The Woods, page 22
“Heathcliff was a total psycho. And anyway, it doesn’t matter because I don’t like Sean.”
She turns and faces me. “Who do you like, then?”
I frown. “You know who I like.”
The smile drops from her face. She looks…what? What’s that look on her face? Goose bumps rise on my arms.
“Still? It’s still Max?”
“It’ll always be Max.”
“He’s all wrong for you, Tess. I know you like him because he’s so kind to you, but I don’t think he sees you that way. He sees you like a sister.”
“You don’t know that.”
I recognize the look on her face this time. It’s pity. “I do know,” she says. “He told me. He’s embarrassed by the way you moon around after him. It makes him uncomfortable. It’s why he hasn’t been hanging out at our house so much.”
A twig breaks behind me and I hear laughing. We both spin round to see Jack and Sean stepping out of the trees. Oh God—how much did they hear? And what the bloody hell are they doing here? I expected Sean, it’s the Easter holidays, after all, but Jack should be away working, not here to torture us.
“Well, looky what we’ve got here,” Jack says, his eyes alight with glee. “Two little piggies ripe for hunting.”
Bella rolls her eyes. She folds her arms and glares at both of them but I can see she’s trying not to smile. “Why don’t you fuck off, Jack Lewis?”
He steps closer to her, an eyebrow raised. “That’s not what you said last night.”
I look at Bella, startled. She was with Jack last night?
He leans toward her like he’s going to kiss her, but she pushes him away. He staggers back a step and laughs again. Bella turns to me. “Go on home, Tess,” she says, like I’m a toddler.
Jack looks at me. “Yeah—run, little piggy.”
I turn away and start walking, determined not to give in to the urge to run. I hear Bella say something, then her laugh turning into a scream. I hear a crashing sound—someone running through the trees toward me.
“Run, little piggy. Run before we eat you all up.”
I want to go back to Bella, I really do, but in the woods, in the dark, I’m finding it hard not to panic as the rustle of leaves and crunching of feet on broken twigs tell me someone is getting closer.
I speed up, breaking into a run.
“You go that way,” I hear Jack’s voice call. “Cut her off.”
I don’t know if they’re talking about me or Bella, but I run faster, fumbling in the messenger bag until I find the clippers, and run on, clutching them in my hand. I’m getting scratched in the face by low-hanging branches, my chest burns and my legs ache, and the footsteps behind me are getting closer.
I scream when a hand grabs my arm, pulling me back. I whirl round, get slammed against a tree.
“Shh,” he says, putting a hand over my mouth. “Calm down, it’s only me.”
Sean. Standing right in front of me, breathing as fast as I am, his hand over my mouth, smelling of cigarettes and chocolate.
I struggle away from him, shaking and nearly crying. “Get off me,” I say, wanting to punch him. He likes you, Bella said. Well, that’s bollocks. Total bullshit. I hate him. I didn’t want Sean liking me. I wanted Max.
“Wait, Tess,” he says, reaching out to grab my arm again. “Don’t run. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to—”
“Fuck off,” I yell. “You and your bloody brother can fuck off. I wish your whole damned family would fuck off and die.” I swing my arm up to slap him and only remember the clippers in my hand as they connect, slicing at the side of his face.
He staggers back, his hand over the cut, and I clap my own hand over my mouth as if I could swallow the words back down.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I never meant…” I drop the clippers and they land in a pile of leaves and broken twigs.
“What the hell is going on?”
I turn to see Greg marching toward us.
“I could hear shouting and screaming from back up at the house. And I come out here and see my own son chasing down a girl?” He stops. “What happened to your face?” he asks Sean.
Sean half turns away from me, his shoulders hunched. His foot kicks the clippers farther into the undergrowth. “It’s fine. I cut my face on a branch. It was a game.”
“A game?” Greg says, looking from Sean to me. “Tess doesn’t look like she’s enjoying your game very much.” He reaches out a hand to me. “Come on, Tess, come on back to the house. I’ll get you a drink and give you a lift home. Leave Sean to his games.”
