Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  “What are you doing?”

  “I . . .”

  There is a thick, panicked silence as she weighs up her options. Everything is still. Even the trees outside seem to have paused, as if waiting for confirmation of treachery. But she can’t do it. She can’t tell me the truth. “I could hear something,” she says, and her voice is so full of inflection she could be on children’s television. “It sounded like a mouse. Have you had trouble with mice recently, Eddie? It was near here. I’ve just been poking around . . . I’ve opened a few drawers. I hope you don’t mind . . .”

  She continues in this vein until I shout— No, I actually bellow, “HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN READING MY LETTERS?”

  There is a bottom-of-the-sea silence.

  “I did find some letters, just a second before you arrived,” she says eventually. “I haven’t read them, though. I took a look at one and thought, Oh, this has nothing to do with me, so I was just putting it back when—”

  “Don’t lie to me! How long have you been reading my letters?”

  Mum’s hand flies to her face, and she starts to take off her glasses, but then changes her mind, leaving them skewed across her nose like a child’s seesaw. I look at her and I don’t see my mother. Only rage, a giant hotplate of fury.

  “How long have you been reading my letters?” I ask, for the third time. I don’t think I have ever spoken to her in this tone. “And don’t lie,” I say. “Not again. Seriously, Mum, do not lie to me.”

  I’m wholly unprepared for what comes next. I’m expecting weeping, my mother slumped on the floor begging forgiveness, when suddenly she turns, sweeping the letter into the air as if it were a parking ticket or some other insult to her existence. It zigzags slowly toward the floor. “Like you’ve lied to me?” she says. “Like you lied to me about wanting to go to LA for a ‘holiday’? About wanting to see your friend Nathan, do a bit of surfing? Like you lied to me about Alan having an ‘emergency’ the day you got back?”

  With a deliberateness I find mesmerizing, she moves forward and plants her hand on the bench that runs down the center of this part of the workshop. “Like you lied to me about that . . . that girl?” She stares wildly at me, as if searching for her son in the face of a serial killer. “How could you? How could you have slept with her, Eddie? How could you betray your sister like that?”

  She must have been reading my letters for months.

  No wonder she’s been so paranoid and clingy since I got back from LA. And no wonder she tried everything in her power to stop me going over there in the first place. Usually when I tell her I’m planning a trip, she looks pleased, because it allows her to convince herself I’m still having a life. This time she behaved as if I were emigrating to Australia.

  “That girl,” she adds, shuddering. She looks like she’s talking about a rapist or a pedophile, not Sarah Harrington. Although I guess that to Mum there’s no moral distinction. “I meant what I said that day. I hope it was her in that hearse.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mum!” I breathe. My voice is soft with wonder. “After all you’ve been through, you wish the same pain on someone else? Are you for real?”

  She makes a dismissive noise with her mouth. My mind leaps in all directions, finding clues everywhere. This is why she’s started to become ill again. She has known about Sarah for months.

  “Was it you who called her?” I ask quietly. “On the phone? Was it you who sent her that threatening message? Is that why you wanted to get a new phone back in July?”

  I’ve started getting those marketing calls, she’d said. They’re really stressing me out, Eddie. I need a new phone number.

  “Yes. It was me who called her. And I don’t regret it.” She’s wearing a pink jumper. For some reason the pink makes this ugliness all the more shocking.

  “And did you turn up at her old school that day? Did you lurk about on the canal path near her parents’ house when she came down to visit?”

  “Yes.” She’s almost shouting! “Somebody had to do something. I could not have her infect you. You’re all I have left!

  “Somebody had to do something,” she repeats, when I fail to reply. “And you obviously weren’t going to. Moping around like that, telling your poor sister how much you loved the woman who killed her . . .” She trails off. She’s hissing again. I stop hearing the words. All I can think is, Do you have any idea what I have gone through to keep you safe from this? How lonely I’ve been? Do you have any idea what I have sacrificed for the sake of your sanity?

