The Younger Wife, page 21
As they drove to the hospital he was every inch the concerned husband, as if her injuries had been sustained as the result of a random accident rather than at his hand. Highest on his list of concerns was what she’d told him right before he let her go.
‘You’re really pregnant?’
Heather kept her eyes forward. ‘Yes.’
‘But . . . I thought you were on the pill?’
‘I am,’ she said. ‘But I was on antibiotics a couple of months ago, so maybe it happened then. I’ve heard that antibiotics can lower the effectiveness of the pill. And I had that stomach bug a few weeks back – maybe I vomited up a pill? I don’t know! It’s a bit late to worry about that.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re right.’
They lapsed back into silence. It occurred to Heather that she probably should have taken an Uber to the hospital. She also should have packed a bag. She didn’t want to have to return to that house after this.
‘I’m leaving you, Stephen,’ she said finally.
Stephen glanced away from the road in apparent surprise. ‘What?’
‘What do you mean what? Do you really need me to explain it?’
He looked back at the road. ‘I’m afraid I do.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving because I won’t allow myself to be abused a moment longer.’
‘Abused? Heather, what are you talking about?’
She shook her head. She wasn’t going to fall for this again. ‘I was sober this time, Stephen, so you can’t say I was drunk and confused.’
‘I can assure you I wasn’t going to say that,’ he said. ‘Heather, can you tell me what you . . .’ He paused, shook his head. ‘Can you tell me what you think happened back there?’
‘You were there!’
‘Humour me,’ he said.
‘Fine.’ She glanced at him warily. ‘I told you I was having a drink and you pushed me up against the fridge and strangled me. When I told you I was pregnant you let me go, and I fell into a pile of broken glass.’
Stephen was quiet for several seconds. ‘That’s what you think happened?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s what happened.’
He didn’t respond.
‘What’s your story then?’ she asked, as they pulled into the hospital car park.
‘My story?’ He laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘I was trying to talk to you. I tried to take the wine bottle from you and you screamed at me. You dropped the bottle and it broke. Then you slipped in the wine on the floor. I grabbed your arm to try to stop you but you landed in the glass.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not right. You strangled me.’ She lifted her hands to her throat where his hands had been. ‘You had your hands around my neck and I . . . I . . .’
Stephen pulled up the handbrake. ‘If I had my hands around your neck, Heather, where are the marks?’
Heather pulled the rear-view mirror towards herself and peered at her reflection.
She couldn’t see any marks, but it was dark in the car. She twisted her head back and forth.
‘I’m worried about you, Heather,’ he said. ‘I think you might need to speak to someone.’
Heather continued to stare at her neck in the mirror, suddenly less sure of herself. That, she realised, was why she didn’t want to tell him she was pregnant. Stephen was so clever at getting her all turned around. At least with her father she knew for sure she was dealing with a monster.
‘Let’s just get these stitches,’ she said, and she got out of the car and slammed the door.
47
TULLY
‘Why wasn’t he wearing a nappy?!’ Sonny cried, when he found Tully on her hands and knees, scrubbing the rug. ‘It’s going to need to be professionally cleaned now. This is going to cost a fortune.’
‘Maybe not,’ Tully said, sitting back to survey the damage. ‘I think I’ve got most of –’
‘God, Tully. It’s just one bloody thing after another with you!’
‘It’s not like I took a dump on the rug!’
‘You were in charge of him!’
‘How was I supposed to know he was going to crap on the rug?’
After she’d recovered from the initial trauma, Tully had tried to find out the answer to that question herself. She hadn’t yelled or even voiced frustration; she’d merely squatted down to Miles’s level and said, ‘What happened, buddy?’
‘I not know,’ he said.
‘An accident?’
He’d looked at her with the sweetest, most earnest expression. ‘Not an accident.’
Tully nodded. ‘Sometimes people do things on purpose and they don’t know why. Sometimes even I do that.’
‘You do?’
She nodded. Then, in the most classic example of child randomness, he threw his chubby little arms around her neck.
Tully wasn’t sure what she’d done right, but for some reason, she felt proud of that parenting moment. She hadn’t felt anything resembling pride for months. And now Sonny had come along and ruined it.
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Forget it. You’re here now – you deal with it!’
She threw down the sponge, stood up and walked out the door, even as Sonny shouted after her that he was sorry. She needed to get away. There was too much on her mind. Dad had another wife before Mum. Dad might be an abuser. Mum might have been saving money to get away from him. It felt like everything that she’d trusted to be real and true had turned out to be a mirage and now she didn’t know what or who to believe.
So she drove to Bunnings.
As she entered the hardware store, it was as if she’d slipped into a parallel universe. She was above herself, watching as she perused each aisle. At her last session, Dr Shearer had asked her to describe the feeling she got before she stole something. To her surprise, she’d managed to articulate it fairly well.
‘It’s like that moment when, after being on keto for three weeks, someone walks past you in a food court carrying a baked potato with sour cream and bacon. You can try to think of other things, but thoughts of that potato haunt you day and night. You can try to satisfy yourself with a bit of chicken or an egg, but you know you’re kidding yourself. The fact is, the moment you saw that potato, a clock started ticking until the moment you’d eat it. In most cases, it’s better to just eat it and be done with it.’
