by Shari Low
I sat there surrounded by my life, by Colm’s things, by the world we’d built together. Sleeping with Vince had been a mistake, a desperate mistake, but a foolish one nonetheless. Slowly, I nodded. ‘It has to be.’
‘Okay,’ he said, his jaw set, as if forbidding him to say more.
‘Please don’t hate me, Vincent. I know it was selfish, I know…’
‘Shauna, stop.’ He sighed, not moving, still standing feet away, unwilling to be near me. ‘I don’t hate you. But last night, I meant what I said and I don’t know how to take it back. I just wish… you know.’
I did. And in a different way, I loved him too. My life was so much better when he was in it, but inside, in that place I’d been trying to numb when I was with him, I knew I’d used him. Like a desperate person cuts their flesh to ease the pressure of a deeper pain, I was self-harming my life with Colm, eviscerating it in the hope that the new scab would cover the old wound until it healed. It hadn’t. It was Colm I should have gone to, not Vince.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I wont leave him, Vincent. I love him. I shouldn’t have come to you, and I’m so sorry…’
‘Me too.’ I could see he wasn’t going to plead, or try to change my mind and I was so grateful.
The vacuum between us swallowed our words until many more seconds ticked by. Vincent was the first to find his voice. ‘I can’t even regret it. I guess at least now I know.’
‘Would you ever have told me?’
‘I doubt it. Not while you and Colm were still together. I wouldn’t have forced you to choose in a competition that I knew I’d lose. I guess that’s what’s happened now.’ The corners of his mouth turned up in a sad smile. ‘But I don’t know where to go from here.’
I exhaled, heart aching. I’d thought about this since the moment I’d left his bed. Twenty years of friendship had made him part of me, a part that I didn’t want to live without.
‘I don’t deserve your forgiveness, or your friendship, so it’s up to you. I’d like to keep going, just be who we were, do what we were doing.’
‘Pretend it never happened?’ Another sad smile, but no bitterness in his voice.
‘Yes.’ I knew I was being brutal, asking too much. I had no right to ask anything more of him.
Another vacuum, then a despondent sigh. ‘Okay. I don’t know how that’s going to work, but I think it’s the only thing we can do…’ he shrugged, saying nothing, saying everything.
‘Me too. Vincent… thank you.’ I meant it. With every ounce of me, I meant it.
We’d loved each other – maybe, we knew now, in different ways – for two decades. Somehow, we’d find a way back from this.
And in a way, we had.
Since May, we’d carried on, never spoken of it again and sure, there were moments of awkwardness at the start but we’d got over them. Within a couple of weeks it was back to normal on the surface, both of us refusing to dive underneath the calm seas.
A brief chapter in my life had closed.
This morning, on a bright October day, a brand new one had opened.
After Colm and I made love this morning, I’d watched him leave, then closed my eyes, hoping to snatch another couple of hours of sleep before he returned with the boys.
I’d almost dozed off, when my eyes flew open, an awareness rippling through me. I knew. I spent the next hour checking, but it only confirmed what was already a certainty.
I left a note on the kitchen table for Colm and grabbed the keys to the van, driving slowly, carefully, my need to share the news balanced by the need to adjust to the new reality.
When I reached my destination, I jumped out, slammed the door behind me and I ran until I got there, sunk to my knees, the wet grass causing stains that spread across the denim of my jeans.
‘Gran,’ I said, reaching out to touch the hard granite, my fingers skipping past the details, only tracing the words on the three lines that meant the most to me.
Bethany ‘Annie’ Williams.
1930 – 2005.
Forever loved.
‘It’s me,’ I said, just like I always did, every week when I came, sat here, talked to her.
‘Something’s happened,’ I told her. ‘Although, you probably know already.’
I could picture her now, cowboy boots and a cigarette, tea in hand, waiting for me to continue.
‘Gran, I’m pregnant.’
My hand went over my mouth and was immediately soaked with tears.
