The Second Wife

by Fleet, Rebecca

  ‘That’s great news,’ I say, barely able to register the negatives in what he has said. It’s only now, when I know it isn’t going to happen, that I realize that part of me thought she might never open her eyes again. ‘I’ll be in straight away,’ I add, hearing my voice crack, but for once I’m not ashamed. If there was ever a time for emotion, it’s now.

  I race down the main street in search of a taxi, and it’s only when I’ve flagged one down and have climbed into the back that I remember Natalie. I send her a quick text to tell her the good news and ask her to meet me at the hospital, and in seconds she’s sent one back, saying she’ll be right behind me. I look at the kisses and exclamation marks with which she’s peppered the message, and I feel the last of the poison around my heart starting to drain away. She may not be her mother, but she loves Jade. We’ll get through this together, all of us.

  I repeat this to myself as the cab carries me along, and by the time it reaches the hospital I’ve almost succeeded in pushing down the niggling little thought that has sprung up time and time again since the fire: the awareness that when it came to the crunch and I was faced with my wife in front of the burning building, we didn’t pull together. I blamed her, told her she’d acted wrongly. My first instinct wasn’t solidarity, but division.

  Jade is lying on her back with her face turned towards the doorway, and when she sees me coming towards her smiling, her face flickers weakly in response. With deliberate slowness she blinks, then extends a bandaged hand across the white sheet.

  ‘Hi Dad,’ she says.

  ‘Darling,’ I say as I sit beside her, stroke my fingertips gently across her arm. ‘Thank God you’ve woken up. I’m so happy to see you.’ Words don’t scratch the surface in this situation, I realize. I can feel all this emotion rising up, choking my throat, stinging my eyes, and I know that if I let it out it would overwhelm her, frighten her even, so I swallow it back down and just smile again, as reassuringly as I can. ‘How are you feeling?’ I ask. I think of the brief conversation I’ve just had with Doctor Rai; the names and results of tests that I find almost impossible to keep in my head. The picture he painted was inconclusive; at best, vaguely reassuring. I realize, with a jolt of shamefaced awareness, that I want my daughter to look me in the eye and tell me she’s going to be OK.

  She moves her head from side to side, thinking about it. ‘I’m not sure.’

  I swallow down my disappointment. ‘I brought you some clothes.’ I open the bag that I brought back from the shops, fan a few items out on the bed to showcase them, a conjurer parading his wares. ‘Of course, I can’t guarantee that they’re the height of fashion. You probably won’t want to be …’ I cut myself off. Seen dead in them. There’s something about the casual turn of phrase that still feels like tempting fate.

  She doesn’t seem to notice my slip, or to pick up on my jocular tone. ‘Thanks.’

  Her voice is faint, and there’s a distance in it; I realize that she’s not quite with it, not quite present in this room. I’m conscious of having to be gentle with her and take things slowly, but maybe she doesn’t want small talk, and it feels disingenuous to ignore the elephant in the room. ‘Do you – do you remember what happened?’ I ask tentatively.

  Jade nods immediately. ‘The fire.’ She glances away for a moment, staring at the shaft of sunlight breaking through the curtain. Tiny motes of dust are spiralling and sparkling in the air. ‘I was frightened,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what to do. It was so hot in there.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart,’ I murmur, feeling its uselessness. ‘Natalie said she looked for you, and that she couldn’t find you. Where were you?’

  ‘I was hiding,’ she says, so quietly that I have to lean forward to hear her. ‘I was in my bedroom. In the wardrobe.’

  Frowning, I look into her face, the seriousness behind her dark blue eyes. It is as if she is waiting for me to understand the gaps between her words. ‘Because of the fire?’ I say at last. ‘You were hiding because you were frightened of what was happening?’

  Minutely, she shakes her head. ‘Because of the man,’ she whispers.

  ‘The fireman?’ I ask. Even as I speak I know that isn’t right. The firemen came later, after Natalie would have started searching, and in any case it makes no sense to hide from someone who is trying to save you.

