Only Annabel opened the front door. My darling daughter stepped first into the firing line. How could he? Max had always doted on her, wistful eyes watching her whirl through life like a butterfly. I remember the joy he took in her, in both the twins, the endless gifts, games . . . Buying their silence, comes the thought. Did Aidan know? Annabel made no mention in her diary of confiding in her twin.
“And then there was Annabel’s diary,” Dom adds, as if reading my mind.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I say, clasping both hands to my mouth. I wait for Dom to offer me some water, but he doesn’t move and I press my head back into the pillows, closing my eyes, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
“I know I was rough with you that morning, sweetheart. It was such a shock, the things you told me Annabel wrote. I just flipped, I guess.” His big hands run through his hair, ruffling his usually immaculate style.
“I just can’t believe Max could—I feel so dreadful, so ashamed that I didn’t know. That I didn’t do anything. More than that, that I’d been planning to run away with . . .”
“We all make mistakes. You’ve definitely used up one of your nine lives, though.”
But I can’t return Dom’s rueful smile. I bite my lip to stop a rush of tears as the final piece of the jigsaw falls into place, completing a dark, shameful picture . . .
When things had seemed beyond repair with Dom, I’d turned to his brother for sanctuary. But he’d come on too strong, and I asked him to give me some space. Then I found Annabel’s diary and my world imploded, leaving me frightened to walk away from everything I knew to step into the unknown with Max. He felt rejected; I’d made him feel worthless. And I was also denying him unfettered access to what he wanted most of all: Annabel.
Max wanted payback, and I see now that Annabel’s name was always on that bullet; he always intended to kill her, to prevent her from telling tales on him, revealing his sordid secret. But he wanted to make me suffer first by forcing me to make the worst choice a mother can ever face. He took a gamble, but to my shame I simply handed Annabel to him on a plate. I chose her because I was hurt and resentful that she didn’t trust me enough to tell me what had been happening and, on top of that, I was angry with her for spoiling what had seemed to be my best chance of escaping my unhappy marriage. If it hadn’t been for finding her diary, maybe I wouldn’t have lost the courage to leave . . .
When Max pointed the gun at me, something deep inside me overruled all my maternal instincts and, in a split-second of terror and frustration, a moment’s unforgiveable loss of reason and control, fury took over and I turned on my daughter.
One victim; two murderers.
I became a desperate, accidental accomplice to a crime that has destroyed my entire family; I inflicted on myself the instant, heartbreaking regret that will plague me for a lifetime. Maybe that’s why Max then took his own life: he’d acted on a violent impulse, and he couldn’t bear to live with the regret. The detective was right: Max was a coward. He has escaped the pain of living with what he did. But I’m still here, and it’s too late for me ever to say sorry, or to make it better; I can never take it back now. I can never bring my daughter back.
So this is what rock bottom feels like.
THIRTY-ONE
“Dom, I need to see Aidan.” I sit upright in my bed, feeling a sob building in my chest, pressing like a rock against my heart. I want to hug my daughter so badly my whole body hurts; I’m overwhelmed by the need to hold my son.
“Later. When you’re feeling stronger. Right now, this is the best place for you. Away from all the stresses of home. The gossiping neighbors. I never knew we were such a popular family. So many flowers; they haven’t stopped coming for weeks. People certainly love to pop by for a chat when there’s a bit of tragedy to pick over, don’t they?” he says bitterly, crossing the room to stare vacantly out of the window.
“I guess everyone wants to pay their respects,” I say in a low voice. “Have you kept the notes?” I ask, the thought of people’s messages making my heart leap. “I’d love to read them. People’s condolences. That would mean so much to me.”
I’m deeply touched to hear that there has been a stream of flowers for Annabel, and eager to read what has been written about her. What a beautiful tribute. It’s such a wonderful reflection on how much she was liked; how much she’s missed. At school, her clubs, by everyone who knew her. She’s left a hole not just in my life, but in the lives of others. It isn’t a consolation, but it is . . . something. The thought of a bundle of letters with Annabel’s name on them brings tears to my eyes.
