Just My Luck

by Adele Parks

  “I’m going to call the police,” I said more than once.

  “No, you are not,” replied Jennifer or Fred, sometimes forcefully, though as the day mooched on, they were less forceful, more bored, as though they had identified my threat as empty, dull. As though they knew I was ultimately weak and would do what Jake had asked.

  When the phone finally rings, it is like an ambulance siren. It fills the house with dread and promise. Threat and hope. Jake cries out, “I have her. I have her. Lexi, I have her.”

  The relief is so overwhelming, it feels as though my body explodes into a million pieces and then in a fraction of a second pieces itself back together again, sharper, more focused, euphoric. I have never in my life felt such happiness.

  “Is she okay?” Tears are in my throat and eyes. I rest my forehead on the kitchen table, which feels solid and steady. It might shore me up when I hear his answer. What they could have done to her has played around and around my head and heart for nearly twenty-four hours.

  “Yes.” He pauses. “Mostly. We’re on our way to the hospital.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Yes, come at once. Meet us there.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “She’s not herself.” I hear the catch in Jake’s throat.

  “Please put the phone to her ear if you can.” I assume he has followed my instruction and I murmur down the phone, “I’m coming, my baby girl. I’m coming.”

  “I think she understood,” says Jake. “She’s not fully conscious.” I don’t want to talk any longer. I just need to see her. I hang up. Naturally, Jennifer tries to muscle in on this deeply personal family moment. “You shouldn’t be driving, you are not in a fit state,” she says. “I’ll drive you.”

  “I’m perfectly capable, thank you.”

  “Which car will you take? Jake took the Audi. Are you even insured for the Ferrari?”

  “Are you?” I challenge. She might be for all I know. “I’ll get a taxi. Please stay here with the boys, keep an eye on Logan for me.” Logan is still oblivious to what we’ve all been going through. He’s spent the day playing video games with Ridley. I’m not sure whether Ridley showed impressive maturity in protecting Logan from the reality of what was going on or whether he simply wanted to keep out of his parents’ way but, whatever his motivation, I’m grateful. I’m a fast learner and, copying my husband’s trick, I pocket Jennifer’s phone unnoticed. I call an Uber and then I call the police.

  CHAPTER 44

  Emily

  Monday, May 27

  When I open my eyes, I am beyond relieved that everything is cream and light, not black and shadowy. I can hear the beep and hum of hospital machines, Mum and Dad are at my bedside. They look like shit and from the look on their faces I guess I must be worse. Mum looks as though she’s bruised. I squint a bit to try to focus, the bright lights are a bit much after the darkness. I realize Mum’s face is swollen, red, purple and blue through crying, not because she’s had a beating. I try to move a bit. My body protests loudly, suggesting I might have taken a beating.

  “Hello, darling, how are you feeling?” murmurs Mum. She has hold of my hand, she leans forward and kisses it, like I’m royalty or the Pope or something.

  “Okay,” I mumble back. I don’t feel okay. I ache from head to toe. It’s more than pain, it’s like a fragility—if I move, I’ll fall apart. I’m in a private room. Of course I am, we are rich. I’d forgotten. When we won the lottery, I thought being rich meant I’d be indulged, protected. I guess it can mean that, but it can also mean I’m exploited, threatened. “I’m thirsty.” Mum reaches for some water at my bedside. She drips it carefully into my mouth, like a bird feeding a chick. It reminds me of something.

  Something to do with the abduction, but I can’t remember what. “What happened?” I ask.

  “You were kidnapped,” says Mum. “Some very bad people held you hostage for money.” I almost want to laugh at Mum’s words “some very bad people.” That doesn’t get close. They kicked me, starved me, bound me and drugged me. Yes, I think I was drugged. I guess she will know all this now, there will be medical evidence. I suppose she’s trying not to distress me by being too explicit. I’m far too weak and weary to point out that she can’t protect me—I was the one who lived through it.

