Page 51 of The Family Across the Street
I found a cab and got myself to the airport and to Sydney.
I needed to come up here and make sure she understood. I am the way I am because of her, because of what she did, and she needed to know that and to pay for it.
But now as I watch her eyes blink, I am unsure. She’s my mum. She never gave up on me – even when she really should have.
She never stopped emailing me, trying to contact me, trying to reconnect. I kept the messages, reread them sometimes. News of a new husband was a punch in the gut. ‘You would like him,’ she wrote, and I laughed at that. How could she ever have expected anything except dislike from me? She had replaced my father, clicked her fingers and erased her history with him.
She moved on, and I never believed her entreaties for me to come and live with her, to reconnect. I knew she didn’t really want me there. How could she?
And then she told me about her new children, not just one but two, a perfect pair. My father was replaceable and so was I. And I believed my hatred for her would burn brighter in my soul than anything else until I met Maddy and her love cooled the hate. I don’t know why Maddy had to be just like her, just like all women.
I came to find her to make her pay.
I wanted… I don’t know now what I wanted. I’m not sure. I don’t think I meant for this to happen. It’s all wrong now. My head is spinning and the light in this room is strange and I can smell the burning scent of a fired gun.
I put my head in my hands, the hard metal of the gun scratching my cheek, burning it a little. The barrel is hot. Then I hear a sound, and I look up.
44
Katherine
It’s a shocking thud to her body, more than it is pain. She takes two steps backwards and then her knees give out and she falls, expecting the floor but landing on the sofa. She looks down at her white T-shirt where the blood is growing and spreading, the red paint of her blood turning the white of her shirt dark pink. A firecracker smell is in the air. ‘Oh Patrick,’ she murmurs, ‘oh baby, what have you done?’
‘Mum,’ he says, a word she hasn’t heard from him in years. ‘Mum, Mum…’ and as she struggles to breathe, despite everything she is overcome with an overwhelming need to comfort him, to comfort her son. She starts trying to get up but her body won’t obey her.
She has always loved him, has been unable to contemplate not loving him. Where did all that love go? She held him to her breast, she kissed a scraped knee, she taught him how to sing the alphabet song. She bought him his favourite toys and cooked his favourite meals. She helped with homework and held him tightly in her arms when he was sad – but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t combat what his father did, what he said. ‘What kind of a man teaches his son to hate his mother?’ was a question she asked of therapists and teachers and friends. When she married him, stars in her eyes and a silver ring on her finger, she had never imagined he would one day hate her enough to turn her own child against her. She could never have imagined this.
John’s face comes to her, a man on an elevator who became a friend and then a lover and then a husband. It was not expected, because second chances don’t come along very often. But there he was, willing to take on her baggage, to listen when she spoke of her first husband and lost son.
The perfection she had hoped for with her second chance was not possible because perfection doesn’t exist. She wonders if he’s tried to call her today, or if he is still angry. The argument from last night would have weighed heavily on his mind as it had on hers, before her son arrived to upend her life. It was another whispered, tense conversation, but it was one that could have meant the end for them. She had threatened and he had cajoled but she was tired of fighting, of fighting with him and for him.
‘Who is she, John?’ Her hands on her hips. She believed she already knew the answer. She had done this before.
‘Just someone from work.’ He looked down, not wanting to meet her gaze.
‘Why is she texting you with heart emojis like some ridiculous teenage girl? Why are you allowing her to text you?’ His phone was in her hand, the evidence on the screen. She had read and reread the messages, trying to discern their true meaning.
‘She’s just… that’s the way she is. She’s friendly. She knows I’m married. I talk about you and the kids all the time. She’s just like that.’ He threw up his hands and then reached for his phone but she pulled it back.
‘She’s like that because you haven’t made it clear that you have a wife that you love. Being married doesn’t mean anything to her obviously.’
He sighed sadly, shaking his head. ‘Kate, you’re not thinking straight. You’re blowing everything out of proportion these days. You can see that I don’t reply the same way. You can see that I keep my texts short and to the point.’
‘Maybe you knew I’d look at your phone.’
‘Why did you look at my phone?’ It was a genuine question. He didn’t understand the fear of finding herself in the same situation once more.
‘I told you, I wanted to find mine. I put it down somewhere!’
‘Kate, if I had something to hide, why do you have my password?’ He smiled as though he had bested her, proved her wrong.
‘What I’m worried about, John, is that there are things you’re saying and doing when you’re together at the office, and instead of reassuring me, you’re making me more worried. Are you having an affair with her or not?’ Some part of her wanted to let it go, to believe him, but she kept pushing, asking, almost needing him to confess so that she would know that she had been right all along.
‘Oh Kate, you make me sad.’
They went to bed separately, in different parts of the house. She curled up alone in their bed, fear over the future replacing anger, exhausting her to sleep. At some point, in the middle of the night, she woke to feel the bed dip and then a hand on her back. When she lay still, he climbed into the bed and pushed up against her and, knowing that she was awake, whispered, ‘Why would I cheat, when I have you? You and the children are everything I have ever wanted. I’m not cheating, Kate, I promise.’
She didn’t reply but she didn’t move away from him either, lying still until he returned to his sofa bed.
