My Name Was Eden, page 16
She plopped down into the water hard, splashing my face and soaking my top, making my mascara run. I’d been due to go out with James that evening for the first time since she’d been born, and the babysitter was due in half an hour. “No. No,” she growled. “You’ve been a bad mummy. Bad mummies don’t get presents.”
I feel the water ebb around my face, and then, as I hold my breath and sink lower, I can hear the steady whoosh of my heartbeat. It sounds like I’m listening through a stethoscope and as it begins to gallop, I’m not sure how to rise, how to breathe again. I can hear Eden calling me, her voice chiming through the din, urgent, insistent. “Mum. Mummy.”
The water breaks apart. I jump out of the bath and grab the towel, hurry onto the hallway.
Downstairs, Bluey is screeching. I don’t bother knocking on her door, but burst straight in. “Were you calling me?”
“No.”
No, of course not. Of course not. Eden isn’t here. Eden has gone.
Eli’s feet tap nervously against his chair. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, love. Sorry.” The towel has flapped open. I pull it tight around my breasts, around the chicken skin of my stomach, feeling suddenly very cold.
30
Eli is quiet. We all are. James scuttles in and out, for work, for pleasure, often returning with the telltale perfume of spirits on his breath. I find myself sitting, for minutes at a time, completely devoid of thought, as though my brain has become a screensaver. And yet, at other times, I am furiously busy. I vacuum. I wash the floors. I turn the tins and jars in the kitchen cupboard so that the labels are facing the same way, and then color-coordinate them. I polish. I put on headphones and listen to bland instrumentals interspersed with the sounds of nature, the sort you get in a spa or therapy center. I twist lemon-scented cloths around the bathroom taps until I can see the dark sphere of my pupils in them.
When Eli comes home from school, he tells me about the assembly they had in Alex’s memory. “They played his favorite song,” he says, pointedly. “Everyone was crying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Charlie was upset, so I looked after her.”
“That was nice.” I want to ask how he feels about it all, if he blames me, if he hates me, but he slides off his shoes and goes to place them carefully by the back door. Until he speaks, I don’t even realize he’s come back in.
“Can Charlie come for a sleepover soon?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Yes? I’ll mention it to Bex.”
“Thank you.” Eli flings his arms around me and squeezes. I’m still wearing my rubber gloves and I think, as they press into my child’s back, how strange my hands look in them. Huge. Like they belong to someone else.
Later, Eli suggests a game of Jenga. He’s noticed that I’ve rearranged all the games in the games cupboard, and sets the tower up on the coffee table in the lounge. “You have to be careful which plank you pull,” he says. “Sometimes they look unstable, like this one”—he demonstrates by pushing one with his finger—“but actually it’s almost completely stuck. See?”
He laughs as they all come clattering to the floor. I don’t know why he’s talking me through the rules like we’ve never played it before. He helps me stack the blocks back up, and while we’re still kneeling on the carpet, James comes in. He’s wearing a tie I don’t recognize: royal blue with silver blooms—stars, or flowers, perhaps—bursting forth like fireworks against a night sky. When he leans down to kiss me, the tie flaps across my face. It smells of his aftershave.
“You’re not supposed to wear shoes in the lounge.” Eli doesn’t look away from the piece he’s pulling from the tower.
“You sound just like your mother,” James says. He’s trying at humor, but there’s an edge to it. “Is there any dinner? It’s been a bloody long day.”
I tell him it’s in the microwave, and he leaves the room.
“Can we play another game?” Eli asks.
All I really want to do is go to bed. I can feel the exhaustion falling over me like a weighted blanket. Sleep has been avoiding me lately, and when I do manage to slide into a state of semiconsciousness, I find myself suspended in a place without windows or doors, a place without texture, color or time. “Okay.”
Maybe this is a dream. Nothing feels real right now. Maybe I’ll wake up and find Alex and Anna are still alive; Eden too.
Maybe.
