Am I Guilty?

by Jackie Kabler

  I shook my head. She smiled, and tapped on her keyboard, making a note on my online file. I waited, eyes flitting across her desk. Tissues in a fancy floral box, a half-empty coffee mug, a potted plant. Homely and safe, like she is. She looked up and smiled at me again.

  ‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘As you’ve been told before, it’s just the way your mind is coping with the stress. For some people, dissociation just lasts for hours or days, but with a major trauma it can be months. It’s your brain protecting itself by switching off from reality. You’ll get there. It might just be the tiniest thing at first, a little flash of memory. And when that starts, the rest should follow. But don’t get stressed about it, Thea, OK? Are you all right, otherwise? How’s the drinking been this week?’

  ‘I’ve not had much at all,’ I said honestly. ‘I’ve realized it just makes me feel worse, act a bit … well, a bit oddly.’ I hadn’t mentioned the pram thing to her and decided there was no need to say anything about it now. I’d stopped doing it, and I wouldn’t be doing it again. ‘So I’ve cut down, quite dramatically. Only a couple of glasses at a time now, and not every day.’

  She nodded, looking pleased.

  ‘Good. That’s excellent. And you never know, cutting down might help the memories to come back too.’

  I nodded in agreement, suppressing a shudder. Of course I wanted to remember, more than anything, but there were moments when I hoped that if … when … the memories returned, they would be just the good ones, the nice bits of that day. I desperately wanted to remember my last hours with Zander, our last cuddles, the last time my lips brushed his cheek. But did I really want to know in full, graphic detail, what happened later … what I did? Everyone said it would be better for me, to have my head clear again, but would it, really? Would I be able to live with it? It was hard enough, agonizing enough, now. How would I cope if suddenly I could relive that day in my head, every single, sick second of it?

  Now, potatoes peeled, I tipped them into a saucepan of cold water and started scraping the carrots. Nell loved carrots so much I was sometimes surprised she hadn’t yet turned orange, something which could actually happen, I knew – something to do with the betacarotene.

  My darling Nell. I knew I spoiled her now, sometimes, but she’d suffered so much. I’d made her suffer so much. She hadn’t even escaped the police questioning, on the day it happened. I hadn’t expected that – the adults, fair enough, but Nell? My beautiful little Nell, taken aside and quizzed about what she knew, what she’d seen. She was just another witness to them, another on the list who had to be interviewed, but there seemed no doubt what had happened, and in the end it was only me who was charged, and that was only fair. It was me, wasn’t it? It was my fault, and only mine.

  And … well, I admitted it. I told the police I had left Zander in the car. The sequence of events was crystal clear – Isla and Nell had run in from the car as soon as I’d pulled up outside, both shrieking about needing a wee, racing each other to the front door, laughing and jostling each other, leaving me to unbuckle the sleeping Zander from his car seat and follow them in. By the time they got back from the bathroom I was sprawling on the sofa, the pram in the corner of the living room as usual, and they assumed … well, they assumed, as everyone did, that he was in it, safe and sound, still asleep. Why wouldn’t they?

  So we opened some wine, Isla and I, and started drinking again. Shit, as if we needed anymore, after all the champagne with lunch, but by then … and sometime after that, we fell asleep.

  I’d gone over it over and over and over again, with the police, with my legal team, just by myself, trying to make sense of it, trying to make the pieces add up to … well, to some sort of coherent whole. Trying to work out why I had done what I had done, trying to formulate some sort of defence, outside of the alcohol and the possible postnatal depression.

  And I couldn’t. Other than temporary insanity, I just couldn’t. For a start, what on earth possessed me to drive home in such a state? It horrified me. I’d never driven drunk before, not ever. I had two children in the car, for God’s sake. The memory of why I did was gone too, of course. I remembered none of it, not the drive, or finding a parking space, or parking in it, but I clearly did all of that somehow, the car parked neatly in the spot right outside the door, no indication that its driver had been half pissed in the middle of the day, the worst kind of irresponsible mother, the kind that disgusted me, would disgust anyone.

