The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  All the bedroom doors are open.

  “As I said, I’m very busy. Perhaps you should go now.”

  I walk behind her down the stairs, and she turns to me as she opens the front door. “I always felt sorry for him as a boy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your husband—Patrick. I was always so sorry for him. Such a handsome young man.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure to let him know you stopped in.” I’m tempted to give her a shove as she hovers on the step. “Tell me your name again.”

  She ignores me. “There was always something a bit strange about this house, even before the murders,” she says. “And his parents… awful when the house was repossessed like that. So embarrassing for them. Mind you, they never really seemed happy here… We were surprised your husband chose to come back.”

  She’s watching me, an expectant look on her face. I won’t give her the satisfaction of answering, even though her words are like worms crawling under my skin. I grip the door and start to close it.

  “Well,” she says, clearly put out by my rudeness and oblivious to her own, “good luck to you. And your lovely children.”

  I’m shaking when I close the door behind her. Is that what it’s going to be like? A parade of faux-friendly neighbors sneaking around my bloody house taking photographs? Whispering poison, insinuating… insinuating what?

  I feel sick as I imagine her googling the name of my medication, making all sorts of assumptions about her mentally unstable new neighbor. I grab the box from the kitchen, rummage through a cupboard to find a plastic-lidded container, and press out all the pills from their foil, emptying them into the anonymous box, no incriminating label to give me away. But the bad taste in my mouth doesn’t go. Her words, her avid curiosity… No. It used to be a happy house; I know that from Patrick. It can be a happy house again.

  Patrick is in the hall hanging up his coat, his suit creased, eyes tired. I tried to persuade him to take some time off after the move, but he insisted on going to work.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask, and he follows me into the kitchen. The breakfast dishes are still stacked up ready to wash and the box of tissue-wrapped crockery I started to unpack is open on the floor but no emptier than it had been hours ago. I went to lie down after taking my lunchtime pill and fell asleep, not waking until four.

  “How did you get on today with the unpacking?” he asks as I rummage in another box for something for dinner.

  “Not too bad,” I say, rubbing my eyes. A pulsing headache has set in and I feel as if I could go up and sleep for another hour. “Another couple of days and we’ll be pretty much done. I’ve got the bedrooms mostly unpacked.”

  “Good, good,” he says, taking off his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt cuffs. He sounds distracted and doesn’t seem to notice the mess as he stares out the back window at the tangled garden.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He blinks and turns away from the window. “What? Yes, I’m fine. There was a… It was a difficult day at work.”

  Patrick is a structural engineer. I used to ask about his job with genuine interest. He’d show me plans and schematics, talk about the buildings he’d worked on, and I’d try to understand. But I didn’t, really, any more than he understood some of the paintings I did. It never mattered. He’d laugh and put the plans away, help me wash the paint out of my hair, the conversation would move on and maybe, at some point, we’d stopped listening to the answers we got when we asked, How was your day?

  He must see my worry, because he squeezes my hand and smiles. “It’s fine—I’m a bit tired and hungry, that’s all. I haven’t gotten used to the commute yet. These are pretty,” he says, looking at the daffodils.

  “One of our neighbors dropped in.”

  His smile fades, replaced by wariness. “Oh, yes?”

  “I caught her taking photographs of the bedrooms.” My earlier outrage stirs again.

  “What on earth for?”

  “Well, I don’t think it was the IKEA furniture she was interested in. She was on a bloody ghost tour of her own making.”

  “Jesus,” he mutters.

  “She seemed to remember you.”

  I wait for him to answer, but he turns away, flipping through the forwarded mail.

  “I could see she was dying to know why we moved here and…” I see his back stiffen. He doesn’t need to hear it today.

  “It made me think—we should ask people around, not nosy neighbors but people you used to know, have a reunion of sorts. It’ll be a way of laying down roots here again.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, no. Any friends I had here are long gone. Anyone who remembers me now is not a friend. They just want to spread lies and gossip. I won’t have them in my house.” He glances down at me. “If this neighbor comes around again, tell her to piss off.”

  I stare after him as he marches from the room. What does he mean? Surely there must be some people left here that he knew as friends. Wasn’t that part of the idyllic picture he painted for me—the friendliness of a small town?

  I find pasta, a jar of ready-made sauce. I’m chopping onions and peppers, and Patrick’s stuffing packing paper into the overflowing bin and stacking plates in a wall cupboard that looks ready to give way. The children are in the living room: I can hear the rise and fall of Mia’s voice through the wall. She came down for dinner dressed all in black, eyeliner thick around her eyes. She’s like a little girl playing dress-up, wearing clothes I don’t recognize, looking both older and younger in too much makeup.

  Patrick opens the bin lid to pull out the garbage bag, cursing as he drops it and everything spills on the floor. I spot the empty pill box too late—he’s already reaching for it, snatching it out of my grasp.

  “What’s this?” There’s panic in his voice as he holds the empty blister pack and stares at me.

  Oh, no, no—he can’t think…“Patrick, I haven’t taken them. They’re here,” I say, holding up the plastic box I put the pills in. “I’ve put them in here.”

  He looks from the empty pack to the plastic container in my hand. “Why?”

