Mark and Joan talk, but it’s as though I’m underwater. Every now and then one of them shoots me a concerned look, before offering me tea, or wine, or Why don’t you have a little sleep?
I don’t need to sleep. I need to understand what the hell is going on.
Where have my parents been for the last year? How did they fake their suicides so convincingly that no one suspected a thing? And—most important—why did they do it?
It doesn’t make sense. I’ve found no evidence of personal debts, no suggestion that my parents moved large amounts of money out of their accounts before they disappeared. When the wills were read, everything—more or less—came to me. Dad borrowed money for the business, but it was only after he died—and Billy fell apart—that the business started struggling. My parents weren’t bankrupt—they can’t have done this for financial reasons.
My head is spinning.
“We need to talk,” I say, when Joan’s out of the room.
“We do.” Mark’s face is serious. “After Christmas, once Mum’s gone home, let’s get a babysitter and go out for dinner. Have a proper talk about everything. I was thinking: the counselor doesn’t have to be someone I know, if that’s what’s bothering you—I can get a recommendation.”
“No, but—”
Joan comes back in. She’s holding a Scrabble set. “I wasn’t sure if you had this, so I brought mine. Shall we have a game now?” She looks at me with her head cocked to one side. “How are you doing, love? I know it’s hard for you.”
“I’m okay.” Lying again; passing off my peculiar mood as a symptom of grief. Another Christmas without my parents. Poor Anna. She misses them so much.
I shuffle Scrabble letters around on the little tray in front of me, unable to see the patterns in even the simplest of words. What am I going to do? Should I call the police? I think of lovely, kind Murray Mackenzie and feel a fresh wave of shame. He believed me. The only person who admitted there was something not quite right. The only person who agreed my mother could have been murdered.
And all the time it was a lie.
“Jukebox!” Joan says. “Seventy-seven.”
“Two words, surely?”
“Definitely one.”
I tune out from their good-natured argument.
At various times over the last eighteen months, grief has been overtaken by another emotion.
Anger.
“It’s completely normal to feel angry when a loved one dies,” Mark said during my first counseling session. “Particularly when we feel the person who died made an active choice to leave us.”
An active choice.
My hand—holding a letter “E” I picked from the pile in the middle of the table—starts to shake violently. I drop the letter onto the rack and push my hands into my lap, squeezing them between my knees. I have spent the last year actively “working through”—to use Mark’s vocabulary—my anger over my parents’ suicides. Turns out it was entirely justified.
Every second I hold on to this secret is making me more nauseous. More anxious. I wish Joan weren’t here. It’s only the second time I’ve ever met her; how can I throw this at her? And on Christmas Eve . . .
Mark puts down a single tile. “Ex.”
“Nine,” Joan says.
“I think you’ll find that’s a double word score . . .”
“Oops! My mistake. Eighteen.”
“Watch her, honey. She’s a terrible cheat.”
“Don’t listen to him, Anna.”
Hey, guess what, guys. My parents aren’t dead after all—they were just pretending!
It doesn’t feel real.
The thought takes hold. What if it isn’t?
For the last two days I’ve imagined my mother’s presence so strongly I even smelled her perfume; saw her in the park. What if I’ve conjured her up? What if the conversation I had on the doorstep was one of the post-bereavement hallucinations Mark was so insistent I was experiencing?
I’m going mad. Mark was right. I need to see someone.
But it seemed so real.
I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Just after eleven, we get ready for midnight mass. The hall is a muddle of coats and umbrellas and Ella’s stroller, and I think about all the people I’ll see at the church, all the people who will wish me well, and tell me they’re thinking of me, and say how hard it must be without Tom and Caroline.
And I can’t. I just can’t.
We’re standing in the doorway, half in, half out. Laura pulls up on the street—no room on the drive with Joan’s car squeezed alongside mine and Mark’s—and jumps out, wrapping a scarf around her neck. She walks toward us.
“Happy Christmas Eve!”
There are introductions—Mum, this is Laura; Laura, this is Joan—and all the time my heart is thumping fit to burst, and I stare at the floor in case what’s in my head is written across my face.
