by Simon Lelic
“I wanted that fifteen years ago! Now it’s too late!” she said. “Don’t you understand? It’s too late!”
“That’s bullshit! You’re the only one who’s given up. Who’s turned her back on her son. Don’t you understand he—”
But he got no further. Their argument was cut short by the sound of the front door slamming and the echo of its reverberations in its frame.
* * *
• • •
So Jake knew. He understood the way his mother was feeling. It must have been so confusing for him. His father, on one shoulder, preaching bygones. His mother, on the other, saying nothing but in such a way that she positively crackled, distorting every other sound in the room.
Because the fact was she could barely look at him. She couldn’t look at Neil, she couldn’t look in the mirror, and her eyes came no closer to her son than the floor at his feet, the empty space just over his shoulder. She loved him, she loathed him. He needed her but he disgusted her. And all the while Alison was being flayed in the press. Raped again, violated again. Susanna couldn’t do it. She couldn’t let the enduring lesson she imparted to her only child be how to hurt someone and then get away with it. That wasn’t her and she wouldn’t let it be him.
And so that’s why she did it. That’s why she went to Jake’s room that night, when Neil was off yet again with his friends, trying to reclaim his lost childhood; to pretend that his failure as a husband, as a father, had never happened. Although isn’t that precisely what Susanna has been doing ever since? Pretending that what she did, what she said, that night never happened?
But there’s no pretending anymore. No more secrets, no more lies. All these years working as a counselor, Susanna should really have understood. No matter how hard you try to bury it, the past has a way of catching up.
19.
Dear Alison,
I hope you get this. I’m going to send it to your home, which I know you’ve left now, but maybe there’s someone taking care of all your things. Checking your post, forwarding letters, all that.
The other thing is, if you do get it, I hope you read it. Because I know you get hate mail now and probably this will just get put straight in the bin. Or maybe you’ll open it and see who it’s from and then put it in the bin, without even reading what I’ve got to say. So probably I should just get right to it. You know, before you get a chance to throw this away.
So why I’m writing is to tell you good-bye. I know when I’ve written to you before I’ve said it will be the last time but this time I genuinely mean it. You’ll see I do, I promise. Because basically there’s no point carrying on. If I could I would run away the way you did but I don’t even know where I would go. It would have to be somewhere else, somewhere different, except the way I see it there is nowhere different. Everywhere is just exactly the same. And anyway the whole world hates me. Scott and that. My parents. Everybody.
Even you.
And that’s the thing that’s been tearing me apart.
What I’ve been searching for is a way to make you understand. How I feel, I mean—about everything. But all I could think was there was no way you ever would, not after what happened. So I have to show you. That’s what I figure. So really that’s what this is all about.
How I decided was, I was sitting in my bedroom. That’s where I’ve been, mostly, since they let me out. There or down by the river. And mostly my parents leave me alone. My dad comes in sometimes with his stupid newspapers, trying to get me to read what they wrote. He doesn’t get that I don’t care what they say because none of it changes a single thing. And Mum. She’s just the same. She probably thinks worse of me than you do. She can barely look at me most of the time. I sometimes wonder how she’d react if I tried to touch her.
Although that night, what happened was, my mum came into my room. She knocked and I didn’t answer but she came in anyway and she asked whether we could talk. I just shrugged or something I guess. And Mum, she came inside and she sat down at the end of my bed, which is the closest she’d got to me in weeks. I was just lying on my side, staring at the wallpaper, which has these swirls you can follow round and round. I used to do that when I was a kid, trace the swirls with my finger.
Can I turn on a light? she goes, and I say, Whatever. So she does, she turns the light on, the little side light, and I’m waiting for her to say what she has to say. It doesn’t matter what it is, I just want her to say it so it’s over with and then she’ll leave me alone.
But, Listen, she goes. We need to talk, Jake. Properly talk. Don’t you think?
And my mum is the last person I want to talk to but there’s something about having her there beside me that feels different from all the times before. So I don’t say no. I just lie there and I don’t say anything.
Will you answer me something? she goes. If I ask you a question? She takes a breath then, like she’s getting herself ready. Are you sorry? she says. About what happened?
And I don’t know what it is but after all these weeks of trying to explain, of other people explaining, of no one getting close to understanding and me not being able to see a way out, it’s like finally somebody’s asked the only thing that matters. You know? Because I am sorry, about everything. I’m sorry you never really understood me, not the way I always thought you did. I’m sorry I messed things up so badly, that I never really understood anything either. I’m sorry I fucked up my life, basically, and that I fucked it up for everyone around me. And what happens is, I start crying. Just like a little kid. All quietly, just sort of shaking, but there are tears running down my face.
And Mum, she sees. Oh Jake, she goes. It’s OK. To feel sad, to feel regret. That’s how you should be feeling right now. It’s normal. Healthy. If it was me I know I’d be feeling that way too. I don’t know how I’d be able to live with myself.
I look up then, just as my mum looks down.
She starts crying herself and moves a little bit closer. Not touching me, not quite, but almost.
