by Anni Taylor
Clink, clink on my skull.
I didn’t know anyone who stirred their tea as vigorously as Nan did. The tiny square of Nan’s kitchen seemed to close in around me, the century-old cupboards giving off a faint mouldy musk.
“Women stayed and fought for their man in my day,” she informed me, the hollow of her cheeks severe in the dim light.
“There’s nothing to fight for, Nan. He’s seeing someone else.”
She didn’t blink or miss a beat. “Then give him a reason to stay married to you.”
“The reason we had for staying together was Tommy . . .” My voice fell away like crumbling earth. I hadn’t admitted that to myself until now.
For a moment, there was something bright and soft in her eyes. But it didn’t stay. I knew it was for Tommy. She loved him in her own way. I wondered if she ever wished she’d been nicer to him on the day he vanished. Probably not. If Tommy wandered back in through the door right now, within five minutes she’d be scolding him for touching the ornaments.
Luke had threatened me with all kinds of things earlier this morning. Saying he’d call Dr Moran and have me committed to a mental health facility. Freeze our bank accounts. He’d even threatened to call a reporter and tell them it was me who sent the letters. Then he’d broken down and said he didn’t mean any of it. Finally, he’d agreed to me having a short break, and he’d insisted on driving me up the street to Nan’s house.
“How long do you intend staying here for?” Nan sipped her tea noisily, her gaze skewering me.
We’d reached the business end of things now.
“Not long,” I told her. “I just need to get myself together. Then I’ll organise somewhere else to go. I need a bit of time. I’ve had . . . issues with my medication, as you know. But all I need is just some rest.”
Her mouth pursed in the way it always did when someone was doing something she didn’t approve of. “Just remember that you made your bed with your husband and you can’t just flit away.” Then she did her signature huffy sigh. “Look, you’re likely to be feeling a bit upside-down at the moment, due to those silly letters. Stay here for a few days if you need to, but then you’ve got to go back to him.”
I took the cup of tea that Nan offered me—she never had coffee here. “What if he doesn’t want me back?”
“That boy was always obsessed with you, Phoebe. It was obvious.”
“Well, not anymore.”
Another sigh. Extra huff. “Well, I’ve said my piece. What about this sleepwalking trouble of yours? How are we going to manage that? I need to know that the whole incident with the toolshed isn’t going to happen again.”
“It won’t. I promise. My psychiatrist changed my medication.”
“That’s a relief to hear. I wouldn’t know what to do with you. You were quite frightening.”
“I was? I’m sorry.”
Her sparse eyebrows pulled together. “The police took some odd things from the house yesterday. Some notepads. My old typewriter and ink. I didn’t know what they were after. Thought it had something to do with that strange fellow that’s been hanging about.”
“Yes, the police are . . . being very thorough.” I winced, wondering if she’d end up figuring out that I’d written the letters.
“They asked me not to mention it to anyone. All very odd.”
“Yeah. Odd. Nan, who’s the strange fellow that you said has been hanging about?”
“A couple of the neighbours said there’s a man who walks up and down the streets quite a lot at night. Could be homeless, though they usually don’t come all the way up here.”
“Okay. Think I’ll head upstairs for a nap.” Taking my cup of tea with me, I stepped out to the hallway and made my way up the narrow stairs to my old bedroom. It’d been my room from the time I was born right up until my first year of university. My childhood books still occupied their spot on a shelf: Charlotte’s Web, Anne of Green Gables, Lemony Snicket, and a host of other dog-eared volumes. A poster of an anonymous ballerina still hung on the wall—the same ballerina silhouette you saw on the internet, turning around and around and you couldn’t tell if she was turning left or right. The room carried the dust of many times the number of decades I’d lived in it, the dust lying thick in the cracks in the floorboards. This had been my mother’s room when she was a baby. Her childhood doll sat on my shelf alongside the books, dull eyes staring out from a brittle plastic face.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I slipped it out. It was Sass. I knew exactly what her reaction was going to be to the news that I’d separated from Luke: tightly controlled excitement. She hadn’t been as impressed with married-Phoebe as much as she had been with fancy-free-Phoebe.
“Hey, babe,” came Saskia’s voice brightly through the phone, “how are you doing today?”
“I left Luke this morning.” Might as well get it out of the way.
“You what?”
“He’s been seeing some other woman.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Before she exploded. “What! No. How could he? God, Phoebe, I’m sorry.” She paused, and I could almost hear the thoughts running wild through her head. “Where are you? Look, if you want to bunk in with me—”
“I’m at Nan’s.”
“You’ll die there. Get your stuff together. You’re coming to my place.”
“I appreciate it. You know I do. But I’m fine.”
“Sorry, babe, but I’m not leaving you alone to deal with this. You didn’t deserve this on top of everything else. It’s fucking cruel of him.”
“I know. But to be honest, I don’t even know if I care. I mean, I thought we were still a couple and everything—up until I knew about the other woman that is—but we weren’t. We were Tommy’s parents and that’s all.” I didn’t need to say the rest. Without Tommy, we were nothing. If Tommy hadn’t vanished and if life had gone on as normal, would either of us have guessed that our marriage wasn’t real?
