“Mum? What are you doing?”
Jess’s voice oozed concern and Audrey knew she needed to nip it in the bud before the trip was declared over before it had barely begun. Sucking air through her lips and clamping her jaw shut, she hoisted herself onto her elbows and forced her legs over the side of the bed. Breathing out slowly, she willed the heaviness to drain from her body.
Why had no one warned her that, at some point during her illness, even the simplest of tasks would denude her of all energy?
Pushing herself to her feet and ignoring the pain griping in her shoulder, Audrey walked toward the door, remembering just in time to pull her face into a smile.
“Is everything all right? You took ages to answer.”
Audrey nodded, trying to look reassuring. “I was just enjoying the view. I didn’t realize we’d be quite so high up. How’s your room?”
“It’s absolutely amazing. Thank you so much.”
Jess pulled her into an embrace and breathed a kiss into her hair before walking into Audrey’s room toward the two armchairs by the window overlooking Central Park.
“So what’s on our itinerary this afternoon, Mum? We could try getting up the Empire State Building or Top of the Rock? Though maybe we should do those early one morning when they’re less busy. I know you want to walk the High Line but it’s a bit of a schlep from here and we might be pushed for time. Is there anything you’re really desperate to do? It is our first afternoon, after all.”
Audrey fought the desire to close her eyes, to let her chin rest on her chest, to sink into whatever temporary oblivion her body was craving. Out of the window, cars circled the park and in the shadow of skyscrapers people scurried through the streets like ants in a colony, keeping the city moving. This was a city teeming with life. And that was why she’d wanted to come: to drink its elixir the way others might swallow holy water from Lourdes.
“The park. Let’s go to the park. It seems silly not to when we’re so close and it’s such a glorious afternoon. At least there’ll be shade.”
At least, Audrey thought, there’ll be benches.
As she leaned forward to pull on her shoes, another surge of pain jabbed at her shoulder: fiercer, sharper, more insistent than before. Audrey ground her teeth, pulled her body up straight, and hauled herself to her feet.
Chapter 53
Lily
On the steps of Daniel’s apartment block, Lily’s husband was staring at her, waiting for her to speak. There had been a question but Lily couldn’t remember now what it had been. The only thing she could remember was the sight of Daniel with his arm around the young redhead, who was now standing at his shoulder, frowning. “What . . . I don’t . . . What’s going on, Daniel?” Lily’s voice felt small, as though her lungs had been pierced and all the air she breathed in leaked straight out again.
“Sweetheart, could you give us a few minutes?”
Lily looked up at Daniel, wondering where he meant her to wait, what he expected her to do. But Daniel wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the redhead. He was looking at the redhead and calling her sweetheart and directing her back upstairs to his apartment.
Something crumpled in her chest, her breath trapped beneath the rubble. Her legs, as she turned and ran back down the stone steps, felt weak as though her bones had been removed and only some strange force of momentum was keeping the muscles and the flesh moving.
“Lily! Wait! For God’s sake, just wait!”
Lily kept on running, each step pounding into her ankles through the high heels of her shoes.
“Lily! What are you doing? Where are you going?”
Ahead of her Lily saw the main road and beyond it the green trees of the park. All she had to do was get to the park. If she could just get to the trees she might be able to breathe.
She felt a hand grab the top of her arm, felt Daniel’s fingers sink into her flesh, and imagined the quintet of small red circles they’d leave behind. “For God’s sake, Lil. You can’t just run away—we need to talk. You need to let me explain.”
His voice was raised, exasperated. Lily shook herself free and ran across the road, car horns trailing behind her. She stumbled forward into the park, Daniel close on her heels, calling her name.
Not sweetheart. Not darling. Just Lily.
She kept on running: past joggers, dog walkers, men in suits on mobile phones, women pushing strollers. She kept on running because while she ran, the world was a blur and she wasn’t yet ready to pull it into focus.
Ahead of her in the middle of the park was Belvedere Castle, like something out of a fairy tale. Lily ran toward it, up the steps, onto the terrace overlooking a lake, and found herself trapped with nowhere to run.
“I’m sorry, Lil. I’m sorry.”
She could feel the heat of Daniel’s breath on her cheek but didn’t turn to look at him.
“I didn’t want you to find out like this. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please believe that. It’s the last thing I wanted to do.”
His words were muffled, as though her head were deep underwater and he was speaking to her from high above its surface.
“Shit, this is all such a mess. I was going to tell you, honestly. I was going to tell you soon.”
Lily wanted him to stop talking, wanted to tell him that she couldn’t bear to hear his voice because with every word he eroded any hope that this was all some dreadful misunderstanding.
“Say something, Lil. Please.”
She was aware of her nails digging into her palms: a sensation, not a feeling. There was no pain, just an understanding that it ought to hurt but didn’t, like the tugging of stitches under a local anesthetic. “How long?” She heard his hesitation in the silence, heard the clanking of scales as he weighed the pros and cons of telling her the truth.
“A year. Just over.”
