The other one waved a hand at her—or at me, I couldn’t be sure. Then she turned and slowly hobbled off along the lane.
“Bloody nutcase,” Louise spat as she approached the house. “She’s a menace, that Sage woman. Don’t engage with her, I’m telling you. Don’t let her through your door. She’s a liar and a con artist, all she wants is money.” She paused to catch her breath, frowning at me. “Well. You look about as awful as I feel.” I opened my mouth and shut it again. “Is your niece at home?”
I showed her into the house. “I’ll just get her for you,” I said, but Louise was already at the foot of the staircase, calling Lena’s name. Then she went into the kitchen and sat down at the table to wait.
After a moment, Lena appeared. Her typical expression, that combination of haughtiness and boredom so reminiscent of you, was gone. She greeted Louise meekly, although I’m not even sure if Louise noticed because her eye was trained elsewhere, on the river outside or some place beyond.
Lena sat down at the table, raising her hands to wind her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. She lifted her chin slightly, as though she were preparing herself for something, an interview. An interrogation. I may as well have been invisible for all the attention they paid me, but I remained in the room. I stood by the counter, not relaxed but on the balls of my feet, in case I needed to intervene.
Louise blinked, slowly, and her gaze finally came to rest on Lena, who held it for a second before looking down at the table.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Whittaker. I’m really sorry.”
Louise said nothing. Tears coursed down the lines of her face, in runnels carved from months of unrelenting grief.
“I’m so sorry,” Lena repeated. She was crying too now, letting her hair down again, twisting it through her fingers like a little girl.
“I wonder if you’ll ever know,” Louise said at last, “how it feels to realize that you didn’t know your own child.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I have all her things. Her clothes, her books, her music. The pictures she treasured. I know her friends and the people she admired, I know what she loved. But that wasn’t her. Because I didn’t know who she loved. She had a life—a whole life—that I didn’t know about. The most important part of her, I didn’t know.” Lena tried to speak, but Louise went on. “The thing is, Lena, that you could have helped me. You could have told me about it. You could have told me when you first found out. You could have come to me and told me that my daughter had got herself caught up in something, something she couldn’t control, something you knew, you must have known, would end up being harmful to her.”
“But I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” Again Lena tried to say something, and again Louise wouldn’t let her.
“Even if you were blind enough or stupid enough or careless enough not to see how much trouble she was in, you could still have helped me. You could have come to me after she died and said, this isn’t something you did or didn’t do. This isn’t your fault, this isn’t your husband’s fault. You could have stopped us from driving ourselves mad. But you didn’t. You chose not to. All that time, you said nothing. All this time, you . . . And worse, even worse than that, you let him . . .” Her voice rose and then disappeared into the air, like smoke.
“Get away with it?” Lena finished the sentence. She was no longer crying, and although her voice rose, it was strong, not weak. “Yes. I did, and it made me sick. It made me fucking sick, but I did it for her. Everything I have done, I did for Katie.”
“Don’t you say her name to me,” Louise hissed. “Don’t you dare.”
“Katie, Katie, Katie!” Lena was half on her feet, leaning forward, her face inches from Louise’s nose. “Mrs. Whittaker”—she collapsed back into her seat—“I loved her. You know how much I loved her. I did what she wanted me to do. I did what she asked of me.”
“It wasn’t your decision, Lena, to keep something as important as that from me, her mother—”
“No, it wasn’t my decision, it was hers! I know you think you have the right to know everything, but you don’t. She wasn’t a child, she wasn’t a little girl.”
“She was my little girl!” Louise’s voice was a wail, a ululation. I realized I was gripping the counter, that I, too, was about to cry.
Lena spoke again, her voice softer now, supplicating. “Katie made a choice. She made a decision and I honoured it.” More gently still, as though knowing she was moving onto dangerous ground, “And I’m not the only one. Josh did, too.”
Louise drew back her hand and hit Lena once, very hard, across the face. The smack resounded, echoing off the walls. I leaped forward and grabbed Louise’s arm. “No!” I shouted. “That’s enough! That’s enough!” I tried to pull her to her feet. “You need to go.”
“Leave her!” Lena snapped. The left side of her face was an angry red, but her expression was calm. “Stay out of it, Julia. She can hit me if she wants. She can scratch my eyes out, pull my hair. She can do whatever she wants to me. What does it matter now?”
Louise’s mouth was open, I could smell her sour breath. I let go.
“Josh didn’t say anything because of you,” she said, wiping spittle from her lips. “Because you told him not to say anything.”
“No, Mrs. Whittaker.” Lena’s tone was perfectly even as she placed the back of her right hand against her cheek to soothe it. “That isn’t true. Josh kept his mouth shut because of Katie. Because she asked him to. And then later on, because he wanted to protect you and his dad. He thought that it would hurt you too much. To know that she’d been . . .” She shook her head. “He’s young, he thought—”
“Don’t tell me what my son thought,” Louise said. “What he was trying to do. Just don’t.” She raised her hand to her throat—a reflex. No, not a reflex: she was gripping the blue bird that hung on her chain between thumb and forefinger. “This,” she said, a hiss, not a word. “It wasn’t from you, was it?” Lena hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. “It was from him. Wasn’t it? He gave it to her.” Louise pushed her chair back, scraping its feet across the tiles. She pulled herself upright and with a vicious tug ripped the chain from her neck, slamming it down on the table in front of Lena. “He gave that thing to her, and you let me hang it around my neck.”
Lena closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head again. The meek, apologetic girl who’d crept into the kitchen a few minutes ago was gone and in her stead sat someone different, someone older, the adult to Louise’s desperate, intemperate child. All at once I had the clearest memory of you, a little younger than Lena is now, one of the few memories I have of you sticking up for me. There was a teacher at my school who had accused me of taking something that didn’t belong to me, and I remembered you admonishing her. You were clear-sighted and cool, and you didn’t raise your voice when you told her how wrong she was to make accusations without evidence, and she was cowed by you. I remembered how proud I was of you then, and I had the same feeling here, the same sensation of heat in my chest.
Louise began to speak again, her voice very low. “Explain this to me, then,” she said, sitting back down, “since you know so much. Since you understand so much. If Katie loved that man, and if he loved her back, then why? Why did she do what she did? What did he do to her? To drive her to that?”
Lena turned her gaze to me. She looked afraid, I think, or maybe just resigned—I couldn’t quite read her expression. She watched me for a second before closing her eyes, squeezing tears out of them. When she spoke again, her voice was higher, tighter than before.
“He didn’t drive her to that. It wasn’t him.” She sighed. “Katie and I argued,” she said. “I wanted her to stop it, to stop seeing him. I didn’t think it was right. I thought she was going to get into trouble. I thought . . .” She shook her head. “I just didn’t want her to see him anymore.”
A flash of understanding crossed Louise’s face; she understood, in that moment, as did I.