Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  Jenny was rigid in the bed, palms pressed down on the blanket, fingers digging in. “That was the one thing we still had going for us: nobody knew. I kept on telling myself over and over, At least we’ve got that. As long as people thought we were doing great, we had a chance of getting back up and doing great again. If people think you’re some kind of lunatic losers, they start treating you like lunatic losers, and then you’re screwed. Totally screwed.”

  If that’s how everyone treats you, I had said to Richie, then that’s how you feel. How is that different? I said, “There are professionals. Counselors, therapists. Anything you said to someone like that would have been confidential.”

  “And have him say Pat was nuts, and cart him off to some loony bin where he actually would have gone crazy? No. Pat didn’t need a therapist. All Pat needed was a job, so he wouldn’t have all this time to freak out about nothing, so he’d have to go to bed at a decent hour instead of . . .” Jenny shoved the drawing away, so violently that it fluttered off the bed, glided to rest by my foot with an ugly rasping sound. “I just had to hold things together till he could get a job again. That was all. And I couldn’t do that if everyone knew. When I’d pick up Emma from school, and her teacher would smile at me and be like, ‘Oh, isn’t Emma’s reading getting so much better,’ or whatever, just like I was a normal mummy going home to a normal house—that was the only time I felt normal. I needed that. That was the only thing getting me through. If she’d given me some awful sympathetic smile and a pat on the arm, because she’d found out that Emma’s daddy was in a nuthouse, I’d have curled up and died, right there on the classroom floor.”

  The air felt solid with heat. For a stab of a second I saw me and Dina, maybe fourteen and five, me jerking her arm behind her back at the school gates: Shut up, you shut up, you don’t ever talk about Mum outside the house or I’ll break your arm— The high steam-whistle shriek out of her, and the stomach-turning free-fall pleasure of yanking her wrist higher. I leaned down to pick up the drawing, so I could hide my face.

  Jenny said, “I never wanted all that much. I wasn’t one of those ambitious types who want to be a pop star or a CEO or an It girl. All I wanted was to be normal.”

  All the force had ebbed out of her voice, leaving it drained and wan. I laid the drawing back on the bed; she didn’t seem to notice. “That’s why you didn’t send Jack back to preschool, isn’t it?” I said. “Not because of the money. Because he was saying he’d heard the animal, and you were afraid he’d say it there.”

  Jenny flinched like I had raised a hand to her. “He kept on and on saying it! Back at the beginning of summer it was just once in a while, and it was only because Pat was encouraging him—they’d come downstairs and Pat would be all, ‘See, Jen, I’m not going loopy. Jack heard it just now, didn’t you, Jack the lad?’ And of course Jack would be like, ‘Yeah, Mummy, I heard the aminal in the ceiling!’ If you tell a three-year-old he’s heard something, and if he knows you want him to have heard it, then yeah, of course he’ll end up convinced that he did. Back then I didn’t even think it was a big deal. I just went, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only a bird, it’ll go out again in a minute.’ But then . . .”

  Something jerked her body, so hard that I thought she was going to be sick. It took me a second to realize it had been a shudder. “Then he started saying it more and more. ‘Mum, the aminal went scratch scratch scratch in my wall! Mum, the aminal jumped up and down like this! Mum, the aminal, the aminal, the . . .’ And then this one afternoon in I guess August, towards the end of August, I took him over to play at his friend Karl’s house, and when I got back to pick him up, the two of them were in the garden, yelling and pretending to whack something with sticks. Aisling—that’s Karl’s mum—she said to me, ‘Jack was talking about a big animal that growls, and Karl said they should kill it, so that’s what they’ve been doing. Is that OK? You don’t mind?’”

