Truly Madly Guilty

by Liane Moriarty

  'What? You can't go over while they're not home,' said Oliver. 'That's trespassing.'

  'Oh for heaven's sake, Vid and Tiffany wouldn't care,' said Erika. 'I'd just explain ... well, I'd just explain what I was doing.' It would be awkward but it would be worth it. She wanted to get some return on the money she'd invested in Not Pat's session.

  'And it's raining,' pointed out Oliver. Now he was crunching the cough lolly between his teeth. 'There's no point going over in the rain. It wasn't raining that day.' He suddenly swallowed the lolly in one gulp and gave her a hard look. 'You're not going to remember anything by standing in their backyard. You were drunk, that's all. I've told you before. Drunk people forget stuff. It's perfectly normal.'

  'And I've told you before, I got drunk because of the medication,' said Erika. Don't take your childhood issues out on me.

  'It's not relevant how or why you got drunk, I'm just saying,' said Oliver. 'It's not going to help. Come on. It's a crazy idea. Stay here. Tell me about your mother's place. How bad was it?'

  'This won't take a minute,' said Erika as she walked to the front door. 'I'll be back in a moment. I'll tell you about Mum then.'

  'I've made a chicken curry for dinner.' Oliver kept talking as he walked behind her. He held the door as she opened it. 'I started to feel a bit better this afternoon, and I wasn't sure if we had any coconut milk but we did. Oh, and I nearly forgot, the police came today! About Harry. They're having trouble finding -'

  'Hold all those thoughts!' Erika picked up her umbrella. Oliver wasn't normally so loquacious but a sick day at home alone always left him banked up with conversation. Also, she had a feeling those cold and flu tablets he took made him a little hyper, not that she would ever tell him that due to his horror of ever being affected by drugs and alcohol. It was cute how chatty he got.

  She hurried out in the rain across the front yard and up Vid and Tiffany's driveway. She rang the doorbell first, for form's sake, just in case someone was home, or someone, somewhere, was secretly observing her, although the only neighbour who could possibly have done that was Harry and he was dead. She waited a good minute, and then she headed around into the backyard. As she went down the path at the side of the house, security lights switched on automatically, turning the rain to gold. She hoped she wouldn't trip some alarm.

  All the fairy lights in the backyard were on, and she remembered how Tiffany had said they were on some sort of automatic timer. Just the sight of the fairy lights created a deluge of sensory memory from that afternoon. She could smell Vid's caramelised onions that Clementine had fussed over. She could feel the way the ground had gently rocked beneath her feet. The woolly sensation in her head. This was working. Not Pat was a genius, worth every cent.

  Don't get distracted, she reminded herself. Focus, except don't focus too much. Relax and remember.

  She had walked down this footpath from the back door. She was carrying the blue and white plates. She was looking at the plates. She liked the plates. She coveted the plates. My God, she hadn't taken the plates, had she? No. She'd dropped the plates. She remembered that.

  The music. There was music, and beneath the music, or above the music, there was a sound, an urgent sound, and the sound was related in some way to ... Harry. Oh, why did she keep coming back to Harry? What did that mean? Just because of his phone call earlier about turning down the music?

  She walked a little further down the footpath. She couldn't see the fountain from here. She needed to see the fountain. Her heart thudded in rhythm with the rain pelleting her umbrella.

  She stopped, confused. Where was the fountain? She turned to the left. She turned to the right. She let the umbrella fall back behind her head and squinted through the rain.

  The fountain was gone. There was nothing but an ugly slab of empty concrete where it had once stood, and Erika's memories were dissolving, disappearing, being washed away like a chalk drawing on pavement in the rain, and all she felt right now was cold and wet and foolish.

  chapter fifty-seven

  Clementine followed Sam into their bedroom, where he pulled a T-shirt from a drawer and shrugged it on. He took off his work pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. His movements were jerky, like a twitchy junkie in need of a fix. He avoided meeting her eye.

  She said, 'Do you mean it? Are you serious? About separating?'