That evening, I climb into bed beside James. He rolls over, reaches out for me, and I turn into him. We hold each other, and his body is hot, much hotter than mine. I feel like I’m being suffocated inside his broad chest, and when he doesn’t immediately release me, I start to panic. “What?” he says. “What is it? What now?” I don’t tell him that I’m thinking about Eli’s hug earlier and the way my hands looked like giant yellow claws. Child-killer hands.
James exhales heavily. He has been drinking again; a nightcap, he called it. I can smell it, sour on his breath. He turns away from me, taking most of the duvet with him. In my thin cotton pajamas I feel suddenly vulnerable, exposed. I should cry. Why haven’t I cried? It feels like there’s a reservoir of mercury inside me, just below the surface, just beneath tipping point. I imagine folding myself in half, watching it all pour out.
Instead, it remains there, corroding me from the inside.
I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until I wake with a start. That scream—did I really hear it, or did it come from inside my head? My heart is galloping, and there’s a tautness, an alertness to my body as I strain to listen. Beside me, James is breathing, a gentle punctured hiss. It’s not yet dawn, and gradually the shadows in the room become shapes as my eyes grow accustomed to the half-light: James’s partially opened bedside cabinet drawer, the fold of duvet around the curve of his shoulder, the headless suit hanging from his wardrobe handle.
Must have been a dream. A nightmare. I try to close my eyes, and then I hear something else. Scratching.
It sounds like it’s coming from outside.
I climb out of bed and James rolls over with a sigh onto the warm patch I’ve left behind. I pinch the curtain and look up the lane, which is bathed in a buttermilk glow from the moon.
I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep now. I wonder if Eli has got Bluey out of his cage again, but when I go downstairs he’s fast asleep, one clawed foot gripping the wooden bar, head turned into his wing.
The house feels like a foreign land in the dark. I push open the door to the lounge, making a long shadow yawn across the room. The curtains are half-open against the patio doors, and beyond them the garden looks like something from a children’s fairy tale. The lawn is so long, it seems to roll away toward the horizon and through the patch of moonlight between slashes of cloud; the shrubs which border it appear to lean toward the grass as if in conspiracy.
And then, in the darkness, a movement.
I can’t see what it is. It slides out of sight, between the shrubs at the top of the garden near Eli’s tree. I watch, I keep watching, until my breath mists up the glass, and then I unlock the patio door.
The cold slaps at my bare feet as I move across the patio and onto the grass. It’s dark. So dark up here. Ahead, the white pebbles in Eli’s garden seem to glow, like eyes. Whatever I heard, whatever I saw down here, I am ready. And there it is: not the ghost of Alex, or Anna, or even Eden, but a fox. It turns and stares for a moment, before scurrying off underneath the fence without a sound. I see it a moment later, heading in the direction of the farm, toward the wire-fenced chicken coops no doubt, probably hoping to find a chink in the defenses.
It was nothing. It is always nothing.
The grass feels different as I hurry back toward the house: wetter and denser, the mud beneath grasping at my feet. And now I can see James standing by the patio doors, staring out at me, a dark silhouette. The lounge light is still switched off. What is he doing?
I break into a half-run, grab at the handle. I pull, hard, harder still, but it won’t open. “What are you doing? Let me in.” I bang on the door with my fist. “Let me in.”
“What the hell is going on?” James opens the door. “Why were you out there?”
“What the hell? Why did you lock me out?”
“I didn’t lock you out! You were pulling on the door instead of pushing it.”
James’s face is corrugated with concern. I haven’t seen him look this tired since Eden was a baby, even though I did most of the night feeds. In contrast, my nerves are singing and I feel suddenly as though I’m fizzing with energy. Or perhaps it’s adrenaline. “Sorry,” I tell him. “God. I thought . . .”
“What were you doing out there?” James repeats.
“I saw . . . a fox.”
“So? It’s two in the morning!”
“I didn’t know what it was at first. I heard a scream, and it must—it must have . . .”
