by Lisa Jewell
Because there was nowhere else for him to go. There had always been somewhere for Adrian to go before. The next woman. The next house. The next family. The next chapter. But he was only halfway through the book of Maya and himself. And he wasn’t prepared to put it down until he’d finished it. Maya didn’t get to choose when it was over. No woman had ever got to choose when it was over with him.
He thought again of Pearl’s bare feet swinging beneath the kitchen counter. And then he thought of the Sunday morning, after he’d gone. He’d woken up in bed with Maya in their new flat and he’d turned to her and smiled and said, “The rest of our lives has officially begun.” He had not thought of Pearl padding down the stairs in her pajamas; he had not pictured her walking into a dark empty kitchen with nobody there to ask her about her dreams. Instead he had pressed his face into Maya’s soft flame-red hair and breathed in her fresh, new smell, told her again and again how happy they would be, how wonderful this new chapter would be, how everyone would love her, how she’d made his life complete.
He’d expected everyone to be happy, just because he was.
Who the hell did he think he was?
Did he think he was God?
And Cat? And Luke? He’d left them too, maybe not in an empty kitchen, but what other tender spot had he ripped himself away from? What other horrible gaping hole had he left in their worlds? Why had he never asked? Why had they never told him?
“You’re just a child, Adrian.”
That’s what Caroline had said to him more than once during the process of their breakup.
“You’re just a little boy.”
“You exist only in the world according to you.”
“You think the rules are for other people.”
“You think anyone who tells you the truth is being mean.”
“You have this innate belief in your own fairy-tale narrative.”
Caroline had said many things to him over those months, in that deep, calm voice of hers. He had not listened to a word of it. Instead he had stroked Maya’s hair and held Maya’s hand and talked to Maya about the baby they would have and rushed home from work to Maya, and met Maya at cinemas and pubs and dreamed about the bright blue future with Maya. Everything else had been aural interference.
He’d thought himself so very reasonable. He’d given Caroline the house. He’d let her choose the terms of their shared custody. He’d carried on paying the bills for over a year without any fuss. He hadn’t once raised his voice or thrown blame at anyone but himself. He had conducted himself impeccably.
But really, what was impeccable about leaving your children and their mother because you liked another girl better?
He changed trains at King’s Cross onto the Northern Line towards Angel. In the corners of his consciousness Pearl’s pale bare feet swung back and forth and back and forth with every footstep he took.
He climbed onto another half-empty train and took another empty seat. His thoughts turned to Caroline and her half-baked ideas about having a baby with Paul Wilson. He tried to imagine it. He tried to imagine there being a child in the world who was inextricably bound to him but was not his. Another face at the Christmas dinner table, another “Daddy.” The thought made him cross. Then he thought of Pearl coming down for her breakfast in her pajamas and Paul Wilson sitting in the half-light, Paul Wilson asking her about her dreams, Paul Wilson maybe holding a baby in his arms who would be Pearl’s new baby brother or sister, and he felt a red heat of injustice spread through his entire anatomy.
Yet he’d expected his family to be happy with his plans to do exactly the same. He’d expected them to embrace Maya and their theoretical child. He’d assumed that everyone would go with the flow, get on with their lives, unscathed.
One more person to love.
The train pulled into Angel. He stumbled onto the platform and made his way up the soaring escalators towards Upper Street. He started to run as he got closer to the house. The air was humid and gray and his shirt stuck to his skin with sweat. His heart was racing. He shouted into his phone as he ran, to Caroline, “I’m on my way. I’ll be there in five minutes. Don’t let Otis go to bed. Don’t let anyone go to bed.”
He took the steps up to the front door two at a time and hit the doorbell urgently. Luke opened the door and stood back to let him pass. “Everyone downstairs?” he asked.
Luke nodded and Adrian ran down the stairs, nearly breaking his neck over the two dogs as they ran towards him to find out who was at the door. He found his family in the kitchen. Caroline was standing over the hob, stirring hot chocolate in a pan. Cat and Pearl sat side by side on the bar stools at the counter and Otis was on the sofa next to Beau, who was fast asleep in his clothes. Luke came from behind Adrian and stood next to Cat.
He looked at them all. He had a hundred things he wanted to say. “I’m sorry,” he said. He put his hand against his racing heart, feeling the sweat cooling on his shirt. “I’m really sorry,” he said again.
And then, quite unexpectedly, he began to cry.
44
Luke stood pressed up against the wall, his arms pinned behind his back, as though there was a lunatic with a loaded weapon in the room. He stared fearfully at the various members of his family as they played out the next scene: Pearl holding his father in her arms, Caroline patting his back, Cat fetching him water, Otis staring at them all from the sofa. He had no idea what was about to happen. A few hours earlier Otis had confessed to a revelation from a strange woman about Maya’s being in love with another man. And now his father was standing five feet away from him crying about a meeting with another strange woman in a pub in central London. Somewhere between the two meetings, he feared, lay the truth about him and Maya. Was it about to be revealed? That the whole thing was his fault? That he’d taken Maya’s love away from his father? That his failure to finish his relationship with Charlotte properly had led Charlotte to write Maya those terrible e-mails? That he was duplicitous and weak, as bad as his father? His breath was red-hot, his heart a beating hammer. He waited to hear what his father had to say, waited for his just desserts.
