by Lisa Jewell
Anyway . . . I’ll let you decide if you want to tell the police. If you want to tell Poppy. But I couldn’t go without telling someone and I know whatever you decide to do, it will be the right thing.
Please, Laurel, forgive me. Forgive me for everything. Forgive me for meeting Noelle, for allowing her into my life; forgive me for not questioning her more when she was pregnant, for not asking more questions about the basement in her house, for not going to the police when I suspected who Poppy’s mother was, for allowing myself to fall in love with you, and for taking these last few weeks with you that were not mine to be taken. Please forgive me.
The horizon is right in front of you, Laurel. March to it right now, with Poppy by your side.
63
The film stops. Silence subsumes the house once more. A quick glance through the front window tells Laurel that Floyd’s car is gone, and that so, by extension, is he. She returns to Floyd’s office and stares at the ceiling. A choking noise comes from somewhere deep inside her. Her baby. Her baby girl. Not tramping the back roads of England with a rucksack on her back, but locked in Noelle Donnelly’s basement growing a baby for her. How long was she there for her? How was she treated? How did she die? And how could Laurel not have known? How many times had she walked those streets in the years after Ellie’s disappearance? How many times had she passed that house, her eye caught by the puff of pink cherry blossom outside Noelle’s basement window? How many times had she been but meters from her own daughter without somehow, through some powerful umbilical connection, feeling that she was there?
Tears of rage explode from her and she thumps Floyd’s desk until her fists feel bruised. She’s about to yell out again when she hears a sound behind her, the creak of the door to Floyd’s study. It opens a crack and there is Poppy. She’s wearing the little jersey and chiffon dress that Laurel bought her in H&M during their shopping expedition. Her hair is bunched inside her fist and she has a hairband and a hairbrush in her other hand.
“I’ve been trying to do a ponytail,” Poppy says, moving toward her, “a high, swingy one. But I can’t get it high enough. And it keeps going all bumpy on the top.”
Laurel smiles and gets up from her chair. “Here,” she says, turning it toward Poppy. “You sit here. I’ll see what I can do. Though it’s been a very long time since I did a high ponytail.”
Poppy sits and passes Laurel the hairband and the hairbrush. Laurel takes the bunched hair from her other hand and starts to brush it. She finds that the act is embedded in her muscle memory. How many mornings, how many times, how many ponytails has she brushed into place? And now it seems her hair-brushing days are not behind her after all. Now it seems that she is a mother again. Something warm and delicate inside her chest opens up like an unfurling flower.
“Where’s Dad?” says Poppy.
“Dad’s not here,” says Laurel carefully. “He’s had to go somewhere.”
Poppy nods. “Is it to do with what he told me last night?”
“What did he tell you last night?”
“He told me that Noelle wasn’t my mum. He told me that your daughter was.” She turns, suddenly, and Laurel can see that her eyes are red and swollen, that she has been crying silently in her bedroom. “Is it true? Is it true that you’re my grandma?”
Laurel pauses. She swallows. “Would you like it to be true?”
Poppy nods again.
“Well. It is. Your mother was called Ellie. She was my daughter. And she was the most wonderful, golden, perfect girl in the world. And you, Poppy, are exactly like her.”
Poppy says nothing for a moment and then she turns to Laurel once more, her eyes wide with fear and says, “Is she dead?”
Laurel nods.
“Is my dad dead?”
“Your dad . . . ?”
“My real dad.”
“You mean . . .”
“The man who made a baby with Ellie. Not my dad who brought me up.”
“Your dad told you?”
“Yes. He told me. He said he doesn’t know who my real dad is. He says no one knows. Not even you.”
Laurel turns her attention back to Poppy’s hair. She pulls it as high as she can and then she twists the elastic band around it three times. “I don’t know if your real dad is dead, Poppy. It’s possible we’ll never know.”
Poppy is silent for a moment. Then she says, “Have you finished?”
