Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t. You’ll need to ask your wife for that information.” Jacob pushed away hard from the desk, partly for momentum, mostly not.

  Outside, he furiously jabbed at his phone. Fiona picked up after three rings. “What is it, Jacob?”

  “I’ve come for our appointment but you’re not here,” he said.

  “It’s my appointment,” she said.

  “Don’t punish the baby.”

  Silence.

  “We’re still the baby’s parents, regardless of what’s happening with us.”

  “You should have thought about that before you cheated on us.”

  “Did you listen to nothing I said the other day? Sweet Jesus, Fiona, I’m not cheating on you. I’ve got stuff I need to sort out, and I don’t even care if you believe me right now, but I’m not cheating on our baby and you can’t shut me out like this.”

  He heard Fiona take a deep breath. “Fine. You can come to the next appointment, if you answer me one question.”

  “Blackmail now? Fff.” Jacob trailed off and sought a shot of patience from the sky. “Fine. What’s the question?”

  “Is there another woman?”

  “Not in the way you mean.”

  Click.

  The phone went straight to voicemail as soon as he tried to call back. As patients shoved in and out of the surgery doors, Jacob kept calling until he had barely any battery left, and no idea what to say if she did answer.

  “Hi, Amy, it’s Alex again.”

  Amy’s breathing made its gentle “shh-shh” sound like the sea retreating. Her skin was almost luminous in the sunlight and her face looked softer than during the last visit.

  It was easy to imagine Amy as a little girl, sitting in the garden, pouring water between cups. Or catching ladybirds on the ends of her fingers and peddling in decreasing circles on a tiny bike. Bob and Jo would have watched her grow from a little thing to a young woman. Did they feel misplaced relief that she was no longer small and vulnerable?

  Of course, Alex realized, she was just reimagining her own childhood. When she’d sorted through her mother’s things she’d found a small leather photo album at the bottom of a box. Inside, pictures of Alex on a trike, Alex with a four-leaf clover, Alex sitting in a washing-up bowl, playing with a bucket. And one of her father in his sixties, two-year-old Alex folded into the crook of his elbow, both smiling rigidly. She couldn’t remember meeting him then, didn’t remember any visits clearly except the last one.

  She was eleven and about to start high school. He had shown up, flustered and irascible, with a My Little Pony sticker book that Alex at once hated for its babyishness and loved because it was all there was.

  “I didn’t think I missed having a dad, you know,” Alex told Amy. “I didn’t know what it was like to have a real dad anyway. I mean, a dad who doesn’t have to keep you secret from his wife. But the older I got, the more I felt cheated, like I’d missed out on something fundamental. I bet it would have been different if I’d had a stepdad like Bob,” Alex said carefully, watching Amy for tiny reactions.

  Alex’s father was a high court judge, a highly regarded one. He died just after her twelfth birthday, by which time he was nearly eighty. Her mother was left a sum of money and that’s how his wife found out about Alex. It was all there in the will.

  “My mum had held out for years, Amy. I think she’d hoped having me would get her a pay bump. Obviously she saw other men on and off—lots of them actually,” Alex snorted, “but she was always holding out for that golden ticket.”

  Alex closed her eyes. She had absorbed all the talk of “The Judge” and ignored as much of it as possible. She hadn’t asked about her siblings after the first time. Her mother had not reacted with kindness to Alex’s lonely questions.

  For a while after he died, they would drive to the cemetery at night and her mother would rage about the family plot and the discrepancies on the stone. Her mother would pour red wine from a Thermos and what sometimes started as a toast would fast descend into yelling at the gravestone. After a few months her mother fell in with a new boyfriend, and the mourning abruptly ended.

  Alex sat back in the hospital chair and looked around Amy’s fabric room. It must have been bigger than her bedroom at Warlingham Road had been. A sort of softened version of it. Alex imagined Jo and Bob carefully removing the posters from Amy’s walls at home, rolling them up and carrying them like newborns into the hospital. They would have unfurled them, maybe quarreled over where best to put them for “when she wakes up.” Or perhaps they moved silently, tacking the posters up to the one solid wall, working without words.

