Or was she?
A voice of doubt echoed in her head.
‘I went to see Jim,’ she said finally, her heartbeat almost banging out of her ribcage.
‘Jim phoned here,’ challenged her mother. ‘He hasn’t seen you.’
She took a moment to think, but she could come up with no convincing excuse.
‘I’ve been walking,’ she said at last, her voice shimmering with emotional restraint. I
t wasn’t exactly a lie.
‘What were you doing at the Lake House then?’
Her mother’s voice sounded odd. Jennifer knew the signs. Knew what was coming next. That the volcano was ready to erupt.
‘You were with Bryn Johnson, weren’t you,’ she said. It was an accusation, not a question.
Jennifer turned and started to walk back down the stairs, counting her steps as she tried to control her breathing. She knew she had to get back outside and run. She had no idea where to.
‘Weren’t you?’ screamed her mother from the mezzanine.
‘I have to go,’ said Jennifer, quickening her pace, not daring to turn around.
‘Where are you going? Come back here this minute and tell me where you were!’ cried Sylvia, her voice echoing around the cavernous atrium space.
Jennifer was at the bottom of the stairs now, her eyes fixed on the front door. Suddenly she heard a thud behind her, and then another, a toppling domino chain of noise that made her stop in her tracks. She turned in time to see her mother bounce twice off the final few steps, landing on the hard walnut with a sickening crack.
Jennifer screamed and ran towards her. Throwing herself to her knees, she touched her mother’s cold face, recoiling in horror as she realised that Sylvia wasn’t moving.
‘Mom!’ she cried, looking around frantically, spotting a slipper on the stairs and then a trickle of blood oozing on to the brown floor.
Her hands were shaking. She ran to the phone on the cabinet in the hall and dialled 911, screaming at them to come to Casa D’Or as quickly as they could. Still trembling, she tried to contact her father, but his secretary told her that he had left for the day.
Tears were streaming down her face as she kneeled back down, desperately wondering what she could do. Only minutes before, she had thought her life could not get any worse, that she could sink to no further depths of misery, and yet touching her mother’s neck, feeling the pulse get weaker and weaker, she felt as if her own life was being drained out of her body.
Sylvia’s face was ghostly pale, and quite beautiful, like the moon.
‘Mom, please. Stay with me. I love you,’ whispered Jennifer. It was such a clear and definite thought, she wondered why she had not told her mother so every day of her life.
She heard the sound of tyres on the gravel but could not move. She took hold of her mother’s hand and did not let go until she heard footsteps behind her.
‘Oh God!’ cried her father as he ran across the hallway.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ said Jennifer, getting to her feet to meet him.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I was coming down the stairs. She was behind me, standing at the top.’ She pointed to the mezzanine. ‘She was upset.’
David Wyatt took a sharp intake of breath, then squatted down on his haunches to stroke his wife’s forehead.
Jennifer felt as if the world had stopped turning, as if she were suspended in space. She closed her eyes, wishing she had super-powers, that she could make the earth spin back on its axis and rewind time, but when she opened them again, she saw her father hunched over her mother’s body, and it was the saddest thing she had ever seen.
Somewhere in the distance she could hear sirens.
She went to the door to wait for them, as if staring down the oak-lined drive would make the ambulance come quicker. At last she saw a flash of red light coming closer and closer. Perhaps it was not too late, she thought, the beat of her heart speeding up.