I hadn’t seen it before.
But it is you.
You have unpicked this friendship, with your tiny legs and tiny arms and that tiny heart thundering in your chest. You have created this relentless, thankless, imbalanced love.
I thought it was me—something that I had done—but it isn’t; it isn’t at all.
Do you remember the two women at the beginning of this story? One tall and fair, one shrunken and dark, entirely comfortable in each other’s company. Do you remember their strong branches, their long, tangled roots? I’ve been watching that tree wither. But I can revive it. I lost my romantic love and then I crushed hers. I created a way for us to fall back into friendship. I need us to be sturdier than we’ve ever been, and there’s only one way to achieve that.
I need to do it again.
It seems excessive. Doesn’t it seem excessive? But if I do nothing, then I am stuck here in this terrible, awful life in which people voluntarily leave me because I am simply not enough to live for and that is just not the life that I want. There is only one path that will take me there, to a life worth having. And I’m so sorry, but you’re not on it.
* * *
Call me if there are any problems,” she’d shouted as she disappeared down the corridor, still slipping her other arm into her coat sleeve. She rounded the corner. “Take good care of my baby,” I heard her sing.
“I will,” I called, and the door slammed shut.
I guess that was my seventh lie.
Chapter Forty-Three
Once upon a time, I almost had a baby of my own.
I remember the night he died. It’s possible that he was a she, but he was always a he to me. I only really knew him for that one evening.
We had been out for dinner with some friends—just a few, not too many. I had invited Marnie. Jonathan had invited Daniel and Ben, whom he’d known since school, Lucy, Ben’s wife, and Caro, who was the only woman in their cycling group. It had been nice. We’d gone to our local curry house and ordered far too much food, and bottle after bottle of beer, and finished the evening with tumblers of liqueur. We had hugged our goodbyes, and Marnie had said that she had exciting news, that we needed to catch up, that there was a man and that things were going well and when could we talk? Caro and her girlfriend were leaving the following morning to cycle through France and she promised to send us a postcard. Ben and Lucy were having dinner with both pairs of parents the following weekend and we all knew, although none of us said it, that he would propose to her in the next few weeks.
It was a normal evening: an enchanting, wonderful, normal evening. I really miss it, you know. When you look around a room or across a table and realize that you are surrounded by people who love you, who need you, who choose you. I miss that feeling of being wildly, unexpectedly lucky. I haven’t felt that way in so long.
* * *
That night the bleeding wouldn’t stop. I sat on the toilet in our small tiled bathroom and the cramps in my stomach were furious, pulsing relentlessly within me. I held my nightdress around my waist and my underwear was stretched between my ankles and flushed with a deep red stain.
I remember tears spilling onto my knees, trickling down my calves. I hadn’t known that I was pregnant, so I don’t suppose I was grieving, but I was frightened, trembling, my entire body quivering. And then suddenly I was angry. I remember this terrible noise, this terrible roar, from the depths of my stomach, a noise that thundered through my bones and filled that cold, sparse room.
“Jane?” I can remember him calling for me. I can remember how he sounded: I can hear him now as though he were still here. “What is it, Jane?”
I ignored him because there were no words with which to explain it.
“Jane. Please. Open the door.”
I said nothing.
“Jane!” he shouted. “Unlock it. Now.”
I didn’t. A few seconds later he stumbled into the room accompanied by noise and chaos as the door shook on its hinges and the wood around the lock splintered and fell to the floor. I remember that he was wearing dark blue jeans. He wasn’t wearing a belt and so they were loose around his waist, hanging on his hips. His gray T-shirt had a stain on the hem: yellow paint, I think. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were fixed and focused but his lips were small and scared.
“Okay,” he said, as he knelt on the floor in front of me. “It’s all going to be okay.”
He leaned forward and kissed me on the top of my head. He was a good man, the very best. I remember him offering me his hands and then registering that mine were wet with blood and instinctively flinching but then forcing himself to hold his still. Because he wanted me to know that, despite what was happening, he still had me and that ours was still a bond—always a bond—that would never for a moment fail.
He stood and he lifted my nightdress over my head.
“I’m going to get you some new underwear,” he said. “Is that okay? Will you stay here?”
I nodded, and he smiled, the softest, smallest smile that told me not to panic.
And then I heard him run over to my dresser. I guess he didn’t want to be away from me for very long. He returned with an old pair of underwear—once white, now gray—and a thick cotton nightdress.
“Do you need something for . . . ?” He glanced at the clean underwear in his hand.
I nodded and pointed to the drawer beneath the sink.
“This?” He held up a sanitary pad packaged in purple plastic.
I nodded.
