Derek Winters looked good, Archie had done a great job of hiding the bruising on his neck. To look at him in the casket, you wouldn’t think he’d hung himself. You also wouldn’t think he was a rapist and incestuous child abuser, but Dorothy wondered what that would look like. The monsters in our lives don’t look like monsters, horns and slavering fangs. The worst deeds in the world are done by people who look like any of us. Dorothy wondered about Derek, what had happened to him in the past, why he’d been that way with his daughter. She knew abuse was handed down from generation to generation but she was also very wary of that excuse, often trotted out in cheap dramas, that the abused becomes the abuser. Plenty of abused people didn’t inflict that experience on others, at some point you have to take responsibility for your actions.
She looked at Edith standing over her husband’s body. When Dorothy tried to tell her about Abi, she’d denied the girl’s existence, unwilling to hear about her husband’s legacy. But with the funeral approaching that was unsustainable, there had to be a reckoning.
Edith gripped the edge of the coffin with her fingertips, knuckles white as she stared at the man she’d shared her life with. No tears, no emotion, Dorothy had seen that countless times before, a front in public. Her Californian mindset thought that was unhealthy, but she understood it was a coping mechanism like any other.
She heard a noise outside, raised voices, recognised one of them as Indy’s. They occasionally got heated exchanges here, it was an emotional time, people on the edge struggling with grief. Anger was understandable and the Skelfs sometimes caught the brunt of that.
Edith raised her head and stared at the door. Dorothy turned towards it just as it was flung open, and Abi and Sandra bundled in, Indy apologising from outside the room.
Abi stumbled over the carpet and fell towards the coffin, reached out to steady herself on the edge of the casket, the force making Derek shift in the box. Edith’s face was stony as she stared at the others.
Abi righted herself and Sandra stopped just inside the room as if she’d been struck by lightning. She stared at her mum for a long time and Edith stared back, gripping the coffin harder than ever. Dorothy tried to find something in Edith’s eyes. She imagined not seeing Jenny for fifteen years, not knowing if she was alive, how she would feel.
‘Mum,’ Sandra said.
Edith scowled and didn’t take her eyes off her daughter. ‘Get out.’
‘What?’
‘I said get out. You don’t get to see him. What are you doing here?’
Sandra shook her head, fighting back tears. ‘Fuck you, Mum.’
Edith was startled at the venom in her voice, looked like she’d been slapped in the face.
Abi looked from one woman to the other, then at Derek in his coffin.
‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ Edith said. ‘Not after what you did.’
Sandra was crying now. ‘What I fucking did?’ She pointed at the coffin. ‘That bastard raped me for years. I tried to tell you and you said I was making it up.’
‘That’s not how it was,’ Edith said. ‘You left without a word.’
Sandra still had a hand on the door handle, gripping so tight Dorothy thought she might rip it off. ‘I had no choice, Mum, I was pregnant. That cunt was going to kill me, or I was going to kill him. And you were fucking useless.’
Edith shook her head, too hard and too long, as if trying to shake something free in her mind. ‘He was a good father and husband.’
‘Oh my God, you’re delusional,’ Sandra said. ‘How can you stand there and say that when he was raping his own daughter, night after night for years, our little secret.’
Edith pressed her lips together.
‘I have no daughter,’ she yelled, finally losing control.
‘Stop it,’ Abi screamed, spit flying from her mouth into the open casket.
Edith and Sandra jumped at her voice.
Abi was crying too and Dorothy felt overwhelmed. The Winters family were in crisis and it was soaking into her bones, like it always did, until her body felt waterlogged.
‘Stop it,’ Abi repeated under her breath. She waved at Derek’s body, still squint from when she banged into the coffin. ‘Look at you both, screaming over his dead body. He probably would’ve loved that. He’s getting exactly what he wanted, to destroy this family, even now he’s dead.’
She turned to Edith. ‘As soon as he touched Mum he destroyed your relationship with each other. But he made me, if anyone has reason to be fucking angry, it’s me.’ She spread her hands wide. ‘You two should be on each other’s side.’
Sandra laughed sickly. ‘Fat chance.’ She turned to Edith. ‘You knew.’
Edith’s face had mellowed as Abi spoke, and now she looked at Derek and spoke softly. ‘I swear, I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t want to know,’ Sandra said.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Edith said, voice faltering. ‘My Derek.’
Sandra pointed at Abi. ‘There’s your proof. A beautiful, smart fifteen-year-old granddaughter.’
Dorothy finally felt a space to speak. ‘Maybe we all need to take a breath.’
So much lost time, so much hatred and resentment and waste. The ripples from our actions get bigger and bigger until they drown us years later in a tsunami.
‘Why would I lie, Mum?’ Sandra spoke quietly as she came into the room. She caught sight of Derek’s body, flinched, straightened her back.
‘I don’t know,’ Edith whispered under her breath. ‘I don’t know anymore.’
Everything she’d believed was crumbling in the face of Abi. A faithful, God-fearing husband, a steady marriage, a wayward daughter who disappeared. She’d built her life around those lies and now she had nothing. Dorothy felt sorry for her.
‘Mum,’ Sandra said, tears down her cheeks as she stood on the spot, unable to move an inch closer.
Edith looked into the coffin. ‘This is all too much.’
Dorothy felt waves of emotion rolling around the room and her eyes got damp.
Abi moved around the coffin to Edith. She was taller than her gran already, the future towering over the past.
‘Gran,’ she said softly. She wrapped Edith in a hug and her gran burst into tears as she pressed her face against Abi’s shoulder.
‘It’s OK, Gran,’ Abi said.