The Shadow Between Us

by Carol Mason

  ‘How old is she?’ he asks.

  It takes me a second or two to realise he’s talking about Jessica. ‘She just turned nineteen,’ I say, after a moment. I gaze far out across the water, to the horizon, wishing I could grasp on to what lies beyond it, if anything does. ‘She’s in Europe. It was supposedly just for the summer, then she was going to be off to Washington State University . . .’ I am aware of how light my voice suddenly sounds just by speaking of her, of a burgeoning of pride at the idea of her determining her own path, regardless of what her dad wants. Jessica having this marvellous free rein to follow her whims and desires, and her doing exactly that.

  ‘Nice . . . So she’s not going to college now?’

  ‘Ah . . . Who knows? I will probably be the last to find out, if I’m being honest. We had a bit of a falling out over it.’ How shiny the truth looks when we varnish it. ‘Her dad didn’t support her wanting to defer her place and spend a year travelling. I was fine with it . . . but in the end it was me she thought was being unsupportive.’ I realise we are venturing down a path I hadn’t intended to take. ‘It’s a long story,’ I say, hoping that will end it. I lean forwards and stare at the tops of my shoes, trying to focus on the criss-cross of the off-white laces, the silver grommets, one of them that’s bent, the smudge of dirt on the left one, by the toe. When I look up I’m a little light-headed; everything looks rearranged, the sun brighter, the sea too much like glass. He is watching me closely. Too closely. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Not sure how we got on to all that . . .’ I fake looking at the time. ‘I should probably make some sort of move . . .’ I stand up, perhaps a little too quickly, and feel the blood draining from my face.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks. ‘Hope I didn’t say something wrong?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, I’m fine.’ I try to say it chirpily but there’s a distinct edge of un-fine-ness about me. ‘Like I say, though, time to go and put my day to good use.’ What did Elizabeth Taylor say? Pour yourself a drink. Put on some lipstick. Pull yourself together. I hate to think how many times I’ve drawn upon the wisdom of a seven-times married movie star recently. ‘I’m supposed to be building a deck. It’s a great day for it.’

  ‘Deck?’

  ‘Well, more like repairing.’

  ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Don’t look so shocked.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re just so tiny. I wouldn’t have thought . . .’

  I must seem a little edgy or something because he adds, ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound sexist or to insult you.’

  ‘You didn’t. Not at all,’ I say, once I can drag a response out of myself. Or did he? I don’t even know. What I do know is we have wrong-footed somehow. He feels it too, and is suddenly out of his depth. Good heavens, I am probably a decade older but right now it feels like a million years.

  ‘I suppose it is a bit shocking, even to me,’ I say, trying to salvage it. ‘I’ve never actually built anything that other people have to stand on before. It was one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” things. Anyway . . .’ I shrug, affecting casualness, but it’s an untold effort. ‘See you later,’ I say, and start to walk away.

  ‘If you need an extra pair of hands . . .’ I glance over my shoulder and he’s flexing his left one. ‘Mine used to be pretty capable. They haven’t been tested in a while.’

  I smile again, weakly, by way of saying thanks in the spirit that the offer was meant: not seriously. ‘Don’t tempt me. You might regret you offered.’

  ‘You might regret I did too,’ he says.

  TEN

  I really didn’t see myself doing this so soon.