Otis sat on the sofa, watching his father’s dramatic entrance with fear and awe. What had that woman said to him? It was his fault. He knew it was. It was all his fault. And it was all about to come out. He thought back to that last day, when Maya had babysat them all, when he and Beau had been really horrible to her. He remembered finding Maya in Mum’s room, touching her dresses, and he remembered her looking so confused, telling him she was trying to work things out. He could have said something different; he could have helped her. He’d replayed it in his head, time after time, day after day, imagined himself sitting down with her on his mum’s bed, asking her if she was OK. Maybe she wouldn’t have opened up to him about being in love with somebody else, but she might have felt a bit better about things. Instead he’d gone up to his room and had that really mean Skype chat with Cat. Said things he totally didn’t mean. Forgotten that he’d left Skype running on the laptop downstairs. And then five minutes later—BAM—Maya was dead.
He watched as Cat passed his dad a glass of water. She was looking at Adrian really strangely, almost as though she was feeling as scared as him.
He hadn’t told anyone about the Skype thing. Only Charlotte. It was weird how he and Charlotte had become kind of friends. She’d PMed him on Facebook a couple of weeks after Maya died, just to say she hoped he was OK, that Cat had told her he was feeling bad, that she was always there for him if he wanted to talk. He’d felt kind of proud having her as a Facebook friend. She was so pretty. And also, you know, his big brother’s girlfriend. It was like a link to Luke somehow. Because up until recently there hadn’t been much of a link between them. So he’d written to Charlotte a lot, told her how he was feeling, how he hated himself, how he held a pin next to his skin sometimes and thought about dragging it through his flesh. But he never did, because he was
a coward.
Then Cat had moved in and he hadn’t needed Charlotte so much; they’d kind of stopped writing to each other. Until the thing about the e-mails had exploded in the family and he’d started feeling bad all over again. Not that he’d written the e-mails. But he had a feeling he knew who had. And that he was part of the whole stinking thing. Charlotte had written back and said, No, no, Otis, it was nothing to do with you. It was nothing to do with those e-mails. I know what it was. I know why she died. She wouldn’t tell him online so she’d met him outside the tube one morning, told him about Maya’s being in love with somebody else. Someone she couldn’t be with, could never tell anyone about. And that was why she’d got drunk and walked into a bus.
It hadn’t made any sense at first. Otis had sat on the bench outside the tube for ages, he didn’t know how long, just watching the people and trying to make sense of it all. It had made him cross. Really cross. Why had his dad left their whole family to go off with a woman who wasn’t even in love with him? Surely, he’d thought bitterly, surely if you were going to do that to all the people you loved you should at least be sure it was, you know, forever.
And now his dad was standing in the kitchen crying and nobody knew what he was going to say and Otis knew, he just knew, that it was all about to go down. It would all come out. And it was all his fault. All of it.
Cat passed her father a glass of water and then stepped away from him, as if he were radioactive. He was crying, hysterically, and it was freaking her out. He hadn’t even cried like that at Maya’s funeral. Pearl had her arms around him and was holding on to him tight. Otis was sitting on the sofa looking wide-eyed and terrified and Luke was standing pinned up against the wall, watching their father through narrowed eyes. And still Adrian hadn’t said a word. He was crying too hard to talk.
Cat wanted to go. She wanted to pick up her jacket and her bag and just run. Anywhere. It didn’t matter where. She just wanted to be away from here. Because it was obvious to her that whoever the hell that woman was, the woman with the phone and the odd-colored eyes, she had just told her father something revelatory and deeply distressing. And she suspected that it was something to do with her. And what she’d done.
Killed Maya.
That’s what she’d done. She’d killed her, as sure as if she’d stood behind her on Charing Cross Road and given her a little shove. Cat hadn’t been a human being these past sixteen months. She’d been a murderer. When she looked in the mirror she saw a murderer. When she heard her name being called she heard a murderer’s name. When people stared at her on the street, when they caught her eye for longer than a second, she felt like they were thinking, Look at that murderer.
She’d been an animal, hiding away from the world in the bosom of Caroline’s family. Eating. And eating. And eating some more. From the moment she’d sent that very first e-mail back in 2010 she’d been waiting for this. She remembered the breathless rush of adrenaline as she pressed send, the sense that she was about to change everything, forever. But then the days had passed and nothing had happened. No reply. No accusations. No consequences. So she’d sent another. And then another. And then another. She’d become addicted to the feeling of power and control. To the euphoria of getting away with it. And then she’d watched with sick satisfaction as Maya had grown smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter, less and less of the person she’d originally been, until that last holiday in Suffolk when it was almost as if Maya wasn’t there at all. She’d seen the distance between Maya and her father and the coldness in Maya’s eyes and she’d thought, Any minute now, any minute now, she’ll be gone, it’s just a matter of time.
