After You (10 page)

18

I
am snooping—there is no other way to spin it—when Claire calls on the following Wednesday, and at first I am too distracted to hear the warning in her tone. What started with me looking for a power adapter for my laptop—to turn DC to AC, or AC to DC, or whatever it is—has ended with me rifling through Lucy’s office. An all-consuming exercise of looking over and under and next to for evidence of the person I used to know. I don’t mean to do it, to violate her privacy—though to be honest, I am not sure what privacy means in relation to the dead—but there is a pile of papers on her desk, and a couple of photographs I have never seen before, and how can I not look?

And being in this room, which is one hundred percent Lucy, down to the small first-edition collection on her bookshelf, the black-and-white picture of her rubbing noses with a two-year-old Sophie, and a
French 101
CD makes me feel like she is currently away on a short vacation. She has to come home to us. There is French to be learned and books to be read, and a daughter to parent, after all.

Certainly she can’t be lost if there is still the matted diploma from the Columbia School of Journalism on her wall, a pair of her favorite flip-flops, solid pink, soles worn thin, still on the floor, a pile of research for an article still unwritten. Too many
stills
—an identity frozen by things—for the object they represent to be gone.

“Ellie, can you come round the school? I’m sorry to do this to you. I tried Mr. Stafford first, but his secretary said he’d be out for the afternoon,” Claire says, and now I’m listening. I’ve turned away from Lucy’s desk, have closed my eyes to concentrate on Claire’s words, and it is then, and only then, that I hear that her voice sounds like defeat. Claire is an elementary-school teacher; her voice never sounds like defeat.

“Is Sophie all right?”

“She’s fine—”

“What’s going on?”

“Please, just come pick her up. There’s been a bit of a row, but I’ll explain when you get here. And, Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“Please hurry. Sophie needs you.”

Headmistress Calthorp reminds me of one of those rubber-band balls you find in an office cubicle, obsessively compact and tightly bound and the useless product of time wasted. I hate her on sight. The way she is dressed like her students: plaid skirt, navy sweater, collared shirt underneath, and blond hair kept in place with a matching plaid band. The way she refuses to get to the point, leaning back in her leather chair, which is brown and antique and has studs that look like they leave marks on her back. The way she crosses her legs and sensible navy pumps, in a proper and unnatural way, calf to calf, ankle to ankle, and parallel. I bet her wool tights are control-top and she feels virtuous about the fact that they hurt.

“What happened? Where’s Sophie?” I say, bypassing the usual pleasantries, hoping she’ll unsteeple her gnarled fingertips and tell me what the hell is going on here. I ran here in Lucy’s flip-flops, a size too small, and I’m out of breath and shaking with fear.

“Sophie is waiting in the front office. What happened to your arm?” she asks me, staring at my cast and its childish doodles—Sophie’s doodles—with distaste. Her tone is curt, judgmental, and wooden like her office. The desk she presides over is an obviously expensive antique, just like her chair, which has thick legs, just like her own.

“Fell off the monkey bars. So Sophie’s okay?”

“Excuse me? You fell off what?”

“The monkey bars. Is Sophie—”

“You mean a climbing frame.” She says it like I’ve made a mistake and it is her civic duty to correct me. “What were you doing on a climbing frame? Those are for children.”
So are plaid skirts
, I think but don’t say.

“Is Sophie okay?”

“If you define
okay
as being in a lot of trouble. She is suspended for two days.”

“Suspended? But she’s only eight.”

“We take violence very seriously at this school.”

“Violence? Are you kidding me? Have you met Sophie?”

“She attacked another student. I know in America children take guns in their lunch boxes, but that’s not how we operate here at The Pembridge Place School.” She pats a brochure on her desk, filled with kilted girls and bow-tied boys, for emphasis.

I want to hurt her.

“What was the fight about?”

“We don’t know yet, but one might say it’s irrelevant. Don’t you agree?”

“No, I think
one
might say not.”

“Well, as I said, Ms…. what was it, Lerner?”

“Call me Ellie.”

“Oh, we don’t refer to adults by their first names here. We believe it breeds disrespect. As I was saying, Ms. Lerner, we have a strict no-violence policy.”

“You do realize Sophie just lost her mother, right?”

“Yes, I do. A tragedy.” She sniffs. “But regardless of the circumstances, we can’t accept such behavior. If Sophie doesn’t apologize, she will be expelled.”

“Let me get this straight. You know that Sophie’s mother was murdered—only a few blocks away from this school, in fact—and your concern at this moment isn’t,
Let’s see how we can help Sophie?
But instead,
if she doesn’t apologize we’re going to expel her?
An eight-year-old? One of the smartest kids in your fucking school?”

