Look for Her

by Emily Winslow

  My mind was blank. I stuttered but ultimately had no words.

  “Henry hit me, but it wasn’t enough. I needed Blake to do the rest. For Hannah-Claire.”

  “You’re lying.”

  She stood, leaning hard on her cane, that arm quivering from the pressure. “I’m not. Blake is a good man, and that’s why he did it. To help. And it worked! Henry’s in jail, and he’ll go to court, and he’ll go to prison. So, I won’t talk to the police about Blake, and you won’t talk to them about Hannah-Claire either. Understand? We both know things that don’t need to be shared.”

  “Blake could never …”

  I didn’t finish the sentence. He could never hurt someone out of sadism, or even anger. But to help someone? Could he do that? I didn’t know.

  Looking at her, I overlaid the image of her, bloody under my bumper, yesterday. No, Blake could not do that. He would have stopped himself. He could never do that much. He couldn’t make her unconscious. He couldn’t make her bleed.

  I shook my head. “No. That didn’t happen.”

  “If you say so. I just wanted to let you know.”

  She started hobbling towards the door.

  “Sandra!” I said.

  She turned around. “My mother calls me that all the time. You can’t rattle me with that.”

  I didn’t help her with the office door. I didn’t help her with the heavy front door, or the steps. I just held still, holding my breath until she was gone.

  I LOCKED MY office and first thought to walk to the college. Blake could be in his house. He could be in the library. I could look up his lecture schedule and wait for him outside the hall doors.

  But I know my son.

  I went home. Not our home now, which is a drive away, but our home before, when Tom was still alive. We had a lovely house not far from the city centre, on Adams Road, abutting the secret bird sanctuary.

  It’s not a secret-secret, but it’s unlabelled. There is no sign or name, just a lock on a gate, to which only the members know the code. There’s no website; membership is run by paper mail, so that the code number, which changes every year or so, comes on a little slip that I had to pin to the refrigerator with a magnet or I’d never find it again.

  This number I remembered, because it was the year of the Battle of Trafalgar. The last one had been the year of the Battle of Thermopylae, with a zero on the front. I hadn’t recognised the history references, but Blake had. It’s lovely when children become old enough to know more than you do.

  I twisted the reluctant gears in the lock. Trafalgar was still good; it clicked open. I entered and locked it behind me.

  This neighbourhood, Newnham, had been colonised in the 1800s when college fellows were at last allowed to marry. They moved out of their college rooms and into newly built semi-grand houses. The largest ones have now been chopped up into rooms-for-rent and graduate student accommodation, and some are still family homes, all of them crammed up next to each other. In front of these houses is an unbroken chain of parked cars, bumper to bumper, belonging to people who got into the city early enough to get free spaces here and not have to resort to the expensive multi-storeys closer in. In short, Adams Road feels full, and busy, but behind this gate there is suddenly an acre of nothing.

  I hold on to that word: “nothing.” I mean that there are no houses in here, no cars, no people. No jostling, no shopping, no advertising. The trees and pond and trail and overwhelmingly prolific growing things everywhere are not actually nothing, but they’re nothing in the way that a blank piece of paper is nothing. A piece of paper is, if you must be literal, a thing, but it’s empty as yet of intrusion and claimed identity. It’s the base state of the world before it’s been parcelled out to owners and made use of.

  Bird chatter fiddled in the background.

  Tom used to bring the children here all the time, when they were very little and it felt like an adventure. As they got older they realised that it’s actually quite small. Blake started coming again after Tom died. I wouldn’t follow him in; he needed his space. But I always tried to remember the number, in case I needed it.

  I followed the path around the pond, carefully stomping down on slippery, wet leaves, pushing pliable, reaching branches out of my way, and brushing up against thorniness, leafiness, and green everywhere. At the far side of the pond are two hides for birdwatchers. Blake was in one of them, at the top of the ladder, facing backwards towards me instead of looking through the view slits in the front. He had to have seen me coming. He didn’t move.

  I waved from below. He shook his head.

  “Blake,” I called. “Please.”

  He descended the ladder with the physical nonchalance of the young. They won’t know that this is their prime until they’re past it.

  I learned years ago not to hug him in public, only at home. I wasn’t sure which this was. I touched his jacket. “We need to talk,” I said.

  We walked to the nearby benches. His left hand brushed against my right. It felt rough. I looked. His knuckles were scratched, and the back of his hand bruised.

  I sucked in a breath.

  “What?” he asked, honest-sounding, innocent-seeming.

  He’s taller than me, so unless I tilt my head deliberately up he can’t see my expression.

  We took the bench, which faces the pond in hope of entertainment from ducks, and geese. I looked there, not directly at him. “One of my clients says she knows you.”

  “What do you mean?” He sounded innocent still, innocent in the literal sense of not knowing what I was talking about.

  “Her name is Anna.”

  Ah. That hit home. He leaned forward, elbows on knees.

  “How did you meet her?” I asked.

  “It’s really not your business.” He ran his hands over his hair.

  “I think she’s telling lies about you.”

  He flinched. “I don’t want to know.”

  “You need to know.”

