“I’ve no idea one way or the other, Cathy.”
Cathy releases a long, shivering breath. “I did. I took it.”
Suzie struggles to keep the shock from her face. Even though she’d always suspected it, to hear it from Cathy that way is still a surprise.
“Ever since their wedding, I’ve been saving. Four thousand pounds, plus interest. I was going to give it to Hazel when I saw her last week. That, and a big apology. I feel like somehow I probably cursed that marriage, and I don’t know how else to make it up to her.”
“Whew, Cathy. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything, I just needed to get it off my chest. I don’t expect you to understand being so broke that you’re feeding your son from the bins behind restaurants or sleeping in your car, but that’s where I was at. I was at the fucking bottom. Then I got the invite to their stupid wedding and I had to borrow money to get there and leave Danny with his feckless, lazy father because the invite said ‘no children,’ not even her own nephew. I turned up with a handmade present in a loaned dress and they stuck me on a table at the back of the hall with people who didn’t even bother to learn my name.”
Suzie remains silent. The road is narrowing. There are no streetlights up here, on the road into the woods. They pass a horse leaning over a gate with eyes like polished black marble.
“I know it sounds like I’m making excuses. I guess I am. But I’m also trying to tell you that I didn’t feel guilty about it, at the time. Not at all. I was jealous, in a way. Hazel always got things the ways she wanted. Even when we were kids.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true—”
“It is, Suzie. I know you find it hard to believe, but all parents have a favorite, and Hazel was theirs. After she went into hospital, Mum and Dad treated her like she was made of glass, couldn’t believe she would do anything wrong. They poured all the love they carried into her.”
The headlights pick out a red phone box at the side of the road, the plastic windows misted with condensation.
Cathy sniffs loudly, wiping at her eyes. “It’s going to sound silly, but after the operation, it was like Hazel had come back different. Meaner. Sometimes it was”—she swallows, glancing toward Suzie—“it was like they’d brought a different girl home. Bad things started happening, and I usually bore the brunt of it.”
“Bad things like what?”
Cathy shrugs. “Some of it was little things happening around the house. That’s how it started. Doors opening on their own, footsteps going up and down the hallway. I’d hear Hazel talking to herself in her room, and one night I caught her stuffing handfuls of slimy wet hair into the toilet and trying to flush. ‘She won’t go!’ Hazel kept saying. ‘I’m trying to flush her away and she won’t go!’ We started finding moldy food everywhere; potatoes gone black and soft, furry cheese. Fruit that had rotted overnight and turned to liquid, covered in flies. Soon after that, mushrooms started to appear. They grew in the corners of rooms and along the window frames and my dad just waved it off and said the house was damp. It’s been a wet winter, he told us, he’ll throw some bleach on them. But they kept coming back, and then they started growing in other places. Towels and sinks, even inside my mum’s shoes. I found some one morning that had sprouted overnight on my pillow. You ever heard of such a thing?”
Suzie tells her she has not.
“Our old cat Gandalf started acting weird—he began hissing at nothing. He was a soft old thing, more blanket than cat, but now if you went near him, he’d go nuts trying to bite and scratch you. The day he got put down, I found one of those little black mushrooms growing inside his ear.”
Suzie wrings her hands on the steering wheel, wishing she was still at home. The car fishtails slightly, but the snow tires hold. Good old Teddy, she thinks. A sensible man.
“Did you tell your parents?”
They slow as they approach a turnoff, with Cathy jabbing her finger against the windscreen, indicating a narrow turning between the trees. “In there. I think we’ve gone past the Spit already. Hard to tell in the dark.”
Suzie grimaces. “There won’t be anyone up at the Spit tonight, that’s for sure. Reckon we’ll have the woods to ourselves.”
The thought frightens her, and she wishes she hadn’t said it. The gears grind as the road leads upward, winding a narrow path into the trees. Cathy is still talking, as if she is unable to stop until she is finished. These things have to come out, Suzie knows. It’s like an infection.
“Yeah, I told them, but my parents thought I was making it up. They said I was only saying all this stuff because I was jealous of the attention Hazel was getting when she came out of hospital. At home, we weren’t allowed to talk about the operation, because what they’d taken out of her had scared my parents. The tumor. I suppose you know about that.”
“I do.”
The car shudders as they bump over potholes and frozen deadfall. Frozen branches crack beneath the tires like gunshots.
“Hold up, wait! Stop!” Cathy slaps the dashboard with the palm of her hand. “Over there. Something caught the light.”
“What kind of something?”
“It looked like metal. It glinted. You didn’t see it?” Without waiting for an answer, Cathy unhooks her seat belt and opens the door. Cold air washes in. “Wait there. I’ll go look.”
“No, don’t—” But Cathy is already outside, burrowing her chin down into the collar of her coat, lifting her phone high in the air so that the screen lights the area around them in a dull, green glow. The snow has drifted deeper here, up in the hills. The wind has sculpted it into peaks around the base of the trees, the low boughs heavy with it. The windscreen wiperstick-tickas Suzie sits tense behind the wheel, watching Cathy move away from the car in slow, careful steps. Her stomach feels sour, her mouth very dry. It’s all this talk of Hazel, the strange infestations of mushrooms. It’s made her nervous, that’s all.
Liar.
Suzie fights the urge to call Cathy back to the car. Instead, she fiddles with the radio to find some music to drown out that irritating inner voice. There is a viselike sensation in her chest as if all the air is being squeezed from her lungs.