Lily heard herself gasp, felt the shock rattle between her ribs. But still she felt nothing: just fractals of ice creeping up from her stomach and crystalizing around her heart. “But I asked you. I asked you explicitly on the phone three weeks ago. And you categorically denied it. You told me I was being silly.”
“I’m sorry. You caught me off guard. And I couldn’t tell you on the phone. But I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”
“You don’t want to lie to me? What do you think you’ve been doing for the past year? Our whole family—our whole life—is a lie.”
Her voice was thin and shrill, a voice she didn’t recognize.
Scenes from their marriage began to tug at her memory. The restaurant receipts she had thought unlikely venues for client dinners. The weekends he’d ventured to the office when he could have worked from home. The last-minute trips to film sets that had never been necessary before. All those nights—dozens of them—when he’d been working late and then showered as soon as he’d returned, saying he needed to wash the day off his skin. He had covered the tracks of his infidelity with little white lies he had known she was too busy to question, and she had walked behind him, blindly smothering the evidence.
“That’s not true, Lil. Of course it isn’t. I didn’t plan for this to happen, it just did. Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
His voice was imploring, as though he had the right to ask anything of her.
“You don’t want this to be hard? You think this should be easy? You detonate our lives and you think we’re all going to walk away unscathed? That’s not how this works, Daniel.” She had wanted her voice to remain calm and controlled but anger rumbled beneath it like distant thunder. “Who is she?”
Daniel groaned and a ripple of impatience skimmed across the surface of Lily’s fury.
“Who is she, Daniel? I want to know.” She sounded convincing, no trace of the fear of his answer.
“She’s a lawyer, from a different firm. We met at a conference.”
So factual, so unsentimental. Lily almost felt like punching him.
“What’s she doing here? Is that why you haven’t
come home at all? Has she been coming here instead? For God’s sake, Daniel, you haven’t seen our daughter except on Skype in over four months and for what? So you can have your mistress come and visit you instead?”
An almost imperceptible twitch flickered at the corner of Daniel’s left eye. Lily had seen it countless times over the year: an unmistakable tell. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
He raised his head, catching her gaze before evading it, like a moth fluttering too close to a flame. “She lives here. Amy. She lives in New York. She’s American.”
The words took a few seconds to attach themselves to meaning. “You moved here for her? I don’t believe I’m hearing this. I can’t believe you could be so duplicitous, so devious. You moved your career—your life—here for her?” A sharp acidity bubbled in the back of Lily’s throat. So many lies, so much deceit. And then she remembered.
Sweetheart, could you give us a few minutes? The way he’d said it, the way he’d directed her back upstairs.
“You’re living with her, aren’t you? You’re actually bloody living together. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Daniel dropped his eyes to the ground and Lily heard the deafening slam of one door closing and the palpable silence where another failed to open.
I’ve had it with the pretense and the lies and the sham of it all.
Phoebe’s words echoed in Lily’s ears. “Phoebe doesn’t know, does she? There’s no way she could have found out?”
Daniel looked up and frowned. “Of course not. How could she? I’ve been really careful.”
He spoke with such earnest reassurance, as though Lily should find comfort in his vigilance.
“But Phoebe gets it, Lil. Before I left, we talked . . . She could tell things weren’t right.”
He said it as though it were a fact of which they should both be proud: that their seventeen-year-old daughter had seen the writing of their marriage on the wall long before Lily had.
She thought about her conversation with Phoebe earlier, about her fantasy that the three of them might spend the summer together in New York. Humiliation scorched her cheeks at the memory of such a recent delusion.
Lily glanced at Daniel and felt the distance open up between them. She had an urge to walk away, to get a cab to the airport and fly back to London on the next available plane, to hold Phoebe in her arms and begin to rebuild their fragile relationship. But first she needed to hear the rest of Daniel’s story, like a self-harmer slicing a razor blade across raw flesh.
“So what was your plan? When were you going to tell me? Or were you just going to stay here, living your double life indefinitely, hoping I might throw in the towel first?”
They looked at one another directly for the first time and she saw it immediately: not just the sadness but the fear. The tangible fear of a secret yet to be confessed.
“What is it, Daniel? Just tell me. Whatever else there is, just bloody tell me.”
There was a heartbeat of silence in which a thousand permutations spun through Lily’s head. But when Daniel finally spoke—when he finally gave her the missing piece of the puzzle—it was too awful for her even to have imagined it.
“Soon. I was going to tell you soon. I’m . . . We’re . . . Amy’s three months pregnant.”
And with those four short words, Lily heard the decisive sound of her marriage ending.
She stared at the whiteness of her knuckles gripping the castle’s stone wall. She couldn’t look at Daniel, couldn’t bear to see whatever counterfeit expression he’d painted on his face.
He’d been adamant, immovable. She could hear him now, during those endless, cyclical arguments they’d had in the months after her third and final miscarriage.
I don’t want another baby, Lil. To be honest, I never understood this automatic need to have more than one child.
I like our family the way it is.
We tried—three times we tried—because that was what you wanted to do. And it didn’t work out.
Please let’s just be happy with what we have.
