Come Back to Me

by Sara Foster

  ‘Alex, I think the only way I can cope with this is if I know that it’s over, that you’re never going to see her again. Can you do that?’

  Alex shook his head. ‘Chloe, please try to understand. I don’t want a relationship with her, of course I don’t – I’m not in love with her like that any more, I’m in love with you. But there’s a history, and a long time ago I made promises, to her and to myself -’

  ‘You made promises?’ Chloe interrupted, her voice rising again. ‘What about the promises you made to me, Alex?’

  ‘Chloe -’

  She marched out of the bedroom and along the landing, grabbing a suitcase from a cupboard there. She carried it back to the room and began to throw things into it, not making any attempt to pack them properly.

  Alex watched her for a minute, then came forward, and said, ‘Chloe, stop.’

  She paused and looked at him. His face was wretched.

  ‘You don’t have to go. I’ll go, until we’ve both calmed down enough to talk,’ he said, gently taking her things out of the case and laying them on the bed.

  She watched him, but suddenly felt too tired to argue. She didn’t have a clue where she would have gone anyway.

  ‘I’ll wait downstairs,’ she said, and walked out.

  She stood by the table in the kitchen for ten minutes, hardly aware of her surroundings. She heard a noise in the hallway and mechanically walked out to look.

  Alex was there with a suitcase next to him. He picked up a bag and turned back to her.

  Beyond all reason, she was suddenly desperate for him to stay. But as they looked at one another, in that moment she couldn’t find her voice.

  And then he was through the doorway, and as he turned back again, before he could say anything she had jumped forward and slammed it behind him.

  She slid down the wooden panel of the door into a heap on the floor, crying and crying, as if she would never be rid of the tears that poured from her. She hugged her stomach, half-glad of the secret she still carried and half-imagining d ramatic scenes that might make Alex rush back to her – blood pouring from her traumatised body, an ambulance taking her to hospital, Alex’s guilt-ridden face as he sat by the bed and learned of the baby he’d almost had. That would serve him right.

  When her tears eventually subsided, she sat still for a while, sniffing and rubbing her eyes. Eventually she turned around and pushed the letterbox open with her fingers, peering through the slit, praying he would still be there; but the rain-soaked path was empty and dark.

  Is this it? she wondered. Is this the end of my marriage – sitting here in the hallway with mascara running down my face? Or is this just the beginning of something else – a difficult period, sure, but perhaps not an ending. She would give anything for someone to explain to her whereabouts down the proverbial line she and Alex were right now.

  What had she been thinking of, that secrets could ever be benign? They were nothing of the kind – they were poisonous shards of glass that were trapped just below the skin, twisting and turning with every movement a person made, threatening to break through the surface.

  Some dark thing began to rear up in her then, towards the surface of her consciousness. It was her mother, sitting like this against a doorway, and sobbing like she would never stop.

  What had happened? It seemed she had pushed the memory down – although now something came to her – a darkened room she didn’t want to look into. She forced the image away, fought it off until she was sure it was vanquished, made herself focus on Alex’s ugly, buried secrets as she curled up on the floor.

  There came a beeping sound from her pocket. She fumbled with the phone as she lifted it out, and looked at the screen. There was a text message.

  I WILL CALL YOU TOMORROW.

  TRUST IN ME. I LOVE YOU.

  I WILL COME BACK TO YOU.

  64

  For the rest of the week, Chloe’s world seemed to revolve around one question:

  ‘Have you told him yet?’

  Mikaela had asked first, when she’d rung Chloe to see how she was and got more than she’d bargained for. Her mother had then outdone herself by ringing at least four times in one day, the same question bursting continuously from her lips. Chloe had almost ranted at her after a while, wanting to shout, ‘How can I tell him about the baby if he isn’t even bloody here?’ but she didn’t. While no one knew Alex had gone, she could still pretend this wasn’t real, and avoid the awkward silences and pitying stares.

