CHAPTER 59
Four o’clock in the morning. Simone stirs, then comes to, dreaming of Lucy standing at the top of a tall building, teetering on the edge. Simone reaches to save her but misses.
The world outside stripes with headlights, and Simone sits up, terrified, but the car fades into the distance. She wonders if they are simply circling her, these near misses. The drone. Soon, they will come for her, to restore the natural order of things. She took one life. Somebody must take hers.
She looks in on Lucy’s room. Her breathing is regular and deep.
Some feeling emerges now, one of those emotions that can only surface in the sea-blue night air, because it brings truth with it. The kind of thing you are not ready to admit in the light of the day, things the sunlight shines too harshly on.
Are they doing the right thing? Simone pushes the question down.
She goes into the kitchen, the tiles cool underneath her feet.
The dishwasher shows FINISHED on its digital display, and Simone opens the door and lets the steam swirl around her bare legs.
Her eyes close. She could be back there, in the kitchen, just after closing.
Pots washed, stainless-steel sides wiped down.
The hum of the fridges. Leftovers packaged in a white cardboard box to be taken and eaten at home – or more often sitting at traffic lights, unable to resist. This is her life. This was her life.
She checks the phone, and sees with shock that Moody sent a text just after midnight. Fear and something else plunge through her, optimism and anxiety entwined. She opens it:
A cop friend has told me this: the British man on the bus has already been interviewed as a witness.
He is a man named Max Pearson. He was an inspector at the camp – has been one for twenty years – then when he visited, he says one of Lucy’s camp mates recommended the trip to him to stargaze at Nueva Rosita.
The night of the kidnapping he was inspecting another camp, with multiple alibis.
He is, I’m afraid to say, squeaky clean. British thing a coincidence.
Simone grips the table. Her insides are plunging downwards. It isn’t him.
It isn’t him.
But this man – is he the same man who told the police Simone and Lucy were on the coach? She frantically types that back to Moody, who, awake, tells her they aren’t sure who it is who said that.
But who is the kidnapper, then? They have chased him down, this red herring, and for nothing.
Simone thinks she’s going to be sick.
Only a few moments later, Lucy appears, looking sleep straggled.
Is it Simone’s imagination, or does she seem much too thin?
Taken from her bed, bound and gagged, whole life displaced, subsisting on next to nothing while on the run.
It wouldn’t be surprising, but Simone doesn’t like to see it.
Lucy waves a hand in acknowledgement and makes a tea.
She looks like meat. Rack of ribs. Butterfly-wing shoulder blades.
‘Something woke me.’
‘It was probably me, checking on you,’ Simone tells her. She takes a breath. ‘Look, Moody has messaged.’
‘And?’
‘The kidnapper isn’t the British man,’ Simone says gently. She relays the rest of Moody’s information to Lucy.
‘What? No?’ Lucy says, her face stricken. ‘Please say no?’
‘I’m really sorry. He might still try to look for him. For the kidnapper.’
Lucy says nothing, turning away from Simone. They stand together in silence, then after the longest time, Lucy speaks into the dim air. ‘I feel like a fool. We went haring after that lead.’
‘I know.’
Another long, bloated pause. A sad pause. ‘We’ve got to go, haven’t we?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘If we ever get to the Bahamas, what are we going to do?’
It’s a resigned and disappointed question that cracks Simone’s heart open. They’re going. Their future sealed.
The room seems to change with the knowledge.
Her daughter is accepting this is the next step. Moody, once a bright optimistic star on the horizon, is slowly dying. He has only the tools available to him. He can’t change the facts. He can’t make a random person a criminal, even though that is precisely what happened to Simone herself.
‘I don’t know. Let things die down. Begin to live more normally …’
‘Do you think I’ll still be able to act?’
Simone regards her daughter across the table. The kitchen has begun, over the last few days, to smell like home – that is to say, like nothing. They have stopped noticing it. It’s the longest place they have stayed since the kidnap.
The answer, Simone knows, is no. And she’s pretty sure Lucy knows it, too. She tries dark humour. ‘Well, it’s a stepping stone, isn’t it? Not much difference between notoriety and fame.’
Luckily, the joke lands. ‘Ha,’ Lucy says. ‘Well.’
‘You’ll be a hero. You survived a kidnap,’ Simone says softly, sadly.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy replies. She lifts her chin. ‘I don’t know why, but I feel sure I will attend RADA. One day.’
‘You never know. Instinct counts for a lot.’
‘You can eat Caribbean rum cake in the Bahamas. Don’t you like that?’ And it’s this grasping, juvenile kindness that makes Simone cry.
‘I do. Hard to find with no alcohol,’ she says, covering up her tears.
‘Can you make me something?’ Lucy says, smiling slightly, her hand to her chin, elbow sliding along the table. It’s a childlike pose, something from the deep past.