  “Because that damn nosy neighbor saw the box. I was embarrassed—humiliated at the thought of our neighbors thinking I’m…”

  “Thinking you’re what?”

  “Crazy.”

  “Jesus, Sarah,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “Taking medication doesn’t make you crazy; it makes you better. This, though, doing this… God, for a minute I thought… What if Joe or Mia saw the empty packet? So soon after your damn overdose? You could have just put them in a drawer, kept them out of sight.”

  “I didn’t think! It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “It doesn’t matter?” His voice rises in disbelief. He squeezes the empty pill box, scrunching it up. “You’re hiding again, refusing to face you have a problem, wallowing in your guilt instead of trying to get better.” He shakes his head. “God, it’s good the children are starting their new school on Monday. They need some distance from you—it’ll be good for them.”

  “Distance?”

  “Your guilt is so obvious in the way you’re clinging. It’s making them claustrophobic.”

  Guilt: my sour, bitter friend. Guilt over my mother, over Joe, and now guilt over what I put them through with those stupid pills.

  “It’s just the same as before,” Patrick says. “With your mother. It wasn’t your fault she died, you did nothing wrong, but you couldn’t get past it, could you? You couldn’t just grieve and move on; you let it break you. You almost let it break our whole damn family. You nearly died, and I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t stand…” His voice is hoarse and I don’t know if it’s with fear, frustration, or both.

  His words have winded me and I can’t catch my breath. I hate that I’ve done this, that I came so close to breaking all of us. In those awful weeks and months after my mother’s death, it was all so much. I couldn’t see
anything beyond all that grief and guilt. It overwhelmed me. But the pills… That’s wrong. I didn’t mean to die. I didn’t.

  “I’m trying,” he says. “I’m trying so hard, but I can’t do it on my own. Give the house a chance—give us a chance. Make it better, Sarah. Make this work, because if you don’t…” He takes a shaky breath. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  His fear leaks into me. What have I done to us?

  The other day I was talking to someone about this town. “It’s lovely there,” they said. “I went there on vacation when I was a kid.” That’s the thing, though. Everyone went on vacation here when they were a kid. When you’re on vacation, you don’t see the rot. You don’t see the rust or the nasty words graffitied on hidden walls. You don’t see the pain, the sadness, the evil, the dull, gray, never-ending boredom that leads people to drink and smoke and fight and die. You don’t see the locked doors and the bars on the windows. You don’t hear the screams and pleas behind those closed doors. You see the fair and the fish and chips and the ice cream. You see sand and sea and picnics and candy. You see pretty houses with net curtains and sea views. You don’t see a murder house. You don’t see anything.

  CHAPTER 7

  “I was thinking, now that we’re here, I could get a job.”

  Patrick glances up at me as he turns a page of his newspaper. “With all your qualifications?”

  “Excuse me?” I say, flicking his newspaper.

  He laughs and puts down the paper. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You know I’m only teasing. But one step at a time, okay? When were you last out there looking for a job? First you’re getting the whole neighborhood around, now you want to take over the world.”

  I pick up his discarded newspaper and go through it for the jobs page. “I’m not looking to take over anything. I’m thinking about a part-time job. It’s supposed to be a fresh start for all of us. I need to do more. I have to do something.”

  “Aren’t you happy? We have this house, this beautiful house, in this beautiful town…”

  “Yes, and now I need a life. A house isn’t enough. Maybe if I’d had more before, I’d…” My voice trails off.

  “What?”

  “Maybe I’d have been better able to cope after my mother died.”

  My words hover and Patrick goes pale. I sit next to him and squeeze his hand. “I am determined to make this work, I promise,” I say. “You, Caroline, the children—you’ve all been running around, trying to help me, but I have to help myself too. I don’t want to be reliant on medication to get me through the day.”

  There’s a look of panic on his face that makes me laugh. “I’m not planning a midlife crisis. I’m talking about a part-time job, or taking some art classes, or… I don’t know, just something.”

  He reaches over, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and strokes my cheek. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’ve done this—moved here, committed to making our new life. Of course you should look for a job, take some classes, whatever. But let’s get the rest of the house sorted first. Then I’m sure we can find you something to do.”

  But now that we’ve moved, I find I want more. My feet itch to get out and do something. Isn’t that what he wanted for me?

  “A few weeks. A couple of months, that’s all. It’s only been a few months since your… illness,” he says. “We’ve only been here two days. Give yourself time to settle, adjust.”

  He gets up and takes his cup to the sink. “Tea?” he asks, filling the kettle. “Fuel for the unpacking…”

  I glance back at the newspaper. I can still apply for jobs. Do the unpacking and decorating while I wait to hear back from them.

  “Oh, wait,” I say as he puts on his coat for work. “I found something yesterday.” I run upstairs and come down with my hands held out. “Look,” I say. “It’s C-3PO and Luke Skywalker.”

  His hands close around the figures. I remember him telling me about the magical Christmas when he got them. All the Star Wars figures he’d asked for, more than a dozen boxed up. “Best Christmas ever,” he’d said. I’d found them sitting on the windowsill upstairs, like they were waiting there to welcome Patrick home.

