Lexi
Lexi
“Try the red, try the red,” Penny says, draping a dress on top of the enormous pile of clothes that I’m clutching in both arms.
“Red makes me look stressed,” I tell her.
It’s the first day of school. After dropping a very excited Mae at the gate in her adorable new uniform, we fled from the eager-eyed parents we already knew from preschool, all desperate for gossip about my misadventures— I can’t imagine what it was like! That Ezekiel, he’s so handsome, isn’t he! —and have come to the high street to find me an outfit for my TV appearance.
I am not the sort of person who has a TV appearance. Or an “outfit,” to be honest. I just have clothes, vaguely assembled in a combination that allows me to cover up the maximum number of stains and worn-out bits.
“I’m not sure it’s the color palette, Lex. I think it’s all the stress that’s making you look stressed, probably? Here, take this one as well.”
“Is this secretly a workout?” I ask, hefting the clothes into a new position, arm muscles groaning. “Have you actually brought me shopping to try to make me exercise by stealth?”
“You need options!” Penny says.
There’s something frenetic about Penny today. She’s always been an emotional person, but lately she seems to be swinging from one extreme to the other several times a day. She’s not sleeping well—the other night I woke from a nightmare about the rig crumbling away beneath Zeke, and I went downstairs and found Penny crying quietly over a glass of milk in the kitchen. It turns out she’d had a nightmare, too. I know these things will happen to me—I accept that. But why are they happening to her, too? Maybe it’s sympathy pains , she’d told me, pulling me in for a hug, and I’d held her tightly, wishing I could take away the pain I’ve caused her.
“I would never wear that,” I say, examining the pale pink dress Penny has pulled from a rail and is holding critically at her eye level. “It’s not me.”
She smiles.
“What?”
“You’re totally right, it’s not, it’s way more me than you,” Penny says, shoving it back. “But I feel like two months ago you wouldn’t have said that. You’d have just asked me which makes you look best. Now. How about this, then?”
She pulls out a jumpsuit. It’s black, structured, with a tuxedo-style front that ties at the waist. It’ll suit my curves, which are slowly returning now that I’m back to snacks and square meals, and the sharpness of its lines appeals to me. It’s a no-nonsense jumpsuit. Dressed-up, but badass.
“Look at your face,” Penny says, beaming. “This is the one.”
“It’s too expensive,” I say, getting close enough to read the label. “I don’t want to try it on.”
“I’ll pay!” Penny says, already walking toward the changing room.
“What? Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, “you’re not buying me a jumpsuit for three hundred quid.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, because you don’t have three hundred quid to spend on jumpsuits for me?”
“I’d do anything for you,” she says, turning so suddenly I almost walk into her. Her expression is oddly fierce. “You know that, right? I know I’m not perfect, but I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy, and—”
“Penny!”
She’s started to cry.
“Oh my God, what’s going on with you?” I pull her away from the women waiting outside the changing rooms, who are eyeing us with curious interest. “Is something the matter?”
“No, no,” she says, wiping her face furiously. “I’m fine! I just want you to be OK. And I’m worried you’re…” She looks up at me, searching. “You are OK, aren’t you, Lexi?”
“Of course,” I say. “Of course I am! You know me. Tough as old boots.”
“About that man…” Her voice drops to a whisper. “About Zeke…”
I stiffen, glancing toward the changing rooms. “The queue’s gone down,” I say, but she catches my arm.
“Did anything happen with you two?”
“Well, we got lost at sea…”
“I mean, I know you took him back to the houseboat. Or he took you back to the houseboat, since it was his, or—whatever. But after that first night. You didn’t like him like that, did you?”
I flush, ashamed. I don’t want to lie. But I desperately don’t want to tell Penny that I fell in love with the scumbag who abandoned her, either, and I can see she’s got an inkling, and it’s frightening her. I hate seeing Penny frightened.
“We were mostly just focused on staying alive, Penny. I’m fine, OK?”
“You’d tell me if you weren’t?”
I feel a flicker of irritation. Every day I wake up and lurch to grip the sides of my bed, not because I think I’m in danger, but because everything feels wrong: the sea should be moving beneath me. I sometimes remember moments so starkly it’s as if I’ve been transported back to the rig or the boat or the storm. Do I have to tell her that? Shouldn’t she just know?
