by Lana Newton
What was that sound? It was making her ears ring. High-pitched, desperate screaming. Was it him? Or was it her?
Finally at the bottom of the stairs his body twitched one last time and remained still, like a rag doll broken and spent. He was lifeless on the floor but the sound didn’t stop. It must be her, she thought. She was the one screaming. She wanted to go to him, needed to go to him, but her body refused to obey. At the top of the stairs she rocked back and forth, watching him and crying for him.
The darkness was closing in on her.
* * *
Blink-blink-blink, went the lights outside. Every year before Christmas, the whole street put up elaborate decorations, garlands, wreaths and nativity scenes. The houses competed with one another for the right to be called the brightest, the jolliest and the most festive. There were Santas and Rudolfs and giant red stockings. How did she know that? She remembered! The memory rose to the surface naturally, without any effort on her part. It just popped into her head as if it had always been there, as if it had never gone away. Paul and her driving home one night not long after they had moved into their home and marvelling at the stunning Christmas lights of the houses on either side. ‘I don’t know what’s more disturbing,’ Paul had said, ‘the fact they would go into all this trouble or the fact they would do it ten weeks before Christmas. It’s not even Halloween.’ She remembered laughing and asking whether they were expected to decorate their own place in a similar fashion. They couldn’t possibly be the only dark house on the street of light. She didn’t want to be The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. ‘Yes,’ Paul had agreed, ‘we have to fit in. Our house must be the most well-lit on the street.’ But of course, real life intervened and they had never decorated their house.
Now, as she huddled into the corner on top of the stairs, she realised the blinking lights had nothing to do with Christmas. There wasn’t anything festive about them. They filled her soul with dread, not joy. It was an ambulance, flashing blue. Who had called them? How much time had passed? Minutes, hours? How long since the push, the fall? How long since she’d killed her father?
She was just like him after all. The daughter of a murderer was now a murderess herself. The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Her father had been right all along. Judge not, that you be not judged.
Paul was home. She could hear his voice. He was talking to someone. Soon two people appeared. They were carrying a stretcher.
The lights snapped on in the living room. They burned her eyes. She closed them and didn’t open them again until she heard their voices. ‘He’s still alive. He’s breathing.’
Suddenly Paul was leaning over her. ‘Are you okay?’ he kept repeating. ‘Are you okay?’ She jumped to her feet, pushing him out of the way and running down the stairs. Her father was still breathing. She strained to see him from behind the paramedics. They were blocking him from her view but she could hear his voice. He sounded strained, as if talking was costing him what little life he had left. ‘It was an accident, I slipped and fell. I’m just learning how to walk again after a car crash.’
‘Please, Sir, don’t talk. Try to relax.’
‘My daughter needs your help. She’s in shock. Please, make sure she’s okay.’
He was breathing heavily, like he was taking his last breaths. She wanted to hold him in her arms, to tell him how sorry she was. To tell him she was just like him. Like father, like daughter. But she couldn’t get to him. There were too many people.
‘We are losing him,’ she heard. A flurry of activity followed, someone was running and shouting, and before she knew it, her father was on the stretcher and she was pushed out of the way, while he was being whisked away from her. They were taking him somewhere. She shouted to them, begged them to wait, to let her see him one last time. But no one heard her, no one paid her any attention. Was she shouting or whispering?
The door slammed and she heard the noise of the engine, followed by the sirens. What if he died and she never spoke to him again? She couldn’t bear that thought because the last thing she had said to him was that she despised him. The last thing she had done to him was push him down the stairs. But the last thing he had done was lie to protect her.
Hands tried to stop her. Hands, voices. The voice directly over her sounded familiar. It was Paul, trying to calm her down. Pushing him out of the way one more time, she ran outside barefoot, where wet slush was falling from the dark skies. Snow in November? It was an aberration like this day had been an aberration in her confusing, forgotten life. She ran on the snow, not noticing the cold. Over and over she slipped and got up. Was she trapped in her worst nightmare? Any minute now she would wake up and none of it would be real. Her mother would still be alive, Claire wouldn’t be a murderess and they wouldn’t be taking her father away with the blue lights flashing.
But she didn’t wake up. She continued running and soon she lost sight of the ambulance.
The blue lights were gone. And so was her father.
