I’m using it only as a counterweight, only after I’ve established that I’m attractive and successful. Knowing that a man really likes me, admires me, or is even maybe intimidated, then I can be honest about the not-perfect underneath, to both his relief and mine. It makes him protective of me and careful. Every man should be protective and careful just as a matter of course, but we all know that’s not the case. Right? You’re a woman. If you’re a straight woman, you know how men are.
I know what you’re thinking. Why do I need this kind of coddling? What makes me so special and fragile? This is my theory: we all need it, but I’m one of the few stepping up and demanding it.
This is the stupidest fucking arrangement I’ve ever encountered. What is this silence? You’re “listening” like a plaster wall; really you’re probably listing errands in your head, or song lyrics. This isn’t human. This isn’t personal. There’s supposed to be a back-and-forth, some kind of comment, not just prompts here and there, leading questions. There are supposed to be reactions.
Do you practise that blank face? Because, to be honest, it’s a little too bland. It’s a giveaway that something has hit home. Like in my last visit when I asked if you’d ever known anyone else from Lilling. You acted like that was meaningless. I almost laughed.
You don’t need to say it twice. I’m off.
[Muffled sounds.] [Door slams.]
Chapter 7
Laurie Ambrose
LAURIE?” SIMON’S VOICE wafted down from upstairs, along with lashings of coloured light from the pretty window on the landing.
“I’m here,” I called up to him, letting drop my handbag and keys. They thudded and clinked, respectively, on the wooden floor, just short of the hem of the threadbare rug.
Our house is full of old things, memory things. The rug has been mine since my first flat, handed down from an aunt who’d had it custom made on a trip to Turkey when she was a young bride. The window was made by Simon’s mother in her stained-glass phase, and fitted just inside the real window frame. It’s of fat, happy birds on a flowering branch.
“You all right?” Simon blocked the birds with his body.
I didn’t answer. The top of the stairs felt very far away.
“Laurie,” he said again, clattering down the steps and wiping his hands on his jeans. They were dirty. He must have been working on the plumbing in the upstairs bath. It’d been dodgy recently.
“One of my clients is dead,” I said.
His smudged hands touched me, leading me to the couch to sit down. He offered me a drink, but alcohol is only celebratory to me, or romantic, not “medicinal.” Accepting would feel like making a toast to death. He got up and washed his hands, returning with a glass of water. I sipped, and set it down. The coaster was also of a bird, an American blue jay. His mother had given us them too.
He touched my hair and I thought of Annalise Williams and her creepy version of a date, her interest in my personal life, and her apparent spite. I try not to judge my clients, but thinking of her made me shiver.
“Tell me what happened.”
“One of my clients drowned. I heard it on the radio on the way home.”
“God, really?”
“You know that woman they found in the Cam yesterday? They’ve released her name.”
“I’m so sorry.” One arm behind me, the other on my knee. I leaned into him, grateful.
Thoughts of my client Annalise, so keen to get off on a man’s sympathy and attention, invaded my mind. It wasn’t fair. I stood up. I walked across the room.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t think I should.” I can’t share what I’ve discussed with clients except in the most general terms. “It’s someone I only saw once, a few months ago.”
It came to him and he snapped his fingers. “Oh! Hannah something, in the river. I had the TV on in the background while wrestling with the plumbing,” he explained, clarifying that he hadn’t been lazy today.
It would have been unethical of me to confirm the name. I changed the subject: “I cut a session short today. It became personal.”
He tensed. I quickly assured him that it wasn’t that kind of personal. There’s a risk of attachment that, in the extreme, could become inappropriate or dangerous. “Not like that. Just … strange. She knew where I lived.”
“What? She knows this house?”
“No. Where I was born.”
Simon shook his head in surprise. “How did that come up?”
I looked up, at the plaster ceiling rose and the delicate, practical picture rail. This was home now. “She made reference to an event from there.”
“Oh, that murder? Annalise Wood?”
It’s peculiar to be from a village known foremost for a death. “Yes, that.”
“And she knows that you’re from Lilling? Is that on your LinkedIn?”
I thought. “No.” I try to keep my personal life off-line.
“Did you tell her?”
“Why would I tell her? In the first session, she asked if I knew anyone from there. Maybe I flinched or something.”
“Maybe …” He looked worried. I joined him back on the couch. I didn’t want to let Annalise Williams’ morbid relationship strategy affect me. “Did she say anything else personal?”
It felt inadequate when spoken out loud. “She mocked my age. She … She was hostile. I can’t properly convey it.”
“But she’s not the one who …”
“No. No. The woman who died only saw me once, then stopped.” What if she’d come back to see me again? Had she still been having panic attacks? What if I’d been able to help her? Would she still be alive? My thoughts must have shown on my face.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Simon asked me. I felt a sweet pang in my chest at the sound of his voice. We’d been married less than a year.