James presses his fingers around my arms. The warmth feels like an electric shock against the coldness of my skin. “You need to get help, Lucy. We can’t carry on like this. It’s bad enough . . . it’s bad enough . . .”
He means Eli. He means Anna. And I know it’s the tiredness and the shot or two of alcohol he had before he came to bed that’s talking, because I would be irritated in the same situation, but I’m not sure which stings more as he stalks back up the stairs—his words or the cold that returns to my bones as soon as he releases his grip.
31
“Lucy. It’s nice to see you again.” Alison presses the wedge away from the door with her foot and I step into the room. I’m trying to locate the source of the smell—sharp, with a thickness that adheres itself to the inside of my throat—before tracing it to a vase of stargazer lilies on the windowsill. “How have you been?”
“Not too bad,” I lie.
“And Eden?”
“E—” I can pretend too. “She’s okay.”
Alison offers me a seat, and I lower myself into the red sofa opposite her single chair. “So, what would you like to talk about today?”
I press my hands into my lap. “Nothing specific. I just . . . I can’t sleep, I can’t focus . . . I feel terrible.”
Alison presses a finger to the mole on her lip. I imagine it detonating, blowing us and the room, with all of its secrets, to smithereens. “Would you like to tell me about that?” she ventures.
My brain delivers an image of Alex’s face just before he ran onto the road, eyes wide with terror. No. No, I would not. I cannot. We sit in silence, and I find my mind drifting, inexplicably, to the time Eden was born and the six months that followed. I remember the despair I felt, lying in bed day after day, my body leaking like a punctured hosepipe, knowing that James was playing with her, taking her out, teaching her to say her first words. How, when she screamed, I felt like crushing her tiny lungs. How I would pop out in the car for milk or eggs or nothing at all, pretending I had places I needed to go, wishing I had the strength to turn the steering wheel and let the blackness take over. I have always been a terrible person.
“I feel like I’m losing the plot. James thinks I’m crazy, and you know . . . I always thought there was something different about her,” I tell Alison. “But now I wonder if it was actually me. Whether there was always something different about me.”
She’s interested. I can see it in her eyes. “Different in what way?”
“Me, or Eden?”
“Well, let’s start with Eden.”
“Oh. It’s hard to explain. She was bright, funny, outgoing. The life and soul, all the things I’ve never been. But now and then, there were these odd things she’d do.”
I think back to Eden’s spoon-hurling, the frenzied crying in her cot that would come out of nowhere and stop just as abruptly as it started, the way she would occasionally refer to herself in third person. “Once, I found her running around the garden late at night when she was supposed to be in bed. She told me something bad would happen if she didn’t complete seven laps.”
Alison crosses her legs. “Do you know where that came from? Did she tell you why she felt compelled to do it?”
“Not really. She was a closed book. At least, she was with me.”
“And your partner?”
“James was brilliant—he did it all, and I think she never forgot that he was there for her when I wasn’t. They were so alike; they understood one another. When I finally snapped out of my postnatal depression, or whatever you want to call it, they’d created something—a union—that I couldn’t penetrate. I always wanted Eli to have lived, and I’m not sure, maybe Eden sensed that. At first, you know, I thought she did this whole name change thing to punish me.”
“But you don’t think that anymore?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Tell me about your depression. Did you ever take medication for that?”
“The doctors prescribed me antidepressants.” I don’t tell her I popped one dutifully from the blister pack and dropped it down the plughole as I was brushing my teeth every evening. “I snapped out of it eventually.”
“And what about your feelings toward this other twin? Did they change over time?”
Outside, a cluster of leaves scurry in feverish circles before spiraling away, over the roofs of the parked cars. “No, of course not. I did for Eli what any mother would do for her child—I recognized him; I kept the memory of him alive. I wanted him to be seen, not forgotten.”
“And how did that impact your relationship with Eden?”
“I tried, but she never liked me. The more Eden and I grew apart, the closer she and James became. He blamed me for everything. And he hated what he called my “obsession’ with Eli.”