“Sure. I put them somewhere,” he says, turning back towards me with a frown. “I’d have to look them out. Bit morbid that, though, isn’t it? Don’t you think we should just move on? Put all this behind us?”
Put our daughter behind us? Never!
“I’m not ready to do that, Dom,” I say, stunned he can even suggest it.
“Well, like I say, just take your time. You’re fine here. The most important thing is that you get better.” He takes two long strides towards my bed and rests his big hands on my shoulders, pushing me firmly back against the pillows, leaning over me.
“The most important thing is that our family has been ripped apart and that it’s all my fault. I can’t just lie here. Aidan needs me.”
“Aidan is fine.”
“He’s not fine. He can’t be fine.”
“Look, let’s not argue,” he says, pulling up the chair next to the bed, and I feel ashamed. I remember him accusing me of believing I was the perfect mother, that I knew our children better than anyone. Better than him.
“Sorry. You’re right,” I say, taking deep breaths to calm myself. “I’m sure you’re taking good care of Aidan. It’s just that I miss him so very much. And I miss our daughter so badly.” Defeat washes over me. I can’t make this situation any better. Dom is wrong: nothing will ever be OK again.
“That’s just the guilt talking.” He straightens up and starts pacing the room again. “Because of what she wrote in her diary. It was a huge shock to both of us,” he says, his voice hard and his mouth a grim line.
I hear the subtext: I have to cope with this, why can’t you?
“I should have known. I never got to help her. I never got to make it better, or tell her I was sorry.” Tears burst from my eyes and I reach out to Dom, needing his comfort, needing to share this soul-destroying grief with my daughter’s father. But he steps back from me, his shoulders hunched.
“What could you have done to make it better?”
“But Max—”
“Max is dead,” Dom barks, and his face is darker than I’ve ever seen it. “He’s paid his price.”
I struggle again to sit up in bed, and I’m surprised when Dom steps across the room to help me this time, pulling back the covers and lifting me out of the bed, carrying me over to the soft tub armchair by the window. His chest is rock hard with tension, but I feel it gradually leave his body as he places me down in the chair and rests his chin on top of my head, wrapping his arms around me.
“If only she’d told us before,” I say, my words muffled against his chest.
“If only lots of things.” Dom steps away from me for a moment to grab a blanket from the end of the bed, draping it over my legs. The small gesture brings tears to my eyes. It feels like years since there has been any real tenderness between us.
“She must have been so scared. So unhappy. I let her down.”
“It’s over now. No one can touch her any more. No one is ever going to get near her again.” He tucks the blanket more tightly around my lap.
“Sometimes it’s a relief when the pain stops and they are at peace,” I say softly, remembering the doctor’s words and thinking how painfully wise they were.
“Peace. Is that what you’re looking for?” His fingertips dig into my thighs.
“I just wish . . . I never even got to say goodbye.” I close my eyes and picture Annabel’s face
, relieved that the image of it hasn’t faded like the photo in my suitcase. I wonder whether Dom has unpacked it, or if it’s still sitting in my wardrobe.
“You were unconscious, Maddie. What are you talking about?” He leans closer to my face, frowning, his hands moving up to press down heavily on my shoulders now.
“No, I mean before that. I watched her die right in front of me and—”
“Fuck. What? What did you just say?” His big body snaps upright but his fingertips still grip my shoulders; I’m too shocked by the look on his face to cry out in pain. “What the hell are you talking about? God, Max really did a number on you, didn’t he?”
“What do you mean?” I say faintly, as once again the world tilts, blood rushing to my head.
“I mean I left Aidan and Jasper at home an hour ago, with Lucy. And—”
I stare mutely into Dom’s eyes and feel the world spin out of its orbit, shooting off into space.
“Annabel was with them. She isn’t dead, Maddie—she’s never been more alive.”
