What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  I imagined them meeting at a patient’s bedside, eyes locking, hands grazing, a flirtation that turned into something more serious, until she offered herself to him unconditionally, the way you can before you have a child to consider. At that time, John was obsessed with his work. It consumed him, which makes me think that she must have done most of the running, and that the package she offered him must have amounted to a seductive proposition indeed.

  I was bitter about it. My relationship with John had such solid and careful beginnings that I’d assumed it would last forever. It simply never occurred to me that there could be a different kind of ending for us, which was, I now realize, extremely naïve.

  What I hadn’t realized was that John didn’t think like me, that he didn’t view any problems we might have had as normal, surmountable. For him things boiled under the surface, until he couldn’t cope with being with me anymore, and his solution was just to up and leave.

  When I rang my sister right after he’d gone she said, “Didn’t you have any idea at all?” and her voice was strained with disbelief. “Are you sure you paid him enough attention?” was her next question, as if the fault was mine and that was to be expected. I hung up the phone. My friend Laura said, “I thought he was a bit detached lately. I just assumed you guys were working through it.”

  Laura had been my closest friend since we were at nursing college together. Like me, she hadn’t stuck with bedpans and body fluids. She’d quit and switched to journalism instead. We’d been friends for long enough that she’d witnessed the birth and growth of my relationship with John as well as its demise. She was observant and forthright. That word “detached” stayed with me, because if I’m being really honest, I hadn’t noticed it. When you have a child to look after, and when you’re busy developing a new career as well, you sometimes don’t.

  The separation and divorce tore me apart, I’ll admit to that. When Ben disappeared I was still in mourning for my husband. In ten months you can get used to some of the mechanics of being alone, but it takes longer for the hurt to heal.

  I went to Katrina’s flat once, after he’d moved in with her. It wasn’t difficult to find. I pressed on her door buzzer, and when she answered the door I snapped. I accused her of being a home-wrecker, and I might have said worse things. John wasn’t there, but she had friends around, and, as our voices rose, the three of them appeared behind her, mouths open, aghast. They were a perfectly groomed Greek chorus of disapproval. Glasses of white wine in hand, they watched me rage. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I never quite got around to apologizing.

  You might wonder what I look like, if my husband could be lured away by such a pert little magpie. If you saw the press conference footage, you’ll already have an idea, though I wasn’t at my best. Obviously.

  You’ll have seen that my hair looked straggly and unkempt, in spite of my sister’s efforts to tame it. It looked like witch’s hair. Would you believe me if I said that under normal circumstances it’s one of my best features? I have long, wavy dark blond hair that falls beneath my shoulders. It can be nice.

  You’ll certainly have noticed my eyes. That’s the closeup shot they replay most: bloodshot, desperate, pleading eyes, red-rimmed and puffy from the tears I’d shed. You’re going to have to take my word for it that normally my eyes look pretty: they’re wide and very green and I used to think they flattered my pale, clear skin.

  But what I really hope you noticed was the smattering of freckles across my nose. Did you see those? Ben inherited them from me, and it always pleased me beyond measure to see that physical trace of myself in him.

  It would be wrong of me to give you the impression that the only thing I was thinking about was Katrina, when Ben disappeared. On the afternoon when it happened, Ben and I were walking the dog in the woods. It was a Sunday, and we’d driven out of Bristol and across the Clifton Suspension Bridge to reach the countryside beyond.

  The bridge traversed the Avon Gorge, a great crevasse in the landscape, carved out by the muddy-banked River Avon, which Ben and I could see flooding its basin far below, brown and swollen at high tide. The gorge was the boundary between city and countryside. The city hugged one side of it, teetering on its edges, and the woods hugged the other, trees running densely hundreds of feet down the steep cliffs until they petered out beside the riverbank.

  Once we’d crossed the bridge, it took us only five minutes to be parked and loose in the woodland. It was a beautiful late autumn afternoon, and, as we walked, I was relishing the sounds and smells and sights it offered.

