Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (40 page)

Willow sat on the little leather footstool, every space inside her—her mouth, her nose, her eyes and ears—clogged with impotent emotion that she couldn’t even name, that she only knew was smothering her.

“It was you,” Imogene said. “You ruined everything. You drove him to an early grave, you know. You killed him with your lies.”

Willow shook her head, her mouth opening but no sound coming out. She stood up abruptly, heading for the door, tipping the stool as she stood.

“I’m sorry. I thought perhaps we could talk honestly, clear the air, but what was I thinking? You admitting that you were wrong, horribly, tragically wrong? That would be impossible, wouldn’t it? Fine, if you can live with yourself, then I don’t have to.”

“Oh that’s right, walk away. Walk away,” Imogene crowed.

Willow halted in her tracks, turning on her heel and advancing toward her mother in a fury.

“What do you expect me to do, Mother? Do you expect me to stay here and listen to this? I
loved
him, God help me!”

“I expect you to live your life like a grown woman and stop blaming everything on other people.”

“I’m going,” Willow said, her hand on the door. “I’ll tell Magda to make you lunch.”

“You will never be happy!” Imogene’s voice rattled in the empty hallway as Willow headed toward the front door, grabbing her coat off the banister, her mother’s taunts echoing after her. “You don’t deserve to be happy, you deceitful little bitch. You poison everything you touch!”

Magda was on the other side of the front door, smoking a cigarette, when Willow tore it open.

“Excuse me.” Willow stumbled over her, struggling to regain her composure. “Good-bye.”

“You won’t stay longer?” Magda asked as Willow pushed past her. “Too difficult, to see her like this? Perhaps you need some time, yes? And come back.”

Willow didn’t answer. Head down, she marched furiously away from the house, her cheeks burning, her eyes stinging with fury, all the anger and the fear and confusion crowding her vision with shadows. Only once she had crossed the river did she stop, on the bank opposite the house. She looked at the window of Ian’s study with her heart in her mouth. She half expected to see him there, pacing and moving things around. Arranging his desk chair in just the right place so he could see her reflection in the mirror when she sat down in it. So he could get the perfect view.

In an instant Willow’s knees buckled beneath her and she sank to the ground, surrendering in terror to the locked doors that sprung open all around her with a cacophony of crashes.
Willow could not stop the past tumbling on top of her, threatening to crush her with its unbearable weight as the horror, the awful horror of everything that she had endured engulfed her.

And then there was the palm of a hand on the back of her neck, and then Holly’s arms around her, her voice in her ear soothing and soft and her shoulder to lean on as she gathered Willow into her arms and helped her to her feet. Willow knew there were people looking. She could sense them, as she buried her face in her sister’s hair.

“My sister has been taken ill,” she heard Holly say as if she were very far away. “Please excuse us.”

Willow let Holly guide her, the unbearable panic subsiding with each step that took her farther from that house, pushing each heavy door in her head shut, one by one. Finally Holly bundled her into the cool, quiet calm of her house.

“The girls . . . Chloe,” Willow sobbed as she sank onto the bottom stair. Holly shut the front door on the world, locked and bolted it and then slid on a chain. “They mustn’t see me like this.”

“It’s okay, Chloe’s taken them down to the harbor to feed the swans. We can talk. Let it out, Will. Tell me.” She led Willow upstairs to her favorite window and directed her at the view. “Was it very bad?”

“She hates me,” Willow said. “She will never believe me.”

“She hates us both,” Holly replied.

“But me more. She hates me more—she
blames
me. She blames me for what she will not admit is true,” Willow said. “She hates me for something that she says never happened.”

“We know the truth,” Holly said, her eyes on the horizon. “I never doubted you, not for a second.”

“Why me,” Willow said. It was almost a whisper. “Why me?”

“I don’t know, we’ll never know,” Holly replied gently. “I wish it had been me.”

“Don’t say that.” Willow turned to look at Holly, her reflection, her sister’s face wrought with pain she knew was engraved on her own. “The only thing that makes it bearable is that it wasn’t you.”

“I used to be so jealous,” Holly said, repeating verbatim a conversation they had had again and again. “Of you and him and your little chats. I was jealous, Will. The thought of it makes me sick to my stomach.”

“I never told you.”

“But still, I should have known. I’m your twin. Perhaps I did know, I just didn’t want to look.” Holly covered her mouth with the back of her hand, suppressing a retch. All three of them had adored Ian, from the moment he came into their lives. It wasn’t only their mother who was besotted with his tall good looks, his sense of fun and the way he took control, made order out of the chaos of their lives. Without knowing it they had all missed having a man in their lives, and Willow wanted to please him, she wanted him to like her. She sought him out, knocked on the door of his den, interrupted his work to talk to him. But he was never cross. He was always interested in whatever she had to say, and he laughed at her jokes. Willow looked forward to seeing him and even though she knew it irritated her mother, she followed him around like a besotted puppy. Which was why almost a year after he’d been married to her mother, when he closed the office door on his hidey-hole and put his arm around her waist and asked her if she would like him to kiss her she had said, yes please.

“I didn’t want you to know. I wanted to keep you safe. He said . . . he said if I ever told anyone then no one would understand. He said Mum would make me leave, that she’d be angry. He was right, wasn’t he?”

“He wasn’t right about anything. He was a monster. Mum knows it, she just can’t bear to admit it. And so she attacks you, not because she hates you but because she is ashamed.”

The women held each other then, each one melding into the other, holding off the past in a long embrace that secured, at least for now, the doors that kept the terrible truth at bay.

The truth that, when Willow was nine, Ian had come into her room one night, shutting the door behind him.

Chapter
           Sixteen

“I
like Chloe,” Jem said later that night as Willow tucked her and her sister into bed. “She can cross her eyes and touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. She told us a story.”