“Yes,” says Laurel. “All done.”
Poppy slides from the chair and goes to the mirror on the wall outside Floyd’s study. She touches her hair with her fingertips in her reflection. “Do I look like her?” she says.
“Yes. You look just like her.”
She turns back to her reflection and appraises it again, her chin tipped up slightly. “Was she pretty?”
“She was extraordinarily pretty.”
“Was she as pretty as Hanna?”
Laurel is about to say, Oh, she was much prettier than Hanna. But catches herself. “Yes,” she says. “She was as pretty as Hanna.”
Poppy looks satisfied with this.
“Are we still going to the party?” she says.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes. I want to see my family,” she says. “I want to see my real family.”
“In which case then definitely.”
“Laurel?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Is Dad ever coming back?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
Poppy glances down at her shoes and then back at Laurel. Her eyes fill with tears and suddenly the unnerving stoicism passes and Poppy is sobbing, her shoulders heaving up and down, her hands pressed hard into her eye sockets.
Laurel takes her in her arms, holds her tight, kisses the top of her head, feels her love for this child flow through her like a sudden, glorious summer storm.
64
I have both my passport and a handgun. I have a change of clothes in a small bag and a fully charged phone. My plan is to get as far away from London N4 as I can and then either blow out my brains or leave the country. I will see how I feel when it comes down to it. At this juncture I have no idea what is worse: to break my daughter’s heart or to break my daughter’s heart and then spend the rest of my life either in hiding or in jail. Plan B at least does not involve a funeral.
And so finally I have cleared up your shitty disgusting mess, Noelle. As I speak (or think, or write, or whatever the hell it is I’m doing with a dead person) Laurel will be introducing herself anew to her granddaughter and then they will go together to the twinkling Richard Curtis Christmas meal in the twinkling mews house in twinkling Belsize Park—and imagine everyone’s faces, Noelle, when they walk in together, those two fine women with their strong brows and their big brains and all that golden light dazzling the bejesus out of everyone. Just imagine.
I wish I could be there to see it.
But I denied myself that privilege when I chose my own happiness and my own needs over Laurel’s.
I’m out of London now, Noelle. I appear to be heading west. Yep, there goes Slough. And I’m feeling good. In fact I’m feeling amazing. I’ve finally shed you, like a dead skin.
I touch the gun in the innocuous Sainsbury’s carrier bag on the passenger seat. I caress its solid lines, feel the cool of the metal through the plastic. I imagine the barrel of the gun, hard against the roof of my mouth, the pressure of the trigger against my fingertip. The day is still bright and clean. I imagine myself pulling off the road a few hours hence and driving into a dark-skied, sleepy Cornish village, finding a bed for the night, or sleeping in my car. Tomorrow I would awake and it would be Christmas Day. The world would fall silent as it always does at Christmas, all those big loud lives sucked up behind a million closed doors. And where would I go? Where would I be? And the day after that? And the day after that?
I feel clean and pure, purged and new. I have just done the best and greatest thing I have every done or ever will do. Do I want to be
here when this breaks in the newspapers? Really? Christ, just imagine the terrifying photographs they would dig out of the two of us. Fred and Rose West would look like Brangelina in comparison.
I pass the Glastonbury Tor. The sun is beginning its descent and the sky is a pearly gray. Pale gold light shines off the stones and a few sightseers are thrown into delicate silhouette. I pull off the M5 at the next junction and make my way back to the tor. A road back I find a field. From here I can watch the sunset, can see the shadows of the Glastonbury stones shrink and grow in the changing light. I think of Laurel and Poppy in the flickering candlelight of Bonny’s dining table, of their faces open and bright. And then I think again of you and me, inextricably linked for infinity, our faces side by side on the front pages of the newspapers for years to come, and I know that I do not want to be here to see that. I think of Poppy, of her brave face as I held her hands in her bedroom last night and told her the truth about herself, the solid set of her chin as she bit back on her emotions, the tiny nod of her head as she silently absorbed words that no nine-year-old girl should ever have to hear. I think of how she will learn to live without me and I know that she will. I know that she will flourish. I think of my parents in Washington, the purse of their lips, the unspoken words going through both of their minds: We should have left him in the hospital. And I know that this will be my last sunset, this one, here, right now, on Christmas Eve, playing out in violent flames of red and gold across the horizon. And I know that these are my last moments.