  It was a miracle I didn’t kill us all. I did ask Isla why she’d let me drive, afterwards, after the police had released me. Well, I didn’t ask exactly – I grabbed her by the shoulders, hysterical with grief and fear and anger and horror, and screamed at her, shook her violently, told her it was all her fault, that if we’d got a taxi home it would never have happened, if I hadn’t driven us home Zander would still be alive and well. That Zander would still be here. And Isla, my beautiful, bold friend who never cried, crumpled in front of me, sobbed as if her heart was being torn in two, and told me she was sorry, so desperately sorry, that she didn’t know how drunk I was, that she hadn’t been counting, and that I’d insisted I was fine, that I wasn’t drunk at all, that it was only a few minutes’ drive, that everything would be OK. And then I’d crumpled too, and the two of us had slid to the floor, wrapped in each other’s arms, and cried and cried.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know it’s not your fault. It was mine, only mine,’ I whispered, over and over, my throat raw, my eyes blind with tears, and she’d held me tightly, rocking me in her arms like a baby, murmuring unintelligible words of comfort. And after that, I let it go. I needed her, needed her desperately, and what good would it do, falling out with my best friend, trying to pass some of the blame on to her? I was responsible for this. Nobody else.

  We talked about it, though, talked and talked, as I tried to remember, tried to make some sense of it all. Isla had tried to jog my memory, at my insistence – describing for me in detail how we’d chatted and laughed as we drove home, both children dozing in the back of the car, worn out by the heat. How even Zander, who woke easily, had slept throughout the short journey, his long lashes brushing his pink cheeks, tiny snores coming from the baby seat. My darling baby, my son, my little boy. And still, I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember his last hours alive.

  Tears pricked my eyelids as the thoughts tumbled through my mind. And then, as I blinked them away, flinching as I ran the peeler over the end of my finger, dropping the carrot, it happened again. A weird, crawling sensation, like a bony hand running up my spine. It had happened earlier today too, first thing this morning while I was still lying in bed, unwilling to leave my warm cocoon. A strange, shivery feeling, that had nothing to do with being cold. A feeling of unease, so intense that it was almost a physical sensation. This morning it had come and gone in a flash, and I’d put it down to being in that odd, semi-awake state but now, as I leaned against the kitchen counter, it stayed, first that shiver up my back, then a sense that something was trying to wriggle its way into my consciousness, a voice far, far too tiny for me to hear trying to make itself audible. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, trying to listen, but just as quickly as it had arrived, the feeling was fading again, and then it was gone.

  I opened my eyes, staring down at the pile of carrots on the chopping board, aware that my finger had started to bleed. What the hell was that? A hallucination? Or could it have been a memory, trying to return, like Dr Evans said it would? But it hadn’t been a memory, had it, not exactly. More of a feeling. A weird, unsettling feeling. A feeling I couldn’t identify. But as I stood there, watching the blood drip slowly from the end of my finger and pool on the chopping board, I suddenly realized that I knew what the feeling was about. It was a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. That something was off-kilter. I didn’t know what. But I knew, suddenly and with absolute clarity, that it was something about the day Zander died.

  15

  FLORA

&nbs
p; The frozen earth, still covered with a fine blanket of snow, crunched under my feet as I marched along the public footpath that crossed the field behind the house, heading for the woods on the other side. Last night had been a late one – we hadn’t arrived back from Bath until nearly 3 a.m. after the Greyline do – but even so, I hadn’t been able to sleep past eight, despite today being a day off. Wary of breaking an ankle in my running shoes, I’d decided on a brisk walk this morning instead of my usual fast 5k, wrapping up warmly and slipping a small flask of hot coffee into my backpack before I left, and closing the door gently behind me, the family all seemingly still fast asleep.