“I’m coming down to see you after work. You’ll be there at Nan’s?” All my friends called my grandmother Nan.
I hesitated. I wasn’t ready to see anyone. I didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. The video of me placing the envelope in the mailbox kept looping in my head.
“I’m sorry, Sass. I’m just really, really tired.”
“You poor thing. You looked so tired yesterday. We put a blanket on you and tiptoed out.”
“I’m sorry for falling asleep on all of you.”
“Don’t be sorry. Don’t you dare. I have to go away for work tonight, but I’m coming to see you the minute I’m back. Get some good rest, okay? I’ll call you later.”
The line went dead. Sass was always the one to end the conversation and hang up. It was like an unspoken rule between us.
The phone rang again almost as soon as I’d dropped the phone back in my pocket.
I expected Sass again. She often forgot to tell me something and she’d call back five times in a row to rush out a couple of sentences and then hang up again just as quickly.
But it was Detective Gilroy.
“Phoebe, Luke told me you’d left to go stay at your grandmother’s.”
“That’s right. I have. Hey, it’s Sunday. Don’t you ever have a day off?”
“I am off work today. But I’m a little worried about you, so I thought I’d call. Is her house secure?”
“Yes. She’s had deadlocks for years. And she’s home during the day. Unlike Luke.”
He seemed to hesitate. “Luke said you two had a series of arguments last night?”
“Yes, we did. I just found out Luke’s been seeing someone else.”
“Seriously?” I heard exasperation in his voice. “That makes things difficult. Well, I’m very sorry to hear it. I think I need to call Luke back and have a chat.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course. It’s just that this throws in an unexpected twist. As I said, I’m worried. I’d like to think that you’re going to be somewhere where someone ca
n look out for you. You’ll be putting yourself in danger if you head outside sleepwalking again.”
“Obviously, the person to look out for me can’t be Luke. He’s got other priorities.”
“Do you have some other family that you could stay with? Somewhere away from here might be good. A change of scene.”
“A few aunties and uncles and cousins, but I don’t want to go and stay with any of them. I want to stay on my street.”
“Okay, it’s your decision. Luke told me you saw Dr Moran yesterday. That’s good.”
“She put me on new medication. I’m feeling better.”
“Well, keep getting better. I’ll stay in contact. We’ll get back to concentrating on Tommy’s case. You need to focus on yourself.”
“I will.”
The call ended.
I heard heavy scraping sounds coming from outside in the courtyard, setting my teeth on edge. I didn’t have a view of the backyard from here. My bedroom window looked out onto the street.
Gulping down the tea, I headed back downstairs. Nan wasn’t in her armchair as usual.
I stepped out through the back door. My tiny grandmother was struggling to shift a large pot of ivy against the shed. I’d tidied and swept up all the broken pots and dirt earlier this morning.
“It won’t get any sun there, Nan,” I pointed out.
“It’s ivy. It’ll do just fine.” She turned to me, a smear of dirt embedded in her lined cheek.
“You should wait and ask me for help if you want to move things that heavy.”
“I’m perfectly capable. I’ve been living here alone a long time.” Her voice held a note of sad astonishment, as though she herself couldn’t believe how long she’d lasted by herself in this house.
I frowned, noticing that she’d roughly hammered a large piece of wire mesh onto the shed door. Stooping, she began winding the ivy tendrils from the pot into the mesh.
Fine threads of panic pulled tight in my veins. It had just been a dream that Tommy had wanted desperately to get inside the shed, but the dream had stayed with me. “Nan, you won’t be able to access the shed ever again once that takes hold.”
“I’ve told you there’s nothing in there that’s of any use. I might as well use the shed to grow my vines on, the ugly old eyesore that it is.” She continued to insert the ivy into the mesh.
I wanted to stop her. But I had no reason to. It was probably just an old memory of Tommy playing in Nan’s yard that had surfaced in my sleepwalking dream. I couldn’t insist that she stop what she was doing. It was her shed and her ivy.
High above the yard, the morning sun made the top-storey windows of Mrs Wick’s townhouse opaque. But not so opaque that I didn’t catch the blurred sight of Bernie Wick’s large frame as she stared down at us from her bedroom window, her mother’s cat in her arms. She moved away as soon as she saw me looking at her.
26.
LUKE
Monday morning
TYING THE TOWEL AROUND MY MIDSECTION, I dripped water to the bedroom. It felt wrong, standing in this room without Phoebe. Like there was only half of me here. There was no Phoebe asleep in the bed like every other morning. The house was empty—just a house made of brick and wood.
I was just going through the motions as I dressed and stepped in front of the full-length mirror. I straightened my tie and stared at the face that stared back at me, my skin reddened in patches by the hot shower.
Who the hell was I? I’d lost my son and now my wife.
I needed to talk sense into Phoebe. She’d stayed overnight at Nan’s—that was enough time to get her head a bit straight. Just days ago, I thought we were starting to get our lives sorted again. She’d come out to a work dinner with me, and she’d handled it well. And she’d been taking care of the wall garden. Little steps, but positive ones.