  I’m a photographer. It’s a career change I made when I had Ben. I walked away from my previous incarnation as a nurse without a single regret. Photography was a joy, an absolute passion of mine, and it meant that I was always looking at the light, thinking about how I could use it in a photograph, and I can remember exactly what it was like as we walked that afternoon.

  It was fairly late, so what light remained had a transient quality to it, but there was just enough brightness in the air that the colors of the leaves above and around me appeared complex and beautiful. Some of them fell as we walked. Without a whisper of protest, they let go of the branches that had sustained them for months, and drifted down in front of us to settle on the woodland floor. When we began our walk, it was still a gentle afternoon, allowing the change of seasons to unfold quietly and gradually around us.

  Of course Ben and the dog were oblivious to it. While I composed photographs in my mind, both of them, with misty breath and bright, wild eyes, ran and played and hid. Ben wore a red anorak and I saw it flash down the path in front of me, then weave in and out of the trees. Skittle ran by his side.

  Ben threw sticks at tree trunks and he knelt close to the leaf-strewn ground to examine mushrooms that he knew not to touch. He tried to walk with his eyes closed and kept up a running commentary on how that felt. “I think I’m in a muddy part, Mum,” he said, as he felt his boot get stuck, and I had to rescue it while he stood with a socked foot held precariously in the air. He picked up pinecones and showed me one that was closed up tight. “It’s going to rain,” he told me. “Look.”

  My son looked beautiful that afternoon. He was only eight years old. His sandy hair was tousled and his cheeks were pink from exertion and cold. He had blue eyes that were clear and bright as sapphires. He had pale winter skin, perfectly unblemished except for those freckles, and a smile that was my favorite sight in the world. He was about two-thirds my height, just right for me to rest an arm around his shoulders as we walked, or to hold his hand, which he was still happy for me to do from time to time, though not at school.

  That afternoon Ben exuded happiness in that uncomplicated way children can. It made me feel happy too. It had been a hard ten months since John left us, and although I still thought about him and Katrina more than I probably should have, I was also experiencing moments of all-rightness, times when it felt OK that it was just Ben and me. They were rare, if I’m honest, but they were there all the same, and that afternoon in the woods was one of those moments.

  By half past four, the cold was beginning to bite and I knew we should start to make our way home. Ben didn’t agree.

  “Can I have a go on the rope swing? Please?”

  “Yes,” I said. I reckoned we could still be back at the car before it got dark.

  “Can I run ahead?”

  I often think back to that moment, and before you judge me for the reply I gave him, I want to ask you a question. What do you do when you have to be both a mother and a father to your child? I was a single parent. My maternal instincts were clear: protect your child, from everything. My maternal voice was saying, No you can’t, you’re too young, I want to take you to the swing, and I want to watch you every step of the way. But in the absence of Ben’s dad I thought it was also my responsibility to make room in my head for another voice, a paternal one. I imagined that this voice would encourage Ben to be independent, to take risks, to discover life himself. I imagined it saying,
Of course you can! Do it!

  So here’s how the conversation actually went:

  “Can I run ahead?”

  “Oh, Ben, I’m not sure.”

  “Please, Mum.” The vowels were strung out, wheedling.

  “Do you know the way?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We do it every time.”

  He was right, we did.

  “OK, but if you don’t know where to find the track, just stop and wait for me on the main path.”

  “OK,” and he was off, careering down the path ahead of me, Skittle racing with him.

  “Ben!” I shouted. “Are you sure you know the way?”

  “Yes!” he shouted, with the assurance of a kid who almost certainly hasn’t bothered to listen to what you said, because he has something more exciting to be getting on with. He didn’t stop, or look back at me.

  And that was the last I saw of him.

  As I walked the path behind Ben I listened to a voicemail on my phone. It was from my sister. She’d left it at lunchtime.

