Before I Wake (24 page)

My hands shake as I pull my handbag off the passenger seat and onto my lap. I was right all along. I didn’t imagine the cards and parcels that were left at our house, and I wasn’t chased down the street by a shadow in London. James Evans was responsible for Charlotte’s accident. I was right all along.

I check that all the doors are still locked and the street is still empty, then I delve into my bag. I find my purse, my address book, my makeup bag, and a handful of till receipts but not my phone. I tip the handbag upside down. The contents spill onto my lap and my hairbrush hits the keys, dangling from the ignition, as it tumbles. I stare at them as they swing backward and forward. Maybe it’s a sign. I should just go. Ring Brian when I’m somewhere safe. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. My fingers make contact with something smooth and buttoned as I sweep the debris from my lap.

My phone.

I scoop it up and press the On button.

Nothing happens.

I sweep my finger down the screen. Jab at the buttons. Press the On button again.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I shake it, bash it on the steering wheel, and press the On button again, but nothing works. It’s out of battery.

Please, I pray as I turn the keys in the ignition. Please let Brian be home.

***

Never have I been so relieved to see my husband’s car in the driveway. I sound the horn as I pull up next to it and glance at the house for signs of life. There aren’t any lights on in the kitchen or upstairs landing. Brian’s probably in his study.

Milly launches herself at me the second I’m through the porch door. She frantically licks my face, her thick tail pounding the air.

“Hey, girl.” I rub her head then gently push her down. “Sorry, got to find Daddy.”

I ignore her whined protestations and go into the kitchen, shutting her in the porch behind me.

“Brian!” I call as I glance around the living room door. It’s empty, exactly as I left it.

“Brian?” I call again as I run up the stairs, cross the landing, and push open the door to the study. “Brian, we need to call the police.”

The room is empty, the laptop lid closed, the chair pushed into the desk, the paperwork piled up neatly in three piles beside the phone.

I head for the bedroom. Maybe he decided to have a nap. “Brian, are you—”

But the bedroom is empty too.

It doesn’t make sense. How can Brian’s car be in the drive but he isn’t home? Where is he?

I run from room to room to room, scanning the floors, the walls, and the ceilings for signs of a struggle, for—my stomach constricts so powerfully I think I might be sick—evidence of an attack, but everything is in order. There are no smashed ornaments, no overturned furniture, no broken glass, and no blood.

I drift out of the living room and into the kitchen, my terror replaced by confusion. There’s no scribbled note on the pine table, no scrawled “gone to the pub” on the whiteboard above the microwave. Maybe Brian texted my phone and I didn’t get it because it’s out of charge. I head toward the charger, plugged in by the kettle, when a scratching sound makes me jump and I’m knocked to the floor.

“Milly!” She nudges me with her nose then licks my face. I gently push her away and glance at the porch door. It’s wide open. I mustn’t have shut it properly.

I scrabble to my feet and cross the kitchen. I’m about to pull the porch door closed when I spot the white padded envelope in the cage below the letter box. I fish it out. My name and address are written in a fine cursive handwriting I haven’t seen in over twenty years.

“Milly, quick!” I grab her by the collar, yank open the front door, and stumble across the driveway.

Ten minutes later, we’re parked up by the marina. It’s late and the seafront is empty and silent. The only sound is the rage of the black sea crashing against the pebbles over and over again. A streetlight casts an eerie glow into the car, turning the white parcel in my hands blood-orange red. I shouldn’t open it. I should take it straight to the police and tell them what I know about James Evans, but I can’t. I can’t risk this being some kind of sick joke, a kitchen implement, cuddly toy, or something equally innocuous that would get me laughed right out of the station.

I fish a tissue out of the small pack in the glove compartment and cover my fingers with it, then pick at the envelope’s seal. If James’s fingerprints are on it, I don’t want to smudge them. It’s fiddly and takes forever for me to peel back the flap, but I get the parcel open and peer inside. It’s too dark to make out the contents and I don’t want to reach inside, so I maneuver Milly onto the backseat and upend the package on the passenger seat.

Two exquisite baby booties tumble out. Knitted from the finest yarn in tiny delicate stitches, overlaid with lace and tied with ribbon around the ankle, they’re exactly the kind of expensive, impractical footwear I coveted for Charlotte when she was a baby. I reach for one, overcome by memories, and bring it closer to my face. I’m not sure what happens next—whether the smell of iron hits my nostrils or the thick viscous liquid rolls down the side of my hand and curls around my forearm—but I scream and toss it away. It smacks against the windshield and drops into the passenger seat foot well.

Even under the burnt amber glow of the streetlight, I know that’s what it is, clinging to my fingers, smudged on the windshield, soaked into the fine ivory wool of the booties. Blood.