  It comes to me at some point that she has stopped talking. Her eyes are wide and glassy with tears.

  “How did you get Sarah’s phone number?” I hear myself asking, although I know the answer. “How did you know she was at her old school that day? Have you been looking at my phone, too?”

  She tells me yes. “And it’s your fault, Eddie, so don’t you get angry with me. I had to intervene, somehow. I had to try to protect Alex from . . . from this.”

  A tear escapes her eye, but her voice remains firm. “It’s your fault,” she repeats. “You who loves to talk about choice! You had a choice, and you chose that woman. That girl.”

  I shake my head, sickened. Her hatred is as livid and vital as it was in the weeks following Alex’s death, intact after all these years.

  “It’s your fault,” she repeats once more. “And I will not apologize.”

  And with that I feel a rupture in my skin—those layers, so thin and strained, so many years, just give way and it all hemorrhages out. The resentment, anger, loneliness, anxiety, fear, whatever—you name it, it’s all storming out like a burst water main. I know in that moment that I cannot carry on like this. I’m done.

  I lean against the door, exhausted. And when my voice comes out, it’s oddly level, as if I’m reading the shipping forecast.

  “No,” I say blankly. (Bay of Biscay: good.) “No, Mum, you’re not blaming me. I am not responsible for your actions. I am not responsible for how you feel, or what you think. It all comes from you. None of it is mine. You chose to read my letters. You chose to harass Sarah. You chose to turn what’s happened to me in the last few months—which, for the record, has been hell—into some sort of grand betrayal. You did that all on your own; I didn’t do a thing.”

  She starts to cry in earnest, although she still looks furious.

  “I am not responsible for your illness, Mum. Nor is Sarah. I have done my best for you—my very best—while you’ve invaded the only tiny bit of privacy I thought I had left.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Yes, I met Sarah, and yes, I fell for her. But I gave her up the moment—the second—I found out. And everything I’ve done since then has been in your best interests. Not mine, yours. And you’re still blaming me?”

  I watch her consider her response. She’s starting to panic. It’s not that she’s listened to what I’ve said, or thought about it, or (God forbid) realized that I might have a point; it’s more that she’s used to me having given way by this stage, and it’s beginning to dawn on her that I won’t.

  So she does what I knew she’d do, eventually: she recasts herself as victim.

  “Okay,” she says, and the tears begin to stream down her face. “Okay, Eddie, it’s my fault. It’s my fault that I have this awful, miserable life, that I’m trapped in my house, taking all that horrid medication. It’s all my fault.”

  She watches my face, but I don’t move a muscle. “You tell yourself whatever you like, Eddie, but really you have no idea how hard my life is.”

  Given that I’ve been looking after her for nineteen years, I think this is a little unfair.

  We stand like two pawns in a chessboard face-off. Mum breaks eye contact first, doubtless to make me feel like the aggressor. She looks wretchedly down at the bench, tears squeezing and dripping into the deep ruts and saw marks below.

  “Don’t
leave me, Eddie,” she says eventually, like I knew she would. “I’m sorry I did what I did. I’m just devastated about you and . . . her. It’s destroyed me.”

  I close my eyes.

  “Don’t leave me, Eddie,” she repeats.

  I move round the bench and hug her. A tiny sparrow of a human being, so easily crushed. I hold her, rigid, and think of my ex-girlfriend Gemma. This was the moment she could never truly understand. The moment when, even after Mum had pushed me to the outer edge of my capabilities, it was still my job to comfort her, to tell her everything was okay. The capitulation was totally inexplicable to Gemma. But I suppose that, like most people, she’s never had the experience of being responsible for someone else’s mental well-being. She’s never lost her sister, and then, nearly, her mother.