I am fine: I’m coping. I’m not lying. But I can feel that Penny is desperate for me to get back to normal, and there’s only so much I can do to fix myself, especially when I can’t tell her that the really broken part of me is my heart.
“I’ll try the jumpsuit,” I say. “But I will pay for it if I want it. OK?”
“OK,” she says, with a shaky smile. “But I’m buying you some shoes. You need to stop wearing those grotty black boots, Lex. They look like you dredged them out of the ocean.”
“Well,” I say, “I kind of did.”
Her phone pings, and her eyes widen. “Oh, God!” she says.
“What?”
“Your memorial!”
“My what?”
Now everyone in the changing area is staring at us again. Someone emerges from behind a curtain, and I drag Penny into the empty cubicle, dumping the huge pile of clothes she gave me onto the bench along the back wall.
“Your memorial. It was this policewoman’s idea. They said it would help us all move on. So we scheduled it for next week. I don’t think anyone canceled it. I’ve just had an alert about confirming the flowers,” she says weakly.
“The flowers for my…funeral?”
“Memorial!”
“I actually don’t know that that is any less macabre, but thank you,” I say, gazing at myself in the mirror.
The lighting in these places is always awful—I don’t know why they do that. Don’t they want me to feel good in these clothes? But I’m lit by bright yellowish bulbs from right above my head, catching every dip and shadow as I wriggle out of my jeans and T-shirt.
My body looks back at me, soft, hard, strong, weak. Now I don’t just see what it ought to be, and what it isn’t. I see a body that got me through hell, no matter what shape it is, no matter how much weight sits on my hips. I look at the softness beneath my belly button and place a hand there for a moment, then slide it around to my waist, up to my breast.
“I’m sorry, is talking about your memorial turning you on, or…”
I drop my hand. “I’m just looking at myself,” I say. “Properly. Which I don’t think I have ever done in a changing room before.”
Penny smiles slightly, putting her phone down on the bench and sitting beside it.
“I like your face right now,” she says. “You’re looking at yourself like you’re amazing. I’m always trying to get you to do that.”
She is, this is true. Penny has told me I’m beautiful every day of my life. Morning, gorgeous! she’ll say when I come down the stairs. Night, beautiful! But it never sank in—it always just slid over me, like the words didn’t count.
“Out on the water,” I say, “it really stopped mattering. All the negative thoughts I have about my body, they just…I didn’t have time for them. They seemed so much less important, and after a few days of genuinely not thinking about myself that way, it’s like I got out of the habit.”
“I love that. That makes me so happy,” Penny says, but her voice is quiet and she’s looking down, fiddling with a coat hanger in her lap. “But I…I wish you’d tell me more about your time at sea. I just can’t imagine it. I hate that you’ve had this crazy experience and I’m here on the other side of it, with no idea what you’ve been through. It’s like there’s a big gap between us all of a sudden. There was never a gap before.”
I reach for the jumpsuit, fingering the fabric.
“I think maybe there was, Pen,” I say. “Lately.”
She looks up, hurt.
“Do you mean that?”
“Not in a bad way, I just think…Look at the houseboat, for instance. You would have told me about that, before, but you didn’t.” I raise a hand when she starts to protest. “Things have been changing. I think I’ve been living in the past a bit. It’s like I’ve been stuck in that first year with Mae, when you really needed me, and she really needed me, and I had…” I trail off.
“You had…?”
“A role. Someone to be.”
I remember feeling in a weird way that I had been waiting for it. Like when Penny phoned me and choked out the truth about the pregnancy, something fell into place. Aha , my brain said. Here’s what you were born to do.
“Who do you want to be, Lexi?” Penny whispers.
I fasten the jumpsuit at the waist, then lift my gaze to the full-length mirror.
The jumpsuit makes me look like myself, but fiercer. Walking through the wind after dropping Mae at school has turned my hair wild—I’ve stopped wearing it tied back, enjoying how good it feels to have clean hair, and now it tangles and tumbles over the jumpsuit’s bold shoulders, giving all its sharp lines an edge of chaos. The woman in the mirror looks as if she’s survived storms and heartbreak, but she also looks like she’s running the show. She has main-character energy; that’s what Zeke would say.