“How are you doing, lovely?” Laura squeezes my shoulder. Solidarity, not sympathy. She thinks she knows what I’m going through. How I feel. Guilt gnaws at my insides. Laura’s mother died. Mine lied.
“I’m not feeling too good, actually.”
There’s a flurry of concern.
“You do look a bit peaky.”
“Do you think it was something you ate?”
“Such a hard time—it’s understandable.”
I cut in. “I think I might stay here. If you don’t mind.”
“We’ll all stay,” Mark says. He makes light of it, even though I know he and his family have never missed a Christmas Eve service. “I never have enough breath for that ‘Gloria’ one, anyway.”
“No, you go. Ella and I will have an early night.”
“If you’re sure, dear?” Joan is practically down the driveway.
“I’m sure.”
“I’ll stay and look after her.” Laura comes up the steps, concern in her eyes.
“I’m fine.” I don’t mean to snap. I half smile in apology. “Sorry. Headache. I mean, I’d rather be on my own.”
They exchange glances. I see Mark weighing up whether it’s safe to leave me; whether I’m safe to be left. “Call if you change your mind. I’ll come back for you.”
“Feel better soon,” Laura says. A proper hug this time; her hair tickling my cheek. “Happy Christmas.”
“Have a lovely time.” I close the door and press my back against it. My pretense at illness was only half a lie. My head aches and my limbs are stiff from tension.
I unzip Ella from her padded snowsuit and lift her from the pram, then take her into the sitting room to feed her.
Ella’s eyes are just starting to drop when I hear a noise from the kitchen. Rita jumps up. I exhale slowly, trying to slow my heart, which is hammering against my chest, then take Ella off my breast and rearrange my top.
Cautiously, with one hand on Rita’s collar, I walk across the hall. From inside the kitchen I hear the scrape of a chair on tiles.
I open the door.
The faint scent of jasmine gives me the warning I need not to scream.
My mother sits at the table. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap, two fingers twisting the fabric of the same cheap woolen dress she had on earlier. She’s wearing her coat, even though the heat from the Aga makes it far too warm in here for outside clothes, and it’s jarring to see her sitting like a visitor in the kitchen that was once hers.
She’s alone. I feel a rush of anger that my father hasn’t had the courage to face me himself; that he’s sent Mum ahead to soften the blow. My father. So confident in business. Full of banter with the customers. Almost cocky with the reps, who would hang on his every word, thirsty for the nuggets of wisdom they hope will one day lead to a showroom with their own name above the door. Yet he doesn’t have the balls to face his own daughter. To own what he’s done.
My mother says nothing. I wonder if she, too, has lost her nerve; then I realize she is transfixed by Ella.
I speak to break the spell. “How did you get in?”
A pause. “I kept a key to the back door.”
The penny drops. “Yesterday, in the kitchen. I smelled your perfume.”
She nods. “I lost track of time. You almost caught me.”
“I thought I was losing my mind!” The shout startles Ella, and I make myself calm down for her sake.
“I’m sorry.”
“What were you doing here?”
Mum closes her eyes. She looks tired, and so much older than before . . . before she died, my head still wants to say.
“I came to see you. I was going to tell you everything. But you weren’t alone—I panicked.”
I wonder how many times she’s used her key, slipping in and out of the house like a ghost. The thought makes me shiver. I shift Ella from one hip to the other. “Where have you been?”
“I rented a flat up north. It’s”—she grimaces—“basic.”
I think of the uneasy feeling I’ve had over the last few days. “How long have you been back?”
“I came down on Thursday.”
Thursday, 21 December. The anniversary of her . . . Not her death. She didn’t die. I repeat this fact to myself, trying to make sense of it.
“I’ve been staying at the Hope since then.” She flushes slightly.
The Hope is a church-funded hostel near the seafront. They run the food bank, collect donations of clothing and toiletries, and offer temporary accommodation to women in need, in exchange for domestic chores. She sees my face.
“It’s not that bad.”
I think of the five-star hotels my parents enjoyed and imagine my mother on her knees cleaning loos in return for a bed in a dormitory of down-on-their-luck women.
Mum’s looking at Ella. “She’s beautiful.”