“Do you want to . . . ?” His eyes were begging, saying, Please, you can do this bit yourself, and it makes me smile now to know that he would have done it for me had I asked. He turned away and I wiped between my legs, over and over again. I continued until I felt drier, but no cleaner. I replaced my underwear and pulled my legs apart to hold the fabric taut as I fastened the cotton pad in place. Jonathan held a flannel under the tap. He wiped my hands, one after the other, in between my fingers, and gently around the ring he had given me. I stood up and he eased the nightdress over my shoulders.
“I need bottoms,” I said.
“As well?”
I nodded again.
“Okay,” he said. “Get into bed and I’ll find them.”
I walked into the bedroom, my legs still sticky, the pad already damp. I pulled back the duvet and slid beneath, surprised by the sight of my hands, how clean they looked, how unaffected.
Jonathan handed me a pair of his own pajamas. They were red and green tartan with an elastic waistband. He wore them all the time: in the mornings as he drank coffee and read the newspaper, in the evenings when we lolled on the sofa watching films. I still have them.
“But they’ll get—” I began.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
* * *
I hadn’t known that I was pregnant. I thought back through our previous weekends—the places we’d been and the people we’d seen—and I realized that it had probably been a month or two but I’d been busy, happy, and the passing time hadn’t registered at all.
I hadn’t known—and I found this difficult to articulate at the time—but I felt as though that negated my experience. I was sad, but I couldn’t justify that sadness, because how can you miss something that never was?
And yet, at the same time, it really was something: not something big, something small, but something all the same. I saw the person those few cells might one day have become. I saw a little boy who looked like Jonathan. I saw a little boy on a little bike with fair hair and a small pointed chin. I saw a little boy who wanted to hold my hand, who swung between us, who grew up beneath us, who was loved and knew it always.
* * *
A few weeks later, Jonathan returned from his final run, his last in preparation for the marathon. He was comfortable again around me; he had stopped pausing when I entered the roo
m and glancing my way every few minutes. We ate dinner from our laps on the sofa and, because difficult conversations are often easier side by side, I told him what I wanted. That I wanted that little boy who looked like him.
And he smiled and he turned toward me and he said that he wanted that, too.
* * *
I think that Marnie would have loved that little boy. I think that she would have bought him gifts and planned adventures and taught him how to cook. I think she’d have been better for him than I am for you.
No.
I know that she’d have been better for him than I am for you.
I can’t help but admit that I feel a little excited.
Because, after this, without either of you, we will be inseparable.
Chapter Forty-Four
You are lying in your crib. You are distracted by the mobile hanging from the ceiling, the gray and white felt stars dancing on twine. She made it beautiful, this room, and perfect for you. The cream roller blind with dainty birds etched in white. The shelves piled with books and toys and pictures of brightly colored animals in glossy white frames. You are very loved.
I see your mother in you, in everything about you. In the little pink lips that sit pouting on your face, matching your pink speckled onesie. In the bright blue of your eyes. In the impatient clasping and unclasping of your fists as you wait to be fed one final time before you go to sleep.
I see your father only in your long legs, your strong thighs. I remember watching as his propelled him forward through his life and into every avenue of success. He was a lucky man, you know. He had all the privilege and such great fortune, and a charm that seemed to inspire confidence. Everyone wanted to make him laugh, to smile, to be the one to provoke something good. It is an incredible advantage to be someone by whom others want to be liked. I suppose I’d have liked to have a little charm myself.
It is hard to believe that our time together is almost over.
I want you to know that I loved you first, before anyone else had seen you or even begun to know you. I saw you first. I loved you in that space between life and not life, when you crossed the boundary between something that was not quite and something that would always be. But I never really knew you after that, never really had a chance to turn that initial love into something more substantial. I wanted to, truly. I had a life planned for us.
You are falling asleep. I’m sorry; I know that it’s late.
I’ll be quick.
I’m not afraid of what might happen. If everything goes wrong—and I know that it might—then I will be in the same position that I am now. I will still be alone.
But will anyone even think to question it? Another tragedy on the periphery of my life? I don’t think so.
As I’ve said, I’m one of those people. I suppose Marnie is one of us now, too.
This cushion was a gift. It once belonged to my sister. I gave it to her when she went into the hospital, age thirteen. I made it. Ridiculous, now, I know. Can you imagine me at a sewing machine? The embroidered cake on the front was a joke. She was amused, but our parents were livid. They couldn’t believe that I would be so insensitive when she was so ill and it made us happy to see them so angry. She gave it to you when you were born. Your mother had this rocking chair already, shiny white wood, and she said that it needed something more, something human, something loved.
Right.
Stop fidgeting. Enough of that now.
It’s time.
The Truth
Chapter Forty-Five
The pillow is in my hand—its scratchy fabric, its cushioned core—and I’m lowering it slowly, entirely in control, when the front door opens so frantically that it flies all the way back on its hinges. It crashes against the wall, the chain jingling as it swings, the clunk as it slams itself shut again. There is this moment then when the room is in freefall. And then it’s her footsteps on the stairs and it’s clear immediately that something is wrong because they are fast, pounding, and she isn’t even careful to avoid the creaks, the ones with the weak wood, the ones that might wake the baby.
