The Game You Played (17 page)

Monday morning

TYING THE TOWEL AROUND MY MIDSECTION, I dripped water to the bedroom. It felt wrong, standing in this room without Phoebe. Like there was only half of me here. There was no Phoebe asleep in the bed like every other morning. The house was empty—just a house made of brick and wood.

I was just going through the motions as I dressed and stepped in front of the full-length mirror. I straightened my tie and stared at the face that stared back at me, my skin reddened in patches by the hot shower.

Who the hell was I? I’d lost my son and now my wife.

I needed to talk sense into Phoebe. She’d stayed overnight at Nan’s—that was enough time to get her head a bit straight. Just days ago, I thought we were starting to get our lives sorted again. She’d come out to a work dinner with me, and she’d handled it well. And she’d been taking care of the wall garden. Little steps, but positive ones.

But all along, this thing with the notes had been happening, and I’d had no clue. Until it all exploded.

I almost wished the police had charged her and put her into my custody. House arrest, or something like that. But I guessed they couldn’t do that. Hell, I remembered reading about a guy who faked his own death and he didn’t get charged. They’d called it pseudocide. Did they have a fancy name for what my wife had just done? Probably not. Probably no one in the history of kids being abducted had ever done what she had.

I tried to ignore the voice hammering at the back of my brain, telling me things were never going to be okay with Phoebe again, let alone Phoebe and me.

Picking up my briefcase, I headed out of the house. My first stop was the local hardware store to pick up some pots and plants and potting mix. Then I drove to Phoebe’s grandmother’s.

Bernice Wick stared at me curiously from the front step of her house as I parked my car outside Phoebe’s nan’s. Bernice seemed to spend a crazy amount of time out there, just watching people go past. She revolted me. People who threw their lives away were bloody wastes of space.

I lugged the stuff from the hardware store up Nan’s path, taking me three trips. I rapped on the door.

Phoebe answered it.

I wanted to see relief on her face. Or regret. Something. But her eyes showed nothing at all.

“I got some pots and things to replace the broken ones,” I started. “And I’ll fix up the yard.”

“I already did that yesterday. You can leave the new stuff here on the porch, and I’ll take it inside.”

“I’ll help you.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Phoebe, please, don’t be like that. I’m your husband. I just want things to get back to normal.”

She pulled her mouth in tight in a way that reminded me of her grandmother. “You mean with you and me and
her
? That kind of normal?”

“There is no
her
. Look . . . it was wrong of me to say I didn’t drop in on someone that night. But she’s just a client. We talked business. It helped get my mind off things.” It was a carefully rehearsed speech that I’d made up while I was at home. I tried to make it sound ad lib.

“And you got close enough to rub bodies and smell of her perfume?”

“What? No. We shook hands.”

“And somehow the perfume jumped onto your neck.”

“I—”

“Don’t bother.” She crinkled her eyebrows together. “You know what, I just realised that I know that perfume.
I remember it.
She’s someone I know, isn’t she?”

“Stop making something out of this that it isn’t. Yes, you’ve probably met her. You’ve met a lot of my clients.”

“If she’s just a client, then why are you so secretive about her name?”

“Because I’m not dragging her into this, that’s why.”

“You think I’m going to go and do something nuts if I find out who she is, is that it? Start sending her letters or something?”

“No, I don’t think you’d do that.”

“Why not? I just wrote those letters about Tommy, right?” Her shoulders slumped then, and she looked defeated. Was that her admission that she’d written them? It was probably the best I was going to get from her.

“Phoebe, I’ll forget those letters if you will. We don’t have to talk about them ever again. And I know you don’t believe me, but I haven’t been seeing another woman—not in any romantic way. Trust me, I wasn’t.”

“Even if that’s true, and I don’t know if it is, you’ve been seeing a woman you haven’t told me about. Lots of times. The same woman.”

Those wide eyes of hers—so like Tommy’s—were drilling into me. “Okay, yes.”
Why did I just admit that?

“And talking about me—all your problems with me.”

“It wasn’t like that.”
It was exactly like that.

“Just go, Luke.”

I inhaled the cold winter air, knowing I needed to change tactics. “You can’t stay here. You know you’ll start going around the bend spending all that time with Nan by yourself. No offence to Nan. Speaking of which, how is she going to cope if you have another sleepwalk episode?”

“I was fine last night. I’ve got the new meds now.” She crossed her arms.

“You’ve got another appointment with Dr Moran this afternoon. I’ll take you.”

“No, I’ll get there myself.”

“Why are you being so difficult? I’m just trying to help.”

“I’m not being difficult. I just don’t need your help.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere with her. The more I was trying, the more she was digging her heels in. Maybe it was better to leave her be for a couple of days and then she’d be ready to come back home.

Monday afternoon

DR. MORAN’S OFFICE SMELLED OF LAVENDER. The walls were deeply lilac. The framed paintings were that type they call naïve art, with the perspective all wrong, giving it a childlike look. I was never sure if Dr Moran thought the paintings would help people get in touch with their inner child or if she’d bought them because she genuinely liked them.

In this office, I always had the feeling I was in a dollhouse and that her patients were the dolls she played with.

