by Natasha Bell
“Indeed,” Fran said. She looked at me for a moment. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Honestly,” I said. She held my gaze until I looked away.
“Okay,” Fran said, lifting her gun to my chest and pretending to shoot me. “Then we should get back in there.”
I pulled the mint tin from my jacket pocket. “Cyanide?”
We stepped into the dining room and joined a conversation about the new business park development. I listened for a while, then drifted into the empty hallway, seeking a few minutes alone. After a while Marc came up behind me, placed his hand in the small of my back. He leant toward me and pressed his lips to my ear. “Fräulein?” he said. I’d spent the past week messing around with my German accent, longing for Marc to catch on to my teasing. I felt my desire swell; perhaps it was finally working.
“Ja?” I said, turning to face him. I touched my fingers to his cravat. “Alles ist gut?”
“Yeah,” Marc said, his voice normal again. I dropped my hand. He sounded tipsy. His gaze drifted to the iPhone in my other palm. “Whose is that?”
“Uh, I don’t know. It must have fallen out of someone’s coat,” I said, gesturing to the overloaded hooks. I placed the phone on the shelf beneath the mirror and smiled at him. “How’s the party?”
“People seem happy. I might just check on the girls.”
“I’ll go,” I said, twisting from his touch.
I found Charlotte sitting at the top of the stairs, picking from a stolen bowl of crisps. “Hey you, you’re meant to be asleep.”
“You’re being too loud.”
“I’m sorry, darling. You want to come down for a bit?”
She shook her head.
“Want to sleep in our bed? It’ll be quieter up there.”
“Okay.”
I led her up to our room and took my shoes and jacket off to snuggle under the covers with her for a bit.
“Why do you have parties, Mummy?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. To see my friends, to bring people together and make them happy.”
“Everyone’s just standing around, though.”
I laughed. “I guess they are. But that seems to be what makes them happy.”
“Does it make you happy?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes, though, even if something doesn’t make you happy to begin with, then if you just smile and pretend, eventually you find you really are happy.”
Charlotte wrinkled her nose.
“Nothing makes me as happy as sitting up here with you, of course.”
“Will you wait ’til I fall asleep?” she said.
“Of course,” I said, stroking her hair. “I’ll be here just as long as you need me.”
January 2014
Eleven Months Gone
Unthinkably, over the course of January, life took on a routine. The sun rising and setting, the clocks ticking and the calendars turning—Marc knew from the first day I didn’t return that these would continue regardless. Back then, though, it had seemed absurd to imagine he would do the same. But the girls and he carved a new existence into the walls of our old one. They trod the same carpets of the same house and breathed the same air of the same rooms. Marc, however, began to walk into those rooms and see only what was there to be seen: Charlotte in a chair or Lizzie with her laptop, rather than the shadow of me watching TV or flicking the pages of a magazine.
Nicola had left him a message saying she wanted to “check in,” but he hadn’t called her back. The morning after he found the passport stamps, a realization had seeped through his hangover: the police already knew. They’d ordered their exit checks and received full reports of every time I’d left and entered the country. They’d questioned him about my travels and about Amelia, knowing full well they had more information than he did. He’d known all along they were keeping things from him, not telling him every detail of the case, but to have watched him maintain his faith in me for all of those months, to have allowed him to make such a fool of himself, he couldn’t forgive Nicola for that.
He’d received valuations from two real estate agents and allowed one to hammer a sign into the front garden. The girls weren’t keen to change schools, but he’d set his heart on Knaresborough and began dragging them out there to look at houses each weekend.
He still thought of me every day, but woke with a numbness, contemplating the events of the day ahead rather than mourning those of days past. He picked the girls up from school and they chattered about things that had happened, made plans for the weekend or the next holidays. They were learning to cook together, spreading Jamie Oliver or Rick Stein on the counter, Charlotte shouting out measurements while Lizzie rifled through the larder. Char, he found, was particularly good at mashing potatoes for the tops of pies, and he and Lizzie had learned to make a mean lasagna. On Friday nights Emily, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the couple across the road, arrived in her skinny jeans and thick mascara to babysit. He met Patrick and Ollie at the Swan. Ollie was doing well, considering. Fran had bought a flat inside the city walls and had Emma at weekends, but Marc hadn’t seen her since before Christmas. The girls had swimming on Thursdays, he did the food shopping on Tuesdays, they ordered takeaway on Saturdays, and invariably he frantically shoved their school uniforms in the washing machine on Sunday evenings. The bins went out on Wednesdays to be picked up first thing on Thursday mornings, recycling every other week. Lizzie had to remember to take her flute to school on Fridays, and Charlotte needed something for show-and-tell every third Monday of the month. They had dental appointments and vitamin schedules, homework planners and birthday diaries. They played Monopoly and Space Dice, read Harry Potter all over again, and talked excitedly about the next Marvel release.
