The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  There’s something I want to do, before I tell you what happened, my last confession—the darkest too. Bear with me, Frank, please. Just a few minutes longer, then I will tell you, I promise. Get a pen and find a bit of space (there’s some in the back here). I do this every day, Frank, with the hour before supper. Did you ever notice? I usually find dusk is best for this, but just do it now, whatever time it is.

  When I’m settled, I’ll think about Eleanor. Nothing new there, but in these instances, I revisit her in the briefest snapshots I can process. I remember how many moments I told her I loved her, every time from the moment she was born. I tally them on paper. Often, I will be so absorbed in making sure that I have caught every instance that the bundles of five go right out the window, and when I open my eyes, I am met by a blur of spindly marks too tight to count. I am keeping these notes in the bottom drawer of the dresser in Eleanor’s room. They are still there, if you want to look. You’ll see that some days I do better than others.

  I wonder what would happen if I did the same for you? After forty years together, would there be more? Then again, we were never very effusive, not verbally. That was never what love was for us. We left the giant proclamations to others. What we have had has been so much quieter, so much softer. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  Love for a child is different—isn’t it? It’s a different love, unquantifiable. It is a taboo to compare the two. Who would you save in a burning building, if you could only take one? The answer’s a given, surely, but I would worry about the sort of spouse who would willingly abandon their other half in an inferno. If I imagine you burning, top to toe in flames, I see myself spontaneously combust too.

  There are probably only one or two tallies from the last few years that could be attributed to Eleanor. I loved her all the same. I loved her more, if that’s possible. More fiercely, more intensely. I told her to her face, knowing she wouldn’t say the same back. Because that is what love is, isn’t it? Giving without receiving. Of course, there is always the hope of receiving. Tiny, precious, fragile. You can be batted away a thousand times and still it will be there, too small to pick up and dispose of.

  I want you to do your tallies now too, Frank, for Eleanor. For me too. I don’t want what I did to change your opinion of me, but it will. I know that . . .

  In the margins, Frank can see that Maggie has done a few tallies here as well. He was never blind enough to think that the silence was easy on her, but he didn’t know it had driven her to distraction either.

  He is too on edge to sit there and count. Besides, Maggie said it. It’s unquantifiable. He could have told Eleanor and Maggie that he loved them both a million times and still it would have been an insufficient reproduction of how he felt. Instead, he shuffles to Eleanor’s dresser. Among the old hairbrushes, an assortment of plastic jewelry, and a stuffed owl that went out of favor, there is a fat stack of curled Post-it notes. A rainbow of her love for Eleanor.

  And if Maggie had tried to count for him, how would she have done? Frank can think of maybe one or two times Maggie has told him that she loves him in recent months, always in desperation, as if the appearance of those words in the chokehold of silence would be enough to crack a little air back into the house. Frank could never reciprocate. Not verbally, at least. Instead, Frank tried to show Maggie just how much he loved her, whether that meant massaging that same spot under her left shoulder blade that always seized up when she was lying in bed with her back to him, or running his fingers down the inside of her forearm in the way that always soothed her. All that and still he comes back to the same question he always does with Maggie, with Eleanor: Could he have done more?

  Frank shuts the drawer and returns to his spot by the radiator. The darkest too. Part of him is too scared to read the rest. That would be him all over, spent before the finishing line. His mind flashes back to how he fell, just before the last hurdle, Maggie jabbing his hand and the medical team half hauling him out. Classic Frank, as Maggie would say. Only he does not want this to be his defining feature—the falling-short, the just-missing-out, one-second-too-late Frank. No, he does not.

  He steels himself and turns the last page.

  One day to go

  I saw her, Frank.

  I had been in the house barely ten minutes when the doorbell went. The boiler was chuntering away with that strange, low moaning—you know the sound, the one that always precedes an expensive call-out. I had rushed off to examine it and hadn’t even had a chance to get my coat off. I assumed it was you, that you had left your keys somewhere in the lab again.

  “Eleanor! What are you doing here?”