  'Probably not,' he said with a lift of his shoulders, as if the state of their marriage was neither here nor there to him.

  She was so agitated she couldn't sort out her breathing. It was like she couldn't remember the process. She kept holding her breath and then taking sudden gasps of air.

  She said, 'For God's sake, you can't just say things like that! You've never, we've never ...'

  She meant that they'd never used words like 'separation' and 'divorce' even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, 'You're infuriating!' 'You don't think!' 'You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!' 'I hate you!' 'I hate you more!' and they always, always used the word 'always', even though Clementine's mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, 'You always forget to refill the water jug!' (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)

  But they'd never allowed for the possibility of their marriage ending. They could stomp and yell and sulk safe in the knowledge that the scaffolding of their lives was rock solid. Paradoxically, it gave them permission to yell louder, to scream stupider, sillier, more irrational things, to just let their feelings swirl freely through them, because it was going to be fine in the morning.

  'Sorry,' said Sam. 'I shouldn't have said that.' He looked at her, and an expression of pure exhaustion crossed his face, and for a moment, it was him again, not that cold, peculiar stranger. 'I was just upset about the idea of Dakota coming to Holly's party. I don't want Holly having anything to do with that family.'

  'They're not bad people,' said Clementine, momentarily distracted from the point at hand by the loathing in Sam's tone. Clementine didn't want to see Vid and Tiffany because they were a reminder of the worst day of her life. Just thinking about them made her shudder, the way you shuddered at the thought of some food or drink in which you had overindulged until it made you sick. But she didn't loathe them.

  'Look, they're just not our type of people,' said Sam. 'To be frank, I don't want my child associating with people like them.'

  'What? Because she used to be a dancer?' said Clementine.

  'She used to be a stripper,' said Sam, with such disgust it made Clementine feel instantly defensive on Tiffany's behalf.

  It would be too easy to put Tiffany into a particular box for a 'certain kind of person' and to decide that the powerful shot of desire Clementine had felt when Tiffany offered her a lap dance was merely a cheap trick of her body, an involuntary response, like using a vibrator. It would be easy to decide that Clementine's behaviour was disgusting and Tiffany was disgusting and what had happened was all just so disgusting. But that was a cop-out. That was like saying that what had happened to Ruby could never have happened if they'd been at a barbeque with 'the right sort of people'. Of course it could still have happened if they'd been distracted by a conversation about philosophy or politics or prize-winning literature.

  'Tiffany is nice. Really nice! They're nice people!' she said. She thought about Vid and Tiffany and the warmth and friendliness they'd showed them that night. They were both so unabashedly themselves. There was no subterfuge, no obfuscation. 'They're kind of sweet people really.'

  'Sweet!' exploded Sam. 'Are you out of your mind? You've got no idea what you're talking about. I've been to those strip clubs. Have you ever been to one?'

  'No, but so what?'

  'They're revolting, depressing places. They're not glamorous. They're not sexy. You've got no grip on reality. Seriously.' It was just another version of the ongoing argument of their marriage. Sam had reality gripped. Apparently Clementine did not. Sam wanted to get to the airport ea
rly. Clementine wanted to be the last one to board. Sam wanted to book ahead. Clementine wanted to wing it. It used to balance out. It used to be a joke.

  'Seriously.' She imitated his tone mockingly under her breath.

  'Seriously,' he said. 'No one wants to be there at those places. Not the girls. Not the punters.'

  'Oh, right, no one wants to be there,' repeated Clementine. The word 'punters' irked her (conservative old-man word), or was it just that everything about him irked her now? 'So I guess you and the other punters were just forced to go along.'

  'In most cases it's a drunk group of blokes and someone says, let's do this for a lark, and you go along and it's funny, but then you see all those hard-faced women gyrating about and you realise it's seedy, it's disgusting -'

  'Yeah, that's right, Sam, because you seemed really disgusted by Tiffany that night,' said Clementine. This was insane. This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn't Sam always specialised in that, hadn't she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that yes he did so say that thing he now denied? 'You were laughing. You were encouraging her. You liked her, don't pretend you didn't like her, I know you did.'

