The Second Wife

by Rebecca Fleet

  I can’t stop thinking about that little scene in the hospital earlier with Jade, when I said all that stuff about the fire and how it should have bonded us, brought us together. I’m not even sure why it came out, but I do know that in that moment I really wanted her to agree, maybe to squeeze my hand or even to throw her arms around my neck, saying that she understood what I meant and that things would be different between us from now on. That we’d be closer, tighter. That she valued me, loved me, never wanted to let me go. Stupid. After all, it’s not like I feel that way about her. But if she’d said it, and if I’d really believed it, it would have made things so much easier. I wouldn’t need to do what I have to do now. I could kick back, relax, and enjoy my life. I’ve waited years to be where I want to be: free, stable, and secure, with a man who loves me and who’ll never leave me. I’m so nearly there, but not quite. The frustration is tangible, prickling on my skin.

  For the past few days, I haven’t felt like myself, whoever that is. The fire dulled my senses a little, maybe. It was easier not to think too much about the future—or the past, come to that—and to just exist. It’s not sustainable, though, and now that I’m here in the taxi, cold air rushing in through the window and blowing through my hair, it feels like I’m slowly returning to my own body. My thoughts are sharper, clearer. I can’t block out the memories that are flooding me, kick-started perhaps by what Alex told me. I still can’t get my head around him and Kas together; talking to each other, looking into each other’s eyes. I feel about it the way you’d feel about walking into a room and finding someone there who you’d only ever seen in a dream. There’s something nightmarish about it—the slip between reality and fantasy, between the present and the past.

  I still find Kas in my head sometimes, and I haven’t tried too hard to get him out, because he lives there. He isn’t going away. There are time-slips even now when I wake up half dreaming and humming with desire, half of me completely lost in those early days when I first knew him. That very first time I saw him striding down the street from the club. I’d never been in love before, and it hit me so hard I could barely breathe. I’ve never forgotten how it felt—falling into his world, falling into him. The way the slightest look or touch could electrify me, the kick I got from those brief moments of connection that was better than any drug I’d ever taken. An obsession, an addiction. Nothing else mattered. I knew from the start that he could pull me under and I wanted to go with him.

  I haven’t forgotten the fear that went along with that desire either. I was confused and overwhelmed and terrified—yes, of him sometimes, as well as of the situation I was in. But somehow, it wasn’t enough to make me get out. I wondered for a long time if there was something wrong with me. It isn’t natural not to care whether people live or die. Life is precious, and everyone has the right to exist. I can believe that, on a conceptual level, but I always struggled to feel it. George Hart, Felix Santos. They were nothing to me, not part of my life. Not everyone could say the same, of course. I remember seeing Felix’s wife in the courtroom, her face pale and haggard, her eyes black holes. It triggered something in me, the sight of her; the start of remorse, a guilt so deep and fathomless that I couldn’t let myself fall into it. I had to drag myself out in order to survive. And once you’ve managed to do that, there isn’t really any going back.

  It was easier with Melanie. The adrenaline, and the alcohol, and the conviction that she was wrong for Kas and that she was the only thing standing in our way. Trailing her through the streets and stepping out onto that platform, watching the way her forehead creased as she took me in, the little lines at the corners of her eyes. I remember her lipstick had smudged slightly, making a little dark red stain at the edge of her mouth. I was nineteen and I felt invincible, and in the end it just happened. It only took a second, that push. Everyone’s done things they don’t plan You don’t think it through, you just do it, and then suddenly you’ve killed someone. You’re a murderer.