When she appears in the doorway, she is chaotic and her hair has fallen loose at the front, stuck against her skin. Her face is flushed and her eyes are wet, wild, bloodshot, blinking like a butterfly in flight, her lashes set by tears. She is trying to breathe, to steady herself, but she is failing and the sound she is making is weak, just a whimper.
She darts toward the crib and droplets of moisture from the surface of her coat seep into my sweater, bleeding through to my skin. “Jane!” She is shrieking. “What did you— Audrey?” She leans over the crib. “Sweetheart?” The belt of her raincoat is undone; it hangs around her calves, dripping water onto the carpet. Her hands curl around her daughter and, as they do, something falls from her pocket, tumbling onto the mattress. I step closer, to see more clearly, and there is this burst of surprise, a surge in my chest.
It is a phone.
And it is this room.
And it is me, in miniature, reflected on that screen. I move toward the crib, to balance myself on its frame, and the mirrored version of me goes, too, matching my movement.
“What is this?”
But I needn’t have asked, because I am already scanning the room for the camera, the counterpart, and there it is: another phone perched on a shelf beside stuffed animals and books stacked in piles.
The shock is its own inimitable thing, like a virus stirring inside me, crawling up from my stomach like acid.
“I heard you, Jane,” she says. “I heard what you said. I checked in at the pharmacy. I wanted to see that she was okay. I listened the whole way home. And if I’d not been going so fast . . .” She closes her eyes, squeezes them shut, and bites her lips together. “You were talking about Charles, and about the night he died, and then . . .” A tremor falls through her body and, in response, Audrey gurgles, kicking her legs, the flesh of her thighs jiggling, dimpling.
“It isn’t what you think—” But there are no words with which to finish the sentence, no way to undo what had already been done.
“Don’t,” she hisses. “Another lie? Is that what you’re looking for? I’ve been such a—”
“Marnie, I—”
“I heard everything, Jane. That you finished work early the day he died. I was so relieved that you were here, to hear your voice in this room. And then—what was it?—that you had a key. And I didn’t think to question it at first; I have always assumed the best of you, never doubted you, not once in—what, twenty years?”
“I can explain—I—”
“Jane,” she says.
I shudder at the sound that my own name makes, like the bark of a dog, the way it comes from the back of her throat. I see then that there is no way to disguise the truth: there are no more lies.
“I’d like you to put down the cushion,” she says.
It is still hanging from my hand, soft against my thigh, and I let it fall to the floor.
She walks out of the nursery. It is so dark outside, just the streetlamps casting patterns against the sidewalk, and this room is so eerie without them in it. I feel the beginning of an almighty grief swelling within me and yet it is too soon to see it fully. I follow her.
She is at the top step, gazing down the stairs, and her coat sleeve is trembling, just slightly, almost imperceptibly, and I know that she feels it, too: this inexplicable fear.
We have held the strings and dictated the shape of each other’s lives. It is a frightening thing to live with, and even more unnerving to lose. There is hope in me, then, in that moment.
Audrey gurgles—almost a giggle—and her little fist furls in an auburn curl. She tugs and Marnie turns back toward me. Her cheeks are rosy, lined by streaks of mascara. Her eyes are swollen, and the edges of her lips have blurred into the surrounding skin.
I know those features in perfect detail.
But, somehow, she seems startlingly unfamiliar. There is something new here now, something more.
“Leave,” she says, eventually. “Get out.”
Afterward
Four Years Later
Chapter Forty-Six
Jane is sitting in her car—she has learned to drive in the intervening years—and she has stopped between the school playground and the train tracks. She has been awake for hours—since three, almost four—and it is still early now. The sun is there in her windshield, rising slowly between the office blocks at the end of the road. She reclines her seat and pulls the blanket from the backseat over her legs. A train thunders past, rattling on its tracks: one of the very first of the day. The empty windows blur together.
Jane remembers traveling by train—she used to do it all the time—and she is relieved to live in the suburbs now, in a town three stops from the end of the tracks, with little need to visit the city itself. She owns a flat—her sister would have approved—in a redeveloped mansion house, carved into seven apartments, decorated in muted grays and whites. She likes the sinister intermingling of old and new: the fireplace with its perfect symmetry, the sleek white kitchen appliances, the interlocking plastic floorboards. She hopes that there are stories hidden in the walls, secrets silenced by a layer of plaster and a coat of fresh paint.
Her own secrets are very quiet now. There was a moment that felt daunting, just after things fell apart, but she’d held her nerve. She’d told the police that she hadn’t said anything of the sort—“A confession? Certainly not!”—and that it was a shame that the baby monitoring app was nothing more than a live feed, that it hadn’t recorded her words, because, if it had, it would have proved her right.
Seven Lies Page 29