  Thinking about her playlist, she noted the band names from the posters in her Moleskine. Pulp and Blur, she already knew, but there were several T-shirts with pictures on the front folded on a chair. Alex walked over to them, looking over her shoulder to be sure she wasn’t being watched. They appeared worn and faded, the kind of aging that makes them soft. Alex touched the first T-shirt gently and eventually picked it up and held it from the shoulders so it unfurled. It had pictures of Iggy Pop on it, in a pastiche of Warhol’s “Marilyn Diptych.” Alex folded it carefully and put it to one side. The next T-shirt was a blue Blur T-shirt, possibly the one Amy had been wearing on Alex’s first visit to the ward. Without picking up the last, Alex could see the familiar typeface of the Smashing Pumpkins. She folded them all back up and placed them neatly back on the chair. From everything Bob had said, she imagined Jo would have taken great care over folding clothes, laundering for her little family.

  Chaos and crisis, those were the breeding grounds for bad things to go on unnoticed. Not enough eyes watching. Visitors who should not have been made welcome, slipping in through cracks. Nothing about Jo and Bob’s life smacked of chaos, or distraction. The tiny little house, the regular jobs, the one child. What could they have missed? How could they have missed anything? But they missed Paul. And maybe, if Paul was to be believed, they missed an older guy too.

  Alex thought of her own mother. She had slept through whole days, leaving Alex to run empty for the school bus in the previous day’s crumpled clothes. So many times she wasn’t there. And nothing dramatic had happened. All those dark corners and very little happened. So why Amy?

  Alex looked at the posters, and the silence of the ward boomed. She took her iPhone from her bag, pulled out her earphones and tucked one bud into Amy’s ear, the other into her own. She leaned in, cocking her head toward Amy, scrolling until she found the right playlist. She put the volume way down so it was barely audible, and allowed Pavement to seep into their ears. Amy’s lips ever so slightly parted and a long exhalation seeped out. Tonight, Alex would add the others—Iggy, yet more Blur, Smashing Pumpkins.

  When Alex had listened to the mix on the way down to Devon, she’d allowed herself to mull over her own cultural experiences of that time, her 1995. She’d thought about using that imagery to inspire some personal connection, to help open up the article. Until it dawned on her that one of the biggest challenges with this piece wasn’t finding her way in, it was unpicking herself from the story altogether. In her best work, she’d always been the story.

  As her mother had lay concave as a chicken carcass, whiskey sour untouched on the hospice nightstand, Alex had scrawled her thoughts and observations into a notepad on her lap. As her mother took her last, ragged breath, Alex had noted her feelings, the accuracy of the term “death rattle,” her sole situation in a room occupied by two just moments before. She had watched her mother’s face wilt as the sun came up. She’d sent her five-hundred-word column to her editor in a series of long text messages as the day broke, gulping warm bourbon from the rubber hot water bottle usually tucked in her mother’s nook.

  The morning after her mother died, Alex had returned to Matt’s arms but didn’t cry for four days straight. She didn’t cry until she read her column that Sunday, and finally knew how she was supposed to feel.

  Her compassionate leave was dead time. She
spent it sculpting the house into their home. As she prepared to go back to work, she had her own surprise hospital stay. And then Matt left.

  She’d returned to her Tuesday column, working on it from home in wine-splattered pajamas. She stared at the blank page for three nights in a row, head swimming with painkillers and wine. Whiskey was too strong for pills like those. The white space had danced around as she’d tried to catch a line. Finally, twelve hours after her deadline had passed she wrote:

  Question: What have my mum, my baby and my husband got in common?

  Answer: I’ve lost them all. It’s not a great punch line, but it’s the only one I’ve got…

  Four hundred and seventy words later, she emailed the column in, crawled halfway up the stairs and passed out.

  Her phone woke her up three hours later. “Firstly,” the voice had said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then he’d asked, though she’d barely known who he was, “Can you come in this morning? We need to talk.”

