by Jo Jakeman
Rachel shook her head but she wasn’t surprised.
“Did you tell Naomi?”
“God, no. I spilled my tea and then she went all . . . well, peculiar. She freaked out and I had to leave. Besides, it’s not really my place.”
“Of course it is. Don’t you wish someone had told you when Phillip started knobbing Naomi?”
“If I recall clearly, someone did, and that someone was you.”
“You’re welcome.”
A secret was no longer a secret once it was shared. Rachel reminded me of that fact almost daily. She was the person I confided in when I wanted to have confirmation of how terrible my life was, or have her rip Phillip to shreds, but if I wanted sympathy, or my innermost thoughts kept between the two of us, then Rachel was not top of the list. But then, as lists go, it was a short one.
Rachel was an advocate of honesty being the best policy. She’d yet to come across any thought that would remain better off unsaid. Perhaps that was why I didn’t tell her the whole story.
I didn’t want to believe my own eyes. If Phillip really was abusing Naomi, how could I sit by and watch? Once I admitted it to Rachel, I would have to intervene. Until I was sure what was happening, I would keep it to myself. It was a cowardly way to behave, but I still wasn’t a match for Phillip even with Rachel by my side.
“I don’t like to gossip,” I said.
“Oh, bless you, but it’s not gossip when it’s in the other person’s best interest. Think of it as ‘information dissemination.’ Imagine telling the tart that Phillip is doing the hokey-pokey at someone else’s shindig.” Her eyes sparkled at the thought and she held up her index finger.
“Numero uno, he gets his balls sliced off as he sleeps because, as we know, she is a psycho bitch.”
“Do we know that? Because—”
“Numero duo”—she held up two fingers—“she gets that smug look knocked off her Botoxed face . . .”
“I don’t think she’s had Botox. That’s just how skin looks when you’re in your twenties.”
“And numero trio—”
“I don’t think that’s Italian—”
“—you get to sleep soundly at night, knowing that you have saved another woman, albeit a cheating witch, from going through the same bollocks that you did.”
I smiled. “You have a fair point.”
“Indeed I do.”
She inclined her head graciously.
“And if it was that simple, maybe I would. But he’s Alistair’s dad. What affects Phillip affects us all. I just want things to be . . . I don’t know . . . normal between us. We’ll be coparents for the rest of our lives and I want to enjoy Alistair’s graduation, and wedding, and the birth of his children without feeling awkward every time I’m in a room with Phillip. I never want Alistair to feel he has to choose which parent to invite to important events. I never want him to worry about hurting our feelings.”
“He’s six, babe. There’s still time for Phillip to get run over by a bus.”
I laughed.
Rachel took my hand and stared hard into my face until I returned her gaze. “Stop worrying about stuff that might never happen. Alistair won’t thank you for being a doormat.”
I felt myself color. I didn’t want to be a pushover, but it wasn’t in anyone’s interest for me to cause a scene.
“Anyhoo,” she said, dropping my hand and picking up her coffee. “How are you fixed for Friday night? I’m thinking double date . . .”
CHAPTER 4
20 days before the funeral
There had been love between Phillip and me once. Difficult to believe it now, I know, but there was a time when he doted on me and I would have done anything for him. I hadn’t needed anyone else but Phillip and our baby.
The baby before Alistair.
As late-afternoon sun bled into the fields I stood and brushed the dirt from my knees. Crocus spears covered the ground early thanks to a mild winter. New green leaves unfolded around me while soft white clouds brushed over the horizon, lit golden from beneath, as they hurried after the setting sun. The first butterflies of the season swooped and fell like streamers in the breeze. I didn’t believe in reincarnation—didn’t believe in anything really—but I often looked out for signs that she was still with me.
I would have called her Iris, if she had lived. The messenger of the gods, the personification of the rainbow, the symbol of hope. When she was taken from me, I mislaid the little bit of hope I had set aside for a rainy day. I was yet to find its hiding place. Every time I saw a rainbow I thought of her reaching out to me and telling me she was okay. That I would be okay.
It was the anniversary of the day she should have been born. I could not, would not remember the date of her death, but every spring I would go to the place where I had lost her and say sorry. As far as the world was concerned, she had never existed. She was a note on my medical file and a scar on my heart.
Grief, when it comes, takes many forms. I had lost enough people from my life to have experienced them all. But the tears shed following the death of someone close to you were nearly always the tears of the future. People cry for what will never be, the days they won’t spend together, the celebrations they will miss, the conversations they will never have. They are the tears of absence.
This year she would have been eight glorious years old. I wrote a card and bought a gift, just as I would have done if she had lived, and spent the afternoon thinking of what might have been. I spoke to her as if she were in my arms and I told her stories of her little brother and how much I missed her.
Rachel sat in the car. She didn’t have children, said she never would, but she knew what Iris meant to me. She would drive me to pick up Alistair from the child-minder and order pizza for our supper. Hot and spicy for me, cheese and tomato for Alistair. She wouldn’t ask me how I felt nor shed tears of her own. She was there to pick me up when I fell, and top up my wineglass when it was empty.
