Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (11 page)

“Don’t go, I don’t know what I’d do if you went,” Sam had told her. Knowing that was the most wonderful feeling that Willow had ever had.

They were married within the year. Every morning Willow would wake up, look around at her life and wonder how she came to be here, in a comfortable West London apartment, the wife of a wealthy man who adored her, and stepmother to a charming little girl who she grew closer to day by day. But before long the optimism had turned to uncertainty, and then that familiar hum of unnamed fear returned to lodge itself firmly in the darkest recesses of her mind. Even then, even in her happiest moments, that familiar sense of foreboding, the one that had been stalking her since she was a child, never left her. Even then she knew her happiness couldn’t last, and she was right.

Willow poured hot water onto the chocolate powder and stirred, probably for a minute longer than she needed to, while she tried to think about what to do with Chloe. There had been several months, possibly years of barbed-wire chaos after her
marriage to Sam fell apart. Years of drinking too much and stumbling from one to another of too many men she barely knew. Stability, if not happiness, had finally emerged in two ways—by being employed by a woman whose lifestyle made hers look like a Benedictine nun’s, and through her friendship with Daniel. The lost love she had once focused on her husband now became Daniel’s alone to enjoy. He’d never grabbed her and kissed her like Sam had, he’d never had a moment of epiphany, and although when she daydreamed on the tube, Willow always imagined that perhaps one day it would come, she knew deep in her heart that she’d almost prefer it if he didn’t ever love her back. That way she’d get to love him for as long as she wanted and she’d never have to see the disappointment in his face when he realized he made a terrible mistake.

Chloe’s being here brought back a lot of things that Willow had successfully managed not to think about for a long time now, things she had become an expert at consigning to the past even though the consequences were still so tightly woven in the present. At least, cut off from Chloe and Sam, she didn’t have to acknowledge the truth, which was the way Willow preferred it. The truth was a terrible burden, one that never seemed to lead to anything good.

When she went back into the room it was silent. Chloe was lying on the bed with her back to the door, her arms wrapped around her, her fingers tipped with the obligatory chipped black nail varnish, clinging to her own clothes, as if she were desperate for a hug.

Willow sat down on the bed, set the steaming mug of chocolate next to her alarm clock and began the speech that she had practiced between the kitchen and the living room.

“Look, Chloe, I have to phone your dad. Believe me, I don’t want to. I haven’t spoken to him since . . . well, anyway. I understand why you’re frightened and worried, you must have
been going out of your mind trying to hide this for so long, but I can’t let you stay here without your dad knowing and I can’t let you get involved in child prostitution and drugs and end up drowned in the Thames, even though it would save me a lot of grief. I have to call your dad.”

Willow put her hand on Chloe’s shoulder and felt the steady rise and fall of her breathing. She peered over her prone body to find that she was asleep, her mouth open, her thick black eye makeup disintegrating on her cheeks.

“So anyway,” Willow said, brushing a strand of her deep black hair from her cheek, “I’m sure when you think about it you will understand. That’s settled then.”

“Who is coming by?” Holly asked Willow to repeat herself.

“Sam Wainwright, my ex-husband, is coming by to discover that his daughter is pregnant.”

“What are you going to say to him? What are you going to wear? Wear that blue sweater; you look hot in it, but you don’t look like you’ve tried.”

Willow looked down at the blue sweater she’d pulled on just a few moments ago because she thought it flattered her without making it look like she’d thought about it.

“Holly, I can’t really talk now.”

“But—”

Willow hung up silently, apologizing as she paced the room and waited, bracing herself for the first meeting in five years with the man she had come closest to loving.

The doorbell rang about twenty minutes later.

Chloe was still knocked out with the kind of exhaustion that Willow had seen in Holly when she was pregnant with the twins. It was as if the body got to the point when it just couldn’t take a minute more of activity and shut itself down automatically, no matter where or what you were doing, like
a sort of prenatal narcolepsy. And, to be fair, Chloe was probably more stressed out than most pregnant mothers, even secret teenage ones.

