I leave Becky there, eventually, but I go back to her house. I know now that there is nothing here, no concrete evidence, just insubstantial memories, like the sea mists I have left swirling around Becky.
It’s time to put it behind us. To say good-bye.
The house stands empty. Tall and slim and dark. I text Scott, telling him where I am, and he calls me immediately.
“Why?” he says when I answer.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just . . . it’s almost over and I just, I guess I wanted to be here. Where she was last. Maybe Becky will move back in again, after . . .”
Scott sighs softly down the line, but doesn’t correct me, doesn’t feel the need to say: Of course she won’t; she’ll be in prison.
“I just wanted to be here,” I say.
Not to figure it out, not now. Just to be here. To accept it. The messy truth. And to bid farewell.
“I see,” he says. He pauses. “Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” I say quietly. “No. It’s fine.”
“Are you going to stay there?”
“I think so,” I say.
I can’t explain it to myself, so I don’t try to explain it to him. I just feel as though I might figure it out if I stay here.
A full night.
“Do you mind?”
“No. Do what you need to,” he says simply, and we hang up.
The door is soundless as I slide my key in the lock and open it. The house sits silently, like a sleeping animal, and I close the front door behind me for the first time.
I’ll just explore a bit. Wait it out. Sleep here, the night before we find out what truly happened.
The living room is a time capsule of what happened that night. Xander wasn’t taken from Becky until the postmortem results came in, but once the spare bedroom was declared a crime scene, and Layla dead, they left. That morning. They never came home again.
I pick my way across the living room. Becky’s mess surrounds me. She was always so chaotic.
The walls are a slate gray, with accents of white: a white fluffy throw, a white rug. White candles in bell jars. Becky is a natural. She should have stuck out design school, somehow. Or gone back, maybe. But she’d been subsumed by motherhood, and then defined by her own failure, too bitter to change it.
A collage of black-and-white photographs adorns the wall behind the sofa. Layla is one of them. Framed and hung during her short eight-week life. It is the same photograph I had framed.
My body remembers the way upstairs, even though it has been almost a year since I walked up these steps. A left turn, halfway up the stairs, that I make instinctively. A fine layer of dust has settled on the banister and I wipe a finger through it.
Becky’s room is at the front of the house, and I walk in and stare at her bed. That, too, is a freeze-frame. Her duvet pulled back, half of the bed bare, as she must have rushed frantically from the room. A hair dryer is discarded, plugged in, switched off, lying on the floor next to her pine wardrobe. A wineglass is by her bed.
I shake my head, leave the room, and head up the second flight of stairs to Xander’s room. I can’t go into the spare room, the nursery. Not yet. I’ll start slowly.
Xander’s room has a raised step, where the doorframe protrudes upward, and I almost trip on it. I’ve hardly ever been in here—only a handful of times. When was I last here? I can barely remember: Our family’s shared past is a speck on the horizon these days.
Xander used to walk alongside me, sometimes, when we were all out together. He seemed to like to chat to me, though he pretended he didn’t. What would we talk about? School. Sports. Television. How much he wanted a dog. It was a lifelong dream of his; I admired his dedication to it. Marc had said when he was ten he could get one if he walked a lead every day for a year, to prove his commitment. “A lead?” I had said, in disbelief. “How bizarre.”
“He has to come home from school to get the lead. He can’t just walk around at lunchtime at school and count that,” Marc had said.
There was a beauty to it. Xander was going to log the walks on Becky’s Fitbit. There’ll be no chance now everything is suspended. Family life as they knew it ended last year. Hope and dreams are hanging, waiting.
His bedroom is entirely blue. Navy walls, royal-blue double bed. The only thing not blue is his enormous Xbox One setup. Gaming paraphernalia lies everywhere.
I sit on the bed. It still smells of him. A musty glass of water sits by the side of the bed. I wonder if he’s sipped it since.
Xander and I played Tomb Raider just two years ago, on Boxing Day. I came up to say hi to him, but ended up staying for hours in his room. I couldn’t move along a snowy pathway in the game. I kept falling off, flailing with an ice pick. How we both laughed at me. In the end, he took the controller from me and ran easily along the ledge, then passed it back. We ate an entire box of Cadbury Roses during that cold Boxing Day.
Curious, I boot up his Xbox. What was he last doing? God, he loved his games.
Xander2000. That’s what he called himself, and that’s what it says in green at the top right of the screen.
He’d been playing a game called Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
Xander2000: Last saved: 10/27.
Weren’t we all?
Last seen then. Last saved then. Before.
The nursery is darker than I remember. The curtains are motionless at the window. I reach to touch the glass. It’s cool against my fingertips. The Moses basket is gone, examined by the police, and then given back to us, and so the room is almost empty, only a makeshift changing table there, a foam mattress lying atop a chest of drawers. Becky’s things are piled into a corner, away from where Layla would have slept. An empty picture frame. Trivial Pursuit and a sack of Xander’s old clothes that I was going to go through for Layla.
I sink down onto the floor by the changing table and allow myself a fantasy. I hardly ever indulge.
Layla is here. She will be one soon—in two weeks. I’m stressing over a cake. Becky is sardonic—“She won’t even remember it”—but helps me ice it anyway, the buttercream forming peaks that mimic Layla’s spiked-up blond baby hair. I hold her out, cast in the dim light of a single candle, and try to encourage her to blow it out, which she doesn’t.
Xander pushes his fringe back from his forehead and reaches for her, his cousin, and he holds her as Becky and I sit and watch.
I close my eyes, thinking . . .
When I open them, the room is just the same. Bare. It holds no clues. Nothing in the house does, of course not. What did I expect? That I would find something the police missed? Solve the case myself, right before the last day of the trial, when it’s solved already?
It was Becky. She got drunk and held my baby too close. That’s all. That’s it. A tragedy.
No. There’s no evidence left, of course. I don’t know what I expected to find. There is nothing here. No evidence.
Just a space, where my baby once lay.
A hole.