The Broken Ones

by Ren Richards

  ‘She was only a baby,’ Nell said, staring into her glass. Those were the words she was supposed to say out loud, even if she didn’t believe them.

  ‘No,’ Lindsay said. ‘She was never just a baby. She’s been gone for more years than she was alive, and she’s still ruining your chance at happiness.’ She took the now-empty glass from Nell’s hands and placed it on the table. With nothing else to focus on, Nell met her sister’s eyes.

  ‘Sebastian is giving you the love you have always deserved,’ Lindsay said, and her earnestness made Nell’s vision blur with new tears. ‘He’s giving you what you never got from Bonnie, or from Chuck, or those idiot teachers who didn’t see what a genius you were. This is the life you deserve, Nell. You’re trying to ruin it because you’ve been taught that life always turns bad when your guard is down. I’m not going to let you ruin it.’ She grabbed another tissue, this time dabbing at Nell’s eyes. ‘You can sleep here tonight, but tomorrow you’re going back home.’

  30

  THEN

  After the interrogation, Matthew escorted her out of the police station. ‘Get in the car,’ he told her, as she struggled to keep up with his pace.

  Once inside the vehicle, he slammed the gas, and her heart leapt.

  ‘You’re lucky they didn’t arrest you, you know that?’ His fingers clenched around the steering wheel. ‘They want you for murder, Penelope.’

  ‘I didn’t kill my daughter,’ Nell said, and it took all her bravado not to jump from the moving car, she was so terrified.

  ‘I don’t care what you did,’ Matthew said. ‘What happened doesn’t matter. What matters is what we can convince a jury of. And this will go to trial. Where’s your cell phone?’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ Nell said.

  ‘Don’t have it?’ he parroted back, annoyed. ‘What do you mean you don’t have it? You’re a teenager; you should be glued to that thing.’

  ‘I left it at the Eddletons’. I was in a hurry.’

  ‘Christ.’ He ran his hand down his face, tugging aggressively on his lower lip. ‘Is there anything incriminating on that phone? Pictures? Texts?’

  ‘No,’ Nell said. Her voice was quiet. She was staring at her lap.

  ‘No?’ Matthew asked. ‘You’re sure? Because it’s only a matter of time before that phone ends up admitted as evidence.’

  ‘If you take me back home, I can get it,’ Nell said.

  Matthew laughed, loud and without humour. ‘You’re not going back to the Eddletons,’ he said. ‘Before the day is over, the police will show them that footage. Your boyfriend will be in an interrogation room, getting grilled on what type of mother you are. He’ll panic and throw you under the bus.’

  He wouldn’t do that. That’s what Nell wanted to say. They may not have had a Hallmark Channel romance, but he loved her, in his way.

  Suddenly she thought back to their fights about Reina. All the times he’d called her crazy. The way he never believed anything she said.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Matthew said. ‘Was your phone on you the day Reina went missing?’

  That morning, Reina had been screaming when Nell scooped her up from the kitchen floor and wriggled her arms into her coat. Mrs Eddleton was shouting to be heard. She was prattling off a list of things she wanted Nell to buy at the grocery store because the housekeeper was out with the flu. Ethan was already waiting in the car and he’d honked the horn for the third time in as many seconds. Nell was supposed to drop him off at the entrance to his university for an 8:30 class.

  Reina had gone dead weight and she refused to walk, so Nell had to haul her out to the car like a sack of grain. As she shouldered her purse, she saw her phone resting on the table in the foyer. It had been a conscious decision to leave it there, so that Mrs Eddleton would have no way to reach her. One more conversation about the groceries needed for the perfect hors d’oeuvres and Nell was going to have a mental breakdown.

  ‘I left it at home,’ Nell said.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled at the road ahead. ‘I hope you’re as smart as Lindsay keeps bragging you are,’ he said. ‘You’re going to need it to get through this.’

  They pulled up to the massive suburban mansion Matthew and Lindsay shared. Before the car had even come to a full stop, Lindsay was running down the front steps, the folds of her asymmetrical sweater flying around her like wings. She gathered Nell into her arms and clung to her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve been trying every day to see you and they wouldn’t let me in. I’m so sorry, but you’re home now.’

  There would never be such a thing as home.

  After a week spent at Lindsay and Matthew’s house, Nell understood that Lindsay’s invitation for Nell to stay there was not just to protect Nell from the press, police and the Eddletons. It was also so that Nell could protect Lindsay from Matthew.

  When they weren’t rehearsing what Nell should say the next time the police summoned her, Matthew was amiable to Nell at best. And in Nell’s presence, he didn’t just kiss Lindsay – he groped her, with the greedy possessiveness of a man trying to compete with a formidable lover. He knew almost nothing about Nell except that she and Lindsay had a bond he couldn’t compete with. Not truly.

  Nell wondered if Lindsay had lost her mind. She seemed to like that she drove her husband wild. She exaggerated the handsomeness of men on the television and sighed that she wished she could find a lover like the hero in whatever romance novel she was reading.

  It wasn’t a marriage. It was a game. Being caught in the middle like an animal trapped between two lanes of traffic was preferable to the press and the Eddletons, but that wasn’t saying much. A kick to the spleen would have been just as preferable.