“Please, we do not use language like that here, Ms. Lerner.” She waves her hands in the air and then sits back with crossed arms. She is not afraid of me. “One must understand—”

“Where is Claire? I’d like to speak with her.”

“I am not sure whom you mean. We don’t have a student named Claire.” She says it primly and in all seriousness. She won’t let her act drop, not even when speaking to a fellow adult.

“Sophie’s teacher.
Claire.”

“Oh, I see. You mean
Ms. Walters.”

* * *

I follow Headmistress Calthorp out of her office and watch as she hoofs down the hallways with the Queen’s gait. Flatfooted and stiff. The students cower in doorways as she passes, and I don’t blame them.

“Soph?” Sophie is sitting next to Claire on a chair outside the front office. She has folded into herself, all parts of her bent to take up as little space as possible. What I have come to think of as the
mute look
, that deadness in her eyes she had when I first got to London, is back. “Come here, sweet pea.”

Sophie runs across the hall to me. She buries her face in my stomach and hugs me with her whole body. She is shivering, like a dog.

“It’s okay, Soph. Whatever it is, it will be okay.” I bend down and pick her up, so I am holding all forty-five pounds of her with my one good arm. She wraps her thin legs around my back, turns her head so it is resting on my shoulder. And that’s when I see it. My little Sophie, sweet little Sophie, has a black eye.

I look at Claire, who is still sitting down, just behind the headmistress. She looks beaten and sad. We make eye contact, and she quickly makes the
I’ll call you
hand motion behind her boss’s back.

“Sophie is not welcome back to school until Friday.”

“All right.”

“And it goes without saying that you and her father need to have a long talk with her. She doesn’t seem to understand that she has no choice but to apologize.”

“All right.” Sophie is crying on my shoulder. I’ll agree to anything to get us out of here. Now.

“Thanks, Headmistress Calthorp.” On the way out, I curtsy—with Sophie still clinging on—I actually fucking curtsy, as if the headmistress is, in fact, Her Royal Majesty. I don’t know what comes over me.

Sophie and I take the long route, weaving through the streets, past the fancy shops of Ledbury Road and the newsagent where we sometimes stop for chocolate, and along the white-mansion blocks with their comforting fresh paint and hearty columns. Past the private gardens, where children with special keys get to play.

Though my broken bone is throbbing under the plaster pushed up against her back, I carry her the whole way home.

I don’t ask what happened right away. First we go inside, huddle in the kitchen booth, and I make her a cup of tea and give her some of her favorite chocolate biscuits. They call them biscuits here, but they’re cookies. Sophie has had another shitty day, one more in a recent outbreak of them, and no matter what happened at school, she needs a little comforting.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, and hand her a frozen bag of broccoli from the freezer to put on her eye.

“No,” she says, the first word she has spoken since we left the school. “Not really.”

“It looks pretty bad.”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

She shrugs her shoulders and stares into her tea. I eat one of her biscuits.

“Wanna talk about it?” Sophie doesn’t say anything in response, so I keep talking. “The headmistress said that you attacked a kid.”

“So.”

“So? Come on, Soph. You can do better than that. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You have a black eye, sweetheart. Something obviously happened.”

“Stephen Devereaux is a big fat jerk.” Stephen is the kid from the zoo who asked if I was Sophie’s mum, the one whose own mother treated me like a leper. “He said … Anyhow, he deserved it, Auntie Ellie. And I didn’t even hurt him that badly. He just has a couple of scratches and stuff.”

“How’d you get the black eye?”

“That was an accident. His elbow hit me when I, um, when I bit his leg.”

“Sophie!”

“He deserved it. I swear. You would have bit him too. He’s an idiot and a jerk and he thinks he’s a Transformer, but he’s just a stupid little nasty kid.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because.”

“I can do this all night, Soph. I have nowhere to be. Because why?”

“He said … he said a lot of things. First he called Inderpal a knob-head, because of his knot, and was making fun of him. Like, his skin is brown ’cause he’s dirty and he should take more baths and get a haircut. And I told him to stop and was like, Inderpal is from the Punjab region in Northern India. He’s not dirty. But big, fat, stupid Stephen wouldn’t stop.”

“You should have told on him to Ms. Walters. Not bit him.”

“But that’s not it. Then … then he said things about Mummy. Bad things. Really horrible stuff.” She starts to cry again, and I am doing my best to hold it together. I can’t cry, too, not now. Definitely not now. She is the child, and I am the adult here. “He said that she … she deserved it, to be killed, and that she was a slut, and other stuff.”

“Oh, Soph.” I can barely breathe. The air is stuck in my lungs, and my stomach burns. “I’m going to fucking kill Stephen and his fucking mother too.”

