“No,” I say. “Wait.” I take a deep breath and step away from him. “He’s not dead. You haven’t killed him. I want you to go and find Mia for me. You have to explain that everything Anna told her is a lie, but tell her nothing about this. Tell her you found me and I’m fine and we talked and that’s it. Tell her I’m still in here talking to Patrick but I asked you to leave.”
He’s shaking his head, but I keep talking. “You have to. I can’t stand it if you get into trouble for this, Joe. I need time to make Patrick see…”
Can I? Is he still alive, still conscious enough to listen?
I push Joe toward the front door, not letting him look where Patrick lies. “Go and find Mia.”
But when I open the front door, Anna’s standing there. She stares at Joe like she’s never seen him before and I realize she hasn’t. Before, she saw my son; now she’s seeing hers, the baby she thought was dead, all grown-up. I ache for her. Whatever she’s done to me, I ache for her loss: seventeen years of Joe’s life.
“I was going to run again,” she says. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave you again.” She’s looking at Joe as she says it. “I called you Liam,” she whispers.
“He doesn’t know,” I say to her, reaching for Joe’s hand.
“What?” Joe says, looking from me to her.
“He lied,” I say. “He lied to all of us. He told you your real mother was dead, but it’s not true.”
Joe and Anna stare at each other and I can see the resemblance now so clearly. Where has she been? All these years as Joe was growing up, where has she been?
Finally, Anna speaks. “If I’d known… If I’d known, I’d never have run so far. I wanted to die, but I never even wanted that enough to go through with it.”
She looks down at her arms and I see Joe rubbing his own. This was why Patrick never wanted Joe told. He’s like her, Patrick said. She was always fragile, but it was her family who broke her. Do you want to do that to Joe? She’s dead. He never needs to know.
He said it and, because I wanted Joe to be mine, I went along with it. I believed him; I believed there would never be a birth mother coming looking for her boy because she was dead. I became Joe’s mother. I should have questioned it more, but if I’d known Eve was alive, I would never have lied. I wouldn’t.
Anna shudders. There are tears in her eyes, but it’s not grief on her face, etched into the tense lines and white-lipped mouth. “Is he dead?”
I shake my head. “Anna—Eve, listen.” I grab her arm as she tries to push past me. “Joe’s going to get into trouble with the police unless we help him.”
“We?”
I take a deep breath. “You. His mother. You can help him.”
“You’re lying. More lies because you want to get away from me. You want to stop me killing that bastard with my bare fucking hands.”
“I’m not lying. Look at me—look at what he did to me. We can make this self-defense, but it can’t be Joe with the knife in his hand. He’ll go to prison—do you want that? Your boy, your son.”
She looks down the hallway, then back at me.
“You said it yourself. All your letters, your gifts, they’ve worked,” I say. “Patrick lost control. Things escalated, just like you said. But it’s Joe who’s going to end up punished for it.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. It’s meant to be him who suffers.”
“What do you think he did to me when you gave him that photo? What do you think he did to Mia?” I lean in, looking for a trace of the clear-eyed Anna I thought was my friend. “You know what he did to Ben. You know what he did to you. Do you think he’d hesitate for a second to see Joe punished for this?”
She lets go of my arm and her eyelids flutter. I think she’s going to faint, and this time, it’s my arm holding her up, stopping her from falling. She leans against the wall and sinks down. “What can we do?”
I glance at Joe. “We have to talk to Patrick. If I tell the police what he did to me, to Ben… You can even tell the police the truth about who you are and what he did. Patrick won’t want any of this to come out. We can—we can come up with a story.” The panic is evident in my voice, the short, sharp breaths I take. I’m saying all this for Joe, but I don’t believe my own words. I just have to get Joe away from the house.
“Mum, no,” Joe says, watching me. “Whatever you’re thinking, please don’t. You promised me. You promised me in the hospital you’d never leave.”