How are you today, Mrs PoppyFlower? You look sad. Never mind, here’s your medicine . . .

Dr Moran was dressed in a crisp white shirt and perfectly pressed pants. Even the smile on her face was perfectly pressed. “It’s good to see you today. How are you? How have you been sleeping at night?”

“Much better.” I wriggled back in the chair and placed my feet on the footrest. Dr Moran was a big believer in footrests. She had one herself.

Dr Moran had called me earlier to make sure I was coming today. It felt like I was being managed between her, Luke, and Trent Gilroy.

“The new medication’s been okay?” she asked.

“Yes. I slept straight through. No waking, no sleepwalking.”

“That’s very good to hear. So, what’s been happening?”

“I . . . I’ve been . . . existing.”

“Getting by?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to chat about the letters?”

“I am.”

“Good. What do you remember?”

“I still don’t remember anything. Maybe I made myself forget?”

“That’s possible. How about we talk about how you’ve been feeling the past month or so.”

“Okay. But there’s not much to tell. I’ve just been . . . numb.”

“Anything else?”

“And angry. It’s been a whole six months without Tommy. With no resolution.”

“Can you tell me what kinds of things you thought about when you were feeling angry?”

“I just felt like the police weren’t doing enough.”

“They weren’t coming up with any answers?”

“Yes, that. It was their job to find him, and they hadn’t done that.”

“You were angry at them?”

“Not exactly. Just . . . I just felt rage. In general.”

“Phoebe, were you keeping a journal or diary or anything this year?”

“No.”

“Poetry? Ever write that?”

“I’m not a poet.”

“I was trying to help jog your memory of the letters. You must have had the paper and envelopes somewhere. A sleepwalker has to start somewhere. In your waking hours before all this happened, you would have known where to find those things.”

“I don’t remember ever seeing them before.”

She sucked in her lips, moistening them. “I’ll let you know that Detective Gilroy invited me to view the film of you putting the envelope in your mailbox. It was helpful for me to see what you were like that night.”

“What did you think?” I said, hiding the fact that a tiny part of me hoped that she’d have noticed something different to everyone else.

“Well, you were certainly in some other kind of state. It seems to me that you need yet more time before any memories return to you. If we can figure out how you came to write the letters, it might help us to discuss your feelings at the time. It can be difficult to heal things sometimes if we can’t see them clearly. Also, you seem to want to remember.”

“I do.” I eyed the clean, white ceiling. “Do you have any idea why I would choose to use Nan’s old typewriter to write the letters on, when I’ve never used it before? I mean, I didn’t even know she still had the thing. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid. I’m not even sure I’d know how to use it.”

“Well, I can’t claim to have used one either. But they don’t look very technical.” She gave a half grin. “It is an interesting point, though. There must have been something in your subconscious that drew you to it.” Dropping the grin, her eyes grew quizzical.

“You ended up in your grandmother’s yard that night, right? Trying to get inside her toolshed? What was that all about?”

“I honestly don’t know. I dreamed that Tommy was there and he wanted to get into the shed. So I was trying to help him.”

“Looks like the sleepwalking is connected with old memories.”

“That’s what I thought. But none of it really makes sense.”

“Well, people do a lot of things when sleepwalking that don’t make a lot of sense. They drive cars and crash them. They write nonsensical stories. They can even get violent.”

“I did something worse. I wrote notes that made me believe that we were close to finding Tommy’s abductor.”

“Maybe that’s the real reason you wrote them,” she said gently. “Perhaps you wanted so badly to get answers that you invented this person.”

“Maybe. It terrifies me to think I’ve done something like this and I can’t recall it. I could do something else and not remember it. Something worse.”

“Well, we’re going to work on making sure that doesn’t happen. Like I said, it seems you need a little more time. We’ll return to this at the next appointment. Let’s just concentrate on you for the rest of this session. How are things between you and Luke? Things were quite . . . tense when you two came in.”

Thinking of Luke made me suck in a breath of resentment. “Things got even tenser. I found out that Luke’s been fucking some other woman.”

I didn’t know for certain that he’d been fucking her, but he’d smelled of her perfume. That, and the cringing look on his face, was enough to tell me that something had happened between him and her.

She gasped, her fingers touching her lips. “Oh no. . . .” She straightened herself then, nodding in a more business-like way. “You’ve had an extremely rough couple of days.”

“You could say that.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“When Luke and I got home from our visit with you, we had an argument. Luke went out for a walk and came back an hour later smelling of perfume. He admitted he’s been going to see someone. I moved out, and I’m at my grandmother’s now.”

It hurt retelling those scenes. It seemed like someone else’s life.

I could tell that she was searching for something to say that was free of bias. She was recalibrating her vision of Luke in her head, trying to match what I’d previously told her of him with this new, tarnished vision. Since I’d started seeing her, soon after Tommy’s disappearance, I’d told her the same
perfect couple
story that I’d told the police.

“Oh . . . Phoebe . . .” She breathed in and out heavily. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“Tell me, how has all this been affecting you? What are you feeling?”

“Empty.”

“So, you’re living with your grandmother now?” She furrowed her brow. “I remember that you haven’t had the smoothest relationship with your grandmother in the past.”

