by Holly Seddon
“I’m not here to talk about that—it’s history. I came here to ask your help to get Violet back.”
“You need to forget Violet,” Robin says softly, “and focus on the baby that’s yours. I understand why you lied about Violet, I get it. You were still upset about the baby you lost and I understand why you got attached to her, but you have your own baby on the way. I can help you with this baby. I can still help you.” There’s a pleading whine to her voice. I’ve never heard Robin on the back foot before. But she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get any of it. That the baby idea was there only to get Jim to take me back, to seal the deal. To let me in and accept that what’s best for Violet, what’s best for all of us, is for me to be Violet’s mother. Just like I’ve been for nearly four years. That it didn’t matter what it took to get back to that: any lie, any deception, anything was worth it.
I start to tread down the stairs, carefully, but the baby thing is history now. I lift up the pajama top and tank top, pull at the tape and throw the bump on the floor. That plan is ruined now. I need a new plan.
“You’re not even pregnant?” Robin asks, but I ignore her. “What the fuck is going on, Sarah?”
I don’t answer.
FORTY-SIX
SARAH|PRESENT DAY
Robin is too hung up on this fake-baby thing. She’s seeing everything in separate pieces, not the whole picture. I ball up my fists; there’s no getting through to her and I can’t let my frustration cloud my thinking. I need a new plan. I have to get things ready for Violet. I have to get her back, find somewhere for us to live. It was going to be here, but Robin isn’t going to help me, that much is clear.
I need to think fast, come up with a new plan, but Robin won’t shut up and it’s hard to think.
“What the hell, Sarah? You’ve lied to me constantly since you got here. Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” Robin asks. “I could have helped. And now I’m wondering what else you’re keeping from me. What do you want from me?”
She’s backing away down the hall, into the kitchen.
“You? You only wanted to help me when Callum had left you and you needed a project. You never wanted me, you never wanted your sister back. I’d missed you for so long, but you just moved on to a replacement.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But that’s just not true.”
“Now you’ve gone behind my back again,” I say. “But it’s not too late. You can still help me.”
“How?” she asks, that new nervousness still creeping into her words.
We’re in the kitchen now. She’s reaching for the key in the back door, and I reach for the knife on the side. I don’t want to hurt her, but I just need to make sure she stays here while I think up a new plan, get it straight. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone, but I have nothing left. I thought I had a sister, but she’s just going to stand in my way. I chant it quietly: “I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt you.”
She looks at the knife, looks at me. She doesn’t understand that I just need time to think.
“Robin, please, I’ll ask you for the last time. Will you help me get Violet back? I need to come up with a plan. Will you help me?”
I lift the knife in my open palm, show her I mean no harm, but she’s shaking her head.
“No, Sarah. You attacked Mum and you’ve lied about serious fucking stuff. You don’t need a plan to get Violet back—you need help.”
I realize too late that, while she was talking, she was fiddling with the back door, and now she’s opened it and is stumbling out backward. No! I need time to come up with a plan; this has all gone wrong. I rush out after her.
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
Robin plunges out into the cold air and trips over her own trainers. Her sister is bigger, but Robin is stronger, scrappy. Through the tangling limbs, Robin manages to push herself back up onto her feet to scramble away.
Someone is panting hard, and it takes a moment to realize that the sound is coming from both of them.
“Please!” Sarah is saying, but she’s swinging wildly with the knife. Robin ducks and runs down the garden.
When Robin dreams, which is rare, she dreams about running outside. About throwing the door open and flying out, scything through the air, light and fast instead of rooted and heavy. She wakes from those dreams drenched, feeling sick. But Robin finally feels fast now. She can hear her sister’s footsteps behind her, running unsteadily on the cobbles. Sarah is barefoot but almost keeping up. Driven by last chances.
Robin sprints as fast as she can into the black of the alleyway and thuds straight into something. Someone.
“No!” she cries, but they move around her and grab Sarah’s arms. The silhouette moves into the light and Robin sees that it’s Sam from the flats. He pins Sarah to the wall, and Robin knocks the knife from her hand and kicks it somewhere into the shadows.
