The Woods, page 28
“Julia told me,” I say, standing on the balls of my feet, ready to run.
He shakes his head. I expected anger, I expected him to come roaring at me, all rage and denial, but he looks calm, defeated as he stands facing me, shoulders sagging. It’s me full of anger, trembling with it. At Jack, who killed his baby sister on an icy road, then came into our lives and took Bella away.
“Look at you,” he says. “All righteous anger and disgust. Just like when we were kids, thinking you’re so much better than the rest of us.”
“You were driving. You caused Ellie’s death.”
“I was a kid. It was an accident. You think because Julia wasn’t driving it absolves her of all responsibility? She knew how dangerous the roads were, she was the adult. She chose to take me and Ellie out with her.”
“But you were driving,” I say again, taking a step closer to him. I want him to admit to what he did. I want him to acknowledge it.
“You think I wasn’t fucked up by it? Of course I was—Ellie was my sister. But it was an accident. It destroyed me but it was an accident. And in the aftermath of that, my mother left—walked out on us, couldn’t look at me, wouldn’t speak to me.” He laughs, a wild, bitter sound. “And you think I should have forgiven her? Yes, she said she was driving, but I wish now she hadn’t. Maybe if I’d told them the truth, my own mother wouldn’t have left us. I went to see her a few nights ago and do you know what her last words to me were? I forgive you, Jack. Well, that’s bollocks. That’s just a slap in the face, isn’t it? That’s her admitting she couldn’t stand the sight of me for ten years, that the reason she left all of us was because of me. And I was a kid, Tess—not much older than you when you lost your sister. Look how much it fucked you up, and you didn’t have your parent blaming you for it, did you? So before you come roaring at me about Julia and Ellie, think about that.”
I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think of my own guilt, remembering the terrible fight Bella and I had before the wedding. I’ve told myself the same as Jack is telling me—I was a kid, I can’t blame myself for the awful things I said, I was a kid. Jack was seventeen when his sister died. I can’t imagine it—can’t imagine how he could have dealt with the guilt, the awful, awful memories.
“You didn’t have to take it out on us,” I say, voice barely more than a whisper. “You didn’t have to take it out on Bella.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I think you know what happened. I think you know how—why—she died.”
He steps closer to me and I force myself not to back away.
“Is this why you’re here with me? You think I’m going to confess to something? Well, sorry, Tess, but I don’t know what happened to your sister. To me, it was just another person I cared about taken away.” He pauses and when he speaks again, his tone is almost gentle. “Truth is, I cared about your sister. I liked her. She got me, we were the same. She was the only person I could talk to and then she died as well.”
He reaches out and pushes a lock of hair out of my face. I flinch and pull away.
“I’m not the bad guy this time. I do not have your sister’s blood on my hands. Can you say the same?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You and Leo…you’re the ones the police keep talking to. They obviously believe you know something about Dad’s death. So perhaps you should own up to your own crimes; don’t come after me for something I had nothing to do with.”
He turns and walks away, leaving me frozen and alone in the woods.
Jack’s gone from the house by the time I get there and Dad’s out, a note on the table telling me he’s gone to pick up Max and Lena’s parents from the airport. The house still feels full, though, and it squeezes something tight inside me, the presences I can feel in Dad’s house of dead women. No sound but the ticking of Dad’s clocks, all out of sync, but beyond it, I swear I can hear breathing. It raises all the hairs on the back of my neck, and my hands are shaking as I step back outside and lock the door. How am I ever going to be able to live here again if I can’t even stand to be alone in the house for two minutes without being chased off by ghosts?
I head for the village to collect the film I dropped off. They hand the photos over in a sealed envelope and I resist the urge to tear it open there and then. I put it in my bag and force myself to wait until I’m away from the shops and people, stopping at a bench in the lane back to the house.