  Jade shakes her head again, and for an instant impatience crosses her face. ‘No,’ she says, and closes her eyes. I watch her – knowing she is exhausted, not wanting to push her, but with some instinct telling me that I should ask again. Before I can speak she opens her eyes again, looks straight into mine. ‘The man in the house,’ she says clearly.

  ‘Who?’ My voice sounds harsh and abrasive. I clasp my hands together, trying to calm myself. ‘Who do you mean?’

  She stirs restlessly on the pillows, half lifting her shoulders in a shrug.

  I force myself to speak calmly. ‘You’re telling me that there was a man in the house last night?’

  Jade brings her wrist to her forehead and rubs it slowly across, wincing as she does so. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispers. I can see the shadows underneath her eyes staining red, as they always do when she is about to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say quickly, ‘I don’t want to upset you. It’s just that this could be important.’ Until now I’ve mentally filed the fire as a freak accident, perhaps a moment of tragic carelessness, or even some bizarre electrical fault. The possibility of an intruder hadn’t even crossed my mind. ‘If there’s something that could help us understand how this happened,’ I try again, ‘then—’

  ‘Found you!’ Natalie’s voice cuts through the room and she rushes in, swooping down on Jade to embrace her gingerly. She’s holding a large bouquet of cheerful multicoloured flowers that she sets down on the bedside table. ‘I’ll get you some water to put them in,’ she says. She’s trying to sound upbeat, but I can tell that she’s nervous. I mentally curse myself for the way I acted last night. It’s been hard enough for Natalie, navigating Jade’s hormonal ups and downs over the past couple of years and trying to remain calm and loving in the face of her teenage defiance, without my putting it into her head that now she’s let her down in the worst possible way.

  I glance at Jade anxiously, but she’s smiling, seemingly happy to see Natalie. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Thanks. I never get flowers.’ She keeps looking at the spray of colour, I notice, seeming totally charmed by the novelty, and I feel a little unexpected stab of jealousy that I wasn’t the one who thought of bringing them.

  ‘Nor me,’ says Natalie, shooting me a mischievous glance before rolling her eyes at Jade. It’s a game they play sometimes, this ganging up on me; in the early days it was an easy way for the two of them to forge an alliance, and sometimes it seems that these bonds need to keep on being strengthened and reaffirmed. But today I’m not really in the mood to play along. I can’t stop thinking about what Jade has said to me, and it strikes me that Natalie needs to hear this too.

  ‘There’s something you should know,’ I say. ‘Just before you arrived, Jade was telling me that she thinks she saw a man in the house last night.’ I look at my daughter, hoping she’ll cut in and explain further, but she just bites her lip worriedly, staring at me, expecting me to solve this mystery.

  ‘A man?’ Natalie repeats. ‘I don’t understand. What man?’

  I glance at Jade again, but she remains silent. ‘She isn’t sure,’ I say, ‘but obviously it’s something we should talk to someone about.’

  ‘Who?’ Natalie asks blankly.

  ‘Well, the police,’ I say. ‘If someone broke into the house, then they should know about it. It seems too big a coincidence for this to happen on the night our house caught fire. It’s possible that whoever this man was …’ I trail off, conscious of Jade, and not wanting to upset her further, but surely this can’t be anything she hasn’t thought of already. ‘He might have done it deliberately,’ I finish quietly, angling myself towards my wife.

  She doe
sn’t reply at first; her eyes flick from side to side, as if she’s considering what I’ve said, and then she gives a tiny, imperceptible shrug. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  She clears her throat and speaks again, louder and more decisively this time. ‘It’s not possible that there was anyone in the house. I would have seen them, heard them. I dozed off on the sofa, yes, but I’m a light sleeper, you know that. There’s no way I would have slept through somebody breaking in, especially when I was sitting there in the room right next to the front door.’ She stops, looks away. I have the sense that a thought has struck her, but whatever it is she doesn’t seem inclined to share it. She just looks back at me, raises her eyebrows a little and shrugs again. I’ve seen it before in her, this kind of silent, defiant certainty. It’s hard to push back against, and often I don’t care enough about what we’re discussing to try. But this isn’t some idle debate about party politics or an after-dinner chat about an interesting moral dilemma. It’s quite literally a matter of life and death.

