The Safe Place, page 29
And for the first time, Emily questioned Scott’s sanity. They’re both deluding themselves, Emily thought. There was no way an adult Aurelia would fail to figure out that her condition was a lie.
Scott must have sensed her doubt. “Consider the alternative,” he said. “Short-term, I mean. She’d be taken to some white-walled clinic to be poked and prodded. She’d have to give statements. She’d be ripped from her home for the second time in her short life, separated from her parents and handed her over to strangers—but this time, she would see everything, remember everything. And she would carry it with her for the rest of her life.” He wiped his eyes. “Don’t do that to her, Emily. Don’t do it to Nina. They don’t deserve any more pain. I would have thought you of all people would understand that.”
Me of all people, Emily thought. What’s that supposed to mean?
But she wasn’t given any further chance to ponder it. Scott had plowed on with his argument and, to be fair, he made a good case. Emily couldn’t imagine Aurelia in the arms of anyone else. She couldn’t bear the thought of her being led into an unfamiliar house where she would be given strange food, strange clothes, and a strange bed. Who was her birth mother, anyway? What kind of person was she? How would she care for Aurelia? How would she speak to her? In French, that’s how. Amandine Tessier might have spoken French, but Aurelia Denny had barely heard a word spoken in three years.
Emily shook her head. “Nina will find me.”
“No. She won’t even look.”
No, of course Nina would not look for her. Nina thought she was dead. Nina thought Scott had shot, killed, and buried her in the woods.
Emily spun around and vomited. When she was done, she wiped her mouth and nodded her assent. Yes. I will keep your secret. Cross my heart and hope to die. Here, let me help you dig a fake grave. Do you have an extra shovel?
Scott told her to keep the credit card and promised an initial lump sum deposited into her own bank account within the next two to three business days. Providing Emily adhered to the conditions, the rest would follow at regular intervals. He smiled, a well-oiled nod. A pleasure doing business with you.
Then he stomped off through the trees to gather a number of large rocks. He threw them into the hole and covered them with a blanket pulled from the back of the Land Cruiser. “In case she gets curious,” he explained.
Emily threw up again.
After he filled the hole in, Scott drove her to La Rochelle. Neither of them said a word the entire way.
* * *
They pulled up next to a bus shelter near the harbor. A thin line of light was just beginning to appear on the horizon.
“Go to the Sinclair Hotel in Covent Garden,” he said. “They’ll have a room ready for you.” Reaching behind him, he pulled his suit jacket from the backseat and draped it over her shoulders. “Wait for me there. I’ll come in a few days. We can talk some more.”
Emily tried to picture herself in a hotel suite, but she’d been so immersed in Querencia for so long, so consumed by it, that she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. She thought about her first glimpse of the estate and how happy she’d been, how grateful that life had finally thrown her a bone.
As the first rays of the sun broke over the water, Scott turned to her. “Please,” he whispered, “think carefully about everything I’ve said.” The moment felt significant, but Emily had nothing to say. Her fear and rage had dissolved, leaving her feeling hollowed out.
She took one last good look at him, pocketing details like souvenirs. The freckle just above his right eyebrow, the neat cluster of hairs below his lower lip, his fingernails, now bitten and dirty, his eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue.
Finally, she opened the door and stepped onto the pavement. Tugging Scott’s jacket around her bare shoulders, she looked back, and an absurd, babyish thought flew out of her heart: please don’t leave me.
“I was right,” Scott said with a small smile. “You really were perfect. For all of us.” Then he pulled the door shut and drove away.
* * *
It was such a relief to be back among familiar surrounding that she nearly kissed the filthy London street. The traffic, the fumes, all the angry people; nothing on earth could’ve been more welcome.
Hobbling into the lobby of the Sinclair, she ignored all the curious stares and successfully checked in. She didn’t last, though. Wrapped in a towel after taking a long, hot shower, she lay on the ridiculously huge bed, bawling into the pillows. Her wails bounced off the textured wallpaper and disappeared in the folds of the curtains. A marble bust of a topless woman observed her with smooth cloudy eyes.
Wait for me. I’ll come in a few days.
Emily imagined Scott opening the door and walking in. Champagne, strawberries. Dinner somewhere nice. How long did he plan to hide her at the hotel? Forever?
After two solid hours of crying, Emily got to her feet, blew her nose, and slung her mud-streaked bag over her shoulder. Throwing Scott’s jacket onto the bed, she checked out, then made her way to St. Pancras Station, where she caught the first train going north.
* * *
The taxi pulled up outside a semidetached sandstone house with a red door, and Emily’s bottom lip trembled at the sight of the brightly lit windows. They were home, just as she knew they would be. Wednesday was Grand Designs and an early night, regular as clockwork.
She handed Scott’s card over and watched as the driver tapped it against the machine. It beeped. Payment processed. The cabbie raised his eyebrows. Emily couldn’t blame him for being surprised; she’d cleaned up her wounds as best she could but she still looked like hell.
She was crying even before her mother opened the door.
Juliet gasped. “Oh my god, where have you been? How did you get here?” She pulled Emily into a tight embrace. “You should have called!”