And that is fine.
That is absolutely fine.
I put my hand into the plastic bag and I take out the gun.
65
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
Theo and Hanna walk hand in hand through a bower of white roses and baby’s breath. Petals of pastel-colored confetti float around their heads and a tinny recording of church bells peels across the urban streets of Finsbury Park. For a brief moment the sun breaks through the bank of clouds that’s been brooding overhead since early this morning.
Laurel holds Poppy’s hand in hers and watches as her newly married daughter greets her friends and well-wishers on the street outside the church. Hanna’s in pure white and her hair glitters with gems. She looks glowing and golden. Her husband stands beside her handsome and assured, his hand resting gently on the small of her back, his face bursting with pride.
How, she wonders, could she have ever thought that Hanna would be Theo’s consolation prize? How, she wonders, could she have allowed herself ever to feel that way?
After a short while the wedding party, only thirty strong, climbs aboard an old red Routemaster bus. Poppy sits on Laurel’s knee, her hands still clutching the bouquet she’d carried into the church in her role as a flower girl. Laurel loops her arms around Poppy’s waist and holds on to her as the bus lurches forward. Poppy calls her Mama. Not Granny. Not Mum. Not Laurel. Mama. She chose the appellation herself. Poppy is the bravest and most brilliant child. She has cried when she has needed to cry and she has been cross when she has needed to be cross. And she misses Floyd every moment of every day. But mostly she has been the light and the joy, the sun around which Laurel and her family all orbit. Mostly she has just been a miracle.
The atmosphere on board is high-octane and chatty. Bonny and Paul sit together at the front of the bus, Bonny’s extraordinary hat almost entirely obscuring the view through the front window. Behind them sit Jake and Blue. Blue is holding a tiny puppy in a bag on her lap. It’s called Mister and apparently will grow not much bigger than a small rabbit. She and Jake have been fussing over it like a newborn baby since they arrived from Devon last night.
On the seat next to Laurel is Sara-Jade. Poppy had asked if she was allowed to invite her, even though she doesn’t really know Hanna and Theo. And although Poppy now knows that Sara-Jade is not her biological sister, she still wants her to be part of her family. Sara-Jade looks, as always, thin and otherworldly in a silver bomber jacket and a shapeless pink dress. She is with a bearded man called Tom, who may or may not be her partner. She has thus far introduced him only as her friend. Jackie and Bel sit opposite Laurel, with a twin on either side. The boys are only a couple of years older than Poppy and Laurel has found to her delight that her life is back in sync, once more, with those of her closest friends.
On the seats to her right are Theo’s parents. Mr. Goodman looks old but Becky Goodman still looks unfeasibly young for her age. Laurel sees the drag of skin away from her jawbone and toward her ears and holds the observation inside herself reassuringly.
Elsewhere she sees friends of Hanna’s from her schooldays, she sees Paul’s father and she sees strangers, twenty-somethings in uncomfortable shoes and too much makeup, friends of Theo’s, she assumes, or colleagues from Hanna’s office.
But there are, as at every wedding, people who are not here: ghosts and shadows.
Laurel’s mother finally passed away eight months ago. But not before she’d had a chance to meet Poppy.
She’d clasped her hand and she’d said, “I knew it, I knew there was a reason why I was still here, I knew you were out there. I just knew you were.” A nurse took a picture that day of the three of them. It should have been four, of course, but three was better than two. Ruby died a week later.