  “Hi, it’s me. Can you give me a ring about the Christmas photo shoot for the blog? I’m at the Cotswold Food Festival and I’ve got loads and loads of ideas that I want to chat to you about, so I just want to confirm that you’re still coming up next weekend. I know we said you should come and stay at home, but I thought we could do something better at the cottage, dress it up with holly and stuff, so why don’t you come there instead. The girls will stay with Simon as they’ve all got things to do, so it’ll be just us. And by the way I’m staying there tonight so try me there if you can’t get through on my mobile. Love to Ben. Bye.”

  My sister had a very successful food blog. It was called “Ketchup and Custard,” named after her daughters’ favorite foods. She had four girls, each one the image of their father with deep brown eyes and hair that was so dark it was nearly black, and stubborn, willful temperaments. My sister often joked that if she hadn’t given birth to them herself she’d have questioned whether they belonged to her at all. And I admit I sometimes wondered if my sister ever truly got the measure of her girls: they seemed such an impenetrable bunch, even to their mother.

  Close in age—all of them older than Ben—they formed a little tribe that Ben never quite managed to infiltrate, and in fact he regarded them with some wariness, mostly because they treated him a bit like a toy.

  Nicky proved a match for them more often than not, though, scheduling and organizing them down to the last minute, dominating them by keeping them busy. Their lives ran to such a strict routine that I sometimes wondered if these raven-haired girls wouldn’t implode once they entered the real world, beyond their mother’s control.

  On her blog Nicky posted recipes that she claimed would make even the fussiest families eat healthfully and eat together. When she started the blog I thought it was tacky and silly, but to my surprise it had taken off and she was often mentioned when newspapers published Top Ten lists of good food or family blogs.

  My sister was a brilliant cook and she combined recipes with good-humored writing about the trials of raising a big family. It wasn’t my cup of tea—too contrived and twee by far—but it was impressive and it seemed to strike a chord with lots of women who bought into the domestic heroine ideal.

  I called her back, left a message in return. “Yes, we’re planning to come up on Saturday morning and leave after lunch on Sunday. Do you want me to bring anything?”

  I was making a point by asking that. I knew she wouldn’t want anything from me. She prided herself on being a perfect hostess.

  Limiting our stay was also deliberate. When I’d thought we were going to visit Nicky at their family home I’d been determined to stay only one night, because although Nicky was the only family I had, and I felt a duty to see her and to give Ben the chance to get to know his cousins, it was never something I looked forward to especially.

  Their big house just outside Salisbury was always perfectly presented, traditional, and loud, and it became claustrophobic after one night. I simply found the whole package a bit overwhelming: superefficient Nicky working domestic miracles left, right, and center; her big, jolly husband, glass of wine in hand, pile of anecdotes at the ready; and the daughters, bickering, flicking V signs at my sister’s back, wrapping their father around their little fingers. It was a world apart from my quiet life with Ben in our small house in Bristol.

  Not that the cottage was my ideal destination either, even without Nicky’s family to contend with. Left to both Nicky and me by our aunt Esther, who raised us, it was small and damp and held slightly uncomfortable memories for me. I would have sold it years ago—I could certainly have done with the money—but Nicky remained very attached to it, and she and Simon had long since taken on its maintenance costs entirely, largely out of guilt, I think, that she wouldn’t let me release the capital in it. She encouraged me to make more use of it but somehow time spent there left me feeling odd, as if I somehow had never grown up properly, never shed my teenage self.

  I slipped my phone back into my pocket. I’d reached the start of the path that led to the rope swing. Ben wasn’t there so I assumed he’d gone ahead of me. I made my way along in his wake, squelching through mud and batting away brambles. When I came to the clearing where the rope swing was, I was smiling in anticipation of seeing him, and of enjoying his triumph at having got there himself.

  Except that he wasn’t there, nor was Skittle. The rope swing was in motion, moving from left to right and back again in a slow rhythm. I pushed forward to give myself a wider view of the clearing. “Ben,” I called. No reply. I felt a flash of panic but told myself to stop it. I’d given him this little bit of independence, and it would be a shame to mar the moment by behaving in an overanxious way. Ben was probably hiding behind a tree with Skittle, and I shouldn’t wreck his game.