I hesitate, looking back at Sean, but whatever was going on, the moment has passed. I want to apologize again, explain I forgot I had the clippers in my hand. I did, I really did. But he’s scowling at me again, all sneering hostility. I tighten my lips and take Greg’s hand.
NOW
Chapter 25
Max and Lena are back. Lena doesn’t seem to care how much work she’s missing, but I’m surprised by Max—Max, who’s so ambitious that he combined his first visit to see Julia with a work thing. But perhaps they sense, like me, that time’s running out. They’ve already been up to see Julia and now we’re sitting in the garden in the early spring sunshine. We’ve made it to March. We’ve made it through the dark of winter. Soon the clocks will change. I went through the house yesterday, putting all the clocks right. I noticed this morning, though, that some of them have already lost time. And things aren’t right, there’s none of the anticipation spring should bring. It’s not warm enough to go out without coats, but I think they feel it too, the heaviness of impending death. I tried to persuade Dad to sit out with us—he seems to be shrinking under the weight of it and it frightens me that he might fade when Julia dies, sucked dry by the presence of death.
“You’re quiet, Hardy-girl,” Max says. He’s wearing sunglasses and I can’t see his eyes as he looks at me, but I can see myself reflected in the lenses and, like Dad, I look smaller, shrunken. I did sleep last night, but it was a sleep full of broken dreams, all nightmares. I didn’t wake up refreshed. If anything, I feel worse today, the world more disjointed. I still haven’t started on the sleeping pills—I’m worried I’ll fall into a dream I can’t climb out of.
Max, since he got here, has become another Max again. The awkwardness that’s hovered around us since our disastrous night in my flat seems to have gone, on his part at least, and he keeps touching me—my arm, stroking my hair. I think I’m alone, feel a touch, turn, and he’s there, a smile on his face, like nothing happened, like he didn’t practically run away screaming after sleeping with me, that I didn’t almost kill him by grabbing the steering wheel and crashing his car. But it’s the painted-on smile I first saw that night in my flat, the one Sophie saw and didn’t like. I don’t know where I am with him—he’s like the spring weather, going from sunshine to rain in seconds, and it keeps me off balance. Instead of leaning closer as he gets more affectionate, I find myself stepping away, hiding when I see him coming.
Detective Levinson called this morning. They checked the house but found no sign of anyone being in there other than the window I’d left open. The wind and rain had blown in, erasing those paths of footprints. He said there was no sign of a suitcase anywhere in the house. If I didn’t have the photograph I took, I’d wonder if it was ever there. He didn’t give any indication he doubted anything I said, but I heard it anyway as he told me the only fingerprints they could pick up off the shoes were mine. I didn’t mention that I’d taken the photograph, because when I went to the album at home to find its twin, it wasn’t there. The page was empty.
“I’m okay,” I say to Max with a smile, putting my own sunglasses on.
There were more stories in the newspapers today. I walked to the village shop and there was Dean House, on the front pages of several of the national papers. It’s only a matter of time before Bella’s death reappears in connection with it. The local paper has already run a story asking, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ARABELLA COOPER? I haven’t told Max and Lena. I don’t know if they’ve seen the stories as well, if they’re just avoiding discussing it with me. It sits between us—between me and Max, anyway. Lena appears to be asleep, face white under her dark glasses and newly dyed black hair. She looks the same as she did back then, regressing, like I am.
“Tess?” Dad appears at the back door and I’m glad to get up, away from Max’s mirrored gaze. “Will you sit with Julia awhile? She’s awake and she asked for you.”
I nod and go upstairs, putting the sunglasses away as I enter the gloom of her room. The curtains are closed, only a narrow shaft of light coming through the gap in the middle. She’s awake and watching me as I walk across the room to sit by the bed.
“Hey, lovely,” I say. “It’s a beautiful day out there. Maybe later we could go out in the garden for some fresh air?”