  Two hours later, hair still wet from a cold shower, Alex held her head still in the conference room and tried to work out what face she should be trying to pull as they talked.

  “We need new ground,” said one of the execs she barely recognized from the other side of the walnut table.

  “This miserablist stuff has served us well but it’s getting old hat. People become blind to it after a while. You know?”

  “I see.” Alex had managed to say, focusing on the basket of fruit at the center of the table to keep her eyes straight.

  “What other ideas do you have?” they’d asked.

  “This is all I’ve got right now,” she’d burped, and coughed the words away.

  “Alex, perhaps take a bit longer, you’ve had a terrible time,” said the woman exec.

  “Yes.” The editor had nodded. “Richard is covering your column and the reception has been good. Very good. There’s no rush to return. And when you’re ready, we’ll look at other opportunities for you.”

  Alex had stood quickly, knocking her knee so sharply on the table leg that tears splashed from her eyes without warning. “Forget it,” she’d said. As the anger swept up her chest, she’d let it out with a “Fuck it all.” Then she’d screamed it to make certain they’d heard. “Fuck it all!” and then “Fuck you!” And she’d wobbled out of the room and into the hands of the summoned security guards. She’d hit the darkness of The Flowers pub minutes later. She’d drank until she could barely squint, and fucked the glass washer with the weepy eye in the tiny kitchen off the bar, door open. She’d made it into the media gossip column in Private Eye that week.

  Alex looked at Amy’s clear skin. Barely a wrinkle, just a tiny dusting around her eyes and darker hairs on her top lip than she probably would have recognized. There was one sprig of gray hair along her parting. Alex reached up and plucked it out. Letting the hair fall to the floor, she stroked Amy’s face and felt the skin give a little beneath her hand. The lightest of light sighs came from Amy’s open mouth.

  Okay, I’m just going to say it. I think my secret might be a bit of a case.

  I’ve had some time to think about it. In fact, I’ve had nothing but time, stretching out in every direction I look. I’ve run things over and over in my head from every angle until I wonder if I’ve changed their shape.

  But the more I run through them, the more my memories of him sour a bit. Like, his behavior doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Not like mine does, but even ignoring why it’s obviously wrong, the situation should never have arisen. I mean, he’s a lot older than me. That’s for starters. When we first kissed, I was in my school uniform. A school uniform he knows only too well. That’s a bit weird. It is though, isn’t it?

  I was fourteen when I met him for the first time, fifteen when we kissed, and he knew it. He knows exactly who I am.

  He’s a good-looking guy. By “good-looking,” I mean crazy bloody hot. Fit too. You can tell just by the way he carries himself, tall and confident, that he’s in shape.

  Why would someone who looks like that want a fifteen-year-old girl? He could have the pick of the bunch if he just wanted something easy, so why doesn’t he? He has plenty of opportunity to pursue actual women, professional women. Maybe he has gone through them all and he’s left to move his finger down the list and start on the teenagers. I don’t think so though, but maybe that’s wishful thinking. We all want to be chosen, don’t we? Want to be someone’s special one, the object of desire rather than yet another body in a barrel load. But the more I think about it, mull over it, roll it around in my brain and dissect it, the grubbier it all seems.

  And he started it. Oh that sounds grown-up, Amy. But he did, and I think that’s part of the problem. If I’d pursued him, dressed up to look older and tricked him, met him under different circumstances, that would be different. But he pursued me. He took every first step.

  From turning to me that day and starting a conversation, when no one else was in the room, holding my gaze too long and sitting too close, he started it. The way he called me pet names, really drawing out the sounds and smiling so his teeth flashed. I should have moved away, should have made my excuses and left. But I didn’t. It wasn’t just because he’s, as I’ve already said, crazy bloody hot, but it was also out of politeness and obligation. An adult talks to you and you talk back.

  I guess I’m thinking along these lines to make myself feel better. Trying to wriggle out of it because the truth is, I should have stopped it before it crossed the line. He shouldn’t have kissed me but I shouldn’t have kissed him back. I shouldn’t have liked it. I should have been upset, or disgusted.

