11
and steady, and I wondered if perhaps she was so exhausted that she’d
12
fallen quickly asleep.
13
I lay on my back with my hands clasped over my stomach and I felt
14
very much in control. This wasn’t what I’d planned— remember that,
15
yes— but I wasn’t dissatisfied with the outcome.
16
“Jane?” Her voice broke in her throat.
17
I didn’t reply.
18
“Did you hear anything?” she whispered into her pillow. “Anything
19
at all?”
20
Still I didn’t reply.
21
“Jane?” she said again, a little louder this time.
22
“What?” I said sluggishly, as though already half asleep.
23
“Did you hear him? Did you hear when he fell? Or anything after-
24
wards?” she asked. “You were there, weren’t you? Perhaps there was— ”
25
“There was nothing,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, peering
26
into the darkness to where I thought she was lying.
27
“Nothing at all?” she asked. “All that time. And nothing at all?”
28
“No,” I replied. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t hear a thing. I guess he— ”
29
“Was gone,” she interrupted. “Yes, I suppose he must have al-
30
ready gone.”
31S
That was the fourth lie I told Marnie.
32N
I didn’t have a choice, did I? How could I answer those questions
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honestly? I couldn’t. I knew it then and I know it now. And yet, curi-
01
ously, it was my denial, my self- proclaimed innocence, that nudged us
02
back onto our path.
03
The truth would have been far more damaging for her.
04
Because then she’d have had no one.
05
06
07
08
09
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01
02
03
04
05
Chapter Twenty
06
07
k
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
A life doesn’t end when a person dies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful
if it did? If you died and all the memories in which you existed
simply evaporated from the minds of their hosts, disappearing into the
15
ether. If you were erased— at that very moment— from everywhere and
16
everyone.
17
I wouldn’t remember Jonathan. I wouldn’t remember loving him or
18
marrying him. I wouldn’t remember his freckles or his strong thighs or
19
the veins that ran along the back of his hands. I would be sad to lose
20
those memories, certainly. But I wouldn’t know that they’d been lost,
21
so I wouldn’t know to miss them. I would have no grief.
22
I wouldn’t remember Charles. I wouldn’t remember hating him or
23
killing him. I wouldn’t remember his firm jaw or the narrow bridge of
24
his nose or the way he pinched his chin when he was thinking. I
25
wouldn’t remember him begging for help.
26
Marnie would never have met him. She would never have moved
27
into that apartment, she would never have loved him, never have mar-
28
ried him. He would have disappeared entirely.
29
But that isn’t how the world works. There are no blank slates, no fresh
30
starts, no clean cuts. There is only the messy aftermath of every decision 31S
you ever make. Because— and this is one of my greatest frustrations— life 32N
moves in only one direction. Every decision that you ever make will be
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written in stone, permanent, never to be undone. They are all entirely
01
irrevocable. Even if you find a way to unwind a specific decision, to un-
02
pick those threads, that decision will always have been made.
03
You chose your first job. You will never have another first job. You
04
picked an apartment in a part of a city, and you will always have lived
05
in that part of that city, whatever comes next, whatever else you choose.
06
It never stops. The decisions are always binding. You pick a partner.
07
Perhaps you marry him. Perhaps he becomes the father of your chil-
08
dren. He will always be the father of your children, regardless of every
09
decision you make from that point onward; whatever you might do
10
next, that choice will always stand.
11
It is overwhelming. I cannot escape from the endless suffocation of
12
my own decisions.
13
I would like it better if life were like a spiderweb, with a labyrinth
14
of options, sprawling out from a single, central point. We would have
15
all manner of choices, and not one would be irreversible, because there
16
would always be another path back to the beginning. But instead we
17
have only one straight thread, no choices at all, a relentless momentum
18
and only one direction.
19
Jonathan has gone. Charles has gone. And yet they haven’t really left
20
us at all.
21
Whenever I am working through a crossword, I think of Charles. I
22
wonder what he might say, if he would know how to unravel the final
23
clue, if he would know the answer that eludes me. Whenever I see a
24
man whose toenails are slightly too long, I think of Charles. I think of
25
his ugly feet and the way he insisted on wearing sandals around their
26
flat in the summer. Whenever I see a tie tied too tight, I think of
27
Charles. When a man asks for the wine menu and then peruses it at
28
29
Charles. There are so many facets of his being that are still embedded
30
in my memory and so he is never as far away as I would like.
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By contrast, Jonathan is never quite close enough. I cannot watch
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01
the London marathon. I cannot stand to see the joggers in their bright
02
Lycra, their numbers pinned to their chests, their headphones and their
03
sweatbands and their tightly laced trainers. I cannot stand to see the
04
charity runners in their fancy dress, their madcap contraptions, the
05
smiles across their faces and the laughter they provoke. Because it all
06
makes me think of Jonathan, and not of Jonathan as I knew and loved
07
him, but of Jonathan as he died.
08
There are things that remind me of him in a more positive way, too.