I wasn’t sure what you were thinking, she says. With everything they’ve been writing in the papers, all the things you’ve been hearing from your dad . . . I was worried, that’s all. I didn’t know what was going on in your head.
Then, what she says is, I’m glad, Jake. It might sound cruel but I am. I’m glad you’re feeling the way you do. Because if you’re sorry we can find a way past this. If you accept it we can find a way through.
Which is typical Mum. You know? Always looking to solve things when some things there’s no way they can be solved. I turn to face the wall.
Jake, listen to me, she says, and she puts a hand on my arm. But slowly, testing, like I’m hot or something. Like she’s worried she might get burned. But then she sort of pulls me round. It may not feel like it now, she says, but there’s always a way forward. Always. A way to overcome the past.
I don’t answer. I just lie there and try wiping away my tears.
The first step is to accept responsibility, Mum says. Pretending this thing never happened, the way we’ve all been doing? It doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t solve anything. Do you agree?
I do, I guess, so I nod, which just gets me crying all the more. What I don’t say but what I’m thinking is that accepting responsibility doesn’t help either. I tried that. It didn’t work.
Then, Mum goes, the next thing is, you need to find a way to make amends. Do you understand what that means? To prove how sorry you are. What I think is, if you don’t do something, you’ll never be able to move on. You’ll be feeling this way forever, never getting past the pain you’re living now.
Which is basically the way I’ve been feeling. Like there is no way forward, no way back even, just this being trapped inside my head.
And you. All the while there’s you. Thinking I hate you probably, that I’m angry at you, when the only person I’m angry at is myself. Like, it’s not your fault you di
dn’t understand me. It’s mine for not being able to make you. I failed basically, the way I’ve failed at everything my whole stupid life.
It’s just such a mess, Mum suddenly goes. All of it! I don’t understand, Jake. I don’t understand any of it. What happened, what you did . . .
She shakes her head, wipes at her tears. But I can tell she’s furious. I can tell exactly how much she blames me.
Alison, she says, squashing all her anger down inside again. I mean, I know she’s gone but maybe there’s a way of conveying to her just how sorry you really are.
She looks at me then, all meaningfully. And that’s when I see it. The way out Mum’s been talking about. I realize what it is she’s trying to tell me. She even spelled it out for me: I don’t know how I’d be able to live with myself.
Whatever it is, she goes on, however you choose to do it—it has to come from you. Do you understand, Jake? Do you understand what it is I’m trying to say to you?
Something else pops into my head then, one of my dad’s stupid sayings. Actions speak louder than words, is what he says, which I’d never really got until then.
So I put my hand on top of my mum’s, which takes her by surprise, I guess. She jerks back, which only makes me think what I’m thinking all the more. And it’s like a relief, you know? Like someone’s had their hands around my throat but now, finally, I can breathe.
I sit up. I say, I get it, Mum. I do. I understand what it is you’re trying to tell me.
And Mum, what happened was, her face just crumpled. She hugged me then, and I sort of let her, because I knew it would be the last time she ever would.
So that’s why. That’s how I came to understand. It just seemed obvious, really, in the end. The way I feel, how I feel about you: I’m going to show you. Just like my mum showed me.
Love, always,
Jake
20.
As Susanna stares down at Jake’s letter, the ink here and there begins to bleed. She wipes away her fallen tears, smudging the handwriting further, but hoping her son will somehow feel her caress.
“You killed him, Susanna. You told him to do it and he did.”
“What? No!”
“You did! Look at the letter and tell me you deny it. That you deny putting the idea in Jake’s head!”
Susanna stares again at the words on the page. She cannot help staring. She cannot stop her tears either, nor hold back the knowledge that Adam is right. If he’s wrong, then why for all this time has she tried to hide it? Why has she never told anyone what she said, not even the man she was supposed to love—the man she did love, once, and who cared for Jake as much as she did?
“Oh Jake. Oh my boy . . .”
“You killed him, Susanna,” says Adam again. “My father! My real father. He’s dead and he’s dead because of you!”
“But . . . I . . . Your mother. I thought this was about what happened to your mother?”
Adam looks at her with undisguised contempt. “My mother? I don’t care about my mother. Didn’t I tell you that already? She never wanted me in the first place. And then she went and died and left me all alone to live with him. So why the hell should I give a damn what happened to her?”
It is cruel, unforgiving and utterly logical.
“This is about Jake, Susanna. All of this, right from the start: it’s been about Jake. He was the only person in the world who would have wanted me. Who would have loved me the way a parent should. He was my only chance, Susanna. And you took him from me!”
“But he was a boy. Just a boy.”
It seems incredible to Susanna that anyone might think of her son as anything but the child he was, yet it strikes her how distinct Adam’s perspective is from hers. It’s as though they are looking at the same point from opposite horizons. For Susanna, Jake is a boy in stasis. A beautiful, lost, broken boy, who threw away his chance of ever growing up. For Adam, he is the man—the father—who never was.