‘Anything,’ Simone says.
‘Meringue.’
‘An excellent choice.’ Simone rises to her feet, finds the eggs.
She separates them deftly, fat round button yolks into a pot to save for omelettes – despite the last time she made them, she still can’t resist them – whites slinked into a bowl, beaten by hand the old-fashioned way.
Good cooking should be painful on the muscles.
She gets them quickly to fluffy, as cotton-like as the clouds outside, puts the oven on super low.
‘Why didn’t you want to live out at drama school?’ Simone asks. ‘Can you tell me?’ They have less to lose now. Moody’s text has sealed their bleak future, and Simone feels able to ask.
Lucy looks directly at Simone, and, for just a fleeting second, she sees Damien. Something about the open expression. ‘Honestly …?’ she says, just the slightest lilt of a question in her voice.
‘Yes, honestly! Of course, honestly.’
‘Because …’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you remember my high-school leavers’?’
‘Yes?’ Simone answers, confused. They’d opened Dishes up to everyone, Lucy’s friends, their friends.
‘I keep thinking about something.’
‘What’s that?’ Simone asks, and she knows, somehow, that Lucy is going to say something that will nudge the foundations of their relationship.
‘You were at the little back corridor in Dishes with Dad. Sitting on the step you like. And you – you had a drink.’
‘Yes,’ Simone answers. Her only drink in twenty years. Those two sips with Damien, and they’d thrown the rest away.
‘You had a drink. On my final day of school.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Simone says.
‘I was – God. OK.’ Lucy takes a breath. ‘I was worried that, you know how you always say I’m your … what’s that thing?’
‘Raison d’être,’ Simone says with a smile.
‘Right. And then you’re sitting there drinking on the final day of – of something.’
‘Oh,’ Simone says in a small voice. How strange the parent–child relationship is.
That Simone can view something so simply, with her daughter witnessing it, unseen, taking something so complex from it.
‘No, no, no. I was trying it for a recipe. And a little toast to you. It was nothing. Hated it. I had two mouthfuls!’
‘Oh.’ Lucy pauses, gazing into the middle distance. ‘But.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t want to leave you, OK?’ Lucy tells her. ‘I didn’t want to … leave us, I suppose.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just didn’t want to.’
‘You’re kind of supposed to want to,’ Simone says delicately, marvelling that Lucy felt the same as she did, her shameful secret. ‘You didn’t want to leave me because you didn’t want to leave me, or because you didn’t want me to be without you?’
It’s a nuanced question, and Simone watches Lucy comprehend it. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I guess, both. Worried when I saw the drink that I’m some sort of – linchpin, I suppose.’
‘Ah. I see,’ Simone answers. ‘I can see how you’d think that.’ She pauses, thinking. ‘The plight of the only child. You thought I’d fall apart without you.’
‘Right,’ Lucy says, a quick smile. ‘Loved too much.’
‘You can never love anybody too much.’
‘I just thought of all the things we wouldn’t do. You bringing leftovers home for no one. I didn’t want to do it yet.’
‘Right,’ Simone says softly, thinking. ‘You think I need you in order to be stable and happy. And sober?’
‘Well, yeah,’ Lucy answers.
‘Not so. I’m not an addict. Lucy, I can’t tell you that enough.’
‘But you will be so sad without me.’
And Simone closes her eyes, now, against this statement. For all her careful parenting, for all the books she read and the reactions she controlled and tried not to have, still, it got her in the Achilles’ heel.
‘God, Lucy,’ she tells her, and though she wants to say, Yes!
I don’t want you to go! The meaning of my whole life has been you!
For almost twenty years! she doesn’t. She says instead, ‘I would always want you to go and live your absolute best life. It makes me so, so happy that you would do that. Happier, actually, than if you stayed.’
‘Thank you for saying that,’ Lucy says.
And it isn’t a lie. It’s just that both things are true: the pleasure/pain of parenthood. ‘I’m here. I love you. You are my raison d’être, but I have many of them. You never need to worry about me.’
‘The drink was nothing?’ Lucy checks.
‘No!’ Simone says.
‘It’s like –’ Lucy appears to be trying to find the words – ‘parents have to let their children go?’ As she says this, her eyes lock on to Simone’s. A beat. ‘You know?’ she adds softly.
‘I know,’ Simone replies, her mind whirring. But what does Lucy truly mean, here? Such a strange and direct statement. Simone wonders if she doesn’t know, or isn’t ready to know, even here, in the blue hour of four o’clock in the morning.
Later, Simone goes back to bed. Lucy lets herself out on to the porch. This time, Simone doesn’t stop her.
They wake up to the smell of meringue, which feels a little like home. Simone does her best to forget what Lucy said. What Lucy meant, what she could possibly mean. And how she could do it. Parents have to let their children go.