Alison’s face gives nothing away. She’d make a brilliant poker player.
“We had different ideas about how to bring Eden up. He was relaxed, chilled out about everything, and before Eden was born that was the one thing I loved most about him. He was always thinking up fun stuff to do. Once, I came home from work and there he was, cooking in the nude.”
Finally, she cracks a smile. “So what changed?”
“Parenthood, I suppose. I played bad cop for so long, it felt like Eden started doing the things she did just to get at me.”
“What kind of things?”
“Moving stuff around the house and abandoning it in different rooms, leaving the door unlocked, cutting things up, strange things like that. She always swore blind it wasn’t her, and I was always on edge; she was so temperamental with me. I started thinking I was crazy.” I pinch the bridge of my nose, remembering how it was possible to love her so fiercely, yet she could drag me by my fingernails through a kind of hell I didn’t know existed. “I caught her doing it sometimes, but James never saw. He thought I was mental.”
“Did he?” Alison raises her eyebrows. “If you became different, that’s okay. Most women do, after motherhood.” Above her top lip, the mole quivers. “Have you ever considered that imperfect is normal? All the things, the things you’ve told me about Eden, they all sound like perfectly normal things for a child to do. Throwing cutlery, denials to save their own skin . . . oh, they know how to manipulate their world alright. And they have to, because otherwise they’re powerless. And perhaps”—she glances down at her notebook—“perhaps you felt powerless too.”
I say nothing.
“Perhaps you still do. Your feelings for Eden—they’re perfectly valid. It’s okay to feel the way you do. The thing is . . .” She shifts in her chair, relaxing into her theme. “Sometimes, when we fix onto one narrative, it can be very difficult for our brains to believe that there could be a different perspective. Can you try and recall something else for me? Can you try and recall a great moment in your life, possibly with Eden?”
There were good moments, certainly. But great moments . . . I look up. A dusting of pollen from the lilies has settled on the desk, like rust. “When we planted Eli’s tree together, we—”
“Not Eli. Just Eden.”
“Oh.” The ticking clock sounds like someone tutting in disapproval at my answers. At the mess I’ve made of my life. Tut. Tut. Tut. And, just like that, I remember something. “Reading her stories in bed when she was little. I used to love that. It was the only time I really felt close, when I could relax. Especially when it was raining outside and it was just the three of us in the house together, with the curtains pulled tight—we were safe. She used to ask me questions, so many questions, about the books I was reading.” I feel a smile creep into my voice. “She loved The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Every night, she made me read that, for what felt like years. I didn’t need to even open the front cover to know it by heart, in the end. She became fascinated by caterpillars. And, well, all animals. She was always rescuing them. Once, she brought in a pigeon that one of the farm cats had attacked, and we looked after it until it was strong enough to release back into the wild.”
“She sounds very kind.”
“Yes.” And yet, how deeply she could inflict damage, wound me with her words. I keep my mouth closed, holding the hurt in.
Alison moves the questioning on to ask whether I’ve previously been in therapy, and what my relationship with my parents was like. “It was good, at the beginning,” I tell her. “But that was before . . .”
I’ve never told anybody about Elliott—not even James. The room seems suddenly too bright; the scent from the lily pollen too strong, like cat piss. I pull the tissues toward me and run my finger along the jagged teeth at the top of the box.
“My brother,” I say finally. “I had a brother.”
Lucy
Elliott’s little blue coat is still hanging up in the cupboard under the stairs. I’m not allowed to go in his room anymore, but sometimes I sneak in when Mum’s asleep to look at his favorite books and touch his clothes. It sounds funny, but when I smell his pillow, it’s like I can bring him to life all over again. I see the white beads of dried-up milk in the folds of skin on his neck and the glittery string of dribble hanging from his chin. I can feel his fingers, all tight around my thumb. And the thing that makes me really sad is hearing his laugh inside my head—snap, snap, snap, like popping bubbles.