Phillip never spoke about that night anymore. Didn’t wonder out loud, What if? Her death didn’t alter his course, yet it had knocked me off my axis and spun me out of control. That’s not to say it didn’t affect him. He was different after that night. We both were. Phillip became crueler, angry at the world. It was his way of coping, I guess. But it seemed, after that night, he always kept me at arm’s length.
Sometimes I’d look at Phillip and see him, as he should be, twenty years from now, gray haired, in a morning suit, walking Iris down the aisle. She’d look beautiful and he’d look proud. A significant event wiped out in the turn of a wheel. A future, a dream destroyed.
Our marriage became a minefield to be navigated with caution. I used to wish that I had died in the accident rather than live with the pain of loss. Most people were scared of death. I was afraid of life.
When I think about it now, it unfolds as if it were happening to someone else. The car had appeared from nowhere and retreated to the same place. Hit and run, the police called it, but that sounded like a game of cricket. End of the over. All out.
In those first months, the only thing I lived for was to find out who’d done this to me and who had killed my unborn child. How could I forgive them if I didn’t know who had been behind the wheel of that car? How could I put it all behind me if I never heard them apologize? The only reason I had to get out of my hospital bed was so that I could stand and look them in the eye. I’d sworn the car that hit me had been black, dark green maybe, but when they retrieved paint samples from the bushes they said they were looking for a blue car. I scanned every blue car I saw in the following weeks for signs of damage or repair, fancying myself an amateur sleuth who would find the person who was eluding the police.
Months passed and no one was charged. I swore at Phillip, and he swore back. He worked late following up leads, checking with more and more garages out of town. They were called and visited, especi
ally those known to the police for operating on the wrong side of the law, but no one had brought in a car with damage that was consistent with having mown a pregnant woman down in the street.
Phillip wasn’t officially allowed to be on the investigating team, but those who were working on the case were his friends and they told him they’d keep him in the loop and that they’d “catch the bastard.” I drew up my own shortlist, of people he’d arrested, those who might hold a grudge, but he wouldn’t listen. He was hurt that I’d dream of suggesting it was something to do with the job that he loved, as if by “doing the right thing” he had brought grief to our door.
When his ex-wife, Ruby, sent me a letter suggesting that “these things happen for a reason,” I accused her too. I knew she hated me and wanted Phillip back. Had he checked Ruby out? Where was she that night? What car was she driving nowadays? But he threw his plate against the wall and shouted, “Enough is enough!” I never trusted her after that—though, in fairness, I’d never trusted her, period.
Phillip visited me at the unit, where they talked in hushed tones and gave me tablets to make me float over the pain. Not that I minded the solitude. The quietness. The kindness. Phillip was considerate in understated ways. He didn’t talk about his feelings, or ask about mine, but while I was in the hospital he did his best to dispose of things that would remind us of what we’d lost. He replaced the nearly new car with an extra roomy trunk for a baby carriage, had taken the stair gate and bassinet to the charity shop, and given away all the books on pregnancy and contented babies.
It wasn’t my first encounter with depression, but it was my most significant. When I was sent home with a pocket full of Prozac, it was there. Its clothes hung in the wardrobe, its toothbrush still in the bathroom like it had just popped out, door on the latch, and coming back at any minute. Even now I sometimes caught its scent when I walked into the room.
Phillip would tell you I started to lose my mind about that time. His affairs, his brutality—they were my fault. The first affair, and the second, I forgave him for. I accepted their inevitability. He was searching for attention that I was reticent to give. There was no point dwelling on the past, he’d say. With the third affair and the fourth, I stopped pretending to care. He was hurting too, he said, but I would drive a saint to distraction with my constant weeping. Chin up. Life goes on.
Except for the baby’s. Hers was forever suspended somewhere between my heart and my mind.
I locked my grief away. I took it out when I was alone at night, when Phillip was working, and when I was sure that no one would catch me crying. I didn’t tell him when I fell pregnant with Alistair. I waited and waited, fearing the worst, not letting myself hope. But then it was real. A pulsing heartbeat and a grainy image. A second chance. I barely left the house after that. I wasn’t going to let it happen again. No one was going to take my baby this time.
For one day each year I would think about Iris and then I would spend the evening being thankful for Alistair. There was no point in worrying about what I didn’t have when what I did have was so precious.
* * *
• • •
I was tired but calm after a day thinking about my daughter as Rachel and I pulled up outside the child-minder’s house. I couldn’t wait to collect Alistair and hear all about his day at school, whom he’d played with and what he’d learned. I loved him with a power that hurt. And that was why I was slow to get out of the car and why I was measured in each step I took toward the neat semidetached house with the miniature windmill in the front yard. Self-reproach trumps joy. I hated that someone else knew more about his day than I did.
Another woman would tell me whether he’d done his homework, and how he’d been when she picked him up from school, and what he’d had for his dinner, and I felt each of her words as a sharpened arrow of judgment to my conscience.