  “They were in our bedroom—Mia or Joe must have found them somewhere. Didn’t you say you had all the characters once? I did look, but I couldn’t find any more.”

  “These aren’t mine.”

  “Of course they are—you told me about them.”

  “Mine were thrown away a long time ago.”

  “You threw them away?”

  He ignores me and keeps talking. “It doesn’t matter, even if they were mine. They’re toys. Crappy old bits of plastic, that’s all.” He goes through to the kitchen and drops them in the bin.

  If they’re not Patrick’s, they must have been here when we moved in. Which means they could have belonged to one of the Evans children. I reach into the bin and pull them out, brushing off the dust. Patrick watches me do it but doesn’t say anything. They weren’t on the windowsill before today. I would have seen them.

  My hands are trembling. I don’t believe in ghosts, but it’s the little dead boy I’m picturing, halfway through an unfinished game as a madman came through the door. I know that’s silly. I know Joe or Mia must have found them in some forgotten corner and put them there, but… it seems wrong to throw them away. Whether they’re Patrick’s and he’s forgotten he still had them, or whether they belonged to one of the Evans boys, they were once precious to somebody. I put them away in the back of a drawer. Safe but hidden.

  A breeze ruffles the hair at the back of my neck. I know it’s from the open window, but it feels like a breath. The breath of a ghost as I close the drawer.

  As I wave Patrick off, I see Mia on the beach, a few feet from the shoreline, her head bowed and shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped around herself against the wind. Why does she never take her coat? I get it from the hall and follow her across the road.

  “Put this on,” I say as I draw level, then step back as a wave breaks a little too close to my foot. Mia doesn’t seem to notice and lets the water wash over her shoes.

  She glances up at me and takes the coat but doesn’t put it on. Instead she hugs it to her, a cushion for her front, the rest still exposed to the wind and saltwater spray. “Thanks, Mum.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  She shrugs and looks down at the phone clutched in her hand. “I wanted to call Lara, but the signal in the house is shit.”

  It is. It’s making it easier to avoid Caroline’s calls when they go straight to voicemail. “Did you get through?”

  “Voicemail,” she mutters. “I wanted to get a lift into Cardiff with Dad. It’s the last day of the Easter break—I thought we could have lunch and then I could meet up with Lara, but he said no.” She looks deflated. Trips to the city were something she and Patrick used to do a lot on school breaks.

  “He’s really busy at the moment. I’m sure he’d love to do that on the next break, though.”

  “Yeah, right. He never has time for me anymore. It’s all the house and work and you.”

  I’ve noticed it too. His preoccupation with the house, with work, with me. When was the last time they had one of their father-daughter lunches? Hers is the first room we’re going to decorate, Patrick insisted. But he’s talking about it in a distracted way, not involving her. He’s doing it like it’s expected Mia’s room will be done first, not like he wants to do it. The thread of unease I’ve felt since we first stepped through the door grips me a little tighter. Patrick has seemed only half-present—what’s distracting him? Is it worrying about me? Is it the house?

  “Your dad used to bring me here years ago,” I say, nudging a shell out of its sand grave with my foot. Mia bends to pick it up. “Not to this exact beach, a bit farther down the coast. I loved it when we visited. He’d buy me an ice cream and we’d walk along the beach and then get fish and chips. You and Joe would be in a double buggy and we’d feed yo
u chips and ice cream like you were baby birds, sitting there with your mouths open.”

  Mia smiles and reaches down to pick up another shell. “Do you remember that vacation in Cornwall? When we got lucky with the weather and were on the beach every day? We had that cottage five minutes from the sea, and by the end of the week, I swear more sand and shells were in the cottage than on the beach.”

  I can feel the tightness in my chest begin to loosen. “We could make it like that here. When the weather picks up. I promise, the first nice day, we’ll bring a picnic down here and I’ll treat us all to ice cream and we’ll finish the day with a bag of chips.”

  “Will you buy us buckets and spades as well? Remember, mine has to be red and Joe’s has to be yellow.”

  “Of course. There’s a shop that sells them a few minutes down the road.”

  Another wave races in and soaks our feet. Mia laughs as I scream and almost fall.

  Mia’s laugh, the pocketful of shells, the sea spray hitting my face, the crashing of the waves and the call of the seagulls, the hint of blue showing through the clouds… I feel something building. It’s the promise, not just a week by the sea, then back to suburbia, boxy houses, and patchwork lawns. We live here now, we live this, and I can almost see it—the dusting of sand in the hallway, shell collections on the shelves, sun shining on bowls of sea glass in the window. Screw the neighbors. If I can make Mia see it too, maybe this could work for all of us.

  But then I look around and the house seems closed up and dark, unlived-in, and I can feel that ghost-breath on the back of my neck. Mia follows my gaze and I see her shoulders sag again.

  “We’ll still have to go back, though, won’t we, Mum?” she says. “After the picnic and the ice cream. We’ll still live in the Murder House.”

  I take her hand and squeeze it. “It’s for us to make it something different. Something amazing. It doesn’t have to stay the Murder House, not if we don’t let it. I’ll go back now, open all the windows…”