  She regretted it as soon as she said it because she knew him so well she could see how her words flayed him.

  'You're right. And that's what I have to live with,' he said. 'I have to live with that forever, but it doesn't mean I want to socialise with her. You know she was probably a hooker, right?'

  'She wasn't! Dancing was just a job. It was just a fun job.'

  'How would you know?' said Sam.

  'We talked about it. When she drove me to the hospital.'

  Sam stopped. 'So you had a fun chat about Tiffany's stripping days on the way to the hospital, while Ruby ... while Ruby ...' His voice cracked. He took a breath and when he spoke again he had regained control of his voice. 'How nice. How very innocent.'

  The rage felt as powerful and unconsenting and extraordinary as a contraction. It took her a moment to catch her breath. He was questioning her love for Ruby. He was implying she'd somehow betrayed Ruby, that she didn't care, that her love was inferior to his, and in fact, now she thought about it, hadn't that always been his implication, that he loved the children more than she did because he worried more, he hovered more?

  'You have no idea what that drive to the hospital was like,' she said carefully. She could hear the anger she was trying to contain rippling through her speech, so that each word sounded offbeat. 'It was the worst -'

  Sam held up his hand like a stop sign. 'I have no interest in hearing about this.'

  Clementine lifted both her hands in frustration and then let them drop. Their relationship was becoming so twisted and tangled, it was like they were lost in the overgrown forest of a fairy tale and she couldn't see how to hack their way back through to the place she knew was still there, the place where surely they still loved each other.

  chapter fifty-eight

  The day of the barbeque

  Tiffany drove towards Westmead Children's Hospital as fast as she dared, while Clementine phoned her parents and in-laws. They were brief but terrible phone calls to hear. As soon as Clementine heard her mother's voice she burst into tears. Tiffany could hear the poor woman shouting through the phone, 'What is it? What happened? For the love of God, Clementine, stop crying and tell me!'

  After the phone calls they drove in silence, while Clementine sniffed noisily, her phone in her lap and her face turned towards the window.

  Finally Tiffany spoke. 'I'm so sorry,' she began.

  'It's not your fault,' said Clementine. 'It's our fault. My fault.'

  Tiffany was silent, her eyes on the road ahead. What if a little girl died because Tiffany still liked to be admired? Because she knew Vid liked it? Because she thought she was so freaking edgy?

  'I was distracting you,' she said. She wanted it on the record before someone accused her.

  'I started it,' said Clementine dully. She turned and looked out the window. 'My child. My responsibility.'

  Tiffany didn't know what to say. It wasn't like arguing over a dinner bill. No, I insist! Let me take this one.

  'I was watching both girls all afternoon,' said Clementine. 'I knew exactly where they both were all the time. Except for then. Sam thinks I'm not as careful as him, but I was watching them. I was.'

  'Of course you were. I know you were,' said Tiffany.

  'She must have been so scared,' said Clementine. 'When the water ...' Tiffany looked over and saw Clementine rocking, the seatbelt pulling tight against her chest, her fist pressed to her mouth. 'She would have been swallowing all that water and panicking and ...'

  Tiffany strained to make out the words as she pulled up at a traffic light.

  Clementine bent forward and rested her arms against the dashboard as if she were in the brace position for an airplane accident. Then she sat back again and pressed her hands hard against her lower abdomen and moaned, making Tiffany think of a woman in labour.

  'Deep breaths,' said Tiffany. 'In through the nose, out through the mouth. Make a "whoosh" sound, like this: Ha.'

  Clementine obeyed.

  'I do yoga sometimes,' said Tiffany. Distract her. That's all she could do. 'Do you do yoga?'

  'I keep meaning to,' said Clementine.

  'I took Vid once,' said Tiffany. 'It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.'

  'What's that ahead?' said Clementine. 'Please tell me that's not a traffic jam.'

  'I'm sure it's not,' said Tiffany. She looked at the line of twinkling red brakelights in front of her and her heart sank. 'Not at this time of night. Surely not.'