  I was terrified in those first few minutes after it happened, so terrified that I lost sight of everything. It was like being shut in a long dark tunnel, zooming down toward some point I couldn’t see, like I was suffocating and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. When you feel like that, you do and say things that you’re likely to regret, and I made a big mistake. I opened my mouth and those weak little words spilled out, and my sister gathered them up eagerly and deposited them at the feet of the police like they were a pile of the gold medals she used to win at sports day. It’s hard to imagine, but I’m not sure I ever really understood who she was. For years she’d made out that she only cared about other people and that she martyred herself for them—for me, in particular. But when it came down to it, there were other things she cared about more. She cared more about some abstract idea of “justice,” more about principles than people. It makes no sense to me. If you love someone, surely you’d do anything for them. Lie for them, kill for them, step outside your whole belief system for them. That’s the way it was for me, and the way it’s always been.

  I stayed true to that, with Kas. I showed him my loyalty. I stuck to my guns and I lied my arse off for him, all through the trial, even though I soon knew that it wouldn’t work and there was no way we were going to get off. Especially then. There was nothing to lose, and everything to prove. And in the end I used up so much emotion on him—missing him, wanting him, convincing myself that one day we’d be together—that there was nothing left over. I was empty inside, scraped out. When I woke up doubled over in pain and knowing that I’d lost the baby, less than a week before the trial started, I felt nothing. When I walked into the courtroom and saw Rachel standing there in the witness box, her shiny blond hair tied up all nicely and her pretty soft lips saying her traitorous words, I felt nothing. When the judge finally read the sentence and I heard that I’d been given fifteen years and that I was going to spend my twenties inside the locked walls of a prison, I felt nothing. I felt nothing. I felt nothing.

  * * *

  • • •

  I DON’T DWELL on those years. I’d thought I’d be surrounded by psychos and have to sleep with one eye open, but in reality, I pretty much got left alone. If you’ve killed someone, or even been an accessory to murder, as I was convicted of, then you get a certain respect. It’s a cliché but the boredom was the worst part, the endless days spent sitting around in the cell or trying to make conversation with twitching weirdos in the communal hours. I thought about Kas all the time. Most of all, those few minutes in the basement. In a way I was glad that we’d only had sex that one time. It made it special. Unique. But in another way it felt as if I’d been staggering around in the desert for days with nothing to drink, and then someone had offered me a bottle of ice-cold water and snatched it away after the first sip.

  I knew he would probably never get out. Two life sentences, and I’d heard through the grapevine that he was still regularly causing trouble, making it even less likely that he’d get an early release. There was a woman inside with me whose husband had a brother in Belmarsh he used to visit, and when I found out I always asked her to ask about Kas. I used to seize on these little tidbits hungrily: that he’d started a fight in the dining hall and been on twenty-four-hour confinement for days, that he spent the exercise hour in a corner of the room by himself lifting weights and attacking punchbags with the kind of quiet, furious concentration that quickly got him a nasty reputation. Not the kind of thing most women would want to hear about their lover, but they made me feel better. I suppose they were just proof he was alive.

  But after a while the tidbits got less frequent, and as the years went on I felt things shifting. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten him—more that as my release date got closer and I had the exit gate in my sights, all I could think about was starting a new life. It came more and more sharply into focus, blurring everything else out. And like I said, I knew there was no chance that he would be there with me. So I put him in a different place in my
head. Somewhere that wouldn’t stop me from starting again.

  People talk about change all the time, as if it were easy. Changing their minds, changing their image, changing their opinions. Anyone can shift the dial a bit this way or that, but not many people can do what I’ve done. Real change is transformation. Reinvention. I had to shed my skin like a snake. And they were exhilarating, those first few months in the outside world. I dyed my hair, got a new look, changed my name. There was no particular rationale behind choosing Natalie. I just thought it sounded sort of perky and positive, like I was someone whose life had never felt a breath of trouble. I started working in a clothes store, made enough to rent a room in a corner of south London.

