It is strange to see Mum back in Oak View. Strange and wonderful. She’s nervous, but whether it’s due to fear of detection by Mark or by Dad, I couldn’t say. Either way, she jumps at the slightest sound from outside and offers little contribution to the conversation unless asked directly. Rita shadows her wherever she goes, and I wonder how she will be affected when Mum leaves again.
Because that’s the deal. Three more days as a family—albeit a family filled with secrets—and then it’s over.
“You don’t have to go.” We’re in the garden, my words turning to mist as they leave my mouth. It’s dry today, but so cold it hurts my face. Ella is in her bouncy chair in the kitchen, facing the window so I can keep an eye on her.
“I do.” Mum begged to come out into her beloved garden. It’s overlooked on only one side—the high hedges on the other two sides protecting us from curious glances—but even so my heart is in my mouth. Mum’s tackling her roses—not the expert pruning that will need doing in spring, but cutting them by a third, so the winter winds don’t snap the stems. I have neglected the garden—Mum’s pride and joy—and the roses are leggy and unbalanced. “Someone will see me if I stay. It’s too big a risk.”
She glances continually at Robert’s house, the only place from which we can be seen, despite the fact that we saw him drive away this morning, loaded with late Christmas presents for relatives up north. Mum is wearing Mark’s gardening coat and a woolly hat pulled low over her ears.
“You should have cut these buddleias back last month. And the bay tree needs fleecing.” She shakes her head at the fence between our garden and Robert’s, at the climbing roses and the sprawl of clematis I should have cut back after it flowered.
It’s looking better already, although I hear Mum tut from time to time, and suspect my lack of attention has left some plants too far gone to save.
“There’s a book in the kitchen—it tells you what needs doing each month.”
“I’ll look at it—I promise.” A lump forms in my throat. She’s serious about leaving. About not coming back.
I read somewhere that the first year of loss is the hardest. The first Christmas, the first anniversary. A full set of seasons to endure alone, before a new year brings fresh hope. It’s true it was hard. I wanted to tell my parents about Ella, to share pregnancy stories with my mother and send Mark and my dad to the pub to wet the baby’s head. I wanted to cry for no reason, while Mum folded tiny onesies and told me everyone got the baby blues.
The first year was hard, but I know there are harder times ahead. The finality of death is inarguable, but my parents are not dead. How will I come to terms with that? My mother will leave me of her own free will, because she is too scared to be here where my father will find her; too scared to be where she may be recognized and her crimes exposed. I will no longer be an orphan, yet I will still be without parents, and the grief that I feel is every bit as raw as if I were truly bereaved.
“Robert’s paying for the garden to be landscaped, once his building work has been done. Will the plants against the fence survive being moved?” Too late, I realize I shouldn’t have mentioned the extension.
“Have you lodged an objection? You must. It’ll make the kitchen incredibly dark, and you’ll have no privacy on the patio.” She begins to list the reasons why Robert’s extension is a travesty, her voice an octave higher than it was, and I want to ask why she cares when she has made it clear she won’t come back here again. But then I think of the way she is carefully tending roses she won’t see bloom. We are programmed to care long after we need to.
I make vaguely supportive noises and don’t mention the money Mark negotiated in compensation for the inconvenience of the construction.
“Help me move this.” Mum has finished fleecing the bay tree. It stands in a vast terra-cotta pot on top of a manhole cover. “It needs to be somewhere more sheltered.” She tugs at the pot, but it doesn’t shift even an inch. I walk over to help her. Robert’s builders will move it when they dig up the sewers for his foundations, but I don’t want to set Mum off again. Together, we drag the pot across the patio to the opposite side of the garden.
“There. That’s a good morning’s work.”
I tuck my arm through Mum’s and she squeezes hard, locking me in place.
“Don’t go.” I have managed without crying, up to now, but my voice cracks and I know it’s a losing battle.
“I have to.”
“Can we come and see you? Ella and me? If you won’t come here, can we visit you?”
A moment of silence tells me the answer isn’t one I want to hear.
“It wouldn’t be safe.”
“I wouldn’t tell a soul.”
“You’d slip up.”
“I wouldn’t!” I pull my arm away, hot tears of frustration stinging my eyes.
Mum looks at me and sighs. “If the police find out Tom and I are really alive, and that you knew it—that you concealed our crimes, harbored me—you’ll be arrested. You could go to prison.”
“I don’t care!”
Mum speaks slowly and quietly, her gaze locked on mine. “Tom isn’t going to let this lie, Anna. In his mind, I’ve double-crossed him. Made a fool of him. He won’t rest until he knows where I am, and it’s you he’ll use to find me.” She waits, letting her words sink in.
The tears come, falling silently down cheeks numb with cold. For as long as I know where Mum is, I’m at risk. Mark and Ella, too. I look back at the house, to where Ella has fallen asleep in her bouncy chair. I can’t let her suffer.
“It’s the only way.”
I make myself nod. It’s the only way. But it’s a hard way. For all of us.