  That racking shudder again. “Oh, God. I thought I was going to faint. Thank God, Aisling took it for granted it was just something Jack had made up—she was just worried in case I thought she was encouraging them to be cruel to animals, or something. I don’t know how I got out of there. I took Jack home and I sat down on the sofa with him on my lap—that’s what we do for serious talks. I went, ‘Jack, look at me. Remember how we talked about the Big Bad Wolf not being real? This animal you told Karl about, it’s the same kind as the Big Bad Wolf: it’s makey-up. You know there’s no real animal, don’t you? You know it’s only pretend. Don’t you?’

  “He wouldn’t look at me. He kept wiggling, trying to get down—Jack always hated staying still, but it wasn’t just that. I held onto his arms harder—I was terrified I was actually hurting him, but I had to hear him say yes. I had to. Finally he yelled, ‘No! It makes growls inside the wall! I hate you!’ And he kicked me in the stomach and pulled away, and ran.”

  Jenny smoothed the blanket carefully over her knees. “So,” she said, “I rang the preschool and told them Jack wasn’t coming back. I could tell they thought it was the money—I wasn’t happy about that, but I couldn’t think of anything better. When Aisling rang after that, I didn’t answer the phone. She left messages, but I just deleted them. After a while she stopped ringing.”

  “And Jack,” I said. “Did he keep talking about the animal?”

  “Not after that. Once or twice, just little mentions, but the same way he’d talk about Baloo or Elmo, you know? Not like it was in his actual life. I knew that could be just because he could tell I didn’t want to hear it, but that was OK. Jack was only little. As long as he knew not to act like it was real, it didn’t matter so much whether he knew why. Once everything was over, he’d forget all about it.”

  I asked, carefully, “And Emma?”

  “Emma,” Jenny said, so gently, like she wanted to cup the word in her two hands and keep it safe from spilling. “I was so scared about Emma. She was still little enough that I knew she could end up believing in this thing, if Pat went on about it enough; but she wasn’t little enough that anyone would figure it was just a game, like Aisling did with Jack. And I couldn’t take her out of school, either. And Emma—when something upsets her, she can’t let go of it; she’ll stay upset for weeks and keep bringing it up over and over. If she started getting sucked in, I didn’t know what I was going to do. When I tried to think about it, my mind just blanked out.

  “So when I was putting her to bed, that night in August after I talked to Jack, I tried to explain. I went, ‘Sweetie, you know that animal Daddy talks about? The one in the attic?’

  “Emma gave me this quick little careful look. It totally broke my heart—she shouldn’t ever have to watch herself around me—but at the same time I was actually glad, that she knew to be careful. She went, ‘Yeah. The one that scratches.’ I went, ‘Have you ever heard it?’ and she shook her head and went, ‘No.’”

  Jenny’s chest rose and fell. “The relief; Jesus, the relief. Emma’s not a great liar; I’d have known. I said, ‘That’s right. That’s because it’s not really there. Daddy’s just a little confused right now. Sometimes people think silly things when they’re not feeling great. Remember when you had the flu and you were calling all your dolls the wrong names, because everything got all mixed up in your head? That’s how Daddy’s feeling right now. So we just have to take good care of him and wait for him to get better.’

  “Emma got that—she liked helping me take care of Jack when he was sick. She went, ‘Probably he needs some medicine and chicken soup.’ I went, ‘OK, we’ll try that. But if it doesn’t work straightaway, you know what’s the most important thing you can do to help? Not tell anybody. Not anybody at all, ever. Daddy’s going to get better soon, and when he does, it’s really important that no one knows about this, or they’ll think he was very silly. The animal has to be a family secret. Do you understand that?’”

  Her thumb moved on the sheet, stroking,
a tiny tender movement. “Emma went, ‘But it’s definitely not there?’ and I went, ‘Definitely definitely. It’s just a bit of silliness, and so we’re not going to talk about it, ever. OK?’

  “Emma looked a lot happier. She snuggled down in her bed and went, ‘OK. Shhh.’ And she put her finger up to her mouth and smiled at me, over it—”

  Jenny caught her breath, and her head whipped back. Her eyes were wild, ricocheting. I said, quickly, “And she didn’t mention it again?”