  The butterflies start up the instant I indicate to turn left off the main arterial road into our tree-lined suburb. I have to put a hand on my stomach to try to quell the sickening sense of dread. Abigail Avenue meanders for about a quarter mile, off-shooting into several no through roads and cul-de-sacs, the third one being ours. When we first drove here to meet the listing agent there was no denying the entire neighbourhood had a certain upmarket charm. In a green belt, just minutes from the lake, with trails in every direction, you could still walk to the shops and be in downtown Seattle in about twenty minutes. There were some beautiful character homes on slopes or hidden among trees, some with direct access to the lake. The one we had come to see – the taupe house – was on the mountainside and already pushing our budget. In the photographs, with its strong architectural lines and three-car garage with sectional glass doors framed in black aluminium, it was too contemporary and not homey enough for me. I’d hoped I’d see it differently in person, but turning into the drive that day with the realtor left me with a Hmm, still not crazy about this place! feeling that somehow never fully went away. The inside was shiny and fresh, to be expected of a new-build. The endless taupe colour scheme and dark wood cabinetry might have been modern and neutral to some but to me it was drab and cold. But Mark loved its clean lines, high ceilings, its wide, light, open spaces – all 4,000 square feet of them – the gazillion pot-lights and monster-sized stainless fridge. Admittedly the bathrooms were nice and spacious, the finishings high quality, and it did have a perfectly manicured, private back garden – in many ways it would have felt ungrateful to dislike it. Plus, as Mark reminded me, it was near Whole Foods for me, and work for him, and Jessica didn’t have to change schools. By the time we left that day I was feeling a bit better about it, or perhaps it’s just in my nature to make the best of things. Had Mark walked away, I’d probably not have given it a backwards glance. But I only had to look at him to see how taken he was with the place. With his latest promotion at work bringing him into the big leagues of high-tech patent engineering, the house reflected how Mark saw himself now, and somewhere in the core of him, he even liked it for all the right reasons. I would have had to find it fundamentally objectionable on a level I could not live with to tell him I hated it and ruin his dream. Then Jessica got to know she would be getting a bedroom twice the size of her old one. With a walk-in closet. That’s when I was officially outvoted.

  Now that I’m turning into our drive I still can’t fully equate it with home, but it’s tempered somewhat by the relief that, despite there being an accident on the I5 so that I am later getting here than I intended, school is still not out for the day, the kids haven’t started trickling home, there are no cars in driveways, no mums ambling back from their afternoon dog walks. The neighbourhood hasn’t come out of hibernation. I am getting away with no one seeing me.

  Going inside is a strange experience. The place feels cavernous, unlived in, oddly silent. I drop my bag by the front door and hear the short echo of my feet as I walk into the great room, noting immediately how show-home-like the kitchen looks. Of course, Wednesday. Josie, our cleaner, will have been yesterday. But it’s more than that. It hits me immediately what it is. The place is missing Jessica. The chairs lack piles of school files and discarded clothing detritus. There are no shoes kicked off by the coffee table, no half-eaten apples, balled-up pairs of fluffy socks, errant hair elastics. Just for the hell of it, I call out, ‘Jess?’ imagining her responding, fantasising about us going back, way back, in time – or even to just a little over a year would do – when we were a normal, happy family. But there is nothing. Just a barren, bewildering silence.

  I dump my car keys and phone on the granite island. The only thing about this house that drove Mark mad was that it’s got one of those hanging pot racks above the island, the kind you see in the kitchens of TV chefs. Mark was always dinging his head on a pan. I can’t look at it without thinking of Jess and me laughing at him when he got in a tizzy about it. There is a build-up of mail sitting by the fruit bowl, like no one has paid any attention to it for a while. I contemplate flicking through it, hoping to see a postcard from Jess, but decide not to bother. I notice that Josie has placed my container of cooking oils right beside the stove again; I’ve told her countless times you don’t keep oil near 22,000 BTUs of heat unless you want it to turn rancid. I like it righ
t behind me on the island within arm’s reach of where I’m cooking. She finally did as I asked, but has clearly reverted to her wilful ways. I never wanted a cleaner. It felt a little lazy or elitist, not to mention an invasion of privacy. Besides, who needs aerobics with free weights when you can scrub a bathtub? But once we moved in Mark wanted our place to be as denuded of life as the neighbours’. We were supposed to be turning over a new leaf in a new house. Though I was never convinced there was anything wrong with our leaf the way it was.

  I wander over to the windows and stare out at the lawn, thinking of how just days before it happened Jessica and I had been laughing because a raccoon kept using our gutters as its personal toilet – Mark had gone up the ladder and got out his iPhone. ‘Daaad! Why are you taking pictures?’ He gave her that look that said, Haven’t you anything better to do than watch me?