A cold calm descends on me. James knows. He knows the secret I took with me twenty years ago. I can stop being afraid now. He knows. I can stop.

I reach for the card that’s lying beside the remaining bootie and wipe it with the tissue, smearing away the blood so I can read the message written on it in the same neat handwriting as the envelope.

“Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

Deuteronomy 19:21

I turn the card over.

A life for a coma? That doesn’t sound right.

We have some unfinished business, Charlotte and I.

The card falls from my fingers in slow motion, arcing backward and forward until it flutters to a stop by my foot.

I have to get to the hospital before James does.

I run from the parking lot to the double doors at the entrance of the hospital, but I don’t feel the wind on my face. I don’t hear the mechanical voice tell me the doors are opening as I step into the lift or smell the sharp sting of antiseptic as I squirt sanitizer onto my hands at the entrance to the ward. I don’t see, hear, feel, touch, or taste anything. I am in limbo. I am running through a nightmare, chasing the specter of my sleeping child. She hovers in front of me, so close my fingertips are millimeters away, and then—gone—she darts away before I can touch.

She will die unless I get to her. I know it with a certainty that runs deeper than bones, flesh, or thought. I would stake my own life on it. Give my own life. James will not take her. He can have me. I will make him have me. I will give him no choice.

I can see the door of her room, further down the corridor. It is ajar, light spilling through the gap. Someone is in there with her. I run but now I’m wading through mud, each footstep sinking lower than the next, and I move slower, slower.

I took James’s baby from him because I knew that I would never be able to escape if I gave birth to his child. And it wouldn’t have been a child—it would have been a leash around my neck, a choke collar to be jerked whenever he wanted to control me, whenever he needed to abuse me, whenever he had to punish me.

I was dry-eyed and resolute when I walked into the clinic. I took the pill without a moment’s hesitation, lay down on the bed without a second thought, and gripped my stomach stoically, silently when the cramps came. I didn’t even cry when blood trickled down my leg and I hurried to the toilet and felt life slip out of me and into the pan. But half an hour later, as I lay curled up on the bed and a nurse put a hand on my head and said, “You’re a strong one, aren’t you? You haven’t had so much as a Tylenol for the pain,” I sobbed like the world was about to end.

Strong? I was impossibly weak. I’d spent four years of my life with a monster of a man, being tortured by hate dressed up as love. I’d been humiliated, belittled, berated, and cross-examined. I’d been judged, ignored, criticized, and rejected. I’d cut myself off from my friends and my family, lost my job, and been made to choose between my life’s dream and my love for James. And I hadn’t walked away. I tried, several times, but I was weak. He always talked his way back into my life and into my heart. Strong wasn’t lying silently on a hospital bed as I aborted his child so I could be free. Strong would have been walking straight out of the World Headquarters club in Camden three years, two hundred and seventy days earlier when he laughingly called me a slut. Strong would have been refusing to ever see him again the night he refused to sleep in my bed because other men had been there first. Strong would have been reporting him to the police the night he raped me. Strong would have been stopping him from doing the same to another woman ever again.

I didn’t cry for the baby I aborted the day I did it, but I did every year afterward on the anniversary. I cried because it didn’t deserve to lose its life, and I cried because I felt angry with James for forcing me into that situation. Mostly I felt guilty—if I hadn’t been so weak when I left him, if I’d had the tiniest bit of resolve left, maybe I could have taken him or her to Greece with me, somehow made it work as a TEFL teacher and a mother.

I thought I’d be punished for what I’d done. I thought I’d never conceive again, but then Charlotte, our miracle baby, appeared a year into my marriage to Brian. I felt blessed, forgiven, like a new chapter of my life had opened up, that I was truly free. And then we tried to give her a sibling and I had four miscarriages in three years.

My miracle baby.

I put a hand to the door and push it open.

Charlotte is lying prostrate on the duvetless bed, an oxygen mask covering her mouth, her chest polka-dotted with multicolored electrodes. The heart monitor in the corner of the room bleep-bleep-bleeps, marking the passage of time like a medical metronome, and I close my eyes.

“Sue?” There is a hand on my shoulder, heavy. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Brian?” I blink several times.

“Sue?” He’s looking at me and his brow is furrowed, but I have no idea what he’s thinking. “Sue, are you okay?”

“All right, Mum?” I twitch at the word “Mum,” but it’s not Charlotte speaking it. It’s Oli, sitting at her bedside. He’s got a pile of
National
Geographic
magazines in his lap and my best hairdressing scissors in his hand. There are a stack of cuttings on Charlotte’s bedside table.

“Mum?” he says again.

I can’t remember the last time he called me that.

“I…” I look from him to Brian and back again. What are they doing here? It’s as though my world has switched from the hyper real, a living Technicolor nightmare, to the monochrome of the mundane. Why are they sipping tea? Don’t they realize how much danger Charlotte is in? I look at Brian questioningly.