  I looked around. The clearing was small, no bigger than half a tennis court. Dense woodland wrapped around most of it, darkening the perimeters, although on one side a large crop of medium-sized saplings grew, spindly and brittle, leafless. They dispersed the light around them, lending it a quality of strangeness. In the middle of the clearing stood a mature beech tree, which overhung a small brook. The rope swing was tethered to one of its branches. I reckoned that Ben was hiding behind its thick trunk.

  I walked slowly into the clearing, playing along with him.

  “Hmm,” I said, throwing my voice in the direction of the tree so that he could hear me. “I wonder where Ben is. I thought he was meeting me here, but I can’t see him anywhere, or that dog of his. It’s a mystery.”

  I stopped to listen, to see if he would give himself away, but there was no sound.

  “I wonder if Ben has gone home without me,” I continued, dipping a booted toe into the brook. The motion of the swing had ceased now and it hung limply. “Maybe,” I said, drawing the word out, “Ben has started a new life in the woods without me, and I’ll just have to go home and eat honey on toast by myself and watch Doctor Who on my own.”

  Again, no response, and the flutter of fear returned. This kind of talk was usually enough to make him emerge, triumphant at having tricked me for so long. I told myself to be calm, that he was upping the stakes, making me work hard. I said, “Well, I guess that if Ben is going to live on his own in the woods, then I’ll just have to give away his things so that another boy can have them.”

  I sat down on a moss-covered tree stump to wait for his response, trying to play it cool. Then I delivered my trump card: “I just wonder who would like to have Baggy Bear . . .” Baggy Bear was Ben’s favorite toy, a teddy that his grandparents had given him when he was a baby.

  I looked around, expecting him to emerge, half laughing, half cross, but there was absolute silence, as if the woodland was holding its breath. In the quiet, my eyes followed the lines of the surrounding tree trunks upward until I glimpsed the sky above, and I could feel darkness starting to push in as surely as fire creeps across a
piece of paper, curling its edges, turning it to ash.

  In that moment, I knew that Ben wasn’t there.

  I ran to the tree. I circled it, once, twice, again, feeling its bark scrape my fingers as I went around. “Ben!” I called. “Ben! Ben! Ben!” No response. I kept calling, on and on, and when I stopped to listen, straining to hear, there was still nothing. A sickening feeling in my gut pinched harder as each second passed.

  Then a noise: a wonderful, glorious crashing sound, the sound of someone rushing through undergrowth. It was coming from the glade of saplings. I ran toward it, picking my way through the young trees as quickly as I could, dodging low, whippy branches, feeling one of them slice into my forehead.

  “Ben,” I shouted, “I’m here.” No response, but the noise got closer. “I’m coming, love,” I called. Relief surged through me. As I ran, I scanned the dense growth ahead of me to try to catch a glimpse of him. It was hard to tell exactly where the noise was coming from. Sounds were ricocheting among the trees, confusing me. It shocked me when something burst out of the undergrowth beside me.

  It was a dog, and it was big and happy to see me. It bounced at my feet, eager to be petted, its mouth wide and dark red, startlingly so, its big fleshy tongue lolling. A few yards behind it a woman emerged from the trees.

  “I’m so sorry, dear,” she said. “He won’t hurt you, he’s very friendly.”

  “Oh God,” I said. I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Ben!” I shouted, and this time I yelled so loudly that it felt as if the cold air was scorching my throat when I drew breath.

  “Have you lost your dog? He’s not that way or I’d have come across him. Oh! Did you know your forehead is bleeding? Are you all right? Hold on a minute.”

  She fumbled in her coat pocket and offered me a tissue. She was elderly and wore a waxed hat with a wide brim that was pulled low on her head. Her face was creased with concern and she was short of breath. I ignored the tissue and instead I grasped her, my fingers sinking into her padded jacket until I felt the resistance of her arm beneath. She flinched.