64
TheWedge
Now
The Wedge is not the same as when I left it. The ivy is overgrown, stretching around the ironwork of the gate, the small patch of lawn yellow from underwatering. Under the window, my hydrangeas are dry and crisp, one touch and the petals will fall. But none of that matters. The lights are on. They’re home.
I ring the doorbell, though I have a key. I’ve seen all of Kit’s messages but I haven’t dared to read them. I’m too frightened. One wrong word could banish me back to the cottage, to the man I locked in the glass cellar.
When Kit opens the door, he blinks. Then, he falls to his knees and weeps, buries his head against the wound of my stomach. He says my name over and over, my name, not the name of my reinvention, it fuses with his shock into a single word,LaurenLaurenLauren.I drop to the floor, wrap my arms round his neck, our cheeks slick with each other’s tears, because I am uttering one word too,SorryI’msosorry.
Then, there’s a familiar patter of feet, yesterday, I’d have given anything to hear that sound but now I’m here, it’s more than I could have imagined because it is also the silk of her hair, her temples, her cheeks. I let her obliterate me. ‘Mummy!’ she says.
I am home.
It’s not plain sailing. After the jubilation of the reunion, Millie refuses to let me change her, bathe her, read her stories, all she wants is Kit. The only time she lets me near her is when she’s asleep. Kit buys a mattress to put on the floor for me when he never bought one for himself but I don’t sleep on it, I’m in her narrow cot bed, slipping my hand under her neck, curling my body round her, inhaling her scent. Guilt circles the lowest parts of me like dirty water round a drain,You abandoned her, you left her, what kind of mother are you?But now, another voice rises.
What kind of mother am I?
I am a mother who’s come back from the edge.
It’s been rough with Kit. At first, he says he doesn’t need to know where I’ve been, he’s just glad I’m home but, when I’m least expecting it, he hurls grenades at me. A few days ago, I was looking for one of Millie’s pink knitted cardigans, the one with rainbows on the pockets. He watched me from the door of her room for a few minutes before he said, ‘She’s grown out of that. You’d know, if you hadn’t left.’ Quiet blowings apart.
So, I decide. To evolve. To change.
I start with his messages. I’ve avoided them until now, I toyed, briefly, with getting a new number, I wanted a blank slate. But blank slates are metaphors, not reality or possibility. We are composites of our history. I know that more than anyone else.So, one evening, I shut myself in Faye’s nursery. Sit in front of her empty cot. Under her mobile, I read.
The messages detonate inside me, the panic and anger, the fury and the breakdowns, there are parts I can never read ever again. But even as they explode, I am flooded by his love for our daughters and for me. And I pray that will be enough. Because when I tell him where I’ve been, everything I’ve done, everything that’s happened, he will finally see the monstrous truth: I am not the woman he married. He’ll have to decide then. If I’m really who he wants.
After I read the messages, I ask if Cassie can take Millie for the morning so Kit and I talk. He wants coffees and croissants – he’s forgotten I don’t like bakeries or maybe he’s testing me. I don’t say anything. I press against him as we walk in, butter, flaked pastry, apricot, I’m afraid, so afraid. But away from the display, there’s a free table by the window and, through the window, there’s a maple tree growing over the train tracks, at that height, that age, it’s fought and won against impossible odds. I track the length of the trunk, take in its whorls, its wounds, follow the branches to the tips of the leaves, until the fear has passed. I’m still here.
Kit sits down, pushes a cappuccino towards me. The sight of foam, the hit of caffeine has made me smile every day I’ve been back.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ he says.
‘I know.’ In my pocket, I push my thumb into the heart of the drift seed.
‘I said I didn’t want to know where you were. But—’
‘—You need to.’
He nods. He trembles as he picks up his coffee, abruptly puts it down. ‘So, if it’s all right with you, I’m just going to ask you some direct questions, I’ve tried to come up with a better way of putting this but there just isn’t.’
‘Okay.’ My heart is racing.
‘Did you cheat on me?’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever cheated on me?’
‘No.’
‘Not any time we were together?’
‘Never.’
He jerks back suddenly, his anger bewilders me, until I realise it would have been a relief if I’d cheated – he’s prepared for that. Now, he’s in the dark once more. ‘You’re going to have to help me out, babe.’ He rakes his fingers through his hair. ‘There’s just too many ends that don’t tie up. I feel like I don’t know you at all.’