  She didn’t hear me. “I was just trying to keep the kids OK. That was all I could do. Just keep the house clean, keep the kids safe, and keep getting up in the morning. Some days I didn’t think I was going to manage even that. I knew Pat wasn’t going to get better—nothing was going to get better. He’d stopped even applying for jobs, and anyway who’d hire him, in the state he was in? And we needed money, but even if I could’ve got work, how could I leave the kids with him?”

  I tried to make some kind of soothing noise; I don’t know what came out. Jenny didn’t stop. “You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step—not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.”

  Her voice was ripe and swollen with remembered nightmare, like some dark rotten thing ready to burst. I said—for her sake or my own, I didn’t know and didn’t care—“Let’s move forward. This was August?”

  I was just thin meaningless sounds, yammering at the rim of that blizzard. “I was having dizzy fits—I’d be going up the stairs and all of a sudden my head would be spinning; I’d have to sit down on the step and put my head on my knees till it went away. And I started forgetting stuff, stuff that had just happened. Like I’d say to the kids, ‘Get your coats on, we’re going to the shop,’ and Emma would give me this weird look and say, ‘But we went this morning,’ and I’d look in the cupboards and yeah, everything I thought we needed would be right there, but I still couldn’t remember anything—putting it there, or buying it, or even going out. Or I’d go to take a shower, and when I was taking off my top I’d realize my hair was wet: I’d just had a shower, like it had to be less than an hour ago, but I couldn’t remember it. I would’ve thought I was losing it, except I didn’t have room to worry about that. I couldn’t keep hold of anything except the second that was actually happening.”

  In that moment I thought of Broken Harbor: of my summer haven, awash with the curves of water and the loops of seabirds and the long falls of silver-gold light through sweet air; of muck and craters and raw-edged walls where human beings had beat their retreat. For the first time in my life, I saw the place for what it was: lethal, shaped and honed for destruction as expertly as the trap lurking in the Spains’ attic. The menace of it left me blinded, sang like hornets in the bones of my skull. We need straight lines to keep us safe, we need walls; we build solid concrete boxes, signposts, packed skylines, because we need them. Without any of that to hold them down, Pat’s mind and Jenny’s had flown wild, zigzagging in unmapped space, tied to nothing.

  Jenny said, “The worst part was talking to Fi. We always talked every morning; if I’d stopped, she’d have known something was wrong. But it was so hard. There was so much stuff to remember—like I had to make sure Jack was out in the garden or up in his room before she called, because I wasn’t about to tell her he wasn’t in preschool, so I couldn’t have her hearing him. And I had to try and remember what I’d said to her before—for a while I used to take notes while we talked, so I could have them there the next day and make sure I got it right, but I got paranoid about Pat or the kids finding them and wanting to know what the story was. And I had to sound cheerful all the time, even if Pat was conked out on the sofa because he’d been sitting there till five in the morning staring at a hole in the bloody wall. It was awful. It got . . .”

  She swiped a tear off her face, absently, like someone batting at a fly. “It got to where I woke up dreading that phone call. Isn’t that terrible? My own sister that I love to bits, and I used to daydream about how I could pick some fight bad enough that she’d stop speaking to me. I’d have done it, except I couldn’t concentrate long enough to come up with anything.”

  “Mrs. Spain,” I said, louder, putting a snap into my voice. “When did things reach this point?”

  After a moment her face turned towards me. “What? . . . I’m not sure. It felt like I kept on going for ages like that, years, but . . . I don’t know. September? Sometime in September?”

  I braced my feet hard against the floor and said, “Let’s move on to this Monday.”

  “Monday,” Jenny said. Her eyes skidded away to the window and for a sinking second I thought I had lost her again, but then she drew a long breath and wiped off another tear. “Yeah. OK.”

