The Fallout (10 page)

Chapter 10

“You can't keep doing this.”

“Doing what? I'm not doing anything, Hannah.”

“You know what I mean. You have to let Dan see September. Whatever you think of him, she needs her daddy.”

“I'm not stopping him from seeing her. It's not my fault things keep getting in the way.”

Sasha took a swig from her plastic cup of vending machine coffee, spilling some onto the Formica tabletop as she replaced it. The sludge-brown liquid pooled on the white surface, which was already littered with empty cups and juice cartons, with their straws sucked virtually flat, the detritus of ninety minutes in the hell that was the indoor play area at the local recreation center. To their left, behind a curtain of netting, throngs of small children frolicked in a sea of brightly colored balls, clambered up netting or crawled on hands and knees through giant plastic pipes. Everywhere you looked there were children hyped up on sugar from the vending machine, crying in corners, hitting each other over the head or pushing each other down slides. There were children shrieking with laughter or shouting to each other or to their parents, insisting they witness some death-defying feat. The noise level in the huge room was almost unbearable. Shell-shocked parents and dead-eyed caregivers sat at the tables or stood by the netting, dutifully calling out encouragement to their less adventurous offspring. It was Hannah's third visit in ten days and she felt as if the place was slowly sucking the soul out of her. She'd only come because Sasha begged her. Now they were here, she found herself growing more and more frustrated with her friend.

“Yes, but the things that keep getting in the way are things mostly manufactured by you.”

“That's not true. It's not my fault September was invited to Molly's for tea yesterday. It's really important for kids to maintain a normal routine at times like this, that's what all the books say. September needs her friends around her at the moment—she needs continuity. God knows she hasn't got much of that at home.”

“Oh, come off it, Sash. You could have rearranged that play date. You're punishing Dan, that's all. I know he went off the rails about that ridiculous car thing—as if you've got the time or the pettiness to go around vandalizing people's things! I don't blame you for being furious with him. But you're also punishing your daughter, who's done nothing wrong.”

Sasha tried to push herself back from the table, clearly forgetting the bench she was sitting on was firmly bolted to the floor. For a second she appeared confused, then angry, then, to Hannah's consternation, her face crumpled and she began to cry.

“Sash. I'm sorry. I know how hard this is for you.”

Sometimes these days Hannah felt she was trapped in some endless Groundhog Day, repeating the same patterns over and over—the indoor play center, coffee, Sasha's tears, her apologies, more coffee, wine, more wine, more tears. Over and over. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten any proper work done. There always seemed to be some emergency—could she pick up September and bring her home because Sasha was meeting with her lawyer, could she drop everything and come over because Sasha couldn't bear to be on her own. She wanted to support Sasha, but worrying about the money she wasn't earning was starting to eat away at her. At night she lay awake counting up her debts. She and Josh had already remortgaged once a couple of years before to release equity for a new furnace, plus taken a foolishly extravagant holiday in Mallorca. Their monthly household expenses were rising, and with half of Josh's salary going toward their credit card debt they needed her earnings just to break even.

“Want to see something funny?”

Sasha's sudden brisk new tone, coming hard on the heels of the tears of a moment ago, left Hannah nonplussed.

She'd barely replied before Sasha had whipped her smartphone out of her bag and was jabbing at it with her delicate fingers so savagely she worried they might break.

“Here. Look.”

She thrust the device under Hannah's nose abruptly, so that it took a second for Hannah's eyes to focus on the screen. It was a Facebook page. But the people on it all seemed very young.

“What exactly am I looking at?”

“Her. It's her. The Child Bitch from Hell.”

Hannah scrolled up to the profile photograph.
Sienna Sinclair.
Oh, shit. Well, at least now she knew what Dan saw in her. The picture was black and white and looked professionally done. It was a close-up of a natural-looking girl wearing a cowboy hat and smiling into the camera as if sharing an intimate joke with the photographer. There was a dimple in one of her cheeks, just by the corner of her mouth, and a strand of her long darkish hair was blowing across her face. She looked like someone you wanted to be with, someone you might see with a group of friends at a neighboring table in a restaurant and wish you could join, someone fun.