Epilogue
A Year Later
Paul was in the nursery, assembling a cot, so that their little one would have a place to sleep once she finally made her entrance into the world. Exactly one week overdue, the baby was in no hurry. But her daddy was in a hurry. This cot wasn’t going to build itself. He was rushing and making a mess of things. Claire, nine months pregnant and loving it, was in her favourite rocking chair, watching him, chanting quietly to her unborn baby, ‘Down in the valley, the valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow.’
The baby had her own room, lovingly painted and decorated by her mother, who in the later stages of her pregnancy had become obsessed with building the perfect nest for her little one. The baby had a year’s supply of nappies, and more clothes than she would ever need. And she had a name, Angela.
Claire had put on weight. She was no longer a swan, fragile and delicate. Paul called her his hot cross bun. He said the weight suited her. She didn’t believe him, even though he seemed incapable of keeping his hands off her.
He was sitting on the floor, surrounded by bits of wood and fabric, but his gaze was on Claire. She could tell he wasn’t concentrating. ‘Come here,’ he called, his eyes twinkling.
‘What for?’ She didn’t stir and only her chair rocked, moving back and forth on the carpeted floor.
‘What do you think?’ He winked.
Her face stern, she fought laughter. ‘There will be none of that. You have a job to do.’
‘I might need your help. It appears I have no clue what I’m doing.’
She shrugged, curling up like a pretzel. ‘I have mere days left of doing absolutely nothing and I plan to make the most of it! It’s a husband’s job to build things while his wife is expecting. I’m afraid you’re on your own.’ There was no way she was leaving the comfort of her chair to sit on the cold floor next to her husband, who was shaking his head in exasperation and swearing at a piece of unfinished furniture.
‘Would you like some popcorn while you’re watching and mocking?’
‘That would be nice.’
He got up then and perched on the edge of her chair, tickling her belly, not letting go of the instruction manual. ‘I’ve never met anyone so …’
‘Smart? Savvy? What?’
‘Spoilt!’
‘That’s because you’ve never met anyone so pregnant.’
‘Is that so?’ His lips were in her hair, his arms around her.
She was short of breath and gasping. Reaching for the instructions, she said, ‘See, you’re doing it all wrong. It clearly states here, connect point A to point B. That is not point A.’
‘So now you want to help?’
‘I’m not helping. I’m micromanaging. Nina calls it my backseat driving.’
Paul motioned at a pile of unconnected wooden planks. ‘I used to be good at this. I’m out of practice.’
‘No, what you are is procrastinating.’
Kissing her on the tip of her nose, he went back to the task at h
and. ‘You might be right, oh clever and savvy wife. What I don’t understand is why they can’t deliver the cot in one piece. It certainly cost enough.’
‘You were the one who refused to pay for the assembly. When they offered it to you, what did you say? That you want to build it for your daughter.’
‘What we need is some inspiration. Music maybe? Queen? Aerosmith?’
‘Will music make you more productive? In that case, Mozart. It’s good for babies. Makes them smarter.’
‘If you say so. But our little girl will be smart and beautiful without Mozart, just like her mother.’
Paul put the music on, then bowed to her and said, ‘Dance with me.’
‘You want me to dance?’ She shuffled uncomfortably.
‘The three of us can dance to The Magic Flute.’
‘At this rate, the cot will be done by the time our baby starts school.’ At the look of his mock-serious face, she couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’d be happy to dance with you. But you might need a forklift to help me up.’
They clung to each other, Paul’s hand on Claire’s round belly. No longer a graceful ballerina, she swayed and waddled in her husband’s arms. He looked so happy and the music was so beautiful, and suddenly she was sobbing into his shoulder while he held her and stroked her back and quizzed her, wanting to know if she was alright. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, even though she wasn’t. She stopped swaying to music and looked up into his face. ‘I miss my mother.’
‘I know you do.’
‘Only now I understand what a mother’s love is like. All-consuming. All-encompassing. I remember her, you know. I have memories of her, like movie scenes in my mind. I see her wearing a blue dress. We are at the seaside, Mum and Dad are holding hands and I’m running in and out of the water, giggling and happy. I remember the carousel at Brighton Pier and Dad winning the biggest toy for me. Teddy Bear for my little Teddy Bear, he said.’
‘You miss your dad, too.’
‘Because of him I have no one. Because of him I’m an orphan. How can I miss him?’
‘You know what Nina says? Heart doesn’t take orders. You can’t press a button and turn off your love for someone. No matter how much you might want to.’
‘He lived a monster but died a human being. He died with love in his heart.’