  “Hey, Dad.” It shouldn’t be up to me to cheer things up, but Dad looks literally done for. Like battered. Suffering.

  He stands up and kisses my forehead, then says, “I’ll go and get a doctor, tell them she’s awake.”

  I get the feeling he’s making himself scarce, as though he’s finding it a struggle to be around me. I glance at Mum, afraid. Dad often leaves the tricky stuff to her. Like when me and Logan really wanted a dog and they’d more or less agreed we could have one and then they changed their minds—Dad left it up to Mum to tell us. Or if we aren’t allowed to go somewhere like a gig, or buy something—you know, before the big win—Dad would avoid answering the tricky questions and just say, “Check with your mum.”

  “What is it, Mum?”

  “You’ve lost your baby, angel.” She just says it like that. Like we both knew there was a baby before. She makes it uncomplicated. “I’m sorry, my darling. I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “Don’t cry, Mum. I’m not sure I wanted it, anyway.” I try to make it sound like I’ve just lost out on buying a dress because they didn’t have it in my size. But then suddenly I’m sobbing. Ridley’s baby is gone. Ridley’s and my baby is gone. “I didn’t look after it. I didn’t keep it safe,” I say.

  Mum jumps up and wraps her arms around me, buries her face into my neck. All this hurts, but it’s worth it. She tells me over and over again that it’s not my fault. None of this is my fault. Eventually, she tells me the police want to talk to me when I’m ready. “We are going to catch these bastards that did this to you.” I agree to be interviewed, but ask Mum to stay with me. She immediately understands it’s not the police I am afraid of. Obviously, I’m actually safer if there are a couple of coppers in my room, but I don’t want Mum out of my sight. “You are safe now,” she says firmly.

  “What happens if someone does it again?” I demand.

  She smiles ruefully. “That’s unlikely. There’s no money left.” I wonder whether they’ve given her some sort of tranquilizer drug, a happy pill because how come she’s not acting like that’s the end of the world?

  CHAPTER 45

  Lexi

  Tuesday, June 11

  We have paid to stay in the rental house for six months and the money is nonrefundable so there’s no point in suggesting we leave it and find somewhere more affordable, although there’s no more talk about buying it. Jake now knows that there’s only just under four million left in the bank: “I thought we had more.” He groaned on discovering the balance.

  “I gave a lot away,” I admitted.

  “Away?”

  “To charity.” I’m vague, and whilst he looked shocked, confounded, he didn’t pursue the matter. I had expected him to be more challenging. I’m disturbed by his passive acceptance; it seems just a smidge away from indifference. “Okay, well, we have four million, Lexi. We don’t need to panic. It’s a substantial amount of money, it just seems less substantial because not so long ago we had almost eighteen.” He’s right, four million is a huge amount of money. What he doesn’t know yet is that I have promised Fred three of it after he divorces Jen. That’s not a conversation I can find my way into.

  Things are not great between the two of us. I don’t know if Jennifer has told him about what I said to her at the party. Is he aware that I know of their affair? We should probably get it all out in the open. Fight, say dreadful things to each other, hurl hurt and abuse and then move on. Or at least around it. But could we move on or around? I don’t know. Bringing the matter into the open is too risky. I’m hideously aware that once it is out of the bag, I won
’t ever be able to put it back in. I will forever be the woman who accepted his affair and whilst initially he may be grateful for that, somewhere down the line he might feel smug about it, invincible. He might have another affair, assuming I’ll stomach that one, too. Or, worse yet, once it is an acknowledged thing, he might confess to loving Jennifer. He might just leave. The tissue-thin veneer of family life carrying on as usual shrouds us for now. The children have been through so much lately. I can’t bear the idea of putting them through anything more. We just need some time to let things settle. We are still a family.

  Although I’m not sure we are a couple any longer.