  But the human mind was adaptable. Nell adapted to waking each morning under the crushing weight of being a childless mother. She adapted to the slammed doors, the fights, the stench of vodka and espresso, and the nauseating knot in her stomach.

  Nell had become so used to all of these things that the silence was the thing that woke her. It had rained the night before – thunder tearing the sky to shreds while the rain applauded its efforts. But the morning was so still that even birds weren’t singing.

  ‘Lindsay?’ Nell whispered. The quiet felt too fragile. Her footsteps were light as she slid out of bed. She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. The upstairs was a mezzanine that looked down over the living room, and from here Nell could see the crackling fire in the hearth. A blanket was wadded on the floor beside the gaudy tiger-skin rug.

  Nell didn’t call for Lindsay again as she made her way downstairs. Something warned her not to.

  Something crashed in the kitchen. The ceramic sound of it breaking tore through the entire house. Nell ran even without understanding what had compelled her to move so fast.

  Matthew was kneeling on the tile floor. Lindsay was pinned under him, clawing at his hands that were clutched around her throat. Her face was red, her eyes shining and wide. Her tongue bulged between lips that had already begun to turn blue. Her bare feet slid helplessly against the tiles.

  Nell grabbed the skillet from the stove. Eggs were sizzling on its surface and the cooking steam trailed after the motion as Nell swung it, screaming, at Matthew’s head. She felt the force of the impact, and even though she saw him fall back, she was certain she hadn’t hit him hard enough. He was going to get up. He was going to kill them both. She hit him again. She tried to hit him a third time, but he staggered to his feet. He was dazed and clumsy, and he clutched the door frame. ‘Fucking crazy,’ he blurted out. ‘Both of you are fucking crazy.’

  Nell could smell the alcohol on him and she knew that he was drunk. She didn’t stop him as he made his way through the living room and out the front door. Nell heard the sound of his car starting, and she craned her neck to look out the window. The car never left the driveway. Matthew passed out cold against the steering wheel.

  Lindsay was
the one to take the skillet from Nell’s hands. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse. Her breath reeked, and in a moment of clarity Nell saw that the force of drawing air back into her lungs had made Lindsay vomit on the floor. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ Lindsay said again, and sagged wearily against her. ‘It wasn’t his fault. It was mine.’

  Nobody called the police.

  Lindsay and Nell crouched together on the kitchen floor and cleaned up the shards of the plate with little daisies painted on it. They mopped up the eggs, vomit and blood with hand towels and they left Matthew to sleep it off in his car.

  He didn’t wake up for a long time, and Nell thought about what she would do if he died there. She tucked Lindsay under the cashmere blanket on the couch and brought her a glass of lemonade, and she thought about burying Matthew Cranlin in his own back yard.

  It wouldn’t be difficult. When she read about crimes in the paper, in hindsight they always sounded messy and doomed to fail. But here in the quiet of this house with all the neighbours cordoned off by shrubs and trees, it seemed easy. She wouldn’t even need Lindsay’s help.

  First, she would prepare the burial site. This often got overlooked by murderers. They were too panicked by the enormity of what they had done, and their flaws weren’t in the execution of the plan itself, but in the cover-up.

  She would go outside. She would take a spade and the cloth gloves from the shed. She would gingerly dig up the tulips and begonias that framed the walkway, taking care to preserve their roots. Then she would dig a hole in the malleable earth. She would drag him to the grave and then she would place the tulips and the begonias on top of him, neatly patted down as though nothing had ever happened. There were a dozen flowerbeds along the walkways and around the well and the property line. The softened earth wouldn’t be suspicious at all.

  She sat on the couch. Lindsay yawned and put her head in her lap.

  It would have been possible, Nell thought. I could have done it.

  31

  NOW

  After a long and embarrassing cry, Nell retreated to the guest room upstairs. There were technically three guest rooms, but all of them were being used as storage and only this one had a bed.

  In addition to the twin bed there was also a crib, still furnished with a cornflower-blue mattress, occupied only by an unopened box of baby monitors. The curtains were drawn, and the door to this room was always closed. In lieu of a nightstand, a resin train lamp sat upon a stack of cardboard boxes of blankets and clothes.

  Lindsay might have donated the contents of this room to charity, if only she could bring herself to open the door. Her marriage had died in this room. It was a shrine to her panic. After going through all the trouble of humouring her husband, she ultimately confessed that she wasn’t going to give him the babies she’d promised him. Not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t trust herself enough to try.

  Robert had been kind and far more patient with Lindsay than most of her suitors, but his wife had promised him children, and without that there was nothing left to talk about.

  Nell knew that she was to blame for this as well. If she’d never had her own child, Lindsay wouldn’t be so afraid of what tragedies might be waiting to happen.

  Though it resembled a nursery, the room smelled more like an old woman’s closet: mothballs and lavender scent packs. Nell closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

  A short while later, she awoke to the sound of a car door slamming. Keys jingling. Footsteps.

