Emma was sketching when they arrived, sitting in the chair that had somehow inched closer to her window in the last thirty-six hours and stayed there. She drew a hamster’s wheel with blurred, in-motion spokes; a tortoiseshell hair clasp abandoned on a stair; Zeb’s old sneakers, which were still in the corner of the room, laces trailing . . .
When she heard footsteps descending from the Harlows’, she paused. Her eyes rebounded to her pad and she was shocked to see that she’d also drawn the face of an alien-like girl, with wide eyes, trying to lure her back to the past. It was a kind of self-portrait. A version of herself that, until recently, she was sure she’d left behind.
She dropped her pencil. The footsteps had come to a halt outside her door. She heard two people murmuring to one another—Steph and a man with a Welsh accent, possibly the police officer Emma had heard around the building a lot lately. An older couple had also arrived yesterday; Emma had guessed from the resemblance that they were Paul’s parents. She’d glimpsed them only briefly from her window, but their devastated faces had fed her insomnia for another night.
It didn’t feel like a springtime Sunday. It was the third morning of Freya being gone.
Just before she answered the door, Emma remembered she had three strings of glass beads around her neck and an ostentatious ring on each finger. During the night she’d been sifting through her stock, fishing out things she’d managed to sell back to her suppliers, and had begun draping herself in her favorite pieces of jewelry as though to become a walking embodiment of her shop. Hastily she shed the necklaces, slipped off the rings before opening the door.
Steph was wearing the green scarf again, but unwound, its ends swinging. There was a wildness to her bloodshot eyes, while the man was neat and composed next to her. Emma had never thought neat and composed could ever be used in contrast to Steph. Her neighbor seemed about to speak but the man took over, introducing himself as George, the Harlows’ family liaison officer.
“Could we come in?” he asked.
They’d hardly made it through the door before Steph spun toward Emma. “Your partner . . . where is he?”
“My partner?”
“Boyfriend, husband . . .” Steph blinked with impatience. “Doesn’t he live here anymore?”
“Steph,” George said, “maybe we should all go and sit down.”
Steph ignored him. “Do he and Freya know each other?”
“What?” Emma felt like she was in the wrong conversation, a misunderstanding she couldn’t disentangle herself from because she couldn’t quite get a footing in it.
Steph reached into the pocket of her cardigan and drew something out, shoving it at Emma.
It was a strip of photos. Emma’s confusion bled into shock as she held it by its edges. That’s . . . But they . . . She struggled to comprehend the series of snaps taken in a booth. Zeb. And Freya. Squashed together in the four square frames. Playful poses and drunken eyes.
Her heart started to thud.
Steph jabbed a finger at Zeb’s face. “Why’s my daughter having photos taken with your partner?”
Emma’s eyes slid up to meet her neighbor’s. Her head was still fogged, heart still booming, but a tiny part of the puzzle was inching into place. “Oh . . . no,” she said. “Zeb’s not my partner. He’s my son.”
A surprised silence filled the room. Awkwardness shimmied up the back of Emma’s neck. It wasn’t in anticipation of the explanations she’d have to reel off, wasn’t because she cared that Steph might gape at her as people often did, scandalized that she, with her petite stature and electric blue hair, could have a six-foot eighteen-year-old son. It was because it suddenly looked as if she’d kept Zeb a secret. Emma hadn’t let on that she had what her neighbors feared to lose, if not in touching distance, then at least within some kind of reach. It hadn’t seemed appropriate, or kind, to bring it up in any of her recent conversations with Steph.
“I thought . . .” Steph’s eyes moved around the room, clocking the photos of Zeb she obviously hadn’t studied the last time she’d been there. Emma felt something expand from her chest as if to envelop all the pictures, all those reluctant, self-conscious, precious smiles.
“I had him when I was fifteen,” she said. “He looks older than he is. And I guess I look younger . . . as long as you don’t peer too closely.”
Steph drifted around, nudging framed photos, like somebody spoiling for a fight by prodding a rival in the shoulder. Emma wished she would stop, but how could she deny her anything, this woman whose child was even more lost than hers?
“I don’t think you ever properly met him,” Emma tried to explain. “He was at art college, and he worked in a comic-book store at the weekends, so he was out a lot. And now he’s”—she hugged her elbows—“away.”
Steph spoke at last. “How old?”
“Eighteen.”
Steph echoed the number, gazing at Emma’s son who had been her whole life, really, since before she’d even grown up herself. They’d lived with her parents until he was thirteen; rented a house with a garden and a plum tree while the shop was doing well; swapped it for this flat when profits had started to fall. And then everything had seemed to go very wrong, very quickly, both with Zeb and her business, as if the two were as intrinsically connected as her heart and brain.
“I didn’t realize,” Steph said. “Didn’t realize you were a mum too.”
It was as if Emma had added to her neighbor’s grief with this secret she’d barely been conscious of keeping. Then Steph seemed to snap out of it, whirling around and pointing again at the photo strip, which Emma was still holding. “What was he doing with Freya?”