“It’s okay, Joe,” Anna says in a flat voice. “We can work this out. Go on now, go wherever Sarah told you to go. Leave it to us.”
I take Joe outside and leave Anna in the house with Patrick.
“I don’t understand,” Joe says, looking back at the house.
“He lied,” I say. “Your father lied. I know I’ve lied too, but I swear to you, I believed your birth mother was dead. I never would have kept it secret if I’d known she was alive.”
“I don’t… I can’t believe she’s my mother.”
“Joe, please.” I take his hand, grip it tight, ignoring the sting of pain from my palm. “Don’t let this break you. I’m your mother. Doesn’t matter whose DNA you carry, I am your mother. I know I haven’t been the best, but please, please, believe I love you. If you let me, I will sort this out. I will find a way to fix it for you. I will be the mother I should always have been. Find Mia and wait for me. I’ll make this right. I promise.”
Joe looks at me. “I got that place in college. They told me at the interview. I thought things were going to go right,” he says. “I’d get away from here, from him. I’d go to college and live with Simon. I’d get to be happy.”
“You still can. Let me fix this.”
He leans down toward me. I see him pause and I know he’s waiting for me to turn away, like I always do. I wait and he kisses my cheek. “Come and find us, Mum,” he says. “Don’t forget your promise.”
Patrick is standing when I go back into the Murder House. Not dead. There’s still time to think of something to save Joe. He’s hunched over, clutching his stomach, face-to-face with Anna.
“You told me he was dead,” she is saying.
Patrick’s eyes flutter and he sways. “You left him. You walked out.”
“But I came back and you told me he died. How could you do that?”
“You were drunk when you came back. Drunk and off your face. You came back after nearly two months and thought you could have him back.”
“He was my son.”
“No. You didn’t deserve him. You didn’t deserve any of it.” His voice gets louder and he breaks off and gasps.
“That wasn’t your fucking decision to make.”
“It wasn’t really me who decided it, though, was it? You never checked. You never asked where he was buried. You accepted what I told you and you ran away again. You were glad to be rid of the responsibility.”
Anna steps away from him. “No, that’s not true. I thought he was dead—you told me he was dead.”
He stares at her, his breath coming fast and shallow. “I saw relief on your face.”
He lurches forward and I see he has the knife in his hand, the one Joe dropped. I reach to pull Anna away.
Patrick turns to me, white-faced and bleeding but still with that knife clenched tight in his hand. “Sarah…” he says. Pleads. His eyes flicker from Anna to me. “Whatever she’s told you, it’s poison. It’s lies.”
Anna hisses and I hold her arm tighter.
“I asked Joe to do it, you know,” he says to me, ignoring Anna. “I told you I’d die if you left me—you’ve always known that.” He breathes in, winces, lets it out with a shudder.
We have to get out of here. We have to stop this.
“I only ever did any of it to make you stay, you know.”
I stare at him. “You didn’t have to do any of it, though. When we first met, when I was looking after Joe, I wanted to stay. You didn’t need to do anything to make me stay.”
He turns away from me. “Yo
u say that, but for how long? How long until you got restless or bored, or saw someone else you wanted? I was just making sure that didn’t happen.”
The romance, the dazzling bright Patrick who’d make me want to dance when there was no music, it faded in those first few years of marriage. I became a housewife, he a career man, and we drifted apart, forgetting to dance. We never traveled; I never went back to college. The map I used to treasure got lost, my paints and canvases grew dusty, and I forgot it all. He was still out there, striving for his ridiculous dream of perfection, this house always in his sights, and I lost track of my own dreams. I became a caricature of the perfect wife Patrick wanted.
I used to wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t waited so long for James bloody Tucker, if I’d gone home instead to wallow in the humiliation of being stood up. I would have stayed at college, gotten my degree, maybe done the traveling I’d always dreamed of.
Or what if James Tucker had actually turned up? We would have had a drink in the pub, maybe gone for a quiet dinner somewhere. Maybe we’d have fallen in love, gotten married.