  I built up my life. I had a place to live, a semi-regular job, and a few friends, but no one got past my force field. I invented a past, but if they ever asked about anything that touched too close to the bone, I put up a wall. A couple of my friends at the clothes store used to call me the Ice Queen—it was affectionate, but like most jokes it had a hard edge of truth. Occasionally I’d tell them about a man I’d met on the weekend, the way I’d invited him back to my place, used him for sex and then kicked him out before dawn. That was one area where I didn’t need to invent anything. It was as easy as it had always been to find a man to spend a few hours with. I always insisted on having all the lights off, because it was only then, in the pitch black, that I let myself slide back into the person I had been before. They would stumble out bewildered into the street afterward, those men, not knowing what had hit them. Afterward they would text and call and sometimes send flowers, but I never replied.

  My friends used to love those stories. They hung on every word, their eyes wide and round, marveling at this capacity for detachment. It was something they couldn’t imagine, these women whose instinct when they found a decent-looking man who didn’t seem to be a psychopath was to dig their claws in and not let go. I wish I could be like you, Natalie, they used to sigh. I wish I could feel like I didn’t need a man. Every time, I would smile enigmatically and say something flippant. They didn’t know that I’d used up all my needing early on. I’d poured it all into Kas and there wasn’t a drop left over. At least, that’s what I thought. And then I met Alex.

  I’d gone to Brighton for the weekend on impulse, because I wanted to and because I could. I was waiting for my drink at the bar, and then he was there as if he’d popped out of a dream, intercepting the barman’s hand to take the drink and swiftly giving it to me himself. I’ll buy you the next one. What’s your name? For a moment, I almost said Sadie, and that was strange because I hadn’t thought of myself as that for a long time. When I analyzed it afterward, I realized that it was because when I first saw him I got it—that animal kick of lust that I hadn’t felt since Kas.

  I wanted him at once, not just because he was good-looking, although he was, with dark hair and eyes and the kind of body you don’t get by accident. It was more the way he held himself, the self-assurance that stopped him from stuttering and blushing at me the way so many other men did. It was instant and powerful, this leap of interest. But a few seconds later I saw the wedding ring. I’d learned that lesson. A wife was an obstacle I didn’t want to fight to get past. If he was happy with her, he’d never really give himself to you. If he wasn’t, he’d still feel tied to her somehow, the way Kas had. Either way, a wife made it too easy for a man to keep you at arm’s length. Never again. So I told him that I wasn’t interested, and that’s when he grabbed my arm and made me look at him. You don’t understand . . . my wife died years ago.

  It was inappropriate but I couldn’t help smiling, because it felt like fate, it was perfect. It couldn’t have been better. It would be the way it would have been with Kas, if everything else hadn’t got in the way. A dead wife was no threat. Let him get nostalgic sometimes and weep over her memory if he wanted. She wasn’t there, and she’d never take him away. This was it. I could see from the start how enraptured he was, and that he wouldn’t look elsewhere. No one was going to take my place. And I gave myself up to it, in a way that I didn’t think I still could. Sometimes lightning strikes twice.

  It was all perfect, except for one thing. The child.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WASN’T TOO BAD at first. Right from the start I could see the role that Alex wanted me to play: a bit of cheerleading here, a bit of help with the homework there, a bit of lounging around watching movies at weekends and “bonding” over packets of snacks. I didn’t have to do a lot of disciplining; he did that. A mother wasn’t someone I saw myself as—I’d shut the door on that long ago, after I’d lost the baby and then spent my most fertile years in a sexless wasteland—but we got on OK, Jade and I. There were even moments, when she gave me a birthday card she’d made herself, or when we spent a sunny day down on the pier playing on the old arcade games, when I felt a flare of affection. Something unlike anything I’d felt before, and oddly compelling. It was always brief, though, sliding away out of my heart as soon as it had come, and difficult to hold on to.

  It was more difficult after we got engaged, when she hit puberty. She was twelve, almost thirteen, and the hormones had well and truly kicked in. Stupid toddler-style tantrums out of nowhere, a lot of slammed doors and tearful accusations. It consumed Alex, more than I had expected. Even when she was in bed, he used to talk about her, going over the same ground again and again. Did I think he should talk to the school? Should he be handling it differently? Was it just a phase, or a sign of something deeper, maybe a delayed reaction to losing her mother? It colored all our evenings, this endless speculating on Jade’s mental well-being. The sofa we used to have sex on turned into a therapy couch, and that wasn’t nearly as much fun.