  This time, though, it’s different. I’m hugging Mum because I have to, but inside, the landscape has already changed.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s raining by the time I get her into the Land Rover and drive her home. The sky is stuffed with gray clouds, swarming quickly over each other like angry thoughts. I apologize silently to Sarah. Wherever she is. I don’t wish you dead, I tell her. I wish you only happiness.

  In Mum’s house, I give the heating a boost and make her some toast before she goes to bed. I give her a sleeping pill and hold her hand until she’s asleep. I have never had the experience of watching my own child sleep, but I imagine it’s a similar feeling. She looks, somehow, both lost and peaceful as she lies there, curled against my hand like a safety blanket, twitching occasionally, her breath barely audible.

  Then I step outside and call Derek, and I leave a message on his answerphone, saying, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I have hit a wall and need his help.

  On returning home, I watch three episodes of some Netflix series and—exhausted but unable to sleep—spend most of the rest of the night on my garden bench, wrapped in my duvet, having a one-way conversation with Steve the squirrel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  December—Three Months Later

  Dear You,

  Well, ho, ho, ho! Merry bloody Christmas.

  I’ll be thankful for the end of this year.

  This is my first letter to you in more than three months. I guess I’ve had a lot to think about. I’ve also been very busy trying to effect change with Mum without her realizing. That’s been Derek’s plan: liberate Eddie by stealth. He’s been magnificent, of course.

  He set up a meeting with Frances, the vicar who’s been visiting Mum for years. She said there are a few people locally who are happy to visit isolated parishioners. Derek said that the idea was to establish a friendship between Mum and a volunteer—however long it took—so that eventually she’d trust them enough to want them to take her shopping, or to the odd medical appointment. Someone other than me she could call, someone to open her world up, just a chink.

  So a chap called Felix is visiting Mum, alongside Frances, once a week. Felix is a Gulf War veteran. Lost his arm out there. Then his wife left, because she couldn’t cope, and then he lost his son in Iraq in 2006. So Felix knows about pain and loss. And yet, you know what, Hedgehog? He’s so jolly! I’ve only met him twice, but he seems like the most positive chap. Listening to him and Mum is quite something—her response to just about everything is negative, whereas his is unfailingly upbeat. Sometimes when he’s talking, I can see her thinking, Is he completely mad?

  “Give her another few weeks,” Derek said to me the other day. “I don’t think she’s far off going out of the house with him.”

  Derek even persuaded her to spend Christmas with her sister so I could have a break.

  So . . . slowly but surely, I’m getting a bit more space. A bit more oxygen. I get glimpses of myself, from time to time—how I was before all of this. How I was during that week with Sarah. How I was when I was young. And they feel good.

  Anyway! Here I am, on Christmas Day, in Alan’s new spare room in Bisley. It’s 5:45 A.M. and Lily’s already up, pounding on Alan and Gia’s door. I went mad and bought her a whole stocking’s worth of presents. Alan says I’m a selfish turd and that I’ve shown him up.

  For now, though, I’m looking out of the still-to-be-curtained window at a gunmetal sky and I’m thinking about you. My dearest, most precious Alex.

  I have no idea if you’re there. If you’ve stood at my shoulder all these years, reading the words I’ve written to you, or if you’ve been no more than a vibration of spent energy. Whatever you’ve been, though, I hope you have somehow known how dearly loved you were, how desperately missed.

  Without you, or these letters, I don’t know if I’d have made it. In death you were as in life: kind, colorful, warm, a friend. I felt you, through these purple pages. Your vitality and silliness, your nosiness, your goodness, your innocence, your sweetness. You kept me putting one foot in front of the other. You helped me breathe when life was strangling me.

  But the time has come for me to go it alone, as Jeanne says. To stand on my own two feet. And so, my little Hedgehog, this is to be our last letter.

  I am going to be okay. Jeanne is certain of it, and—actually—I am, too. I have to be, really; I see every day in our mother what the alternative looks like.

  I am even going to give in to Alan’s insistence that I start dating. I don’t really want to, but I accept that I have to at least give myself the chance of loving someone else.