“She can be a hard person to be around. But she’s been okay.”
No, she hasn’t been okay. She’s been her usual critical self.

“You’re planning on staying with her? No plans to head anywhere else?”

“No plans yet.”

“Of course. I’m sure you’re still feeling numb and bruised. So, all of this with Luke came as a complete shock?”

I chewed my top lip. “I knew something was happening before the night I found out. But I didn’t admit it to myself. I didn’t want to see it.”

“What didn’t you want to see, Phoebe?”

I tried to hold back. I didn’t want to talk about this. I wanted her to make me remember writing those rhymes, but we’d gotten nowhere with that.

“I didn’t want to see that I’m a disappointment to him,” I found myself saying in answer to her. I folded my arms, trying to barricade myself.

“Why did you think you disappointed Luke?”

My eyes closed, betraying the barrier I’d tried to put up. “Because I’m not all he thought I was.”

“Luke had a different picture of you?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think he had a different picture?”

I hesitated, the truth of Luke and me welling inside my chest.

I wanted to talk.

“Because he never knew me,” I said, the words flattening as I spoke them.

“He didn’t know you?”

“No. Luke had always pursued me, I mean, from the time we were teenagers. But I didn’t give in. And I think, because of that, he built me up in his mind to be something more than what I was. Every year that he didn’t have me, the more special I became—in his eyes.”

“In other words, he put you on a pedestal?”

“Exactly. And in a way, that was his biggest criticism of me. I wasn’t good enough as I was. He just saw some ideal of me.”

She sat back, eyeing me thoughtfully. “What things about you do you think Luke doesn’t know?”

“He doesn’t know what drives me.”

“What drives you, Phoebe?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s that feeling of having a warm body. Of feeling totally alive and awake.”

“Can you tell me the last times you felt that way?”

“When I lived in London I felt like that. As a theatrical actor. It didn’t pay much, but I felt alive in those days. There was an energy. I travelled a lot. Travel is easy from London. Things were constantly moving.”

“When do you think things stopped moving?”

“I guess, when I became pregnant with Tommy. Luke and I married, and we moved back to where we started. Everything became centred on Luke, and he expected that I’d be happy with that. He was working around the clock to be able to afford the house we have now. There was no time or room for anything else.”

“And then when Tommy was born?”

I stared out the window, at the arch of bare-branched trees that lined the avenue. Dark, brittle sunlight had turned the scene sepia. “When Tommy was born, he was like this little squashy alien being who I knew nothing about, and who knew nothing about himself. He was sick for the first few weeks. It was hard for me to accept that he was even mine.”

“Am I right in saying you felt a bit of distance from your baby?”

“Yes. I wasn’t an instant mother. At least, I didn’t feel like one.”

“And in the months after the birth? How were things then?”

“I guess . . . I always felt like a bit of an imposter being a mother. It wasn’t something I was qualified for.”

A smile stretched the edges of her pink-lipstick mouth. “It’s a job none of us feel qualified for.”

“I just wasn’t the mother I should have been.”

“You didn’t feel adequate?”

“No.”

She hesitated, tapping her pen lightly on her notebook. “It’s a common experience for mothers to feel inadequate.”

I stared at her. “I wasn’t just
inadequate
. I didn’t protect him from someone stealing him away.” Something inside me broke. “I can’t stand it. The weight of it. I can’t do this anymore. After the first weeks, people started saying that time would find me in a better place. I’m not in a better place.”

“Can you tell me the place you’re in?”

“It’s so deep. There’s no light. I feel . . .
hate
. Hate for everyone this hasn’t happened to. Because they get to live in a different world to me. Hate for myself for not protecting Tommy.”

I cried, listening to myself speak words that I didn’t know I’d been holding inside.
I hated people for not being me?

Dr Moran fetched me tissues, saying soothing things I could barely hear.

A lull fell in the room. I’d given away too much of myself. I could see that her eyes had changed.

“Phoebe, I’m going to ask this directly. Have you had thoughts of harming yourself lately?”

“No,” I lied. I wasn’t ready to tell about what I’d done. If I did, she might want to put me in a facility somewhere. And I didn’t want that. I needed my own space. A cocoon.

She didn’t look convinced. “I always wondered in our earlier sessions if you were holding things back. I want you to get the most out of these sessions, and you won’t if you hold back. I’ve sensed anger from you, but you haven’t brought those feelings to the surface. Except for little bits and pieces.”

“I’m trying to put it behind me, I guess.”

“It’s hard to put things behind us when they’re following us everywhere. Sometimes we need to stop and turn around and face those things.”

“I don’t want to talk about this stuff anymore.”

“Okay, but we’ll return to it at your next session. I think we’ll make another appointment in three days. Right now, we’ll concentrate on small steps to get you back on that road of having a warm body again. Tell me, how often do you do things you enjoy doing? And how often do you see your friends?”

“I can’t say I really have hobbies anymore. I don’t see my friends very much. I don’t have much in common with them anymore. They have
lives
, and I don’t. They’re all doing things and going places, and I’m not. It makes me feel worse, so I avoid seeing them.”