  She’d made an exception for Mikaela. Her cousin had heard the quaver in her voice immediately, and once Chloe had started crying down the phone she couldn’t seem to stop, so Mikaela had immediately insisted that Chloe came to stay. They had been holed up together for the past few days. Chloe brought home bad food for them both after work, and to start with they talked, then progressed to watching sitcom reruns while slating the perfect-looking actresses that swanned on and off the screen. It was an odd throwback to their teenage years, and initially Chloe had found comfort in that; then gradually it had begun to disturb her. She didn’t want to go back to being one of the girls, sharing her broken heart and letting others help her to mend it. Her despair was something she couldn’t even articulate, let alone allow others to pick over.

  Tonight she would be going home. For a few days it had been a relief not to have to face the empty house, now devoid of its loving atmosphere; but Mikaela was away with work from today and Chloe had begun to miss some of her home comforts, not to mention clean clothes.

  Alex had been persistently ringing her mobile, but she was still too hurt and confused to talk to him. When he’d tried her at the office, she had hung up as soon as Jana transferred the calls. She needed to clear her head first; she was scared she wouldn’t be able to stop her mouth from spitting vile accusations and insults at him right now. He had left voicemails too, but she hadn’t replayed them. She didn’t want to hear his voice, so she deleted them instead.

  This morning she’d already spoken briefly to her mother, who had been most affronted when Chloe had cancelled the next trip to the Lakes. As Chloe spoke she was aware of the irony – this was what Alex had been begging her to do for weeks, and it had taken his leaving to push her to it. Her mother spent the rest of the call making snide comments about how she hadn’t realised she was such a burden to them. In response, Chloe had told her that now she was pregnant it might be more difficult to come quite as often, to which her mother had laughed and said, ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Chloe. It’s not an illness, you know.’

  As she tried to shake off that particular conversation, Chloe walked through the office doors in a daze, still absorbing the fact that she was further on in her pregnancy than she’d known, rubbing her stomach, unable to comprehend that a new life had taken a firm shape of its own in there before she’d even been aware of it, and that her husband still didn’t know that he was going to be a dad.

  As she walked out of the lift and past reception, she saw David Marchant striding towards her. With no time to avoid him, she turned and attempted a smile.

  ‘Morning, Chloe.’ David made no effort to hide the long look he took at his watch as he approached. ‘Good to see you this morning. Don’t forget you have a meeting with Neil at eleven. The Abbott case is looming large for us now. If you see Mark popping in at any stage this morning, be sure to pass the message on to him as well, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, David.’ Chloe sighed as she made her way towards her office. She tried to imagine the look on David’s face when she told him she was four months pregnant. Normally it would have terrified her, but right then it made her almost laugh out loud. Great, she was becoming hysterical.

  As she walked past the secretaries’ pool, Jana noticed the smile on her face and gave her a shy, friendly hello. It took Chloe aback. Jana didn’t often talk to her; in fact, Chloe didn’t think the secretary liked her much. It hadn’t bothered her overly, as she’d made a rule that her relationship with her secretary would be strictly
business after what had happened with Charlotte. Spending a few years working with her former boyfriend’s one-night stand hadn’t been much fun.

  She noticed Mark’s office was dark, and the door was shut. She turned back to Jana.

  ‘Where’s Mark this morning?’

  Jana shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has he got anything on?’

  ‘Well, his diary’s clear,’ Jana replied.

  ‘He hasn’t phoned in?’

  ‘No,’ Jana said.

  Mark was never later in for work than she was. What the hell was going on with everyone? Chloe wondered with tired exasperation. She usually felt she was a good judge of character, but she didn’t seem to know anyone at all at the moment.

  In her office she lifted her bag onto her desk and took out the number of the ultrasound unit at the hospital. She rang it and asked for an appointment, having to repeat herself when the lady couldn’t hear her whispers. She watched the glass wall of her office closely, waiting to see either David or Neil appear there looking cross, but nothing happened.

