Evan swaps his beer into the other hand so he can take mine and rub it reassuringly. ‘It’ll work out fine,’ he says. He has a way of doing that. Even when it’s a disaster and you know it won’t be fine because it can’t be fine, the way he speaks is so soothing, he makes you think it will be.
‘Right.’ I rub my hands together. ‘Now that I’ve tricked you by getting you to veto the outrageous things, I can go off and do the other things I really wanted to do and you’ll accept them because they’re not as bad as the photo booth, bunting or fancy dress.’
My husband is lost to me. He’s glued to the screen, his features twitching with every touch and pass of the ball. ‘I literally have no idea what you’ve just said, but I know you do, so go enjoy yourself planning my party. Just let me know the date and what time I need to be there.’
I drop a kiss on Evan’s head of black, curly hair; he seems to be edging back to growing the Afro he had in college. ‘I will,’ I say happily before I leave the room.
The moment I’m out of sight, I have to stop and lean against a wall, using it to keep me upright. The swirl of worry and fear that I’m losing my daughter whips itself up inside like a hurricane building up speed to begin its destructive path where nothing will be left standing. I have to take a breath, then another then another. I know what a panic attack is now, and I know when one is approaching. I know what I have to do to stay safe, to head it off or see it through.
This is bad, I think as the panic whisks itself up even more. I push myself harder against the wall, trying to force breath into my lungs.
If Evan has brought up the problem with Vee without me even mentioning it to him, then things with my daughter are not only as bad as I thought, they’re actually a lot worse.
verity
March, 2019
‘In my dreams, I would sneak and sit next to her on the sofa, because if I was next to her, then she wouldn’t be able to leave. They wouldn’t be able to take her away. I wouldn’t have to watch them put on handcuffs and speak to her like she was lower than dirt,’ Logan Carlisle said to me.
This was the second time I’d met Logan Carlisle. The last meeting had ended not long after he had shown me the newspaper cutting on his phone. I’d been so shocked I’d told him I needed to go away and have a proper look around on the internet for information. That Mum and Dad were away so he couldn’t talk to her even if he wanted to right then, and could we meet up to talk about it again?
This time we went to a café just off London Road. It was not too far from where I lived and I was reasonably confident no one would see us together. We sat down with our orders and he had started talking – unbidden, unasked.
He continued: ‘In real life, I would sit as close to her as possible, sharing her body heat, enjoying the time when we were just together. I remember never wanting to leave her side because somehow I, this six-year-old kid, could keep her there.
‘And I remember how cold it was in the corridor, when I sat on the steps for days and days and days, even after Bella stopped doing it because Poppy told us she’d be back. We believed her. I believed her. I needed her back and thought she’d be back, so I sat there and waited for her. Every day was a fight to get me to eat, to go to the toilet, to go to bed, to go to school. Every day I didn’t want to leave the step because I knew more than anything she was going to come back. My parents tried to tell me without telling me at first. They’d say to give it a rest, to wait for her elsewhere, to remember that she hadn’t meant for me to sit there literally until she came back. But I knew better. I can still remember the taste in my mouth, the way I would get so cold sitting there, the way my stomach would churn and dip and rise as I sat there waiting for her.’
He looked at me then. Fixed me with his gaze as though he had suddenly remembered he was talking to another person rather than just wandering the maze-like alleys of his memory, losing himself in the paths and recollections of yesteryear. ‘Do you have anything like that in your past, Verity? Memories so vivid and real that it feels as though you’ve somehow jumped back into your body from that particular time and experienced it again, which is why you now remember it so totally – physically, mentally, emotionally?’
I shook my head. ‘Not for a sustained period.’ Understanding flitted across his face, a small smile wafted onto his lips as he lowered his gaze and swirled his coffee around its boat-like cup. You had a happy childhood, I could almost see him thinking. No one and nothing made you feel like I did. No one stole your childhood and replaced it with nothing. Not even with something awful, just having the person you loved removed and in their place was a nothingness no one even tried to fill. Because she was not dead, she was not here, she was just nowhere. And no one wanted to acknowledge nowhere. No one wanted to dress up or fill that void, so they just left you to it. You have no idea, what it’s like to live with your loved one in limbo. You have no idea what it’s like to have a childhood that was full of love and care and attention and still hollow and sad and empty. You have no idea because you had a happy childhood.
I was almost submerged by a wave of guilt from the way he was looking at me because yes, I had been happy. There were bad times, there were arguments and pain and misery sometimes, but all in the context, the cocoon, of things being good; life being so much more than fine. My parents were happy together and they made their whole lives about Conrad and me. I felt wretched, sitting in front of this man, because he went through that, and my mother could have been the cause of it.
She was there. That was the worst part. The articles told me she was there. The way she lived her life told me she was there. Even now, Mum would not eat ice cream. Would not buy ice cream. Would pretend it was not happening if we had ice cream. I remembered when we were pulled over nearly ten years earlier, how the police officer spoke to her. ‘It’s almost like he knew you, Mum,’ I’d said to her at the time and she’d dismissed it. Not denied it, or asked how he could possibly know her; she’d brushed it away like something that needed to be hidden under the rug of our lives. And I’d thought nothing of it. I’d thought nothing at all of it beyond being upset that we’d been stopped by the police when I didn’t think we’d done anything wrong.
And now I realised that I had accepted my mum’s dismissal because we’d been so happy. So settled and sorted that I wouldn’t have had any reason to question what my mother did as a teenager, whether she was a murderer and whether she’d let someone else go to prison for her crimes. Because only a monster would do that, surely. Only a monster would let someone else take their place in being punished. And my mum wasn’t a monster. She just wasn’t. That was what was so awful about this. About meeting Logan Carlisle, about reading those stories – they were none of them the person I knew.
People said you could never really know anyone, but could the woman who’d dedicated her life to me and Con and Dad really be the smiling, sexy siren who’d killed her teacher?
Maybe Poppy, Logan’s sister, had been like that, but not Mum. How could she have made us all so happy if she was really like that? But then, how could I listen to Logan talk and not doubt her? Because he was not making this up. He knew his sister and she wasn’t like that. I knew my mum and she wasn’t like that.