Page 100 of The Perfect Son
“Your mum is here for a reason.” Sadler raises his voice, a deep baritone next to my shrill cries. “In cases like this,” he says after I fall silent, “evidence that contradicts the delusion is ignored, explained away just as you are doing now. You are burying the facts, making them part of your delusion, just as you’ve done any time you’ve found yourself confronted with the truth. It’s why you cut yourself off from your mum and your brother, and your friends in Chelmsford. All those in fact who knew Jamie was dead. It’s why you’ve suffered from episodes of isolated amnesia whenever you came too close to the truth.”
“No.” I shake my head from side to side. “Mum.” I turn to face the frail frame of my mother. “Please, I’m begging you, whatever they’ve told you, whatever they’re threatening you with, please—” A sob catches in my throat. “Please tell them they’re wrong. You stayed with us after the funeral. You saw Jamie.”
Mum nods and for a fleeting second I think she’s going to agree with me. “I heard you talking to yourself,” she says. “I should’ve questioned you on it but I knew you were hurting so badly. I didn’t think there was any harm in that, but I didn’t know you were seeing Jamie. I called the grief charity so you’d have someone to talk to. I should never have left. I’m so sorry.”
“I wanted you to go,” I mumble. “Jamie was hiding in his room too much. Neither of us could grieve properly with you there.”
Mum reaches forward and squeezes my hand. “But Jamie died too.”
“Why are you LYING?” I shout. Mum jerks away and shrinks against the chair as if I’m a violent lunatic, but I can’t stop. “Why would you say that?”
“Often with hallucinations there’s a clue,” Sadler continues, his voice now calm as he positions himself back on the armchair opposite me. “A telltale sign that if you look hard enough at the hallucination, then you’ll see it for what it is. I want you to do that now please, Tess. Think about the Jamie you’ve seen since the plane crash. You’ve said yourself that Jamie was hardly talking to you. Does this seem like the same Jamie you loved before the crash?
“I want you to think back over these past weeks and find that telltale sign, that one thing that will help your mind recognize the hallucination for what it is—a psychosis brought on by your grief.”
I shake my head, short side-to-side jerks that blur my eyes. I want to cover my ears with my hands and scream for Jamie but my mother’sface is ghostly white and the tears are streaming down her cheeks just as they are mine. “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask her.
She swallows as if about to speak but Sadler holds up his hand.
The death certificate is lying on my lap and I push it to the floor. “These are easy to forge, you know. If you know the right people.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it has to be, doesn’t it? It’s just a piece of paper. Nothing special at all.
“Tess?” Sadler leans forward so his elbows are resting on his knees.
“There isn’t anything. I know in my heart that Jamie... that Jamie...” The words are there in my head, but they are stuck, like a packet of crisps in a broken vending machine, dangling halfway between out and in, waiting for someone to give the machine a nudge.
Jamie’s face floats through my mind. His beautiful eyes are wide and sad, and oh so blue. I can picture him now on the floor of the living room with the PlayStation controller in his hands. His face fixed in concentration, his tongue prodding at the baby tooth at the front, wiggling it back and forth, wondering if today is the day it will fall out.
A wave of sickness hits me. My face must change, because Sadler is nodding and leaning closer, barely perched on the chair anymore. “Follow that train of thought, Tess. Tell me what you see.”
“The tooth,” I whisper. “Jamie has a wobbly tooth. It’s been hanging on by little more than a thread for... for months.”
A wall of tears builds in my eyes and I can hear Jamie’s singsong question in my ears.“Mummy, if my tooth falls out when I’m in Frankfurt with Daddy, will the tooth fairy give me a pound or a euro?”
I crouch forward and cover my ears with my hands, muffling the noise in the room but doing nothing to stop the memories I don’t want to remember.
All this time Jamie has been pushing the tooth with his tongue, allthis time since the plane crash, and the same tooth hasn’t fallen out. Darkness and cold flood my body, like jumping into a pitch-black, icy sea. Other memories are breaking free now. I can see myself standing in my slippers on the driveway, waving and grinning at Mark in his gray jumper as he pulls out of the driveway. And there in the back seat with his mess of blond curls, wearing his favorite Liverpool football shirt, is Jamie waving furiously at me.
I see Jamie in his bedroom with his new rucksack open on the bed. The rucksack I couldn’t find.“How cold will it be in Germany?”he asked, examining a thick jumper as if the answer might be inside the wool.
I remember the rain tapping at the stained-glass windows, the hard wood of the pews. My eyes staring at the worn tiles on the floor, my brother’s hand squeezing mine so tight as I fought the urge to keep my gaze down and away from the coffin, so small—too small—sitting beside yours.
“That’s it, Tess.” Sadler’s voice shatters the memory. “That’s the sign. Jamie’s tooth. You didn’t ask him about it, did you?”
I shake my head.
“I think on some level, deep down, you knew Jamie had died that day.”
“I didn’t,” I cry out.
“I’ve spoken to Denise and Shelley and to your mum.” He nods to my mum, pale and quiet and so small in the armchair. “You were so careful not to talk directly to Jamie in their presence. Not until the end when your breakdown worsened and you couldn’t keep it in anymore.”
Tears fall from my eyes. I’m shivering all over. My stomach hurts. “It doesn’t make sense. It can’t... it can’t be true.”
“You were supposed to go to Frankfurt with Mark and Jamie. Doyou remember? Denise told me she canceled your booking at the last minute. Why didn’t you go with them?”
“My passport expired,” I whisper. “I didn’t check it until a few days before. I was going to go to the passport office and get one the same day but Mark said not to bother. He knew I hated flying. ‘A trip for the boys,’ he called it. I... I was relieved. Oh my baby. My poor sweet baby.”
My throat is squeezing shut and I’m crumbling to the floor. I should’ve been with you. I should’ve been with my family, and I wasn’t. I’m alive and you’re not.