“Did she?” Willow said, brushing Jem’s fringe off of her forehead, which she promptly smoothed back down. “What was it about?”

“About a duck,” Jo-Jo told her. “A fuzzy duck.”

“That sounds like Chloe,” Willow said.

“Are you okay, Aunty Pillow?” Jo-Jo asked, patting Willow’s cheek rather more firmly than necessary. “Your eyes are red and puffy. Did you cry? Did you fall over and cry?”

“I didn’t fall over, but I did cry a bit. I’m fine now, though,” Willow reassured them.

“Who made you cry?” Jem looked concerned.

“No one, I just felt a bit sad. Not anymore, though! Its impossible to be sad when you have two such delightful nieces.” Willow smiled for them, and they seemed reassured.

“Is it because you have to go back soon and you will miss us?” Jem asked, solemnly.

“Yes.” Willow nodded, resting her cheek for a moment on the small girl’s tummy. “I will miss you very much.”

“You should visit more often. Mummy says it all the time.” Jo-Jo yawned, patting Willow on the head.

“Mummy’s right, I should,” Willow agreed, basking in the warm glow of the pink fairy lights that adorned the ceiling of their tiny room, the smallest in the house. The girls had picked it themselves at the age of two and showed no sign of wanting to move out. They enjoyed their proximity to each other, something that Willow and Holly understood perfectly. Holly had never suggested the girls might want a room each, even though the house had plenty. If and when they were ready to be apart, she always said, they’d let her know.

“Aunty Pillow?” Jem reached out for Willow’s hand. “Are you famous?”

“No.” Willow smiled. “No, not at all.”

“That’s a shame.” Jem turned her head away, signaling that she was ready for sleep. “Famous people are better.”

“There is no one in the world who is better than your mum,” Willow said.

“Except God, and also the queen . . .” Jem drifted away before completing her sentence.

“Night-night, Jo-Jo,” Willow whispered to her other niece.

“Night-night—and don’t be sad anymore, Aunty Pillow. We shall love you, come what may.”

Holly had made crab and chili linguine, and was tonging it onto plates when Willow came down from putting the twins to bed. She sat at the shining, glass-topped white table and Holly filled one of her oversize designer wineglasses to the top with something very cold and white. She repeated the action for herself, before pouring a glass of sparkling water for Chloe and sitting opposite her sister.

“Dad called. He’s only just leaving London, so he’s going to
check straight into the hotel when he gets here and come for breakfast tomorrow.”

“It’s nice that he’s taking the time to come down here, to be with you. It shows how much he cares,” Holly said, glancing at Willow.

“It shows how much he wants to control me,” Chloe grumbled.

“That’s not what he’s doing,” Holly told her gently. “He’s trying to look after you, like he always has. The trouble is you’ve changed and he hasn’t. He hasn’t quite realized yet that you need a different sort of looking after now. He’ll get there.”

No one spoke for a moment or two. Chloe twirled her pasta around her fork, first clockwise, then counterclockwise before getting up to pour herself another glass of water, and Willow gazed across the expanse of the water out the window, content to let the tang of the wine settle in her mouth for a moment. Chloe played with her food, occasionally glancing at Willow, no doubt taking in her swollen lids and pinched, puffy face. Oddly enough, Willow felt utterly calm.

For a little while at least she knew she would feel like this, she would feel serene and peaceful and . . . relieved. Because as painful as her visit to her mother, to that house, had been, it had released everything that had been building up inside of her since the last time she had been forced to confront what had happened, like blowing a pressure valve. All the anger, sorrow, grief and guilt. All the thoughts of what might have been if she’d done something or said something different, of what kind of person she might have been if her mother had never taken them into the bank to ask for an overdraft. If she hadn’t been so full of herself or made herself stand out to get his attention, the attention she’d so desperately wanted. If she hadn’t liked Ian so much, if she hadn’t wanted him to like her. If she hadn’t said, yes please.

The battle that Willow fought on a daily basis was between her child’s mind and her adult one. Now in the present she knew well enough what had happened to her. Although she’d never been able to bear the idea of counseling, of talking things through with some well-meaning stranger, after the divorce forced her to really consider how the past was influencing her life now, she could say with some certainty that she had been groomed. That Ian had spent months preparing her for what he wanted. She knew that those two words, yes please, had been put in her mouth, without her realizing. Willow knew all of that perfectly well in her adult mind, but it was the child’s mind, the little girl, who didn’t know or understand what was going on until it was all too late and there was no way out, that was the voice she had to fight to keep locked away. The voice that told her it was her choice, her fault, that she had wanted it to happen, that
she
had made it happen.

All these toxic background thoughts that polluted her head on a daily basis, often without her present mind even registering them, had spewed out of her in a frenzy of emotion, like lancing a septic boil; venting the poison eased the pain, temporarily at least.

Holly, who felt every beat of anguish with her, had held her in her arms as they stood before the window and let her cry until she saw Chloe and the twins trailing back along the shore, pockets bulging with what was no doubt another precious collection of stones. Then she had pushed Willow’s hair back from her forehead, lifted her chin and kissed her, telling her to go and wash her face, since the girls were coming back.

Previously, that would have been that; they wouldn’t talk about what they never talked about for as long as possible, and for a few days, perhaps even for a week or two, there would be a feeling of acceptance, of a slate wiped clean. There would be the potential of a fresh start, of the future spreading
out before them like a blank page, as the tide of their fury swept back out to sea. Usually Willow was resolved to enjoy this time, one of the rare periods of calm between the storms that almost always raged in her heart. And here, at her sister’s house, where Holly had labored so faithfully to make a home free from anguish, was normally the perfect place.