The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  I think of seeing Joe that day at the fairground, the boy leaning in to kiss him. I have to turn away for a moment so he won’t see the worry on my face. It was me who persuaded Patrick not to push him into going back to school, to let him have this time to recover and work out what he wants to do. I’m trying really hard to let him have his independence, but it’s so difficult when the shadows of the attack are still on his face. “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s not from around here. He rescued me,” Joe says, and he smiles. “Mia would love that, wouldn’t she? I got into a bit of a state on a night out in Cardiff before we moved here and he helped me out. That’s how we met.” His smile widens. “He’s twenty-one and he’s just finished university. He’s working at the Gap while he waits for a proper job. He wants to be a teacher. He doesn’t even like clubbing—he was dragged there by coworkers. He doesn’t drink either, or smoke, and he’s vegetarian.”

  Joe looks at me and I hold my breath. I have to hide from him sometimes, from all I see in his face, and talking about this boy, what I see in his face is everything, all there, open and raw, laid out for this boy called Simon. It terrifies and thrills me at the same time.

  “I don’t even know why I like him,” he says. “He’s so… normal. He’s quiet. We have nothing in common. But… his smile. And the pattern of his voice—its rises and falls, the way he… pauses.” Joe’s voice drops to a whisper.

  He’s wearing a dark blue long-sleeved top and the sleeves are stretched down, almost covering his hands. I think of his scars underneath, all the things he’s never talked to me about etched into his arms. He sees me looking and pulls the sleeves down even farther.

  “How…” I stop. Joe is actually talking to me; I don’t want to scare him off. “How’s it going with the therapist?” He’s had two sessions now, making his own way there on the bus. I offered to go with him, but he refused. Patrick doesn’t talk about it—won’t talk about it.

  “It’s okay, I guess. She keeps telling me I have to open up and talk about stuff, so I won’t always feel the need to…” He fiddles with a cuff. “I told her about Simon and she said to be careful, that I might be too vulnerable for a relationship at the moment.” He glances up at me. “But we’re only friends. That’s what he wants.”

  “Have you mentioned Simon to your father?”

  He laughs. “Are you kidding?” The laughter dies. “There’s something else I’ve been talking to the therapist about. You know I said someone was watching the night I was attacked? I thought I saw… I thought it might have been Dad. But she thinks I may have imagined it. Put him there in my mind because of all the issues I have with him.”

  There’s an aching lump in my throat. Oh, Joe. How could we have gotten to the point where my boy could believe his own father would watch him get beaten up and do nothing? But haven’t I wondered too? Wasn’t I looking for evidence that night in the hospital?

  “Do you think she’s right?”

  “I think she must be. How can I have seen him? It was dark and I was thinking about him. That boy was kicking me and I was thinking about Dad and how ashamed and disgusted he’d be, and suddenly I thought I saw him.”

  He gets up then, and I think that’s it, but he only goes as far as the hall and comes back with his scruffy old backpack. He reaches inside and pulls out a brochure, pushing it toward me. It’s a prospectus for a continuing-ed college in Cardiff.

  “Here’s something else for Dad not to find out about. I know I fucked up my chances of a degree course by leaving school, but I don’t want to go back. I can’t,” he says. “Simon got this for me. There’s a part-time course I can do and still work. I could still go to art college.” He touches the prospectus. “I never thought it was for me, the happy-ever-after thing. I might look like him, but I sometimes think I’m more like you.”

  I reach across and put my hand over his. All these secrets… all these lies we’re telling each other. The truth burns to come out, but now… I think how much he is offering me and how hurt he would be by the truth. Can I bear to force that pain on him right now?

  “Now, though… Do you think I could, Mum?” Joe says, his eyes bright, cheeks flushed. “Do you think I could do this—stop fucking up and get a life?”

  Patrick is staring at the pot of daisies Anna brought. I’d forgotten about them and left them on the hall table, still done up in tissue paper with a blue bow.

  “Where did these come from?”

  “My friend brought them around.”

  “Friend? What friend?”

