The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  “Everything okay?” he asks, and I nod, lifting my face for his kiss.

  I don’t want to tell him I was chasing a watcher he doesn’t believe is real. “Thought I saw someone I knew,” I say, wincing at how feeble it sounds when I don’t really know anyone in the town yet.

  He frowns and glances up at the now-empty path. “I’ll try to get home early,” he says.

  “Don’t be silly—I’m fine.”

  He hesitates, his hand on the door. “Don’t forget to take your pills, okay?”

  I jump when the door slams behind him and have to take a deep, shaky breath. I look out of the window—the coast path is still empty. I go back to the kitchen via the front door, making sure the security chain is on and the latch down. I hear the sound of wind chimes again, but this time it seems louder. It sounds like they’re hanging right outside the house. I’ve looked in the neighbors’ gardens and haven’t found them. I liked it at first, the melodic clang. But sometimes the chimes sound off, a discordant note that unsettles me.

  I put on the radio, turning it up loud to sing along as a classic Prince song comes on. I get a cloth and clean the kitchen window, opening it wide when I’ve finished. It does make the room brighter and eases some of the tightness in my chest.

  When the surfaces are clean and every dish washed, I turn to the mountain of boxes. I swear it’s grown since yesterday—yesterday the Andes, today the Himalayas. I wish I could snap my fingers, like Mary Poppins, and have it all unpacked in seconds. I want to see it as it could be: paintings on freshly decorated walls, polished wood, and fresh flowers everywhere. Beautiful antique furniture and the floors restored. My doll’s house come to life. It’s childish, but I’m impatient to get to the fun stuff.

  My phone buzzes and another text from Caroline comes through. I still haven’t taken any of her calls since the move—I don’t want to hear her warnings and the constant edge of worry in her voice. I’m going to wait until everything’s settled here and I’m back off the pills, then invite her around. Prove to her that this move was the right decision. I know you said you were going to tell Joe soon, so I’ve asked Sean to check where Eve was in care. Like I said, they may not be able to give you any information but it could be a start if he wanted to track her family down.

  I squeeze the phone. Damn her for still interfering. This is not the right time, not yet—and it’s not her decision to make. Joe needs to be settled: he needs to be in a good place when we tell him. His smile needs to be more fixed. This is too soon after his car accident, too soon after the aborted therapy sessions, too soon after the move. When we tell him, he’ll have questions about his mother, and how is he going to handle the knowledge that she was a drug addict who died from an overdose? Oh, the bitter irony of Eve’s fate compared with my own recent experience. Was her overdose as accidental as mine? I reply to Caroline with a terse three words: Leave it alone. Me and the pills—I’ve made it harder than ever to tell Joe the truth.

  The sun breaks out from the clouds and shines on the peaks of the cardboard mountain. I live by the sea and the sun has come out: I don’t want to spend my time hiding inside, trapped by the fear of a watcher who might simply be someone out walking the cliff path, curious about the Murder House and the family who moved into it.

  Make this work, Patrick’s pleading voice whispers in my head. Make it better.

  “Screw it,” I mutter, putting away my phone and snatching up my keys. Isn’t that supposed to be our new philosophy? Isn’t that what brought us here? It’s not running away; it’s running toward something. It’s not my tropical beach, but it is an adventure, or it could be if I make it one.

  There’s a DIY shop in town, small, dark, and cluttered with old wooden cupboards and shelves filled with nuts, bolts, and hinges. It smells of sawdust and damp, and everything is covered with a layer of dust. The small supply of paint and wallpaper is probably twice the price it would be in one of the big out-of-town places, but I don’t want to wait. I want to see that look on Patrick’s face again: excitement, exhilaration, the bright edge of promise.

  I can help. This pot of chalky white Farrow & Ball paint, this roll of Osborne & Little wallpaper patterned with butterflies, this can bring happiness. I add more cans, more rolls of wallpaper to my pile, though it makes me twitch when I see the total. It’s okay, I tell myself. My mother’s money was there to make us happy, and this is how I’m going to use it: to heal our family and give us a home.