  She had her duffel bag slung over one shoulder, weighed down by it so that her upper body slanted like an overburdened coat hanger.

  “Yeah . . . er . . . I was in the area. I thought I’d pop by.”

  She reached up and rubbed her fists into her eye sockets. I could see the imprints of her knuckles on her skin. She looked tired, very tired, but there was some low-level buzz about her; her hands shook; and she didn’t seem to want to stay still. I wondered how long she had been waiting for one of us to come home.

  “What is it, Eleanor?”

  She cast a look over her left shoulder. Then her right. Back again over her left.

  “I’m trying to get sorted out.” There it was again—the shoulder-checking. What was she looking for? “Look, Mum, it’s a long story, but I need a bit of help.”

  “What sort of help?” I asked, folding my arms. A “power stance” I had read about somewhere. It didn’t feel too empowering to me, weak in the face of my only child. All I wanted to do was reach out and pull her into my arms. I shoved my hands in my pockets to suppress the urge.

  “It cost to get down here. And there’s a few people I need to pay back—Mike, Dan . . .”

  She reeled off a list of names I had never heard before. All the time, the twitching, the shoulders. I prayed you would turn up and help me de-escalate the situation. How many bombs could detonate on the doorstep before the whole house collapsed?

  “We give you money, Eleanor. Where’s that going?”

  I thought of the Friday evenings I would spend transferring her £200, £300, whatever I could spare after payday.

  “Yeah, it went, OK? I know I need to get sorted. I’ll do it, promise. Just, please, Mum, please?”

  Eleanor’s eyes bore straight into mine. I felt a sharp pain, just below my belly button. The endless pull toward her.

  “I can’t, Ellie.” I could feel myself welling up and willed myself to hold it together. “Your father and I would do anything for you. You know we would do anything for you, right?”

  She kicked her trainers against the door frame absentmindedly.

  “Darling, please,” I whispered. “We can’t give you any money. But we can keep you safe.”

  Her eyes were red, bloodshot, slightly rheumy.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “What? You said you were visiting? Wait for your father to get home at least. He’ll want to see you!”

  She had already turned around, so I couldn’t see if she was angry or just jittery, anxious to keep moving.

  “Eleanor, wait!” I shouted, raising my voice as loud as I dared without rousing the neighborhood curtain-twitchers. I put one of your shoes in the door to stop it slamming shut. “I’m sorry. I love you!” I shouted, halfway out into the driveway. “It is only because I love you!”

  I ran back to the house and snatched up my keys, kicked the makeshift doorstop away so the door slammed. I was about to go after her, but she was already out of sight. She always was quicker than me. She was gone.

  Isn’t it strange how your body copes with trauma? In the face of the greatest pain you can imagine, you just keep on, one foot in front of the other. You can be shell-shocked, a husk of your usual self, and still your body keeps marching to its own inner clock. It was just like that then, Frank, although my mind was in pieces. I returned to autopilot the moment I got
in. I took off my coat, turned on the oven, and stuck in the first thing I could find. Chicken pie. A nice one too. I went to pour a drink and saw the card for her twenty-fifth birthday tucked between the wine rack and the wall, months overdue. We hadn’t the address to send it to.

  When I heard the door go, I went to greet you. Just like any other night, I told myself. Just like any other night. All through supper, the confession hovered on my lips. I got halfway through the introduction to my statement ten, twenty times, but just as I came to it—“I saw Eleanor, she was here, I turned her away”—I swallowed the words down again and felt them stinging the back of my throat like a scoop of salt on an open wound. The words have lodged there ever since, Frank.

  After we had eaten and you had retreated to the sitting room, I popped three of my sleeping tablets and swallowed them down with a draught of stale water from a cup near the sink. I lay beside you on the sofa, settling my head on your stomach and into oblivion. I was just going under when it struck me that my performance must have passed muster. You hadn’t mentioned Eleanor once. I opened my eyes a sliver, the effort nearly too much to bear, just so I could blink you a good night.