But…
Perhaps I’d still have a Mia in some form—maybe younger, a different surname. But I’d never have had a Joe.
And Patrick was right. It could have been so perfect.
“I loved you so bloody much, and I hate you for that. I hate you for not being the man you should have been,” I say, and his face twists into anger. Careful. I have to be careful.
“Are you going to tell the police it was you, not Joe? They won’t believe you. You never could tell a convincing lie,” he says. “What’s it going to be, Sarah?”
“They’ll believe it if I tell them as well,” Anna says. “They’ll believe us if you’re dead.”
“But I’m not dead, am I, Eve?”
Anna’s mouth twists into a smile. “Not yet.”
The blood underneath him has spread farther and he’s white-faced. His eyes close, his white-knuckled grip on the knife relaxes, and I think he’s going to fall. For a heart-stopping second, I think this is it, that Joe really has killed him. I could go now, gather up the children and run away, and for a second I’m so tempted. But then I’ll always be waiting for that knock at the door, and so will Joe. If I let him live, we’ll forever expect to see Patrick raging toward us with a bloody knife in his hand however far we run.
And I can’t do it again, can’t live through another seventeen years of waiting for the hammer to fall. I just want him to hit us with the damn thing now so I can stand here, arms spread wide, stand in front of Joe and Mia, taking the hammer blow for them, which is all I’ve ever wanted and so far failed to do.
His eyes snap open, as if he hears my thoughts.
“Sarah…” he whispers.
I can hear cars driving past, which seems so strange, that normal life is carrying on outside this fucking house.
“I want you to stay with me, Sarah.”
I shake my head.
“If you stay with me, I’ll develop amnesia. I won’t remember a thing about who attacked me. It’ll be like Ian Hooper and John again—no one has to know the truth. I’ll tell them I heard someone come in, but I didn’t see who. It won’t matter if they find Joe’s fingerprints. He’s my son: he’s meant to be here. No one will believe her,” he says, glancing at Anna. “And I’ll carry on not remembering. I’ll not remember for as long as you’re home with me. You know they’ll believe me. You know how good I am at keeping a secret. But if you leave again, I’ll tell them it was Joe. I’ll tell them everything and he’ll go to prison.” He pauses to get his breath back. “What do you think prison will do to Joe?”
It would kill him. I’ve already realized that.
“I don’t want to be on my own. Stay at home. Stay at home and save Joe.”
This was what I wanted. A way out for Joe. But if we do this, Joe will be as much a prisoner as I’ve been, bound to Patrick forever by this awful lie.
“Don’t listen to him, Sarah,” Anna says. Does she see indecision in my face?
I stare at Patrick and try to see the man I once loved, who once loved me properly. But I’m not sure he ever existed. Screwed up by his parents, he was frantically manipulating things from the first time we met. But there’s worry on his face as he stands there bleeding. This is his final gamble, his very last chance. He’s betting everything on this spin.
And he’s still holding the knife. There is no happy ending here. There is no indecision.
I step forward to whisper my answer to him.
“Never…”
I move back. “I will never come back to you. And if you tell the police who stabbed you, I’ll tell them why. I’ll tell them you raped me.” I look at Anna. “I’ll tell them about Eve and what you did to her. And I’ll tell them about John Evans, what you made him do.”
I see the moment he breaks and I can’t move fast enough. I’m frozen in place as Patrick disappears, replaced by a monster made of rage. It’s all my nightmares come true—the madman with the knife coming toward me. All traces of weakness are gone as he launches himself at me, slamming me to the floor, knocking the breath from my body, one hand at my throat, the knife coming toward my face. I reach for it, black spots floating in front of my eyes as he squeezes my throat harder. I miss the handle and the blade slices deep into my palm. It’s slippery with Patrick’s blood, my blood, and I can’t get a grip. I feel the sting as it cuts my cheek and he pulls it back to stab again.