“I …” I wanted to play him the recordings, to see if he thought I overreacted to Annalise Williams today. I wanted to play Hannah-Claire Finney’s, just to hear her alive and hopeful. But I couldn’t do that. Their stories weren’t for me to share. But I wonder sometimes, when clients affect me—when they discomfit me, as Annalise Williams did, or emotionally touch me, as Hannah-Claire Finney did—at what point our interactions might become also partly mine.
Well, this was mine: “I was five when Annalise Wood disappeared.” My mother was protective in my teen years, but I suppose most parents are. I don’t think Annalise’s murder caused that. I think the murder merely confirmed her fears, which were already deep. “I was twenty-one when the body was finally discovered.”
“I remember it.”
“Why?” He’d never mentioned Annalise Wood before.
“Lilling isn’t that far away. It was in the news.” We were both at Cambridge then.
I still rearranged memories of those years, when Simon and I knew each other but I was with Tom. University was the start of my and Tom’s story; Simon was a background friend. Now, four years after Tom’s death, those early memories were framed differently, zooming in on Simon’s and my amiable, casual interactions as the start of our own story.
“She didn’t like the ring you gave me,” I said.
“Who?”
“Annalise.” Shit. I didn’t mean to say her name. “The woman I asked to leave early today. She said that it was cheap to have a garnet instead of a diamond.”
He had too much confidence to let that get to him. His focus went elsewhere: “Her name is Annalise? Like the murdered teenager?”
I’d already let her name out; it wasn’t like I could snatch it back. “That’s how it came up in conversation. It’s not a coincidence. Her mother named her after Annalise Wood.”
“Why?” His mouth frowned around the questions.
I shook my head. “She said that her mother admired how much Annalise was missed. She wished for that kind of value for her daughter.”
Simon whistled in amazement. “That’s a kind of popularity I could do
without.”
“Not that someone stalked and killed her. The grieving after.”
“It’s still morbid.”
I nodded. “I know. It’s a weighty name, especially for someone in Lilling.”
“So she’s actually from there? Did you know her or her family?”
“No. I didn’t recognise the surname. She’s not necessarily from Lilling itself; all of the villages in that part of the county were affected by it; they all feed into the same secondary school. She said something odd,” I added, remembering. “She said that the name Annalise had a spike in popularity after her disappearance was so heavily covered in the media. But I’ve never known anyone called Annalise. It always felt like a cursed name to me, like calling your child Desdemona or Lolita.”
“People die every day,” Simon mused. “Why do we all remember Annalise? The name Hannah isn’t going to become an anathema because your client was killed in the river.”
“Killed?”
“Wasn’t she? You said …”
“I said she died. I assume it was an accident. Or …” Suicide, I finished to myself.
“Oh. All right. That’s just as sad, isn’t it? My point stands.”
He kept talking. I only half-listened, mesmerised by his assumption of murder.
He mused, “I suppose the relative rarity of the name Annalise is part of the reason. Everyone already knows at least one Hannah, and probably several. That diffuses the effect. For many people, the murder story is the only time they’ve ever heard of an Annalise at all… .”
I felt the tension in my face tightening my lips. I was offended by the suggestion of murder, just a further horror to add to Hannah’s sad life. I also felt a tickle of selfish hope, and realised that I’d been feeling guilt: that this woman had been in my care and I hadn’t saved her from herself. If someone else had done it to her, then it wasn’t my fault.
Simon answered his own question: “As for why some cases get famous, there’s a titillation to it, I suppose. A pretty young girl, a mystery. All those years of wondering before they finally found the body.”
“They still don’t know who killed her.”
“Really? After all this time?”
“It gets harder to figure out with time, not easier.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
He waited patiently for me to go on, but there was so much that I couldn’t say to him.
Even after Hannah-Claire’s death, it would violate privacy ethics to tell him that she had also talked about Annalise Wood. That two people connected to Annalise Wood came to me within months; is that odd? Is that statistically unexpected? Lilling isn’t so far from here. Her murder was famous. Was I being paranoid? I couldn’t ask him.
I already edit myself, even in normal conversation, to cut references to Tom. I say “my” instead of “our”: “my savings” even though Tom had made most of that money, “my children” (a boy and a girl, both grown up and at university) as if they have no father. That blue photo album on the bottom shelf is now “my trip to New Zealand,” not “Tom’s and my fifth anniversary.” Simon had never asked me to be so careful, but I felt that I should, for my sake as well as his. I was learning a new “our.” “Our” now meant Simon and me.
My job added an extra layer of necessary editing.
“I need to talk to Prisha,” I announced. She’s my boss, and ethics allowed me to discuss clients with her. I could also talk about Tom without feeling disloyal. She’d known him.
Simon had known him too, which was a blessing with the children, who were, in a way, relieved that their new stepfather was someone that Tom had liked. It was possibly odd for Simon. I never knew his ex-wife. They had parted acrimoniously, and that unevenness hangs over us. I had lost a treasured spouse to acute asthma after seventeen years; Simon had been divorced over a diagnosis of male infertility after five. I wonder if he, too, purposely edits her out of his conversation, for me… . I always assumed his reluctance to mention her was for his own sake. Her leaving tainted even his happy memories of their marriage. I, on the other hand, have nothing but happy memories, magnified by their having been snatched away by unfair death.