  “No!” He sat upright. He faced me. “No! I don’t need to do anything. I don’t need to attend my lectures. I don’t need to meet my deadlines. I don’t need to go home. Just stop. Everything needs to just stop.”

  I reached towards his shoulder but held just short of touching it. “She was in the hospital yesterday.”

  “Is she all right?” He asked this breathlessly, and his mouth hung a little bit open while he waited for my answer. There was genuine caring in his eyes. Is he worried only for her, or also for the consequences of his own actions?

  “She’s out now. She told me that you hit her. She told me that she asked you to.”

  He leaned away from me and shook his head. “I’ve never hit anyone.”

  “She says you did.”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that. Fuck.” He pounded his right hand against his knee for emphasis.

  “What happened to your hands?” I asked.

  “Not that. Not that.”

  “What?” I used my gentle mum-voice, the soothing one.

  “I hit the wall, then hit the glass table in our house. It’s a piece of shit and actually broke. I hit things, not a person. Never a person.”

  “What were you angry about?”

  “I am not a fucking client! Stop! Stop.”

  I stopped. I held still. He didn’t leave. That became my overwhelming goal: please don’t leave.

  Once everything had kept still long enough, I said, “She came to me, Blake. I didn’t come to her. She’s lying about you.”

  “Stop. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  “You stop! You! This does matter. It all matters.” He’s been this way on and off since he was little, these futile surrenders. “She’s done something terrible and she’s covering it up. She’s using you. She’s using me. We’ve got to do something.”

  He didn’t leave, but neither did he answer. A pair of Canadian geese landed on the water and held his attention.

  I choked out, “I think she killed somebody.”

&n
bsp; It had come together suddenly for me. Why would she care if the police knew she lied to her cousin about being the daughter of Annalise Wood? And if she really believed that Henry Ware had something to do with Hannah’s death, why would she risk the perfect setup she’d created to jail him, to put the blame on Blake instead? That would only make sense if she knew that Henry actually didn’t do it. She wasn’t avenging Hannah; she must have been protecting herself… .

  “That’s insane,” Blake said, then stopped short, because I’d spent years correcting him and Clara when they used words like that casually.

  “She’s a very disturbed person,” I said carefully.

  The geese on the water squabbled and flapped at each other. I waited.

  Blake kept looking straight out, not facing me, but he talked. “I’ve only known her a few weeks. We bumped into each other around the corner from your office. Literally bumped. She was on the phone and not paying attention, I guess. I knocked her phone onto the pavement. I didn’t mean to, and even though it was fine I felt terrible, and to be honest I already felt terrible because I knew what you were going to ask over dinner: Am I making friends? Am I happy? My friends’ parents ask about supervisions and studying, and they hate that. You’re supposed to be so different, caring about me as a person instead of about grades, but you don’t understand what the problem with all of those questions is. They’re not actually different questions. They’re all actually asking, Are you still a failure? No one wants to answer that. No one. So by the time I bumped into Anna, I already wanted an excuse to get out of dinner. Apologising to her seemed like a good one.”

  I didn’t comment. I held my expression still. But even that stillness was a reaction he could read, and a stereotypical therapist one at that.

  “She said that she was new to Cambridge,” he went on. “She seemed like she needed a friend. She’s at Wolfson and Cambridge is overwhelming, she said. I understand that. So we talked for hours. She thought it was funny when I admitted I’d skipped dinner with my mother to go to a café with her. She made a joke about mental health. Holy shit, had she just come from being with you?”

  “Yes.” I was frantically trying to figure out how she could have known Blake is my son. Is my Facebook page insecure? I hardly use it. Blake was mentioned in Tom’s obituary, but there was no photo of him… .

  “I told her what it is that you do, and she laughed. It seemed strange at the time but I …”

  That made me feel hopeful that she had been surprised by the connection. It was still something put into motion by me, by my appointment with Blake and my appointment with her skimming against each other at the end of that day, but at least I hadn’t helped her plan something using information I’d been careless with.

  “Then she asked me a lot of questions,” he said. “She thinks that having a psychologist for a parent must make me feel … manipulated sometimes.”

  I looked away. He’s allowed to feel that way, even if I deeply hope he doesn’t.

  “We went out a few times after that. It’s not important.”

  I didn’t bring up that she’d met Clara. I didn’t bring up that she’d been talking about May Ball dresses, months and months away. I did say, “She’s charming and needy, and she’s involved with a police situation. It’s very important that you stay out of it.”

  “She was hurt? She said that I hit her?” he asked, quietly.

  “She said that to me. Only to me.”

  “I swear I did not.”

  “I know.” I believed him, but an accusation could still be devastating.

  “Is she all right?”

  He still cared. It broke my heart. “She was well enough to be discharged. She’ll heal.” While I mouthed vague comfort, I strategised: Blake’s broken glass table and any mark on the wall would have to be photographed, to protect him, just in case.

  I asked him, “Where were you yesterday afternoon?”

  He shook his head. “I stayed in bed most of the day.”

  “Were your housemates in?”

  “Is that when it happened?”

  I nodded.

  “Matt was home part of the time. I heard him. He was upset when he saw the table. But he wouldn’t have known I was there. He banged on my bedroom door and I ignored him.”