  I don’t know how to read the look on his face. “Anna. I told you about her.”

  “Why daisies? Why these?”

  “Patrick, I don’t understand—they’re just flowers. I thought we could plant them outside. I thought they’d look nice.”

  He looks like he’s going to be sick. “I hate daisies,” he says. “Get rid of it.”

  When I was a kid, I had all these dreams. Stupid fucking dreams about going into space and curing cancer and winning Oscars and all sorts of crap. It settled, eventually, as dreams do, into something so much less bright and fanciful. But even my dull-as-ditchwater dreams got snatched away, ripped to pieces, ground into the dirt.

  Dreams do not come fucking true. Ever. They don’t. Not even for them, pretending their house is a castle, not the fucking Murder House. Especially not for them, nest of cuckoos with their lies and their secrets.

  You’re in there, in the house that was once just a house before it became the Murder House. I can see them all through the window, your perfect smiling family. But I know better. I know what’s going on in their pretty heads.

  How can I still be so invisible?

  I step closer to the window, out of the shadows. They’re all too absorbed in themselves to see me. I crouch down, dig with my hands in the wet earth under the bay window, dig up the pills I watched her bury. I dig them all up and put them in an empty jar. Now we’ll see, won’t we? Now we’ll see.

  CHAPTER 27

  I wait for the house to be quiet before I get up. I wait and I plan. I have three passport application forms hidden in my bedside table drawer. All I need is to sell one painting at my exhibition and I’ll be able to afford to get the passports and three cheap flights somewhere—anywhere—in Europe. I’ll get the brochures out again, not the exotic tropical vacations but the ones that focus on Spain or France. I’m not going to wait anymore for the adventures my mother never had. The moment Mia finishes school for the summer, we’ll be on a plane, far enough away that Patrick won’t be able to find us.

  Anna talks about shelters, but that’s not what I want. I’m not going to hide among all those women who’ve been beaten and battered and tell them I’m scared it was my husband scribbling on a cellar wall, that I’m scared because he nearly slapped his daughter, that he’s drinking and he doesn’t drink—he doesn’t. He doesn’t get angry, doesn’t lose control.

  I’m not going to do that because it’s too close. We’ll never be free of Patrick and this house if we stay around here. It’ll be night and the lights will flicker and the wind will rattle the window and Patrick will be there in my mind, standing outside Mia’s room in the middle of the night crying, fixing locks on every door, grinding sleeping pills into my tea. And Joe—what about Joe? He wouldn’t come to a shelter with us—he’s getting away on his own.

  And I’m scared about that too. I’m scared to see Joe ready to go off with all that hope in his face, because what if he doesn’t get into that college course? What if this Simon of his rejects him? What if Patrick comes along and grinds salt into that raw hope, drags him back to the Murder House? What if he goes the way his birth mother went? It makes me want to lock him up, hide everything sharp, put bars on his window, and I’m scared that makes me like Patrick or my mother. I think that’s what moving here has done to me.

  So, no, that’s not what we’re going to do. We’re going to spend the summer on a hot beach where Mia and Joe will lose
the dark shadows and get tans. We’ll lose the tension we all carry around. I’ll get a job and I’ll paint. I’ll paint a whole damn new life for us, and when we come back, I’ll make it a reality.

  Two more months, that’s all. Two months to find the money for those passports and tickets and then we’ll be free.

  I wait and I plan, but I don’t wait enough, because when I go downstairs, Patrick is in the kitchen. He’s sitting at the table and he has my pills in front of him, the lid of the container open.

  “What is this?” He says it quietly and all the hairs on my arms stand up. I’ve been so careful to eat some of the mints each day so Patrick wouldn’t get suspicious and check closer, but I can smell them from here. I should have filled it with white stones. I should have been swallowing them. I don’t know what to say. I shake my head, but I have no words.

  He turns and picks up a glass jar, pushes it next to the plastic box on the table. The jar is full of dirt-clogged white pills, half-dissolved and crumbling. I think I’m going to be sick, throw up all over Patrick, the pills, the table. I don’t understand how… Did Patrick see me bury them? Has he dug them up? No, that’s… The nausea rises again, higher. Did I do it? I’ve been thinking about them. As things have gotten worse, haven’t I been fantasizing about digging the fucking things up?

