Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (44 page)

“I think I’ll let the twins have the limelight for now,” Willow said. “I’ve got a few things I need to sort out upstairs. We’ll just nip up there and grab a couple of things first.”

Shrugging, Magda pushed open the door and stepped aside to let them in.

Willow looked up the stairs, her heart racing, and took a step back, walking into Sam’s chest.

“One step at a time,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m here.”

The fourth stair up creaked—Willow remembered for two reasons. Because she and her sister always used to skip over it if they wanted to sneak in or out without their mother hearing, and because Willow would lie in bed counting the creaks. The first creak would be her mother going up to bed. The second creak would be Ian.

Now, as much out of superstition as anything else, she stepped over the fourth step, wincing as Sam trod on it behind
her. As she reached the first landing, Willow stopped. Her mother’s bedroom door was half open, a pale, watery light cast across the rose-print wallpaper that hadn’t been changed in thirty years. After a moment’s hesitation, Willow pushed it open and walked in. It was a beautiful room, perfectly proportioned, high ceilings and the original doors that led out onto the veranda, but it was so cold—not in temperature, although today there was a chill in the air, but in atmosphere. This was a room without love, Willow thought, looking at her mother’s neatly made bed, a purple hot water bottle sitting in between the pillows. How had Ian loved Imogene, Willow wondered? Had he ever loved her at all? Had he taken her in his arms and kissed her, and if he had, did she ever sense in the dark that there was something else, something much darker, lurking in the shadows? Willow caught her own reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. She looked pale and drawn, and for the first time in ages she could see the contours of her cheekbones. For a moment, she almost thought it was her mother in the mirror, staring back at her. How lonely she must have been, Willow realized. How lonely for Imogene to be wooed into a life of married respectability, only to find her husband withdrawn and distanced, cut off from everything, even her own children, by his controlling behavior. For the briefest moment, Willow almost understood what it had been like to be Imogene back then, their eyes meeting across the decades. And then it was gone, and Willow knew where she had to go next.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked.

Willow nodded, reaching out for his hand and gripping it tightly. She led him over to the next room, Ian’s hidey-hole.

“This was his room, his study where he worked and pursued his hobbies.” Willow put her palm flat against the door, feeling her breath shorten and tighten, her heartbeat accelerating.
“He liked to spot wildflowers, to press them and keep them in a book,” she told Sam, imagining Ian as she spoke, sitting at his desk, his head bent over some book or other, the light from the anglepoise lamp on his desk reflecting off the bald spot on the top of his head, his thick-framed glasses sitting on the end of his nose. “I thought I was the bee’s knees because he let me come in here and look at his collection.” Willow snatched her hand away from the door as if it had suddenly scalded her. “And then afterward, after he started, well, it happened in this room too. ‘Willow, come and look at my new flowers,’ he would call out. Holly would be so upset, feeling so left out that he liked me more than her. And I would pretend I hadn’t seen him, or heard him, or that I had something better to do. But Mum would always make me go. I suppose she thought it was nice that he was taking such an interest in me. And she hated her kids to seem rude or ungrateful; she’d always brought us up better than that.”

Willow felt Sam standing very close behind her, she felt his arms encircle her shoulders. “And so you went?”

Willow nodded. “I want to go in, I want to see that it’s just a room. That he’s not in there, that it can’t hurt me. But I don’t know if I can. I want to be strong enough, but I don’t think that I am.”

“I am,” Sam said. He kissed Willow on the cheek and then released her, opening the door before she could stop him. Willow gasped, the air dragged out of her lungs in a single second. He was there, for a moment, in the half-light that ebbed through the drawn curtains, he was there, sitting at his desk, smiling at her.

“Willow, come and look at this.”

And then he was gone. Instinctively, Willow wanted to back away, but Sam reached out a hand to her and after a moment she took it, stepping into the room. It was small, lined
with books, and the desk was still cluttered with his things: albums, a desk diary from the year he died, the lamp, which had somehow been shifted into a broken, disjointed angle, as if it were trying to escape the otherwise perfectly preserved room. Willow looked around her. The room seemed much smaller than she remembered; the leather-topped desk Ian used to sit her at looked diminished. A thick film of dust covered everything, except on his desktop, where four finger streaks dragged across the desk, perhaps from when her mother had come in here to call for help. Back when she was nine it was a sign of Ian’s importance that he had a phone extension in his office, back when hardly anybody had two phones in their house. The beige plastic phone with the old-fashioned dial seemed like a relic now, but then it had served to add to his authority.

“You know”—the intrusion of Sam’s voice made her jump—“chances are, there’s something hidden away in here, photos maybe. Something to show what kind of person he was. If we looked, I bet we’d find some evidence.”

Willow looked at the locked desk drawer, the set of keys still hanging innocuously from the lock. There was a small safe on the shelf behind a stack of box files that Willow assumed only she knew about. After Ian had died, Willow thought there might be money in it, a secret stash, enough for her to be able to take her and Holly away. It had taken every ounce of courage she had had to come into the room, to search for the combination, but whatever bravery she had deserted her as soon as she crossed the threshold. She had not known the combination then and she would not search for it now. All these years later, Willow wondered what exactly Ian did keep in a secret safe that even her mother didn’t know about. Whatever it was, it was only right that those secrets would find their final resting place, a place of solitude and
peace. Willow had no inclination to drag them out into the light to be violated again.

Willow let go of Sam’s hand for a moment, looking around the room.

“There is nothing in here, no ghosts,” she said to the room at large as much as to herself. “Nothing in here but dust.”