Now, in aisle 37, Tully stood in front of a wall of spray paint. She wanted all of it. Everything. She wanted . . . the baked potato.
Her mind was a tumble dryer of thoughts and feelings. The obvious answer was that Rachel was wrong about Dad. Indeed, her theory was nothing more than a cobbled-together jumble of insinuations from less-than-credible sources. But there was some stuff that was hard to explain away. Like the fact that Dad had kept his previous wife a secret. If she really was his wife.
Tully took one tin of spray paint and shoved it into her bra.
As she walked the aisles, memories filled her mind – snapshots, really – of moments with Dad. Moments when he’d been short with her. Moments when he’d pitted her against Rachel for no apparent reason. Moments when he was unnecessarily mean, or rough, or unfair.
Tully strolled down the next aisle. Garden lamps. Two of them went into the legs of her stretchy pants. She still couldn’t breathe. A tin of chalk paint went up her jumper. A Phillips screwdriver down the back of her shirt. A packet of thumbtacks into her pocket. Some 3M hooks in her undies.
People around her were watching, obviously. She looked like a Michelin man, bulging with goods. Tully didn’t care. A little boy around Miles’s age pointed at her and laughed, and his mother grabbed his arm and dragged him away. Tully didn’t care about any of it. All she cared about was the release. The sweet, sweet release of potato after weeks of chicken. Nothing else mattered until she’d finished the last bite.
When she couldn’t physically carry another item, she strolled towards the exit. When the manager approached, she wasn’t even surprised or upset.
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said politely. His name badge said Trent, Assistant Manager. ‘Can you show me what you’ve got down your shirt and your pants?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Tully said, still walking. ‘I can’t.’
‘In that case, ma’am, I’m going to have to detain you while I call the police.’ He gestured to a colleague of his, a woman. ‘Rhiannon will take you to my office to wait for them.’
‘You can’t detain me,’ Tully said. ‘It’s against my human rights.’
As a lawyer’s wife, she hated herself at this moment. Sonny and Tully routinely chortled about the rights people seemed to think they had. But it was enough to make Trent, Assistant Manager, unsure of himself.
‘We have several witnesses, including staff, who saw you putting items inside your clothing,’ Trent said. ‘Which means we can detain you.’
‘How?’ Tully said. ‘Because you’re not allowed to physically put your hands on me . . . that’s assault.’
She wasn’t sure what she was doing. Going mad, probably. It was as though she was in some suspended version of the real world, in which she could say whatever she wanted and do whatever she wanted. She strode towards the exit. ‘Bye, Trent.’
The police pulled into the car park as she got into her car. She watched the officer walk to the front door and then watched Trent point to her. By the time Tully was reversing out of her parking space, another police officer was tapping on the driver’s side window.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car,’ the officer said to her, when she refused to open the window.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tully called, not stopping. ‘I’m late to pick up my son.’
‘I am asking you TO STOP AND GET OUT OF YOUR CAR,’ the policeman repeated, raising his voice.
Tully turned up the radio and drove away.
48
HEATHER
‘Seventeen stitches,’ the young doctor told Heather. Actually he told Stephen, and Heather just happened to be there to hear it. The doctor had practically swooned when Stephen walked in – all the hospital staff had. It was as if Mick Jagger or Barack Obama or Jesus Christ had showed up in emergency. Heather had to confess that seeing him like this, so admired and revered, made him more attractive in her eyes. He stood taller, his eyes shone brighter. He was so comfortable in this environment, nodding at other doctors and waving at nurses and administrative people. Everyone knew him. Everyone. Heather had been seen right away, a perk of his position in the hospital. She had been examined, scanned, stitched and cleaned up and they’d only been here a little over half an hour.
What would all these people think, Heather wondered, if I told them what you’d done to me?
‘How is the pain?’ the doctor asked.
‘It’s a little sore,’ Heather admitted.
‘I can give you something for that.’
‘Oh no,’ Heather said quickly. ‘It’s nothing I can’t manage.’
‘Are you sure?’ the doctor said. ‘You don’t need to be a hero.’
‘I’m fine,’ Heather assured him. ‘But thank you.’
‘All right then, I’ll leave you to get dressed.’ Heather had changed into a hospital gown for her scans. ‘If you are worried about anything at all, of course you can come back. But I’d say you’re in good hands with Dr Aston.’
Stephen thanked the young doctor and he left the room. When he was gone, Stephen turned to her. ‘He’s right about the pain, Heather. You don’t need to be a hero.’
‘In case you’d forgotten,’ Heather said, ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said patiently. ‘But there are medications which are safe to take while pregnant.’
Heather hesitated. Her arm was throbbing. ‘Really?’
He smiled. ‘Trust me. I’m a doctor.’
Stephen left her in the room and disappeared to find painkillers. While he was gone, Heather tried to make sense of everything. Stephen had strangled her . . . hadn’t he? She had felt his hands around her neck, saw him staring into her eyes. But even now, when she looked at her reflection, there were still no marks on her. How was that possible? Was she going mad?
