by Rachel Ryan
“So I slept with Emma,” he said. “Because I was selfish. Because I wanted to feel something new. Because I didn’t know what I wanted. Turns out, that half an hour was all it took for me to be sure. Afterwards, I knew all I wanted was you, us. All I wanted was to undo what I’d just done.”
He took two steps back and sat down on the concrete step at their front door.
“I knew you’d sensed something was wrong, so I admitted to kissing her. I agonized over whether to tell you everything. I already felt guiltier than I’d ever felt in my life. And then, when Rose called to tell us about the diagnosis…”
He buried his face in his hands.
“I thought, Okay, I can’t tell her the full truth now. Not when her mother’s sick. I told myself I was protecting you. But honestly, Georgie… I was glad to have a reason not to tell you everything. It wasn’t about protecting you or any of that shit. I was just terrified of losing you. I don’t know how I’d get through a day without you, let alone the rest of my life.”
Georgina went over and crouched beside him. She put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her in bleary astonishment.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Translation: It’s not remotely okay. Not right now. But one day, it will be. If we work on it. “I believe you.”
“Oh, thank God. I thought… I thought I’d lost… I fucking love you, Georgina, d’you know that? I love you.”
“I know.” She felt a calm certainty she hadn’t felt in a long time. “I know you do.” She stood up, took him by the arm, and helped him to his feet. “Come on, up you get. Let’s get you inside before we both freeze to death.”
* * *
As Georgina helped Bren through the door, neither of them noticed that someone was watching from across the street.
When the front door closed, the person drew nearer and looked up expectantly. After half a minute, a light came on in the upstairs windows. Curtains wide open, Georgina and Bren moved around the bedroom like characters in a silent play. From the street below, their audience of one observed their every move. They watched as Georgina helped Bren onto the bed and covered him with a blanket. As she left the room and returned with a glass of water.
Only when Georgina pulled the curtains shut did the watcher slip away into the dark.
Chapter 29
“How was your weekend, Georgina?” Kelly-Anne asked her at the school gates.
Oh, it was fine, Kelly-Anne. I thought my husband was setting me up to look crazy so he could steal our son away when he left me for his lover. But it turns out I’ve just been paranoid all along! Isn’t that absolutely hi-LAR-ious?
“Quiet,” Georgina replied. “Didn’t do much. How about you?”
“Well,” began Kelly-Anne, taking a deep breath in preparation for whatever monologue she was about to launch into, and Georgina, knowing feedback would not be necessary, tuned out and let her mind drift back to the weekend’s events.
Yesterday morning, she had brought Bren a mug of coffee in bed. “How’re you feeling?”
Bren was abashed. “I’m all right… Thanks.” He accepted the coffee without looking at her. “Georgina… All that stuff I said about being bored… Christ, I never meant…”
“It’s okay,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I’m glad you told me. I’m not saying the explanation excuses what you did, but it helps me make sense of it. Okay?”
He looked up then and leaned in to press his forehead against hers.
Kelly-Anne’s braying laugh brought Georgina back to the present moment, to the schoolyard with the chalk hopscotch colored on the concrete.
“It was my birthday on Sunday,” she was saying. “Mark got me a voucher for this all-day spa experience. Even had the little fish nibbling my feet! Ever tried it?”
“I’ve never been to a spa,” Georgina said.
“What! At all?” Kelly-Anne seemed dismayed. “Have you never even had a massage? Georgina, you’re missing out!” She tossed her long black hair around her shoulders with a sudden flash of excitement. “I know! We should go together! Girls’ day out.”
Georgina was paying close attention now. She would need to tread carefully to avoid this. “Sure, sometime,” she said noncommittally. But Kelly-Anne was pulling her iPhone out of her pocket and scrolling through her calendar.
“Let’s see… Maybe a weekday?”
Georgina steeled herself. She wouldn’t be swept into spending an entire day with Kelly-Anne. “I have college and work, Kelly-Anne. I don’t have much free time.”
“Oh…” Kelly-Anne looked so disappointed that Georgina felt momentarily guilty, but then the school opened and children began spilling out, and Georgina was saved.
“Maybe some weekend, then, Georgina!” Kelly-Anne called, brightening up already, as they went their separate ways.
Georgina felt somewhat resigned. Perhaps, no matter what she did, there was no avoiding ending up in a hot tub somewhere, cucumber slices on her eyes, listening to Kelly-Anne babble on. The woman was relentless.
At home, Georgina and Cody ate peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, and then had “homework together” time. Afterwards Cody watched TV while Georgina studied.
“Are you finished yet, Mom? Can we do something fun?”
Georgina closed her laptop. “Yes, darling.”
The weather was sleeting down outside, a cold gray combination of rain and hail, so they stayed indoors and worked on a big art project. Giant sheets of paper, every color pencil and crayon imaginable, glue, glitter, and shiny baubles left over from Christmas were all used for their abstract creation. When it was completed, they hung it up in the kitchen, then curled up in front of the TV, warm under the knitted blanket.