“Fuck!” Sam says. “What’s going on?”
Robin and Sarah say nothing, and the gate to the back of the flats swings open. Mrs. Peacock pokes her head out, flashlight in her hands.
“Call the police,” Sam says, his voice shaking like he’s trying it out. The old lady disappears into the garden.
Sarah had been limp against the wall but starts thrashing and crying. Robin rushes at her, grabs one of Sarah’s arms. When the moonlight catches her face, Sarah wears a look of desperation and panic.
“Thank you,” Robin says to Sam, who looks even more frightened than he did this morning.
“What the hell’s going on? Isn’t she pregnant?”
“No,” Robin says grimly.
Sarah slumps down to a crouch, sobbing and mumbling sadly about needing a plan, needing help. Robin and Sam hold her tightly. They stay that way, taut and tensed around an exhausted body, until the police finally arrive, three officers running full pelt down the pedestrianized alleyway, illuminated by the squad car parked askance at the end.
“You’ll be okay, Sarah,” Robin says as her sister is handcuffed. “This is for your own good. I promise, you’ll be okay.”
“Since when does our family keep promises?” Sarah says, as she’s pulled barefoot along the cobbles.
FORTY-SEVEN
ROBIN|2017
Robin leads her sister through the double doors, out into the rose garden and onto the car park. Sarah’s nervous, not used to the outside. The wind lashes at them and makes her jump. It’s been months since she arrived and she hadn’t left the grounds until today, but the time has finally arrived. She’s as ready as she can be. The rest is up to the family.
Robin gets into the backseat with her twin. The two women in the front cast nervous glances at each other but don’t say anything.
“Did you tell her where we’re going?” they ask.
“I did,” Robin says. “I told her about the new house, and she’s excited, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Sarah smiles, a little uneasy.
Angela starts the engine and the car rumbles down the drive and out through the gates. Sarah’s thin fingers scratch at her jeans, her tight jaw clenching as the trees and hedges start to whip past faster, blurring into streaks.
Sarah has pills and tools to help with the transition. She has support and a safe place waiting for her. But it’s still new and she’s still raw. The outside is so big for her, just like it was for Robin.
“Did you tell Sarah about the album?” Hilary asks, breaking the silence.
“No,” Robin says, embarrassed. She looks down at her own jeans, picks at a speck of something on them. Paint, probably, from the kitchen. Since getting the keys, everyone’s been pushed to get the place finished in time.
“You should be proud,” their mother says, as she slows to indicate into their new road. There’s a staccato to her voice still; it gives away how nervous she is around her children. How much she wants to get everything right.
“Robin’s releasing an album.” Hilary leans back to try to make eye contact with Sarah.
&nb
sp; “Have you got back together with the band?” Sarah asks, taking her eyes off the window for a moment to look at her sister. “That’s good.” She smiles thinly.
“Not with the band,” Robin says. “This is…different. I’ll tell you later.”
They pull up outside the house, a family home in Maplesden, a village a few miles away from Birch End. Sarah stays in the car for a moment while the rest get out. Her chest rises and falls. She looks around as she takes in the newness of everything.
Hilary and Angela talk with their heads close as they walk from the car. Robin hears them admiring the front garden, joking about what Jack would have had to say about “the height of those bushes.” They smile together, bow their heads briefly.
So many mistakes over the years, so many things said. So many losses. If Hilary holds Angela responsible, she hides it well, beneath the layers of gentle words, her creamy coffee-advert voice, her nervous distraction.
When Robin first said she’d come back to Berkshire, finally ready to get the help she needed, they’d rallied together. Angela had driven Robin from Manchester to Berkshire. A long journey for such a nervous driver, but she didn’t complain. Robin was glad to only be traveling fifty miles an hour on the motorway, her head in her hands for most of the five or six hours. Angela had taken her daughter to Hilary’s house, the house Robin had grown up in. Angela visited every day, talked in low voices with her onetime friend, casting glances at Robin and touching Hilary’s arm in quiet agreement.