I wrap protective arms around my daughter, as though by hiding her from view I can shield her from her grandmother’s lies, but Ella arches her back and fights my embrace. She twists to see this stranger in our kitchen, this thin, ill-kempt woman who stares at her with filmy eyes I will not acknowledge.
I will not.
And yet my chest aches with a heaviness that has nothing to do with what my parents did, and everything to do with the pain I see on my mother’s face. The love. A love so tangible it arcs between us; so tangible I’m convinced Ella feels it. She reaches out a pudgy hand toward her grandmother.
A whole year, I remind myself.
Fraud. Conspiracy. Lies.
“Could I hold her?”
The audacity takes my breath away.
“Please, Anna. Just once. She’s my granddaughter.”
There’s so much I could say. That my mother relinquished any familial rights the night she faked her own death. That a year of lies means she doesn’t deserve the reward of Ella’s chubby hand in hers, of the talcum-powdered scent of a freshly washed head. That she chose to be dead, and as far as my daughter is concerned that is how she will remain.
Instead I walk toward my mother and hand her my baby.
Because it’s now or never.
Once the police know what she’s done they’ll take her away. A trial. Prison. The media circus. She had the police out searching for Dad, when all the time she knew he was fine. She claimed his insurance money. Theft, fraud, wasting police time . . . My head spins with the crimes they’ve committed, and with the fresh-found fear that I am now an accessory to them.
My parents brought this on themselves.
But I’m not a part of it. And neither is Ella.
My daughter shouldn’t be punished for other people’s actions. The least I can give her is a cuddle with a grandmother she’s never going to know.
My mother takes her as gently as if she were made of glass. With the ease of experience, she nestles her into the crook of her arm and runs her gaze across every detail.
I stand inches away, fingers twitching at my sides. Where is my father? Why has Mum come back now? Why come back at all? A hundred questions run through my head, and I can’t bear it anymore. I snatch Ella back, so swiftly she lets out a cry of surprise. I shush her in my arms, pressing her against my chest when she tries to turn back toward her grandmother, who sighs softly—not in admonishment, but something more akin to contentment. As though her granddaughter were all that mattered. For a second my mother and I lock eyes; we agree on that one thing, at least.
“You need to leave. Now.” It’s more abrupt than I intended, but I no longer trust myself to stick to the script. Seeing my daughter in my mother’s arms is softening my heart. I feel myself wavering. I have to do the right thing. I have to tell Mark, the police.
She’s my mother . . .
She lied to me.
“Ten minutes. I want to tell you something, and if you still feel the same then—”
“There’s nothing you can tell me that—”
“Please. Just ten minutes.”
Silence. I hear the grandfather clock tick in the hall, the call of an owl from the garden. Then I sit.
“Five.”
She looks at me and nods. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Your father and I haven’t been happy together for many years.”
The words fall into place as though I’ve been waiting for them. “You couldn’t split up, like normal people?”
Lots of my friends had divorced parents. Two houses, two holidays, two sets of presents . . . No one wants their parents to separate, but even a child can learn to understand it’s not the end of the world. I would have coped.
“It wasn’t as simple as that.”
I remember hiding in my bedroom once, with my music turned up to drown out the argument going on downstairs. Wondering if this was it; if they were going to get divorced. Then, in the morning, going downstairs to find everything calm. Dad drinking his coffee. Mum humming as she put more toast on the table. They pretended everything was fine. And so I did, too.
“Please, Anna, let me explain.”
I will listen. And then, when Mark gets back, I will tell him. To hell with what Joan thinks. I’ll phone the police, too. Because once everyone knows, I can distance myself from this insane scheme cooked up by my parents as a preferable alternative to divorce.
“You found a vodka bottle under the desk in the study.”
She’s been watching me.
And I’d thought I was going mad. Seeing ghosts.
“Did you find others?” Her voice is calm. She stares at the table in front of her.
“They were Dad’s, weren’t they?”
Her eyes snap to mine. She searches my face, and I wonder if she resents me for not acknowledging this sooner, for leaving her to shoulder the burden alone.
“Why did he hide them? It was no secret he liked a drink.”
