Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  “And”—he paused, looked suddenly uncertain—“and I know it’s maybe a bit soon, but after you’ve told me your life story and I’ve cooked sausages that may or may not be edible, I want us to have a serious conversation about the fact that you live in California and I live in England. This visit of yours is too short.”

  “I know.”

  He tugged at the dark grass. “When I get back from holiday, we’ll have—what, a week together? Before you have to go back to the States?”

  I nodded. The only dark cloud over our week together had been this, the inevitability of parting.

  “Well then, I think we have to . . . I don’t know. Do something. Decide something. I can’t just let this go. I can’t know you’re somewhere in the world and not be with you. I think we should try to make this work.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, me too.” I slid a hand inside his sleeve. “I’ve been thinking the same, but I lost my nerve every time I tried to bring it up.”

  “Really?” Laughter and relief spilled into his voice, and I realized it must have taken some courage for him to start the conversation. “Sarah, you’re one of the most confident women I’ve ever met.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “You are. It’s one of the things I like about you. One of the many things I like very much about you.”

  It had been a great many years since I’d had to start nailing confidence to myself like a sign on a shop. But even though it came naturally now—even though I spoke at medical conferences around the world, gave interviews to news crews, managed a team—I felt unsettled when people remarked on it. Unsettled or perhaps exposed, like a person on a hill in a thunderstorm.

  Then Eddie kissed me again and I felt it all dissolve. The sadness of the past, the uncertainty of the future. This was what was meant to happen next. This.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fifteen Days Later

  Something terrible has happened to him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like death. Maybe not death. Although, why not? My grandmother dropped dead at the age of forty-four.”

  Jo turned round from the passenger seat. “Sarah.”

  I didn’t meet her eye.

  She looked instead at Tommy, who was driving us west along the M4. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  He didn’t respond. His jaw was clenched shut, the pale skin by his temple pulsing as if someone were in there, trying to break out.

  Jo and I shouldn’t have come, I thought again. We’d been convinced Tommy would want the support of his two oldest friends—after all, it wasn’t often that you had to stand shoulder to shoulder with your school bully while the press took photos—but as each dreary, rain-spattered mile passed, it had become evident that we were doing little more than increasing his anxiety.

  What he needed today was the freedom to peddle synthetic confidence without being watched by those who knew him best. To pretend it was all water under the bridge. Look how I became a successful sports consultant, delivering a program to my old school! Look how happy I am to be working alongside the head of PE—the very man who punched me in the stomach and laughed when I turned my face into the grass and cried!

  To make matters worse, Jo’s seven-year-old, Rudi, was next to me on the backseat. His father had been offered a job interview and Jo hadn’t had time to find childcare. He had been listening with great interest to our conversation about Eddie’s disappearance.

  “So, Sarah thinks her boyfriend’s dead and Mum’s getting cross,” Rudi surmised. He was going through a phase of distilling awkward adult conversations into neat one-liners, and he was very good at it.

  “He’s not her boyfriend,” Jo said. “They spent seven days together.”

  The car fell silent again. “Sarah. Think seven-day boyfriend dead,” Rudi said, in his Russian voice. Rudi had a new friend at school, Aleksandr, who had recently come to London from somewhere near the Ukrainian border. “Killed by secret service. Mum disagree. Mum cross with Sarah.”

  “I’m not cross,” Jo said crossly. “I’m just worried.”

  Rudi considered this, and then said, “I think you tell lie.”

  Jo couldn’t deny it, so remained silent. I didn’t wish to antagonize Jo, so I remained silent as well. And Tommy hadn’t said anything for two hours, so he remained silent, too. Rudi lost interest and returned to his iPad game. Adults were rife with baffling and pointless problems.

  I watched Rudi obliterate what looked like a cabbage and was blasted suddenly by a great longing: for his innocence, his seven-year-old’s worldview. I imagined Rudi Land, in which mobile phones were gaming stations rather than instruments of psychological torture, and the certainty of his mother’s love was as solid as a heartbeat.