  The back of my neck prickles as I stand at the counter and I spin around, expecting to see someone watching me, but the shop is empty.

  “You’ll be busy,” the man serving me says, nodding at the bags around my feet as we wait for the card payment to go through.

  I laugh. “That’s the plan.”

  “Hey,” he calls as I leave. “Aren’t you from the—the house on Seaview Road?”

  I hear the omission in his words. Aren’t you from the Murder House? That’s what he was really asking. My laughter dies. Is that who we are? The new Murder House family? I clutch my shopping bags tighter and walk faster, ignoring the question. No, that’s not who we are going to be.

  I stop and sit on a bench on the coast path, bags of paint and wallpaper at my feet.

  “I thought it was you.”

  I smile as Joe sits down next to me. I don’t like his new school uniform—too much black. He looks so pale in contrast, purple smudges under his eyes, too thin under the baggy layers. “You’re out early,” I say.

  “I had a couple of free periods.”

  “Not playing hooky like me, then?”

  “What from?”

  I sigh. “I promised your dad I’d spend the day emptying boxes. But there are so many and the sun was shining, so…”

  “You skived off.”

  “I know it’s got to be done, but…”

  “It’s okay, Mum. You don’t need to explain to me.”

  “How’s your first day going?” I ask.

  He shrugs and leans back against the bench, lifting his face to the weak sun and closing his eyes.

  “Classes are okay, I guess,” he says. “It’s got a decent enough art room and I like the art teacher. She’s going to help me put my portfolio together.”

  I spend so much time worrying about Joe—about him finding out, about losing him—that sometimes I forget to enjoy him in the moment. It’s so nice to hear enthusiasm in his voice, to hear him planning a future. I could tell him now, here, neutral ground, just me and him. Confess it all and make him understand our reasons for the years of lies, help him understand how fully I love him, how much he is a part of our family now. Then the sun goes behind a cloud and the shadow it casts over his face makes him look younger and older and fragile, and I picture my words breaking him. I swallow the words.

  “Do you miss it?” he asks.

  “What? The old house?”

  He nods.

  I stare out at the sea as I think about it. Do I? I miss Caroline. I miss having a choice of shops and restaurants. But even after all those years there, did I really love the house? It was so small and new and featureless. Anonymous, very much a blank canvas. Our new house is all features. Full of potential. But full of other things too.

  “I’m excited by the possibilities here,” I say. “With the house and the town. I keep looking forward to the summer, when we can get out more and the house is finished. But I kept waking up last night—the wind outside, clanks and creaks from the house, the sea… I keep waking up with my heart racing, imagining…” My voice drifts off, but Joe nods anyway.

  “Yeah. I know.” He hunches forward, his head down, his face hidden under his dark hair. “So what’s this?” he says, nodding at the shopping bags.

  “I want to make the house ours,” I say. “I want to make it beautiful. I want it to be a home.”

  When Joe heads back to school, I walk home. The phone rings as I unlock the door. I pick it up and there’s a crackling on the line, a whistling noise that sounds like t
he wind. I wait, but no one speaks. It’s probably a bad connection or a wrong number. I won’t let it spook me, not today. The half-full bottle of wine in the kitchen calls me, but I put it away at the back of a cupboard.

  I push the boxes stacked in the living room out into the hall and start on the painting, soft dove gray covering yellow-stained, damp-spotted magnolia. The room comes alive with every sweep of the roller and I laugh again, alone in the house. I’m painting away the house’s history, painting out Ian Hooper and his awful crimes. I’m making it Patrick’s again, alive, not dead. A happy house. A home. I can’t wait for Mia and Joe to see what this place can be.

