The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  “No—I was better after I met Patrick, happier. You may not like it, but it’s true.” I shift in the bed and wince. “And I wouldn’t have Joe and Mia.”

  “And you wouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed recovering from a fucking overdose.” She glances back at the door. “You should leave now. Take the children.”

  Fear blooms, darker than my bruises. “I don’t want to leave. And what about Joe? I wouldn’t get custody even if I did want to leave.”

  “No,” she says, her voice flat. “I guess you wouldn’t. Especially not after this.”

  “This is not Patrick’s fault,” I say again.

  “I know. It’s yours.” Caroline sips her own coffee, the heavy bangles on her wrist jangling as she lifts the cup.

  I remember Patrick’s fingers down my throat, his desperation to keep me alive. God, that perfect couple we used to be, so in love—how did it end up like this? Have I become like my mother? Shrunken, hollowed out? I let Patrick fill in all the gaps. My fault, not his. If he left me, would I end up like Mum? I imagine myself sitting at the table for the rest of my life, waiting for him to come home. Caroline gazes at me with frustration and I remember the hopes I had and I want to cry because I don’t recognize myself anymore.

  She looks down at the travel brochure I refused. “Is there any point in me bringing you these? Patrick told me about the house.”

  They’ve talked? What did he say? Did he tell her I refused to give him my mother’s money?

  “He wants me to tell you to go for it, to move. But I’m here to say don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. Stick with the travel plans—have your bloody adventure. Haven’t you waited long enough?”

  “He thinks moving will be good for us, for the children,” I say, biting my lip until I taste blood. “Maybe he’s right.”

  “You’ll be totally isolated out there. Alone. How can that be good for you?”

  She makes it sound like the house is in the middle of nowhere, cut off from civilization. It’s in a town, on a bus route, just an hour and a half’s drive from Cardiff.

  She leans in closer and I can see her eyes are red-rimmed. “That house—its history… How can you possibly live there? How can Patrick want to live there?”

  “You don’t understand what it means to him.”

  “No, I don’t. But I’m scared for you. You did this to yourself here, surrounded by friends. What the fuck do you think is going to happen to you there?”

  “Caroline, trust me, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. Patrick overreacted.”

  “Overreacted?” She taps her nails on her cup, her voice rising.

  She doesn’t believe me. She thinks I wanted to die. She’s my best friend, but I can feel the distance between us growing, stretching. Is everyone going to think that? Are they all going to think I’m either suicidal or desperately crying for help? I close my eyes, but this time I picture what Caroline must be imagining. Me, shaking more pills into my hand, not just two—dozens.

  I shake my head. “I didn’t do it.”

  “I don’t know what to do anymore,” she says. She stands up, slamming down her coffee cup on the cabinet. “I’ve tried. I’ve been trying for six months, but I can’t keep doing this, propping you up, trying to stop you from falling back into depression again. I thought you were getting better.” She stops and takes a deep breath. “Damn it, Sarah, how could you do it to Joe and Mia? How could you do it to me? And now you’re going to rip your family away from their lives and move them into the Murder House?”

  She wipes away tears and smeared mascara. “You think it makes it better that you’re here by accident? You care so little about any of us? Your children had to see you sprawled on the bed, surrounded by fucking empty pill bottles, thinking you were dead.”

  Pill bottles? “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Don’t. Don’t keep apologizing. Get some help. Some proper professional help. And maybe… God, maybe Patrick’s right. Maybe you do need a fresh start somewhere. But not that house. Come to mine—bring the kids. Come to mine and…” Her voice trails off as she sees me shaking my head.

  “Stop blaming Patrick,” I say. “You’ve always wanted everything to be his fault, but this is all on me, a stupid mistake. I will get help, but I need you to stop trying to blame my marriage for everything.”