  We sleep in the same bed, but have consciously uncoupled, as the A-listers might say. We are tremendously careful never to make any physical contact, not even an accidental banging together of feet. We cling to our own bed edge, like bookends with invisible fat volumes between us. We are giving each other space, and I’m able to hide the three-million-pound gift to Toma in that space. Luckily, the police are more tenacious in the matter of investigating the kidnap and trying to recover our ten-million ransom money than Jake is about understanding how our bank balance came to net out as it has. I understand the police carried out a forensic search of the place where Emily was found and all the surrounding area. The criminals apparently weren’t quite as professional as we first assumed: they have left a raft of physical evidence. Fingerprints on casually discarded food tins and drink cans, tire tracks that will help the police identify what vehicle they used to abduct her, and even a jacket from which they can collect DNA. Besides this physical evidence, the police have fraud experts pursuing the paper trail. They took our phones, and I presume they might have ways of tracing calls that we thought were impossible. We only had our phones returned today. I’ve been managing without one; it’s actually quite liberating. As long as my kids were close beside me, I found it peaceful to be out of reach, off-grid. It gave me some thinking time. Jake disagreed; he was really narky about giving his up. Apparently, he can’t go without a phone for a matter of hours, let alone days. He went out and bought the top-of-the-line latest model.

  We have all been interviewed at length. Emily was brilliantly brave as she recounted her ordeal as well as she could. Her medical exam confirmed she’d been sedated, and that she was beaten, restrained, starved and severely dehydrated, so it’s no surprise that her memory is patchy. The police are encouraging. They say everything she recalls, no matter how small a detail, is a help. Jake and I sat in on her interview. It was harrowing to hear exactly what she had gone through. Jake actually wept. I stroked Emily’s back, held her hand. Whispered that I was sorry. I feel I let her down. How did I let this happen? I should have been more vigilant. I should have anticipated this threat and guarded against it. Whilst she was missing, I had imagined every possible degradation and torture that she might be enduring, but that still did not prepare me for hearing my child talk about what actually did happen—her absolute fear, her pain, her humiliation. When Jake sobbed, Emily took hold of his hand and said, “Don’t cry, Dad. It could have been worse.” This only made his shoulders shake more, because no grown man imagines his baby girl will one day have to be comforting him about her own misery. It’s an unnatural perversion of order. Still, I’m glad I know exactly what she has endured. We shouldn’t be protected from it, and maybe I can support her most effectively now I know.

  Jake’s interview took a long time as he is potentially very useful, being the one who had the most contact with the criminals and the one who recovered Emily. I found my interview excruciating, especially when asked, “Why didn’t you call the police straight away, Mrs. Greenwood?”

  “I wanted to. I thought we should, but I was too scared. They said they’d hurt her.”

  “They hurt her anyway,” pointed out Detective Inspector Owens. I can’t resent the man for stating the truth. She was kicked and punched in the stomach. That’s most likely how she lost her baby.

  The police seem confident that they will find a lead. Whether we ever recover the money or not, which Jake deposited into an offshore account as demanded, I don’t know, but I do want those monsters who hurt Emily brought to justice. I want them to rot in a prison cell for years.

  Emily constantly assures us she is fine. She’s certainly being strong, but that is often different from fine. She was in hospital for three days and she’s been home a week now. Mostly she stays in her room. She hasn’t started at the new school; she isn’t ready for it. Logan has used her nonattendance there this term as an excuse for him to return to his old school. We’ve all agreed we can discuss the matter of which school they will settle on over the summer holidays and make a final decision then. I have put the idea of returning to their old school back on the table because first and foremost I think they’d both benefit from having their old friends around them, and also because I know that after I have paid Fred the promised money, we probably won’t be able to afford private school. Jake has not railroaded this through his preference for the private school. I guess he’s aware of Emily’s fragility. As far as I know, she has not been in touch with Ridley since she was rescued. I told him that she’d lost the baby; he was palpably relieved. An uncomplicated, understandable response. I envy him because I fear things may be a little more complex for Emily as she carried the fetus. Bloody biology curses women every time. This evening, Logan went to Scouts as usual and I was delighted when Emily emerged and announced she wanted to visit her friend Scarlett. It’s great that she’s feeling robust enough to venture out of the house and to gently kick-start her social life. I immediately drove her there and Scarlett’s dad kindly offered to bring her home by ten.