  Outside the window the light had moved; it fired the whirling leaves with a translucent orange glow, turned them into blazing danger-flags that made my adrenaline leap. Inside the air felt stripped of oxygen, as if the heat and the disinfectants had seared it all away, left the room dried hollow. Everything I was wearing itched fiercely against my skin.

  Jenny said, “It wasn’t a good day. Emma got up on the wrong side of the bed—her toast tasted funny, and the tag in her shirt bothered her, and whine whine whine . . . And Jack picked up on it, so he was being awful too. He kept going on and on about how he wanted to be an animal for Halloween. I had a pirate costume all made for him, he’d been running around with a scarf round his head saying he was a pirate for weeks, but all of a sudden he decided he was going to be ‘Daddy’s big scary animal.’ He wouldn’t shut up about it, all day long. I was trying everything to distract him, giving him biscuits and letting him watch the telly and promising he’d get crisps when we went to the shop—I know I sound like a terrible mum, but he never gets that stuff normally; I just couldn’t listen to it, not that day.”

  It was so homely, the anxious note in her voice, the little furrow between her eyebrows as she looked at me; so ordinary. No woman wants some stranger thinking she’s a bad mother for bribing her little boy with junk food. I had to hold back a shudder. “I understand,” I said.

  “But he wouldn’t stop. In the shop, even, he was telling the girl at the till about the animal—I swear I would’ve told him to shut up, and I never do that either, only I didn’t want her to see me make a big deal of it. Once we got outside I wouldn’t say a word to Jack all the way home, and I wouldn’t give him his crisps—he howled so loud he nearly broke my and Emma’s eardrums, but I just ignored him. It was all I could do just to get us home without crashing the car. Probably I could’ve handled it better, only . . .” Jenny’s head turned uneasily on the pillow. “I wasn’t in great form either.”

  Sunday night. To remind her of being happy. I said, “Something had happened. That morning, when you first came downstairs.”

  She didn’t ask how I knew. The boundaries of her life had been turning ragged and permeable for so long, another invader was nothing strange. “Yeah. I went to put the kettle on, and right beside it, on the countertop, there was . . . there was this pin. Like a badge, like kids pin on their jackets? It said, ‘I go to JoJo’s.’ I used to have one like that, but I hadn’t seen it in years—I probably threw it away when I moved out of home, I don’t even remember. No way had it been there the night before. I’d tidied up, last thing; the place was spotless. No way.”

  “So how did you think it had got there?”

  The memory had her breathing faster. “I couldn’t think anything. I just stood there like an eejit, staring at it with my mouth open. Pat used to have one of them too, so I was trying to tell mys
elf he must have found it somewhere and put it there for me to find, like a romantic thing, like to remind me about the good times, to apologize for how awful things had got? It’s the kind of thing he would’ve done, before . . . Only he doesn’t keep stuff like that either. And even if he had, it would’ve been in a box in the attic, and that stupid wire was still nailed over the attic hatch; how could he have got it down without me noticing?”

  She was searching my face, scanning for any particle of doubt. “I swear to God, I didn’t imagine it. You can look. I wrapped the pin up in a piece of tissue—I didn’t even want to touch it—and stuck it in my pocket. When Pat woke up I was praying he’d say something about it, like, ‘Oh, did you find your present?’ but of course he didn’t. So I took it upstairs and folded it in a jumper, in my bottom drawer. Go look. It’s there.”

  “I know,” I said gently. “We found it.”

  “See? See? It was real! I actually . . .” Jenny’s face ducked away from mine for a second; her voice, when she started talking again, had a muffled sound to it. “I actually wondered, at first. I was . . . I told you what things had been like. I thought I could actually be seeing things. So I stuck the pin into my thumb, deep—it bled for ages. I knew I couldn’t be imagining that, right? All day, I couldn’t think about anything else—I went straight through a red light on the way to get Emma. But at least when I started getting scared that I’d hallucinated the whole thing, I could look at my thumb and go, OK, a hallucination didn’t do that.”