Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  The problem was, I couldn’t.

  I had tried out the idea of Eddie simply not being interested. Each and every one of the fifteen days my phone had remained silent. I’d combed through every glowing, lambent moment of my time with him, searching for cracks, tiny warning signs that he might not have been as certain as I was, and I’d found nothing.

  I barely used Facebook these days, but suddenly I was on it, all of the time, scouring his profile for signs of life. Or, worse—someone else.

  Nothing.

  I phoned and messaged him; I even sent him a pathetic little tweet. I downloaded Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and checked throughout the day to see if he’d surfaced. But they told me the same thing every time: Eddie David had last been seen online just over two weeks ago, the day I left his house so he could pack for Spain.

  Flattened by both shame and desperation, I’d even downloaded a bunch of dating apps to find out if he was registered.

  He wasn’t.

  I craved control over this uncontrollable situation. I couldn’t sleep; the thought of food made my insides convulse. I couldn’t concentrate on anything and I jumped on my phone with the frenzy of a starving animal when it buzzed. Exhaustion pressed at me throughout the day—great fibrous wads of it; a suffocation, at times—and yet I spent most of the night wide awake, staring into the pitchy darkness of Tommy’s spare room in west London.

  The strange thing was, I knew this wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t sane behavior, and I knew it was getting worse, not better, but I had neither the will nor the energy to stage an intervention on myself.

  Why didn’t he call? I typed into Google one day. The response was like an online hurricane. For the sake of any remaining sanity, I had shut down the page.

  Instead, I’d Googled Eddie, again, had gone through his carpentry website, looking for . . . By that point I didn’t even know what I was looking for. And of course I hadn’t found a thing.

  “Do you think he told you everything about himself?” Tommy asked. “Are you certain he isn’t with another woman, for example?”

  The road dipped down into a little bowl of parkland, in which stately oaks had gathered like gentlemen in a smoking lounge.

  “He’s not with another woman,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because . . . I know. He was single; he was available. Not just literally, emotionally.”

  The flash of a deer vanishing into a beech wood.

  “Okay. But what about all the other warning signs?” Tommy persisted. “Were there any inconsistencies? Did you sense he was holding anything back?”

  “No.” I paused. “Although, I suppose . . .”

  Jo turned round. “What?”

  I sighed. “The day we met, he canceled a few incoming calls. But that was the only time it happened,” I added quickly. “From then on he answered every time his phone rang. And he didn’t have anyone strange calling him, either; it was all friends, his mum, business queries . . .” And Derek, I thought suddenly. I had never quite got to the bottom of who Derek was.

  Tommy’s eyebrows were engaged in some complicated triangulation.

  “What?” I asked him. “What are you thinking? It was just the first day, Tommy. After that he picked up when anyone rang.”

  “I believe you. It’s more that . . .” He trailed off.

  Jo was noisily silent, but I ignored her.

  “It’s more that I’ve just always thought Internet dating to be risky,” Tommy said eventually. “I know you didn’t meet him online, but it’s a similar situation—you have no friends in common and no shared history. He could have recast himself as almost anyone.”

  I frowned. “But he made friends with me on Facebook. Why would he do that if he had anything to hide? He’s on Twitter and Instagram for his work, and he’s got a business website. Which includes a photo of him. And I stayed at his house for a week, remember? His post was addressed to Eddie David. If he wasn’t Eddie David, cabinetmaker, I’d know.”

  We were now deep in the old woods that spread across Cirencester Park. Pennies of light flashed across Jo’s bare thighs as she gazed out of the window, apparently at a loss. Before long we’d emerge from the woods, and soon after that we’d reach the bend in the road where the accident had happened.

  At that thought, I felt my breathing change, as if someone had thinned out the car’s oxygen.

  A few minutes later we emerged into the postrain brightness of country fields. I closed my eyes, still unable, after all these years, to look at the grass verge where they said the ambulance crew had laid her out, tried to stop the inevitable.