Stephen was gone a long time. Long enough that the scenario had gone around in her head several thousand times, and it still wasn’t any clearer. When he returned he had two pills in his hand, one long and the other round. He also held a plastic cup of water.
‘Are you sure these are safe?’ Heather asked.
‘One hundred per cent certain,’ he said. ‘That’s what took me so long – I had to find my obstetrician colleague to make sure.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, softening a little.
He put a hand on her leg. ‘You might not believe this right now, but I do want the best for you, Heather. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think that now there’s a baby in the picture, we need to trust each other and know that we are in this thing together. Do you think that you can do that?’
Heather didn’t know what she thought. All she knew was the pain was getting worse, so she took the pills from him and swallowed them both in one large gulp.
49
RACHEL
As Rachel stood on her father’s doorstep, she felt quite nervous. She was empty-handed this time. It felt unusual, and yet she didn’t think it was the kind of visit that warranted cupcakes.
‘Rachel,’ Dad said, when he opened the door. ‘This is a surprise.’
‘Well, you always drop in on me unannounced, so I thought it was time I returned the favour.’
Dad looked tired, and not ecstatic to see her, but he opened the door wider and Rachel stepped inside. After trying and failing to reach him by phone the night before, she had woken up determined. She was going to confront him. She had to. And she would do it face to face.
‘Is Heather home?’ she asked, taking a seat on the barstool in the kitchen.
‘Yes, but she’s sleeping. We’d better keep our voices down.’
Rachel looked at her watch. ‘Still sleeping at nine o’clock?’
He looked at her quizzically. ‘It’s Sunday morning, Rachel. Some people like to have a lie-in.’
‘Not you,’ she said, pointing to the jogging outfit Dad was wearing.
‘No, not me.’ He sighed, falling onto the stool beside her. ‘So . . . what’s up?’
‘What’s up,’ she said, ‘is that I wanted to talk to you about Fiona Arthur.’
There was that flicker of recognition again. ‘Rachel, I told you –’
‘– that you didn’t know who she was, I know. But I met Fiona yesterday and she said she used to be married to you.’
The look on her father’s face was surprisingly rewarding. Annoyed, but also cornered. ‘You met Fiona?’
‘That’s all you’re going to say? Not, Sorry I lied to you? Not, Rachel, I can explain?’
He massaged his temples. ‘I wasn’t aware I had to share every aspect of my life with you, Rachel.’
She stared at him. ‘You don’t. But I’m not sure why you would lie to me when I asked you a direct question.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s a part of my life that I intended to keep private, that’s all. I didn’t know how important it was to you.’
‘It’s only important because her name was written on a piece of paper inside that hot-water bottle of Mum’s,’ she cried. ‘I’ve been trying to work out why Mum was saving all this money, and you had an essential piece of the puzzle and didn’t tell me.’
Dad had the decency to look contrite. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Where did you find Fiona?’
‘On Facebook.’
‘Of course on Facebook.’ He sighed. ‘Rachel, I really wish you hadn’t reached out to her.’
‘I wish you had told me that she used to be your wife!’
‘It’s complicated, okay? Believe me, I had a good reason to keep it to myself.’
‘She said you abused her.’
Dad gaped. ‘She said I abused her?’
Rachel thought back to the language Fiona had used. ‘She said you hurt her,’ she corrected.
Dad rose from his stool. ‘And you took that to mean I abused her?’
Irritatingly, this caused Rachel to falter. ‘Well . . . how else would I take it?’
Dad looked positively stricken. He stood up and walked over to the kettle as if to switch it on, but then turned and walked back to her. ‘Do you really think that of me? That I could abuse someone? Your mother?’
‘I don’t. But . . .’
‘I don’t know what is going on in this family. It’s like no one knows me at all.’
‘What does that mean?’ Rachel said.
Dad stared into space for a moment. It was uncomfortable, seeing him like this. Normally Dad was calm, in charge, in control. It had shaken him, having her question him like this. But after a few moments, he appeared to make a decision. He returned to the barstool beside her. ‘I did hurt Fiona, all right? We were married for three years. We tried for a baby the entire time but she just couldn’t fall pregnant. She was older than me, and her time was running out. We’d been starting to look into other options when I met your mother.’
‘While you were married.’
‘Yes. She and Fiona were friends, believe it or not. We were all friends. But when Fiona started to go into a black place, I fell in love with your mother. Eventually, I left Fiona. I have always felt dreadful about it, even though I never regretted my decision. It left Fiona in a pretty awful position. I don’t suppose she would have been able to have children after that . . . Did she mention anything about children?’
‘No.’
He nodded. Rachel had to admit, he was doing an excellent job of feigning concern.
Finally he sighed. ‘Look. Your mother and I felt ashamed about how things had happened. She never even told her own mother – you know Gran would have been mortified if she thought Pam’s relationship began in sin. And we both felt terrible about the way we’d hurt Fiona. I guess we didn’t want you kids to know how our relationship started. But if she insinuated that I physically hurt her . . .’
