You Can Trust Me: A Novel

by Sophie McKenzie

  Catrina is irrelevant.

  “I know,” I say into the phone. “Just get back as soon as you can.”

  Will tells me he loves me; then we say good-bye. As promised, a man in uniform takes us home. The children are in a terrible state. Zack is clingy and Hannah won’t stop weeping. The police officer asks if there is anyone who could come over to help me. He gives me a card with a telephone number and a small brochure.

  “Call this if you remember anything or if you want help or advice on dealing with what’s happened. For you or the children.” He reels off the names of various support groups and counseling options. “They’re all in the brochure.”

  I take very little of this in. At home, the house feels cold, though it’s a warm day. I glance at the kitchen clock and am staggered to find it is not yet 1 P.M. It feels like an entire day has passed since we entered Julia’s flat. Years since Will left for Geneva last night after the dinner party.

  Julia is dead.

  It still hasn’t sunk in. I make beans on toast, moving around the kitchen on autopilot. Zack eats. Hannah refuses and disappears to her room. Zack follows me around the kitchen as I empty the dishwasher and put on a load of laundry. I don’t know what to do or where to go.

  I gave the police officer Julia’s mother’s name earlier. She calls in tears, unable to focus. I hear guilt in her voice. She and Julia rarely spoke. Julia called her “the Martyr” because of her name, Joanie. As in Joan of Arc.

  “I can’t believe it,” Joanie says over and over again. “How can this have happened?”

  I don’t know what to tell her. She says she’s on her way to Exeter from Bridport, where she lives. She’ll be staying with Robbie, Julia’s twin brother. A few minutes after Joanie hangs up, Robbie himself rings. We used to all hang out together a lot when we were younger. In fact, a million years ago, Robbie and I went on a date. It was a disaster, him being two years younger and overwhelmed with his crush. I felt guilty for not being interested and tried to let him down as gently as possible. Julia never said, but I think she was relieved we didn’t end up an item.

  Robbie sounds bewildered, demanding details of how I’d found her. I deal with him as best I can, but there’s a tension between us on the phone. The awkwardness isn’t just because of that long ago date. Robbie and Julia weren’t close. Despite being twins, they never really got along. Julia was always a bit too wild for the rest of her family and rather looked down on Robbie, who got a trainee job in hotel management for an Exeter-based hotel chain while she was at uni. He worked his way up through the ranks to become conference and banqueting manager, but other than a few work trips abroad to other hotels in the same chain, his life remained as unglamorous as Julia’s was full of adventure.

  Robbie rings off, sounding as shell-shocked as he was at the start of the call. I put down my phone and notice that the light is beginning to fade from the day. Hannah still hasn’t reappeared, so I go upstairs and try to talk to her but she shouts at me and slams her door. I bite back my anger and console myself by watching Toy Story with Zack, even managing to laugh along with him when Buzz insists he can fly. I run him a bath and hold his hand as he falls asleep.

  Will calls again. His voice is soft and sympathetic. He is full of concern for me and the kids. He will be on an early flight home tomorrow evening. I cry down the phone, a mix of misery and relief that he is there, a solid presence unchanging among the chaos. Before I can mention her, Will says he’s sorry that Catrina is with him on the business trip and repeats that he had no part in the arrangements and that the two of them have barely exchanged two words since they arrived.

  I reassure him that I believe him, that it doesn’t matter anyway, that Julia’s sudden death has put everything in perspective. Will sounds deeply relieved and my heart fills with affection for him. I have met Catrina now. It’s done—and so comprehensively overshadowed by what has happened to Julia that any lingering doubts in my mind about the affair have been laid, at last, to rest. Will and I say we love each other and ring off. I’m exhausted. I haven’t eaten all day. I heat some soup and take a bowl to Hannah. This time she eats and she cries and I hold her and for a few minutes I feel like we are sharing our grief. But I am holding back my own tears and when Hannah realizes she accuses me of not caring and this is so far from the truth and my heart is so wrung out and exhausted and I am so devastated as the pain of losing Julia settles inside me that I turn on her and shout that she is selfish.