Alistair was younger than six in all the ways that counted. He slipped into his sixth year while the labels in his clothes still read “4.” He was in a “big-boy” bed when he was anything but. Six candles. Six friends to tea. Six bumps. Six years of making the world a sweeter place through cuddles, sticky kisses, and smiles. Alistair. A cinnamon-scented stretch of a boy yet to find control of his limbs and emotions. Holding on to his infant ways like a favorite pair of threadbare pajamas.
I could see him at the window. He had his coat on and I knew he would have been wearing it for the past twenty minutes asking, “Is it time yet?”
I rang the doorbell even though I could see his blue duffle coat through the little window and knew he was reaching for the lock that he was still too short to reach. I wriggled my fingers at him and his face creased to show dimples so deep that you could lose kisses in them.
Ella opened the door, smiling, in her apologetic way, from beneath her fringe, and ushered me through to the warm hip-high cuddle of my boy. She was skinny with a mass of curls and an oversized mouth like a child’s drawing of a stick woman. The school lunch smell of gravy and mash lingered in the hallway. Finger paintings and photos on wood-chipped walls led upstairs, where toys and books were neatly stacked. Music played in the kitchen, a kid’s television program keeping Ella’s youngest child rooted in her high chair and Mummy’s hands free to deal with the paying guest.
“Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!”
“Hey there, buster.” I pulled him onto my hip and kissed his hair.
“Everything okay?” I asked Ella.
Ella’s rubber mouth twisted to one side and then drooped at the corners.
“Well . . .”
“Go get your schoolbag, Alistair. And find your shoes.” I plopped him down and he scurried away.
“It’s fine really, but we did have a little accident. And then we tried to cover it up. Said he didn’t know he’d wet himself. These things do happen to little ones from time to time. We’ve dealt with it now.”
“That’s not like him.” I watched him down the corridor, concerned that something had upset him, and embarrassed that Ella had dealt with it instead of me.
“And it’s probably nothing, but . . .”
Alistair came running back into the hallway and barreled into my knees.
“Where are your shoes?”
He dropped his bag and ran back to the kitchen.
“We did use a naughty word today. He called me a b-i-t-c-h.”
The word was spelled out in crisp syllables, her lips enunciating each letter so that I would be in little doubt as to what she was saying, or to the gravity of the situation. She closed her eyes and shook her curls as if the very act of spelling such a word caused her a great deal of personal anguish.
“No. Really? I don’t know where he’s heard that kind of—”
“Says he heard it from you.”
“Did he?”
“Along with a poem about beans being good for your heart?”
“God! Sorry. That probably was me. Funny at the time but in hindsight . . . Have you got those shoes, Al? We need to move. Rachel’s waiting in the car.”
“Obviously, we don’t like to encourage that kind of language. But given your situation, poor lamb . . .”
“Situation?”
“Broken home.” She overenunciated again, and I rushed into the kitchen to find Alistair transfixed by the television as vegetables sang a song to a ginger-haired man in a hat.
“Shoes on? Good. What do you say to Ella?”
“Beans, beans, good for your heart—”
“Okay, thanks, then.”
I took Alistair’s warm hand in mine and pulled him out of the house.
“We’ll see you next week,” I said.
“Beans, beans, they make you—”
“Bye!”
I slammed the door. Ella always made me feel like a fraud, like she was the perfect mother. Or was that my own insecurity leaching into the evening air? I took Alistair’
s bag from him and walked to the car idling at the curb. Rachel was uncharacteristically immobile in the driver’s seat. Usually she would hang out the window or blast inappropriate music from the stereo to make Alistair laugh. But something had changed in the five minutes since I had left the car. I could see, sitting by her side in the passenger seat of the car, the unmistakable outline of Phillip Rochester.
CHAPTER 5
16 days before the funeral
It was gray out. Cold too. I squinted through the kitchen window but the raindrops were too fine to see. They were polishing the patio with their touch and darkening the soil, but they landed so lightly you wouldn’t have known they were falling. I pulled my jumper down past my wrist. Three bruises, the size of grapes, on the top of my wrist, one slightly larger, oval underneath. A thumbprint. They would fade, and until they did, I would hide them. And not because I was protecting Phillip either, but because I was excusing myself from the questions and the pitying looks. I was sick of being Imogen Rochester the victim.
Mother was on her way, but our Sunday lunches weren’t a time for honesty and soul-searching. They were another box to be ticked on the long list of Things Normal People Do. She got to spend time with her grandson and I got to be made to feel like I couldn’t cope.
Phillip had been all smiles when he had turned up unexpectedly outside of Ella’s house on Wednesday. The way he always was when there were witnesses. Hair tousling for Alistair, and “Have you grown again?” Ignoring the fact that Alistair was jumping up and down like an overexcited dog wanting to be picked up. And for me, “Might I have a quick word?”
At first, I’d thought he’d remembered. I let myself believe that Iris was on his mind too, and that he’d come to share a moment with me. But then I saw the look in his eyes.
We walked a few steps away from the trunk of the car while Alistair climbed into the backseat. Phillip’s hand was on my wrist, viselike, as tight as his smile.