Emma’s hackles rose at the way Steph said it. But jumbled with the instinct to defend her son was a flutter of nerves. She hadn’t been aware that Zeb and Freya were friends either. More than friends? They seemed such different teenagers: Freya social and sporty; Zeb more introverted, creative, obsessed with obscure bands and Marvel films.
“I’ve no idea,” she admitted.
George cleared his throat. “Could you contact your son, Miss Brighton?”
“Yes,” Steph said, that wildness back in her eyes. “Call him.”
Where was her phone? As Emma scanned the room she saw her sketchbook still open on the table. She prayed Steph wouldn’t recognize her own hair clasp among the drawings. And the windows around the edges of the page—Emma couldn’t stop sketching windows.
Spotting her phone on the sofa, she grabbed it and pulled up her recently dialed list, dominated by Zeb’s name. After weeks of longing to talk to him, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to answer this time, with Steph and George staring. Her mind raced as the phone rang: Zeb and Freya? Zeb and Freya?
“No answer,” she said, hanging up.
“Please keep trying him,” George said. “Could you supply us with a phone number and current address for him too?”
Emma nodded, her palms moist as she tore out a page of her sketchbook to write them down. Steph’s traumatized face made her maternal anxieties surge to the surface with renewed force. She should never have let Zeb go. Should have fought harder. How to Be a Better Parent, the book that had come through their door was called, with a mother and an adolescent boy on its cover. Emma had kept seeing that cover ever since, likening the boy to a younger Zeb, paranoia overtaking sense.
Did the book contain any advice that might have helped either Steph or herself hold on to their children?
Steph extended her hand and it took Emma a moment to realize she was asking for the photo strip back. For a second she felt territorial: It featured both their kids, so why should Steph get to make demands? But she was being ridiculous: They were Freya’s pictures. And perhaps they were evidence now. A shiver zipped through her. Evidence of what?
Left alone, Emma dialed Zeb’s number three more times, anxiety soaring again when there was still no response. She sent him a text: Need to speak to you, Z. It’s urgent.
To distract herself she turned to a clean page and began to sketch him. The velvet-haired baby; the rampaging toddler; the gangly adolescent with a mop of curly brown hair. She found it harder to sketch him as he was now. The nuances of his face kept eluding her: sometimes grinning and guileless, at others withdrawn, unfamiliar. She’d experienced something like grief even before he’d left, feeling him pulling away, their relationship fraying. That was why she’d caused such a scene outside her shop on the day he’d dropped his bombshell. She winced as she remembered half the street looking on, Zeb walking away shaking his head, like he was ashamed of her.
Her hand stilled as an image popped into her mind. A sketch, but not one of hers. She leaped up and went to Zeb’s room, where the scent of aftershave and musty maleness lingered. She hadn’t stored any stock there in case it jinxed his return. Some of his clothes still hung in the wardrobe, band T-shirts and black jeans: a reason to hope, or an indication he’d left in a hurry? Emma imagined Steph sitting in Freya’s room, gazing at her things, her teenage life. The shock of finding unexpected photos.
She took Zeb’s sketchbook from his drawer. The well-being officer at his college had suggested he use his love of drawing to help with his “anger issues.” Emma still became dry-mouthed when she thought about that phrase, so at odds with the baby Zeb she’d been sketching. It was probably temporary, his tutors had told her. A response to stress, to becoming an adult. And didn’t Emma know how hard that could be?
Zeb mostly used charcoal, giving his drawings a dark smokiness. Emma turned the crisp pages, drinking in the skillful pictures she’d studied many times in his absence. She flipped past a hand with fingers curling into a fist. A jacket caught on a bush, its sleeve torn, the shrub starred with flowers and thorns.
Eventually she reached what she was looking for today. The drawing was larger than the others, and he’d filled in the backdrop with dense strokes, so the figure in the foreground rose off the page. It was a girl of around Zeb’s age, sitting on the edge of what looked like a merry-go-round in a playground. She had a pale ponytail and wore a sweater and leggings, slim arms stretched above her head. Zeb hadn’t drawn her face in much detail, only closed eyes and the smudge of a mouth, but she was suddenly so familiar that Emma’s heart skipped.
She dropped the book when the home phone trilled. Another silent call? She’d had five in total now. Each time she would consider not answering, but each time she’d think, What if it’s Zeb calling from a pay phone? What if he’s changed his mind about everything, but lost his mobile, needs rescuing? And hadn’t she just asked him to contact her urgently?
She rushed to the handset in the living room.
“Hello?”
There was no reply. Barely any sound.
“Who is it?”
No background buzz. Just soft, slow breathing.
“Say something,” Emma hissed, angry now.
That fear was rising, same as when the egg had slopped out of the book: a dread of being targeted. She told herself yet again that there was no evidence of a link between the calls and the parenting book. That she didn’t need to fear the lines being drawn between present and past . . . between her son and Steph’s daughter . . . between her own problems and the Harlows’ ordeal . . .
“Leave me alone!” she yelled, slamming down the phone.