Page 4 of We All Live Here
Lila pulls her palm down over her face slowly and lets out a long, shaky breath. “Never change, Violet,” she says, when she can speak again. “You’ve already acquired so much more wisdom than I everdid.”
Chapter Two
In the days since Dan leaving, and her mother dying, Lila has developed a series of strategies to get through each day. When she wakes, mostly between five and six a.m., she slugs down an anti-depressant citalopram with a glass of water, dresses before she has time to think, and walks Truant for an hour, striding up to the Heath where the early-morning dog-walkers cross muddy paths with the lone coffee-drinkers and grim-faced runners in earphones. She walks while listening to audiobooks or chatty, anodyne podcasts, anything to ensure she’s not alone with her thoughts.
She returns and wakes the girls, bribing and cajoling them out of bed and onto the school run, trying not to take personally the harrumphing and cries of anguish about missing socks and phones. Since Bill moved in with them he has made breakfast, insisting that the girls eat porridge with berries and a variety of seeds instead of Lila’s Pop Tarts and three-day-old bagels with jam. Bill is rigorous about diet and talks endlessly of fish oils and the scouring properties of lentils, ignoring the rolling of thegirls’ eyes, and their longing looks toward the box of Coco Pops. In the evenings he rustles up nutritional meals involving unfamiliar vegetables, and tries not to show his hurt when the girls grumble that actually they’d rather have a ham and cheese toastie.
When Lila returns from dropping the girls, she sits in what is laughingly called her study, a room near the top of the house still lined with the battered cardboard boxes of books they never unpacked, and attacks the most urgent admin of the day. This—and its accompanying financial calculations—exhausts her so she often has a little nap on the sofa-bed, or occasionally lies on the rug listening to a soothing meditation podcast, trying to ignore Truant’s barking downstairs. She tries to eat regularly so that her blood sugar does not drop, and her mood with it. When she wakes up, she shakes off her grogginess with a mug of tea, and then goes to the shop for whatever they don’t have. By then it’s usually time to collect Violet, at which point she becomesMumagain, with no time for invasive thoughts, engaged instead in endless domestic warfare against mess, laundry, homework, the respective travails of her girls’ days, until bedtime. Then she takes two antihistamine tablets (the doctor will no longer prescribe her preferred sleeping pills: apparently they are now considered a “dirty drug”), or sometimes, if in a pronounced insomniac phase, smokes half a joint out of the window. Finally, when she feels mildly confident that sleep is approaching tentatively, like a skittish horse, she switches on a sleepcast—in which soft-voiced actors read boring stories in monotones—and prays not to wake again within a couple of hours.
She does not want to think about her ex-husband and his effortlessly gorgeous new partner. She does not want to think about his and Marja’s spotless home up the road, with its sparse selection of stylish objects and Noguchi coffee-table. She does not want to think about her absent mother, who had somehow made all of this mess so much more manageable.
Some days, Lila feels as if she’s battling everything: the furious, slippery contents of her brain, her wavering, unreliable hormones, her weight, her ex-husband, her house’s attempts to fall down around her ears, the world in general.
As the girls get up from the supper table that evening, leaving Bill gazing reproachfully at the unfinished bowls of venison and pearl barley stew (“It’s a very good meal—high in protein and low in fat”), Lila realizes with an internal thud that a whole new battleground has just opened up:Dan’s new baby.This child will be the half-sibling of her daughters, a constant presence in all their lives. It will have an equal right to whatever their father has—money, time, love. This child, more than anything else, makes it all real—Dan is never coming back, no matter how unlikely she had known that was. This child is going to be a new thing for Lila to deal with—possibly daily—for the next eighteen years. And the thought makes her want to ram her knuckles into her eye sockets.
•••
He calls at eight fifteen.No doubt after Hugo, Marja’s well-behaved six-year-old, has been in bed, bathed, compliant, in clean pajamas and with carefully brushed teeth, for at least an hour. Violet, meanwhile, is hanging by her legs from the banisters, singing the words to a rap song that has contained, at the last count, eleven different references to genitalia.
“Lila.”
She feels the reflexive clench of her stomach at his voice. Takes a breath before she speaks. “I wondered when you’d call.”
“Marja’s really upset.” He sighs. “Look, neither of us wanted you to find out like this.”
“Marja’s upset, is she? Oh.” The words are out before she can help herself. “How distressing for her.”
There is a short silence before he speaks. “Look, it’s eighteen weeks. We thought it was best to get through the summer holidays and then…”
“But it’s fine for the school mums to know.”
“She didn’t tell them. That bloody woman—what’s her name?—she guessed. And Marja couldn’t lie so—”
“No. God forbid there should be any lies involved around here. So when are you planning to tell the girls?”
Dan hesitates. She pictures him running his palm over the top of his head, his habitual gesture when faced with something he finds difficult. “Uh…well. We thought—I thought—it might be better coming from you.”
“Ohhh, no.” Lila stands up from the table and walks to the sink. “Oh, no, Dan. This one’s yours. You want to tell the girls they’re being replaced, that one’s on you.”
“What do you mean ‘being replaced’?”
“Well, you’ve already moved out to play Daddy to someone else’s kid. How else are they meant to see it?”
“You know it’s not like that.”
“Do I? You were their dad. Now you take someone else’s kid to school in the mornings. Have dinner with him every night.”
“I’m still their bloody dad. I’d have dinner with them every night if I could.”
“Not if it involved living with us, though, right?”
“Lila, why are you doing this?”
“Me? I’m doing nothing. You’re the one who ran off. You’re the one who started sleeping with one of our actual neighbors. You’re the one now raising someone else’s kid while your own children see you two days a week.” She hates herself for the sound of her voice, the words that are pouring out of her, but she cannot stop herself. “Andyou’re the one who decided to impregnate a woman twelve years younger than you with another bloody baby. A baby which, if I remember rightly, you insisted to me you would never have, no matter how much I wanted it, because you could barely cope with the two we’ve got!”
It is at this point that something makes her look over her shoulder. Celie is standing by the fridge. She has an orange-juice carton in one hand and she is staring at her mother.
“Celie?”