  Hannah screams at me to get out of her room and I go and I run to our bedroom and hurl myself on our bed as if I were twelve too, not thirty-eight and a married mother of two, and then I reach for the phone and call my own mother, who is shocked like everyone else. And she says the words I’ve been failing to face since this morning.

  “Oh my darling, it’s like Kara all over again.”

  Immediately I’m back in my third year at university. My dorm room. The knock on the door. The two policemen with serious faces. “Please come with us—there’s been a terrible incident.” And time passing, Mum and Dad arriving, then Kara’s freshman tutor; us all gathered with pale faces in the waiting room. Then Dad going to identify the body and Mum’s low moan breaking the silence as he walked back to us, his mouth trembling.

  Kara was viciously attacked one cold February night in her first year at university as she walked along the canal back to her student housing. They think her murderer attacked her as she passed under a bridge. He raped her with a knife, then stabbed her in the stomach. She bled to death on the footpath. Her killer was never found.

  I feel sick. I get off the phone and go to check on Hannah. She’s asleep. With her face in repose, she looks even more like Kara. As a child, my sister was sunny-natured and smart. Everyone loved her. Her death was a terrible violation, a gash that tore right through the mundanity of our small, suburban lives. It killed my father. That’s what Mum and I believe, anyway. Dad couldn’t bear that he hadn’t protected her: his sense of failure destroyed him. I look at Hannah, her makeup still streaked and her hair over her face, and I know I would feel exactly the same.

  But it wasn’t like that with Julia. Mum is wrong about that. Unlike Kara, Julia has died peacefully, presumably from an unknown medical condition. At least it looks that way.

  I fall asleep, trying to focus on that one thread of comfort. I hold on to it the next day when I let the children stay home from school and that evening when Will returns and hugs me as I cry. I hold on to it the day after, when Julia’s mother calls me with endless inquiries about her daughter’s life, her resentment that they had hardly spoken for years simmering under every question. And I hold on to it the day after that, when Martha drops by, full of gentle concern, and at the school gates, when the other mothers ask me what happened—news having somehow spread.

  But then Thursday comes and, with it, the first piece of news from the postmortem. Julia’s mother calls to tell me. She sounds angry but resigned.

  Julia’s body contained lethal doses of Nembutal as well as three times the legal driving limit of alcohol.

  “We have to face it, Livy,” she says. “Julia killed herself.”

  The words are too brutal. The idea is impossible.

  “No,” I say. “Julia would never—”

  “The postmortem is clear. There was nothing else wrong with her.”

  “But—”

  “Livy, this isn’t helpful.” Julia’s mother is cold and hard. “The police found evidence on her computer of Web sites she’d visited going back two months, plus a brochure about Nembutal on her desk.”

  “But … but all that was for an article she was researching on suicides in the fashion industry. She told me about it,” I explain. “Some young girl killed herself, and Julia was looking into a connection with the fashion industry using skinny models.”

  I suck in my breath, remembering Julia shaking her head as she told me about the pressures on some of the models she had spoken to.

  They all think they’re to
o fat, she’d said wearily. They skip breakfast, lunch is black coffee and a cigarette, then it’s a paper tissue for dinner. They’re worse than dancers.…

  “No article was ever published,” Joanie insists. “No one commissioned her to write one.”

  “I know,” I say. “She was just interested.”

  “Exactly.”

  There’s a long silence. I rack my brains, trying to work out how I can convince Joanie there is no way Julia would have killed herself.

  Then Joanie clears her throat. “She left a note, Livy.”

  My mind reels. Julia left a suicide note? No, that goes against everything I’ve ever known about her. “What does it say?”

  “Please, Livy.” Julia’s mother’s voice, then her words, cut me like a knife. “It was addressed to me … well, to the family. It’s private.”

  What is she saying? I am … was … Julia’s best friend. “Please.” My voice breaks. I can’t bear the thought that Julia left a note I can’t read. “I need to know, to understand.”