  ‘So how would you explain what Jade saw?’ I ask, as calmly as I can. I shoot my daughter a little apologetic glance. Under normal circumstances we wouldn’t be having this kind of conversation in front of her, but this is far from normal, and she’s already too deeply involved to be cut out.

  Natalie breathes in sharply through her nose, folds her arms in front of her chest defensively. ‘It’s hardly any wonder, is it,’ she says, ‘if she’s confused?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s entirely fair,’ I reply tightly, straining to keep my voice under control. ‘There’s a world of difference between being physically and mentally exhausted, and hallucinating something that never happened. I don’t think we can just dismiss—’

  ‘Please.’ Jade interrupts me, her voice suddenly weak and sounding very young. ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Just forget it, OK? Forget I said anything.’

  Her face is white and drawn, and I’m reminded that she’s been through a horrific ordeal. The last thing she needs is to listen to us arguing. She needs stability right now; a loving family. And by the sounds of it, she’s told me all she can for the moment.

  ‘All right,’ I say with an effort. ‘We’ll leave it for now. What do you want to talk about?’

  For the next twenty minutes we chat about safe topics – which of Jade’s classmates she wants to come and visit her, who might go through to the finals of her favourite reality show – until it becomes clear that she’s getting tired and the doctor is lingering at the door, subtly sending a message that it’s time for us to leave. I bend over the bed and hug her goodbye, breathing in the scent of her hair; hospital shampoo, a sharp peppermint tang. For some reason the unfamiliarity of it brings a lump to my throat and I have to fight to make my voice cheerful when I tell her that we’ll be back to visit her very soon.

  Outside in the corridor I take Natalie by the arm and draw her aside against the wall. ‘What was all that about?’ I ask quietly.

  To her credit, she doesn’t try and pretend that she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. ‘I’m sorry, Alex, but I’m not going to go along with something that I don’t think happened.’

  I take in the unblinking levelness of her gaze, the slight lift of her chin. ‘I’m not saying you should, but I don’t appreciate you intimating that my daughter is lying.’

  She flinches a little, her face clouding with hurt, and already I’m regretting that ‘my’, but it’s too late to take it back now.

  ‘I never said that,’ she says carefully.

  ‘Well, one of you is,’ I fire back.

  Natalie gives a short bark of laughter and shakes her head. ‘Really?’ she says. ‘It isn’t possible that we’re both telling the truth? That she thinks she saw a man in the house, and that I don’t think there was anyone there?’

  I’m silent for a moment, confounded, because when she puts it like that of course it’s obvious – she’s right. This doesn’t have to be black and white, and yet that’s where my instincts naturally went: slotting my wife and my daughter into opposing positions, pitted directly against one another, with myself as arbiter and judge.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ I say slowly, sorting through my thoughts.

  It’s her cue to take the moral high ground and accept the apology, but to my surprise she doesn’t. Instead she steps back, wraps her arms around her body and scowls, her eyes blazing. ‘This is you all over, isn’t it, Alex?’ she hisses. ‘You don’t look for the most likely explanation, you look for the one that’s going to cause the most hurt. It’s not my fault you’re so fucking suspicious—’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I interrupt, struggling to catch up. This kind of aggression isn’t like Natalie, and it throws me off base, but even more disturbing is the subtext behind what she’s saying. Suspicious, I think. The truth is that I hadn’t gone so far as to suspect anything, not yet, but now that the word is in my head the inference is clear. If Jade is right in what she’s saying, then an intruder isn’t the only explanation. It’s also possible that if a man was in the house, he was there because my wife invited him. And I can’t help wondering why it is that she’s got to this theory so much faster than I have, as if it was there in her head all along.