  He shouldn’t have touched the fabric of my skirt like that, or run his fingers down my back but I shouldn’t have run home with a smile on my face as wide as the River Eden. I shouldn’t have run straight into my bedroom, slammed the door and lay on my bed, grinning like a Cheshire cat and running it over and over again in my head like a dirty movie.

  He wasn’t some lech either. He gave me a lift home once and he could have tried anything but he didn’t. He could have driven us off somewhere else, carried on where we left off in his kitchen, but he didn’t. He talked to me kindly, brushed my tears away and took me home. And the dark, nasty truth of it is that I didn’t stop wishing he’d taken advantage of the situation. I didn’t stop wishing that another situation would arise because I knew, just like I still know, that if it had, I would have grabbed it with both hands and not given a damn about right and wrong.

  So if he is a case, what does that make me?

  Alex had been putting off visiting the optimistically named “park” where Amy had been found all those years ago. It was time to brave it, but she didn’t like it on sight. The trees were tall as sin, lurching in the fierce wind. Dew hung wet and thick on the ground, twinkling on the spiders’ webs and crushing leaves into the grass with its watery weight.

  It was still early on a crisp Saturday morning, but there were already several teams of Chinese families gathering early sweet chestnuts, pulling the brown bellies from the spiky green sheaths and stuffing them mechanically into carrier bags.

  Mechanically? That was the kind of sweeping racist statement her mother had frequently oozed, thought Alex.

  Kent was full of chestnut trees, but it was “uncouth” to stoop down to collect them. “Floor food,” her mother had spat when she’d caught Alex stuffing chestnuts into her pockets as a little girl.

  Alex had woken up today haunted by her research the afternoon before. And the feeling was enhanced in this dark, cloudy place.

  The visit to Paul Wheeler had left her more confused than ever. He was shifty, and almost certainly lying about something. Was there any truth to his “older fella” story, or could this just be a cover story? Could he be the “fella” in question?

  No matter which angle she approached the idea from, it was hard to imagine he could have committed a sex crime on his own daughter, and executed the attack well enough to get away with it. The question
mark that throbbed brighter than ever was the consensual element, the lack of bruises in the most private of places. As unpalatable as it was, there was one possible explanation, where previously there’d been a de facto alibi for Wheeler in Alex’s head. It even had a name. Genetic Sexual Attraction.

  It was such a firm and definite phenomenon that it had an acronym. GSA. And those three letters stood for the possibility of Paul Wheeler and Amy Stevenson engaging in an intense sexual affair. The thought of it, when Alex allowed herself to think while she researched, curdled her throat.

  GSA, she’d read, often happened in cases of close relatives meeting for the first time as adults or adolescents. Adoptees, long-lost first cousins…unknown parents. A few couples had even found they were father and daughter only after marriage and children of their own. It was, Alex had read with a scratchy swallow, felt more keenly when relatives closely resembled each other. Alex thought of Paul with his blue eyes shining. She imagined him fifteen years younger, tall, handsome, his sparkling eyes locking on to Amy’s identical irises. His patter irrelevant beside that unfathomable connection. A connection that maybe, just possibly, led Amy here, to this cold, damp slice of nowhere.

  Alex shivered. As well as the gangs of trees sprouting haphazardly in acres of ragged wet grass, there was a little lake surrounded by big jagged rocks. With every sinking step into the muddy grass, Alex felt more nauseated. Amy’s final resting place as was intended. It wasn’t a nice place to die.

  In July, the grass would have been lush and green. The trees would have been stumpier fifteen years ago, standing still in the summer air. Maybe sparing a rustle of leaves at night.

  Alex imagined the search party, carefully combing the land with sticks, line by line, hoping not to find anything. How many of those trudging through the tall summer grass secretly believed Amy had run away? Until that fateful connection of wood to cooling body, meters from where Bob had been thrashing his own angry, desperate stick.