  She opened her eyes. It was still night, and she knew she hadn’t been asleep for very long. She moved to the window and looked out onto the driveway. There was a white Mercedes she didn’t recognise, but she knew the man who had stepped out of it. Matthew Cranlin was making his way to the front door.

  Nell was about to move, to run and shout a warning out to Lindsay. But then, from where Nell stood at the window, she saw the front door swing open before Matthew could reach for the bell.

  ‘Didn’t you get my text? I told you not to come here tonight.’ Lindsay spoke in a hushed voice, but it still echoed through the house. She hugged her silk robe around her, shivering at a breeze.

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to check my phone,’ Matthew said. ‘I sped over here as soon as my flight touched down. All I could think about was you.’

  He slapped his hands on either of her hips, reeling her against him.

  Lindsay relented when he kissed her. Even from up here, Nell saw her sister falling under Matthew’s spell. Her shoulders slackened and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

  When the kiss ended, Lindsay slapped his cheek playfully. ‘Get out of here. My sister’s upstairs.’

  ‘She’s a big girl,’ Matthew said, grinning as she leaned in for their next kiss. ‘Come on. We’ll go somewhere. I’ve been flying all day to see you.’

  Of all the things Nell would have expected to come rolling up Lindsay’s driveway in a shiny white Mercedes, Matthew Cranlin had not been one of them. But it disheartened her to realise that she wasn’t surprised. Her sister’s bad decisions always bubbled back up to the surface, like a bloated corpse in a swamp.

  Nell stood in the darkness and watched as Lindsay, giggling and tripping over herself, grabbed her purse and let Matthew open the passenger side door for her. A minute later, they were gone.

  Nell could have taken Lindsay’s car and followed them. She could have called Lindsay to ask what the hell she thought she was doing. But she didn’t. She stormed back to the bed and fell onto the mattress, furious. Furious with her sister, and furious with herself.

  No, she told herself, as she closed her eyes and tried to fall back asleep. She was furious with Matthew. And in the morning, when Lindsay snuck back into her own house and tried to pretend nothing had happened, Nell was going to remind her of everything that man had put her through. She was going to shatter the bubble that protected her sister from reality.

  In the morning, Nell woke to the unfamiliar ringing of her new phone. It had a cleaner and more musical sound than her old one. She lay still for a moment as she tried to place the song.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey.’ Sebastian’s voice.

  Nell sat up. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Slept like shit,’ he said with a nervous laugh. ‘What about you?’

  Nell had slept in the graveyard of Lindsay’s nonexistent child. She dreamt of the mobile spinning and the music box on the dresser creaking open. There had been a tiny figure spinning slowly. Too slowly. It never turned all the way for Nell to see its face, but she’d somehow known it would frighten her.

  ‘Lousy,’ she said.

  ‘Come home tonight,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about this, Nell. Please.’

  She doubled forward, still pressing the phone to her ear. Sebastian. Her love for him was the only stable romantic love she’d ever experienced. Desperate at times, but always a load-bearing pillar in her life. She could see herself having a life with him, being happy. Not with children, but with a dog maybe, even one of those modular houses he coveted and she so openly despised. All that mattered was that he was the one to climb into bed beside her at night.

  But there would always be a wedge between them. Reina’s ghost on the mattress, reminding Nell that she could play the part but she would never be what Sebastian thought she was.

  ‘Nell?’

  For one maddened, vulnerable moment, she wanted to tell him about Reina, and the day she disappeared. She wanted to tell him all of it. After years of sleeping beside this man, she could anticipate his reaction to almost anything, but not this. There was no promise that he would understand, much less love her. He might even insist on telling the police. One guess was as good as another. This was uncharted territory.

  The police couldn’t punish her, but the court of public opinion could. She feared that the most: hundreds, thousands, millions of people gathered outside the doors of her publisher, screaming for her head or her career – whichever they could ha
ve the quickest. She would have nothing. No more stories entrusted to her care, no more words and no more pages. No more Sebastian. No more apartment overlooking the dragonfly city. No more Nell Way, who was no relation to Penelope Wendall. And as always, no Reina.

  It was the hundredth time she considered telling Bas the truth, and the hundredth time she kept quiet.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’

  He let out a relieved breath. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Love you.’

  ‘Love you,’ she said. ‘So much.’

  She could tell by his pause that she’d startled him. She told him she loved him all the time, but always withholding her earnestness. She was either afraid to give him too much, or it felt too unbearable to acknowledge.

  She hung up before either of them could say anything more, and she closed her eyes. She could smell the presence of a new baby in this room. Little bottles of lotion and diaper cream in a basket under the crib, and the liquid-resistant rubber liner over the mattress.

  The Eddletons had given Reina a beautiful nursery like something out of a fairy tale, with a mobile of little crocheted bears and stars spinning in their own galaxy.

  Mothers often talked about the scent of their new baby, how they dreaded the day that it would fade.

  Nell never had a baby that smelled of sweetness and powder. There was no softness. Not a single time had she walked to her daughter’s crib eager to fill her arms with the weight of her. During her pregnancy, she’d romanticised motherhood. She had dreamed of a little piece of herself to love, but she gave birth to a sobering reality instead.