The Fallout (29 page)

It was teatime, while she was sitting up drinking a cup of tea so stewed it looked orange, that she said, “I want to see Sasha.”

As soon as she'd spoken the words, he realized he'd been waiting for them all along. Throughout that endless morning, awareness of Sasha's presence just a couple of floors away had been like a constant shadow in the room. Not intrusive, but there nevertheless.

They looked into each other's eyes and he nodded.

A text exchange with Dan told them which ward Sasha was on and, after Hannah had been officially discharged, they made their way to the elevators.

“Are you sure you're up to this?”

Hannah was as pale as Josh had ever seen her—her skin looked as if it might crumble to powder if anyone touched it as she huddled in the elevator, swaddled in an old hoodie of his and a pair of baggy sweatpants. She walked slowly and falteringly after the morning's trauma, holding onto his arm as they made their way toward the ward.

The nurses' station was unmanned, but there was a whiteboard up on the wall behind it with a list of patient names and corresponding bed numbers. Sasha Fisher, bed fourteen.

Josh stopped. Now that they were here, he found his nerve failing him. For the last few lost days and weeks, the Sasha of his imagination had transformed from troubled cast-off wife to incarnation of evil. He'd spent night after night lurking outside her house, incubating his hatred inside him, until he was so full of it, it hurt to breathe. He'd driven himself to the very brink of madness (
the tire
). But now that he was vindicated, he was finding it hard to hold onto that hatred—it turned to dust when he tried to grab onto it. Hannah, however, was as determined as he'd ever seen her, leading the way into the inner ward without hesitating.

“Oh!”

The sound escaped him before he had a chance to check it. Although he'd been told about the marks on Sasha's arm, he still wasn't prepared for this. The ugly welts of blood. The stark, unmistakable letters scored into flesh.

Sasha herself looked terrible. Flat. As if someone had opened up a valve and let all the air out of her. Standing awkwardly by the side of the bed, Josh found himself thinking of a hologram, wondering whether, if he went just a little too far to the side, she might disappear altogether.

Her eyes filled with tears when she saw them.

“Oh, fuck. I'm so happy to see you two. I've been going crazy in here. Well, crazier, anyway!”

She reached out a hand toward Hannah, but Hannah refused to take it.

“Hans. I'm so sorry. About the baby. Dan told me. There was nothing I could do. The car was out of my control.”

“You did it on purpose.”

Hannah's voice was unemotional, flat, as if she was passing comment on the weather.

Sasha's hollowed-out face crumpled.

“We know, Sasha. Okay?” Sasha's self-pity infuriated Josh. “We know what's been going on. We know it's you who's been doing all this stuff—you staged the break-in at your house, you keyed Dan's car and smashed the window and made up lies about him being violent and into disgusting, sick pornography. That's your daughter's father! What were you thinking? And then when we wouldn't take your side against him, you turned on us, too. You could have ruined my career, you know.”

Sasha was staring at him, her eyes suddenly huge in her shrunken face. She was shaking her head slowly, tears silently falling onto the pillow.

“No. You're wrong. I wouldn't hurt you two. I'd never hurt you. You're my friends—”

“Exactly,” Hannah interrupted. “We're your friends. Or rather we were your friends. Yet you nearly killed me—and Lily—and you did kill the baby. All to try to get back at Dan, to try to make him feel guilty.”

“Hannah...” Sasha tried to grab at Hannah's hand, but she moved out of the way. “This is me you're talking to. Sasha. I would never hurt Lily. I love Lily, you know that. Look, I know I've been going off the rails these last few months. Dan's leaving brought back everything from my childhood and I admit I've really struggled to cope. I know I've done some stupid things.”

She winced as she swallowed, as if it was painful.

“You're right—I did do that thing to Dan's car and I smashed the window of that woman's flat. I couldn't stand it, don't you see? I could see the four of you in there laughing and it felt like I'd been completely erased, like I didn't exist. And Dan never hit me, or left porn on the computer. I shouldn't have said all those things. I've just been so crazy with grief.”

She looked at Josh, as if for sympathy, and he felt again a twinge of anger.

“But I didn't do the other things. I swear it. Someone did try to kill me, and someone did break into the house. And I have no idea about the calls to your work, Josh. I swear.”

“I saw it, Sasha! I was at your house last night and I saw that painting you claimed had gone missing. It was in the sideboard.”

Now that the anger had finally arrived, he was almost enjoying it. There was something almost righteous about it. Finally, after all these weeks of being impotent to act against all the crap that had been going on, here was his chance to be heard.