My hands are shaking as I open the envelope and my shoulders sag as I look at the first black-and-white photograph. It’s a squirrel on a wall, close up and beautifully detailed and shadowed, but it’s just a squirrel, not an answer to anything. The next couple are the same—a shot of the woods, moodily shadowed, one of the river, light playing on the water’s surface. I pause as I get to the next photograph. It’s me, standing in the garden at home, head bowed, curls covering my face. I never noticed her taking this. My heart thumps as I flick through the next ones. They’re of Dean House, taken at night. Darkness, dust, the creepiness of those empty rooms captured by Bella in stark black and white.
When did she take these? Did she visit Greg at night? Or did she go there alone—before she took me there? There’s the living room, the hallway, the stairs. I stop at the next one and then flick back through the others. What did I see? Something different. There, in the corner of that one. A shadow that when I squint takes on the shape of a figure. Whenever she took these photos, she didn’t go there alone.
There’s another photo, near the end, that shows the figure with more clarity. It’s a boy, facing away from her, dark clothes, head in shadow. I can’t tell who it is, but I can guess. I stare harder at the photo, willing it to come to life, willing him to turn and face me so I can be sure. It has to be Jack, who haunted her last months, who took her back to Dean House at night, who’s present in these photos, but hiding in the background. Hidden. Secret. Guilty.
The last photo, though, that’s the one that steals my breath.
Chapter 35
The morning of Julia’s funeral, I give up on sleep at six o’clock and tiptoe out of my room. Dad’s room is open and empty, so I’m not the only one struggling to sleep. He’s nowhere downstairs, and I worry until I catch sight of him in the garden. I fill two mugs with tea and go outside. He’s sitting on a peeling wooden chair on the terrace, staring at the daffodils that have just come into flower. Winter has turned to spring in the time I’ve been here. He doesn’t look up or seem to notice my approach and it makes me wonder if this is what he’s been doing when no one else was here and his wife was slowly dying upstairs.
“You’re up early,” I say.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Dad says. He’s staring at the garden, looking so lost and alone in the space that used to be beautiful when Mum tended it. He’s huddled in his chair, looking smaller, older. He’s only sixty-three, but he doesn’t look it today. He looks decades older.
I sit next to him. “Are you thinking of working in the garden again?”
“I was thinking…” His voice drifts off and he sighs. “I don’t know if I can do it again, Tess. I looked out and saw the daffodils and…” His voice breaks and he covers his eyes with his hand. I take his other hand, clutching it tight with both of mine.
“The seasons are still going to pass,” he says. “Time’s going to rush by and I’m going to be alone. I don’t think I can keep doing it. I don’t think I can go through it again.”
My throat closes up, aching with unshed tears. He had me and Bella after Mum died and he had Julia with him after Bella died. But this time…there’s only me left. I can feel it all closing in, the dark of the woods creeping closer, trees taller and tighter together. I want to run back to the city, to the safe box I live in, the safe teaching job where every day is the same and no one goes into the woods.
But Dad’s alone. He’s been alone for months, even when Julia was still breathing upstairs. And I don’t have a safe teaching job anymore, do I?
“I’ll be here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He looks up and gives me a tired smile. “You have your job—your life in town. I won’t let you give it up for me.”
“But I don’t,” I say, the words coming out in a rush. “I have Bella’s life, not my own. I never wanted to be a teacher—that was what she wanted. I hate living in a city, I hate the grayness, the claustrophobia, the way I sometimes think I can’t breathe, surrounded by so many people. I hate teaching.”
“Oh, Tess,” Dad says. “I always wondered, when you said you wanted to teach instead of applying for that landscape gardening course you always talked about. But you were so sure, so insistent.”
“I’m not going back to teaching. I actually lost my job…no, don’t, it’s fine,” I add when I see Dad react to my words. And actually, it is fine. I feel lighter again as I say the words, like they held weight. “I’ve already decided. I’m going to apply for a landscape gardening course. I’m going to stay here and commute.” I lean over and pull out a weed that’s choking a budding rosebush. “This garden can be my homework. We can work on it together like we used to when Mum and Bella were alive. Yes, time will pass. Yes, the seasons will keep turning, but we’ll get through it together, as long as it takes.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want you to…”
“I won’t be giving up anything,” I say. “I’ll be gaining something. I’ll be finding my life. We could make it beautiful again,” I say. “The two of us working together—me teaching you which are flowers and which are weeds.”
