“I don’t see why not,” said Madeline. She had no patience for this sort of talk. It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.
“But it will be nice for Jane and Ziggy, living near the beach, I think, I guess, and ah, you know, I just wanted to really thank you, Madeline, for taking Jane under your wing the way you have.” She took her sunglasses off and looked directly at Madeline. Her eyes were pale blue, and she was wearing a frosted pink eye shadow, which wasn’t quite working for her, although Madeline approved of the effort.
“Well, of course,” said Madeline. “It’s hard when you move to a new area and you don’t know anyone.”
“Yes, and Jane has moved so often in the last few years. Ever since she had Ziggy, she can’t seem to stay put, or find a nice circle of friends, and she’d kill me for saying this, it’s just, I’m not sure what’s really going on with her.”
She stopped, looked back over her shoulder at the café and compressed her lips.
“It’s hard when they stop telling you things, isn’t it?” said Madeline after a moment. “I have a teenage daughter. From a previous relationship.” She always felt compelled to clarify this when she spoke about Abigail, and then felt obscurely guilty for doing so. It was like she was separating Abigail out somehow, putting her into a different category. “I don’t know why I was so shocked when Abigail stopped telling me things. That’s what all teenagers do, right? But she was such an open little girl. Of course, Jane isn’t a teenager.”
It was like she’d given Di permission to speak freely. She turned to Madeline enthusiastically. “I know! She’s twenty-four, a grown-up! But they never seem like grown-ups. Her dad tells me I’m worrying over nothing. It’s true that Jane is doing a beautiful job bringing up Ziggy, and she supports herself, won’t take a cent from us! I slip money into her pockets like a pickpocket. Or the opposite of a pickpocket. But she’s changed. Something has changed. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like this deep unhappiness that she tries to hide. I don’t know if it’s depression or drugs or an eating disorder or what. She got so painfully thin! She used to be quite voluptuous.”
“Well,” said Madeline, thinking, If it’s an eating disorder, you probably gave it to her.
“Why am I telling you this?” said Di. “You won’t want to be her friend anymore! You’ll think she’s a drug addict! She’s not a drug addict! She only has three out of the ten top signs of drug addiction. Or four at the most. You can’t believe what you read on the Internet, anyway.”
Madeline laughed, and Di laughed too.
“Sometimes I feel like waving my hand in front of her eyes and saying, ‘Jane, Jane, are you still in there?’”
“I’m pretty sure she’s—”
“She hasn’t had a boyfriend since before Ziggy was born. She broke up with this boy. Zach. We all loved Zach, gorgeous boy, and Jane was very upset over the breakup, very upset, but gosh, that was what, six years ago now? She couldn’t still be grieving over Zach, could she? He wasn’t that good-looking!”
“I don’t know,” said Madeline. She wondered wistfully if her coffee was sitting on the table up at Blue Blues getting cold.
“Next thing she’s pregnant, and supposedly Zach isn’t the father, although we did always wonder about that, but she was absolutely adamant that Zach was not the father. She said it over and over again. A one-night stand, she said. No way of contacting the father. Well, you know, she was halfway through her arts-law degree, it wasn’t ideal, but everything happens for a reason, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” said Madeline, who did not believe that at all.
“She’d been told by a doctor that she was likely to have a lot of trouble falling pregnant naturally, so it just seemed like it was meant to be. And then my darling dad died while Jane was pregnant and that’s why it seemed like his soul might have come back in—”
“Mu-um! Madeline!”
Jane’s mother startled, and they both turned away from the sea to see Jane standing on the boardwalk outside Blue Blues, waving frantically. “Your coffee is ready!”
“Coming!” called Madeline.
“I’m sorry,” said Di as they walked back up from the beach. “I talk too much. Can you please forget everything I said? It’s just that when I saw poor little Ziggy didn’t get asked to that child’s birthday party, I felt like crying. I’m so emotional these days, and then we had to get up so early today, I’m feeling quite light-headed. I didn’t used to be, I used to be quite hard-hearted. It’s my age, I’m fifty-eight. My friends are the same, we went out for lunch the other day, we’ve been friends since our children started kindergarten! We were all talking about how we feel like fifteen-year-olds, weeping at the drop of a hat.”
Madeline stopped walking. “Di,” she said.
Di turned to her nervously, as if she were about to be told off. “Yes?”
“I’ll keep an eye on Jane,” she said. “I promise.”
Gabrielle: See, part of the problem was that Madeline sort of adopted Jane. She was like a crazy, protective big sister. If you ever said anything even mildly critical of her Jane, you’d have Madeline snarling at you like a rabid dog.
20.
It was eleven a.m. on the first day of Ziggy’s school life.
Had he already had his morning tea by now? Was he eating his apple and his cheese and crackers? His tiny box of raisins? Jane’s heart twisted at the thought of him carefully opening his new lunch box. Where would he sit? Who would he talk to? She hoped Chloe and the twins were playing with him, but they could just as easily be ignoring him. It wasn’t like one of the twins would stroll up to Ziggy, hand outstretched, and say, “Why, hello! Ziggy, isn’t it? We met a few weeks back at a playdate. How have you been?”
She stood up from the dining room table where she was working and stretched her arms high above her head. He’d be fine. Every child went to school. They survived. They learned the rules of life.
She went into the tiny kitchen of her new apartment to switch the kettle on for a cup of tea she didn’t especially feel like. It was just an excuse to take a break from the accounts of Perfect Pete’s Plumbing. Pete might be a perfect plumber, but he wasn’t that great at keeping his paperwork in order. Every quarter she received a shoe box filled with an odd assortment of scrunched, smudged, strange-smelling paperwork: invoices, credit card bills and receipts, most of which were not claimable. She could just imagine Pete emptying out his pockets, scooping up all the receipts from the console of his car in one meaty hand, stomping around his house, grabbing every piece of paper he could find before stuffing the lot into the shoe box with a gusty sigh of relief. Job done.