‘Yes, he loved you very much.’
She didn’t want to talk about her father. Some things were better left unsaid. Things that filled her with dread, thoughts and memories she couldn’t face. She did her best to fight them. But still they slithered in, disturbed her sleep and her waking hours, rattled the sharp edges of her heart. No one knew about the suffocating guilt that poisoned her from inside out. No one knew what she’d done. Tony had made sure of it. And she would never tell another living soul, not even her husband. Perhaps she was a coward but she wasn’t ready to admit to it, not even to herself. ‘I remember Mum taking me to see the ballet when I was five. I think it was Swan Lake.’
‘Your favourite.’
‘I fell in love with the dancers on stage. I was completely under their spell and wanted to be just like them. For weeks I talked of nothing else, begging Mum to take me to a dance studio. And she did. I remember holding her hand, afraid to let go. It was my first time and the other girls had been dancing for months. They had their tutus on and looked like they belonged there. I wanted to run and hide in my T-shirt and a pair of leggings. Mum told me not to be scared. I’ll still be here waiting for you when the class is over, she said. Go and be a ballerina. Follow your dream. Before I knew it, I was twirling like everybody else. And I was no longer afraid.’
There were other memories, too, and each one had her mother in it, so beautiful and kind, the love of young Claire’s life. She remembered Angela dressed in striped pyjamas reading a book to little Claire, who was hanging onto her mother’s every word, begging her to read more-more-more, another chapter, another page, another paragraph. She didn’t want the story to end, even though she knew it by heart. Her mother would read Cinderella and The Little Mermaid, and her father would laugh and tell Angela to read something about real life, not fairy tales. ‘No,’ Angela would say, ‘little girls need to hear about princesses. How else would they learn about true love?’
And there was Angela cutting her daughter’s hair short because Claire wanted to look just like her brother. Afterwards, people would ask if she was a boy or a girl, and she would be so embarrassed, she’d make her mother swear she would never touch her hair again. She remembered dressing up and going out with her mother. Where, she didn’t know. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that they were wearing matching outfits and they were happy. She remembered dropping her favourite doll in the river and a young boy (Nate!) jumping in and rescuing it for her, only to spend the rest of the day teasing her mercilessly and threatening to throw the doll back in. Paddling in a boat, the four of them. Only Nate refused to paddle, and their boat was spinning around and around until Claire was too dizzy to paddle herself.
With every new memory, she mourned her mother and brother anew.
But with every new memory, her mother and brother came alive in her mind.
Paul whispered, ‘Please, don’t cry. Everything will be alright. I can’t believe there’s a baby in there. Our baby.’ Reverently he placed his hands on her pregnant belly, like it was an altar, something to worship and love.
As Paul pulled her close, she knew that no matter what the future had in store for her, she would face it head-on. Because they were together. Because she was finally home.
And then there was water, and it was everywhere – on her legs, on the floor, under her feet. ‘Something is happening,’ she exclaimed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think the baby is coming.’
She was like the Great Sphinx of Giza, calm and collected. Not so her husband. He was a meteor someone had let loose around the house. He paced and he babbled. ‘What should we do? Where is your hospital bag? Do you want anything? What can I get you? What can I do?’
‘Call the hospital. We need to go and quickly.’
It was a new beginning. She was ready.
Acknowledgements
This book’s journey to publication was a long and difficult one. Her Perfect Lies started eight years ago as a short story, hurriedly scribbled on a boarding pass during a holiday in Grenoble. A couple of years later it became a romance novel and then a romantic suspense novel. Finally, it transformed into a psychological thriller. So many people have supported and helped me over the years and I am grateful to every single one.
Thank you to Cara Chimirri for her amazing vision for this book and for bringing the best out of the story. Thank you to Emily Kitchin for guiding Her Perfect Lies to publication and to everyone at HQ Digital for making my dream come true.
I would like to thank my family for always being there for me. Thank you to my mum for her wisdom and kindness, to my husband for his love and support, and to my beautiful little boy for filling every day with joy, laughter and cuddles.
Thank you to Salvador Castello for his expertise and knowledge on a variety of subjects and for being the most wonderful father figure for me for the last twenty years.
Thank you to my talented friend and writing buddy Mark Farley for proof-reading, advising and holding my hand through countless brainstorming sessions.
And thank you to all my readers! I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to read this book – we hope you enjoyed it! If you did, we’d be so appreciative if you left a review.
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