Three months pregnant. By the New Year, Daniel would be a father again.
“Lil, I don’t want this to be any harder on you and Phoebe than it has to be. You can have whatever you want: the house, money, whatever. I just don’t want things to get ugly between us. Do you think we can do that?”
His voice was calm, soothing, the voice someone might use to bring a child out of a tantrum. Except Lily wasn’t having a tantrum. Lily was watching her life implode.
“Lil, please. I know this is hard, and I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted to hurt you. But I honestly think it’ll be easier on both of us—and Phoebe—if we’re able to keep things civilized. I’ll take all the blame. You can petition me on the grounds of adultery. It only needs to be as difficult as we make it.”
He had it all worked out: a petition for adultery, the quickest route to a clean divorce, leaving him free to marry the redhead before the ink had dried on their divorce decree.
“Part of me will always love you, Lil. Always. But surely you must know things haven’t been great between us these past few years. I don’t know . . . After all those miscarriages . . . I never felt like we’d just lost a baby. I always felt we’d lost a little piece of our marriage too.”
The back of Lily’s throat burned. She thought about her lost babies, those ghostly figures of children who would never take up their rightful place in the family yet never altogether disappear. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? If you wanted to be with her so much, why didn’t you just leave me?”
Daniel hesitated. “I don’t know. I wasn’t sure, I suppose.”
“You weren’t sure about what?”
“I wasn’t sure about anything. For God’s sake, it’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly. I didn’t know until I got here—until Amy and I were living together—that things were going to work out between us.”
It took a moment for Lily to understand what he meant. “You were hedging your bets? You came out here to test the water? And what were you going to do if it didn’t work out? Come back to me? Pretend nothing had ever happened? Wait until someone else came along? I can’t believe your audacity, Daniel. I can’t believe you could be so selfish, so calculating.”
Lily watched Daniel’s eyes flick up to the left, as they always did when he was in the wrong, the way his lips rolled inward when he was lost for words, the way his fingers rubbed against one another when he was agitated. And in that moment she hated him. She hated him for calling time on their marriage without so much as a warning. Hated him for not having had the courage to leave her until he’d already replaced her. Hated him for the biological injustice that he could start a whole new family. More than anything she hated him for the inequity of it all.
Lily released her hands from their grip on the stone wall, took a step backward, and began to walk away. Her legs felt as though they were no longer attached to her body, seemed to be moving independently of the rest of her. Her head felt light, as though it had been emptied of everything she thought she knew about her life. Just a single thought went around in her mind: that she needed to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, and accept the fact that she didn’t know where she was heading or where she might end up.
“Lil? Where are you going? You can’t just leave. We need to talk.”
Lily whipped her head around and looked directly into Daniel’s eyes. “I can’t just leave? You’re the one doing the leaving, Daniel. You’re the one who’s shacked up in New York with a mistress half your age. You’re the one who’s about to become a father again at nearly fifty, with no thought at all for the daughter you’ve abandoned in London. You’re pathetic, do you know that? You’re pathetic and cowardly and a total bloody cliché. So do not tell me I can’t leave. I didn’t do this. You did it. And now you don’t get to decide what happens next.”
Chapter 54
Audrey
Sitting on a bench in Centr
al Park, overlooking the boating lake, Audrey hoped that if she surrendered to the pain in her chest it might grant her a brief respite.
Cancer was like that, she’d discovered. It turned you into someone in a permanent state of negotiation, bargaining with the intruder inside your body. Audrey would find herself offering deals to it, anticipating their rejection, proposing new terms. But cancer was an unreliable business partner, constantly making ever greater demands for less favorable returns.
Right now, all Audrey wanted was to enjoy her first afternoon in New York: to walk around a park she had seen in so many photographs and films that visiting it now gave her an uncanny sense of déjà vu.
Next to her, Jess flicked through a guidebook with unintentional impatience, wanting to see things, do things, make the most of their time. Audrey would have been like that once too. She would have wanted to cram in as much sightseeing as possible, to tick off all the major attractions and fulfill a set of objectives. Now all she wanted was to sit quietly and soak up the atmosphere.
Dotted across the lake, boats were being rowed by young couples, enthusiastic dads, groups of laughing girls. As Audrey looked out across the water, wondering if she dared risk embarking on the next stage of their walk, someone caught her eye hurrying along the path toward them. “Lily? Lily! We’re over here.”
As Lily raised her head and turned toward them, Audrey saw immediately the creased forehead, the red eyes, the pinched eyebrows. As Lily sat down on the bench next to her, Audrey could see she was trembling. “What is it? Whatever’s the matter?”
Audrey listened in silence as Lily gabbled a story about Daniel and a redhead, about a pregnancy and a divorce, all the time wondering how it was possible that she could think herself so close to her daughter yet know so little about her life. “Why didn’t you tell me there were problems between you and Daniel?”
There was a microscopic quiver in Lily’s chin that Audrey last remembered seeing decades before in the wake of their double loss, accompanied by the muffled echo of restrained grief.
If Only I Could Tell You Page 23