  If there was any point to becoming an adult, it eluded me today. Who wouldn’t prefer to be killing cabbages and talking in a Russian accent? Who wouldn’t prefer to have had their breakfast made and their outfit chosen, when the alternative was malignant despair over a man who’d felt like everything and somehow become nothing? And not the man I’d been married to seventeen years; a man I’d known precisely seven days. No wonder everyone in this car thought I was mad.

  “Look, I know it sounds like a teenage saga,” I said eventually. “And I don’t doubt that you’re pissed off with me. But something has happened to him, I’m certain of it.”

  Jo opened Tommy’s glove compartment to extract a large bar of chocolate, from which she snapped off a chunk with some force.

  “Mum?” Rudi said. “What’s that?”

  He knew perfectly well what it was. Jo handed her son a square without saying anything. Rudi smiled at her, his biggest, toothiest smile, and—in spite of her growing impatience—Jo smiled back. “Don’t ask for more,” she warned. “You’ll only end up being sick.”

  Rudi said nothing, confident she’d give in.

  Jo turned back to me. “Look, Sarah. I don’t want to be cruel, but I think you need to accept that Eddie is not dead. Nor is he injured, or suffering a broken phone, or battling a life-threatening illness.”

  “Really? You’ve called the hospitals to check? Had a chat with the local coroner?”

  “Oh, God,” she said, staring at me. “Tell me you haven’t done any of those things, Sarah! Jesus Christ!”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rudi whispered.

  “Stop that,” Jo told him.

  “You started it.”

  Jo gave Rudi more chocolate and he went back to his iPad. It had been my present to him from America, and he told me earlier on that he loved it more than anything else in the world. Which had made me laugh and then, to Rudi’s bafflement, cry a little, because I knew he’d have learned that phrase from Jo. She had turned out to be a remarkable mother, Joanna Monk, in spite of her own upbringing.

  “Well?”

  “Of course I haven’t been calling hospitals,” I sighed. “Come on, Jo.” I watched a row of crows scattering from a telephone wire.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. My point was just that you don’t know any more than I do what’s happened to Eddie.”

  “But men do this all the time!” she exploded. “You know they do!”

  “I don’t know anything about dating. I’ve been married the last seventeen years.”

  “Well, you can take it from me: nothing’s changed,” Jo said bitterly. “They still don’t call.”

  She turned to Tommy but found him unresponsive. Any residual confidence he’d feigned about today’s big launch had evaporated like the morning mist and he’d barely said a word since we’d set off. There had been a brief display of bravado at Chieveley Services when he’d had a message telling him that three local newspapers had confirmed attendance, but a few minutes later he’d called me “Sarah” in the queue at WHSmith, and Tommy only called me Sarah when he was extremely
anxious. (I had been “Harrington” since we turned thirteen and he’d started doing push-ups and wearing aftershave.)

  The silence thickened, and I lost the battle I’d been fighting since we left London.

  I’m on my way back to Gloucestershire, I texted Eddie, quick as a wink. Supporting my friend Tommy; he’s launching a big sports project at our old school. If you wanted to meet up, I could stay at my parents’. Would be good to talk. Sarah x

  No pride, no shame. I’d somehow moved beyond that. I tapped the screen of my phone every few seconds, waiting for a delivery report.

  Delivered, it announced perkily.

  I watched the screen, checking for a text bubble. A text bubble would mean he was writing back.

  No text bubble.

  I looked again. No text bubble.

  I looked again. Still no text bubble. I slid my phone into my handbag, out of sight. This was what girls did when they were still in the tender agonies of adolescence, I thought. Girls, still learning to love themselves, waiting in mild hysteria to hear from a boy they’d kissed in a sweaty corner last Friday. This was not the behavior of a woman of thirty-seven. A woman who’d traveled the world, survived tragedy, run a charity.