She waited for Sam to leave and then, looking around one last time, she shut the door. And now that she had gone back, Willow knew that door would no longer rattle in her mind, demanding to be opened, and perhaps for the first time since Ian had died, she understood that she would never hear him calling for her again. A sense of relief drained through her, dragging the almost unrecognized constant nag of fear that had grated on every inward breath she had ever taken and stripping it away from her blood and bones, until standing there on the landing outside Ian’s hidey-hole, the realization finally hit home.

I am safe,
Willow thought, looking up the stairs to her bedroom.
I am safe.

“Come on,” she said to Sam, feeling emboldened by the sensation. It had been a long, long time since Willow had gone to her old room, and if she’d had to enter it in the past, she’d made a point of staying in it for as little time as possible, never sleeping there since the day she left home. Now Willow stopped at the top of the staircase. Turn left and you went into her room, turn right and you entered Holly’s.

Did Ian ever stand there and make that choice, Willow wondered? Did he toss a coin, or draw a lot? Was there something he saw in her that wasn’t in Holly, some vulnerability her sister had not shown? Willow did not know, and she was burdened with the truth that she would never know, but somehow even that gave her mind rest. There was nothing to be gained by wrangling over questions that would never be answered. It was what it was.
Let it go,
part of her said.
Let it go.

As much as Willow wished for that to be possible, she knew that it was not. When something was as much a part of you as the color of your hair or the pitch of your voice, you couldn’t let it go, no matter how you might wish it. But perhaps she could let it rest, acknowledge the damage that had been done and let it rest. At least, Willow thought as she looked from Holly’s door to her own, at least she could be glad about one thing.

How glad she was that he had left her sister alone.

Steeling herself, Willow marched to her bedroom door and pushed it open with enough force to send the knob thudding into the wall. How her mother used to shout at her about that dent in the wall, Willow smiled to herself, pulling the door back and running her fingers over the dip.

“Funny,” Sam said, nodding at a single poster of a boy band still just about tacked to the wall by one dog-eared corner.

“Hey, they were all the rage once,” Willow said crossing to the wall and smoothing it back into position. “See this one, in the boots? I used to daydream that I’d bump into him on the street and that he’d whisk me away from all this.”

“So what’s in here?” Sam asked her. The rest of the room was bare, the wardrobe was empty, the bed thankfully gone, the ghostly outline of the furniture that had once been there embedded in the grubby pink nylon carpet. Willow turned a slow circle, looking around, taking in every corner, every shadow. Then abruptly she knelt on the floor.

“Willow?” Sam said. “Are you okay?”

Willow nodded, drawing her coat around her. “Ian told me he loved me more than anyone else in the world. He said that I should feel special, chosen. That he would always look after me. It started when I was nine. I got my first period when I was twelve and he didn’t want me after that. And the terrible thing is that as relieved as I was, I also felt rejected, betrayed.
Part of the reason I’ve struggled so long to come to terms with my past is the disgust I have in myself for feeling that way. After he was . . . over me, he didn’t look at me or speak to me directly again, not for three years. It was as if he were disappointed in me for growing up. I became angry and literally hateful, full of hate for him, for my mother. The only person I could bear to be with was Holly. Poor Holly, constantly trying to keep the peace, trying to understand. I didn’t tell her until after Ian had died, but as soon as I did it was like she had always known. She just hadn’t been able to bear it. Holly believed me, right from the start. Mum didn’t.”

Willow leaned forward, running her hands over the rough surface of the cheap carpet.

“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Sam said, kneeling next to her. “How can a mother hear her daughter say those things and refuse to believe it?”

Willow shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe because I waited for three years to tell her, maybe because I lived with him all that time and said nothing. Maybe because she already knew. I don’t know why, but I was wild and getting wilder. As soon as he died, it was like this pent-up fury in me that I’d been pushing back down burst out. And with all the pain and the hurt, I did every single thing I could think of to hurt my mother, to punish her. Everything. And all the while all I wanted for her was to open her arms to me, to hold me and tell me that everything would be okay.”

Willow’s voice broke on the last few words, and she bit down hard enough on her lip to taste blood.

Sam reached out for her, but she didn’t move, keeping her head bowed as she sat perfectly still, waiting for the wave of emotion to pass by. Eventually Sam let his arms fall back to his sides. After perhaps a minute, Willow lifted her head.

“I wanted her to believe me, to believe her daughter, so I
never showed her the one thing that would prove it. In fact I succeeded in forgetting about it, until last night when I was talking to Chloe. I want to do everything in my power to make sure she is free to be happy for the rest of her life, that’s what a mother does, isn’t it? It was at exactly the same moment I thought that, that I remembered the proof.”

Sam looked ashen, his face filled with fear.

“What is the proof, Willow?” he asked.

Crawling on her hands and knees to the small fireplace, Willow hooked her fingernails behind a loose piece of skirt-board, pulling it back just enough to be able to slide two fingers behind it. Looking up at the ceiling, she felt around for a second or two and then, finding her quarry, pulled it out. A folded piece of paper.

Willow held it out to Sam, who took it reluctantly.

“Ian wrote me a love letter.”

“So anyway, I’m going to be the angel and the Virgin Mary.” Jo-Jo was at her grandmother’s knee as Willow and Sam walked into the room.

“You are so not!” Jem said. “She is so not. We don’t even start at big school till Jan-yew-airy. Do we, Mummy?”

“No,” Holly said carefully, eyeing Willow as she walked into the room. “But Janet says you’re going to do something Chrissmassy at preschool.”

“Preschool!” Jo-Jo wailed. “I don’t want to be a cracker again!”

“I liked being a cracker, because when you get pulled you go
pop!
” Jem giggled, and Willow watched her mum’s face soften and smile as she listened to her grandchildren.