“Are you sure, Tess?” he asks. “Sure you want to give up your life to come back here? I’ve always understood why you’ve stayed away.”
I pull up a few dandelions. “I’ve been running from it for ten years,” I say. “It’s no wonder I can’t remember what happened—I’ve been running from everything that reminds me of that summer, living a life that isn’t mine, that I never wanted.” I pause and sink down to sit on the damp grass. “If I’d stayed, if things had been how they should have been and Bella was still alive, I’d have stayed home and gone to the local college, taken the landscape gardening courses I wanted to take. Bella would have done her teaching course—she’d be the one living in the city. I’d be here or close by, maybe with my own business. That was what I always wanted. Like I said before, Dad, I’m not giving anything up by staying. I’m getting my life back on the track it was meant to be on the whole time.”
The vicar clears his throat. “I believe Jack will now come up and speak about Julia.”
We look at Jack, sitting farther along the front row. He gets up and goes to the front, standing behind the lectern. He stares straight ahead, then glances at me and smiles. I shiver and have to resist the urge to jump up and stop him from speaking. Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity to get a final revenge on his mother for leaving him? To devastate us all as a final punishment with twisted lies and accusations?
“What I remember most about my mother,” he begins, looking at me and Dad as he says it, “is her coming in when my brother or I had a nightmare. She’d come in and sit by our beds and tell us stories—nice, safe, gentle stories, to help us go to sleep again. She’d say that her stories were magic. That her stories could chase nightmares away, so we only had good dreams. She took her magic stories to another house when I was seventeen.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “I like to think the magic worked there too on her new family.”
There’s a lump in my throat that aches as he continues talking about a woman I don’t know and don’t recognize. Dad’s squeezing my hand so hard it hurts and I can feel him shaking next to me. I should have offered to speak. I should have done this for him, like I should have been there for him since Bella died, like I should have been there when Julia first got ill.
“I regret not seeing more of her since her wedding to Leo,” Jack’s saying now, and Dad lets out a shuddering sigh next to me. “I was angry—we were angry, but Mum was happy with her new family, like she was never happy with us. I don’t know why, maybe I’ll never know now that she’s…but I regret it because if I’d got to know Leo and Bella and Tess, I could have had a second family too—this second family who must have been so special, so amazing, she could walk away from us and not look back.” He stops and I think maybe he’s getting upset. He looks down and when he looks up, I expect there to be tears, but instead of tears, there’s that smile again, bigger, aimed right at me and Dad, who’s now openly sobbing.
“Still,” he says after a pause that lasts a decade. “It’s not too late, is it? Perhaps now that my wife has kicked me out and both my parents are dead, I can move in with Tess and Leo. Play happy families like Julia did.”
I stand up as Jack sits down, arms folded, still smiling. It’s not fair. Not fair for those to be the only words spoken at her funeral—not fair to Julia, not fair to Dad, who’s in no fit state to speak. I move past Dad and walk up to the front, stand next to the vicar.
“I haven’t prepared anything,” I say. My voice wavers, so I stop and take a breath. I close my eyes, but I feel myself swaying, so I open them again, grip the lectern with both hands. “But as Julia was all about the impromptu, it seems fitting. Impromptu parties, picnics, and barbecues on sunny days, she had the best and finest impulses.”
I look away from Jack and his punchable smirk to Dad, gray-faced and red-eyed, and Sean, unsmiling, sitting tall. Max, Lena, and their parents make up the rest of the front row—Julia’s family.
