the reporter was correct. You had been on the phone. She was distressed, saying that she’d held back telling us that before because she felt sorry for you. She didn’t want you to look like a . . . bad mother. She said the call was super short. That your son shouldn’t have had time to wander off during such a short call.”

  “Who was the call from?”

  “Well, we were hoping you could tell us that. We’ve been unable to track the call. You only spoke to this person for around a minute.”

  “I don’t remember this at all. I didn’t even have my phone—”

  “As far as I understand, you lost your phone sometime that day? You told me that’s why you weren’t the one to call us first—because you’d lost your phone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you must have lost it sometime after that call. I’d like you to have a think on who it was. It’s probably not important, but we’d like to know.”

  “Okay, I’ll try.”

  “Thank you. I’d appreciate it.”

  When I finished the phone call to Trent, my mind was churning.

  I had been on the phone when Tommy disappeared?

  God. I’d let myself become distracted by a call?

  Who was it?

  No one had come forward to say they’d been talking to me that day on the phone. It couldn’t have been Sass or Kate or Pria. Trent said the call was just a minute long. Had it just been a spam call? Some salesperson selling timeshare apartments or life insurance? Even the big banks spammed you. One of those calls could account for the short duration of the conversation and why I’d forgotten it.

  Trent said it was probably not important, but why would he call specifically to ask me about it?

  Prickles ran along my arms. Could the person on the phone have been the kidnapper?

  Were they on the phone to me when they took Tommy, deliberately distracting me?

  I gazed up at the canopy of trees.

  Think.

  I pictured the phone I’d had back then. It had a deep-green, diamond-patterned protective case. And a ring tone that was from David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.”

  And then there it was.

  A memory.

  A memory of me taking my phone out at the park that day. Of me answering a call.

  My lungs squeezed down, clogged with dust from the past.

  Whose voice was it on the other end of the phone?

  Think.

  It wouldn’t come to me.

  I needed to go back to the beginning of that day.

  The san
itised version of the day Tommy vanished began to disintegrate. The picture that I’d painted for the police and the media wasn’t real. Yet, I’d ended up believing it myself.

  I remembered the morning, before we left for Nan’s house. I’d drunk two furtive mixer cans of bourbon from a stash I kept in the kitchen cupboard. Luke’s mother had rearranged the cupboards the day before, and it had taken me ten minutes to find the cans. She’d praised me for the way I’d dressed Tommy. Her constant praise was irritating, and I was glad to be going to Nan’s, even though taking a toddler to Nan’s was always a trial.

  I remembered walking to Nan’s with Luke and sitting in her living room, watching Tommy trying to conceal the fact that he desperately wanted to touch Nan’s ornaments. And Nan getting cross with him. No, not with him. With us. In her eyes, Luke and I were lazy parents.

  In my mind, I could see Tommy’s large brown eyes and his tufty blond hair that was so like Luke’s, all his dimply toddler beauty.

  A dull ache had started in my head that wasn’t a headache. More like the boom of a drum. A slow, monotonous beat.

  We left Nan’s house to take Tommy to the playground.

  Luke had lifted Tommy onto his shoulders. “Well, we’ve got the grandma thing out of the way for this week,” he’d said.

  “Don’t even,” I snapped at Luke, but in a lowered tone that diminished any power in my voice. I didn’t want Tommy to tune into the change of conversation.

  Luke cringed. Actually physically cringed. He knew exactly what I was referring to. His mother—Tommy’s grandmother—had been staying with us for three weeks now.

  “My mother won’t be at our house forever,” he told me. “Just until things are a bit better.”

  “You mean, until I’m not crazy anymore?” I said under my breath.

  “You’re not crazy.” Luke didn’t bother to quieten his voice. There was nothing in his tone that made me believe he really meant it. He sounded more like a parent trying to placate a child.

  In Luke’s opinion, I was on the train to crazy-town. Especially after the incident three weeks ago, when he came home to find me locked away in our bedroom with a bottle of scotch that one of his clients had given him. I’d been crying into my pillow, while Tommy was running loose in the house. The house was upside down, even more than usual.

  Enter Luke’s mother. He installed her in the spare bedroom and set her function dial to cooking, cleaning, and childcare mode.

  I was the one who didn’t cook. Or clean. Or look after the kid. Worse, I’d proven myself unable to cope with motherhood. The defective woman.

  Luke’s mother—June—was bright and cheery, with her yellow-framed glasses and cruise ship clothing (floral shirts and white capri pants).

  I was never at fault in her eyes. That sounded better than it actually was.

  She’d gush that I was doing a super job if I had a shower. She’d stand behind me and whisper that I had mother’s intuition when I knew that Tommy was ready for sleep (the times that he started spinning in circles). She’d even tell me I was a wonderful mother if Tommy just survived the day.

  All I could think was, no wonder Luke’s father drank. Living with her would be like living with Pollyanna on steroids.

  “Look.” Luke gave a heavy, exaggerated, beleaguered-husband sigh. “We’ll set a time-frame. How about another week? My mother stays just one more week.”

  I knew what would happen if I disagreed. He and his mother would gang up against me. His mother would never say anything nasty, but she’d beat me down with her cheery platitudes until I begged for mercy. Neither of them trusted me alone with my own son. Luke’s parents had come back three weeks early from an overseas trip just so that June could move in with us for a while and care for Tommy (and supervise me).