“Have you seen her status?” Sasha asked. “
In a relationship
. That's what she's put. No prizes for guessing who with. And look at this.” She snatched the phone back from Hannah and began jabbing at it again before pushing it back across the table with a tight smile of triumph. “It's them. Together. Her and my husband.”

Sasha had pulled up a photograph that showed a couple at a party, mugging for the camera, the girl (her hair, in this photo, was toffee-colored, with some lighter sun-kissed streaks) turned toward her partner and holding onto his arm, face raised to his in a gesture of mock adoration, while he pretended to look bored without quite managing to wipe the pleasure from his face. A golden couple. If she'd seen them herself from across a room, she'd have envied them.

“I don't understand,” Hannah said now. “How come you have access to her page?”

Sasha's eyes lit up as if she'd been waiting for Hannah to ask this very question.

“Because the stupid bitch has no privacy settings, that's why. She
wants
me to see. She's taunting me.”

“Oh, come off it, Sasha. If she was taunting you she'd have made it much more obvious than that, surely. She probably just doesn't know that everyone can see her page.”

“Don't be stupid, Hannah.” Sasha grabbed the phone back as if Hannah had failed some sort of test and lost the right to look at it anymore. “Everyone knows about privacy nowadays. They have it drummed into them at school, which, don't forget, she's barely out of. She's done it deliberately. She writes things, too. On her friends' walls. Things like ‘D and I absolutely loved that film.'” Sasha had put on a high-pitched, girlish voice. “Or ‘Will pop in to the launch with D later.' She lists practically every boring, shitty detail of their life.”

“Then don't look at it, Sasha. I mean it. It's going to mess with your head. Please tell me you don't sit at home obsessively checking her updates.”

“Of course I don't.”

Sasha's shoulders slumped.

“That's a lie. I do check, all the time. Wouldn't you? It's become like an addiction. Last night I was up 'til four, going through photo after photo. I even looked up the friends she's tagged and started looking through their albums. Complete fucking strangers, and I was looking at their boyfriends and their cats and their parents' silver wedding anniversary parties.”

“Sasha. You're going to drive yourself mad.”

“I know, but I just can't help it. Fuck, Hannah, I can't bear that he's with her. I can't bear thinking that September will grow up in a broken home. I'll have to wear that ‘divorced' label for the rest of my life, like there was something wrong with me, like I was returned to the shop.” Sasha's hand in hers felt to Hannah like a nub of bone, something impossibly small and unyielding.

“I get what you said before about September needing to see her dad. But Dan has got to see there are consequences for what he's done. If he's allowed to have free access to her whenever he wants, he's won, hasn't he? He's got everything he wants. And what have I got? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Hannah thought about reminding Sasha that it wasn't a contest, that nobody had won, but decided against it. She was so tired of the drama. She longed to go back to the routine they'd had before. At the time she'd complained about it, about there not being enough hours in the day, but now she looked back on her life prior to her friends' splilt as something halcyon, a comforting and orderly progression of hours, one after the other, all organized and calmly executed. She'd never wasted time she didn't have in overheated play centers with a Sasha who seemed incapable of hearing anything other than what she wanted to hear.

Even at home it was impossible to escape the whole thing. Dan had taken to calling all the time to complain about Sasha keeping him from September and to plead with her to intervene, and Josh seemed constantly to be in a weird mood.

Increasingly her sleep was plagued with flashbacks to
that night
, which always happened when she got overstressed. In her dreams she once again felt the fear thudding against her rib cage as her mother's face swam in front of her, contorted in fury, beloved features twisted like a rank cloth until they were unrecognizable. Her own heart was racing, her mouth sandpaper-dry as she stared down at the hole in her sister's head, magnified by her subconscious to craterlike proportions.