  ‘He’s going to use it as evidence when he takes the raccoon to court,’ I teased, and elbowed Jess in the ribs. ‘Or maybe he just wants the photo in his back pocket, you know, for when he and the raccoon have the serious talk.’ We had cracked up. Makes me smile just remembering it. We were often united in mocking the one person we smugly saw as being less evolved than the pair of us. It was a girl thing. Mark had given me that face. We never found out why he’d photographed it.

  I look over at the Waxmans’ next door. Urgh! All I can see is the hideous Fourth of July weekend. I hadn’t wanted to go to any party just six weeks after what happened. I made the effort for Mark, to prove I was doing better than he thought I was, to show I was at least trying. Bill said it was going to be a low-key affair – just the five couples from the cul-de-sac and some of the younger kids. But when we walked in it seemed like he’d invited half the neighbourhood. No sooner had I put my fig, blue cheese and prosciutto canapés on the table than Phyllis Chappell, who has never said more than ‘hello’ to me in the past, was hugging me and saying how brave it was of me to be here, how she couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be me. I remember standing rigid like a tree trunk, wanting it to be over. Then I was trussed by another pair of well-meaning arms, shrinking into myself until I had nowhere else to go. The music was loud – a tune from my growing up, Feargal Sharkey’s ‘A Good Heart’. You don’t hear it much in North America. Ordinarily I’d have sung along in my mind, been swept back with dewy-eyed nostalgia to the days of my youth. But the music couldn’t penetrate, couldn’t reach the part of the brain where the feel-good chemicals live. Music then and music now makes me feel nothing; I am utterly dead to it. Mark rescued me and I wanted to say, I need to go home! But then I spotted Barb Norman, who, just days after it happened, somehow ended up in my kitchen saying, ‘I know you suffer terrible remorse. Remember that God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble. Let Him give you strength. Psalm 46:1.’ She had squeezed my clenched hands, held hers fast over mine, almost as though we were praying for me together. Then she’d got up and left, with the same busybody entitlement she’d arrived with. Seeing her here released a flurry of dread in the pit of my stomach. I already felt defensive and she hadn’t as much as looked in my direction yet; tension was gathering around my ears like a storm. If she came over . . . If she repeated one more Godly platitude . . . She’d get it in the neck just like the woman in the parking lot.

  ‘Wine?’ Mark was at my side again, gently ushering me outside to the drinks table. My husband, who I’d shown such little appreciation for over the previous weeks. I’d been finding myself looking for a chance to attack him for reasons I didn’t even understand. The guilt about this was just around the corner waiting to make me feel worse about myself than I already did. I spent a painful eternity meandering from one table of food to the next, wishing my friend Deanna would arrive, gazing with feigned interest at platters of raw vegetables, picking at pitta and dip – anything to give myself something to do other than have to stare into somebody’s face and wait for them to say something that was going to hit a nerve. I still hadn’t regained my appetite; just the look of food made me want to throw up. I was skinny – had dropped twenty-five pounds in six weeks. I’d never had a huge bottom but now when I turned sideways in the mirror I was a straight line; my neck felt bird-like and loose-skinned. Even my shoes were like boats; my feet had shrunk! I remember overhearing Stephanie, who lives directly opposite us, gushing to Tanya about how her beautician had started ordering Marc Jacobs’ Jealous Glaze nail polish after Stephanie had raved about it to her. How could I remember so little about the terrible thing I’d done, and yet days later I could still recall the name of a nail polish like it was my own name? I stood there grasping for something to add, inwardly decrying them for being this shallow and self-absorbed. Then Bill cracked a joke about something and everybody was suddenly high-fiving and falling around laughing. Everyone but me. I remember the laughter suddenly dissipating when they must have noticed that I was a block of stone. Then, out of the blue, Bill stunned me by giving one sharp smack to my back, like a man might do to his buddy. ‘Come on, Liv! Put a smile on that face!’ The hard thump and his words reverberated through the weightless shell of me.