  My mind weighed possibilities. Good: a witness to the shattered table. Bad: supposed proof of Blake having a temper …

  Does this mean that Blake has a temper? What would I think if someone Clara was close to reacted in anger like that? Would I trust him to be with her?

  “Why were you angry?” I asked him.

  “She broke up with me.”

  He wasn’t finished, he was still explaining that with all that had happened to her cousin she had to focus on other things, how it was yesterday morning and she was already dressed for the funeral and how that made her seem distant and costumed to Blake, not real, but in my mind I paused to correct him. I wanted him to say “didn’t want to see me any more” not “break up with” because the latter implies a more serious relationship. In my mind I was grooming him for explaining to police if he had to, for explaining in court if he had to. It was difficult to breathe. I gulped in big, fresh gulps of air, but none of them felt like enough.

  “Mum, are you okay?”

  I forced my chin up. “You can’t see her. And you can’t hide. Go to your lectures and supervisions. Act normal. I’ll take care of this.”

  “I don’t feel normal. I don’t want to pretend.”

  “I don’t care!” I waved my two fists in front of me like spinning gears. I suddenly understood, profoundly, how one could want to hit a table and a wall and to break something.

  He stood up. The geese took off. “I don’t want you to fix it for me, Mum. Anna can say whatever she wants. I didn’t do it. I’ll say so, and it’s the truth.”

  I shook my head, half in “no” and half as simple quivering. No, he mustn’t risk it. “She’s not worth it, Blake.”

  “What do you know about anything? What do you think I’m worth? I was messed up after Dad died. Him being dead was in my mind literally all the time, and I was pretty sure that on top of losing him I was about to lose literally everyone else, because who would want to be around me when I was like that? With Anna, I was different, because she was the hurt one. That made me the strong person, or the kind person, instead of the fucked-up kid whose dad died. That felt good.”

  I had to tell him. “She’s dangerous,” I said. “I think she killed her cousin.”

  His mouth opened but he said nothing at first, just let his jaw hang there, accusing me of a step too far.

  “You think she pushed Hannah-Claire into the river?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense! She told me that if I revealed to the police what she and Hannah-Claire had talked to me about in sessions, that she would put her accusation of Henry onto you. If she really believed Henry had done it, why would she be willing to take the pressure off him? It must be that she set Henry up in this way to protect herself from being found guilty of Hannah’s death herself… .”

  Blake laughed. At first it blended in with the chatter of birds, but then it got louder, like a flapping of huge wings.

  He said, “You’re crazy.” He emphasised the word deliberately, no shame, no apology.

  “I know it’s difficult to contemplate about someone you care about but—”

  “No. Stop. No.”

  “Blake, she’s not who you think she is.” In my mind, I amended it to “who you wish she was,” because really he hardly knew her at all. He was infatuated, clearly, and feeling hurt and wanted to be a white knight for her, but …

  “Stop analysing me. God. Really? I don’t just ‘think’ she didn’t kill Hannah-Claire. I know she didn’t. I was with her that night. I was with her all night. Hannah-Claire had just left when I arrived. I saw her. I saw her just before she died.” He started to shake.

  I stood but he held up his hand before I could take a step.
>
  “No. I don’t trust you right now.” He walked away. His footsteps crunched on and shuffled through the leaves on the path.

  I forced myself to not chase him. It wouldn’t help. I knew it wouldn’t help. I forced myself back onto the bench. I literally sat on my hands.

  I pushed my thoughts down a logical track, an analytical track, to keep myself from feeling sick over her and Blake… .

  Anna had been attacked, horrifically. Someone had done this to her. The police believed that Henry was the one, which is what Anna said she’d wanted. She’d told me that she egged him on to get him to reveal his true violent self, and then had Blake finish the job. If I believed Blake, and I did, she was making that part up. It really had been Henry, whom she’d triggered at great cost to herself. How could she be willing to let him get away with this? What was more important than seeing him punished for his violence?

  A question rose like a soap bubble, and just as fragile: I’ve studied the effects of concussion and trauma. Memory loss surrounding such an incident is a real thing. Does she even know for sure who hurt her?

  She seemed to be choosing from among several possible realities as they suited different situations: To the police, she accused Henry. To me, she accused Blake. She was controlling us. Henry had been arrested. I was keeping my mouth shut.

  I am. I’m doing that. Then, Should I?

  I needed to protect Blake, from even accusation. But if we accomplished that with silence, it would always be hanging over his head.

  What was Anna trying to hide? If she truly believed that Henry was responsible for Hannah-Claire’s death, she wouldn’t let him get away with it. But if she’s not protecting herself, who is she protecting?

  The key had to be in what Hannah-Claire had told me. Or in what Anna thought Hannah-Claire had told me.

  If I could figure that out, then we’d have something to use against her.

  “Tom,” I said. There was no answer, of course. Just wind pushing through leaves, ducks squabbling, songbirds jabbering. Whether you believe in life after death or not, the person is not here any more. Their at least being somewhere else is supposed to be a comfort, but from my selfish point of view it’s not very different from not existing at all.