Page 60 of The Family Across the Street
‘It wouldn’t have changed anything,’ John says all the time. ‘He came to the house to hurt Katherine and he meant to hurt her no matter what.’
Patrick sounds like a very damaged young man. She understands why, losing his father like that. But at some point, people have to grow up and make a choice to leave certain aspects of their past behind. Logan has done just that.
He’s really challenged some ideas that she’s held for a long time. Everyone deserves a second chance. Gladys feels like she’s also been given a second chance – a new start in her own neighbourhood, where everyone knows everyone and where her interest and concern are actually appreciated. People are chatting out on the street more than ever now and the Patels have asked her to look after Charlie while they’re away – and even though she’s a bit wary of their large dog, he’s perfectly friendly once he gets used to you.
Margo pops in a lot now as well. She’s a bit lonely at home with the baby all day long and she finds it relaxing to sit in Gladys’s kitchen and watch her bake – or that’s what she says at least. Gladys is delighted to have the baby to fuss over and of course she will also get to fuss over Debbie and Logan’s baby once it’s born. She feels like a real grandmother now, even though none of the children are really related to her. It’s strange how a crisis can bring a neighbourhood together. Life seems very full these days at any rate.
She makes her way to the parking lot of the hospital. Logan will be going home next week and she wants to make a few meals for Debbie to put in the freezer. Lou is with Peter for another couple of hours so she can go shopping.
‘You were a hero as well,’ Lou keeps telling her as he holds her hand, softly stroking her skin. She can feel his worry in his touch and knows that his fear of losing her is as great as her fear of losing him. In her reflective moments she is grateful that she has had the chance to love and be loved this way.
‘If you hadn’t insisted on the police coming,’ he’s said more than once, shaking his head, ‘they may have all died. If you hadn’t had that inkling that something was wrong… well, who knows what might have happened.’
‘All I did was what I usually do,’ she replies when he talks this way.
‘And what’s that, old girl?’
‘I interfered,’ says Gladys, proud of her busybody status now. ‘I interfered.’
Katherine
‘Mum, Mum, Mum,’ shouts Sophie, flinging open the bedroom door, ‘we got you so, so many flowers on our walk. I got red and pink and white and George found some purple ones!’
‘Sophie, wait,’ she hears John call from downstairs, ‘I told you Mum might be sleeping.’
‘She’s not,’ says the little girl.
‘You’re right, I’m not,’ agrees Katherine, even though she had been. She struggles slightly to raise herself in her bed.
‘Wait,’ says George, coming into the room. ‘You need to let Dad help you sit up.’
‘I’m fine. I can do it myself,’ she says, giving him a smile.
He watches her, biting down on his lip while she gets comfortable. He watches her closely every time she moves. If he’s in the bedroom and she gets out of bed, he insists on holding her hand and walking her to the bathroom. He is waiting for her to get better, waiting for her to go back to being the mother she was three weeks ago, believing that her physical healing will return their lives to the safe routine he was used to.
Both he and Sophie have had their first appointment with a child psychologist who specialises in trauma. ‘He’s pushing a lot of his feelings away,’ the psychologist explained in a phone call. ‘He is still trying to be brave for you and Sophie, even though the threat is no longer there. It will take a little time for him to open up.’
Katherine worries about him more than she worries about Sophie. Her daughter has nightmares about what happened, waking and shouting about a gun and her stuffed monkey, but she will talk to whomever will listen, describing her older brother as ‘mean’. She feels no connection to him and is able to dismiss him as a bad man, as she would a character on television, but George asked once, just whispering in her ear, ‘If he’s my brother, will I also try to hurt people when I’m big?’
‘You would never do that, my darling,’ she told him, even though the words hurt. She hates the idea that her older son is something that George fears he could become.
‘Right, kids, you need to take the flowers down to the kitchen so I can put them in a vase for Mum,’ says John, and the children trail him out of the bedroom as Katherine moves to get herself more comfortable.
Today is John’s last day at home full-time before returning to work. From tomorrow morning, Gladys will have the children for a couple of hours in the morning and the new nanny, Abigail, will fetch them for afternoon playdates and summer holiday adventures. Katherine is itching to get out of her bed, but the doctors had to be persuaded to send her home as early as they did.
‘My children need me at home,’ she kept saying, knowing that John was struggling with two sleepless children sharing his bed. Sophie would wake from her nightmares and George would sit up for hours, listening for noises in the house. He checks all the doors now before he goes to bed, insists on making sure everything is locked, and John says he freezes when the doorbell rings, just stands completely still and waits. Katherine’s heart breaks for him. He is struggling with so much right now and every night she prays that he can find a way forward and that, eventually, the idea that he is safe at home will return.
Once Katherine came home, things slowly got back to a certain amount of normality. Gladys has been a godsend and the whole school community has rallied around the children. Things will never be the same, and the twins will carry that hot summer’s day with them forever, but Katherine hopes that one day the memory will feel manageable. She cannot allow her two young children to be haunted by her older child – and by her failure to realise just how damaged he was.
‘You did everything you could for him,’ John keeps saying, but Katherine wishes she had done more. She could have insisted he stay with her after his father’s death, could have worked harder to make sure he had the right therapy. She should never have limited her contact as he asked her to, and at night, when she wakes from dreams of her older son as a boy that change into nightmares of him, his face changing into his father’s face and a gun in his hand, she knows that she should never have said yes to him living with Anthony. The guilt over not saving him when he was younger catches her in moments when she is not concentrating and then she will see only the little boy who liked to be sung to and loved adventure stories. When she thinks of him, she sees him at two and five and ten years old, his face bright with laughter. He used to sit next to her and stroke her hair as she read to him. Her heartbreak over the loss of her child is a physical thing that steals her breath and hurts her soul.
Maybe if she had never remarried and had more children, Patrick would have been more likely to come back into her life, but she cannot be sure of this. Anthony did a lot of terrible damage. He turned a surly adolescent into a young man who was capable of hurting others, who wanted to hurt those he felt had hurt him.
She has not spoken to Maddy, to Logan’s sister, but she is writing and rewriting an email to her. She is struggling to get the words right, trying to find a way to apologise for the man her little boy became. She will send it soon but she keeps rereading it, worried that the words will be all wrong.
Katherine is also talking to a counsellor, but she is aware that no matter what she hears the truth will always be that her son is gone, and she believes that if she had tried harder, she could have saved him.
On terrible nights when she cannot close her eyes to rest, she will take out a notebook and write a list of questions for her son.