  I hesitate as I get to the edge of the wall by the door. Halfway up, there are pen marks and initials scribbled on it. A DIY height chart: TE and BE. Tom and Billy Evans—Billy, who never outgrew the last pen mark, age nine, seven-year-old Tom, who hid under the bed from the monster and vanished after the trial. The roller drips paint on the floor as I waver. Must I be the one to erase them this one final time? I take a deep breath and put the roller to the wall, painting up and down, covering the scribbled pen marks, covering the ghosts of two little boys who once lived here.

  “Screw it,” I say, but any urge to laugh is gone and tears build. A lump forms in my throat. I paint the wall to the edges, then drop the roller in the tray and stand back to look. The height chart is gone. The wall is smooth and blank.

  Mia gets in first from school and I greet her in the hallway, trailing after her as she dumps shoes, bag, and coat on the floor. I resist the urge to remind her to hang up the coat and the bag.

  “Well, how was it?”

  She shrugs, going through to the kitchen and opening the fridge. “It was okay. Felt like a bit of a freak show, turning up so late in the year.”

  “Were they nice to you?”

  She laughs. “Mum—it’s not kindergarten.”

  “But still…”

  “Well, they didn’t sit me in a circle and sing welcome songs, but most of them were friendly enough, I suppose. The teachers were the same as all teachers. There were a few idiots, nothing major.”

  “I’m glad,” I say, opening a cupboard and getting down some cookies. “I really am.”

  “What have you been up to?” she asks, licking the chocolate off a cookie.

  “Come,” I say, leading her through to the living room, eager to see her reaction.

  “Nice job, Mum, but you missed a bit,” she says.

  “What? Where?”

  Mia points to the wall opposite the window, to the edge by the door. Butterflies have escaped from the wallpaper and taken up residence in my stomach. There are lines in the paintwork, scribbled marks halfway up the wall. I step closer and I can see it—TE and BE, fainter than before but still there.

  “I’ll cover it if you like,” Mia says, leaning to pick up the roller.

  “No,” I say, grabbing her hand before she can touch the wall. “Leave it.”

  Mia leans in to look at the initials and draws in a hissing breath through her teeth. “Jesus—is that them?”

  I nod. Her turn to shiver.

  “Why don’t you want it painted over? It’s bloody creepy.”

  I don’t think she needs to hear that I’ve already tried to cover it. None of the other marks on the wall are showing through. They must have used a permanent marker to immortalize the chart, I tell myself, though I know how unbelievable that sounds.

  She touches Tom’s initials, wobbly letters that suggest he wrote them himself. “It’s so sad,” she whispers.

  We both jump as the front door slams and Patrick calls hello. Mia bounds out to meet him and I hear her talking, a bright string of stories about her first day when all I’d gotten was a shrug and one sentence. I look at my watch—it’s only four thirty. What’s he doing home? I go out into the hall to find him staring up at the cardboard Mount Everest. He looks at me then and I reach to smooth my hair, wishing I’d taken the time to change out of the faded T-shirt and sagging jeans I’d put on to paint. I haven’t bothered with makeup and I never got around to a shower this morning.

  Patrick, in contrast, looks the same as he did this morning, as perfect as he always does: no crease in his shirt, no sign of sweat or dirt or tiredness. He still smells of shower gel and his favorite spicy aftershave. I go in for a kiss and don’t think I imagine his slight recoil.

  “Get a room,” Mia mutters as she pushes past to go upstairs.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, brushing down my T-shirt. “I lost track of time.”

  He looks at the pile of boxes again. “How have you done with the unpacking?”

  “Ah… not that well today.”

  “No? How many boxes did you get done?”

  I wince. “None.”

  “What?”

  “Wait, though—there’s a reason. I have a surprise.”

  His face stays wary as I grab his arm and tug him through to the living room. “Close your eyes,” I say, dragging him in to face the painted walls. I’ve finished two and made a start on the wallpaper. I’ve done enough so he can see how beautiful it’s going to be—just like my doll’s house.

  I made another decision too, while painting walls. I get my phone out of my pocket. I’ll tell Patrick about Caroline’s text tonight, as we sit in our beautiful new living room. We’ll make a plan, work out what we’re going to say to Joe and when. A fresh start for all of us in our new home.