  It was a beautiful day, frost shimmering on tree branches, the morning sunshine so bright I wished I’d remembered to grab some sunglasses before I left. As I clambered over the stile at the edge of the wood, I felt a sudden wave of happiness wash over me. Life hadn’t always been that easy, but I was in a good place, really good – a job I was thoroughly enjoying, a lovely home to live in, nice people around me, and this glorious countryside literally right on my doorstep. I felt … well, calm I suppose, at peace, these days, and that wasn’t a word I’d been able to associate with my feelings for such a long time that I suddenly laughed out loud, a little bubble of euphoria making me almost light-headed for a moment. A robin who’d been sitting on a low branch flapped his wings, startled, and flew away, and I laughed again.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Robin! I’m just in a VERY. GOOD. MOOD,’ I announced, as I headed down the winding path through the trees, the snow thicker here, the sunlight dappled, trees close together, branches entwined high above my head.

  I walked for twenty minutes or so, my body warming from the exertion, my breath forming a ghostly cloud around my face as the path wound steeply uphill now, twisting around century-old oak trunks and criss-crossed by gnarled roots.

  Finally, I reached my coffee-stop destination, a clearing at the top of the rise where somebody had once had the genius idea of putting a wooden bench for those exhausted by the climb, a few square metres of relatively flat, scrubby ground before the path curved back into the wood again, for the descent to the road a mile or so below.

  I slipped my backpack off and brushed the snow off the bench with my gloved hand, then sank gratefully onto it and poured myself a coffee. The first sip burned my tongue, so I carefully put the cup down beside me, balancing it across the wooden slats of the seat, and gazed out across the valley, waiting for my drink to cool.

  I could see the church spire from here, standing tall above the cluster of houses which surrounded it, their red roofs which usually glowed softly in the early morning light today covered in snowy blankets. It was so quiet, so peaceful, the twittering of a few birds and the occasional crack of a twig in the woods behind me the only sounds, and I took a deep breath of cold air, closing my eyes for a moment, savouring the near-silence.

  I’d been invited to join the family for Sunday lunch later, and I was looking forward to it – (Annabelle is a fantastic cook); I enjoyed being with the kids – but it would be noisy and chaotic as always. It was one of the reasons I’d always relished my solo runs and walks – I needed the short spells of solitude, the moments alone with nature, the time to centre myself, to calm my racing thoughts.

  As I opened my eyes again and reached for my cooling coffee, I remembered yesterday and the conversation about Rupert Ashfield. Annabelle seemed to be fascinated by Thea and Rupert and the whole awful story, and I supposed I couldn’t really blame her for that – most people were the same when they discovered where I’d worked before this, their eyes widening, hands clapped over mouths, eyes expressing sympathy and curiosity.

  Although if pushed, and if I felt in the mood to cope with the telling, I would now and again give the inquisitive a few details of the day Zander died, I’d never given my full account to anyone except Annabelle, the other night in the restaurant. I’d felt I owed it to her, to tell her what she wanted to know, but I doubted I’d talk to anyone else about it in such detail. I didn’t feel the need to tell her anymore, though, about the other stuff – didn’t feel the need to fill her in about Rupert, and about his and Thea’s relationship.

  They had been happy, once, or so I believed, but even when I arrived on the scene things were already starting to deteriorate, and while there seemed to be various reasons for that – he was away a lot, she was always working when he was at home, the usual – a lot of it was definitely down to Isla or, more accurately, to Isla and Thea’s friendship, and the pressure Isla always put on Thea to go out partying.

  It had always seemed quite intense to me, as if Isla wanted Thea all to herself, as if she resented the fact that Thea was now a mother of two with all the responsibilities that entailed, and couldn’t simply drop everything to go out and have fun on a Friday night when Isla arrived from London, ready to let off steam after another week of high flying.

  I’d heard them arguing, more than once, Thea and Rupert – those low-voiced, spiteful little arguments that took place after the children were asleep: Rupert accusing his wife of being a bad mother, telling her she should never have had children if she still wanted to ‘party like a teenager with that vacuous woman’; Thea retaliating in a shaky, tear-filled voice, ‘I’m not allowed to have friends then? Not allowed to go out at all? Lock me up then, why don’t you? For God’s sake, Rupert, it’s once a week, if that. I’m trying to juggle the kids and my business every bloody day here, on my own while you’re off doing your thing. Surely you can cope for one evening? I’m suffocating here, I need this.’