  She walks away and turns back at the door. “You say none of it’s Patrick’s fault. Well, maybe not this, but you’ve been disappearing since you met him. And your breakdown? I’m not sure it was anything to do with your mother dying. You’re a ghost of the girl you were in college. I’ve tried so hard to keep you… I’m sorry if I’ve said things you don’t want to hear, but it’s the truth. I’ll… I’ll see you at home, okay?”

  I turn my head away. “Maybe you should leave it awhile. I don’t need the tension between you and Patrick at the moment.”

  “Don’t shut me out.”

  “I’m tired. Can you go, please?” I close my eyes and swallow a lump in my throat as she shuts the door behind her.

  The next day, Patrick holds my arm as we leave the hospital, hand cupped around my elbow, steadying me when I falter. An icy wind whips around the front of the building and I can’t stop my teeth from chattering, despite the coat and scarf Patrick’s wrapped me in. My legs are still shaking after my meeting with the doctor—not the ward doctor, who took away the drip and checked my throat and looked into my eyes with a little white light, but a psychiatric doctor who sat next to my bed and asked sharper questions that slipped under my skin like needles.

  I was all dressed and ready to go, to walk away like none of this had ever happened. Then the doctor came in and wanted to know why I’d done it and if I wanted to do it again. He asked all these questions about Patrick and Mia and Joe and the house and my mother, and I started crying, not because I was bloody suicidal but out of frustration because no one would listen. And, of course, that had to be when Patrick walked in—to find me crying and freaking out.

  So my meeting became their meeting. They stepped outside the room, but I could hear them talking. I stood on the other side of the door on shaking legs, listening to the doctor talk to Patrick about my suicidal state of mind, each sentence another needle under my skin.

  She had a breakdown.

  Her mother died and the guilt left her mentally wounded.

  Months of medication and therapy.

  We thought she was getting better.

  We thought the worst was over.

  Stupid. I was stupid taking those bloody pills. I should have stayed calm when the doctor came in, explained myself. Explained it was an accident, not a suicide attempt.

  When Patrick came back into the room, the doctor didn’t come with him. He was carrying a white paper bag from the hospital pharmacy. “Come on, Sarah,” he said. “Let’s take you home.”

  Mia and Joe are waiting on the corner, huddled together for warmth, the same look on their faces as on Caroline’s. They flank us as we walk to the car, both staying at least three feet away from me, their unexploded bomb of a mother.

  We drive home in silence, parking on the driveway, the car headlights shining on the front door. It’s getting late. All the other houses have lights on—families eating dinner, sitting in front of flickering televisions, workday finished, happy to be home. The houses look closer, squeezing in on us. The air feels heavy and thin at the same time and I can’t seem to breathe enough in.

  How many of those neighbors are watching now? They would have seen the ambulance, seen me taken away. I close my eyes. I can’t face it. I can’t face the scrutiny and I hate—hate—the thought of the avid gossip and questions my family is going to have to deal with because of me. I want to tell Patrick to drive us away.

  “Go on in, you two,” Patrick says to the children as he switches off the engine and the house falls back into shadow.

  Joe and Mia scramble out of the car. Joe pauses and looks back, but Mia grabs his arm and tugs him away.

 
When we’re alone in the car, Patrick opens the white pharmacy bag, pulls out a box of pills. “I thought… I thought you wouldn’t want to take them in front of the children the first time.” He glances up at the rest of the houses on the street. “It’s okay—no one’s watching.”

  I stare at the box. No, it’s too soon. Barely six months since the last time I came home from the doctor’s with a box just like this one, after Mum died and I forgot how to get up. Maybe if my mother had had pills after my dad left, everything would have turned out differently.

  But this is not the same. I’m different, whatever everyone else thinks. I’m not broken like I was then. I’m better. I’m… I look closer at the label.

  “Diazepam? Jesus—that’s… Am I really that bad that I need diazepam?”

  “The other medications clearly didn’t work—this is a short-term measure. It’s just for a few weeks, to get you on an even keel. Then we can go back to the doctor and see… Come on, Sarah. They’ll help.”