“I couldn't stop it,” she'd plead with her dream sister while the blood oozed from the hole, thick and tarry. “I'm so sorry, I couldn't stop it.”

Once, she woke up to find Josh gently shaking her shoulder. “What couldn't you stop?” he asked. But her pulse was pounding in her ears and she didn't reply.

At least Gemma was coming to stay for the weekend. With her demonstrably alive-and-well sister right there in front of her, maybe she'd finally get a break from it all.

“Listen. Sash...” She leaned across the table, realizing too late that the ends of her hair were trailing in the puddle of coffee. “Why don't you go away somewhere for a couple of days this weekend. If you don't want Dan to look after September you could take her with you.”

“Where would I go?”

Sasha's eyes were suddenly pebble-hard and Hannah felt uncomfortable, wishing she wasn't still holding Sasha's hand in hers, not sure how to take it away without it seeming awkward.

“I don't know—a friend, maybe? You need a break, and I'm not going to be around much because Gemma will be here.”

Abruptly Sasha withdrew her hand, sitting back so that Hannah was left leaning into an empty space.

“I didn't realize your sister being here would rule out you spending time with me.” Sasha's voice was thin and reedy. “Doesn't she like me or something?”

Hannah felt herself blushing. The one time they'd met, Gemma hadn't much taken to Sasha, pronouncing her a spoiled-princess type.

Her heart sank when she saw the tears building up once more in Sasha's eyes.

“I understand. It must be so wonderful to have a supportive family. You're so lucky, Hannah. Don't worry about me. I know I've been a burden these last weeks. I'm sure you can't wait to spend some time away from me.”

“Don't be silly. It's not like that.”

“I just don't know what I'd have done without you. Sometimes I feel I'm completely going crazy. You're the only one I can talk to.”

Hannah watched, stricken, as a fat tear made its way down Sasha's gaunt face. Guilt painted her insides black until she couldn't stand it anymore.

“Of course you can still come over even when Gemma's here. She'd love to see you,” she lied. “The three of us will have a laugh together. She's great fun.”

* * *

“It just came out. I felt so sorry for her.”

“Hans, how many times have we been through this? There's a little word you need to learn. It starts with
n
and ends with
o
and it's got two letters. Can you think what it might be?”

“I know, I know. But with any luck she won't take me up on it. She could tell I wasn't that keen.”

“That woman is so self-obsessed she wouldn't notice if you were keen or not.”

“Give her a break, Gem. You only met her once. She's had a really hard time.”

“Bless her, I'm sure she has. Tell you what, though, if her husband's back on the market, send him my way. He was fit.”

“He's already got another woman. Anyway, where's your solidarity?”

“Same place as my desire to spend my free weekend listening to your friend crying into her designer handbag about how hard done by she is.”

Hannah sighed, tilting her phone so the noise didn't carry down the line. Gemma could be very judgmental. Sometimes, when Hannah and Josh were arguing, he'd accuse her of the same thing. But Gemma was worse, taking against people for no better reason than a limp handshake or a single questionable joke. It had taken years for Josh to overcome the unfavorable first impression he'd created when, seized by nerves at meeting Hannah's family, he'd drank too much and ended up droning on loudly and (though she wouldn't admit it at the time) boringly about the perilous state of the education system.

And Gemma had been even more scathing about Sasha. Hannah could hardly bear to think how hurt Sasha would be if she could hear the conversation. She knew she ought to mount a more vigorous defense of her friend, but as always she found herself swaying in the wind of her sister's forceful opinion. Though Gemma was a year younger, Hannah couldn't remember a time when her sister's judgments hadn't colored her own, even before that long-ago incident from which none of them—Gemma, Hannah and their mother—had ever quite recovered.

But there was a small part of Hannah that was enjoying not having to be understanding and sympathetic for once. She seemed to spend her entire life tiptoeing around other people at the moment. It felt good to have a normal conversation—even if it was on the phone to her sister sixty miles away in Oxford—without having to worry about saying the wrong thing, or upsetting someone by mistake.