  Jo’s hand found its way to my knee.

  “Why are you doing that?” Rudi’s antenna was up. “Mum? Why is your hand on Sarah’s leg? Why are there flowers tied to that tree? Why is everyone being—”

  “Rudi,” Jo said. “Rudi, what about I spy? I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘W’!”

  There was a pause. “I’m too old for that,” Rudi said humpily. He didn’t like being kept out.

  My eyes were still pressed shut, even though I knew we’d passed the spot.

  “A whale,” Rudi began reluctantly. “A watering can. A wobile phone.”

  “Okay, Harrington?” Tommy asked, after a respectful pause.

  “Yes.” I opened my eyes. Wheat fields, tottering drystone walls, footpaths like lightning forks across horse-cropped grass. “Fine.”

  It never got any easier. Nineteen years had sanded down its edges, planed over the worst of the knots, but it was still there.

  “How’s about we discuss Eddie some more?” Jo suggested. I tried to say yes, but my voice trailed off. “In your own time,” she said, patting my leg.

  “Well, I do keep wondering if he’s had an accident,” I said, when speech felt possible. “He was off to southern Spain to windsurf.”

  Tommy’s eyebrows considered this. “I suppose that’s a reasonable theory.”

  Jo pointed out that I was friends with Eddie on Facebook. “She’d have seen something on his page if he’d got hurt.”

  “We shouldn’t underestimate his phone having died, though,” I said. My voice wilted as each avenue of hope shut down. “It was a mess, he—”

  “Babe,” Jo cut in gently. “Babe, his phone isn’t dead. It rings when you call him.”

  I nodded miserably.

  Rudi, eating crisps, kicked the back of Jo’s seat. “Borrrrrrrrred.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “And remember what we agreed about speaking with your mouth full.”

  Rudi, unseen to Jo, turned toward me and offered me a view of his half-masticated crisps. Unfortunately, and for reasons unclear, he had decided that this was an in-joke between us.

  I slid my hand into the side pocket of my bag, closing my fingers around the last piece of hope I had. “But Mouse,” I said pathetically. Tears were hot and close. “He gave me Mouse.”

  I cupped her in the palm of my hand; smooth, worn, smaller than a walnut. Eddie had carved her from a piece of wood when he was just nine years old. She’s been with me through a lot, he’d said. She’s my taliswoman.

  She reminded me of the brass penguin Dad had given me as a desk mate during my GCSE exams. It was a stern-looking thing that had scowled ferociously at me from the moment I’d opened each paper. Even now, I loved that penguin. I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone with it.

  Mouse meant the same to Eddie; I knew it—and yet he had given her to me. Keep her safe until I get back, he’d said. She means a lot to me.

  Jo glanced back and sighed. She already knew about Mouse. “People change their minds,” she said quietly. “It might just have been easier for him to lose the key ring than to get in touch.”

  “She’s not just a key ring. She . . .” I gave up.

  When Jo resumed, h
er voice was gentler. “Look, Sarah. If you’re certain something bad has happened to him, how’s about you scrap all these private communications and write something on his Facebook wall? Where everyone can see it? Say that you’re worried. Ask if anyone’s heard from him.”

  I swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean exactly what I just said. Appeal to his friends for information. What’s stopping you?”

  I turned to look out of the window, unable to reply.

  Jo pressed on. “I think the only thing that would stop you is shame. And if you really, truly, honestly believed something terrible had happened to him, you wouldn’t give a rat’s about shame.”

  We were passing the old MOD airfield. A faded orange wind sock frilled over the empty runway and I suddenly remembered Hannah’s great hoots of laughter when Dad once observed that it was like a big orange willy. “Willy sock!” she’d yelled, and Mum had been torn between helpless laughter and reproach.

  Rudi opened Jo’s music library on the iPad and selected a playlist called “East Coast rap.”

  If I was as worried as I said, why hadn’t I written something on Eddie’s wall? Was Jo actually right?