When the girls mentioned me, Marc spoke as if I was dead. Not morbidly, but matter-of-factly. “Mummy would have liked that,” not “Mummy would like that.” He tried to keep his thoughts pure for them, tried not to linger on his hurt and anger and loss. It was only alone at night, in those moments before sleep, that he allowed himself to picture my blue skin and cold flesh, the slice of somebody’s knife. He might never know what happened at the river, never discover why I was there or what role Amelia did or didn’t play, but my husband had finally accepted I was gone. And in that, at least, there was a kind of release. My family was coming to the end of the first month of the first year they’d lived without me and, against all odds, they were coping.
* * *
By the middle of February there had still been no offers on the house and Marc was fighting a sense of stagnation. Encouraged by Susan, who’d been forwarding him articles about the need to make positive changes and establish new routines, Marc drove over to the animal rescue center. He spent more than an hour speaking to an enthusiastic volunteer and stroking the soft, black fur of a terrier abandoned by the side of the A64 just after Christmas. The following week he returned and drove the puppy home. Lizzie was meant to be meeting Charlotte after sports club and walking her back, but if he hurried he’d make it in time.
“Oh. My. God,” said Lizzie, dropping her school bag on the pavement. She stared open-mouthed at the puppy on the end of the leash in Marc’s hand. “Is this for real?”
Marc smiled at our daughter, his heart filling to see her so uncomplicatedly happy. The puppy wagged its tail as Lizzie dropped to her knees to pet it.
“What’s going on?” said Charlotte, walking up. She skirted around Lizzie’s bag, then her eyes landed on the dog. “Puppy!” she squealed and Marc could barely contain his laughter. Her classmates were noticing the commotion now and pulling away from their parents to crowd and coo. The puppy yapped and twirled in circles.
“Can we keep her?” Charlotte asked.
“Him,” Marc said, nodding.
They said good-bye to the other children and parents and began walking home. Lizzie took
the leash and Charlotte skipped ahead with the puppy dancing around her feet.
“What are we going to call it?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t know,” said Marc. “We need to think of a name.”
Charlotte turned back to face them. “What about Princess?” she said. “Princess Amelia.”
Marc stopped walking. He felt his blood drain toward his shoes.
“It’s a boy, dummy,” Lizzie said. “He can’t be a princess.” She turned and saw Marc had stopped. “Dad, what’s wrong?”
The three of them stood in the middle of the pavement, the confused puppy running back to sniff Lizzie’s ankles.
“Where did you hear that name?” Marc said.
Charlotte squirmed under Marc’s gaze. “What do you mean?” she said.
Marc tried to keep his voice steady. He knew he was frightening our daughter. “I need to know where you heard the name Amelia.”
Charlotte frowned, unsure what she’d done wrong. “In a story Mummy told me,” she said nervously.
“What story?”
“Um, about a princess who realizes she doesn’t need a prince to make her happy.”
“It’s a dumb name for a dog,” Lizzie said. “Even if he was a girl. He doesn’t look like a prince or a princess, he looks like an otter.”
Both girls were staring at Marc. He could hear his pulse in his ears. They needed to not be on the street right now. He needed to get them home. “Come on,” he said, as if it had been the girls slowing them down. “We’ll call the dog Otter, that’s a great name. Well done, Lizzie.”
The girls spent the evening playing with Otter, keeping out of Marc’s way. At eight, when food had still not even been mentioned, Lizzie dug a pizza from the freezer and put it in the oven. She took two slices up to Marc, knocking tentatively at the office door. Marc sat in the middle of the floor, the filing cabinet and my box of folders emptied around him, bills mixed with letters mixed with scraps of paper. For a moment Marc saw himself through our daughter’s eyes, knew what she was seeing was bad. But he was too far inside of himself to conjure more than a simple “thanks” before she shut the door and retreated downstairs.
The pizza grew cold as he turned the office upside down. His armpits sweated and his eyes prickled as he grew increasingly frantic. He’d tried to ignore this, to numb himself with alcohol and forget about the letters and their implications. He’d told himself to listen to the police, accept the evidence, concentrate on his daughters and the life the three of them could still have. He’d told himself he could move on. But he’d built their newfound stability on a tectonic plate boundary and the volcanoes of my past were far from dormant.
There wasn’t a single address on any of Amelia’s letters. A couple of the original envelopes floated among the pages, but they featured nothing but a New York post stamp. Marc fished out my address book from the things the police had returned, already knowing Amelia’s name was absent. He rechecked every scrap of paper, every crumpled shopping list and old bank statement. Eventually he turned to the Internet, scrolling past the articles speculating about her anonymity, uninterested in reviews. There was a website with stills of her work. He’d visited it before, but now he lingered on the brief Artist’s Statement:
I’m driven by identity, by the solidity it brings to an individual as well as its ability to shift, morph and ultimately elude. People want to know who I am, but the answer is only my work. That I may be the product of immigration, have studied at SAIC and drunk Kool-Aid as a child is less relevant than you think it is. Some refer to those brought up in two or more countries as “third culture kids”; I’d like to posit myself as a child of the “fourth culture.” My identity, rather than being a fusion of the things, people and cultures around me, is the distillation of them.
* * *
Shaking his head at such incomprehensible gobbledygook, Marc remembered his mission. But of course the site featured no contact details, no address or even information on upcoming shows. Another dead end.