“Julia gave my father a second chance at love, and Bella and me a second mother. We didn’t think we needed her, but she fit into our lives and filled a gap. She made our family whole again and I wish I’d said that to her more. I wish I’d spent more time telling her how grateful I was for all the love she brought back into our lives. When Bella died…” I pause and swallow. “When Bella died, she held us together, stopped Dad falling apart completely. And she’s done it again now. She knew for a long time this day was coming and I think…I think she wanted Jack and Sean to be here, and Max and Lena and their parents—I think she wanted us all together, not for her own sake, but for ours.”
I feel Bella’s presence next to me and it gives me strength.
“We were splintered and broken for a long time. Too much death, too much loss. I hadn’t realized how broken we are, but Julia has laid the framework to fix things. I hope…I hope Jack and Sean want to stay in my dad’s life. This is a gift, Julia’s final gift, so that’s what I’m up here to say. Thank you, Julia. Thanks for everything.”
Maybe my words aren’t entirely true—do I really trust any of them? I was beginning to—Max and Sean anyway—but everything I’ve found out…how can I trust any of them when I believe they all have their own agendas for being here? Those photos…so no, my words aren’t true but I wish they could be. I wish things were that simple, and I can see from Dad’s face what he feels. He squeezes my hand as I sit back down and his eyes shine with tears as the music plays and Joan Baez starts singing “Farewell, Angelina” and we say a last goodbye to Julia.
Sean comes over to me as we all stand outside, Dad accepting condolences from friends and neighbors.
“Did you mean it? About fixing things? Us staying in your lives?”
I can’t meet his eye. “Dad needed to hear it. Especially after your brother’s words.”
“I see. So that was all bullshit.” His voice is stiff, expression back to the scowl I remember. It’s defensive, that look of his—I’ve got to know him enough in the last few weeks to realize that. A part of me wants to smooth his ruffled feathers, tell him I do mean what I said, but…I don’t know him. The enforced intimacy between all of us, it’s not real. We’ve been thrown together, stripped bare by Julia’s illness and death, Greg’s body being found, but none of it is real.
Max is watching us from where he stands with Lena and his parents, immaculate in his black suit, hair swept back, handsome and perfect. But the tingle, the thrill I used to feel whenever I saw him, is completely gone. We’ve all changed, we’ve all grown up except Bella, who hovers invisible on the periphery, permanently eighteen, stuck in her skinny jeans and tank top, unable to stop bleeding, unable to stop being dead.
“Have you had that film developed?” Sean asks in a low voice.
“Not yet,” I say, trying to keep my tone casual. Is it him in the photograph? No, that doesn’t make sense. He was the one who gave me the camera in the first place.
It’s not finished, Bella says.
I bite my lip. She’s standing right next to Sean, her arm touching his. I don’t even have to close my eyes to see her anymore. She’s crept into my waking world. It makes me think of her sleeping with Max when I dreamed of him being mine. It brings coils of jealousy rising to the surface. My dead sister stands next to Sean and I’m jealous. Of course it’s not finished. But I don’t know how to end it.
Bella leans forward. Wake up.
Wake up? I am awake, I am. I’m always awake.
I walk back to the house ahead of the others to take plastic wrap off the plates of sandwiches, make sure the kettle is full and the wine chilled. I’m glad I do because Detective Levinson is waiting outside the house.
I frown. “You do realize it’s my stepmother’s funeral today?”
“I’m sorry. I won’t be a moment—it was you I wanted to speak to.”
He follows me into the house, hovers as I put sandwiches and sausage rolls out on the table.
“We’ve spoken to people who told us about the relationship Greg Lewis had with Nicole Wallace.” He pauses. “Your sister was named as well. As someone who was close to him.”
I stop, freezing halfway to the table with a plate of cheese sandwiches in my hand. “They weren’t close. Not like that—not like you’re insinuating. She was going out with Jack, with Greg’s son, for God’s sake.” I stop and shake my head. “These are all just rumors, though, aren’t they? Even if Bella was hanging out with Greg—Mr. Lewis—that doesn’t mean…”