  * * *

  • • •

  The Cotswold stone cottages of Chalford were sliding into view, clinging determinedly to their hillside as if awaiting rescue. Chalford would give way to Brimscombe, which would turn into Thrupp and then Stroud. And in Stroud a large committee of teachers, pupils, and press were waiting for Tommy at our old school. I had to pull myself together.

  “Hang on,” Tommy said suddenly. He turned down Rudi’s rap and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Harrington, did you tell Eddie you were married?”

  “No.”

  His eyebrows had become quite wild. “I thought you said you told him everything!”

  “I did! But we didn’t go through our roster of exes. That would have been . . . well, tacky. I mean, we’re both nearly forty . . .” I trailed off. Should we have done? “We were meant to tell each other our life stories, but we never got round to it. Although we did establish that we were both single.”

  Tommy was watching me through the rearview mirror. “But have you and Reuben updated your website?”

  I frowned, wondering what he could be getting at.

  Then: “Oh, no,” I whispered. Freezing fingers brushed my abdomen.

  “What?” Rudi shouted. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sarah’s charity’s website,” Jo told him. “There’s a whole page about Sarah and Reuben, about how they started the Clowndoctor charity in the nineties when they got married. And how they still run it together today.”

  “Oh!” said Rudi. He put the iPad down, delighted at last to have been able to solve the mystery. “Sarah’s boyfriend read it and his heart got broken! That’s why he’s dead, because you can’t be alive if your heart doesn’t work.”

  But: “I’m sorry—I don’t buy it,” Jo said quietly. “If he spent a week with you, Sarah, if he was as serious about you as you are about him, that wouldn’t be enough to put him off. He’d confront you. He wouldn’t just slink off like a dying cat.”

  But I was already on that confounded Messenger app, writing to him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Day One: The Day We Met

  It was furnace-hot the day I met Eddie David. The countryside had begun to melt and pool into itself; birds holed up in stock-still trees and bees drunk on soaring Fahrenheit. It didn’t feel like the sort of afternoon for falling in love with a complete stranger. It felt exactly like every other June 2 on which I’d made this walk. Quiet, sorrowful, loaded. Familiar.

  I heard Eddie before I saw him. I was standing at the bus stop, trying to remember what day of the week it was—Thursday, I decided, which meant I had nearly an hour to wait. Here in the livid heat of the day, for a bus in which I would certainly fry. I started to wander down the lane toward the village, looking for shade. On a boiling current I heard the sound of children in the primary school.

  They were interrupted by the blast of a sheep from somewhere up ahead. BAAA, it shouted. BAAA!

  The sheep was answered by a great gale of male laughter, which barreled off into the compressed heat like a jet of cool air. I started to smile, before I’d even seen the man. His laughter summed up everything that I felt about sheep, with their silly faces and daft side-eyes.

  They were a little way away, on the village green. A man sitting with his back to me, a sheep a few feet away. Staring at the man through those side-eyes. It tried another baa and the man said something I couldn’t hear.

  By the time I’d reached the green, they were deep in conversation.

  I stood on the edge of the scorched grass, watching them, and felt an old slide of recognition. I didn’t know this man, but he was a charming replica of so many of the boys with whom I’d been to school: a big, pleasant loaf of a thing; cropped hair and biscuity-brown skin; the West Country uniform of cargo shorts and faded T-shirt. He would be capable of putting up shelves, would doubtless know how to surf, and would quite probably drive a clapped-out Golf donated by his pleasant but batty mother.

  The sort of boy whom, I’d stated in my teenage diaries, I would one day marry. (The “one day” referred to an unspecified time in the future when, like a butterfly from a scrubby chrysalis, I would resign my post as average-looking, socially unsuccessful sidekick to Mandy and Claire, and would emerge a bold and beautiful woman with the power to attract any man she had time to notice.) The husband would come from this village—Sapperton, or one of the others nearby—and he would definitely drive a Golf. (The Golf was quite a thing, for some reason. In the fantasy, we drove it down to Cornwall for our honeymoon, where I amazed him by charging fearlessly into the sea with a surfboard under my arm.)