“I thought Prisha was in Vienna this month.”
Shit. “You’re right.” Her youngest sister was having a baby there; the sister’s husband was a minor composer in residence for a year at the opera house.
“You can’t tell me, can you?” he asked, with an understanding smile.
I shook my head, agreeing that I could not.
“Shall I go for a walk? You can talk to yourself to your heart’s content.”
He was starting a new company from home, so I rarely got to be in the house alone. He was conscious of that and always offering to give me space. I rarely wanted it, but that day I said, “Yes, please. I’m sorry. There’s just something I need to work out, and …”
He kissed the top of my head. “Shall I bring back a curry in an hour? Would that suit you?”
“How about something from the noodle place. Duck for me. Hour and a half?” I wanted to be composed when he returned. I wanted to be done thrashing out whatever was bothering me.
“The Dog and Pony,” he said over his shoulder as he exited. That’s the pub down the road.
Tom and I had lived near the centre of Cambridge for the whole of our marriage. It was taking a bit of getting used to, now living in a satellite village: One pub, one curry house, one noodle place. A tiny library open only half-days. If I didn’t have a car and an office in the city centre I’d go mad.
I’m not supposed to use words like that: “mad,” “crazy.” Even in jokes or hyperbole they foster a mind-set of otherness. I edited myself yet again, and said out loud, “If I didn’t have a car and an office in the city centre, I wouldn’t like it very much.” I laughed. I did sound crazy, talking to myself and laughing at non-jokes.
I decided that, just for the next ninety minutes, I wouldn’t edit at all.
I tried to conjure Prisha’s presence: her calmness, her attentive posture. She would sit on the edge of the couch, balancing a teacup and saucer on her knee. But I didn’t want to talk to her, not really, not if I had no constraints. It would be a sad thing if even in our imaginations we remained limited to what was possible.
“Tom,” I said out loud, then glanced over my shoulder, as if Simon might have heard that through the window. It’s not that I prefer to talk to my dead husband; I’m just not allowed to share these things with my living one. “Tom, I had a terrible day. No, that’s not fair. I had a troubling day, but someone else had it much worse. Someone else is dead. No, not you—I mean, you are, but someone just died yesterday, someone I knew, a little, and I’m sad for her.”
Simon and I had bought this living room set new, so it was hard to picture where in it Tom would settle himself. In the middle of the three-seater couch, arms spread over the back? Or claiming the chair with the footstool? “Next to you,” my brain conjured, in his voice.
How could I judge Annalise Williams for her manipulations and obsession, when I was indulging in an imagined conversation with my dead husband?
“I’m being very unkind,” I said. “A woman came to see me twice. This is a different woman, not the one who died. I think of them both together, though, because they’re both attached to an old murder, of Annalise Wood, back home.” “Home” is a fluid word, meaning where I was born, where I grew up, where I used to live, where I live now, all at once.
“It’s unkind of me to dislike her, but I do. Her name is Annalise, just like the murdered girl. She’s obsessed with her. She tells boyfriends that she was raped and left for dead at some point in her past, and, instead of them running screaming, somehow this works for her. It gets them emotional, and, um, chivalrous, I suppose… .” Two months into dating, I’d broken down in front of Simon over a cancer scare (the biopsy later revealed that the lump was benign). We’d been close before then, but that confession of fear, and his embrace of it, had deepened things bet
ween us. The only difference between that experience and Annalise Williams’, I admitted to myself, was that her story was false, but I couldn’t fault her reasoning: such vulnerability can, at a certain relationship point, raise the stakes. She didn’t have a sob story of her own, so she borrowed one.
How does one get to twenty-four without some sad story to tell? She probably had plenty, I answered myself, but none so dramatic. I remembered that Simon looked at me differently after I told him, as if I were more precious for having been almost lost.
I was editing myself a bit after all. I only thought this part about me and Simon, and didn’t say it out loud to imaginary Tom.
“Tom,” I said, coming back to the point. “It’s unkind of me to dislike her, because sessions are not analogous to real life. Real life has a back-and-forth, an equality in conversations. Sessions are, by design, narcissistic. I can’t fault her for talking on and on, all about herself. That’s what she’s there for.” I sipped at the water Simon had brought me earlier. The glass was from a set Tom and I had bought at a charity shop for our first shared home.
“Sometimes it’s tempting to imagine that the things that get admitted to in therapy are more real than the face the client presents to the world. You know, as if the public face were only a mask and that the private confession is what’s really true. But that’s not fair either. The public person is also true, just incomplete. You need to mix the secret things in with the public things to get the whole person, not just replace the public with the private.” Seeing as I was lecturing my imaginary dead husband, it was certainly good news that what’s done in secret isn’t the full “me.”
Look for Her Page 8