  “It was on the open screen, on her computer. The police found it. It just says … ‘To my family. I’m sorry, I can’t go on. Please make no fuss, no flowers, no religious service. Just remember me kindly. I love you. Julia.’ It’s very short. There’s no reason given.” Now Julia’s mother sounds hurt. Her voice trembles. “This is very hard for me.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” I speak the words, but inside I’m raging. I don’t believe this … can’t believe this. There is no way Julia would write such a note.… Make no fuss. Indeed—she lived for drama; no way she wouldn’t have spoken to me.

  And then I remember her missed call and the text she sent:

  PLS CALL. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.

  She tried to speak to me. And I ignored her.

  “I’ll let you know the details of the funeral,” Joanie continues briskly. “It would be helpful if you could e-mail me a list of friends, colleagues, people we should invite.”

  “I can help contacting people too,” I offer.

  “Thank you, but we can manage. I’m with Robbie and Wendy.”

  My breath catches in my throat. Irrationally, I feel hurt. And on Julia’s behalf too. She would hate to think of her brother and sister-in-law organizing anything connected with her.

  “Please, I’d like to help—”

  “That’s very kind of you, but we have everything under control. It will be a nondenominational service, in line with Julia’s wishes about not having a religious service. “So … the West Devon funeral parlor, we’re thinking.” Julia’s mother sniffs. “Anyway, please send me that list of friends and colleagues when you have a moment.”

  In a daze I take down her e-mail address; then I say good-bye.

  An hour passes. The sun blazes outside but I sit at the kitchen table, staring into space. Images of Julia parade through my head—fierce, proud, funny. I think of my traumatized children. Julia loved them. She loved me. If she’d felt down, I would have known. But she was happy and enjoying her work. She was into her new guy, her Dirty Blond. She loved her life.

  I shake my head. It can’t be true. I won’t accept it. There must have been something else, some other factor. I become obsessive in my search for more information. I call all the numbers the police officer gave me. The police confirm the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Julia died between 10 P.M. and midnight. I can’t stop thinking how hectic that evening had been, then how quiet the house seemed after Will left for the airport and how I’d gone to bed thinking it was too late to call Julia back. If only I had ignored convention, as I’m sure Julia herself would have done.

  I call the editors of the interior decorating, beauty, and fashion magazines for which Julia freelanced. I call the bloggers and journalists I met through her. I call the two ex-boyfriends of hers with whom I’m still in touch. And I speak endlessly to Will, who listens patiently as I rant that Julia wasn’t capable of killing herself, and then weep in his arms.

  All these people agree that it is shocking—then they sigh and say that it’s hard, but that we must accept it. They hint, to greater and lesser degrees, that I’m refusing to face the truth only because I feel guilty. Which, they say, I shouldn’t. Some tell me directly that it isn’t my fault. I want to shout at them that I know. That this isn’t the point. Julia’s death is not about me.

  Mum and Will both tentatively suggest I’m letting Kara’s death all those years ago influence me. “But there is no killer here, just a deeply unhappy woman who fooled us all, who put a brave face on things,” Will says, his sympathetic tone belying the fact that he, like everyone else, thinks I’m completely mistaken.

  And so, another week passes, the body is released, the funeral draws near, and Julia’s story is rewritten. She was not really happy and full of life, but secretive and depressed. I hear many mentions of the therapist she saw for several years in her twenties, after Kara died. Likewise, there are frequent references to Julia’s numerous “evenings in with Jack.”

  “But when she said that, it was meant lightly, ironically,” I tell people.

  They purse their lips and talk about solitary drinking and quote stats on whisky and suicide.

  I grow tired of the conversations. I withdraw, watching my children closely. Zack, in that amazing way young children do, is bouncing back—I can see his memories of Julia fading already. Hannah is withdrawn at home, but her teachers say she is behaving normally at school.