PART THREE
THIRTY-TWO
“Visual and auditory hallucinations are often significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”
The whiteboard is back. Professor Hernandez is looking more animated than I have ever seen him. His usual dignified calm has been replaced by almost fevered excitement as he sketches diagrams and jots down notes on the white screen at the end of my room.
“Hallucinations. I don’t buy it. I heard Max instruct me to choose one. I saw Annabel’s body fly across our back garden to lie beneath the rose bushes. I felt her; I clawed my way towards her, I twisted my fingers into her hair and . . .”
Just saying the words takes me back there and I shut my eyes to block out the horrific images. Nothing stops them, they keep on coming, thick and fast, and my eyes are burning from the tears that also won’t stop coming. My throat feels raw from sobbing for hours. I haven’t stopped crying since Dom left—crying, laughing, crying, laughing. My emotions are all over the place.
I’m counting the hours until Dom returns. He said enough was enough; I was clearly going crazy in this place. How could I even have thought the condolence cards were for Annabel? he wanted to know. They were for me, and I needed to be back where I belonged: at home with my family. He promised he’d be as quick as he could; he just needed to collect some fresh clothes for me and get the twins home from school. He needed to prepare them and Lucy for the big news: Mummy’s coming home.
I reach for my glass of water and take a huge gulp before leaning back in the armchair next to the window, resting my pounding head and closing my eyes.
Annabel is alive.
I feel euphoric, overwhelmed—and completely baffled. It still seems too amazing to be true; I can’t stop going over and over in my mind how nothing—and no one—has pricked the bubble of my delusion in all this time. Before he left, Dom explained that Annabel had been too traumatized to visit me after my surgery at the West Mid. Aidan had been equally upset, but he’d had the idea that the familiar sound of the recorder might help to wake me up. I knew I’d been right about that; it just never occurred to me to ask the doctor whether Annabel had visited along with her brother.
It never occurred to me, because I believed she was dead . . .
And because I haven’t talked about her, no one has asked me about Annabel. I’ve said her name, but I’ve told no one the grim details of my story. Stash didn’t bat an eyelid at the idea of my having a daughter at home, and the doctor simply assumed I wasn’t talking about her because we’d had some kind of mother-daughter squabble. Only I knew the truth; and my sadness and shame stopped me telling it.
While I’m sure it made the news when I was shot, Annabel’s death would have been the story to really grip the media, yet no child was actually hurt. I expect the incident made the local headlines for a time, but no one has recognized my name at this hospital. And why would they? We’re miles out of London, weeks after the shooting . . . They have hundreds of patients here, and Professor Hernandez said his team had been given my medical case notes, details about my next of kin, but little beyond that. He talked about the bitter-sweet loss when a child in pain is finally at peace, but he meant generally; he had no idea what had happened to Annabel.
But the detectives—they told me she’d been shot . . .
No, that’s not right, I think. They talked about the first shot being misfired, and I simply assumed the bullet had somehow hit me after killing Annabel. I was so distressed during the police interview, I heard only what fitted with what I thought I already knew: that Annabel died and I was injured in the attack. They never mentioned her—or Aidan—because I was the victim.
And Annabel is alive.
I close my eyes and allow the thought to sing through me once again. The miracle of it takes my breath away; the mystery of it still bemuses me. Every time I think I’m getting closer to forming a clear picture of what happened, something emerges to shift the perspective, change the angle—and now the picture has been turned completely upside down and back to front.
I need to get home to them all. I want to see them so badly it hurts more than any physical pain I’ve yet had to endure . . .
* * *
Even though it’s only lunchtime, Professor Hernandez has closed the curtains and dimmed the lights. He sits down in the armchair opposite me, our knees almost touching, and he continues his explanations. I feel like we’ve been talking for hours; he must be as exhausted as I am, but he looks as alert and interested as ever. I’ve poured out every detail I can remember about my marriage, Annabel, the twins’ birthday, my row with Dom and the events of that terrible morning. It goes completely against the grain of my natural shyness and desire for privacy, but I need the doctor’s help to understand: why did I believe my daughter was dead?