  He sounds so anxious. I did that, didn’t I? Put that fear into his voice.

  He hands me a the white pill and I shiver as I put it into my mouth. That ghost of a dream is back as I swallow.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I never meant to… I swear I never meant to die. But I’m sorry.”

  He takes a deep breath and stares at the closed front door. “When I met Joe’s mother…” He sees me wince. “When I met Eve, I thought I could save her. I should have seen she was beyond saving. She was self-destructing so fast it was inevitable she’d end up dead. We weren’t together when she died and there was nothing I could have done, but the guilt was overwhelming. Like with your mother. I felt dreadful that I wasn’t there.” He grips my hand. “And then I met you and you were so different—together and happy, and so amazing with Joe. But the last six months, Sarah… I’ve been so scared. I can see you falling apart and it’s like Eve all over again and I’ve been so bloody afraid. I couldn’t stand it if Joe found out the truth and then saw it happen again with you. I couldn’t… I couldn’t bear it.” His voice breaks and he buries his face in his hands.

  I’m shaking, my eyes stinging with unshed tears.

  “The house—I just want you to be happy. I want us all to be happy like we were.”

  There’s fear in his voice and it makes something tighten inside me. “But…”

  “If we moved, it could all go away. We could start again.”

  I get that, I do. This was only ever meant to be our starter home, the first rung on the ladder. We outgrew it long ago, tripping over one another in the too-small rooms. But the second rung on the ladder has always seemed so high, so out of reach.

  “Maybe we could move—maybe we should move,” I say. “But why there? We could look around, find somewhere closer to Cardiff, something…”

  Patrick laughs and it’s a bitter sound. “We can’t afford anything else. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If someone else bought the house and did all the things we talked about, they’d sell it for twice as much. This is it. The only chance—not just for me to get the house back but for us ever to own anything like it.”

  He’s right. His childhood home isn’t just the next rung on the ladder: it’s a climb right to the top. God—sea views, detached, Victorian… When he’d taken me to see those beautiful seaside towns and I’d heard the longing in his voice, I’d feel it too: a yearning for a life I’d never had. I’d feel the exotic pull of it.

  He comes around to my side and helps me out of the car.

  “It could be such a happy place,” Patrick says. I know he’s not talking about our current home. “It was perfect once, before the murders. It could be perfect again.”

  Caroline’s voice is going around and around in my head, and the fear and wariness on Mia’s and Joe’s faces, the way they tiptoe around me. Patrick’s words have sent panic chasing through me. I need to protect my children. Patrick’s right. To do that, we need a fresh start, somewhere I can get better, be better. Somewhere that will take away the fear in Patrick’s voice. After we do the work, that house could be the dream home we always longed for. Because it was his perfect childhood home long before it became the Murder House, wasn’t it? We’ll be safe. It’s not running away.

  “Okay,” I say to Patrick, bitterness from the pill still on my tongue. “You can have the money. Let’s do it. Let’s buy the house.”

  Part 2—The Murder House

  Headline from Wales Online, May 2002:

  Brutal Triple Murder Shocks Community

  A man has appeared in court today charged with the murder of three members of one family.

  Headline from the South Wales Echo, June 2002:

  Welcome to the Murder House

  I have this dream. In it, I’m in the house and it’s dark and I know someone’s in there with me, even though I can’t see them. In the dream I start running, and the landing stretches out so it’s a big long corridor and I’m running and the dragon in the man suit is chasing me and I never get to the end. There are all these rooms off the corridor and all the doors are closed and that’s good because I don’t want to look in any of them. I know something terrible waits inside for me, and if I stop and open those doors I’ll never get away.

  The sign went up today on the house. People crept out to watch, standing around in silence as the big red Sold was slapped over the For Sale sign everyone assumed would be there forever because who the fuck was going to buy that house, right? All the others cling to the shadows, pretending they’re not really watching, just happen to be passing. Not me: I stand in the middle of the street, arms folded—I’m not scared of the Murder House.