  “Okay, you can look now.”

  He opens his eyes and I grip his hand, squeezing as he stares at the walls, then at the half-dozen shopping bags spilling rolls of wallpaper and cans of paint.

  “Surprise,” I say, my smile growing as he spins to take it all in. “It looks just like those magazine pictures, doesn’t it?”

  My excitement fades as he doesn’t say anything. He leans and picks up the receipt that’s fallen out of one of the bags. “Did you really spend over three hundred pounds on paint and wallpaper? For one room?”

  “I know it’s a lot, but look at the colors. They’re so beautiful and just like the ones in that magazine you showed me.”

  “Yes, but three hundred pounds?”

  “I’m sorry. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  He sighs and pushes a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, too. It’s great, but…” He looks down at the bags again. “Maybe we could take some of it back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “But you said there’d be plenty of my mother’s money left to do the house up.”

  He hesitates, looking away from me to the unpainted wall. “The bank asked for more of a deposit than I anticipated.”

  “So what does that mean? How much is left?”

  He hesitates again. “None. I had to use it all.”

  I bite my lip hard, tasting blood. All gone.

  “It’s not a problem—we have to be careful, that’s all,” Patrick says. “If we want to do everything, we have to plan what order we do things in. I want to do the kitchen first, the flooring and the electrical. The big things, the important things. Decorating can wait.”

  “How will we pay for it if my money’s all gone?” I don’t mean the words to come out so bitter.

  Patrick folds the receipt for the paint and wallpaper and puts it into his pocket. “I’m not saying we can’t do anything. But I’ll get some white paint. We’ll start with that. A coat of white everywhere will freshen things up, provide a base.” He touches my arm. “Thank you, though, for doing this. For trying.”

  I scrub clean the palette in my head, the Naples Yellow and Rose Madder, the Burnt Sienna and Viridian. I thought the house could be my canvas. I got carried away.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “It won’t be forever—we just need to build the savings back up.” He steps behind me and slides his hands around my waist. “Let’s get your old decorating magazines out tonight, plan all the rooms. You can make mood boards, get samples, and as soon as things are straight…”

  I push away my sense of deflation, sm
ile, and turn in his arms. “See? I’m dangerous left here with nothing to do. I definitely need to get out and find a job.”

  He leans down to kiss me. “Come on—I’ll make you some tea.”

  He pauses at the door. “Listen,” he says. “Why don’t we all go to the fair this weekend?” He laughs. “You told me you were pregnant with Mia when we were there, do you remember?”

  Of course I do. He’d won a cuddly toy for Joe at one of the stalls and I told him he’d better try to win another.

  “Wasn’t it perfect?” he says. “God, I was so happy.”

  It was. One of those moments to put away and keep forever. I look down at Caroline’s message on my phone. Does it matter if we wait a few more months to tell Joe? We can be that happy again—here, now. I need to make this work for all of us.

  She’s pretty and thin, the woman you moved into the Murder House, long pale hair, small pale face. Younger than you, smiling but brittle, circles under her eyes like she’s been up all night. I wonder if she has dreams too.

  I watch her moving around inside the house, reluctance in every step. I watch her step outside and take in great lungfuls of air, like she’s been holding her breath the whole time she’s been inside.

  Someone stops and speaks to her. She smiles, and even across the road I recognize in her a desperation. I see a woman so full of fucking need and I realize how easy it would be to smash her to dust.

  I could tell her some stories that would kill her smile. I could tell her what’s hidden under the wallpaper. I could tell her about the holes in the walls and what made them and how they became places to hide… things.

  She doesn’t know. She only sees the fresh blood.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Sarah? Earth to Sarah?”

  I look at Patrick. How long has he been talking? What was he talking about? “Sorry.”

  “Did you hear anything I just said? It’s time to go.” His gaze moves to the pills in front of me. “You’re not skipping your medication, are you?”