Another Mother's Life

by Rowan Coleman

  Seeing Marc and Alison again had taken her by surprise, but somehow the way she felt about seeing them again surprised her more than the actual event. It was almost as if on some level she had always been expecting this moment, knowing that one day it would come. Now that they were back she felt curiously complete, as if a missing part of her life had been returned to her. Knowing where they were and what they were doing released the pressure of the past that had been building inside her, like a dam that had burst, and she could feel it flowing free out of her fingers and toes.

  As she’d looked into the face of her old friend she’d felt happy and sad simultaneously, but the bitterness and anger she’d expected were not there at all. Alison looked almost exactly the same, except that in the brief moment Catherine had talked to her she hadn’t seen Alison’s fearlessness, that passion for life that had propelled Catherine through most of her teens, connecting her to the world outside of her parents’ house. Seeing Alison as she was now, the real woman and not some imagined paragon leading a perfect stolen life, Catherine found herself wondering what had changed her friend so much over the years. She found herself wondering how Alison was.

  Being confronted with Marc was altogether different. Jimmy had asked her how seeing Marc again had made her feel, and she hadn’t exactly lied but had edited the truth, because she couldn’t tell anyone, especially not Jimmy, how it made her feel to look into his eyes again.

  Stretching her arms out over her head, Catherine sat up and looked at the clock; it was almost two. She had to get up and go get the girls soon.

  The knock at the front door made her jump, sitting forward on the sofa. She looked at the door and for a few long seconds considered the possibility of not opening it because she knew who was standing on the other side of it.

  She knew that she was wearing her work clothes, which were crumpled now, that her hair was messed up from lying on the sofa, and that the traces of makeup she’d put on that morning would have run around her eyes. And she knew the very last person in the whole world she wanted to see was on the other side of that door. But Catherine didn’t seem to have any control over her own limbs; just as she was thinking about sneaking out of the back door and taking refuge in Kirsty’s shed, her body had gotten up and opened the door.

  And there he was. There was Marc.

  And with the cooling insulation of her husband gone, she could feel how he burned with heat, as if he had somehow captured all the sunshine from that distant summer in his eyes.

  “Morning,” Marc said. “I looked you up in the phone book. I was going to phone but the address was there and I just got this feeling I should call round, see for myself how you were after the party. Maybe talk a bit about … everything.”

  He paused. “So how are you?” he asked.

  Catherine felt her rebellious body stepping aside to allow him in even though her head was shouting at her to slam the door in his face. “Fine. Just tired.”

  She held her breath as Marc walked into her tiny living room. She suddenly saw her home through new eyes, through his eyes. The tiny room, the shabby sofa, the grubby carpet, and breakfast things still piled on the dining table. She wondered if it would have been possible for their lives to take more divergent paths than they had.

  Marc turned and looked at her where she was still standing by the front door. He was wearing a camel coat over a suit and he held a pair of black leather gloves in his hand. She could still feel the heat of him even from three or four feet away.

  “Drink?” she asked him, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “Coffee?” Marc suggested.

  Five minutes later, she sat down at the table and took a sip of coffee. While she was making the coffee she’d been trying to adjust to this new reality. Marc James, the Marc James, the man who had stalked her dreams for so long, was sitting at her table in her house. He’d even helped clear away the breakfast dishes. It was as if by allowing herself to think about him again, to dream about him, she had conjured him up out of thin air, like letting a genie loose from its lamp.

  “This is all a bit odd, isn’t it?” Marc said finally.

  “Yes,” Catherine agreed. “I sort of can’t believe that you are here.”

  “Do you hate me?” Marc asked, glancing briefly sideways at her.

  “I don’t think I ever hated you,” Catherine said. “But even if I did, all of that business was a long time ago. I got married, had children, moved on.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure if she was lying or not, but it seemed like a sensible thing to say. It was a way to put distance between herself and him, even across this three-foot-wide table.

  He looked at her, his sudden smile causing her to grip the sides of her chair beneath the table.

  “You haven’t changed,” he said.

  “I have,” Catherine replied. “And so have you.”

  Marc laughed once and nodded. “I think about the kid I was back then, and wonder if I am the same person. I mean I can’t understand how I turned from him into me. It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Alison made it possible, I suppose,” Catherine said carefully. “It looks as if you two were meant to be together after all.”

  “I didn’t want to let her down,” Marc said. “But I have. I never learned to resist that urge to spoil things that were good for me. You were good for me, you made me feel human. I couldn’t wait to ruin that.”

  Catherine didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “We were all young,” she said. “How many twenty-year-old men would turn down the chance to have two teenage girls on the go? I was naive and so were you. I was passive. Alison fought for you, she won you. She deserved you.”

  “Some would say she got what she deserved,” Marc said. “You do realize I only left with her because I didn’t love her. It seemed easier to be with a girl I didn’t love than to be with one I did.”

  Catherine looked out the back window down her long, thin garden where the grass was overgrown and the vegetable patch was covered in polyethylene sheeting to protect the seedlings from the frost.