  Natalie

  September 2017

  GETTING ANGRY IS an effort. I’ve barely slept in twenty-four hours and there’s an ache running down the length of my spine, and my mind feels fuzzily light, as if I could spiral out of it at any time. It would be easier to fold. I could tell him that I’m sorry and that I understand why he might not be thinking straight right now – even that I can understand why he might be suspicious, though I’ve given him no reason to be. But instead the blood rushes to my head and all those words spill out of my mouth.

  And actually, it helps. Everything that has happened in the past few hours jostles inside me and fuses into this one simple point of anger. It’s the oldest story in the book. Never mind the fire, the trauma that his wife and daughter have gone through – when it comes down to it, what’s really eating away at him right now is the thought that I might be fucking someone else. It’s so stupid that it almost makes me want to laugh.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ he says, but then he just stands there, his mouth hanging slightly open, giving me this hurt puppy look that I’ve seen a few times before and which usually disarms me. Not this time. He looks ridiculous. And that only serves to ratchet the anger up a few notches, because I don’t want to think of him this way. This is Alex, my husband, the one I idolize, that I’ve always put first. The one I’d do anything for. But right now he just looks like a man, and a pretty ineffectual one at that.

  ‘Yes?’ I prompt, knowing that there’s an edge of sarcasm in my voice and not bothering to soften it.

  He takes a step towards me, then back again, as if pulled by invisible strings. His hands rise helplessly for a moment. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  I look at him again, more carefully this time. He looks exhausted – deepening shadows beneath eyes red with crying, his skin almost grey under the harsh neon strip lighting. His shoulders are hunched, making him seem smaller than his six feet. I try and remind myself that he’s gone through an ordeal, too. But at the same time the images are flickering in the back of my head of where I’ve been: the flames rising up, bright and savage, the unbearable heat and the smoke rushing down into my lungs, making it hard to even draw breath. There was a moment there when I didn’t think I was going to get out. When everything went soft and dream-like and I could see my feet moving but they didn’t seem to be going far or fast enough, and I thought, I’m going to die. And when you’ve gone through that, doesn’t that earn you a bit of slack? A bit of understanding? A tiny bit more than ‘I don’t know what to say’?

  There’s a breeze coming from somewhere, cutting through the thin layers of my clothes and finding its way to my skin. I wrap my arms around myself, squeezing tight. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’ll just leave yo
u to it for a bit while you try and figure something out.’ Before he can answer – not that it looks like he’s miraculously found the right words in the last few seconds – I turn on my heel and march down the corridor. I think I might hear him asking me to wait, but I’m not sure enough to turn around, and as I push through the entrance doors and find myself back in the outside world with the autumn sun bright and cold on my face, I realize he isn’t going to follow.

  Automatically, I hail a taxi and ask the driver to take me back to the hotel. It’ll cost me my last five-pound note. I realize I need to call the bank, ask them to send me a new card. The thought is exhausting and I lean my head back against the seat, closing my eyes as the taxi carries me along. There’s something in the way it slips and turns along the coastal road that gives me a weird pang of déjà vu. Whatever it is, I can’t catch on to it. A beat, and it’s gone.

  Once I’m in the hotel room I climb on to the bed and switch the television on, but I know instantly it’s hopeless. The picture is distant and static and it’s like I’m looking at a different world. I can’t think of anything except what’s happened. The gap between how things should have been, and how they actually turned out. I should have been awake when Alex came back, the lights dimmed attractively low, a drink waiting for him on the table. I should have been there to welcome him in and chat about his night, make small talk about his clients for a few minutes before I slipped out of my clothes to reveal the new black silk underwear I bought a few days ago. I’d stood in the shop, sliding on the bra and feeling it smooth and tight against my skin, imagining his reaction. My hands on myself, stroking the fabric, thinking about the look he’d give me before he reached forward to touch it for himself. I don’t even know where that underwear is now. They changed me out of my smoke-drenched clothes last night, put me in some standard issue hospital gown that felt scratchy and stiff, and then gave me a basic zip-up top and jogging bottoms this morning that are about as far away from sexy as you can get.