The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  “Are you cross, Mummy?”

  “A bit,” I said, giving him a hug. “But not with you.”

  “Will Jake and Ethan be in trouble?”

  “It’s not fair to go off and play without you so I need to find out why they left you on your own, and where Alistair was.”

  He stiffened.

  “Mum! Please don’t! Jake’ll know that I told you even though I promised not to tell.”

  “Then I’ll talk to Jennifer.”

  “Please, Mum.” His voice cracked and I could tell he was on the verge of tears. “I just want to go home. I don’t like it here anymore. I don’t like the vacation house. It started off being really cool but now it’s just horrible.”

  “We’re going home on Saturday, Daniel. It’s only a few days. In the meantime, perhaps steer clear of the bigger boys and stay near the villa.” I looked away. “Play with your dad, OK?”

  “What if something else bad happens?”

  “Nothing else bad is going to happen, Daniel. I promise.”

  He sat, twisting his hands in his lap. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “Just want to go home,” he said in a small voice. “Back to our normal house, with our normal things.”

  I gave him another hug and kissed the top of his head.

  “Soon.”

  “Promise you won’t tell Jake and Ethan?”

  “I promise.”

  I handed him a clean T-shirt to wear.

  “Where’s my Harry Potter T-shirt, Mum?”

  “It’s ruined, Daniel, I had to throw it away.”

  His face crumpled again. “Please can you try to mend it?”

  “It’s all ripped up the side. I’ll get you another one.”

  “Please?” He looked up at me with his big blue eyes. “It’s my favorite.”

  “Well…”

  “Please?”

  I stood up.

  “All right. If Jennifer has brought a sewing kit, I’ll see what I can do.”

  I went to the pedal bin in the corner to fish out his T-shirt and was about to let the lid fall again when something caught my eye beneath it. It was one of those things that you recognize instantly—even if you haven’t held one in your hands for a decade or more.

  I lifted it out of the bin, turning it over in my hand. Dizziness clouded my vision for a moment. This was … No, I didn’t have the headspace to think about this right now, to even consider the implications of it. There was too much going on already, too many plates spinning. Too much worry and suspicion and fear. I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans.

  Just a piece of generic white plastic with a singular purpose.

  But what on earth was it doing here?

  I needed to ask Lucy as soon as she got back.

  48

  I found Jennifer out on the balcony, looking down into the vineyard.

  “Jennifer, can I talk to you?”

  She turned and gave me a sympathetic smile.

  “Sure. Is everything all right?”

  “Perhaps we could go somewhere a bit more private?”

  “Of course.”

  She followed me down the outdoor steps and into the garden, the grass soft beneath my feet. We sat at either end of a bench made of clean white stone.

  “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, Jen, but apparently the three boys had a big falling-out this afternoon. All a bit of a shame, really. Daniel said they left him alone in the house, and he also thinks…” I hesitated, knowing I was on shakier ground now. “He said something else as well.”

  “What?”

  “He couldn’t be sure, but he thinks they might have gone off in your rental car. For a drive.”

  Jennifer frowned.

  “A drive?”

  “He couldn’t find them anywhere, and he said your car was missing.”

  “Hmm,” Jennifer said. “Well, that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that Jake and Ethan would do. Jake’s far too young to drive, for a start. It doesn’t sound like my boys at all.”

  Yes it does, I thought, wondering how she could be so unaware of what her sons were like. It sounds exactly like your boys.

  “Can you raise it with him? With Jake?”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Why not? You can’t have him driving around the French countryside. Who knows what might have happened.”

  “The truth is, he gets very upset sometimes when he feels he’s in trouble. Very upset. Especially when he’s accused of something he hasn’t done.”

  “I understand that.”

  “And he didn’t do what Daniel’s saying.” Her voice was quite firm, no room for maneuvering. “He didn’t do those things.”

  “Daniel was quite specific—”

  “He’s mistaken. I’m sure Daniel was upset, and I’m very sorry about that, but I’m absolutely certain that my boy didn’t do what he’s saying. This estate is a very big place, there must be a hundred hiding places here. It sounds like a game of hide-and-seek that just got a bit out of hand.”

  “All the same, could you ask him? See what he says? Daniel was really very upset when he thought he’d been abandoned—he couldn’t find Alistair, either.”

  “Like I said,” she replied, her voice taking on a harder tone, “Jake doesn’t take it well when he gets accused of things.”

  “And like I said, Daniel was quite specific.”

  She hesitated, looking around to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

  “I need to tell you something. So you understand.”

  “OK.”

  “You have to promise it won’t go any further. Not even Sean. Especially not your children.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m only going to tell you this because you’re my dear friend, and I want you to understand. Do you remember last year, when Jake had encephalitis?”

  I nodded. “He’s fine now, though, isn’t he?”

  She smiled a sad little smile and looked at the ground. “Most of the time, yes.”