  Well, Frank, I’m afraid you know the rest. When the police came and asked their questions—Have you seen her recently? When was the last time?—I didn’t say anything. Not that I could then, not without being carted off under suspicion, unveiled as the most unnatural criminal that I am, the mother who couldn’t mother.

  But afterward? Even if I didn’t offer my confession at the police station, hunched over the reception desk, giving myself up, my words rasping against the bulletproof glass, I could have told you. After all, I had been following through with what we had agreed, in the dark, under the duvet, in the weeks before. We had always been there first to cushion the blow, and nothing had changed. We had to get her to the point where she would start to help herself. We had to let her hit rock bottom.

  Do you know what kills me most, Frank? That she must have thought she was alone. That she had no one. And that could not have been further from the truth. Not then, not ever. What if I had said it? You’re not alone. Better than I’ll fix it. Better even than I love you. Just those three words. Would they have changed anything?

  So, there you have it: I saw her, Frank. I was the last person to see Eleanor before it happened.

  And worse than that? I turned her away . . .

  Chapter 8

  I saw her. Frank has read those three little words so many times that he cannot distinguish between them anymore. Somewhere between the looping troughs of the “w” and the tall line of the “h,” everything he had thought to be true has fallen apart. There is no axis in his world, no firm ground on which to stand.

  Oh God.

  He runs over the last interaction, scrawled in handwriting that grows increasingly cramped. He can see it all—Maggie’s pleading, Eleanor’s restlessness, Maggie hunched over the kitchen table reliving it all in her mind but unable to spit out the words, the gag of a guilty conscience.

  Does he blame her? Only as much as he blames himself.

  Frank starts the last page all over again, as if by rereading it he can make up for the fact that he wasn’t there. Not when Maggie needed him. Nor when Eleanor did either, for that matter. That was his role in the family—the diffuser, the great diplomat in chief. And where was he that night when they needed him the most? He will never forgive himself.

  Somewhere, down below, there is a keening sound. It must have been going on for a few minutes now, high-pitched and relentless. Maggie, he thinks, palms collapsing into her thighs, bent double; Eleanor running off into the distance. It’s his mind, there with her again, hearing things too. Only the noise won’t stop, not after another minute, not after another two. There is a second’s respite of silence, but it barely lasts a heartbeat before the noise starts up again.

  This must be it—madness setting in. Frank has never felt so close to Maggie, or quite so far away. He can swear it is coming from downstairs and wishes it would just stop again, for a second, while he processes and resets and gets back to his rereading.

  It takes another five minutes for Frank to be sufficiently irritated into investigation. He has to take the stairs slowly. He hasn’t felt steady on his feet for months now, and without Maggie he is rudderless too. Frank reaches the hallway and finds that the noise is louder here and impossible to avoid. He heads toward its source, the kitchen, with a horrible sense of déjà vu.

  When he walks in, he sees the light first. Shit. His phone. He’d forgotten about it. But clearly Edie hasn’t.

  Unknown number. Since his first mobile was thrust upon him (by Maggie, obviously), Frank has gone out of his way to avoid calls, even when the caller is most definitely known. That was his awkwardness. But this? He cannot afford to resort to his avoidance tactics again. He picks up.

  “Hello?” The voice on the other end is almost shouting over the traffic roaring in the background.

  “He-hello?”

  “Frank—is that you?”

  Ah—he knows that voice.

  “Daisy? Yes, it’s me.”

  For a second, Daisy doesn’t respond. Frank’s stomach plummets. This can’t be good news.

  “Frank, you need to get down to the hospital now.”

  “But . . . but they said this afternoon. It’s not, what, lunchtime?”

  Frank squints out of the window and directly into the sunshine. White spots dance before his eyes, and he has to steady himself against the countertop.

  “I know, I know, Frank. And look, I shouldn’t be telling you this, I shouldn’t be phoning you, not now I’m off my shift, but something ain’t right.”