She looks at me, shocked and scared. She can tell that I’m not just using bad language to make her laugh.

“Sorry, forget I ever said that. I’m angry, that’s all. You should never, ever have to listen to stuff like that, Soph. You’re right. Stephen is a big jerk. Come here.”

Sophie puts her head on my lap and stretches her legs along the booth. I stroke her hair and rub her back.

“It’s going to be okay. I promise, sweetie. It’s going to be okay,” I say, though less for her benefit and more for my own. Her tears have stopped and she looks close to falling asleep. Her eye is now eggplant purple. “We’ll fix this.”

“Auntie Ellie? Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Soph.”

“What’s a slut?”

19

H
ow bad is it? Single or a double?” Greg says, hands waiting on the bottle of scotch. He has already been upstairs to check on a sleeping Sophie, to see, at least from a distance, the blue shadow of her black eye, the way it looks incongruous and ridiculous on her kid face.

“Triple. And I think you’ll need one too.”

Greg sits next to me on the couch, pours our drinks, and hands mine over.

“To us finally hitting bottom,” I say, and clink his glass.

“That bad?”

“I think so. But you’ll have to tell me. I don’t really understand what’s going on here. The kid who Sophie had a fight with? His name is Stephen Devereaux.” Greg stares at me, and I can see him take the force of the news in the way his face opens and shuts. He puts down his drink, and the coffee table vibrates.

“Okay. Okay,” he says, and folds over, resting his forehead on the tip of his glass. He is making himself smaller, just like Sophie.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t understand, Greg. Not really.”

“I assumed you knew. I thought you were just being polite. Not saying anything.”

“Knew what?” My arm aches, and I suddenly wish I were home with Phillip, sipping wine with him after a joint effort at a stir-fry dinner. Far from this dramatic shit storm. I want to walk away and start over. That’s what I was trying to do by staying here, after all. Right? Hit the restart button on my life.

Well, I need another try. This is too much for me.

Lucy, what the hell did you get me into?

“It doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s all over. One way or the other.”

“Yeah,” I say, and consider letting that be enough. Maybe I don’t need to know. None of this is my business. Then I remember Lucy at the age of twelve, flaunting our BFF necklaces, one of two people I thought I would always know and understand in this world. I thought we’d jumped the invisible line, and I remember I used to feel that way about Phillip, too, that I didn’t know where one of us ended and the other began. I’ve now been wrong twice.

“It apparently still matters,” I say, and point to Sophie’s abandoned Mary Janes at the door.

“What did that little bastard say to her?” I was hoping Greg wouldn’t ask, so I wouldn’t have to say the words out loud. Stupid of me.

“He called Lucy a slut and said she deserved it.” My delivery is flat and without emotion. If I do it any other way, I’ll break, clean in two.

Greg sips his drink. Eyes on the floor. Hands on his knees. Deep breaths, in and out.

“What did Sophie do?”

“She bit him.”

Greg chokes on his drink.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s my girl.”

“It’s not funny.”

“No, I guess not.” He rubs his hand over the stubble on his face. “One can’t help but feel sorry for the kid, though. He’s just parroting his mum’s rubbish. And the craziest thing is I don’t blame her either. I’d have said the same thing about her husband. I
have
said worse things about him.”

And then, of course, it all falls together, all of the parts I did not want to see.

“So, just to be clear: Lucy had an affair? With Stephen’s dad?” I think back to the zoo and how Stephen’s mother ushered him away from Sophie and me, like we had cooties.

“She was going to leave me for him.”

“What?” I had pictured a one-night stand, a stupid, drunken mistake. The sort of slipup that could be, might be, forgivable.

He shrugs a what-are-you-going-to-do shrug. Too casual and practiced. Betrays that the wound is still fresh and deep. He has lost Lucy twice now, and the second time has not made the first any less painful.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met the guy, but he sounds like this cocky French asshole. Apparently they worked together at the paper. She was moving to Paris to be with him.”

A French reporter. I think back to the week after the funeral, to the floppy-haired man who kept asking me questions:
Who are you? Who are you?

And then I return to the question I keep asking myself, which has been humming throughout the conversation:
Why didn’t she tell me?

“How’d you find out?” I ask.

“She told me. A few days before the accident. I mean, I knew something was weird—we hadn’t been all that happy for a while—but I never thought she’d leave us.”

“Paris?”

“Yup, Paris.”

“My parents are coming—did I tell you that? They’re coming here, and then they’re taking the Chunnel. They want to have sex under the Eiffel Tower. Again.” I am not sure why I volunteer this information, but I don’t know what else to say. I still can’t believe Lucy was having an affair.