“I don't understand.”

Sasha was looking at him as if in total incomprehension.

“And I suppose you don't understand either about the razor blades in your bathroom, that September could easily have found, or the marks on your door where she tried to get out after you locked her in her bedroom—probably so you could go out, leaving her all on her own. She's four years old!”

Now Sasha collapsed entirely.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, raising her hands to her face. “Poor Temmy. I can't explain it. I was sick. I always waited until she was asleep.” Again that quick glance of appeal. “Fuck. I'm a terrible mother. No wonder they've taken her away from me. Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

Josh clapped his hand to his mouth as Sasha began banging her head rhythmically backward on the metal hospital bed.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she continued. Clang, clang, clang.

A nurse hurried over, her round face knotted in disapproval.

“What's all this silly noise about, Mrs. Fisher?” she said, grasping Sasha roughly by the shoulders to stop her from throwing herself backward. “We don't want to be upsetting all the other ladies, do we?”

She looked suspiciously at Hannah and Josh.

“I think Mrs. Fisher needs to rest now. Maybe you'd better come back another time.”

As they turned and walked away, the soft thud of Sasha's pitiful body against the bedpost followed them across the room.

Chapter 28

It was an unseasonably warm day, and Hannah raised her face greedily to the sky, soaking up that sense of well-being that always came with feeling the rays on her skin after a long sun-starved winter.

The excited squeals of laughter coming from the giant trampoline in the corner of the garden mixed with the distant birdsong and the lazy buzzing of not-quite-awake bees, creating a kind of sounds-of-summer soundtrack although it was still only late March. She took a long breath in, enjoying the sensation of filling her body with pure oxygen, literally flushing the toxins out of her system.

“Ta-da!”

Sienna plunked a huge bowl of salad down on the long, silvery teak table. Hannah recognized the bowl as one Sasha had picked out at a souk in Marrakech when the four of them had spent a weekend in a riad—Sasha and Dan's present for her thirty-second birthday. It seemed like a different life now.

“Please don't look too closely,” Sienna said of the curious mixture of leaves and vegetables heaped in the brightly patterned ceramic dish. “I kind of threw everything in together. Just douse it in dressing and it'll be fine.”

“All the ingredients are edible?” Dan poked the concoction dubiously with a hand-shaped wooden salad server. “You're sure that big thing in the middle isn't a pan scrubber or something.”

“It's an avocado, idiot! At least, I think it's an avocado...”

Hannah looked up and smiled, thankful that she could finally look at Sienna's now-visible baby bump without that answering painful lurch in her own abdomen. Now that she and Josh had decided to try for another baby, she felt much calmer about everything. There was an old song lyric that had been lodged in her head in the days after the accident, about not knowing what you had 'til it had gone. She mourned her lost baby with a desperation that shocked her. But she was starting to make peace with herself. “It wasn't your fault,” Josh kept telling her with a touching insistence. “It wasn't either of our faults.” Now, at last, she was starting to believe him.

“Can we eat on the trampoline?”

September's transparent fluttery-eyed appeal invoked the usual indulgent capitulation in her father.

“I think that might just be permissible.”

He'd have to start saying no to her eventually, but for the time being no one begrudged the little girl the chance to be spoiled. Not after what she'd been through. The trampoline had been the biggest gift, entailing the digging up of Sasha's decked Moroccan chill-out area, but there'd been a stream of others. All Dan's way of trying to make it up to September that he hadn't been around to protect her. Lily, as usual, was quieter than her friend.

“You okay, Lily-put?” Hannah called.

Her daughter nodded slowly.

“Don't like salad,” she said, eyeing the heaping bowl in pride of place on the table.

Sienna breathed in slowly, and for a second Hannah thought she was offended. Then she smiled.

“Don't worry, you two can have fish finger sandwiches. How's that?”

Dan put his hand out and gave Sienna an affectionate pat on the bum and Hannah closed her eyes again. Now that she and Josh had started very slowly rediscovering each other sexually, she no longer felt that instinctive recoil at the sight of other people being intimate in public, but it was still a little odd to be sitting in the garden Sasha had designed (well, with the help of an expensive “garden architect”) while her husband, albeit soon-to-be-ex-husband, groped his pregnant new girlfriend.

On the whole, though, it was almost miraculous how fully Sasha had been expunged from their lives over the last three months. The police had examined the tire but hadn't found any conclusive evidence that it had been deliberately tampered with, so there were no charges laid. However, social workers had been involved, and it was agreed Dan should stay in the house to look after September. In the meantime, Sasha had been admitted to a very upmarket residential psychiatric clinic, often in the headlines for treating celebrity addicts. The money had come from a trust fund her father had set up with the express function, as far as Hannah could tell, of bailing his daughter out when things went disastrously wrong.