  “Who do you think bought it?”

  I look at the man who slunk out of the shadows to ask. He lights a cigarette, holding out the packet to offer me one. Close up, he smells dusty and his breath is meaty and sour. “Probably someone who doesn’t know,” I say, and he stares at me like I’m nuts.

  I remember when the house was something else, not the Murder House, just a house. These people, all these people watching, they see only the blood. You can tell by the way they avert their eyes, the way they cross the road, like something or someone will snatch them up if they get too close.

  In my dream, the dream I have about the house that’s just a house and not yet the Murder House, there are carpets in the hall, brown and cream swirls, and there’s textured paper on the walls. It tips and tilts as the hall stretches out into an endless corridor and I run and run. It comes to life, flowing in and out under those closed doors. It comes to life and drags at my feet like an angry riptide.

  I lied to the man with the rotting breath. I do know who’s moving into the Murder House. New people are arriving—time to be neighborly.

  CHAPTER 5

  APRIL 2017

  Someone’s watching the house. There was a whole line of them when we pulled up earlier, the moving van behind us: a dozen silent watchers who just happened to be passing by, pretending to be doing something else but really just staring at Patrick as he put the key in the front door. No one said hello. No one came over to welcome us to the town. They just watched as our furniture was unloaded.

  I grew more and more tense, self-conscious in front of the curtain-free windows. I’m not sure if Joe and Mia have noticed them yet—they seem shell-shocked by the move. It’s all been so fast. We’ve been swept along by Patrick’s enthusiasm, but I don’t think the children really believed it was going to happen until the van turned up this morning. Mia looked on the verge of tears for most of the journey, and Joe visibly paled when we pulled up outside the house. And Patrick… I pointed out the watchers and he laughed. “We’re famous,” he said. “Ignore them; they’re just vultures.”

  “They look like they’re waiting.”

  He put down the box he was carrying and joined me at the window. “They probably are,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He smiled. “For us to become tomorrow’s news. For the
bogeyman to jump out of the cupboard and a new family to be killed in the Murder House.”

  He winked at me, like it was a big joke, but goose bumps rose on my arms and they haven’t gone down since.

  The line of vultures thinned out over the course of the afternoon as the sky got darker and the rain started. I thought everyone had left, but when I look outside it seems there might be one figure left. It’s probably a trick of the light. Patrick’s dragged the kids off to pick up takeout, on the pretext of showing them the town, and it’s only me here, exposed every time I pass a window.

  I wash down a pill with water, then try to distract myself while I wait for it to kick in by unpacking boxes, pausing to stroke the built-in shelves in the alcoves, humming as I fill them with books. Every filled shelf makes the house look more like a home and I don’t notice it getting darker until I can no longer read the titles on the spines. As I reach for the light switch, a floorboard creaks in one of the empty upstairs rooms.

  I stop humming.

  No, Sarah, this is silly. It’s just a house.

  I glance out the living room window, but the watcher has gone. My heart’s pounding. There was no watcher, I tell myself. It’s seven o’clock at night in a bloody seaside town in south Wales: Who do I think is trying to get in? I put down my box of books and go back to the kitchen to make tea, putting on all the lights as I pass. I turn to the sink to fill the kettle, glance up, and scream. There’s a face at the window.

  I drop the kettle, water pouring out in a flood at my feet, then realize. Oh, stupid, stupid me—it’s my bloody reflection. I’ve just given myself a heart attack over my own reflection.

  As I’m mopping up the water, though, laughing shakily to myself, there’s a sharp knock on the front door and I have to put both hands over my mouth to stop the shriek. Did Patrick lock it when he went out? I stand, frozen, in the kitchen, until I remember I’m visible to anyone in the darkness outside. I creep into the hall and silently slide the security chain into place, but the front door rattles again and I watch it open an inch, stopped by the chain. Without thinking, I race over and slam it shut, my hand shaking as I scrabble for the latch.