“Her,” I say, meeting my own eyes, pointing at my reflection. “I want to be her.”
Marissa is driving me to the Morning Cuppa studio, but Penny insists on coming along to support me. She seems almost as nervous as I am, fidgeting in the front seat—she always goes up front because of her car sickness. I’m sweating. I can’t believe I’m doing this. The money is amazing, but I’m not sure any amount is worth what I’m about to do. Not the television part: I mean seeing Zeke.
“Christ,” Marissa says after a long stretch of silent motorway. “Where’s Mae when you need someone to chat shit about Peppa Pig for an hour or so?”
“I should have called Zeke,” I say, leaning my head against the glass. “I should have called him before now. Seeing him again for the first time like this, it’s…”
“Cruel?”
I swallow. I have been punishing him. I know that, deep down. I wanted him to figure out what he’d done, and I wanted him to feel awful for abandoning Mae.
But I also knew that if I spoke to him, I’d break. I’ve been living in Penny’s flat, in Mae’s world, and the idea of letting Zeke into my life again even an inch felt like such a monumental betrayal. I’ve been using every ounce of energy not thinking about him.
“What do you mean, it’s cruel?” Penny says, voice too high.
“You haven’t seen the poor boy at the bar every night, pining,” Marissa says, reaching for her sunglasses as we turn westward. Her car is cluttered with unopened mail, empty Coke cans and various spare pairs of glasses, all serving slightly different purposes, all largely indistinguishable to the untrained eye. “He looks worse than he did when he got off that boat.”
I press my hands into my stomach and close my eyes. “Don’t.”
“Why?” Penny says, turning to look at me over her shoulder. “Why is he looking so awful? Do you think he knows about Mae?”
“No,” I say, voice strangled, as Marissa says, “No, Penny, I mean because he’s madly in love with Lexi.”
“Marissa, shut up,” I say, glancing at Penny for long enough to catch her shocked expression and then shutting my eyes again, pressing my head to the glass.
She’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. We’re only on Morning Cuppa for a fifteen-minute slot, so I’m hoping there isn’t time for us to talk in too much depth about what happened at sea, but there is no way we can discuss that experience without revealing quite how deeply we fell in love.
“She doesn’t know?” Marissa says, catching my eye in the mirror. “Lexi.”
There is a lot of weary judgment in that Lexi .
“Are you serious? Lexi?” Penny is straining around in her seat now, gripping the headrest, staring at me with the exact horrified expression I’ve been desperate to avoid.
“It doesn’t matter if he’s—if he thinks…It doesn’t matter what he feels about me,” I say, turning my gaze to the gray town streaking past the car window. All towns look gray to me lately. “He’s turned out to be a dickhead. The dickhead, the original dickhead, the dickhead we refer to as the standard by which all other dickheads are measured. He’s the man who abandoned you, Penny.”
She’s quiet for too long. Still staring at me.
“Marissa,” she says, with a wobble in her voice. “Can we pull over?”
“What, here? Now? Are you going to vomit?” Marissa asks, already checking her mirrors. “Stop turning around, you know that makes it worse.”
“Just do it, would you?”
We pull over into a parking space. Penny climbs out of the car and walks away down a suburban street—one of those ones where everyone has extended their houses so much they all look kind of monstrous, growing attic conversions out of the tops of their heads. The cars are shiny and sleek; a woman pulling up weeds in her front garden eyes the staggering Penny with open suspicion.
“What’s she…” I trail off, watching Penny fold over on herself, covering her face with her hands.
“Hmm,” Marissa says from the driver’s seat.
“What does that mean?”
“Penny means well, but she doesn’t always do the right thing, and I’ve been wondering for a while if this is one of the times when Penny has been a bit of a coward.”
Marissa yanks on the handbrake and checks her watch.
“Go talk to her. You’ve got three minutes. And, Lex—”
She stops me as I climb out of the rear passenger seat.
“Don’t let her make you feel bad. And don’t let her squirm out of telling the truth. Penny sucks at owning up to things, and she needs to get better at it.”
“She doesn’t mean—” I start, but Marissa holds up her hand.
“You coddle her. You know you do. She’s an adult. She can cope with a bit of a bollocking when she deserves one. In fact, it might do her some good. We’re all dickheads sometimes, Lex, as your mum used to say—even sweet Penny.”