Mum’s eyes close briefly. “There’s a difference between liking a drink and needing a drink.” She hesitates. “He was clever about it, like many alcoholics are. Careful to hide it from you; from Billy.”
“Uncle Billy didn’t know?”
Mum gives a humorless laugh. “The cleaner found a bottle of vodka stashed in the bin under Dad’s desk. She brought it to Billy in case it had been thrown away by mistake. I panicked. Told Billy it was mine. Said I’d bought the wrong sort and no one would have drunk it so I’d thrown it away. He didn’t believe me, but he didn’t push it. Didn’t want to, I suppose.” She stops and looks at me, and there are tears in her eyes. “I wish you’d told me you knew Dad drank. You shouldn’t have had to cope with that on your own.”
I shrug, an obtuse teen again. I don’t want to share confidences with her. Not now. The truth is, I’d never have said anything. I hated that I knew. I wanted to exist in my happy bubble, pretending everything was perfect, and never heeding the myriad signs that told me that they weren’t.
“Well.” Another deep breath. “When he was drunk—and only when he was drunk”—she rushes to make this clear to me, as though it makes a difference; as though any of this makes a bloody difference in light of what they’ve done—“he hit me.”
My world spins on its axis.
“He never meant it—he was always so sorry. So ashamed of what he’d done.”
Like that makes it all right.
How can she be so calm? So matter-of-fact? I picture my father—laughing, teasing—and try to reframe my memories. I think of the arguments that would end abruptly when I came home; the shift in atmosphere I took pains to ignore. I think of my smashed paperweight; of the stashed bottles around the house. I had seen my dad as a lovable rogue. A loud, jovial, generous man. Fond of a drink, occasionally crass, but ultimately good. Kind.
How could I have gotten it so wrong?
I open my mouth to speak, but she stops me. “Please, let me finish. If I don’t get it out now, I don’t know if I can bear to do it at all.” She waits, and I give the tiniest of nods. “There’s so much you don’t know, Anna—and I don’t want you to know it. I can spare you that, at least. Suffice to say, I was scared of him. Very, very scared.” She stares out the window. The garden light is on, and the shadows around the patio flicker as a bird flies across its beam.
“Tom messed up at work. He took out a business loan without telling Billy, and they couldn’t make the repayments. The business started going downhill—oh, I know Billy will have told you it was fine, but that’s your uncle for you. Tom was mortified—three generations, and he’d put them into debt. He came up with a mad plan. He wanted to fake his own death. He’d disappear, I’d claim the life insurance, and then in a year or so he’d turn up at a hospital and pretend he had amnesia.”
“And you went along with it? I can’t even—”
“I thought it was the answer to my prayers.” She gives a shallow laugh. “At last I’d be free. I knew there’d be repercussions when he turned up, but all I could think about was not being frightened anymore.”
I look at the clock. How long does midnight mass last?
“So you went along with it. Dad disappeared.” I want to know about how he made it look like suicide, but the detail can wait till I know how this ends. “You were safe. And then you . . .”
You left me, too, I want to say, but I don’t. I’m keeping emotion out of this; treating it like a case study. An awful, shocking story that happened to someone else.
“Only I wasn’t safe,” she says. “I was stupid to think I would have been. He kept calling me. He even came to the house, once. He wanted money for a fake passport. Documentation. Rent. He said the life insurance was his; that I’d stolen it. He’d changed his mind about faking amnesia; said it wouldn’t work. He wanted the money so he could start a new life. He said he’d hurt me if I didn’t pay up. I started giving him small amounts of money, but he wanted more and more.” She leans forward and pushes her hands toward me. I stare at them but make no move to take them. “That money was for your future—it’s what you would have inherited when we died. I wanted you to have it. It wasn’t fair of him to take it.”
I feel numb. I’m still trying to equate this version of my father with the man I thought he was . . .
“You have no idea what he’s capable of, Anna,” she says. “Or how frightened I was. Your father died to pay off his debts. I died to escape him.”
“So why come back?” My words are full of bitterness. “You got what you wanted. You got your freedom. Why come back at all?”
She leaves a silence that makes me shiver even before the answer lands.
“Because he found me.”