  I’m not sure where Jake is. He’s often out and I don’t ask where exactly. That space thing again. Or, more honestly, that fear of having all the cards laid out on the table. I plan to spend the evening drafting an email to my old boss, Ellie, at the CAB asking whether I can have my job back now that we aren’t multimillionaires. My plan is to make a public announcement that we have given all the money away to charity; obviously, we can’t admit to paying kidnappers.

  I sit in front of the family computer painstakingly perfecting my note when suddenly the screen turns black. A fraction of a second later the lights flutter and then turn off. I had music playing, but silence now throbs all around me, and not even the fridge is humming. A power cut. It’s just a power cut. Isn’t it? The blackness settles and I wait. Has someone cut the power? Is there someone here with me? I’m so glad the kids are out. I used to think being alone was frightening; now I know there are far more horrifying things.

  I wait, straining my ears for a creaking floorboard, a door opening or closing. I glance about for my phone. Where did I put it? I should keep it close to me at all times the way the kids do, the way Jake does, but as I’ve been without one for a few days I’ve got out of the habit of keeping it close by. I tend to pick it up and put it down wherever I happen to be standing. Tentatively, I begin to edge around the house. It’s pitch-black. The blinds are down, blocking out the streetlight, and I can’t open them manually because, of course, they are designed to rise and fall at the flick of a switch. The combination of privacy, security and convenience renders me powerless. Even if I could rid myself of the fear that there is an intruder, which I can’t quite, I am not familiar enough with my surroundings to walk confidently through the house, so I creep and steal. I feel my way, painstakingly.

  An inch-by-inch blind search reveals that my phone is not on the kitchen table or counters, not on the hall console or on any of the coffee or occasional tables in the sitting room. I carefully edge upstairs, trailing my fingers along cool, unfamiliar walls, finding my way around corners and through doors. There is no sign of an intruder, but they wouldn’t advertise themselves, would they? My phone is not by my bed, or in the bathroom by the basin. Eventually, I find it in my dressing room, the last place I searched because I’m not used to having a dressing room and it di
dn’t pop into my head to look there.

  I’m relieved to have the phone in my hand. It feels like a lifeline out of the blackness and silence. I could call an engineer, or Jake. Maybe even the police. I don’t think there’s anyone here, but perhaps it’s better to be safe than sorry. I call Toma.

  “Lexi!”

  “Toma.”

  “How good to hear from you!” The joy in his voice floats across the miles that separate us, it fills my room, even lights up the room and—I can’t deny it—my heart, too. “What are you doing with yourself?”

  “Well, right now, I’m sitting in the pitch-black.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve had a power cut.” Suddenly, I’m certain that’s all it is. Hearing his voice has made me feel more secure and rational. The fear that was causing my shoulders to hunch, my pulse to race, ebbs away. Although my pulse remains speedy, I sigh. “Oh, Toma, I have so much to tell you.”

  “Then tell me, Lexi.”

  “You have time?”

  “For you, always.”

  * * *

  Jake doesn’t come home until after midnight. By the time he does I have already called the mother of one of Logan’s Scout friends to explain about the power cut and make arrangements for him to have a sleepover. I have also called Emily who, unsurprisingly, didn’t want to return to a pitch-black house. She’s staying at Scarlett’s. The power cut is an inconvenience, but the silver lining is that both the kids will enjoy their impromptu sleepovers. Jake strides into the house, using the torch on his phone to light his way. I heard a taxi drop him off, and the slight heaviness in his step suggests he’s had a fair bit to drink. I wonder who with.