  There was complete silence, then a low rumble of disapproval. Distantly I was aware of Mark saying something to Bill, though I didn’t know what, and then they had sailed on to some other topic – their kids, their golf, their hair, their trip to the Canadian Rockies. Bill’s boorish behaviour was forgotten about and I was the only one somehow still stuck in the moment, pulsing with shame.

  I walked to the corner of the yard, to where he stored the barbecue when it wasn’t in use, still feeling the impression of his hand on my back. What I did next wasn’t really me. I was outside my body, watching myself, almost fascinated; I saw myself turning on the garden hose. Wren, Bill’s springer spaniel, was the only one who seemed to be aware of this: dogs and water. He started barking and trying to bite the end of the hose. Before anyone knew what had hit them I’d aimed the water right at Bill. The long jet of it was super-powered: I could hear the force of the water blasting the cotton of his colourful checked shirt; the fabric ballooned, like a sail caught by wind. He leapt and shouted, covered his face with his hands, but I wasn’t aiming for his face. I was aiming for his middle as though his big fat gut was the bullseye in my private target practice. But then I was turning it on everybody. I was going after anything that moved. I remember blankly watching the women run for cover, the sound of their squeals melding with Earth, Wind and Fire singing ‘September’. I remember vaguely thinking how amiss this very sight before my eyes was. But all in all I was just blank, just vaguely conscious that my head and my hands weren’t connected – my intentions and my actions hadn’t got it together. It wasn’t me who was commanding this evil water torture. I was too busy being transfixed by a beautiful rainbow that was suspended in the particles of water, in a shaft of sunlight.

  I suddenly heard ‘What the fuck?’ as though life’s volume had just been turned up. Bill was soaked to his skin and was glaring at me like I was the evil outlier. This was a person who had dined in my house, who had sat on my sofa until the wee small hours and playfully flirted in that inoffensive way that we tend not to mind because it reminds us we are living, sexual beings rather than just husbands and wives. And now he was staring at me like I was a Martian. The kids were laughing like this was the best thing they’d ever seen. Wren kept on trying to bite at the water just a few inches from my hand. Then I heard Mark saying something to him again. But it wasn’t what I thought. I realised Mark wasn’t defending me, he was apologising for me, bumbling out an excuse for my behaviour – not a word of criticism of Bill’s. Then his blonde, handsome head was coming towards me . . . barging through my aim, wrenching the thing out of my hand. It fell to the ground, quickly saturating my pale green ballet flats. Next I was being frogmarched back across the soggy lawn past my enemies, through the gate, back to our side of the fence. As he hauled me into the silence of our house, tears suddenly began to stream down my face – or maybe it w
as only then that I was feeling them, along with the clench of each individual one of his fingers on my bare arm.

  ‘Liv.’ I heard his voice. ‘Liv.’

  I was numb yet stinging. I was so sore. Inside and out. I was as mortified as if he had stripped me bare in front of them.

  I remember feeling the dying of love. All those years – good heavens, nearly a lifetime – of esteeming him so highly, all of it leaving me. What overlaid everything was the stigma of having been so publicly let down.

  ‘Liv.’ I hear it again.

  Echoes of the garden party fade. No one is there; I am staring at an empty yard.

  The noise in my head has abruptly stopped, replaced by dull confusion. I turn from the window. Mark is standing right by the island. ‘You’re back?’ His suit jacket is hanging off his right shoulder from a fingertip. ‘You’re home.’ The questioning tone when it isn’t a question. He is buoyed up, optimistic.

  ‘I thought you’d be at work . . .’ I say. I’m puzzled. How long could I have been standing here, so powerfully pinned by a memory? He’s wearing a lilac dress shirt. With his fair, lightly tanned skin he suits the colour very much. I am struck by how tired he looks, and older – something I’ve never noticed before. In all these years his collar-length hair has never been either longer or shorter than it is now. As though his hair might point to time having stood still, if only his face didn’t contradict it. And for a moment I imagine what it would be like to be back. If this – him standing here, his cautious optimism – were the bridge. ‘I came to get some more of my stuff. And a few things from my desk.’