Phoning Sam after all this time had been nerve-racking to say the least but it was the kind of absurd torture that Willow seemed to regularly dredge up for herself, so once she had gotten over the initial shock, she really wasn’t surprised by the turn of events. This, after all, was her life, so of course this happened. Really, she should have seen it coming a mile away.

Willow had discovered Chloe’s phone, which was a good deal more expensive than her own, in the pocket of her outsize tracksuit top and scrolled through her contacts, searching for “Dad.” Only there hadn’t been an entry under “Dad,” so she settled on what seemed to be the most likely candidate: “Twat.”

Willow had been about to call from that phone, realizing just in time that a call from your ex-wife from your daughter’s mobile might be one thing too many to process, and Sam had a lot to process already, even if he didn’t know it yet. So, in the unlikely event that he might still keep her mobile number, she went to the landline phone and dialed the number stored under Twat from there instead.

“Yeah-lo?” Sam said. This was the way he always answered the phone. At first it had driven Willow mad, then she had found it terribly endearing, and
then
for those last few awful phone calls, the ones she’d foolishly assumed would be the last, almost painful—an acknowledgment that the demise of their marriage had not been significant enough to alter his cheery, cheesy phone greeting.

“Hello, Sam, it’s Willow.” Silence. “Willow Briars? You know, we were married for a bit?”

“I know who you are, Willow.” Sam’s voice was flat, unreadable. “What do you want?”

“Sorry to phone you out of the blue like this, but . . .” Willow
trailed off, wondering at what point in the first conversation you’ve had with your ex since you told him to shove his maintenance up his arse it was appropriate to drop a pregnant teenage daughter bombshell.

“Willow?
Willow?
” Sam repeated her name, forcing Willow to feel the tone and timbre of the voice she’d once so adored. He’d grown up in Sheffield, and despite having lived in London for more than twenty years it was still there: traces of a childhood running riot amid the dark satanic mills of a decaying industrial city. Willow had liked that about him, that ounce of grit in his voice that turned each word into a pearl, a voice so far removed from anything she knew that every word seemed like a talisman of protection. Or at least that’s what she used to think.

“I don’t have time for this, Willow.” He all but growled.

“Sam . . . Look, this is weird, I know.” Willow took a breath. “It’s just that Chloe turned up here about an hour ago—”

“Chloe? With you? How . . .
why
?”

“She’s run away apparently. She said you wouldn’t have noticed yet.” Willow couldn’t help the edge in her voice.

“What? This is nonsense, put her on. Honestly, I’ll—”

“She says she’s been going through a hard time,” Willow interrupted him. “She says she was excluded from school, that you don’t take any notice of her, that she’s contemplating a career in child prostitution and drug abuse.” It was a risky tactic, but Willow figured if she went in hard now, then the whole six months pregnant thing might not come as quite such a blow.

There was an exasperated gasp. “Why did she come to you, of all people?” Sam exclaimed.

“Resourceful, I guess,” Willow said. “So, is all that true? All that? She didn’t get it off the latest episode of
Hollyoaks
?”

“Look, I don’t know what she’s told you, but there’s nothing wrong between Chloe and me, nothing more than the usual
teen thing. She thinks she hates me, she blames me for everything, we don’t talk, I never see her. She’s fifteen, this is how it’s supposed to be.” Sam stalled as if he’d just remembered that he didn’t like Willow anymore. When he spoke again his voice had hardened considerably. “Where are you? I’m coming to get her.”

“Sam—” Willow took a breath. “There is no easy way to say this. Chloe is six months pregnant.”