Pregnant. After all this time, after the drugs, and tests and the legs up the bloody wall, I’d finally fallen pregnant when I’d given up hope.
‘I think you had something to do with it. I can’t believe that you didn’t. So thank you, Annie. With all my heart. Thank you so much. I promise you, I’ll make this baby’s life amazing.’
In my mind, Annie threw her head back and let rip with that raucous cackle of pure joy.
This was everything. The whole world. But I knew it had to come with a trade.
One love for another.
39
2016
Secrets And Lies
I was there. I was knocking on the door and praying there would be no answer. Yet I wasn’t walking away. If I left right now, this would go no further, but if I didn’t, it couldn’t be undone. Still, I stayed. Banging on the door now. Desperately hoping no one would come.
The door opened and I spoke with a calm that contradicted everything I was feeling inside.
‘You slept with my husband.’
Jess said nothing for a moment and I was sure she was trying to come up with a plausible lie, or a deflection that would give her time to lodge a defence.
‘I did,’ she said, like she was admitting to spilling milk or skipping a queue, while those two words had just shredded my life. She stood back to let me enter and as I passed I felt a fleeting urge to punch her, but I resisted. What would be the point? She closed the door and I waited until she led the way to the kitchen. She looked younger somehow. Perhaps it was the jeans and the simple blue T-shirt. Or the fact that her hair, usually so sleek, was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun. Or maybe it was just that she fucked my husband last night.
I’d looked after this woman’s children for fifteen years. I’d never once caused waves. Even when Colm and I barely had the cash to eat, I’d made sure she got her maintenance payments. Yet she’d had no compunction in taking away the one thing that was mine. I was losing him already, but this was different. At least the other way, I could have pretended to myself he wanted to stay. Not now.
I’d spent the whole night just staring at that green dot on the map. I’d been tempted to go round there to confront them, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to face the truth. Maybe that made me a coward. Instead, I watched the dot, my heart breaking when it finally moved at seven a.m. Euston station. Then north. Stopping at Manchester. That’s where he was right now.
I had no idea where he was coming back to. Our home? Here?
He must have seen my missed calls by now, yet he still hadn’t contacted me.
Was it over?
‘Would you like tea?’ How pathetically civil.
‘No.’
I couldn’t even sit. I just leaned against the polished black granite of the breakfast bar. A thought stabbed my heart. Had Colm fucked her on there? Or in the chair in the corner? Or in the hallway? Or did they wait until they got upstairs and christen every room? Hell, maybe they’d done it before. Maybe they’d never stopped. Perhaps he’d been shagging her since the day they got divorced and it was a miracle I hadn’t found out before now.
‘How long?’ I hated that I sounded like a cliché.
‘Just last night.’
My expression told her I didn’t believe her.
Sighing, she pulled out a high leather chair and climbed onto it.
‘Shauna, I’m not going to lie to you, but let me start by saying I’m so, so sorry. It was once, I swear. I’ll answer everything you need to know.’<
br />
‘How could you?’
That stumped her.
‘You think that because you’ve split with Steve you can just swoop right in and take Colm from me?’ She didn’t ask me how I knew.
‘No. I’m not trying to take him. Last night wasn’t the start of something.’
‘So what was it?’ I saw tears spring to her eyes and I wanted to scream. She slept with my husband and she was the one who was crying? I don’t fucking think so.
‘It was… desperation. Unhappiness. Sadness.’
So now she was just throwing out nouns.
I was pacing, unable to stand still, unwilling to touch a single surface in this house in case my husband’s flesh had been there. Right now, the husband that I loved, disgusted me.
She carried on talking. ‘Have you ever been so desperate, in so much pain, that you would reach out to anyone who was there, just to feel someone touch you?’
That stopped me, an image from the past flashing in front of my eyes. Six years ago. Vincent. Me. Naked. Hungry for each other, every movement fuelled by a craving for solace on my part, for reciprocation of love on his.
She was watching me, saw that her words had resonated.