She shakes her head and winces. “I don’t think so, Tess. I’m so tired.”
I swallow down a lump in my throat. How stupid of me—that optimism when I spoke to Sophie, my ridiculous hopes of remission. The strength that got her out of bed those first few days when we came back…looking at her now, I don’t know where she found it.
“I wanted to tell you…” she says, and I wait for her to catch her breath and continue.
“I wanted to talk to you about Ellie. About the accident and after…”
“You don’t have to,” I say, touching her hand. Leaning closer, I realize her breath smells sour, as though the rot inside her is creeping out. I resist the childish urge to hold my breath—don’t let it in, don’t let it get you too. “Dad told me. You don’t need to talk about it.”
“I want to,” she says. “I need to. My boys won’t listen and I want…if I tell you, you can try to explain to them why I had to leave.”
In the darkness of her room, leaning in close to hear the whisper of her voice, holding her cold, thin hand, her story becomes a fairy tale—not a Disney version, but a Brothers Grimm tale, a Hans Christian Andersen tale.
“I always wanted a daughter. We tried for years after Sean was born but nothing happened and I thought it never would. When I got pregnant, I was convinced it would be another boy. For a few weeks, Greg even tried to talk me into an abortion—money was tight, there was no room for another baby, the house was too small. But I couldn’t and then she was born. She didn’t look like any of us. She was like a changeling child with blond fairy hair and dark eyes.
“I’ve never known a baby so quiet. Jack and Sean used to cry for hours, red-faced temper tantrums even as the tiniest of babies, but she slept through from only a few weeks old and barely cried at all.” She stops to take a breath and I pass her a glass of water, holding it steady when her hands shake.
“Everyone loved her—Greg, the boys, anyone who met her, and she was…she was mine in a way the boys never were. They had their football and rugby with Greg and I was just Mum who did their washing and cooked their tea. And when Greg insisted they go away to boarding school, they seemed even further out of my reach. But then I had my little girl who loved tea parties with her dolls and loved wearing pretty dresses and it seemed complete.” She stops talking and closes her eyes.
“And then you lost her,” I say, remembering Ellie, my pretend baby sister. There’s a lump in my throat and my voice is more of a whisper than hers.
“We should never have gone out that day—the roads were too icy.”
“It was an accident,” I say, words so many people have said to me over Bella’s death. Does it make Julia feel better to hear them? Did it ever make me feel better? No. Of course not.
“We should never have gone out,” she repeats. “Sometimes I dream that she’s still alive. I dream that we stayed home that day and played with her dolls. And then I wake up.”
My eyes fill with tears. It’s awful. So awful. But what plays in my mind are Lena’s words—about why Julia really left. “Was there another reason you left?” I whisper. “To do with Greg?”
She looks at me and there’s something in her face. Is it fear? But then the door opens and Sean comes in, walking to the other side of the bed to sit in the red armchair.
“I was paralyzed by my grief,” Julia says—to me, but her other hand reaches toward Sean. He looks at it but doesn’t take it, remains hunched in the chair.
“I couldn’t function, couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t there for such a long time. I know I let Jack and Sean down, but I couldn’t…” She coughs and her face spasms in pain.
“Julia,” I say, squeezing her hand, wishing I’d never asked. “Don’t—rest…”
“I have to,” she says again. “I’m sorry, Sean. I’m so sorry.”
“You left,” he said, his own voice raw. “You came out of that…fog and you left. You were only a couple of miles down the road, but it might as well have been a thousand. You stopped calling, put us off when we wanted to visit.”
“Your father—”
“Don’t blame Dad.”
“He blamed me.”
Sean reacts to that, getting up and turning away from us to face the curtained window.
“Greg got angry—at first he raged at the world for taking his little girl away, but then he turned that rage on me.”
“I never saw anything,” Sean says.
“He never did anything in front of you, but when we were alone, he said things—awful things. He made my guilt grow. He hated me; he told me I killed her. He said I murdered her.”