  She had absolutely no idea where the next few seconds and minutes would take her, and knowing that made her feel dizzy, as if she were balancing on a knife’s edge.

  “Why are you here, Marc?” Catherine asked him. “Not why are you back in Farmington, although I could ask you that too. I mean why are you here now, sitting at my table drinking instant coffee?”

  “For the same reason I’m back in Farmington,” Marc said, sitting very still. “To find you.” Catherine heard the sound of her own indrawn breath, and she knew that Marc must have heard it too.

  “I don’t suppose I expected to actually find you standing in my hallway at a party. I honestly thought you’d be long gone. But I wanted to find the memory of you. I wanted to get close to that person I was for those weeks I was with you. I’ve never been like him since then, Catherine. That person was the best I’ve ever been. Almost since the day Alison and I left I keep letting people down. I keep hurting them even when I don’t want to. It just seems to happen around me. I thought in this place I might find you and I might find the man I was when I was with you. I thought that you, the memory of you at least, might heal me and make me whole.” Marc smiled and looked at his hands. “And then there you were, the living, breathing you, standing right in front of me in the hallway, and now I don’t know what to do.”

  “There is nothing to do, is there?” Catherine said.

  “Isn’t there?” he said, looking up at her. “Look, on Sunday morning Alison told me she didn’t love me anymore. It’s been like a set of scales. Over the years the more I loved her the more I hurt her and the less she loved me. I love her, Catherine, but I’ve used up all the love she had for me.”

  “And now you want me to make things better?” Catherine asked him, frowning.

  “No, I just want you,” Marc said. “I want you.”

  Catherine made herself look at him and they held each other’s gaz
e for what felt like an age. He just walked back into her life after fifteen years and told her that he wanted her back even though he was still in love with his wife, who was leaving him. She should be furious. She should be incandescent with rage, but all she could feel was the pull in her guts when he told her he wanted her.

  She needed to put distance between herself and him right now.

  “I have to pick up my daughters,” Catherine said, scuffing the chair on the carpet as she stood up.

  Marc stood up too.

  “Are you happy?” he asked her, reaching out and catching her hand. His fingers felt hot on hers.

  “Yes, thank you,” Catherine said, unable to muster the energy required to withdraw her hand from his.

  Marc drew her hand closer to him, and her treacherous body followed it.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said, his voice diminishing to a whisper, “if our kiss would still feel the same?”

  He drew her body flush into his and brought his lips to within a whisper of hers.

  “I …” Catherine had no idea what she was about to say, and just as her lips formed a nameless word the back door opened.

  She sprung away from Marc as if he had just given her an electric shock.

  Jimmy stood in the kitchen doorway and looked from Catherine to Marc. Catherine discovered that she could not look at her husband.

  “I came back,” Jimmy said flatly.

  Marc turned and smiled at Jimmy, holding out his hand. “We meet again!” he said pleasantly. At last Catherine made herself look up at Jimmy. His jaw was set, his hazel eyes clouded and dark.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Marc, advancing two or three steps toward him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Catherine rubbed her hands over her face, trying to wake herself from the stupor she’d been lulled into. As Marc dropped his hand back to his side, she saw the muscles in his jaw tighten.

  “He just popped in to say hello, to catch up,” she said, as guilty as Marc was of acting as if nothing had happened but desperate to defuse the tension in the room. “Anyway, why aren’t you in London?”

  Jimmy did not take his eyes off Marc, the fury he felt illustrated quite clearly in the tense way his shoulders were pulled back. “I got to Euston and I changed my mind. I came by to tell you I’d pick the girls up if you like. Now that I’m here I think we should pick our children up together.”

  Catherine could not hide her surprise at the violence in Jimmy’s voice. Was he concerned about her welfare or had he decided to get territorial about two years too late?

  Marc hadn’t budged, if anything he’d squared up to her taller, leaner husband.

  “I don’t suppose it’s any of your business who Catherine spends her time with,” he said.

  Before Catherine knew it Jimmy lunged at Marc, pushing him abruptly against the wall.

  “You leave her alone, do you understand me?” Jimmy said to Marc, his pointed finger millimeters from the tip of Marc’s nose. “She didn’t have anyone the first time you got to her, but now she has me and I won’t let you hurt her again. I don’t want you anywhere near her.”

  “Jimmy!” Catherine was astonished, pulling him away from Marc. “Jimmy, just leave it, I know what I’m doing!”

  “Do you?” Jimmy looked sharply at her as Marc straightened his tie.

  Catherine shook her head at him, silently admonishing him. “Well,” she said, looking at Marc. “You’d better go.”

  “Okay.” Marc was careful to appear completely unflustered, and Catherine could sense it was designed to enrage Jimmy all the more. “It was so good to see you again, Catherine. I’ll look forward to picking up where we left off.”

  “Me too,” she replied automatically, providing him with enough ammunition for a triumphant smile as he headed out the front door.

  As Catherine watched him leave, suddenly all of the air rushed back into the room and she could breathe again. She sat down on the dining chair with a thud.

  “What was going on?” Jimmy demanded.

  “How can you ask me that? What was going on with you, you idiot!”