  The rain was clearing. Through the crack of open window I could smell the tang of wet tarmac and damp, smoky earth. I am in agony. I stared vacantly at a field of round hay bales, squeezed tightly into shining black plastic like pudgy legs into tights. I would tip over the edge soon. I would tip over the edge and go into free fall if I didn’t find out what had happened.

  I checked my phone. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d taken out my SIM card and rebooted. Time to try again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Half an hour later we were on the dual carriageway coming into Cirencester and Rudi was asking his mother why the clouds were all moving in different directions.

  We were a matter of mere miles from where I’d met him. I closed my eyes, trying to remember my walk that hot morning. Those uncomplicated few hours Before Eddie. The sour-milk sweetness of elderflower blossom. Yes, and scorched grass. The drift of butterflies, stunned by the heat. There had been a barley field, a feathered, husk-green carpet panting and bulging with hot air. The occasional explosion of a startled rabbit. And the strange sense of expectation that had hovered over the village that day, the boiling stillness, the littered secrets.

  Unbidden, my memory fast-forwarded a few more minutes to the moment I actually met Eddie—a straightforward, friendly man with warm eyes and an open face, holding court with an escaped sheep—and misery and confusion tangled like weeds over everything else.

  “You can tell me I’m in denial,” I said to the silent car. “But it wasn’t a fling. It was . . . it was everything. We both knew. That’s why I’m sure something’s happened to him.”

  The idea made my breath stick to the inside of my throat.

  “Say something,” Jo said to Tommy. “Say something to her.”

  “I work in sports consultancy,” he muttered. Embarrassment bloomed on his neck. “I do bodies, not heads.”

  “Who does heads?” Rudi asked. He was still keeping close tabs on our conversation.

  “Therapists do heads,” Jo said wearily. “Therapists and me.”

  Ferapists. She pronounced it ferapists. Jo was born and bred in Bow, was a proper, salt-of-the-earth Cockney. And I loved her; I loved her bluntness and mercurial temper, I loved her fearlessness (lack of boundaries, others might say), and most of all I loved the tremendous fury with which she adored her son. I loved everything about Jo, but I would still have preferred not to be in a car with her today.

  Rudi asked me if we were nearly there yet. I told him yes. “Is that your school?” he asked, pointing at an industrial estate.

  “No, although there are some architectural similarities.”

  “Is that your school?”

  “No. That’s Waitrose.”

  “How long till we get there?”

  “Not long.”

  “How many minutes?”

  “About twenty?”

  Rudi slumped back into his seat in self-conscious despair. “That’s ages,” he muttered. “Mum, I need some new games. Can I have some new games?”

  Jo said he could not, and Rudi set about buying some anyway. I watched in awe as he matter-of-factly typed in Jo’s Apple ID and password.

  “Er, excuse me,” I whispered. He looked up at me, his little blond Afro an unlikely halo, his almond-shaped eyes cartwheeling with mischief. He mimed a zip being shut across his mouth and then pointed a warning finger at me. And because I loved this child far more than I wanted to, I did what I was told.

  His mother turned her attention to the other child on the backseat. “Now look,” she said, putting a plump hand on my leg. Her nails had been painted in a color called Rubble for today. “I think you have to face facts. You met a bloke, you spent a week with him, then he went on holiday and never called you again.”

  The facts were too painful at the moment; I preferred theories.

  “Fifteen days he’s had to get in touch, Sarah. You’ve been sending him messages, calling him, all sorts of other things that quite frankly I’d never expect of someone like you . . . and yet—no response. I’ve been there, love, and it hurts. But it doesn’t stop hurting until you accept the truth and move on.”

  “I’d move on if I actually knew that he simply wasn’t interested. But I don’t.”

  Jo sighed. “Tommy. Please help me out here.”