  Life slips back into its old groove: I ferry the kids around, shop for groceries, and pay bills. And yet, even as everything remains the same, it is all different. I notice a woman in Jackie O sunglasses and a green jacket coming out of the Waitrose supermarket on Gladstone Road. She looks so much like Julia that I actually follow her for a few steps until she turns a corner and I see the hook nose of her profile and the youthful tilt of her chin and I realize that it isn’t Julia after all. On instinct, I take out my phone to call and tell Julia my mistake. And then I remember. I stand in the street, my shopping heavy in my hands. I can almost hear her caustic cackle: I’d lay off the happy pills, Liv, she’d say. Or: Earth to housewife: Get a grip.

  Every day there is something new I want to tell her: the picture Zack draws of a car that—if squinted at from a particular angle—looks bizarrely like one she used to drive, or the actress I see in some drama who reminds me of an old mutual friend. I try to tell Will instead, but the memories aren’t his, and anyway, he is preoccupied with work and exhausted when he gets home at night.

  And so it is that the two of us talk less and less about Julia, even as I miss her more and more, while through it all, the options turn over in my mind.

  Not sickness. Not suicide.

  Gradually, silently, the only other alternative seeps like a poison into my mind, shifting everything known and unknown.

  No one takes Nembutal by accident. It’s not even legal without a prescription, and Julia’s medical records confirm that she certainly wasn’t prescribed it. Her death wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t her choice.

  Which leaves only one remaining explanation: Someone else took Julia’s life and made it look like she’d killed herself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Will takes the day off work so he can go with me to the funeral. He doesn’t think the children should attend. I agree with this when it comes to Zack, who continues to take Julia’s death in his stride and expresses all his feelings in the form of questions: What happens when you die? Is it just your heart stops? When your heart stops, can your brain think? Where will the Julia bit that isn’t her body go? Was it like lying down on the sofa and going to sleep? What would it have felt like? Could it happen to me? Could it happen to you and Daddy?

  I answer his questions as best I can, trying to strike a balance between honesty and reassurance. Sometimes people do get suddenly ill, I explain, but usually only when they are very old and their own children are grown up. It hasn’t occurred to Zack that Julia might have taken her own life—that such a possibility
might even exist. I can’t see how his understanding or his grieving will be helped by going to Julia’s funeral.

  That is not the case with Hannah. She asks point-blank what the police have told me about Julia’s death. I hedge a little but cave in under Hannah’s persistence. One look at the horror in her eyes and I regret my honesty. Hannah, unlike Zack, already knows that suicide is possible. But she has no greater resources for understanding how Julia might have killed herself than I do. I tell her that no matter what the police and the coroner and everyone else thinks, I don’t believe the suicide verdict. However, Hannah is swayed by the weight of all the authority figures ranged against me, including that of her own father. She cries in her room, one minute pulling me to her, the next pushing me away. She refuses to talk. Will tries. So does my mum. But Hannah doesn’t speak. I recognize the hurt that bleeds from her eyes. She knows she was special to Julia, and she is asking my own questions: How could Julia take herself away from us? Why weren’t we enough? How could she do this to us?

  I ask those questions every day and I’m still coming up with the same, single, simple answer: Julia would never have killed herself. If nothing else, she would never have let herself be found by my children. She knew we were coming over. Our Sunday lunches were a regular arrangement on weekends when Julia was at home, and we’d confirmed this latest one only two days before. I remember the conversation:

  I’d called to check what time she wanted us to arrive. She’d sounded distracted, her tone uncharacteristically tense and anxious. I’d asked if she was okay and she’d said she was fine, just preoccupied with work. Then she said something that had sounded strange, a vague reference to “looking into something.” She’d mentioned her new man too, Dirty Blond. Was he connected to the thing she was investigating? I’m struggling to remember the exact flow of the conversation.

  Suppose she found out something about him … something she didn’t like? She was far more secretive about Dirty Blond’s real name than usual. Why was that? Is the man married? This thought circles my head. It seems unlikely Julia would have had an affair. In all the years I knew her, she never once slept with a married man. Not knowingly, at least. Perhaps she found out he was married just before she died? Was that what her text on Saturday night was about?