Chapter 17. Ophelia
OPHELIA
The house isn’t much different than when I left it just after New Year’s, save for the overdue bills on the doorstep and the fresh layer of mold on the damp windowsills.
It’s eleven degrees outside, but somehow inside feels even colder. I wrap my flimsy brown jacket tighter around myself, the thick white socks that sit over my tights doing nothing to dull the sting.
It hurt coming back to this house before Christmas, with its empty bookshelves and dusty furniture, but now, where memories of Alex and me sit between the grief and the decay, it’s somehow even worse.
I didn’t see what Morello’s people did to clean up the scene; I just walked, mute and stiff back to Belladonna’s car.
I let their questions wash over me. Are you hurt? Would Laura have been working with anybody? Does she have family we need to silence? Where do you want to go now? Can we clean the cut on your hand?
I only had one answer: Please don’t take me back to Sorrowsong.
Instead, I had Belladonna’s men bring me some clothes and my laptop and drop me here, not that I’ve bothered to change. My leggings are caked in mud and there’s blood beneath my fingernails that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly erase.
I’m disgusted with myself. Disgusted at what I did to her. Disgusted that I was so desperate to leave the snake pit of loss and loneliness and anger and despair that I climbed out of it and took the ladder with me.
I ignore my phone ringing incessantly on the chipped laminate worktop in the kitchen. It takes one, two, three tries for my shaking fingers to plug in the kettle, another two tries to prize open the rusting tea bag tin and throw one into my dad’s favorite mug.
I don’t know what to do.
Sorry wouldn’t cover it, even if she was still alive for me to apologize to.
My tears drip onto the white envelopes as I slice them open. Water, gas, electricity, tax. They amount to almost nothing, but so does my bank balance.
And I’m currently in no state to call the care home and ask for a job.
I hiccup a sob as I bring the mug to my lips, the steam scalding my nose, red and raw from crying.
Tea is pointless without milk.
I flip my phone over, daring to look at the screen. Ten missed calls from Colette. Ten more from Divya and Magda. Four from Vincenzo. Three from Mack, two from Brendan. One from Belladonna.
Endless calls from Alex.
It should warm my heart. It’s all I’ve hoped for.
But it’s a reminder of Laura, of what her phone must’ve looked like: empty, save for anonymous messages to a girl who let her down.
I put down the phone before the tears really come.
Before the regret and the desolation and the self-loathing that I’ve held in for the past eight hours finally hit.
It reduces my knees to jelly on the small, square landing at the top of the stairs, folds me at the middle, spreads a migraine like hot oil through my skull.
For the first time in four and a half long years, I stagger into the larger of the two bedrooms and pull back the pristine covers, slipping beneath the duvet with puffy eyes and a broken heart.
My scream of frustration is muffled by the pillow.
“I need you,” I sob into the dusty fabric. “I need you both, and you aren’t here.”
I AMBLE THROUGH the council estate, corner store bottle of milk dangling from my pinky and lollypop hanging out my mouth.
I lasted four hours without a decent cup of tea before I gave in and shuffled my way down the street in what I am sure is a flattering combination of Alex’s sweatpants and my mom’s old sandals.
For the first time since my parents died, I find myself free of questions.
I know that my parents died as the result of some cheap, heinous deal to keep one of Cain Green’s many affairs under wraps.
I know Bancroft and my mother had an affair.
I know who texted the photo of Alex and me and Bancroft’s body.
I know that Brendan was able to recover Laura’s phone and erase all traces of it.
I know everything.
So where is the satisfaction? Where’s the sense of victory I’ve chased incessantly for five years?
I’ve filled the answers to all my unknowns like the potholes on these shitty Scottish roads, but it feels like they’re only in worse condition.
I just need to get through today. Tomorrow I’ll tackle things like showering and eating and studying.
I nod at Mrs. Smith who lives on the corner, standing in her dressing gown with a cigarette between her lips. She nods back, setting her cup of tea on top of the green wheelie bin beside her. “You got any dishwasher tablets spare, Winters?”
“Haven’t got a dishwasher, Mary.”
She coughs, a heaving, wet cough that racks her whole body. “You should get one.”
“Probably.”
“Is it true? You went to that posh castle school?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it like?”
I pause just past her house, in almost as much disrepair as mine. A heavy sigh has my shoulders sinking. “The food’s good.”
“I bet.” She exhales a thick plume of smoke. “If you see Steve, ask him if he has a dishwasher tablet spare.”