She hadn't seen Sasha, of course. She doubted whether she would ever be able to see her again. So many times in the past she had forgiven her behavior, made excuses for her, tried to see things from her perspective. But this last thing she found she couldn't forgive.

It had been a strange time, trying to claw her way out from the pit of her grief without the support of the people she'd normally turn to. Her mum (stupid how her heart still dissolved at the thought of her being dead), Sasha. Even Gemma hadn't been around so much. She'd come to stay the first weekend after it happened, but there had been a stiffness there, an awkwardness that had never existed between them before. Hannah told herself it had nothing to do with the photograph of Josh or what Sasha had told her, nor the car crash that had brought that earlier accident rushing back into her head, but still she found it hard to be natural around her sister, and the next time Gemma had offered to come to stay, she'd found an excuse to say no.

But how weird it was that the woman she'd first perceived as nothing but a threat should turn out to be such a savior. Since Hannah got back from the hospital, all but paralyzed by guilt and grief, Sienna had been quietly and unobtrusively present—sorting out the mess of the flat, writing explanatory emails to features editors on her behalf, picking up Lily from school. Just sitting there listening when Hannah needed to vent about what had happened. Now she couldn't imagine life without her. Gemma hadn't liked her, of course. But then Gemma hadn't liked Sasha, either. Now Hannah wondered whether her sister might not just be jealous of her friendships. More worryingly, Lily wasn't too keen on Sienna, but then, as Josh said, Lily was used to having Hannah to herself. And maybe she and September had outgrown each other. It happened at that age. When she felt stronger, Hannah resolved to widen her social net. Big school would help with that. It'd be a natural break for them. But for now, Hannah needed Sienna's support.

“How was your first week back at school?” Sienna was asking Josh now, peering over the top of her bowl of eccentric-looking salad.

“Oh, you know. Interesting.”

Josh liked Sienna—sometimes Hannah worried he liked her a little too much—but she knew he wasn't about to go into details about how it really felt to go back to work after you'd had such a big question mark hanging over you. Kelly Kavanagh had withdrawn her allegation—Josh said the supply teacher who'd replaced him had actually given her worse marks than he had, which had led to a rapid change of heart. And when the Head had been appraised by social workers of what had gone on with Sasha, and the likelihood of her being behind the hoax calls, he'd immediately convened a meeting of governors and Josh had been unanimously reinstated. But, as he'd said to Ian at that first meeting, mud sticks. Josh knew some of the kids called him
Pedo
behind his back, and Hannah could only imagine how awful that must feel. They still hadn't had a proper, honest discussion about that period where Josh was leaving the house in the morning and going God knows where, because he couldn't face telling her the truth about what had happened. She'd failed him then, she realized now. And while they were both enjoying their fragile, newly cemented accord, Hannah knew that until they'd really explored what had gone wrong during that time, they wouldn't completely be able to move on.

“I still can't get over being able to be here, with her,” Dan said, gazing at September as she and Lily ate their lunch on the trampoline, their heads bent together. “It's like being given a second chance.”

“If you say you've found God all of a sudden, I might have to be sick into this most excellent salad,” said Josh.

“Oi, less of the sarcasm,” laughed Sienna, prodding Josh with one of the wooden hands.

Dan, though, was clearly intent on having a serious moment.

“I blame myself, you know.”

For a moment Hannah thought Dan might actually be about to take some responsibility for the chain of events he'd set into motion.

“I should have realized my leaving would trigger Sasha. I was just too wrapped up in being in love to see it.”

Sienna blew him a kiss across the table while Josh shuffled awkwardly in his chair next to her.

“What exactly did happen to Sasha when she was little?” Hannah had never dared ask this question outright. Sasha's traumatic childhood was one of those mythical things that everyone knew existed, but didn't quite know the specifics.

Dan glanced over at the trampoline, but September and Lily had gone back to bouncing again, taking turns performing silly midair jumps and grading each other out of ten.

“Sasha's mother was a cunt, basically.” Dan picked up a lettuce leaf from his plate and started tearing it to pieces. “She never really got over Sasha's dad leaving and blamed Sasha because she couldn't accept the idea that he just couldn't stand being married to her. She hardly had anything to do with Sasha if she could help it and then she married this complete asshole who got off on little girls, and when Sasha's mum realized what was going on, she ignored it. She told Sasha she was making it up to get attention. She accused her—a ten-year-old child—of being jealous of her. She said Sasha had driven her father away by fawning all over him and she wasn't going to let her drive his replacement away, too.”