* * *
I’ve got three days. Whatever it is, it’s going to happen then. He seems excited. He likes feeling important, I think. In control.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“About what?” I say, playing dumb.
“Your future. Your fate.”
I shrug. “You’ve made it pretty clear it’s out of my control.”
“On the contrary,” he says, “all of this has been in your control.”
I laugh.
“You still don’t accept that it’s your doing, do you?” He seems disappointed. What has he achieved if he hasn’t broken me fully? If I don’t grovel at his feet, grateful for whatever tiny reprieve he might offer.
“You chose this, Alex.”
“I did not.”
“Perhaps not explicitly, but everything you did, everything you had, was leading you here. To me. To this moment that will decide the rest of your life. I’d have thought you’d see some beauty in that.”
2013
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21
MY LAST MEMORY
“Five more minutes,” I remember saying, kissing him lazily on the shoulder.
“I have to get up,” Marc said with a groan.
My fingers brushed his belly, tickling their way toward elastic.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He wriggled away, turning to plant a loving but firm kiss upon my pouting lips. “Tonight? I promise.”
I rolled over and faced the dressing table as Marc pulled himself out of bed and padded toward the bathroom. I bit my bottom lip to keep from crying, lay there as the clock ticked over, knowing soon I’d need to wake the girls, start our routine, but unable to leave these sheets, this bed. Unwilling to accept the day’s arrival.
Marc had no idea as he crept back into the room to pull on yesterday’s jeans and a crumpled striped shirt over his freshly showered skin that he wouldn’t be able keep that promise. Would he have been so keen to hurry down to the office and get stuck into a second year’s thoughts on Keats if he’d known that was our last chance?
* * *
He found me standing by the sink, rinsing his preferred coffee mug. The girls chewed cereal, still in pajamas.
“Morning, Daddy,” Charlotte said with her mouth full, then giggled as milk dribbled down her chin.
He kissed each of our daughters’ foreheads, then stepped in my direction, wrapping his arms around me from behind. I felt the warmth of his fingers through my robe, the chill of the tip of his nose as he nuzzled my neck. I clutched the edge of the sink, worried my knees might buckle.
I exhaled a long, silent breath, then turned around. “Don’t forget they have swimming tonight,” I said, pointing to the calendar on the fridge.
“Uhg, do I have to go?” Lizzie said.
“Yes,” said both Marc and I, then caught each other’s eye with a smile.
“But they’re going to make us do butterfly again. I get water up my nose.”
“Can we go to Center Parcs in the holidays?” Charlotte said.
“That’d be cool,” Lizzie said, sitting up. “I’m tall enough for the rapids now.”
“I like the roller-skating,” Charlotte said. “And the pancakes.”
Marc laughed and looked at me. “Maybe we could?” he said, raising his eyebrows. I suppressed a sudden urge to kiss both those eyebrows, to taste his skin. “We could get a chalet and see if everyone wants to go,” he said.
“Can Thomas come?” Charlotte said.
“You luuurve him,” Lizzie said.
“I do not!”
“You do! He’s your boyfriend!”
“He’s not!” Charlotte said, close to tears. “Mum, tell her not to be mean.”
Lizzie rolled her eyes. “I’m not being mean. Why are you getting so upset? You’re such a baby.”
&n
bsp; “I’m not a baby.”
“Are too.”
“Girls!” I said. “Come on, time to get ready.”
“I’ll go,” Marc said.
I stood in the kitchen and listened to Marc usher them upstairs as Charlotte told Lizzie she was not the Messiah but a very naughty boy. I opened and closed my palms. “Come on,” I said aloud. I grabbed my mug and marched to the top of the house. I undressed and ran the shower until the water was almost too hot to bear. Bracing myself against the tiles, I let the water cascade over my body, opened my mouth so it would trickle to my tongue. I tasted salt and raised my head into the stream.
I dressed in dark jeans and the worn houndstooth jumper Ruth had given me a couple of Christmases ago, then crept down to the first-floor landing. Charlotte’s door was ajar. I put my ear to the crack. Marc was in there, searching for a discarded uniform, no doubt.
“What are you doing?” I heard him ask.
“Mr. Panda and Mr. Potato are getting married and having a baby,” our youngest replied matter-of-factly.
“Give me that Sharpie,” my husband said. “Now put this on.”
I passed Lizzie’s closed and silent door and felt a pang of something, but carried on down to the hall. I laced my shoes then yelled up the stairs that it was almost time to leave.
Waiting for my family now, I turned to the mirror above the key shelf. I studied my reflection, tried to find something familiar there. I ran my finger beneath my left eye, pulling the slackening skin taut.
“Now you’re older and I look at your face,” Marc sang as he descended the stairs, still buttoning his shirt. He stepped up behind me and kissed my shoulder. “Every wrinkle is so easy to place, and I only write them down just in case…”
“I should die!” I finished, sticking my tongue out at his reflection. I plucked a hair grip from the shelf and fixed it in my hair, then turned to the girls. “Right, are we ready?” I leant to finish tying a shoelace, wrapped a scarf around a neck.