  No, no—stop. That’s not me anymore. I’m in control now, no lost days.

  But if not me, if not Patrick, then who?

  Someone’s been watching. They watched me bury the pills. They’ve known the whole time they were there and they’ve waited…

  “I found this on the doorstep,” Patrick says, nodding at the jar. “With a note that made no sense.” He looks up at me. “It made no sense because how could these be your pills when you’ve promised so faithfully you’ve been taking them every day?” He picks up the plastic box and tips out a handful of mints. His voice is shaking. “I don’t understand why you’ve done this.”

  “I don’t need them anymore.”

  “Don’t you? Your paranoia, your obsession with the history of the house… Sarah, you’re worse than you were before, not better.”

  It’s not true. It’s not just paranoia. “I tried to tell you they were making me feel worse.”

  “No, you didn’t. And if it were true, why didn’t you go to the doctor and tell him that?”

  Because of the cellar. Because of my sketchbooks. Because of the fear on Mia’s face, because of Joe in a hospital bed, because Patrick knew John Evans.

  “I just… I was becoming too reliant on them. I had to get rid of them right away, while I still had the willpower to do it. It was impulsive, stupid, I know that, but once I’d done it, I couldn’t think how to undo it.”

  He picks up the jar with the mud-caked real pills, holds it up to look at it. From across the kitchen, I’m sure I can see worms and bugs in there and bile surges, stings my throat.

  “Someone knew how to undo it. Someone knew what you did.” He looks at me. “Who left these, Sarah? Who dug them up and left them for me?”

  I don’t know, but I think of the watcher I thought was Ian Hooper, that I’ve been scared recently is Tom Evans, and my stomach lurches at the thought of either of them watching me bury the pills. Better that, though, than the first fleeting thought that came to mind when I saw the jar. (Mia. Mia did it.) I don’t want it to be my daughter hating me that much.

  Picking up the box of mints, Patrick walks over to the garbage can and empties them all in, going back to scoop up the ones on the table, putting them into the bin as well. He fills a glass with water and hands it to me. I watch as he picks up the jar and shakes out a small white pill. It has bits of damp mud clinging to it and he holds it out on his palm.

  “Take your medicine, Sarah.” His voice is shaking again.

  “Patrick.” I step away.

  He moves closer, still holding out the pill. “Take your fucking pill.”

  I back up farther, but I hit the wall. I close my mouth and shake my head and I’m back in the old house, the blurry figure coming into my bedroom, the dream of someone pushing pills into my mouth. I think he’s going to do it, he’s going to cram those mud-covered pills in, feed them to me along with the worms and bugs in the jar.

  The front door slams and Patrick freezes, his hand inches from my face. Mia comes in, making for the kettle, stopping when she sees us, me hunched against the wall, Patrick leaning over me.

  She stares from me to Patrick and back again. “What’s going on?”

  Patrick lowers his arm and moves away from me. “Why aren’t you in school?” he says to her.

  “Study period,” she says. Patrick’s got his back to her and he’s still looking at me, but I see Mia blink, see the lie on her face.

  She picks up the jar on the table, dropping it, her nose wrinkling as a centipede wriggles to the top and crawls onto the table. “What’s going on?” she says again.

  “Nothing for you to worry about, Mia,” Patrick says, his voice no longer shaking, looking at the empty bottle, the centipede on the table, the open bin. He turns and smiles at his daughter. Her face is wary. “It’s your mother. Your mother has been lying to us all.”

  “No—Mia, wait. It’s not what you think.”

  I see Mia’s face twist. “God—you two. I don’t want to be involved in your sick games.” She turns and runs, leaves me there with Patrick.

  We watch her go, hear her stomp up the stairs. “I’m sorry,” he says, after a silence that seems to last years. “I… lost my temper. I’m sorry. We’ll make an appointment with the GP, see if we can’t find something that will work for you.” He chucks the jar, complete with mud and bugs, into the bin and walks out after Mia.