“Temporary psychosis would not be an unexpected outcome in this situation,” he continues, leaning forward in his chair. “Especially as you had perhaps shown a predisposition towards this kind of episode. Your postnatal depression was, I would suggest, borderline post-partum psychosis that had remained undiagnosed.”
“You think I was already nuts.” I screw up my nose, feeling like an idiot.
“No. But I do think you’ve been storing up trouble for some time. Motherhood isn’t just a biological experience. Nor purely an emotional or psychological one. Physiological, even. It’s a combination of all these things. And then some.” He smiles gently.
“So I was a nut that cracked,” I say wryly. I sigh heavily and shake my head. “This is all too much to take in.”
“Let’s take it more slowly, then.” His voice is low and he frowns in concentration as he explains: “The trigger was extreme terror, of course. An excessive degree of emotional stress, not to mention the physical injury and neurological compromise resulting from the gunshot itself. These are all factors I would determine as contributing to your misapprehension.” He rests a comforting hand on my knee, but I brush it off.
“My daughter’s death was a misapprehension. A misapprehension. That won’t do; that simply won’t do!”
“I’m sorry. That was . . . Please, allow me to phrase it differently.” He sits back and rubs tiredly at his eyes, the first sign that he’s finding this as difficult as I am. “Your belief that Annabel died was a projection of your deepest fears, Maddie,” he says, speaking slowly. “You had been feeling extraordinarily guilty about having let her down, and that guilt was greatly exacerbated by fear for her life when the gun was pointed at her.”
“I’m sorry, I still don’t get it.” I cross my arms, hugging myself to contain my frustration.
“You don’t need to apologize,” he says quietly. “The brain is the most complex part of our bodies. Even I don’t understand all its subtleties, and I’ve specialized in neurology for almost thirty years. But I will try to put this as simply as I can, OK?” He leans forward again, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands lightly together as he continues
. “How about this: you felt so responsible for not having been able to protect Annabel from an abuser’s unwanted attentions that, at the point you were rendered unconscious by the bullet, your brain instantly contorted those feelings into a belief that she had died. You projected your anxieties into a distorted reality.”
“You mean, basically, I made my worst fears come true,” I say slowly.
“In your imagination—your unconscious mind—yes. Exactly that,” he confirms.
“But it was all so real. If I close my eyes, I can still see it happening as vividly as if it was just yesterday. All of it.” I rub my eyes as if I can wipe away those images, but I know they will never leave me.
“All of it? Or just Annabel flying away from you, your arms reaching out to save her,” he says, choosing his words so carefully that I know he’s making an important point.
“You think that was symbolic,” I say. “My brain inventing that whole scenario as a visual depiction of what I felt I’d done to Annabel: failed her, let her slip through my fingers.” I look up sharply, convinced that I’ve grasped it now. I look to his clever face for approval.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he says, and sits back, smiling gently.
My shoulders slump in relief. At least that’s something, even if it’s not the whole answer. “I have wondered . . . I haven’t ever been able to visualize the gunshot. I don’t remember gesturing to Annabel; I don’t remember seeing the bullet hit her. I just remember crawling towards her, knowing that I had let her down so appallingly yet again. I put that down to the images being too unbearable for my mind to allow them to come back to me, when all the time it was just—not—completely—real . . .” I cover my face, pressing my fingers punishingly into my eyes. I feel like my mind has tricked me—betrayed me.
“Exactly so. Your mind was full of guilt, and guilt became distorted into paranoid conviction. But you had already been shot, Maddie. You were already unconscious. Your brain just filled in the blanks of what happened, replaying everything over and over until it seemed to have made sense of it. The brain does not like mystery, you see. Where it perceives a black hole, it will fill it with information based on everything it does know.”
The Perfect Family Page 18