  From atop Luke’s shoulders, Tommy yelled with excitement when he first spotted the playground.

  Luke set him on the ground and let him run ahead.

  A suffocating bitterness tightened around me. “Instead of her staying on, how about you change your work schedule so you can actually be at home with Tommy sometimes? So that I can go and do things? So that, oh, I don’t know, so that Tommy can get to know you and we can be an actual family?”

  “You know we have to make sacrifices.”

  I didn’t know when individual Luke and individual me had become we.

  Luke had begun speaking for both of us sometime after Tommy was born. When Luke spoke of things that he was doing, he used the we pronoun. Luke couldn’t change his plans because we needed him to do exactly what he was doing.

  Taking his eyes off Tommy for a moment, Luke glanced at me. “We’ve still got a long road ahead of us to get where we want to be.”

  There it was again. We.

  “Other couples manage,” I said. “You don’t have to work twelve hours a day.”

  Tommy ran a short way then turned to check that his parents were still close behind him.

  “To hell with just managing.” Luke’s voice rose in order to make his point. “We’ll be in a very good position a few years from now if we hang tight.”

  “Even if it’s killing me?” My words fell like a rock, dragging space and time into a vacuum. I hadn’t spoken those words before. I hadn’t told him how I really felt.

  He stopped still. I could sense the rising irritation in his raised shoulders, in the stubborn set to his jaw. “It’s fucking killing you to live in a great house in a great suburb and have your days free to do whatever you fucking want?”

  “I never asked for a great house in a great suburb. And I am not free.”

  Tommy was too far ahead now. We both jogged along the path to catch up to him.

  Luke and I clamped down on our angry words as soon as we reached the playground. That’s what we did. Put on the nice show in public. Rip strips off each other at home after Tommy was asleep for the night.

  When we reached the playground, Tommy made a beeline for the water-play canals.

  Squatting, Tommy zoomed his plastic yacht backwards and forwards in a canal like it was a car.

  Luke’s phone rang. I could tell by the almost supplicating, reassuring tone he’d swapped to that it was his mother.

  Anger flashed through me. “Tell her to be gone by the time we get back.”

  He held his hand over the phone. “Phoebe, we’ll talk about this later.” He sounded so nice, so fucking endearing. He always pretended to be something he wasn’t in front of her.

  And now, if I started yelling here in front of all these people, I’d be the raving lunatic. Look at what her poor husband and child have to put up with. I had to conceal, conceal, conceal. An actor, pretending everything was wonderful.

  “Tommy, do you want an ice-cream?” Luke said as he put his phone away.

  Tommy thought for a second, his fist tightening on the boat, then shook his head.

  “Okay, well I’m going to get one.” Luke fished his sunglasses out from a pocket and put them on.

  I shielded my eyes from the sun. “Just get one scoop in Tommy’s.”

  “He just said he didn’t want one.”

  “He thinks he’ll have to leave the water to get ice-cream. Of course he wants one.”

  “Then he should learn to say what he wants, not make other people guess.”

  “He wants a fucking ice-cream, Luke.”

  People gawked. My voice had inexplicably carried. How my voice had amplified like that in the middle of all this noise, I didn’t know. Maybe all my rage had condensed into that one sentence.

  “Not in front of all the kids,” he mumbled.

  Of course. He was on show now. People were looking and watching. Who was at fault here? Which one of them started it? Who should we direct our disgust at?

  Shaking his head, Luke moved off. And with that, he sealed it. I was the one to blame. Everyone here knew the story: He was the hapless husband who was used to defusing his wife’s irrational outbursts. He was the one who never struck back. His wife might
even be violent. Did the kid have any bruises on him?

  When no further entertainment was forthcoming, the people turned back to their own kids. A couple of the mothers gave their children grabby hugs and kisses on foreheads. Just to demonstrate they were nothing like me. They loved their kids. Even their husbands. Hot meals on the table every night and sex on Sundays. They wore long cargo shorts and long pastel T-shirts and pastel hats. Which proved their devotion. No cleavages or cut-off shorts. Their husbands wore the same outfits their tiny sons did. Everyone looked so good and pure and shapeless. You could bottle them and sell them on a supermarket shelf like jars of applesauce. How would any of them know if their kid or husband was replaced with another? They wouldn’t.

  Tommy splashed in the canal, oblivious to my loud, angry words. He was used to them. Used to Luke and I screaming at each other. We weren’t always careful. Things slipped through.

  I wanted to give Tommy a different mother. It was a gift—giving your child a good mother. But you couldn’t give what you didn’t have.

  It was okay for Luke. He got the guy card. As long as he paid the mortgage, he was good. In the eyes of the pastel T-shirt brigade, there wasn’t one thing more he needed to do to be husband-and-father material. But the wife and mother, she needed to turn herself inside out, empty herself completely. Everything in life she’d been trained to do so far was useless. Her career, her personal time, her motivation to succeed—she had to let all that go.

  Something was stirring in my head. The heat of the day and the pastel clothing and the slow sound of a drum.

  The phone buzzed in my pocket, and I slid it out to answer it.

  A voice asked me, “Are you going to go ahead with it?”

  *

  I was ripped back to present time.

  Sitting in the park, staring at a phone in my hand that existed only in my memory.

  A fuse blew in my head, and my brain turned to static.

  Cold, dead static.

  There had been a phone call that day.