Anna leaps at him from behind, pulling on his arms, pulling him away from me and I scramble up, lose my balance, fall to my knees, coughing, drawing in whooping, painful breaths through my swollen throat.
I crawl away from them, but Patrick is on Anna and I hear her scream. I turn and she’s on the floor, hunched over and Patrick is smiling. Oh, fuck, he’s smiling and he’s going to kill her. He’s going to kill Joe’s mother all over again.
“Patrick!” I shout it, scream through the pain, and as he spins to look at me, he slips in his own blood. He throws out his hands to break his fall and drops the knife. Anna lunges to pick it up, staggering upright. She looks at me.
“Run,” she says, panting.
I stare at her. I see in her face she’s going to finish it. Here I am on the cusp again. I could stop her, or try to. She could kill me as I try. Patrick could kill both of us.
But I will not run away, not again. I take a step forward.
“Mum?”
Oh, God, that’s Mia’s voice.
“Mia, no!” I shout, running from the room. “Get out, get out.”
She can’t see this—I can’t let Patrick get near her. She’s in the hall and I grab her arm, pull her outside, down the path.
“Run!” I hear Anna scream again.
We turn to look at the Murder House and, as we do, the door slams shut.
ANNA
It’s quiet in the Murder House. As quiet as it was in the dream I used to have, when the house was just a house. You’re lying four feet away, silent and still, your eyes open and unseeing.
You got me, with the knife, before you dropped it and I killed you. I haven’t looked to see how bad it is, but the pain is bright-white and it feels like the blade is still in my side. I think you did a better job on me than Joe did on you. How long? How long before someone sees Sarah, staggering and bloody, and calls the police, sends them racing here to the Murder House?
There was a moment just now when I thought you’d lost. I had my dead son back and I watched you die, and I thought I’d won and you’d lost. But then I thought of him, this beautiful boy we made, and I looked at myself, at the scars on my wrists that I showed to Sarah, and at the other scars I didn’t show, the red and silvery white dots of needle marks on my arms and legs.
Not all of them are old scars.
Sarah, your pathetic, far-from-perfect wife, is weak. But she does love Joe.
She does, at least, love Joe.
This is the story that will be told:
&n
bsp; Once upon a time, a queen lived with a king in a castle. Only the king wasn’t really a king and the castle wasn’t really a castle. The king was really a dragon wearing a man suit who’d put the queen under a spell so she wouldn’t realize he was a dragon and the castle was actually a dungeon. She was a woman in the dark and she didn’t even know.
A knight came along one day and decided to help save the queen and her children. The knight pushed and prodded and pushed and prodded at the dragon until the dragon forgot himself and threw off his man suit and showed his true self. The spell was broken and the queen got to live happily ever after in the light with her children.
And the brave knight… the knight slew the dragon.
Do you like that story, Patrick? It’s our fairy-tale ending, after all.
How long now? No sirens yet, but it won’t be long. As I wait, the blood pumping out of me slows. The pain is fading and I’m growing numb. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I slump lower and close my eyes.
Do you remember? Do you remember the first time we danced? We were outside, on the beach, looking up at the stars. I was drunk and you whirled me around and around and it felt like we were flying.
I was laughing and giddy and breathless, and we were flying to imaginary music, and I loved you and all I wanted was you, the stars, your arms around me, you and me flying.
It’s time for our dance to end.
SARAH
There’s a big audience the day they bulldoze the house. The actual event is a bit of an anticlimax—I see it on the faces of the people watching. What are they hoping for? That blood will start streaming down the walls, that ghosts will come screaming out of the rubble? I bet all these people were here that night too, watching the bodies being brought out.
Anna was still alive when the police got here, but she’d lost too much blood and died before she even made it into the ambulance. I told the police the same story I told Joe. I told them Anna knew Patrick would come for me after he beat up Ben, so she rushed over to warn me. I told them he was going to kill me and she saved me. She saved us all. Joe doesn’t need to know the bad stuff she did. He only needs to know she died a hero.
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