Suddenly, I was wrangling with a new question. Why did I get to sleep with someone else, yet here I was, raging at Colm for doing the same? What utter hypocrisy. And back then, I’d blamed the pain of loss, but that had to be surpassed by what Colm was facing now.
I was a lying, cheating hypocrite, so perhaps I had no right to judge anyone.
‘But why you? What could you give him that I couldn’t?’ I demanded, my fight weakened, but still there.
‘Nothing,’ she replied.
The adrenalin was wearing off and my legs were beginning to feel like they might not hold me much longer, so I relented on the seat, taking the one that was furthest along the breakfast bar from Jess. Deflated I may be, but I still didn’t trust myself. ‘Then why?’
Jess exhaled sadly. ‘Maybe a bit of nostalgia. The chance to feel like we were nineteen again. No worries. No cares. It wasn’t me he wanted, Shauna, I promise you. It was the chance to be that person again, be that young guy, just for one night, to feel that his life could still have an amazing future.’
I hated that I understood that. I hated even more that he chose to claw that feeling back with Jess and not me. Why her? Why then? If he wanted to revisit the past, why didn’t he want to try to recapture the bliss of our early days together?
I stared at my hands, entangled so tightly that my knuckles were white. ‘So what now? Does he want to be with you?’
‘No. He really doesn’t. He was in a complete state this morning – devastated over what he’s done. Please don’t let this come between you. He loves you. Only you. And I know I said it already, but I’m so sorry, Shauna. I’ve never been that woman before and I never will again. I’m not proud of myself but for a moment, through a tequila haze, I saw a chance to have a resolution that we never got when we parted.’
‘Did it work?’ I so hoped that it didn’t.
‘No.’
‘Good.’ I didn’t want her to have any satisfaction at all.
My jaw was starting to ache from clenching my teeth together to stop me from screaming, shouting, crying.
There was a long pause, neither of us rushing to fill it, both unsure where this was going now. I’d come here furious, apoplectic with hurt and grief, and yet now there had been a shift in the narrative and I wasn’t sure how I felt any more.
Had Colm cheated on me under normal circumstances, we would have been having a different conversation. With no one to fall back on, no other family in my life, I needed the stability of unconditional and unassailable trust in a relationship. Now Colm had broken that, I should be gone.
Yet I knew that my time with Vincent made that a double standard.
Before Colm got sick, infidelity would probably have been a deal-breaker, but this life we were living now was no longer black and white.
I realized that Jess was staring at me, waiting for my next attack. In almost fifteen years, the longest conversation we’d ever had was about her screwing my husband. I’d never have seen that one coming.
Something else was replaying in my head. A comment that raised an unanswered question.
‘What did you need to resolve?’ I asked her, going back to what she’d said a few moments before.
She thought for a moment. ‘When we split up we were so angry. Cancel that. I was so angry with him. I thought he’d destroyed every shred of love I had for him, but now I realize that I just didn’t understand him. I didn’t know him well enough. Maybe now I’m a bit wiser. I see him acting the same way now with you and I recognize it, and know that it’s not out of a lack of love or care, but because when the worst things happen in life, he simply doesn’t know how to act any other way. I think I needed to forgive him.’
‘By screwing him?’
A tired, apologetic shrug. ‘I didn’t say it made sense.’
Another silence while I processed that, not sure that I understood.
‘Why were you angry with him? What had he done?’
For the first time, there was a question in her calm demeanour. ‘He never told you why we split up?’
‘He just said you grew apart.’
He whole body visibly shuddered and I could see more tears showing up, just ready to flow. ‘We lost a baby. A girl. Daisy. She was stillborn. A perfect, beautiful, little girl.’ Jess had to stop, take a breath.
Sympathy overwhelmed me. Oh God, poor Jess. Poor Colm. Why had he never told me? I reached out, took her hand.
‘You don’t have to…’
She cut me off. ‘I do.’