I don’t know how I did this for four years, survived off petrol station bread and my own tears. When I round the corner onto the gray pebble dashed terrace that I call home, my feet come to a stop.
I should be pleased to see him, to discover he hadn’t flown back home yet, but there’s something about that car being here.
A hundred-thousand-pound car parked between houses that cost the same.
Wheels that probably cost a month’s rent each while Mary is trading the items in her kitchen cupboard for dishwasher tablets.
When I reach the ridiculous Land Rover, it’s empty, but the lights are switched on inside the house, something I didn’t bother to do.
The door is unlocked. I kick my sandals off on the peeling vinyl flooring and drag myself into the kitchen.
Alex turns to face me, the room plummeting into silence. He looks tired. He rakes his eyes down my body, and whatever he sees is enough to fill them with something that looks a lot like sadness.
Great.
“For the sake of my carbon footprint, Ophelia, we are really going to have to work on our communication issues.”
I kneel to place the milk in the fridge, but it looks ridiculous now, surrounded by fresh fruit and yogurt and cheese and ready-made meals that Alex has already put there.
The yellow light from the bulb in the fridge swims from the tears I can’t keep at bay, the guilt that sits on my shoulders too heavy for me to stand.
I brace a hand on the bubbling floor in front of me, curling my other against my heart, because it hurts. If it were anyone else stood behind me, I’d be embarrassed about the mangled sob that tears its way out of my throat.
“You can’t just switch all my lights on,” I cry, like that’s the issue here. “I’m trying to keep my bills down.”
A hand settles on my lower back, rubbing a gentle circle. “Let me help with—”
I sit back on my heels, the two of us kneeling in front of the fridge in this tiny kitchen. “You can’t just throw money at everything to fix it,” I snap, even though it’s harsh. He’s exceptionally good at not throwing money at me, at not making me uncomfortable in that way.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I forgot,” I hiccup, through my tears.
“Forgot what?”
“I forgot this.” I wave my hand around the house, then toward the faded picture of my parents pinned to the door. “I forgot them. I forgot Mary from down the road, and I forgot Laura. And you’re all just so out of touch, and I got so used to all the luxuries that I fell out of touch, too.”
“Ophelia, you’re not someone who’s used to luxury things.”
“That’s not what I’m referring to.”
I don’t mean the cars, the handbags, the shoes.
I mean real luxuries. Friends who care, who show up with chalkboards and snacks whenever something needs to be planned, friends who will drive you places at four in the morning just because you ask.
Alex. Alex who loves me so much and so deeply that the chains of my past feel looser now.
Luxuries Laura might’ve had, if I hadn’t deserted her.
His eyes soften with understanding. “Being loved and accepted for who you are isn’t a luxury you don’t deserve.”
“Someone died because of me.”
“I don’t know who Laura is, but I know that you are not the villain in her tale. You didn’t decide her fate. You’re giving yourself way too much power in her life.”
“Stop it.”
“We’re not doing that. You’re not depriving yourself of kind-ness because you think you don’t deserve it.”
My shoulders shake, chest aches. “Please stop.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I gave up on revenge for a relationship with you is what happened,” I bite out, angrier at him than I really mean. There’s only one person I’m really angry with. “I let myself get consumed by you.”
“Who is Laura?”
Self-loathing is a dull blade somewhere inside me, clawing its way from the inside out. “She’s me. She’s me if I hadn’t met you.”
He rises to his feet, and I hear the clatter of a mug against the counter, the spluttering of the kettle. And then he’s gone, footsteps sounding upstairs before the sound of water filling the bath.
It only makes what I’ve done feel worse.
I’M ON MY third episode of MasterChef, ridiculing the way Clare from Birmingham has made a roux even though I haven’t got a single idea what a roux is, when Alex finally joins me on the sofa after what felt like a hundred work meetings.
Fresh out of contact lenses, he’s in those reading glasses, the ones that appear so rarely and yet feature in almost every single one of my daydreams.
Following what can only be described as a catastrophic breakdown overnight, today I feel all out of fight, like the still quiet after the storm when the sky couldn’t possibly rain anymore.
“She’s put rosemary in a roux,” I say, because I don’t want to talk about anything else.
His legs join mine on the coffee table in front of us, lifting my hoodie to check on the bruises that stain my ribs from my fight with Laura. “What the fuck is a roux?”
“Dunno. But I bet you’re not meant to put rosemary in it.”
“What an idiot.”
“Literally.”