Sean turns. “Stop it.”
“He started drinking more. One night he pushed me against the wall and put his hands around my throat. There was so much rage on his face.” She looks back at me. “I was already close to your dad by then but nothing had happened—it was too soon after he lost your mother, way too soon after I’d lost Ellie, but we…we helped each other. We became friends.” She turns her head toward Sean. “I couldn’t stay. We weren’t a couple anymore. I couldn’t stay and wait for him to start using his fists.”
“But you left us behind,” Sean says. “Packed us back off to school and left without telling us. You could have told us; you could have had us to visit every other damned weekend. Christ, you weren’t the first parents to split up, but it was like you wanted to leave us as well as Dad.”
“I never planned to leave you. Greg made you go back to school so soon after Ellie died, made Jack go off to work when he left school. I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t. But I tried—I called you. I called you both and you wouldn’t take my calls.”
“We were angry,” Sean bursts out. “You ran off without a word, moved in with another man, for God’s sake. But we would have listened, eventually. If you’d kept trying.”
Julia rubs her eyes. “I know. I left it too long. And when I made you visit…it was too late. You hated me then.”
“I never…” He stops.
I remember what he was like at seventeen, the bitterness and the anger, the way he looked at Julia at the wedding. Death takes more than just the victim. It destroys everyone else within touching distance.
Julia’s eyes are drifting shut, her voice getting slurry. “I always thought I’d have time. That enough years would pass and we could become a family again. My boys and my stepdaughters. That I could forgive Jack and he would forgive me…I’m sorry, Sean. Tell your brother, won’t you? He won’t listen to me. I’ve tried…”
Her breathing slows, becomes even. What does she mean—forgive Jack? Forgive him for what? I stay in the chair, wait for Sean to storm out or sit back down. He comes over to the bed and takes Julia’s limp hand, still held outstretched toward him.
“No one ever talked about Ellie,” he says, staring down at his mother. “We all just suffered alone.” He sinks back into the chair. “You became a target for all the pain and anger. We could blame you.”
We sit in silence then, the son and the stepdaughter, holding Julia’s hands, willing her to keep breathing.
“I wish…” he begins, and his voice trails off. I wait another three of Julia’s breaths before he continues.
“I wish I’d come to visit her sooner. Before she got ill. I’ve wanted to for a long time, but my anger, my resentment—it was like a voice in my head. It kept saying no, she should come groveling to you on bended knee.” He sighs. “And Jack…Jack fed into that, always telling me she should come to me, not the other way round. I let his and Dad’s bitterness feed mine.” He looks at his mother. “I used to take such childish pleasure in refusing her calls. I was angry at her for calling; then, when she gave up, I was angry at her for not calling. It became easier for us to pretend we had no parents. We never bothered coming back after the wedding.”
“We always think there’s going to be more time,” I say, thinking of Bella, our strained relationship that last summer. How many nights have I spent aching with regret, curled up around it like a physical pain, thinking the same as Sean—I wish, I wish, I wish?
“At least you’re here now.” At least Julia is still alive.
“It’s too late, though, isn’t it? Fucking deathbed reconciliation—that’s not what I wanted.”
“No, of course not, but that’s all you’ve got.”
He flinches. Does he hear it in my voice? Bitterness. No, it’s not enough, yes, it’s too late for him to restart his relationship with his mother, but at least he has this time, however long it is, to talk to her, to mend what’s broken.
I want that with Bella. Is that why I’m seeing her so vividly in dreams and hallucinations?
Julia gasps and her eyes fly open. “Tell her,” she says.
“What?” I lean closer. “Tell who what?”
Her eyes are glazed and unfocused. “Tell Bella to be careful. Tell her to watch out for him. She doesn’t know…” Her voice drifts off and her eyes close again. I glance up at Sean and he’s watching his mother, white-faced.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” he says in a low voice, but it sounds to me like Sean knows exactly what Julia meant.