  “And he’s got so tall this past year, I can’t believe he’s already overtaken—”

  “It wasn’t encephalitis.”

  I waited for a moment, thinking I’d not heard her right. “He was misdiagnosed, you mean?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand, Jennifer.”

  “That was just what we told people. We didn’t want him to be stigmatized.”

  She looked away, across the garden, tears in her eyes. I waited for her to continue, but she seemed to have lost her words.

  I put a hand on her arm. “It’s OK.”

  She looked back at me, then over to the villa, checking again that no one else was within earshot.

  “The real reason was that he had to go away from us for a little while, for some treatment.” A tear spilled down her cheek. “He was going to hurt himself, Kate. You can’t understand if it’s never happened to you, but we had an argument one day, seemed like nothing out of the ordinary, just something silly about tidying his room, which he never seemed to want to do. But he reacted like—like I’d accused him of a terrible crime. He went nuclear. And then I found him sitting on his window ledge, and you know his bedroom is two stories up, right?”

  I nodded, put my hand over hers. “The attic room.”

  “Took me two hours to persuade him not to jump, and every single second my heart was in my throat. I didn’t sleep for three nights after that. The next week he did it again, and the week after that we found him wandering up the railway track behind our house. It was awful, just the most awful thing imaginable. Every day worrying about what he would do next. Worrying about a phone call, or a visit from the police—or worse. We grounded him, but he just went out anyway, so we tried locking him in but he always found a way out. You can’t keep your child prisoner in his own home, especially when he’s bigger than either of us.” Her voice dropped again, until it was barely above a whisper. “Eventually we got so scared that…” Her voice tra
iled off.

  I waited for her to continue, giving her hand a little squeeze.

  “What happened, Jen?”

  She wiped a tear away. “We had him—we had him committed. So he could be treated.”

  “My God, Jen, I had no idea this was all going on!” I hugged her, rubbing her back. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We didn’t tell anyone. The doctors spent a lot of time with him and eventually he was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder—prone to impulsive behavior, risk-taking, emotional outbursts. Although I believe that’s mostly garbage,” she added hastily. “We knew he’d been getting in trouble at school, too—fighting and stealing and skipping classes. That’s why we moved him and his brother to Lucy’s school. We thought that if he had a fresh start, a clean break from all the bad influences at his old school, it would be easier for him to move on. That’s what Alistair said, anyway. He’s supposed to know about these things.”

  “Oh Jennifer, you poor thing. I had no idea you were dealing with all this.”

  “So you see, I have to be really careful. It’s like he’s on a knife-edge most of the time. Some days he can be superexcitable and into everything, trying everything, but other days he gets so low. He has these black moods and he’s just knocked down by everything, especially when he’s accused of doing things he hasn’t done. And he’s my baby, my firstborn. I have to protect him.”

  “I know that, Jen, I understand.”

  “You’d do the same for Lucy.”

  “You’re right. I would, absolutely.”

  I paused, not sure how to ask the next question.

  “Was there any … any treatment for him? To help him get through it?”

  “He has pills, but he doesn’t like taking them. Says they make him feel like a zombie.” She turned her wedding ring on her finger, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. “I found a stash of them under his bed; he’d been pretending to take them but he’d just been hiding them instead. And I was so frightened. I didn’t want to confront him in case it set him off again, so I just left them there. Pathetic, aren’t I?”

  “No, you’re not. Not at all.”

  “Will you promise me you won’t tell anyone about this?”

  “Of course. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Not even Sean?”

  “Not even him.”

  She got up off the bench and wiped her eyes, taking a deep breath and letting it out dramatically. “Let me talk to Ethan about—about whatever happened this afternoon with Daniel. I’ll ask him to be nicer to him from now on.”

  “Thanks, Jennifer. Are you OK?”

  “Fine.” She summoned a shaky smile. “I’m always fine.”

  I watched her walking back across the lawn, toward the villa, and thought about what she’d said. It was a terrible thing to fear for your children, to fear they might come to harm. It was the unthinkable dread of every parent that their own flesh and blood could somehow end up being the cause of that harm. Anxiety, depression, isolation, self-harm; drugs to blot out the pain, blades to slice flesh where the scars couldn’t be seen. The thought of your own child suffering in secret was unbearable.

  I knew all of that. I felt it myself, for my own children.

  49

  Lucy was slumped in the big armchair with her phone when I knocked on her bedroom door.

  I pushed the door shut behind me and sat down on the edge of her bed.

  “How was shopping?”

  “Good,” she said, not looking up from her phone. “Hot.”

  “Get any bargains?”

  “A few bits, a new hat and some sandals.”

  “Great, you must show me them later.”

  “Sure.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Put your phone down a minute, I want to ask you something.”

  She sighed and put her phone in her lap. “What?”

  “Have the boys—I mean Jake and Ethan—ever talked to you about taking one of the rental cars out for a drive, without the adults knowing?”