Susanna can see it now. She understands every one of Adam’s questions, everything he in turn has been saying to her. All his talk about how Jake loved Adam’s mother, about how he cared for her. And Adam’s suggestion that what happened wasn’t rape, not really. The fire too, his obsession with whose idea it was, who started it, how Alison escaped the burning classroom. Adam has been doing exactly what Susanna accused the newspapers of doing; exactly what we all do when the truth is too appalling or upsetting or inconvenient even to bear. He has been seeing things differently; manipulating the facts to construct and then reconstruct the narrative until it’s the story he really wants to hear. More than that, he has been constructing a father: the parent he wished for but never got to have.
And as for Susanna . . .
In Adam’s mind—in Adam’s story—it is Susanna who stole his father from him, who dictated the shape of Adam’s life.
And not just in Adam’s mind, as it happens.
“You know I’m right,” Adam says. “Don’t you, Susanna? I can see you do. You’ve always accepted Jake died because of you. That’s why you ran. You had to. You couldn’t live with what you’d done. You couldn’t live with the shame.”
There were so many reasons Susanna ran, in the end. She told herself it was because of Neil. After Jake’s death, Susanna’s husband took their private sorrow to the press. He even let them publish Jake’s picture.
He was acting out of grief, Susanna knew. He was angry, lashing out, and he wanted the world to know the tragic fate of their son. Except Neil’s version of events in the interviews he gave affirmed every lie the newspapers had allowed to take root. The abdication of their family’s anonymity not only reignited the campaign of vitriol against their son’s victim, therefore. It also exposed their future daughter in a way that Susanna convinced herself was unforgivable.
Particularly when Neil threatened to do it all over again. This was later, after the incident with the spitter. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Journalists are always asking us to give more interviews. We should talk about this, the hate there still is out there in the community. For Jake’s sake. And Emily . . . with the money the newspapers offer, we’ll be able to give her a decent education. A holiday now and then too.” It was unforgivable, Susanna decided.
And Neil: she suddenly realized it was only the paralyzing weight of her grief/guilt, guilt/grief that had kept her at his side, which she hoped having another baby might help to lift. How she’d loved Neil when they’d first met. She’d been very young, admittedly, they both had, but his looks, his easy manner . . . once upon a time Neil had been exactly what Susanna needed. And she’d hoped having Emily might somehow save them; might bring them back to how they’d been when Jake was first born. She even managed to convince herself that the distance between her and Neil had only developed because of Jake—and that it had nothing to do with the fact that they had grown up into diametrical opposites, coexisting out of expediency and habit. But then, when Emily came along, the love Susanna felt for her daughter put her feelings toward Neil in starker relief. Having another child wasn’t about saving their marriage, Susanna realized. It was all about saving herself.
And there was the incident with the spitter itself, of course. That was another reason Susanna ran.
No matter how Neil and the newspapers tried to spin things, there were people who knew what had really happened. Scum, the woman had called Susanna. Meaning she was a traitor: to women, to common decency. There were others like her, Susanna knew, just as there were countless so-called “fans” who, thanks to Neil, now knew exactly where to send their poisonous tributes to Jake.
Perhaps if it had just been her and Neil, Susanna might have accepted the world’s attentions as her penance. Certainly she put up with the way she was portrayed in the press for long enough. It was as Adam said: they never liked her. She was too cold, too aloof, too reluctant to criticize Alison and not ready enough to cry in fr
ont of the cameras for the loss of her son. But the problem was, it wasn’t just her and Neil. Susanna had to try to protect Emily, to give her daughter a future that wasn’t stained by what had happened in the past.
So Susanna had good reasons to run. Ultimately, though, and underpinning them all, wasn’t it exactly as Adam said? Wasn’t it shame that caused Susanna to flee? To hide, moreover? Wasn’t the real reason Susanna became Susanna that she could no longer live with her old self? Adam asked her right at the beginning: Do you deny you’re responsible for what Jake did? For how it all ended? Susanna thought he meant the rape, the fire, but really he was talking about his father taking his own life. And Susanna’s answer?
I am responsible.
I am.
For what happened to Alison, for what happened to the school and for what happened to Jake. Susanna blames herself for everything.
And at last Adam can see she does too.
“You sit there crying,” he says to her, spits at her, “as though crying will make everything go away. You sit here hiding in your little hole and you think no one will ever find you. But I found you, Susanna! I found you!”
Susanna is forced to listen then as he lays out how he did. By following the signposts online, initially; all the clues collated by Jake’s fans or by those who simply made it their business to know. There was a rumor she was working as a counselor, started by someone who claimed to have been one of her patients—and that, Adam says, was just too apposite—too perfect—not to follow up. A counselor? How predictably pathetic. From then on it was easy. He didn’t have a name but he had a location, and all counselors have to register on the central directory that serves their area—assuming they want to get any clients at all—meaning in the end it was a simple process of elimination. Susanna was right to be afraid of the Internet, as things turned out. But she should have known that just because you cover your eyes doesn’t mean the danger goes away.