  What I found myself wanting to say, when he began to second-guess himself in this way, was that it wasn’t his fault at all. It was her. I knew he wouldn’t appreciate me saying it, but she was something of a burden to him. When that word first popped into my mind it reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite pin down at first, and then I remembered that it was how I’d thought of Melanie, when Kas had told me that it was his duty to stay with her. The comparison stayed with me for a few minutes, and then I packed it carefully away in the back of my head.

  We got married, and to be fair to her Jade was an angel that day—smiling sweetly in her pale green lace dress and scattering confetti over us like falling rain—and that rosy glow carried us through for a while. But they call it a honeymoon period for a reason, and after that everything very quickly went sort of gray and flat. Not between me and him—I was still obsessed with him, still wanting to be with him every chance I got, and I knew he felt the same. But the routine that we’d settled into, the way it all centered around Jade and her trials and tribulations . . . it was a grind. A couple of months in, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. We should move—leave Brighton and go back to London, make a fresh start. I could get back into working, maybe move on from being a clothes saleswoman to some sort of personal shopper or something. I had a feeling I’d be good at that. Helping people change the way they looked, calculating how to move them closer to the person they wanted to be. It was an area in which I had some experience.

  I’d realized when I was inside that I had a talent for being a chameleon. I’d proved that I could throw all my cards up in the air and deal myself a new hand. If you met me now, you’d meet a nice housewife in her early thirties living in a trendy seaside town, with just enough money; nothing flash, but good enough to fit in. You’d see a beautiful woman with carefully styled dark hair and a slim figure with curves in the right places, but dressed in such a way—understated, fashion editorial rather than glamour model—that you don’t feel too threatened. I’m not out to steal your man. My voice is neither one thing nor the other, not posh, not common, just somewhere comfortably in between. I’ve always been a good mimic. I fit myself to whoever I’m with, and people like that, even if they realize I�
�m doing it, it validates them, makes them feel they’re worth imitating. I don’t put a fucking foot wrong.

  I went all out to persuade Alex that the move was a good idea: home-cooked dinner, new underwear, the works. At first he was completely convinced, but the next day it was a different story. He’d had a private word with Jade, he said, and he’d realized it wouldn’t be fair on her. He didn’t want to disrupt her and take her away from her friends, make her start again somewhere new, not at this vulnerable age. Like she’d even be talking to most of these “friends” in ten years’ time, or like there wouldn’t be a reason to call any age vulnerable, if she wanted it to seem that way. She didn’t say anything to me about the idea of the move, but that evening, after Alex had sat me down and told me that it wasn’t going to happen, I saw her shoot a glance at me from under her eyelashes as she sat eating her dinner, and it spoke volumes. Don’t think you can pull rank on me, that glance said, because I come first.

  And it’s true, she did. She does. He doesn’t even try to hide it. Of course, I have to think of Jade first and foremost. I’ve heard that countless times. I think he thinks I like it. Maybe some women find this sort of thing noble or heartwarming. And every time he says it, I nod and smile and practically pat her on the head if she’s there, and inside I can’t help thinking, is this what I signed up for? Is this what I fucking signed up for?

  It took me awhile to really figure out what this meant, but once I did it hit like an earthquake. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The knowledge that I’d been so focused on congratulating myself for not falling in love with a married man that I’d completely neglected to notice that a man with a child was even worse. Much, much worse. Against another woman, I’d have a chance at least. I could use every wile at my disposal to convince him that I was the one. But against Jade, I’d have no chance at all. If I went to Alex and told him that it was her or me, that he had to make a choice, he’d choose her. He wouldn’t even have to think about it. It might break his heart, but he’d choose her every time.