Stella sleeps with her arm wrapped tightly around my middle. She is the big spoon to my little spoon and her embrace is reassuring, protective, pure.
She held me in her arms and rocked me while I cried and roared and spilled my darkest secrets out. She said all the right things. She cried too. For the child I was and for the woman I have become – one who is scared to trust, who is confused about love, who lashes out with a tongue so sharp it can cut. The woman who has been holding this secret shame inside for two decades.
All the time she said the words I needed to hear, over and over and over. This was not my fault. I was a child. I did nothing wrong. He, Joe McKee, the man who I was grieving for in the most fractured of ways, was a monster.
I talked about all my mixed feelings. My anger at his betrayal. The rising sense that something was very wrong. The misplaced love. The rejection. The pain and anger. The shame. There was so much shame. Shame that I had, despite everything, begged him to come back into my life. How sick was I?
We talked about help. About support. About counselling. She held my hair back when I did indeed empty what little had been sitting in my stomach down the toilet. And she sat me tenderly on the edge of the bath and gently washed away my tears and the grime of the day with a facecloth.
She put my toothpaste on my brush for me and I know that if my arms had been too tired to brush, she would have done that, too.
She helped my exhausted body, the one that had felt as if it was wrong and dirty all these years, into a bath and she gently, so very gently, soaped me and cleaned me. And when we were done, for the first time in years I felt truly clean.
My body numb, she helped me to dress, slipping on my knickers for me and pulling the oversized T-shirt I slept in over my head. Taking my brush from the dresser, she teased it through my hair, and then she pulled back the bed covers and helped me to lie down.
‘No one will ever hurt you again,’ she’d whispered as she had wrapped her arms around me.
And I had never felt so loved, or so protected before. I felt the shame that had held me down for almost my whole life start to ebb away.
The sun is shining on the front of the house at Aberfoyle Crescent. It’s glinting off the windows, making the place look warm and welcoming. There’s no sign at all, from the exterior, of the drama that has gone on behind those doors over the last week.
If walls could talk, I think wryly, they’d tell a very different story on the inside. Then again, it’s definitely better that they can’t.
I wish that I could turn back the clock and not come to see him, even though he was ill. It was selfish of him to pull me back into his drama again. He wanted to ‘make amends’, he said, and yet he’d never once talked about the past. That sordid past.
Maybe, if he had even said sorry, I could be less angry. But he hadn’t. The whole thing was just his way of trying to control me all over again. And I had fallen for it, because a part of me, that damaged part of me that was still mired in shame and confusion, believed it might have helped, needed him to say sorry and that he loved me, and that he knew he had done very bad things.
But I’d expected too much of him, just like I always did.
He knew if I’d ignored his request I’d look like the evil, ungrateful daughter. In his arrogance he had been sure that I would never reveal his filthy secrets to anyone. Or maybe it wasn’t arrogance at all. I had kept quiet for years, after all. I had not called out his sick actions. Maybe if I had …
I try not to think about that. I try to hold on to the sense of relief that I feel now he is gone. Now he is rotting in the ground.
I never have to fear hearing his voice, or seeing his face, or feeling his touch again.
But I do have to clear out his belongings from the house Heidi so desperately wants to get rid of. I try not to think about that too much, either. Why she wants to get rid of the house so quickly. Why she is so damaged.
Stella asked me this morning if I thought I should tell people the truth of what happened when I was younger. I shook my head. What good would it do people to know now? It can’t be changed, I’d thought.
‘But at least they, including your mum and Kathleen, might stop talking about him as if he is some saint. That must be hard for you,’ she said as she buttered some toast for me – still intent on pampering me after the previous night’s revelations.
‘Causing them pain won’t make any of this easier for me,’ I’d said.
They can’t confront him. They can’t make him face justice. But I suppose he faced justice the night he died. He had no doubt experienced fear and terror and pain. He had known what it was like to be helpless. To be weak and vulnerable.
Karma had come full circle, I suppose.
‘Do you think you should tell the police?’ she had probed gently.
I’d shrugged. ‘Why? It’s not like they can arrest him.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But it might help them understand why someone killed him.’
She’d looked away, stared out of the kitchen window. It dawned on me that my revelation had given me a very strong motive for wanting him dead.
‘You don’t think it was me, do you?’ I’d asked.
‘It would be understandable if it was,’ she’d said in a quiet voice.
I took a deep breath and steadied myself to admit the one thing that I’d not been able to say out loud before.
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said. ‘But I wish it was. From the bottom of my heart, I wish it had been me.’
Stella turned to face me, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. ‘I’m glad it wasn’t,’ she said slowly, deliberately, ‘but I would’ve supported you if it was.’
I nodded, my face blazing again. I could not speak.
She sat down beside me and took my hand. ‘Can I ask something else?’
I nodded once more.
‘If he hurt you, do you think he could’ve hurt her, too?’
‘Who? Heidi?’
I thought of how she hated him. How she always seemed to hate him. How I always thought it was because he was intrinsically linked in her mind to the death of her mother. I might’ve given it a passing thought in the past, but to be honest I’d done my best not to think about Heidi at all over the last ten years. But I knew she had never left his side, even as she grew up. They had never become estranged. Not like me. She still visited him. She may not have loved him, or even liked him, but she felt a duty of care to him and she acted on that. Would she have done that if he had hurt her in the same way?
But then I think of how messed up I was. How confused I had been about what love meant, and care and family. I think of how many times I’d told her no one else wanted her. That she was alone. That she’d be better off dead. My face blazed at the memory. I had been such a vindictive bitch. Even when I was old enough to know better.
I had goaded her through her life, and even when I came back to see Joe at her behest, I had still been unable to resist goading her. Acting like a child. Breaking that stupid doll.
And all the time refusing to acknowledge that she could be hurt, too. That she might have endured some of what I had. Except he had left me, hadn’t he? He stayed with Heidi. From the moment her mother had died when she was nine and a half, he had been a constant. He must have thought he had died and gone to heaven, I think, and my stomach tightens and turns and guilt and fear wash over me.
We’d both been guilty. My father and I, of destroying her.
I could no longer look at the breakfast I’d been eating. I could no longer think beyond Stella’s words. Had I been so wrapped up in my own pain that I’d failed to see what was most likely going on under my nose? If I had spoken up all those years ago, could I have stopped him from hurting her?
I’d turned all the hate and hurt I felt for him towards her. And that, ultimately, makes me complicit in his crimes.
If she was pushed to put a pillow over his head and end his life, then I was as guilty as if I had handed her the pillow myself.