At what point should I have called? Emily thought, her old hackles rising like an allergic reaction. When I was trapped in the car, being shot at in the woods, or digging my own grave?
“Oh goodness, are you bleeding?”
Emily glanced down as Juliet grabbed hold of her lacerated shoulder.
“Let me look at that.” Peter appeared from behind Juliet’s shoulder, peering through his tortoiseshell bifocals. He took a handkerchief from his pocket—Peter was the only person alive who still used a handkerchief—and dabbed at the wound, making Emily feel about seven years old.
Straightening up, he breathed a heavy, malty sigh. “What’s going on, Emmy?”
Emily opened her mouth. I nearly died, she almost said. But those words had no place here in this house, in this shrine to the ordinary.
Her parents smelled of milk and cookies. The smell of cinnamon wafted from the kitchen, and Kevin McCloud delivered his final thoughts from the living room.
It doesn’t matter, she thought. None of it matters. I’m home.
* * *
In the days that followed, Juliet treated Emily like a sick patient, and Emily was happy to be mollycoddled. She offered no explanation for her sudden reappearance, but, in true Proudman fashion, no one asked. Juliet and Peter just tiptoed around her and made more tea, and for once in her life, Emily was grateful for their inability to communicate.
She slept a lot: shallow, fitful naps full of sinister dreams. For three nights running, she woke up drenched in sweat, convinced someone was trying to break into the house.
She cried every day. There was an empty, sick feeling under her ribs, like she hadn’t eaten for weeks, but which wouldn’t go away no matter how much she ate.
She watched a lot of TV. She crawled into bed and vowed never to leave.
After a few days, however, she ventured outside, taking short trips to the local shops, or walks with Juliet to the park. But every time she left the house, she felt sick. She saw Scott everywhere: driving cars, picking up dry cleaning, waiting in line at the butcher’s. What would he do when he discovered she was no longer at the Sinclair? Did he already know? He would contact her; she was sure of it. But when? And how?
Three days after she arrived back in England, Emily got a text from an unknown number.
I’m sorry the hotel didn’t work out. However, I understand the need to regroup. I trust this first installment will take the pressure off.
Her stomach flipped. She immediately checked her banking app and saw that an obscene amount of money had been deposited into her checking account. A second text followed a few minutes later.
Enjoy your visit. Your parents have a beautiful home.
Leaping off her bed, she ran to the window and pressed her face to the glass. She scanned the pavement, the bus stop, the cars, and the bushes, expecting to see a flash of silk tie or a glint of gold watch. But the street was empty.
Without even a second’s hesitation, she dialed the unknown number and waited, listening first to a gaping silence and then to a recorded message informing her that the number she had dialed was not available. She tried Scott’s usual number, the one she couldn’t quite bring herself to delete, but got the same message. Disconnected.
* * *
In her first days back, Emily spent a huge amount of time on the internet. She couldn’t help it. She Googled Amandine Tessier compulsively, reading every available article and interview she could find. She watched old news reports showing grainy images of a seaside town beset by a storm. The reporters talked about freak weather conditions, explaining how initially police had assumed that Amandine had been swept into the ocean—knocked out by a falling object, perhaps, her little body unheeded in the melee. But then two tourists had come forward claiming they’d seen her. A man who’d been in the private beach area with his children, and a backpacker on the promenade.
“It was her,” said the man. “I’m sure of it.”
“She was on the road,” said the backpacker. “A woman was carrying her. Then the tree came down and almost hit them. I tried to help. There were flames everywhere.”
Neither of the witnesses, however, could provide a positive ID for the woman. They hadn’t seen her face; she’d been carrying a large umbrella and wearing a hat, but they couldn’t agree on what kind, and couldn’t even guess at her age.
“She was wearing sunglasses,” said the man.
“It was hard to see through all the rain and smoke,” said the backpacker.
CCTV footage had been useless. As well as igniting trees, the lightning had knocked out a crucial section of the network, and the surviving cameras were no help. They showed hundreds of hooded figures dashing into doorways and diving into cars with hats and towels thrown over their heads, many of them carrying children.
Nina, it seemed, had been extremely lucky.
Of course, once the word got out that the disappearance was being treated as an abduction, the phone calls came flooding in, all describing sightings of a red-haired child at the beach, at the shops, at the cinema. They reported a man dragging a child, a woman smacking a child, a child all alone, a child crossing the road, getting into a car, eating ice cream, running, screaming, falling, crying. People posted photos of their neighbors online, pointing out that the DuPonts or the Wilsons or the Garcias who just moved in across the road, they had a daughter or a niece or a cousin with heterochromia, could she be Amandine? Several citizen’s arrests were made in shopping centers and doctor’s surgeries, young mothers detained and interrogated on account of their daughters’ different-colored eyes. Police had apparently spent years trying to follow up on all the leads, but astonishingly, no one had seen anything significant.
“If you have any information at all,” said a coiffed TV presenter in a colorful studio, “please call the help line.”