  The centipede is still crawling along the table. I pick it up with a shudder and carry it out into the back garden, setting it free in the grass. I hear a noise and look up. Mia is watching me from the window in Joe’s room, a pale ghost half-hidden in the shadow of his curtain. If Mia hadn’t come in, would Patrick have fed me that pill? I think of his face. Yes. He would have. If Mia hadn’t come back, he would have shoved that pill, covered with mud and bugs and worm shit, into my mouth and he might not have stopped at one.

  Why is he so determined to keep me medicated? What is he so scared I’ll see if my head is clear?

  I get up when I hear the front door again, then the sound of the car starting. By the time I go back through the house, Patrick is gone. I glance at the clock—nearly ten thirty. I don’t know what’s going on at work, if they’ve had the disciplinary meeting he told me about, if they’ve reached a resolution. Every time I ask, he changes the subject. Every day, he puts on his suit, gets into the car, and drives off, but I have no idea anymore if he’s going to work.

  I scrub away all signs of mud in the kitchen and empty the bin. I have a gnawing ache in the pit of my stomach. It’s been there ever since we moved here and it’s getting worse. It wakes me at night and it makes me wish, just for a moment, but a dangerous moment, that Mia hadn’t interrupted us and that Patrick had made me take that pill. Is that why I buried them within reach, instead of throwing them away to be collected by the garbage men? Is that what I couldn’t tell Patrick? I wanted the numbness, the disconnection, the fuzzy layer between me and this nagging ache?

  “You okay?” Mia’s watching me and I realize I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen, a garbage bag in one hand, the other clutching my stomach.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Spot of indigestion.”

  There’s so much worry on her face it makes the ache worse. She’s abandoned the makeup; she looks pale and tired. “Mum—stop. Stop pretending everything’s fine.”

  “I’m not pretending—I don’t want you to worry, that’s all.”

  She laughs, a disbelieving sound that’s almost a sob. “You don’t want me to worry? God, Mum, you tried to kill yourself and you don’t want me to worry? Dad’s done everything to try to make you happy, including moving bloody house. And now he’s m
iserable and angry and lashing out.”

  “It’s not—”

  “I shouldn’t have told you about Caroline. It’s made things worse, hasn’t it?”

  “No—please, Mia, you haven’t done anything wrong,” I insist.

  “Maybe you’re the one who should go away. Sort yourself out. If you weren’t here, Dad would be normal again. He’d have time for me and Joe.”

  My God, even my own daughter wants me gone. I’d imagined that if I left, Mia would come with me. What would I do if she insisted on staying with Patrick? I couldn’t. Couldn’t leave her here. “Mia, please…”

  “Listen to yourself. Stop pretending everything’s going to be okay. Please stop.”

  CHAPTER 28

  I sit in a too-hot bath, but I can’t get warm. What am I going to do? Mia’s questions echo in my head. I could have told her about my plans—the passports, our summer abroad—but what if she doesn’t want to come with me? I can’t leave her with Patrick. With Mia, I could fight for custody, but I have a history of anxiety and depression. I’m on record as suicidal. And Joe… I’d lose him. He’s not eighteen for another seven months. I can’t leave yet. I need money; I need a plan. I need Joe to be out of here, safe.

  I don’t hear Patrick come up and when the bathroom door opens, I lurch upright too quickly, sending a tidal wave of water over the side, onto the floor, onto his feet. I blink water from my eyes and grope for a towel, vulnerable in my nakedness even after seventeen years together.

  He holds out a towel, not moving as I wrap it around myself. My hair is dripping, but he’s standing in front of the towel rail so I can’t reach for another without him moving. He watches me drip onto the floor, goose bumps rising on my arms.

  When he moves I wrap a towel around my hair and follow him into the bedroom. He sits on the bed, taking off his shoes, like nothing happened earlier, but I can see dirt from the muddy jar under his fingernails. I sit on the opposite side and reach for a comb.