  They could fit her in tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d see their baby for the very first time. Alone.

  As she sat down, she reluctantly looked at the in-trays piling up behind her with legal documents waiting to be drafted and letters needing to be written. The court applications to be made. Half-heartedly, she pulled a case file towards her, but instead of opening it she tried to re-examine just why she hadn’t told Alex about the baby. If she had, surely he wouldn’t have left. She thought back to the Lakes, and that fateful conversation when she’d only just found out herself. ‘We’re not ready for that yet,’ he’d said dismissively. If he hadn’t said those words, would she have told him by now?

  Possibly, as since then she had certainly been worried about how he would react. When the baby had been on the tip of her tongue so many times, one question kept recurring in her mind.

  What if it changed nothing?

  That was the core of it. And so their poor baby had become the trump card in its parents’ marital problems before it was even born. She pushed away the thought that they would make terrible parents. But really, what chance did their child have when its mother was being torn apart by worry just as the very cells of its tiny, amorphous body were furiously dividing and multiplying and trying to get the act of creation right?

  She tried to distract herself by going to Mark’s office. The lights were still off. She frowned: it was past ten o’clock. She didn’t think Mark had been late since the time they’d broken up. Her brief affair with Risto flitted through her head. Mark hadn’t spoken to her much for quite a while back then, even though that relationship had fizzled out as quickly as it had started when Risto had had an unrefusable offer from a head-hunter.

  She went back to her office and tried Mark’s mobile. He answered straight away.

  ‘You do know we’ve got a meeting about Abbott at eleven, don’t you? I saw David this morning and he didn’t look too happy.’

  Mark sighed. ‘Fine, I’ll try and get in. Jesus, Chloe, I’m hardly ever late like this, and now David is on my case.’

  ‘Why are you late?’

  Mark paused, then said, ‘Look, you worry about your problems, and I’ll look after mine. How is Alex, by the way?’

  Chloe bristled. God he was infuriating. She took a deep breath. ‘He’s fine. I’ll see you at eleven, then.’ And she hung up before he could reply.

  65

  It had taken Alex three days of sleeping on his friend Justin’s sofa to decide whether to go to see Amy again. It felt like betraying Chloe, but right now he couldn’t find his wife to talk to her about it. She wasn’t at the house, and she wouldn’t take his calls. He had thought about going to her office, but it was such a public space that he knew this was a bad idea.

  In the meantime he kept rereading the internet printouts he’d shown to Amy. Each time he did so he could feel his blood heating up rapidly.

  Three men go on trial today accused of the kidnap, rape and murder of a Swanbourne waitress.

  Michael Evan, 31, George Constantine, 34, and Clay Tate, 29, are accused of luring Vanessa Gordy, 24, from the Indian Ocean Bar in North Cottesloe. Her body was found two months later in bushland near Yanchep by a family walking their dog.

  The case has attracted huge media attention in Perth, as Tate is a member of the prominent Tate Mining family.

  All three men have pleaded not guilty.

  The report was already weeks old. Each day it seemed more and more pressing that he come to a decision. If they didn’t hurry, they might miss the trial altogether. This was their chance.

  He had spent years after Amy had disappeared thinking of what those bastards had done to her, to him, to them. Not only that, but the more he remembered the time they had spent at the hospital, the more he felt he had let Amy down, unable to discern, much less offer her, the support she needed, and the stronger his urge had become to redeem himself and make it up to her. Time hadn’t faded his feelings much; it was only upon meeting Chloe that he had been able to gradually lay them aside.

  So many times he had dreamt of seeing those men caught and punished. Not quite as often as he had imagined the retribution he would inflict himself were he allowed, but this was certainly the next best thing. Amy’s return had brought back all the old torments: the inadequacies he still felt; the rage he thought he’d quietened; and more and more his thoughts were consumed with at least seeing that justice was done.