She’d sent one more e-mail, just after they got back, just to be sure, just to give Maya that final kick towards the exit doors. And then she’d gone and got herself killed. And the happy ending that Cat had dreamed about, the one where Maya left and her dad moved back in with Caroline and everything went back to the way it had been before—which wasn’t exactly conventional, but which she had been happy with—had been ripped from beneath her feet. Instead of being the anonymous, conquering heroine, the one who’d saved the family from the dark compromises of a three-family existence, she had become instead an unspeakable monster.
Her father was beginning to calm down now. She could hear his breathing leveling itself out. She risked a glance in his direction. He was forming his first words. She caught her breath, clenched her fists and waited to hear what they would be.
45
Adrian placed the glass of water on the kitchen counter and pressed the paper towel that Caroline was offering him against his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting the wave of emotion that had hit him like a shovel to the head as he’d walked into the kitchen and seen his family all there, all safe, all in one place. As his tears subsided and his vision cleared he could see fear in their eyes.
He crossed the room towards Otis and sat down next to him. “So,” he said, “how was your little adventure?”
Otis tutted. “It wasn’t an adventure.”
“Well, whatever it was. Are you feeling OK?”
He shrugged. “Bit tired,” he said.
“I bet.” He drew himself closer to Otis and tried tentatively for a hug, but his son’s body stiffened against his touch. Adrian looked up and saw everyone looking at him. There was a strange wariness in their expressions.
Adrian smiled. All he wanted to do now was to make everyone feel OK. “Listen,” he said, looking from child to child. “I’ve heard something tonight that changes everything. Maya didn’t kill herself.” He looked around again, saw heads slowly rising, eyes finally meeting his. “That woman, Abby, she was the last person to see Maya alive. She spent an hour with her, in a pub, talking to her. About everything. And she told me: so now I know. It was nothing to do with not being able to have a baby and it was nothing to do with those e-mails. She didn’t walk out in front of that bus on purpose. She fell. She slipped. Because she was drunk. And she was drunk because she was too nervous to come home. To come home and tell me that she didn’t love me anymore and that she wanted to leave me.”
“So it wasn’t about the e-mails?” said Cat, her full, open face etched with fear.
Adrian took a breath. Here was where it ended. All of it. No more blame on anyone apart from him. “No,” he said carefully. “Abby said that Maya didn’t take the e-mails very seriously. She said that Maya had no bad feelings towards anyone in the family. It was all about me,” he said, looking at Cat, making sure she looked at him. “All of it. Nothing to do with anyone else. At all.”
A sob caught in the back of Cat’s throat, loud enough to make Pearl jump. By his side, Adrian felt Otis’s stiff little body slump and soften and suddenly Otis’s arms were around Adrian’s chest, his head buried beneath his arms, tears soaking through his shirt. Adrian felt his heart swell at the earnestness of the gesture. He had not felt his boy’s arms around him for a very long time. Otis pulled away after a moment and stared up at his dad through tear-streaked eyes. He rubbed them away with the heels of his hands and said, “I love you, Dad.”
Cat walked towards Adrian and Otis, tears spilling down her face, “Dad,” she began, “those e-mails . . . those e-mails . . .”
“We’re not going to talk about the e-mails,” said Adrian. His tone was firm, final.
He saw Luke staring at him desperately from the other side of the room, still pinned to the wall. He saw the terror in his eyes and directed his next words at his eldest son: “We’re not going to talk about any of it. OK? What we’re going to do is this: we’re going to blame me for everything. What happened to Maya is my fault. Every bad feeling any of you has ever had is my fault. Any bad thing any of you has ever done is my fault. OK?”
Nobody said anything.
“OK?” Adrian repeated.
Everyone nodded their heads.
“A fresh start. Yes?”
More nods.
“I am so sorry.” He held his hand out to Caroline, who took it and squeezed it uncertainly. “I’m so sorry that I’ve spent my life putting myself first. I just always thought that if I was a ‘nice guy’ then people would be happy for me, whatever I decided to do. That’s what my mum always said to me: ‘As long as you’re happy, darling, that’s all that matters.’ But she didn’t teach me that happiness should be dependent on the happiness of people I loved. But now,” he said, “I want you lot to decide what I should do.” He rubbed Otis’s hair and smiled at Pearl. “I want you all to write me a letter, from the heart, no holds barred, and tell me how to be what you want me to be. It can be as stupid as you like. You know”—he smiled at Luke—“maybe you’d like me to dress differently.” He looked at Pearl. “Or maybe learn to skate. Or maybe take a vow of celibacy.” He squeezed Caroline’s hand. “Just anything you can think of. And I’ll try to do it.”
Beau stirred from his sleep and looked up and around in awed shock. “What?” he said. “What’s happening?”
Adrian looked down at his youngest child and smiled. “We’re all just talking. About what we want Daddy to do so that we can all be happy again.”
“Are you coming home? To live?”
Adrian smiled. “I don’t know about that. But I’ll do whatever anyone wants me to do.”
Beau nodded. “OK,” he said, yawning. Then he turned his big eyes to Adrian and he said, “Can you carry me? Up to my bed?”
Adrian was about to say: Oh no, big boy, you’re too heavy for that now. But he stopped himself. He thought of all the nights when Beau had been small enough to be carried to bed and he’d been watching TV in a flat two miles away with another woman.