  She gave me an exaggerated shrug. “Don’t know. Don’t think so.”

  “You sure?”

  “They’re both too young to drive, aren’t they? Jake’s not even sixteen yet.”

  We looked at each other, both aware that this was a dodge rather than an answer.

  “So they’ve never mentioned it to you?”

  She looked up and over my shoulder. “They talk about a lot of stuff, all kinds of things, boasting with each other. Why are you asking me this?”

  “Just something I was wondering about.”

  She picked her phone up again and began scrolling. “Right.”

  “There’s something else as well.”

  She sighed. “Is it about drinking wine again, because I haven’t—”

  “I found something in the bathroom next door, in the bin. The bathroom that you and your brother use.”

  “In the bin?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked up from her phone again, frowning. “Because that’s not weird at all, going through our bin—perfectly normal behavior.”

  I reached into my pocket and took out what I’d found. “Do you know what this is?”

  She glanced at the short stick of white plastic that I was holding. Blinked once, twice. Looked away again.

  “Yeah. We did it in biology.”

  “And?”

  “It’s one of those test things. A pregnancy test.”

  “Correct. Do you know how they work?”

  “Not exactly.” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “You have to wee on it or something?”

  “Right again.” I turned it over to show her the two parallel blue lines behind the clear plastic window. “Two lines means pregnant.”

  “I know that.”

  I thought for a moment about how to phrase the next question.

  “And do you know,” I said slowly, “how it got there? Into your bathroom?”

  “Not a clue. Someone else must have put it there.”

  I leaned forward, smiling at her. Trying to soften my expression. “Is there something you want to tell me? It’s OK if you are, we can talk about—”

  “I’m not!” she said forcefully, crossing her arms.

  “You’re not what?”

  “Pregnant. The test isn’t mine. And if it had been mine, I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to dump it in my own bathroom bin where anyone might find it and start asking questions. Where Daniel might find it.”

  I felt a little of the weight lift from my shoulders. “You’re sure?”

  “Trust me, Mum—I’d be way more sneaky about it than that. You’d never know.”

  50

  Jennifer

  Behind a locked door in the downstairs bathroom, Jennifer wiped her eyes and blew her nose before taking another tissue to repair the damage to her eyeliner. She stared at the face in the mirror for a moment, hands grasping the granite countertop, taking ten deep breaths as she’d been taught to do. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  Calm. Clear. Do what needs to be done.

  She went into the kitchen and found a cloth under the sink, took a small bottle of water from the fridge. She checked through the entrance hall window for anyone out on the front driveway, then, satisfied it was deserted, she took the keys from a hook by the front door and walked down the sweeping stone staircase that curved out onto the drive. Their rental car, a Ford Fiesta, was the cheapest one they could get that would still fit two lanky teenage boys in the back—just about—and all of their luggage.

  Jennifer walked a slow circle around the car, running her eye over the paintwork, the bumpers, the trim. There were a couple new scrapes on the paintwork, low down near the offside rear tire. They’d not been there when they’d picked the car up from the airport four days previously. She squatted down, examining them more closely and touching an index finger to the metal. Parallel scratches in the bodywork, probably from a low wall or a bould
er by the side of the road. But not deep. Not too hard to hide.

  She poured water from the bottle into a patch of earth in the flower bed, dabbed the cloth in the wet mud, and smeared some dirt over the scratches—just enough to disguise the new marks. It had to be carefully done, so it just looked like the regular dirt you might get from driving around the French countryside.

  Superficial stuff could be covered like that, well enough to fool the rental company inspection when they returned the car in three days’ time. We don’t want to get hit with a hefty repair bill, do we? Such a rip-off, anyway. They tried to charge you hundreds of euros for even the tiniest dent. Anything deeper would need a trip to a garage before they returned the car on Saturday.

  She stood up and admired her handiwork, looking at the smudges of dirt and adding some more near the front wheel, so the marks were more consistent. When it dried, it would disguise the marks well enough.

  With that done, she took the key fob from her pocket and unlocked the doors. Opening the driver’s side door, she pulled the seat forward, back to where she usually had it. Then she locked the Fiesta again and went back inside.

  51

  It was my turn to do the dishes after dinner. I was glad of the distraction, the chance to be away from the others for a little while, away from making polite conversation, away from having to pretend that everything was normal.

  Away from Sean.

  I filled the sink and began scrubbing at pots and pans, the water so hot it almost scalded my hands and arms. My emotions were a mess of hurt and confusion and despair that things could ever be put right again. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the image of Izzy out of my mind—the image of her as she walked up into the clearing in the woods, summoned by a message from my husband’s phone. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that Izzy was the one—it had been her all along. She was the only single one among us. Her hometown connection with Sean had finally turned into something more intimate, more dangerous. More destructive.

  Our conversation on her first day here came back with a sick, deadening realization that she had virtually admitted it to me.

  “He’s married, isn’t he?”