09
When I watch groups of men speed past on bicycles on weekends, head-
10
ing out of the city and toward the suburbs, to charge up hills and fly
11
back down, to clock the miles, and to stop for a pint and a sandwich in
12
a pub on a country lane. That was something Jonathan loved to do. I
13
think of him whenever I’m at Angel tube station, because that was
14
where we parted each morning, after toasted bagels and bananas and
15
the panicked hunt through the piles of shoes in the understair cup-
16
board and the rush to the platform, because we were always running
17
just a few minutes late. I think of him whenever I pour myself the dregs
18
from an orange juice carton, because I never shake it and that last glass 19
is always thick with pulp.
20
This is what it means to have been alive. This is what it means to
21
have ghosts.
22
Marnie and I are stuck on the same single thread, living with death,
23
never able to recover the versions of us that existed before it.
24
Are you feeling sorry for me?
25
Do you see a woman warped by guilt?
26
Well, if so, then you shouldn’t.
27
I don’t regret what I’ve done; I don’t regret any of my decisions. I just 28
wish that they were more malleable, that I could see my life both with
29
and without them at the very same time. I would like, for example, to
30
see what this life might look like with Jonathan and without Charles.
31S
What would my relationship with Marnie look like under those terms?
32N
Is there a world in which women have best friends and husbands? Or is
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it always one at the expense of the other? I would like to manipulate my
01
timeline to find the best possible version of my life, rather than existing 02
within what I can only assume is the very worst of them all.
03
I wish that my life had ended when Jonathan died. But it didn’t.
04
Because that is not how grief works. You are stuck with your life for as
05
long as you live it, even when you will it away, unless you are willing to 06
take it away. And, unwilling as I was, I had no choice but to live without 07
Jonathan.
08
And now, Marnie had no choice but to live without Charles.
09
All of which is simply to say that the story continued. I hope you
10
don’t mind me going on; we do have the time, after all. And you
11
wouldn’t want to be here on your own.
12
The important thing to recognize is that in the days after that death
13
I knew that I had made an irreversible decision. And I was content to
14
live with the consequences. I felt sadness regularly, yes, when I saw
15
Marnie’s swollen eyelids, her chapped lips, the heartbreak written there
16
on her face. But I didn’t feel guilt. And in fact, I felt rather optimistic.
17
I thought I had found a way to create a spiderweb. And I felt a little
18
safer, a little steadier, too.
19
I’m getting carried away.
20
What you need to know is this: I wanted my best friend back. And
21
it worked.
22
But only for a while.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
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01
02
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The
10
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Fifth Lie
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01
02
03
04
Chapter Twenty- One
05
k
06
07
08
09
10
T
11
he funeral was well attended. Charles’s colleagues— mostly
12
men with chiseled jaws and sharp, dark suits— brought their
13
wives, all pretty and blond in tight black dresses and patent stilettos.
14
They were accompanied by Charles’s secretary, Debbie, the only
15
woman in the group over 130 pounds and under five foot five. She was
16
in her sixties, small and stout, with cropped gray hair and a smart jacket 17
straining slightly at the buttons. I had met her once before: a couple of 18
years earlier she had come to the flat on a Friday evening to drop off
19
some paper
work.
20
Charles’s school and university friends arrived at the same time,
21
dark glasses propped on their foreheads and thin black ties hanging
22
around their necks. They hovered at the gates of the church, finishing
23
their cigarettes, stubbing them out on the railings and grinding the
24
butts into the paving slabs beneath their feet. A couple of them were
25
accompanied by children, hip- height boys in black trousers and white
26
shirts, three of them playing together and laughing inappropriately
27
loudly. I wondered if Charles, in his casket, was wearing a tie, too,
28
tightened around his crooked neck.
29
Charles’s sister, Louise, had returned from New York. Her husband
30
had stayed behind and was taking care of their younger twins and older
S31
daughter single- handedly for the very first time. Louise veered between N32
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E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
panicking about their welfare— would they have been fed, washed,
02
changed?— and trying to prove that she was suffering the most, far
03
more than anybody else. I imagined that this was probably not the case.
04
Nonetheless, she was gallantly performing a strange exaggerated grief.
05
She seemed to have an endless supply of tissues and was indulging in
06
regular mascara top- ups and was constantly hiccuping tears. Charles’s
07
mother had been planning to attend. She’d been doing a little better,
08
Louise had said, until suddenly she wasn’t doing better at all and was
09
too frail, too weak for the long journey. Marnie’s parents were there.
10
We’d expected her brother would come, too, but work was chaotic,
11
he’d said, and he couldn’t get away at such short notice and flights from 12
New Zealand were so expensive, and he’d come over soon, he prom-
13
ised, when things were calmer.
14
Marnie didn’t seem to mind. She had been quiet in the days before
15
the funeral, gliding from my bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom
16
and occasionally sitting still like a statue on the sofa in front of box sets 17
we’d originally watched when they’d first aired many years before. She
18
had cried very little. But she had woken in the middle of the night a
19
number of times, sitting upright and screaming and then waking and
20
apologizing and lying immediately back down again. She was still in the
21
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 23