“I love you, sweetie,” Georgina said, stroking Cody’s hair. “You know that, don’t you? I love you more than anything else in the world.”
Cody took this proclamation in his stride, with the ease of a child who has always been adored. “I love you too,” he said, eyes fixed on the screen.
Eventually Georgina got to her feet. She could lie here forever with her son, but there were chores to be done.
She walked out to the hall, picked up this morning’s unopened post and carried it into the kitchen. Brushing some glitter off the table, she sat down. There was a bill she’d been expecting and a white envelope she hadn’t.
Curious, she opened the white envelope first. The page she slid out was stamped with a familiar logo, that of their phone provider. With it came a handwritten note.
I’m a mother too. —Nina
Georgina recalled the morning she’d rung the telecom company and asked a woman named Nina for a record of calls made to their landline.
For a moment, she sat quite still, not looking at the page. The image of Cody on the sofa, phone pressed against his ear, giggling away, was still conjured easily in her mind. If he really had been on the phone with someone, she was about to find out.
She gazed across the room. There was rain on the window. The sky outside was somewhere between a threatening iron-gray and black.
Just read it, she thought briskly. Put this idea out of your head once and for all.
She looked down at the page.
The list was short. Georgina and Bren barely used the landline.
So who had received a long call from a private number on Saturday the ninth of January?
Duration: 13 minutes.
Saturday, January 9. Her mind flew back through the dates, mental calculations concluding that yes, that was the same evening Cody had sat on the sofa, chatting into the phone. The same day the long pauses in his conversation had struck Georgina as eerily real.
The previous day, another phone call:
Incoming call—private number. Duration: 4 minutes.
She recalled coming in from the garden to find Cody crouching behind the sofa, phone to his ear. How he said into the receiver: “She found me.”
She remembered the call to the house the night before, nobody speaking w
hen she answered, how she had thought someone was trying to scare her.
But their intention hadn’t been to frighten her. They hadn’t been calling for Georgina at all.
They’d been trying to reach Cody.
Her hands had begun to shake. The page trembled in front of her. She placed it down on the table.
Duration: 13 minutes.
She and Bren had stood there watching and arguing while someone had been on the phone to their son.
The stick-figure drawings. The sweet wrappers. I said she could be New Granny.
She grabbed her phone.
“Hey,” Bren answered pleasantly. “I’m stuck at work, but I’ll try to get out in the next half—”
“Bren,” she interrupted him in a rush. “I just saw our phone records for the past month. You know all those times Cody was pretending to be on the phone? There was actually someone on the line.”
There was a moment of silence. Then: “You’re serious, Georgina?”
“Yes. Bren, somebody’s been calling and having long conversations with him.”
She kept her voice low, although she was sure Cody couldn’t hear her from the sofa in the front room. The TV was still playing loudly.
Bren was asking, “Have you got the number there in front of you?”
“The caller ID was withheld.” She looked at the page. “I can send you a photo.”
“No, I believe you. I’m just trying to make sense of it. Could it have been one of his friends calling from their parents’ phone?”
Georgina put a fingertip on the words: January 9… 13 minutes… “The calls correlate with the times Cody told us he was talking to his new granny.”
“Okay,” said Bren. “Okay. I’m going to come straight home…”
Georgina’s gaze was drawn back to the square of the kitchen window, where the figure had stood staring in at her. With the phone records in front of her and silence all around, she no longer believed she had imagined it.
“I want to get Cody out of this house and bring him somewhere safe. My dad will let us stay for a few days.”
“Wait for me to get home at least, and we can discuss it. I’m leaving work now…”
She heard a soft thud from outside, like feet on concrete.
Bren was still speaking. “We can sit down, talk to Cody…”
Georgina lowered the phone. She sat absolutely still. She strained her ears.
For a moment, she thought she’d imagined it.
Then she heard the heavy sound of the side gate rattling.
Georgina raised the phone to her ear. “Bren,” she breathed. “There’s someone at the house.”
“What?”
“I can hear them moving around outside.” She pushed the chair back and got to her feet, keeping her eyes trained on the kitchen window. “Call the Guards.”
“Okay. I’ll have to put you on hold. Don’t hang up.”
The line went silent. Georgina began to back out of the kitchen without taking her eyes off the window. She would grab Cody, get him upstairs…
Then she heard a giggle behind her.
She turned towards the hall and froze.
Cody was standing at the front door, his back to her. He was peering through the letter box. As if in response to someone on the other side, he nodded his dark head and let out another hushed, secretive giggle.
“Cody!” Georgina screamed, and he whirled around. She rushed forward to drag him away from the door. “Who were you talking to?”
Cody was silent. For a moment, Georgina was too frightened to even approach the door. Gathering her courage, she moved close enough to peer through the peephole. But whoever was there had ducked out of sight.
“Cody, who was out there?”
“No one.”
She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him up the stairs. Bren was on the line again. “Georgie, the Guards are on their way. Are you there? I’m racing home right now.”
“We’re here.” Georgina marched Cody into her bedroom. Fueled by terror and adrenaline, she began tossing clothes into an over-night bag.