But all along, this thing with the notes had been happening, and I’d had no clue. Until it all exploded.
I almost wished the police had charged her and put her into my custody. House arrest, or something like that. But I guessed they couldn’t do that. Hell, I remembered reading about a guy who faked his own death and he didn’t get charged. They’d called it pseudocide. Did they have a fancy name for what my wife had just done? Probably not. Probably no one in the history of kids being abducted had ever done what she had.
I tried to ignore the voice hammering at the back of my brain, telling me things were never going to be okay with Phoebe again, let alone Phoebe and me.
Picking up my briefcase, I headed out of the house. My first stop was the local hardware store to pick up some pots and plants and potting mix. Then I drove to Phoebe’s grandmother’s.
Bernice Wick stared at me curiously from the front step of her house as I parked my car outside Phoebe’s nan’s. Bernice seemed to spend a crazy amount of time out there, just watching people go past. She revolted me. People who threw their lives away were bloody wastes of space.
I lugged the stuff from the hardware store up Nan’s path, taking me three trips. I rapped on the door.
Phoebe answered it.
I wanted to see relief on her face. Or regret. Something. But her eyes showed nothing at all.
“I got some pots and things to replace the broken ones,” I started. “And I’ll fix up the yard.”
“I already did that yesterday. You can leave the new stuff here on the porch, and I’ll take it inside.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Phoebe, please, don’t be like that. I’m your husband. I just want things to get back to normal.”
She pulled her mouth in tight in a way that reminded me of her grandmother. “You mean with you and me and her? That kind of normal?”
“There is no her. Look . . . it was wrong of me to say I didn’t drop in on someone that night. But she’s just a client. We talked business. It helped get my mind off things.” It was a carefully rehearsed speech that I’d made up while I was at home. I tried to make it sound ad lib.
“And you got close enough to rub bodies and smell of her perfume?”
“What? No. We shook hands.”
“And somehow the perfume jumped onto your neck.”
“I—”
“Don’t bother.” She crinkled her eyebrows together. “You know what, I just realised that I know that perfume. I remember it. She’s someone I know, isn’t she?”
“Stop making something out of this that it isn’t. Yes, you’ve probably met her. You’ve met a lot of my clients.”
“If she’s just a client, then why are you so secretive about her name?”
“Because I’m not dragging her into this, that’s why.”
“You think I’m going to go and do something nuts if I find out who she is, is that it? Start sending her letters or something?”
“No, I don’t think you’d do that.”
“Why not? I just wrote those letters about Tommy, right?” Her shoulders slumped then, and she looked defeated. Was that her admission that she’d written them? It was probably the best I was going to get from her.
“Phoebe, I’ll forget those letters if you will. We don’t have to talk about them ever again. And I know you don’t believe me, but I haven’t been seeing another woman—not in any romantic way. Trust me, I wasn’t.”
“Even if that’s true, and I don’t know if it is, you’ve been seeing a woman you haven’t told me about. Lots of times. The same woman.”
Those wide eyes of hers—so like Tommy’s—were drilling into me. “Okay, yes.” Why did I just admit that?
“And talking about me—all your problems with me.”
“It wasn’t like that.” It was exactly like that.
“Just go, Luke.”
I inhaled the cold winter air, knowing I needed to change tactics. “You can’t stay here. You know you’ll start going around the bend spending all that time with Nan by yourself. No offence to Nan. Speaking of which, how is she going to cope if you have another sleepwa
lk episode?”
“I was fine last night. I’ve got the new meds now.” She crossed her arms.
“You’ve got another appointment with Dr Moran this afternoon. I’ll take you.”
“No, I’ll get there myself.”
“Why are you being so difficult? I’m just trying to help.”
“I’m not being difficult. I just don’t need your help.”
I wasn’t getting anywhere with her. The more I was trying, the more she was digging her heels in. Maybe it was better to leave her be for a couple of days and then she’d be ready to come back home.
27.
PHOEBE
Monday afternoon
DR. MORAN’S OFFICE SMELLED OF LAVENDER. The walls were deeply lilac. The framed paintings were that type they call naïve art, with the perspective all wrong, giving it a childlike look. I was never sure if Dr Moran thought the paintings would help people get in touch with their inner child or if she’d bought them because she genuinely liked them.
In this office, I always had the feeling I was in a dollhouse and that her patients were the dolls she played with.
How are you today, Mrs PoppyFlower? You look sad. Never mind, here’s your medicine . . .
Dr Moran was dressed in a crisp white shirt and perfectly pressed pants. Even the smile on her face was perfectly pressed. “It’s good to see you today. How are you? How have you been sleeping at night?”
“Much better.” I wriggled back in the chair and placed my feet on the footrest. Dr Moran was a big believer in footrests. She had one herself.
Dr Moran had called me earlier to make sure I was coming today. It felt like I was being managed between her, Luke, and Trent Gilroy.
“The new medication’s been okay?” she asked.
“Yes. I slept straight through. No waking, no sleepwalking.”
“That’s very good to hear. So, what’s been happening?”
“I . . . I’ve been . . . existing.”
“Getting by?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready to chat about the letters?”