Emily pored over every blog, support-group forum, and crazy conspiracy website. She watched endless videos of press conferences. Amandine’s family, their faces waxen and pinched in the flashing white light. Her siblings, sad and small. She replayed the footage over and over until she knew each video by heart. She watched Nicolette Tessier break down over and over again, weeping into a bouquet of microphones.
Emily clicked on more links. A famous singer, an international star heavily involved with children’s charities, had paid the case some lip service, and the Storm Child made global headlines. There were late-night panel-show discussions and social-media debates. But no amount of talk could bring Amandine back, nor could it produce any further clues as to her whereabouts. Her body was never found, and eventually it was decided that the ocean must have claimed her after all.
Emily also spent a lot of time missing Nina. She thought about the way she laughed, the way she spoke. The way she knew exactly what to say when Emily was feeling low. She thought about all the conversations they’d had. Emily had shared her innermost secrets. They weren’t very nice, apparently. Hit me and stuff. I don’t remember it. She’d never told anyone that.
She’d never spoken about her therapy, either, not with anyone other than her parents. They thought my body might have retained some memory of the abuse. Not the kind of memory we have as adults or older children. Something different. There’s a word for it. That word, she remembered, was “implicit.” Dr. Forte had once tried to explain it. Past experiences recalled subconsciously. Trauma stored and encoded as pictures or physical sensations. Splinters of memories, slicing into the mind. The body keeps the score, she’d said.
Emily returned to Google and searched for information on early childhood trauma. She realized that even though there was very little chance Aurelia explicitly remembered that fateful day in Nice, she was reliving her abduction on an almost daily basis. Every time she heard thunder or got caught in the rain or was touched in a particular way, her body remembered—and it reacted. Sometimes that reaction took the shape of an emotional outburst; other times it would manifest as a fixation or a phobia. Or a bloody great bonfire. Either way, everything led back to what had happened … which posed unsettling questions about Emily’s own behavioral patterns. The tantrums, the nightmares, the visits to Dr. Forte’s office. The panic attacks. The flurry. The heavy object. It made her wonder: what exactly was she reliving? What did her body remember?
* * *
On the twelfth day after her return to England, Emily woke up filled with a burning sense of purpose. She got up, got dressed, and spent the morning on her parents’ computer, downing cup after cup of instant Nescafé. She scribbled notes in a spiral-bound notebook. She made a phone call. Then she grabbed her wallet and caught the bus into the village.
In the supermarket, she filled her basket with cod fillets, jasmine rice, and feta cheese. She bought tomatoes, garlic, zucchini, eggplant, a fat bunch of mint, and the most expensive bottle of wine in the shop. At the self-service checkout, she waved her card over the card reader. This time, unsurprisingly, she had no problem paying.
Then she crossed the road to the bank, where she gave her account details to a cashier whose pinched mouth and downturned eyes made Emily wonder what kind of life she’d led. What’s your story? she thought as the woman tapped mechanically at her keyboard. What secrets are you hiding? Everyone was carrying something, she was beginning to realize. The world was a much darker and more complicated place than she’d ever thought.
“Are you sure you want to close this account, dear?” asked the cashier, doubtfully.
Emily nodded.
“And what would you like to do with the, er, closing balance.”
Emily told her.
The cashier blanched. “All of it?”
“All of it. These,” Emily slid a piece of paper under the partition, “are the payee details.”
The cashier raised her eyebrows and mumbled something about wonders never ceasing.
Other than the odd coin thrown in a jar, Emily had never donated to charity before, and the feeling it gave her was like stepping into a warm bath. She decided to focus on that, rather than on the little voice inside that whispered, What have you done, you crazy stupid fool?
The right thing, she told the voice, slamming a mental door in its face.
The representative she’d spoken to on the phone earlier had been comforting. “I wish there were more people like you,” he’d said, once he realized she wasn’t joking. “On behalf of Missing People UK, I’d like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
Leaving the bank, Emily caught sight of her reflection in the huge square windows. She looked taller, somehow. Lighter.
* * *
Back in the kitchen, Emily took a pair of scissors from the cutlery drawer. She cut Scott’s Amex card into four neat pieces and dropped them into the bin. Then she unpacked her shopping bags on the countertop. She placed all the ingredients in small bowls, laying them out in the exact order that she would need them, just as Nina had taught her. Stepping back, she checked the clock on the wall. Just over an hour until her parents came home from work. Perfect. Plenty of time.
She would make a nice dinner. She would open the wine. She would spend time with her parents. After that … well, that was where she ran out of ideas. She would have to earn some money at some point. Get a job. Probably not acting, but hopefully something she liked. There was a multitude of possibilities out there, some more achievable than others, but they were there. And she would build a life, all by herself.
But first, before all that could happen, before she could even start cooking, there was something she had to do.
* * *
Grabbing her jacket, she slipped out the back door. The sun was still high in the sky but the afternoon heat had eased considerably with the arrival of a chilly northerly breeze. Autumn was on its way, much to the apparent relief of the British public. According to Peter, the summer had been the hottest on European record, with more consecutive sunny days than ever before. Everyone had enjoyed it, he said, for the first couple of weeks; after that they all started wishing for rain again. There was just no pleasing some people.