  Because that’s the thing: Mum can’t change, but I can. And I will. I will march on through winter, I will finish my commissions, and I’ll take on more. I’m going to start offering summer workshops for young people. I’m going to do this stupid Tinder thing. I’m going to get fit, too, and get better at stonemasonry, and be a stupendous godfather to Lily. And I’m going to do all of this with a smile on my face, because that’s the person people think I am, and that’s the person I want to be again.

  That’s my promise, Hedgehog. To you, and to myself.

  I will never forget you, Alex Hayley Wallace. Not for a day. I will love you until the end of my life. I will always miss you, and I will always be your big brother.

  Thank you for being there. In life and in death.

  Thank you, and good-bye, my darling Hedgehog.

  Me xxxxxxxxxxx

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Early March—Three Months Later

  The day my life changes forever, I’m gearing up for my first Tinder date. I feel quite stupid with nerves. (It doesn’t help that Alan is texting me on the hour, every hour, to check I’m not backing out.) She is called Heather, and she has nice hair, and she seems smart and funny. But I still don’t want to go. I actually caught myself earlier, wondering if I could hammer a nail through my hand so I’d have the excuse of an afternoon in the emergency room.

  I have not admitted this to Alan.

  It’s also Mum’s sixty-seventh, so I’ve taken her for lunch in Stroud. We’re in Withy’s Yard, which has always been a safe place for her—presumably because it’s hidden up an old stone alleyway, visible to almost nobody—and today she’s full of chat. Felix took her shopping yesterday, and he’s better at it than I am. His only downfall is that he can’t carry as many shopping bags because he has only one arm.

  In all honesty I’m only half listening, because I’m busy imagining tonight’s terrible silences and oddly pitched laughs—so it takes me a little while to realize Mum’s stopped talking.

  I look up. She’s frozen, staring off to her right, soupspoon hovering inches from the bowl. I follow her line of vision.

  I don’t recognize them, at first. They just look like two middle-aged people eating salads. She’s wearing a checked shirt and is talking on a mobile phone. He is wearing a cord jacket, and he’s watching her. Like Mum, both of them appear to have stopped eating. I feel a vague shift of recognition, looking at the man’s profile, but nothing more.


  But as I glance back at Mum, I know exactly who they are. The only people who could have this sort of effect on her. Her spoon has been dropped into the soup now; its handle is slowly disappearing like the stern of a sinking ship.

  I look back at Sarah Harrington’s parents. I do recognize them. Of course I do; they often came to pick up Alex for playdates, or to drop little Hannah off for the afternoon. I remember them always being friendly. So much so that I sometimes wanted to go and play in Frampton Mansell, too. They seemed so solid together; a proper family, whereas mine was made up of a father hundreds of miles away with a new baby on the way, and a mother crippled by bitterness and depression.

  I have two distinct thoughts: First, what am I going to do with Mum? She cannot be here, two tables away from Michael and Patsy Harrington. And second, if it’s not Michael or Patsy Harrington who died last year, who was it?

  I distinctly hear the woman saying, “We’re on our way.” And then they’re both up and gone, not pausing even to straighten up their chairs or apologize to the lady behind the café counter. Sarah’s mother is pulling on her coat as she hurries down the alleyway toward the High Street. Mum and I sit still for a few moments, silent amid the hum of conversation and clinking cutlery. It’s not until the milk steamer starts screeching that we look at each other.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the end we go to the farm shop on the Cirencester Road to get some nice soup to have at Mum’s: after the Harringtons left, she said that her birthday lunch was ruined and she wouldn’t eat any more.

  The extent of our conversation about them has so far been this:

  Me: “Are you okay?”

  Mum: “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I haven’t pushed her. But I can’t think about anything else. Sarah’s parents. The people who made her. Where were they off to? What was wrong? It didn’t look like a good-news sort of call.