  They’d make up, eventually, but sometimes it took days, days when the atmosphere in the house was heavy and tense, the children picking up on it too: Nell irritable and tetchy, Zander whimpering and needy.

  It was during one of those times that Rupert had first turned to me. It was a still-chilly evening last March, when Zander was a couple of months old, and I’d been curled up with a pile of magazines and a hot chocolate on the old sagging velvet sofa in the snug, a cosy little room off the kitchen. It had become my sitting room, sort of, Thea and Rupert preferring the main lounge at the front of the house, but that suited me. I had a lovely room upstairs but I liked having my own space downstairs, too, and I loved the snug, with its walls lined with bookshelves and its French doors opening out into the garden. There was no TV in the room, but there was a digital radio which I enjoyed tuning in to obscure French or Italian radio stations, humming along to Europop as I flicked through the pages of House & Garden, Red or Cotswold Life.

  That evening I’d been engrossed in an article about the trend for boudoir-style bedrooms – odd how I still remembered that, specifically – when the door opened and Rupert ambled in clutching, rather to my surprise, a beer bottle. It was a Tuesday night and he wasn’t a big drinker, not during the week at home anyway. But Thea was out that night, meeting some mums from her postnatal classes, and I’d supposed he was just taking the chance to have a quiet drink alone, the children both in bed by this time.

  He’d nodded at me, then slumped down into the armchair opposite my sofa, took a long drink from his bottle and sighed heavily.

  ‘You all right, Flora?’ he asked.

  I gave him a brief smile, replied ‘Yes, fine thanks!’ then turned back to my magazine, hoping he wouldn’t hang around. I didn’t mind Rupert, although weirdly I still didn’t know him that well at that point, despite working for Thea for well over a year by then. I still preferred my own company after a long day at work, and it made me a little uncomfortable to be alone with him, especially when I knew his relationship with my boss was not in a good place.

  I’d taken up the job in the December, and Thea had fallen pregnant the following April, with Zander arriving at the beginning of January. I lived in their house, of course, like I did now with Annabelle, and in many ways I did, I suppose, become part of the family, certainly as far as Thea and Nell were concerned.

  But Rupert was away so much, and on those evenings when he was at home I usually ma
de myself scarce, not wanting to intrude on their family time, especially during those long summer months when Thea was pregnant, hot and exhausted, so Rupert and I had never really got to know each other, outside of being basically polite and making small talk.

  Of course there’d been times when Thea had insisted I join them, for dinner or barbecues, or Friday night drinks in the garden, and they were fun times, more often than not. When they were getting on, Rupert and Thea were interesting and entertaining company, and generous with their food and wine, taking it in turns to cook and good-humouredly trying to outdo each other. Isla was frequently there too, and although at first she seemed to resent my presence, she gradually accepted that I was part of the household, although it took a while.

  ‘She’s protective of me, that’s all. Wants to make sure I’m not replacing her with you,’ Thea had whispered to me when we went inside to refill our glasses one evening, after Isla had pointedly ignored me when I’d asked her if she was staying in Cheltenham all weekend. I’d nodded and told Thea not to worry, at the same time thinking how peculiar, how strangely juvenile it was to see a grown woman so possessive of her ‘best friend’.

  But gradually, Isla thawed, seemingly realizing that I was no threat, that she was still the number one woman in Thea’s life, that although Thea and I got on well she was really just my employer and landlady, and I actually began to look forward to her visits.

  On form, she was hilarious company, full of stories about London and television life, and she made me howl. Even so, I could see that her presence always put Rupert a little on edge, and often he and Thea would exchange sharp words after Isla had finally taken her leave for the evening. Thea once confided in me that her husband thought her best friend was a bad influence, and that he’d be happier if they terminated their friendship.

  ‘He doesn’t realize that I quite like being influenced by her. If she was a man, I’d probably have married her,’ she’d said to me once, and grinned. ‘I’ve never had as much fun with anyone in my life as I’ve had with Isla. Sometimes I wish Rupert was a bit more like her. He can be so … so uptight, you know?’