  “What do you mean?” Frank leans more heavily into the heel of his palm. He is pressing down so firmly that a hot fizz begins to run up his arm, prickling all the way up to his neck.

  “I don’t know quite . . . She’s not where they want her to be. I left something at work and I had to go in to collect it, so I thought I’d just pop in to see her. I was lucky they let me. Anyway, I told her you’ve been there. That you hadn’t left her side. But there’s something not quite right, Frank. It’s like she’s giving up . . . I don’t know how long she—”

  The fizz has reached Frank’s head. He slumps against the cupboard, and the jammy door by the cereals slams with a bang. She can’t be, can she?

  “Frank? Frank—are you still there? Look, maybe I shouldn’t have called. I just thought you should know—”

  “No. No. I need to get to her . . . You were right . . . Daisy?”

  “Yes, Frank?”

  “Thank you, thank you so much.”

  Frank hangs up. He needs to see Maggie, and he needs to see her now. Giving up? That’s not the Maggie he knows. But after having read every word of that final confession once, twice, to the point that the phrases are imprinted on his mind like the layout of a childhood home, so much of what he had thought to be true about Maggie has been thrown on its head.

  There is no more time for this. Frank props himself back up to standing and walks over to the sink. He shoves his head as far under the cold tap as it will go, the water slightly musty from stale days in the tank, and then shakes himself out like a shaggy sheepdog, albeit one with ringing ears and a sharp pain behind the eyes.

  Now he feels more like himself. He does that ineffectual patting routine that he always does before he goes out—wallet, house keys. Relieved to find he has both, he stuffs his feet into two shoes by the door and wipes the excess water off his hands and face with the anorak that hangs limply from the bannister. He grabs the car key fob from the hook in the porch and runs out to the driveway, slamming the door behind him.

  He twists the key in the ignition. Nothing. He tries again. Nothing. The battery’s dead. Frank can’t believe it. Sod’s law. How long will it take to walk? An hour? More? That is time he doesn’t have. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his bike. Six months it has been rusting outside. No cover, no lock. No wonder
no one cared to steal it, with a stone in its back wheel that has left him with a slow puncture.

  Needs must. He heads for this next best thing, flinging his right leg over the seat. His torso feels very precarious as it is thrust over the road handlebars, all the more so for having the planner tucked under his right arm. Frank kicks his right foot out a few times on the gravel to get himself started and suddenly wishes he had brought his helmet. As he judders this way and that across the uneven stones, he tries to keep calm and think of Maggie.

  At the first traffic lights, he flies straight through a red. Turns out the brake cable needs some work too. The number 4 bus comes to a slamming halt just inches from the back wheel, and Frank is so shaken that he cannot even raise a hand in apology or thanks or a shamefaced mix of the two.

  He doesn’t remember the lactic acid building up in his thighs so fast. It is far too hot for this, and the exertion is so fierce that his feet seem to have lost all feeling. Every gulp of air he swallows seems woefully insufficient, and his shirt is clinging to his skin with every increasingly sweaty turn of the pedal. “Maggie. Maggie. Maggie,” he chants beneath his breath. He will not lose her too.

  In a stroke of mad athleticism or sheer desperation (likely both), Frank has managed to make it three-quarters of the way to the hospital. Only there is one hell of a hill standing between him and his goal. To the frustration of the boxy Volvo behind him, he throws himself off his bike and almost into the main flow of traffic.

  Frank manages to heave the bike onto the curb and, without so much as a second’s thought, drops it into the hedgerow that lines the pavement.

  “Hey, mister, that going spare?” a weeny little smidgen of a man pipes up, immediately abandoning his girlfriend’s hand in favor of the broken treasure before him.

  “All yours!” Frank roars above the traffic.

  He takes a look at his footwear and only now notices that he has two different shoes: on his left, his gardening slip-on, on the right, a deck shoe that has never once so much as set foot on a floating vessel. Neither screams running gear. Frank tries to think of the last time he ran properly—school cross-country? He seems to remember going off the route in search of an iced bun instead.