  There was a long pause. Was there any humiliation greater than this? I wondered. A conversation like this, at the age of nearly bloody forty? This time three weeks ago I’d been a functional adult. I’d chaired a board meeting. I’d written a report for a children’s hospital with which my charity was soon to start working. I’d fed and groomed myself that day, made jokes, fielded calls, responded to e-mails. And now here I was with less command of my emotions than the seven-year-old sitting next to me.

  I checked Tommy’s eyebrows in the rearview mirror to see if he was likely to throw anything in. His eyebrows, which had taken on a life of their own when he’d lost his hair in his early twenties, were nowadays more reliable barometers of his thoughts than his mouth.

  They were creased together. “The thing is,” he said. He paused again, and I sensed the effort it was taking to extract himself from his own problems. “The thing is, Jo, you’ve assumed I agree with you about Sarah. But I’m not sure I do.” His voice was soft and careful, like a cat skirting danger.

  “What?”

  “I predict a riot,” Rudi whispered.

  Tommy’s eyebrows worked up his next sentence. “I’m sure the reason most men don’t call is that they’re just not interested, but it sounds to me like there might be more to this. I mean, they ended up spending a week together. All that time, can you imagine? If Eddie was just after you-know-what, he’d have disappeared after one night.”

  Jo snorted. “Why leave after one night if you can pack in seven days’ you-know-what?”

  “Jo, come on! That’s what twenty-year-old boys do, not men of nearly forty!”

  “Are you talking about sex?” Rudi asked.

  “Er, no?” Jo was thrown. “What do you know about sex?”

  Rudi, terrified, returned to his fraudulent iPad activity.

  Jo watched him for a while, but he was bent studiously over the screen, muttering in his Russian voice.

  I took a long breath. “The one thing I keep thinking about is that he offered to cancel his holiday. Why would he—”

  “I need to wee,” Rudi announced suddenly. “I think I’ve got less than a minute,” he added, before Jo had time to ask.

  We pulled up outside the agricultural college, right across the road from the comprehensive Eddie had gone to. A gray mist of pain hovered as I stared a
t its sign, trying to imagine a twelve-year-old Eddie bouncing through the gates. A round little face; the smile that would crease his skin into laughter lines as the years passed.

  Just passing your school, I texted him, before I had time to stop myself. I wish I knew what happened to you.

  Jo was suspiciously upbeat when she and Rudi got back in the car. She said it was turning into a lovely day and that she was very happy to be out in the countryside with us all.

  “I told her she was being mean to you,” Rudi whispered to me. “Do you want a piece of cheese?” He patted a Tupperware of rejected cheese slices from the sandwiches Jo had given him earlier.

  I ruffled his hair. “No,” I whispered back. “But I love you. Thank you.”

  Jo pretended not to have heard the exchange. “You were saying that Eddie offered to cancel his holiday,” she said brightly.

  And I felt the fissures of my heart open wider, because, of course, I knew why she was finding it so hard to be patient. I knew that of the many men to whom Jo had given her heart and soul (and, often, her body) in the years before Rudi, almost none had called her. And the ones who had called always turned out to have a collection of other women on the go. And each and every time she had let them string her along, because she could never quite give up the hope of being loved. Then Shawn O’Keefe had arrived on the scene, and Jo had got pregnant, and Shawn had moved in, knowing Jo would feed and house him. He hadn’t had one single job in all that time. He’d disappear for whole nights without telling her where he was. His “job interview” today was pure fiction.

  But Jo had been allowing this for seven years, because she somehow convinced herself that love would blossom if she and Shawn worked just a little harder, if she waited just a little longer for him to grow up. She’d convinced herself they could become the family she’d never had.

  Yes, Jo knew all about denial.

  But my own situation seemed to be too much for her. She’d tried to humor me since Eddie had disappeared off the face of the earth, forced herself to listen to my theories, told me he might just call tomorrow. But she hadn’t believed a word of it, and now she’d cracked. Don’t allow yourself to be used the way I have, she was saying. Walk away now, Sarah, while you still can.