  Instead I’d married an effete American clown. An actual clown, with boxes of red noses and ukuleles and silly hats. In a couple of hours he’d be stirring, as the bright Californian sunshine began to bleach the walls of our apartment. Maybe he’d yawn, roll over, and nuzzle at his new girlfriend before padding off to ramp up the air-conditioning and make her some gruesome green juice.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Oh, hello,” the man said, glancing round. Oh, hello. As if he’d known me for years. “Found myself a sheep.”

  The sheep let off another foghorn baa, never turning from the man’s face. “It’s only been a few minutes,” the man told me, “but we’re both very serious about each other.”

  “I see.” I smiled. “Is that legal?”

  “You can’t legislate love,” he replied cheerfully.

  An unexpected thought came to me: I miss England.

  “How did you two meet?” I asked, stepping onto the green.

  He smiled at the sheep. “Well, I was sitting here, feeling a bit sorry for myself, when this young lady appeared as if from nowhere. We started talking. And before I knew it, we were discussing moving in together.”

  “This young man,” I said. “I don’t know anything about sheep, but even I can tell you he’s not a lady.”

  After a moment the man leaned backward and checked the sheep’s undercarriage.

  “Oh.”

  The sheep stared at him. “Is your name not Lucy?” he asked. The sheep remained silent. “He told me his name was Lucy.”

  “His name is not Lucy,” I confirmed.

  The sheep baaed again and the man laughed. A delirious jackdaw flapped out of a tree on the lane behind us.

  Somehow I was standing right by them. The man, the sheep, and me all together on the bleached village green. The man was looking up at me. He had eyes the color of foreign oceans, I thought, full of warmth and good intentions.

  He was rather lovely.

  It will be many months before you can expect to develop authentic feelings toward another man, I’d been told th
is morning. The advice had come courtesy of a preposterous app called the BreakUp Coach, which my closest friend in LA, Jenni Carmichael, had downloaded (without permission) to my phone, the day after Reuben and I had announced our separation. Every morning it sent me dire push notifications about the state of emotional trauma I was in right now, and how that was totally okay.

  Only I wasn’t in any sort of emotional trauma. Even when Reuben told me he was sorry but he felt we should divorce, I’d had to force myself to cry so as not to hurt his feelings. When the app told me about my shattered heart and my broken spirit, I felt as if I were the recipient of someone else’s mail.

  But it made Jenni happy when she saw me reading the messages, so I kept the app. Jenni’s emotional well-being—increasingly delicate, as her thirties came to a close, taking with them her hopes of reproduction—was heavily dependent on her ability to look after the needy.

  The man turned back to the sheep. “Well, it’s a shame. I thought we had a future, Lucy and I.” His phone started to ring.

  “Do you think you’ll be okay?”

  He pulled his phone a little way out of his pocket and canceled the call. “Oh, I expect so. At least, I hope so.”

  I busied myself scanning around for another sheep, a farmer, a helpful sheepdog. “I feel like we should do something about him, don’t you?”

  “Probably.” The man pulled himself up to standing. “I’ll call Frank. He owns most of the sheep around here.” He dialed a number on his phone and I swallowed, suddenly uncertain. Once the sheep had been dealt with, we would have to stop joking and conduct an actual conversation.

  I stood on the green and waited. The sheep was picking unenthusiastically at the coarse spokes of grass around him, keeping tabs on us. He’d been shorn recently, but even his cropped coat looked suffocating.

  I wondered why I was here. I wondered why the man had been feeling sorry for himself earlier. I wondered why I was raking a hand through my hair. He was talking to Frank on the phone now, chuckling easily. “Okay, mate. I’ll do my best. Right,” he said, looking at me. He really did have lovely eyes.