Twenty-three years earlier
Heathrow is a bubble of suspended reality. People drink fizzy wine and eat burgers at six a.m., brush their teeth in public toilets, and snooze on plastic chairs surrounded by strangers. Some are moving between different time zones—they’ve flown in from tomorrow or will land yesterday. There’s a feeling of anonymity, even though everyone’s had their identity rigorously checked.
I weave among it all, cleaning toilets, glad to be pretty much invisible. I hear spurts of conversation, snatches of lives, the constant drone of flight announcements in multiple languages. My skin smells of bleach and my fingertips are cracked.
Often I think about the day—two years ago, almost exactly—when I stood on the boundary of a different airport, watching planes rising into the dusk, holding my breath as one swept overhead. I remember how, in the months that followed, I clung to the image of that fluid starry sky whenever I couldn’t stand to be in the new reality I’d created for myself. The one in which I was a killer and a coward.
And I’m still both of those things. I hide here among the daily swarm of travelers, then go home or to the hospital, my head ducked to the outside world. Sometimes I think I’m as much a prisoner as Becca, but then I feel even more guilty: How would I know what she’s going through? Just once have I had the guts to visit her in prison, and her flinty gaze cut right through me.
By now I know the length and rhythm of the journey from Heathrow to the hospital. When we first moved here, it took me a while to get used to the rush and crush of the Underground. I’m not sure why Mum thought London would be a good place to start over. She talked about the specialist hospitals, but maybe she thought it would be somewhere to blend in; maybe she realized I wanted to hide. I still wonder how much she suspects about what really happened to Nick. She accepted the idea of Becca as a killer so wholeheartedly. But if some pushed-down part of her does know I was involved, what does that mean? Does motherly love trump what she had with Nick—enough to forgive me, even protect me?
Auntie Rach and Uncle Jack never turned their backs on Becca. But Becca pushed them away, refused to see them. Mum reckons Becca blames them for her shoddy defense lawyer, but I think there’s more to it. I don’t know if I’d want Mum visiting me in prison either. Sitting across a table from each other, like we used to in our flat after school, except surrounded by other prisoners, watched by guards. I’m not sure I could stand it. To this day I’m still anxious for her to be proud of me.
I arrive at the hospital and my nose detects the alteration from one chemical smell to another. Lemon bleach to alcohol hand sanitizer, cleaning fluids to something more potent being pumped into my mum’s blood. Our landlady, Dominique, is sitting with Mum, her long gray hair giving her the look of a kindly witch. We wouldn’t have coped without Dom, especially since Mum’s MDS has developed into leukemia. The first day we moved into a tiny flat in Wembley, it was like Dom sensed we were a desperate little unit of two, in need of a crutch. She checks on Mum when I’m at work, takes her to chemo when I can’t, holds her hand till I arrive. There are good days sometimes, when we joke about the doctors or flip through magazines. But there are dark days too.
I have to keep going, have to put one foot in front of the other as I walk through this brightly lit ward. Mum is counting on me.
Another two years from this day, Mum will be dead. I will have nothing left, nobody to care for, and I’ll know the time has come to confess.
I’ll put it off, though. I’ll keep working hard, as many hours as I can get, leaving myself no time to think about the past. My bosses will promote me from cleaner to server, and then to the first-class lounge, recognizing me as someone who’s never off sick and never turns down a shift. Every day I’ll watch the travelers and wonder what it’s like to be them. Eventually this game of displacement will consume me and I’ll reinvent myself bit by bit as Stephanie Shaw, a name glimpsed on a boarding card during a transaction. A name that sounds like a character from a book.
“Stephanie Shaw” has always lived in London. She’s independent, lives alone by choice. Though it’ll break my heart to leave Dominique, I’ll move into a flat closer to the airport and one day I’ll make it official: I’ll legally become Stephanie Shaw. Kate Thomas will no longer exist.
Then, without meaning to, I’ll meet a man. I’ll be drawn toward him, sitting lost in his thoughts in the first-class lounge. Perhaps I’ll sense that, like me, he’s both a blank sheet and a labyrinth of secrets. I’ll fall for him so quickly I’ll barely know it’s happening, and I’ll let myself be happy for a while.
Then the guilt will return, even stronger. How can I lie in a comfortable bed, in this man’s arms, while Becca’s in prison? I’ll feel it again: the certainty that I have to turn myself in, and the fear of everything that will follow.
Because there’s still something only I know.
The effects of the carbamazepine were not just increased because of antidepressants and alcohol. The level in Nick’s blood appeared higher than the dose Becca and I agreed to give him because, quite simply, it was.
I was so scared it wouldn’t be enough. Scared that two small white pills would have no impact on tall, broad Nick. So as he was waiting for Mum to get ready, sipping a second beer between ordering a taxi and packing last-minute things, I snuck two more tablets into his drink.
This is the part I’ve never told a soul. The part that might get Becca out of jail, switch our places, reverse the courses of our lives.
But just when I’ve gathered every scrap of courage from every corner of myself, I’ll discover something that changes my whole perspective.
I’ll discover I’m pregnant.
My life will become about that baby instead. I’ll realize that whatever I tried to do for Mum in the past, whatever I know I should do for Becca, it doesn’t compare with what I would do for her, my daughter, my Freya.