“She knew, and she did nothing?”

Hannah felt sick. It was what she'd always suspected from the little snippets that Sasha had let slip over the years, but to hear it spelled out like that so brutally was a shock. For a moment all four of them watched the two girls on the trampoline and Hannah knew they were all thinking the same thing—Sasha would have been scarcely older than September and Lily when the abuse started.

Sienna got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Hannah wondered whether being pregnant might make her especially sensitive. She was well aware of how the hormones could drive you from one emotional extreme to another. Hers had all but disappeared now, but they'd lingered for quite a while after the miscarriage, tricking her trusting body into believing it was still growing something inside it, still expectant, still fruitful.

“What about her real father?” she asked Dan.

“He was a selfish bastard. He'd moved onto wife number two by then, and had another baby and moved to France. Having a child from his first marriage come to stay would have got in the way of his happy family.”

Dan seemed oblivious to any irony in what he was saying, any links between the situation he was describing and his own.

“But surely he couldn't just ignore what she was saying.”

“Yes, but she didn't say it, did she? Bear in mind she was just a child and she hardly ever saw her dad. They didn't have the kind of relationship where she could just say ‘Oh, Daddy, by the way my mother's husband comes in my room at night and rapes me.' She hinted at it, the few times she saw him, but he never picked up on it.”

“But you think he knew.”

“I think he wouldn't let himself know. It would have been too inconvenient for him. That's why he set up the trust fund for her before he died, the one that's paying for the five-star nuthouse she's in now. It's guilt money.”

For the first time since the accident, Hannah allowed herself to feel pity for Sasha, for the child she'd once been. No wonder she was so screwed up. What chance did she have, had she ever had, to lead a normal life, with all that lurking in her past?

“How long did she put up with it?”

“'Til she was sixteen. That's when she left home and came to London.”

Six years. She'd lived with it for six years. What did that kind of thing do to a child? How did it affect your ability to form relationships? To parent? How did you learn love when you'd never been shown?

“Now,” said Sienna, emerging through the folding glass doors of the kitchen bearing a large cheesecake. “It's time to stop talking and celebrate your fabulous new commission with cake. Double celebration because I didn't make it myself!”

Hannah was embarrassed but still pinkly pleased. The commission wasn't anything exciting in itself—just a straightforward case-study interview. But it was a newspaper she'd never written for before. And after the work famine she'd recently been through, any assignment was a bonus.

“I thank you all kindly,” she said as the girls scampered over to toast her with cake. “And thanks for offering to look after Lil, too. I'd have been totally up the creek if you hadn't.”

It was only after she'd accepted the assignment and ended the call with the commissioning editor, hoping she had managed not to sound too pathetically grateful, that she'd realized the day the interview had been set up was a professional development day at the preschool, so she had no child care. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel that tight band of panic across her chest as she'd imagined phoning the editor back to say she couldn't do the job after all. Luckily she hadn't had to. Josh had convinced her Sienna wouldn't mind looking after Lily and had even called her himself to ask, reporting back that she'd been delighted to help. Lily herself wasn't so delighted, but Hannah would make it up to her when she got paid. Take her out somewhere special.

“Fiddlesticks!” Sienna was smiling, showing her perfect little teeth, white like Tic Tacs. “I'm happy to do it.”

Later, when they were back at home and Lily finally asleep after a protracted bout of tears that seemed to come out of nowhere, Hannah again brought up the subject of Sasha. She was like a sore spot you just couldn't stop touching.

“No wonder she was so desperate for her and Dan to stay together. After what happened to her, it must have seemed like the end of the world for September to be part of a broken family. And it must have triggered so much from her past.” They leaned back on the sofa, and Josh put his arm around her, still tentatively, as if he was half expecting her to shrug it off or stiffen under his touch as she would have done at one time. They still had a long way to go to get their relationship back to where it used to be. Sometimes, when Hannah was crying in the night and wouldn't let him comfort her, she felt the distance between them unfurling endlessly like a coil of rope and wondered if they'd ever find their way back to each other. But other times, like now, she felt as if they might just make it. She found it helped to view the last few months as some sort of endurance test that their marriage had been through, like one of those sadistic Japanese game shows where contestants have to eat live frogs and crawl through rat-infested sewers. She was proud of how they'd survived. Occasionally, she sought out statistics on how many marriages fail and felt quietly content that they were still here, still just about together.