Willow was not ashamed to admit that after hanging up on Holly and during the twenty minutes she had been waiting for a knock on the door, she had brushed her hair and slipped on her new shoes and sprayed her cleavage with perfume. Of course Sam had ceased to be interested in her that way a long time ago—if he ever really was in the first place—but pride made her determined to show him that she too had moved on in the last five years, even if she didn’t have a girlfriend who made pasta by hand and liked arugula to excess. She wanted him to see that she wasn’t merely the flunky of a PR guru and talent agent, not someone who went through a series of emotionless one-night stands with virtual strangers because she couldn’t have the man she wanted. No, Willow was most determined that he shouldn’t notice that.

Closing her eyes and taking a breath, she opened the door.

“Willow.” Sam hadn’t changed that much. He looked tired and, unsurprisingly, stressed, but he was still pretty much the same tallish, handsome-ish man that Willow had loved so inexpertly. She was disappointed by the butterflies in her tummy when she looked at him, her body betraying her head with the memory of passion that had been extinguished before it had really had a chance to ignite.

“Sam.” Willow managed to keep her voice even as she stepped aside and let him into her flat.

“Well, where is she then?” His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his jaw clenched. He would not look directly at her.

“Asleep. She conked out just before I phoned you.”

Sam shook his head with contempt. “This is typical of you, Willow. You waltz back into my life like a time bomb, and wherever you go, shit follows.”

Willow took a breath. “Actually, your pregnant daughter waltzed back into my life. I could have just shut the door in her face.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t,” Sam shot back, his blue eyes thunderous.

“That isn’t fair and you know it,” Willow said. “I’m letting it pass because you are in shock. And you should be. How did you let this happen, Sam?”

“How did I . . . ? This has got nothing to do with you. Chloe!” Sam tried to barge past her. But Willow blocked him once and once again.

“She’s my daughter. I’m taking her home!” he yelled, his impotent rage boiling over.

“I don’t want to go home.” Chloe appeared behind Willow. “So fuck off.”

“You . . .” Sam lunged at Chloe, barging Willow out of the way, and for one stunned second Willow expected to turn and see Chloe knocked to the floor, blood trickling from her lip. But in the moment that it took her to turn around, she found Sam with his arms around Chloe, holding her as best he could, which was tricky because of her not inconsiderable bump.

“How
did
you miss
that
?” Willow said, only realizing she’d spoken aloud when Sam looked at her.

“Have you ever told a teen girl she looks like she’s gaining weight?” Sam snapped back. “It never goes down well. Best to keep out of it.”

“That’s your motto, isn’t it? Keep out of it.” Chloe pried herself out of his arms, her childlike relief at seeing him evaporating in a second. “I’m serious, Dad. I can’t come home. I don’t want to be in that house anymore. It’s suffocating me!”

“Whose is it?” Sam ignored her, nodding at her belly. “Is it that Ryan kid’s? It is, isn’t it? I swear to God I’m going to knock him from here to next week and then back again.”

“No! It’s not that loser’s.” Chloe looked affronted.

“Whose is it, then, who’s done this to you? I’ll kill him.”

“It doesn’t matter whose it is,” Chloe shouted. “Why won’t you listen to me?”

Father and daughter both saw red at exactly the same moment.

“What do you mean it doesn’t
matter
? It
matters,
all right. For one thing it’s a
matter
for the police. You are underage—”

“I won’t be in that house with you and that awful bitch anymore. I’ve got this baby to think about now and you don’t want me there anyway!”

“I’m going to prosecute. First I’m going to prosecute and then I’m getting a solicitor. No, first I’m going to beat the shit out of him and then I’m going to prosecute and then . . . I bet he got you drunk, didn’t he? I bet some idiot kid got you drunk. I’ll show him . . .”

“No one made me do anything I didn’t want to. You’re the idiot! I’m a screwup, Dad. I’m a fuckup, a big fat mistake!”

Sam wasn’t listening. “We’ll need a nanny. You can go back to school until it’s born. It’ll have to be the local high school now, but they’ve probably got a program for teenage mums and then we’ll get a nanny.”