Laurel’s hopeless brother is not here either. He’d flown back from Dubai for Ruby’s funeral in January and said he couldn’t make two trips in one year.
And, of course, Ellie is not here.
Laurel hasn’t told Poppy the full truth about Ellie. She said that Ellie ran away from home and then got run over and left in a wood and that at some point between running away and getting run over she’d had a baby and that Noelle had adopted the baby and given her to Floyd when she couldn’t cope anymore.
Neither has she told Poppy about the body in Floyd’s garden. She’d simply packed a small bag for Poppy and brought her to her flat in Barnet for a few days while the big plastic tent was erected over the flowerbed, helicopters buzzing overhead. As for Floyd himself, Laurel told Poppy that he’d taken his own life because he felt so guilty about pretending to be Poppy’s father when he wasn’t. Poppy had swallowed back tears and nodded, in that grim, brave way of hers. “I really didn’t mind, you know,” she said. “Because he was a very good dad. He really was. He didn’t need to feel guilty. He didn’t need to die.”
“No,” Laurel had said, wiping a single tear from Poppy’s cheek with her thumb and then rocking her in her arms. “No. He didn’t.”
The bus pulls up outside the canal-side restaurant where Theo and Hanna will be holding their wedding reception. The party duly dismounts and smooths down its skirts and rebuttons its jackets, adjusts its hair against the sharp wind blowing in off the top of the water. Paul approaches. “Are you OK?” he asks, his hand against the sleeve of her jacket.
Laurel nods. She is OK. Her life is upended in every way. She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life. And she is still, of course, traumatized by the revelations of the last months of Ellie’s life. Some nights when she closes her eyes she is in that basement, trapped inside those pine-clad walls, staring desperately up at a window that no one will ever see her through. But the nightmares are starting to fade.
Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK. Laurel is OK. She really is. Because she has Hanna and she has Jake and now she has Poppy and Theo, too. Her relationship with Sara-Jade has grown deep and strong in the months since Floyd’s death. She sees her frequently, for Poppy’s sake but also for her own. She sees something of herself in Sara-Jade, something important in some way, something to nurture.
Hanna lives with Theo now. She rents out the miserable flat in Woodside Park and Laurel no longer needs to be her cleaning lady. Everything about thei
r previous dynamic has been transformed. They are friends. And Hanna and Poppy are the best thing to come out of the horror of Ellie’s disappearance. Poppy hero-worships Hanna and Hanna adores Poppy. They are virtually inseparable.
Laurel catches Hanna’s eye across the room as they find their way to their seats. She smiles and Hanna winks at her and blows her a kiss. Her beautiful daughter. Her golden girl.
Laurel catches the kiss and holds it next to her heart.
EPILOGUE
The woman clutches the piece of paper inside her hands and stares desperately through the glass screen at the policewoman sitting there. She’d told her someone would be along in a minute but that was nearly half an hour ago and she really needs to get going before she gets a parking ticket and the frozen chicken breasts in the boot of her car start to defrost.
“Excuse me,” she says a minute later, “I’m really sorry but my parking’s about to run out and I really have to go. Could I just leave this here with you?” She holds up the piece of paper.
The policewoman looks up at her and then at the piece of paper, then back at her again. “Sorry?” she says, as though she’s never seen her before or been told about the paper.
“This letter,” the woman says, trying her hardest not to sound impatient. “The letter I found in a book I got from the Red Cross shop.”
“Right,” says the policewoman. “Sure. Let me take it.”
The woman hands the letter to the policewoman and watches as she reads it, watches her facial expression change from disinterest to alarm to sadness and then to shock. “Sorry,” she says, “tell me again where you found this?”
“I told you,” says the woman, her patience stretching very, very thin. “I bought a book last month from the Red Cross shop on Stroud Green Road. A Maeve Binchy. I only just got round to reading it last night. And this note fell out. It’s her,” she says, “isn’t it? It’s that poor girl? The one who had the baby in the basement?”