  “You were about to kiss him!” Jimmy shouted, catching his voice as it rose and struggling to contain it. “You were going to kiss him, Cat!”

  “Jimmy, back off,” Catherine told him. “It was nothing … nothing happened.”

  Jimmy looked at her as if he had never met her before in his life.

  “So suddenly everything he did to you is forgotten?” Jimmy asked her. “And you, you just felt like giving it away?”

  “Jimmy!” Catherine gasped. “I didn’t plan it, I don’t know if I wanted it. Maybe it would have been one way to finish things … or start something.”

  She had no idea why she was being so antagonistic. It was just that Marc had left and she felt furious, and Jimmy was the only one here to turn on.

  “He’s a married man!” Jimmy blurted out.

  “Yes, I know that, Jimmy, but it’s funny I thought you’d be the last one to judge what a married man should or should not do.”

  “He messed you up, Cat. For years and years he blighted you, blighted our marriage, even the birth of our children. He made it almost impossible for me to keep loving you and impossible for you to love me. Him, that … shit of a man did that. And you let him breeze back in here and what? You were about to climb back into bed with him?”

  “Why do I have to tell you anything?” Catherine shouted at him, her fury giving her strength. “And who says Marc was the reason I didn’t love you? Maybe I just couldn’t love you. And anyway, none of this has got anything to do with you.”

  The instant the words were out of her mouth Catherine regretted them, but they were out there now and she knew they had hit Jimmy hard.

  “This has got everything to do with me,” Jimmy told her darkly, his anger making him tremble. “I’m the one who sat up all night listening to you talk about how confused you were. I’m the father of your kids, I’m the man who … the man who really cares about what happens to you despite what you may think about me. I’m the one who is always here for you.” Jimmy stood firm. “Whether you like it or not this has got everything to do with me. So you tell me right now—were you going to kiss him back?”

  Catherine flung her hands in the air as she slammed past Jimmy and marched to the front door.

  “Leave me alone, Jimmy. Go back to London and make some money for a change.”

  “Were you going to kiss him?” Jimmy demanded once more.

  “Why do you care?” Catherine asked. Then she turned and looked at him. “Really, what difference does it make to you?”

  “I need to know, Catherine.” His voice caught, making Catherine pause and take a breath.

  “I’m fine,” Catherine replied. “Nothing happened and every-thing’s fine.”

  “Would you have kissed him?” Jimmy said, frustration and fury saturating every word.

  Catherine took her hand off the door latch.

  “Yes.” She threw the word at him with full force. “Yes, I think I would have kissed him. I wanted to kiss him.”

  Jimmy seemed to deflate in front of Catherine’s eyes, the tension draining out of his muscles. “Right. You would have kissed him.”

  “Look.” Catherine paused. “I get that you are worried about me and I appreciate that, but I don’t need you to march in here and start laying down the law. I’ve got to handle this my way and you should have stayed in London. This mess shouldn’t stop you from getting on with your life.”

  “But you are my life,” Jimmy said almost to himself. He looked up and caught Catherine’s expression. “I mean you and the girls. Like it or not, you are a big part of my life. Whether we are together or not I have to make sure you are okay. You’d do the same for me, right?”

  Catherine thought for a moment and then, dropping her bag, she walked across the small room, put her arms around him, and held him. His heart was still racing.

  “Of course I
’d do the same for you,” she said. “I needed you over the weekend and you were there for me, but now—I’ve got to sort this out my own way, Jimmy. I’ve got to work out how to handle this. I’ve never really been on my own, never really had to stand on my own two feet. I always had Alison or my mother telling me what to do and then there was you, rescuing me, taking me away from my parents. But I can’t let you rescue me this time—it’s not your place to even try anymore. I have to sort this out for myself, you understand that, right?”

  “I understand that,” Jimmy said, briefly hugging her back before stepping away from her.

  “Coming to get the girls, then?” Catherine asked.

  Jimmy shook his head mutely.

  “I need some air,” he said. “Unpack my rucksack, that sort of stuff.”

  “See you later, then?” Catherine offered.

  “Maybe,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay.” Catherine shut the front door behind her, leaving Jimmy standing alone in what had once been his living room.

  He knew he couldn’t rescue Catherine this time. He’d understood that long before he’d seen her on the brink of kissing the man who had once ripped her life to shreds.

  Seventeen

  Do you ever think,” Kirsty asked Catherine later that night as they sat in her back garden sipping tea, “that there is anything out there? You know, like a higher force or something? A God sort of thing?”

  Catherine looked up at the dark and crisp February night sky. The evening was chilly but the sky was perfectly clear; the stars glittered with a particular brightness and a kind of intensity that made Catherine catch her breath, thinking that just a tiny bubble of atmosphere was keeping her here on the earth instead of wheeling out there lost in the magnitude of space. Only a couple of miles away from where she was sitting now, a huge sucking, gaping, gulping universe waited to swallow her up, and after the events of the last few days, there was a little part of her that couldn’t quite extinguish the desire to find a pin big enough to burst the bubble so she could go sailing out among the stars.