No, that’s not true. I can believe Lucy was having an affair. Her moral code was different from mine, which wasn’t a problem as long as I wasn’t her victim. What I can’t believe is that she didn’t tell me about it.

“How lovely for them,” Greg says, and gives me a weak smile.

“Wait, what do you mean you never thought she’d ‘leave us’?” I ask. My body feels the betrayal first, before my brain does. And when it does, it’s obvious why she didn’t want to tell me. I’d never have allowed her to do it.

“She was leaving both of us behind. Not just me, but Sophie too.”

I decide to forgo my painkillers tonight, and, instead, Greg and I proceed to get very drunk. The throbbing in my arm recedes, my head thickens, and things start to seem a bit more manageable. I am a happy drunk—never maudlin, maybe because I am too maudlin in real life—and I enjoy my surrender to the scotch and the ice in my glass. A pleasing numbness takes hold.

“A clean slate. A fresh start. That’s what she said she wanted,” Greg says now. His voice is a touch slurred, but it could be from exhaustion as much as the alcohol. “Like Sophie and I were some burden she couldn’t bear to keep carrying. That’s what she made me feel like, in the end. Heavy baggage. No fun to feel like heavy baggage.”

“No, it’s not.” I wonder if Phillip feels like that, that I am one more thing he has to contend with in the already challenging enough game of Life. And then I think back to when I was sure that being together was the simplest part. Back when we made each other feel lighter.

“She said Sophie and I would be better off without her. Can you believe that? She said we deserved to have someone in our lives who actually wanted to be there. Such bullshit. Selfish, self-serving bullshit.”

“It’s weird that she didn’t tell me. She told me everything.”

“Maybe she didn’t want you telling her not to do it.”

“Probably.”

“Maybe she thought you’d judge her.”

“Probably.”

“I gave up trying to understand her a long time ago.”

“I thought I
did
understand her.”

“Can you believe she’s gone? For good? I mean gone, gone.” He closes his eyes when he says it, as if he can capture her fleeting image if he tries hard enough. A shadow slipping under a door.

“No, I really can’t.”

We sit quietly for a while, stare into our drinks, wonder how to unravel the confusion that Lucy has left in her wake. Does it matter anymore that she was going to leave? I think of how Greg looks at Sophie, with love and loss and longing, and more than a little pain; though he could stand to get home a few hours earlier, I am not sure he could love his child more.

“How are you and Phillip?” he asks, apropos of nothing.

“You know, we’re hanging in there.” Neither Greg nor I is naive enough to think that Lucy hasn’t passed along each of our secrets. As I know things about him that I shouldn’t, he knows just as much about me. One of these days, we should compare notes. I’d be curious to hear how Lucy transposed me to her husband and who I became in the recounting.

“Marriage is hard. Why don’t people tell you that?”

“They do. I think we all just expect to be the exception.”

“Yeah, I guess. Listen, thanks for being here.” He says it slowly, almost too slowly. Like he wants his words to convey more than their meaning. I feel his hand on my cheek before I see it. My stomach drops out, my organs are somewhere on the floor, tight and twitchy and frightened and uncomfortable.

He wants to turn my face.

He wants to kiss me.

I do not want him to turn my face.

I do not want him to kiss me.

“Greg.” I shake my head back and forth, as if to shake his hand away. I keep my eyes staring forward. If I don’t look at him, this won’t be happening. At the very least, it will keep it from happening more. “Not a good idea.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He takes back his hand, puts both of them in the air, in a you-caught-me gesture, moving the moment along to whatever we are going to feel next in one quick motion. “I’m sorry. Totally inappropriate.”

“It’s okay.”

We sit in silence for a few moments, trying to erase our embarrassment and to bounce back from bottoming out.

“You think I should get my own flat?” I ask. My mind is spinning the possibilities: going home to Sharon, staying here in this house, or starting a whole new life in London.

I am thirty-five years old and have no idea where I belong.

“Because of my moment of weakness and drunken desperation and possibly, yes, I’ll admit it, revenge? No, of course not.”

“But the way we’re living is bizarre.”

“I’m an idiot, Ellie. Please don’t leave because I’m daft.”

“Not because of that. Because this situation is unsustainable.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what Lucy said about our marriage.”

Hours later, when I’m alone in the guest room, no longer drunk and unable to sleep, I feel the sting of Lucy’s betrayal. What kind of person
chooses
to walk away from her own kid? My best friend has posthumously morphed into a stranger.

The fury sweeps over me in waves, gaining ground on the replay of tonight’s events. Lucy’s not here to defend herself, but it doesn’t matter. There is no defense. Only one brutal fact: Whether Lucy had lived or died, Sophie was getting left behind.