For many moments there was nothing but the sound of her sobs before she went on, her voice cracking with pain, her words floating on a sea of sorrow.
‘It was after the twins. It seemed like life was perfect. We were so in love and we had these two incredible little boys and it was everything we had dreamt of. When I fell pregnant we were overjoyed and when we found out it was a girl… I can remember wondering how I got so lucky. How we had managed to build a perfect life. We wanted her so, so much. There was no warning. Everything was so good, so happy, and then suddenly it wasn’t and we never knew why. Her heart stopped when I was in labour, they did everything they could, an emergency C-section, they took her out, tried to save her, tried to bring her perfect little body to life, but she couldn’t come back, couldn’t stay with us.’
Instinctively, without questioning, I was out of my seat and my arms were around her and I had no idea where her tears stopped and mine started. We both cried. For that little girl. For us. For Colm.
The world changed before either of us spoke again. I saw now. I understood so much more.
Only when she was still did I let her go.
‘After Daisy died…’
I put my hand on hers. ‘Jess, you don’t have to tell me any more.’
‘I want to,’ she said. ‘After Daisy died everything changed. I was inconsolable, lost. I couldn’t function, couldn’t exist without her. Colm handled it so differently. He wanted to move forward, block it out, act like it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t deal with my grief and I hated him for not sharing it. Of course he did, somewhere inside, but he wasn’t capable of showing it and even less capable of supporting me. When he looked at me all he saw was a pain that he couldn’t take away. He couldn’t bear to watch my suffering so he shut me out. It got so that I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him.’ She rubbed her palm across her sodden cheek. ‘We couldn’t recover. Couldn’t make it work.’
My mind raced to absorb everything she said, so much of it revealing reasons, providing explanations. Colm’s reluctance to have more children. His inability to deal with heartbreak. A hopelessness that manifested as a lack of care. Jess had worked through it all and come to a place of understanding and acceptance.
Somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that I could
too.
‘I’m so sorry, Jess. Truly.’
‘Thank you. I am too.’ It took a few seconds for that to sit before she lifted the tone, moved back to more recent ground. ‘But none of this excuses what I did and I don’t think that it does. I want you to know that.’
‘I know. But it explains so much. Not just about last night, but about our life together. Kind of wish we’d had this conversation ten years ago,’ I said, squeezing her hand. ‘I need to know, though. Do you want to be with him?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘No.’
The wave of gratitude that crashed over me was all-consuming.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s you he’s in love with, not me. And because…’ she stopped, choosing her words. ‘Because I couldn’t lose him twice.’
The bolt of pain cracked my heart, followed by a surge of empathy I could never have anticipated. We were no different, Jess and I. We were both losing our husband, an imperfect, infuriating, but special man, and the only difference was timescale.
Pragmatism kicked in and I needed to know what was next, how to move on, now that I knew we had a future, however short. I just needed to get him back.
‘How was it left this morning, Jess? Did you discuss what happens next?’
‘Yes. There will be nothing between Colm and me, I promise. He’s yours. And I told him not to tell you what happened last night, but I don’t know if he can do that.’
I immediately knew that she was right. There was too much pain, too many boundaries that had been irrevocably broken. If we had to wade through the mire of our mistakes we’d never make it to the other side. We had to keep it all in a box, sealed tight, buried under the seabed, never to be reopened.
‘He has to. If he gets in touch with you today, tell him again to say nothing to me. Tell him it would affect the boys, it would cause too much damage… anything. Just make him promise not to tell me.’
‘Can I ask why?’
It was time to match her truth and, strangely, I had no qualms at all about trusting her. ‘Because a long time ago I did something I regret. If Colm tells me about you, then I’ll have to go there too and we might not have time to recover from that. I can’t have whatever time he has left wrecked by deceit and mistrust and more pain. I love him too much to let that happen. He’s dying, Jess. Counting days. There’s nothing to be gained from the truth here. And I need you to help me, make him see it’s the only way.’