  *

  Clementine couldn't believe what she was seeing. It was like the universe was playing with her, laughing at her, punishing her.

  'You're kidding,' she said as they pulled up behind a stopped car. She twisted around in her seat. There were cars pulling up behind them, one after another, all of them coming to a complete stop. The lane next to them came to a standstill too. They were trapped in a sea of metal.

  'If there's a side street coming up' - Tiffany jabbed her finger at the car's in-built satellite navigator - 'we could duck down and find a back way, but I can't seem to see -'

  'I should have gone with Ruby,' said Clementine.

  She and Sam hadn't even discussed it when the doctor had said only one parent could go in the helicopter. 'I'll go,' Sam had said without even looking at Clementine. Surely it was normally the mother who went. Children needed their mothers when they were sick. Just because Sam took the girls for their injections didn't give him first place in line during medical emergencies. They called out 'Mummy!' if they were sick in the night, and Clementine was the one who would go and sit and cuddle them while Sam went to measure out the medicine. Why had she just passively stood aside and let him go? She was the mother. Clementine should have gone. She loathed herself for not insisting. She loathed Sam for not giving her the option.

  'Oh God,' she said out loud. Her stomach cramped violently. 'We're not moving at all.'

  The brakelights on the car in front went off and Tiffany hunched hopefully over the steering wheel. They inched forward and stopped immediately. From behind them a car horn tooted and another one responded with a furious, ludicrous scream.

  'Oh, fuck it,' moaned Clementine. 'Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.'

  She couldn't sit still. She plucked at the diagonal strap of her seatbelt. It felt like she was being physically restrained from seeing Ruby. The need to be there with her right now was overwhelming. She wanted to scream with it. She could feel her arms straining with the desire to hold her.

  'She's in good hands,' said Tiffany. 'My niece was in intensive care once at Westmead and my sister said they were amazing. She was so ... um, impressed, and ...' She fell silent.

  Clementine looked out the window and then opened it to let in some air. She imagined herself throwing open the door and running. No footpath. She'd just ru
n along the highway, past all those stupid horrible metal cars, screaming, 'Get out of my way!'

  'I'll see if we can find a traffic report.' Tiffany switched on the radio.

  She pushed buttons, flicking past fragments of sound before finally settling on what sounded like a news report.

  'Come on,' said Tiffany to the radio.

  Finally they heard it. 'A three car pile-up,' said 'Vince, the roving traffic reporter' cheerily from his viewpoint in a helicopter. Someone else in a helicopter. 'Traffic at a standstill. It's unbelievable! This is not your average Sunday evening! It looks like a peak-hour gridlock on a Monday morning.'

  Tiffany switched off the radio.

  'So that confirms we're in a traffic jam,' she said.

  They sat in silence.

  The car in front of them moved and then stopped almost immediately.

  'I can't ... I have to ...' Clementine undid her seatbelt. The roof of the car was so close to her head. 'I have to get out of here, I can't just sit here.'

  'There's nowhere to go.' Tiffany looked panicky. 'We're moving. Look! We're moving. It will clear.'

  'Did you see how white she was?' said Clementine. 'Her face was so white. She normally has these pink little cheeks.' She could feel her self-control slipping, like a foot sliding on gravel. She looked at Tiffany. 'Talk to me about something else. Anything else.'

  'Okay,' said Tiffany. 'Um.'

  Clementine couldn't bear it.

  'I've got an audition coming up. A very important audition. It was the biggest thing in my life this morning. Did you have to audition to be a dancer?' She pressed her hands over her face and spoke through her fingers. 'What if she stops breathing again?'

  'I don't think she can stop breathing, because she's intubated,' said Tiffany. 'To help her breathe.'

  The line of traffic moved again. Stopped.

  'Fuuuuuck this!' Clementine slammed her closed fist on the dashboard.

  'I did have to audition,' said Tiffany quickly. 'For my job at the club. I went with my friend Erin. Otherwise I might have chickened out.'

  She stopped.

  'Go on,' said Clementine. 'Keep talking. Please keep talking.'