He smiles, his hand still on my shoulder. “Oli popped by to pick up his magazines and said he’d like to visit Charlotte before he went back to university. We came in his car.”

“You came in Oli’s car…”

“Yes. Mine’s still at home. It won’t start, some kind of problem with the fuel pipe, I think. The sooner I get myself an electric car, the better.” He squeezes my shoulder. “We waited for you to come back from the beach so you could come with us, but when you said you wanted to be alone, I thought…” He tails off. “I would have left a note, but somewhere between grabbing my jacket and leaving the house, I forgot.”

Oli laughs. “Not like you to be forgetful, Dad.”

I stare at the two of them. They’re laughing and smiling, but lying on the passenger seat of my car are two blood-stained booties and a card threatening our daughter’s life.

“You look a bit pale.” Brian angles me into the empty chair on Charlotte’s left and crouches beside me.

No one says anything for several minutes until he inhales noisily through his nose. He’s steadying himself to say something big.

“I found these.” He plunges a hand into his trouser pocket then uncurls his fingers to reveal three small white pills. “I was having a bit of a tidy up. I thought you’d appreciate it after everything that has happened but”—he looks at the treasures he has uncovered—“I was wondering if there was anything you wanted to tell me, Sue.”

“Yes.” I sit upright, suddenly, which makes him lurch back in surprise. “Charlotte’s in danger. James has found me. I’m not imagining it this time, Brian. I’ve got proof. It’s in my car. Blood-stained booties. He knows about the abortion and he’s trying to get his revenge through Charlotte. He blackmailed her, that’s why she’s in the coma, that’s what made her walk in front of the bus that Saturday afternoon. But it’s not enough for him to hurt her.” I grip Brian’s wrist. “He wants her dead. He’s going to kill her.”

I stare at his face, waiting to see rage, violence, or murder, but I see nothing at all, save a quick glance toward Oli.

“Brian?” I tighten my grip on his wrist. “You do believe me, don’t you? Look at my hands, they’re…” But my hands aren’t bloodied in the slightest. “Clean. But only because I used the hand sanitizer when I came in. If we go down to my car, I can show you the booties and the—” I try and stand, but Brian pulls me back into the chair. “Brian, please! Why are you looking at me like that?”

He looks at Oliver and nods again. Three seconds later, he’s standing beside me too, a plastic cup in his hand.

“Sue,” Brian eases my fingers off his wrist. “I’d like you to take a couple of these pills.

“No!” I look imploring at Oli, who looks down at the ground. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I only went along to the doctor’s because I made a mistake about that teacher at the school, but I’ve got
proof
this time. I haven’t made another mistake. Please! Let’s just go down to my car and I’ll show you.”

“Sue.” Brian presses the pills to my mouth. They graze my bottom lip. “Take the pills and then we’ll talk.”

“No!” I try and stand up, but he puts a hand on my shoulder. The pressure is gentle but insistent. He’s not going to let me up.

“Please, Mum.” Oli takes a step toward me, holding out the plastic cup like it’s a sacred chalice. “Take a sip. It’ll help the pills go down.”

“Oliver, no.”

“It’s just water.”

“I don’t care what it is. I’m not going to—”

“Mum, please! We’re worried about you. We have been for a while. You…” He looks away, unable to sustain eye contact. “You haven’t been yourself since Charlotte’s accident. All that talk about Keisha and Charlotte and who was best friends with who and asking for Danny’s number and address and…well, I thought it was a bit odd, but I wouldn’t have said anything until Dad mentioned that he’d found your pills down the side of the sofa.”

The haze that hit me when I walked into the room clears, and I stare at my husband and stepson as though seeing them for the first time. They think I’m mentally ill. I can see it in their frowns, in the hunch of their shoulders, in their whispering voices. They’ve put one and one together and come up with “mad” and nothing I do or say will convince them otherwise. What can I say? That I’ve spent more time with Charlotte’s friends recently than I have my own daughter? That I went to a club in London and got in a blacked-out car with a footballer’s agent? That I’ve been peering into the front rooms of stranger’s houses? They wouldn’t believe a word. Worse than that, they’d think it was all part of the delusion. And of course I’m deluded—I haven’t been taking my pills, have I?

I could show them what’s on the passenger seat of my car, but they’d probably think I did it myself, for attention or because I’m disturbed. Brian would take one look at the blood-stained booties and be on the phone to the doctor quicker than you can say “psychiatric unit.” There’s only one option left to me. One thing I can do.

I look at the pills in Brian’s fingers. “If I take them,” I say steadily, “will you listen to me then?”

A slow smile crosses his face. “Of course I will, darling.”