“Where are we going, Mom?”
“Granddad’s,” said Georgina shortly. “Sit on the bed, Cody, where I can see you— No, don’t you dare! Don’t you dare leave my sight!”
Cody sank down onto the bed with uncharacteristic obedience. Perhaps he picked up on how tense Georgina was, how close to snapping like a dry twig.
Bren stayed on the phone the whole way home. He arrived before the police. Georgina had never felt so glad to see him.
“There’s nobody out there now,” he said. His eyes fell on the packed bags.
“Bren, I’m not staying here after this. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.”
“Well, we have to wait for the Guards anyway.” Bren folded her in his arms. “We’ll see what they have to say.”
Two members of the Irish police force, or the Guards, arrived within five minutes, a man and a woman. But the ensuing conversation did not go as Georgina had envisioned. Neither of the Guards seemed convinced that receiving calls from an unknown number was cause for panic. Nor did they seem compelled by Georgina’s story. It didn’t help that Cody claimed his mother was making everything up.
“I was playing a pretend game,” he insisted.
The two police officers looked at each other, then at Georgina.
“There was somebody in my garden,” she said. “I heard them.”
“But you didn’t actually see the intruder?”
She looked guiltily at Bren. She wished she’d thought quicker, crept to the window and looked out to see who was at the door without alerting Cody to her presence.
“No. I just grabbed my son and took him upstairs.”
“Well,” said the Guards before they left, “we’ve registered the incident. Get in touch if anything further happens.”
When the door closed behind them, Georgina turned to Bren, expecting him to say something about her overactive imagination. But Bren was studying the phone records, a deep line between his eyes. He went over to crouch in front of Cody.
“If you lie to the police, you get in very serious trouble. Did you know that, buddy?”
“Not if you’re a kid,” said Cody calmly. “Kids don’t get in trouble with the police, not properly. Kids can lie to the police.”
There was a silence.
“Where did you learn that, Cody?”
Hesitancy flickered across Cody’s face.
“Um,” he said. “I think I heard it at school.”
“Really.” Bren looked straight into his eyes. “Did a grown-up tell you that?”
“No.” But Cody had turned faintly pink.
Bren straightened up, frowning. Georgina pulled him aside.
“I’m not staying here,” she said. “I don’t feel safe. That’s the end of it.”
Bren wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were still on his son’s flushed, obstinate face.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m starting to agree with you.”
The wave of relief she experienced was so strong that for a moment, Georgina felt unsteady.
“Mine and Cody’s bags are already packed,” she said. “Grab whatever you need for work tomorrow. I’ll call my dad.”
While Bren was packing his things, Georgina tried one more time. “Cody, that was New Granny at the door, wasn’t it? What was she saying to you?”
But Cody, lower lip protruding, remained stubbornly silent.
Chapter 30
That night, in her childhood bedroom, Georgina unpacked the few bits and pieces she’d hurriedly jammed into a bag in the rush from their house. Cody’s knitted blanket. Some of his T-shirts, jeans.
“I’ll get the spare room cleared out,” her father said. “So the three of yous won’t have to be crammed in here.” Jimmy had allowed some clutter to accumulate in the spare room—an exercise machine Georgina had bought him eight years ago that he never used, the boxes of Rose’s old things.
“We’re fine here.” Georgina was happy to be anywhere but her own home.
“And we’ll only be here a few days,” offered Bren. “Just ’til we get the kitchen fixed.”
Georgina’s father was under the impression that a broken pipe and flooded kitchen was the reason they were staying with him. The last thing they wanted was to worry Jimmy.
“Stay as long as you want, Georgie,” he was saying now. “Sure I love having yous here.”
That made something in Georgina’s chest tug sadly. “Thanks, Dad.”
* * *
It felt strange, the following day, to drop Cody off at school as usual. Bren and Georgina both took the day off work, telling Jimmy it was to “pop over to the house and see how the repairs are coming along.”
At their house, they spent the afternoon searching for clues, brainstorming theories, and making calls to Cody’s classmates’ parents into which they tried to weave leading questions about whether any of their children were behaving strangely. They came up with nothing.
They collected Cody from school together and brought him back to Jimmy’s, where Jimmy tried to engage Bren in conversation about the fictional burst pipe. “How’re the repairs coming along? I’ve got a number for a good plumber if you need one.”
“Thanks, Jimmy, but I’ve already found someone. They said it’s a big job and it’ll take a few days.”
When Bren left the room, Jimmy said to Georgina, “Just be careful you’re not getting ripped off, love. I could always pop around and have a look myself, if you want.”
Georgina knew that while her father would never say so aloud, he did not consider Bren sufficiently masculine to be trusted to keep an eye on dodgy workmen.
“Thanks, Dad, but really, we’ve got it under control.”
After clearing the table, she followed Bren upstairs to her old bedroom, where they could speak freely.
“I hate lying to my dad,” she said.
Downstairs, she could hear the shouts and laughter of Cody and Jimmy playing together.
Bren flopped onto his back on the bed, and Georgina lay down beside him. He put an arm absentmindedly around her.