While Sarah was being cared for, perhaps Angela and Hilary both needed a project. Perhaps that project was Robin. They often drove her to therapy appointments together, Robin with her eyes closed, panting and saying, “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck,” like a mantra.
It had been Angela’s idea to do music therapy.
It had been Hilary’s idea to send the album that had emerged to Robin’s old record company.
Robin’s not cured; she still struggles with towns, shopping centers, supermarkets, the list too long to finish. People en masse feel like a swarm, and the open air can feel choking. She has panic attacks where she still believes she’ll die if she doesn’t take exactly ten thousand steps before nightfall. But the space between them has grown. Robin is ready to be the strong one again.
“So here we are,” Robin says. She pulls Sarah’s suitcase out of the boot and they trudge up the front path. “Our new house.”
Sarah stands and stares at the front door.
“Just the two of us,” Robin says.
“Just the two of us,” her sister agrees, as she slowly reaches for her hand.
SLEEVE NOTES FROM ONLY FOREVER BY ROBIN MARSHALL AND CALLUM GRANGER
I didn’t write these words and I didn’t dream up this music. The heart of this album was created by the best friend I ever had and the only brother I knew.
For years, I was too scared to listen to the demo tapes he left me or to read the words he’d written so carefully. To see and to hear was to acknowledge the gap he’d left behind. Its vastness swallowed me whole.
It took my sister to hold my hand, to twist my arm up my back and to push me into the place where I could finally honor these memories. I hope you like what my brother started and what I finished. But I hope you won’t be offended if I say that it doesn’t matter either way.
Forever is too long to hide from memories, good and bad. So here are ours: hers, his and mine.
For my brother and sister, forever.
For my friends
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Before I thank the many, many people I need to thank, there’s something that I’d really like readers to know.
There are some very difficult and sensitive scenes and characters’ experiences in Don’t Close Your Eyes. Please know that I agonized over each of these and desperately wanted to be sensitive and respectful to those affected by suicide, family separation, sexual assault, pregnancy loss and mental health issues.
But for the thanks, the need for which is swelling with every book.
Thank you to everyone at Ballantine in the United States. And especially huge thanks to my lovely new editor, Julia Maguire, whose enthusiasm and notes gave me several late nights and many, many improvements.
To the incredible team at Corvus—especially my wonderful editor, Sara O’Keeffe, whose insights shaped this book immeasurably.
Thank you also to the publishers around the world who are releasing Don’t Close Your Eyes in translation. I could not have hoped for a more brilliant bunch of book lovers working on this novel.
As ever, my deepest gratitude to my intrepid, inspirational and incredible agent, Nicola Barr. The whole team at Greene & Heaton are the bomb. Special hat tip to Kate Rizzo.
Thank you to my parents and my family, including my sister—who I swear neither of the Marshall sisters is based on—not to mention bro-in-law, Mark, and my beloved little cherub of a niece, Eva.
Thank you (and sorry) to my adored children. I love you guys so much. Thank you for putting up with my glazed-over expression when I’m there in body but in 1990s Berkshire in my head.
I dedicated this book to my friends. I’m very lucky when it comes to friends and I love them all dearly, even if I’m way too English to say that to any of their faces. I’m slowly realizing that friendship and its importance is something that runs through everything I write. And those friends who have been lost will never be forgotten.
And to my best friend of all. My champion, my matinee idol, the Franco Columbu to my Arnold Schwarzenegger, my beloved husband, James. I love you, mate. Thanks for everything.
BY HOLLY SEDDON
Try Not to Breathe
Don’t Close Your Eyes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HOLLY SEDDON is a full-time writer, living slap-bang in the middle of Amsterdam with her husband, James, and a house full of children and pets. Holly has written for newspapers, websites and magazines since her early twenties, after growing up in the English countryside, obsessed with music and books. Her first novel, Try Not to Breathe, was published worldwide in 2016 and became a bestseller in several countries. Don’t Close Your Eyes is her second novel.
hollyseddon.com
Facebook.com/hollyseddonauthor
Twitter: @hollyseddon
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