  Eventually, he left Chloe a long message on their home answering machine, explaining as much as he could think of, and then made his way to see Amy, still hoping beyond hope that this was the right thing to do.

  Amy was overwhelmed when she saw Alex at her door. She had almost given up on him. The last few days had seemed to exist separately in time, as though there were nothing imaginable either before or after: past and future were on an entirely different plane of existence. She had been in a bubble, scared almost to breathe in case it should burst.

  She invited him in, and watched as he cast his eye over her surroundings for the first time. She saw his gaze run across the bare white walls scarred with dirty marks, and the damp spot on the ceiling, then on to the scuffed wooden floors and over to the sofa bed in the corner at one end, the kitchenette at the other.

  ‘This is… is…’ He threw up his hands as if lost for words.

  ‘Horrible,’ she finished for him, moving to the kettle that perched on a tiny sill of the kitchenette. ‘It’s only temporary, though.’

  Which was true, but the way she’d said it made it sound like she was about to buy a huge three-bedroomed semi-detached in the suburbs, whereas all her places in the past ten years had looked very similar to this, and she had no doubt the next one would too.

  She looked up with a wry smile on her face as she said it, to let him know that she wasn’t feeling sorry for herself, and he smiled back.

  They stood there awkwardly for a moment. Eventually, Alex walked across and put his arms around her, his cheek pressing against the top of her head. She kept her arms by her sides, but didn’t want to push him away.

  ‘Look,’ he said, holding on to her. She could smell his skin – aftershave mixed with something earthier and more natural. She breathed deeply, listening as he continued, ‘I don’t know how much longer the trial will last…’

  She moved away from him and walked over to the window. ‘You don’t have to come, you know,’ she said softly, looking at the grey sky outside.

  There was anger in Alex’s tone as he said from behind her, ‘Oh, really? For god’s sake, have we really just picked up from where we left off ten years ago, Amy?’ His voice became louder as he added, ‘Have you come back into my life, turned everything I know upside down, just so you can continue to shut me out?’

  She turned and stared at him. ‘My name is Julia,’ she replied, enunciating the name slowly as though he were a child.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. He stomped
over to the door, grabbing the handle before he came marching back across the room, cupped her face firmly between his palms, making her look at him, and said, ‘Amy – Julia – whoever you are – I am NOT leaving. This time, I am NOT going. I want to help you. You are GOING to let me help you.’

  The force of his words terrified her for a moment – even though it was Alex, perhaps the one man she still trusted – and she burst into tears. And then he lifted her bodily, carried her to the sofa and sat her on his lap, shushing her as though she were an infant, holding her, letting her weep and weep. And when she was done, she realised she didn’t want him to leave ever again.

  That afternoon she told him the story of the past ten years, all her adventures – as bold a narrator as some returning conquistador. She described climbing mountains, rappelling off cliff faces, rafting through white-water gorges, snorkelling in coral seas. And he stared at her in open amazement.

  Yet in between each word she spoke there was the void of everything she left out. She held his attention with the solidity of her words, distracting him from the great white sea of absence around them. What would he see, she wondered, if he could peer into this ocean of things held back? And what would he think of the terrible thing she hadn’t yet told him? Would he understand that she had tried to live the life they had dreamed of having together? Or would he see that when she went rappelling she had been praying the rope would have an undetected fray; that halfway through her descent it would snap, leaving her plummeting to earth. Or that her life jacket would deflate, her scuba tank be empty of oxygen, her foot brush against a deadly creature that would not hesitate to bite. That she had spent the years since death first took a long, appraising look at her, actively seeking it out once more. But because of the promise she had made to her mother – and perhaps also the prospect of facing her father in the afterlife – she couldn’t empower herself to take charge of her destiny. How galling it was that as much as she had become a victim of life, she was still forced to wait to be the victim of death – it was out of her hands, there was nothing she could do.