I frown as I climb out of the car. Marissa has always been harder on Penny than I have—she’s only known Penny as an adult, whereas I saw the bedraggled, sad girl who used to climb our back fence to escape the chaos of her mother’s house. The Anchor was Penny’s retreat, her safe place; I’m that for her, and I never want that to change.
I catch up to her as she leans against the fence outside a house with Grecian-style pillars on its porch. The sun is shining, but weakly, as if someone has watered it down.
“Penny?”
She’s sobbing into her hands. I tug at her arm, trying to see her face.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Do you love him?”
I open my mouth to say what she wants to hear— No! Of course I don’t! How could I possibly love the man who turned his back on you? But the lie won’t come out. I think of him for a second, unable to help myself. I see him tanned and bearded, a breeze lifting his curls, and it winds me; I press the heel of my hand to my chest.
“I haven’t wanted to ask,” Penny says, her words almost lost in her tears. “But I think I already know the answer.”
“Penny, it doesn’t matter, it’s over now. It’s done. I’m sorry that…I’m sorry for…”
She emerges from behind her hands and looks fiercely at me.
“ You do not need to be sorry.”
I am sorry, though. It feels like such a betrayal to have loved him so deeply. It feels like a betrayal every time I let my guilty mind slide into the sweet, devastating pain of remembering him. And it definitely feels like a betrayal every time I think that maybe I don’t care, maybe I don’t give a damn about the worst thing he could possibly have done, because I love him so much I’d forgive it all.
“I need to tell you something,” Penny says, taking a gulping breath.
I glance back toward the car, and then toward the Grecian-pillared house, where someone is peering out of an upstairs window. We are officially making a scene, and we are also approaching the end of the three minutes Marissa gave me.
“Does it need to be now?” I try gently. “Because—”
“Yes,” she says, her voice a little firmer.
She pushes off the fence and starts walking again, further away from Marissa’s car. I walk along the pavement beside her, glancing at her, trying to read her. Is it about Mae? Or is it Penny? Is she OK? I’ve been worrying about her not sleeping—was that a sign of something serious? Is she ill?
“When I got pregnant with Mae, I was so ashamed of myself,” she says. She’s twisting her hands, tugging at her sleeves. “I knew you and your mum would be disappointed in me. She was always telling me off for going home with customers, and you…I knew you thought the same.”
“I didn’t,” I protest, though I remember how it felt every time I saw Penny flirting with some cocky, over-aftershaved guy at the bar, how sometimes I wished she’d just be sensible .
“I remember you asked me if I knew who the father was,” she says. “Not who the father was, but if I knew .”
I wince. “Sorry. That was totally insensitive.”
“And I did know. It was this cute curly-haired eighteen-year-old who I could’ve sworn was called Zach. He had made it very clear that he only wanted one thing for one night, like he’d spelled it out so much, checking in with me all the time that I was cool with it all, and I’d said sure, absolutely, same here.”
I actually cannot bear to think about this. The very idea of Penny with Zeke makes me want to claw at my skin or hit something. I look back toward Marissa’s car.
“Shall we just—”
She talks over me, determined. “Then when your mum asked how involved I wanted him to be, I felt so panicked. Imagine this stranger coming in and being a huge part of your life all of a sudden, Lex,” she says, finally looking at me.
Her face is beseeching. I start to feel cold, despite the heat of the sun, despite the nerves that have had me sweating in the back of the car since we set off this morning.
“This stranger who made it so clear he never wanted to speak to you again. I mean, what if he decided to push for joint custody of the baby? It was such a mindfuck, being pregnant when I had never expected to have a kid, and there you and your mum were, offering to drop absolutely everything to help, and it felt so nice. You said the baby and I could live with you both. It sounded so amazing. I wanted us to be a family, and I didn’t want some guy—”
“Penny,” I say, pulling her arm to stop her. “What are you telling me?”
She starts to cry again. I step back slightly, and then I remember what Marissa said in the car, and instead of easing off like I usually would, I push.
“Tell me, Penny. Say it.”
“I never told him, Lexi,” she whispers. “I never told Zeke I was pregnant.”
I drop my hand from her arm and reel away. “You—you—” I turn back to her. “Are you fucking joking? Are you fucking joking ?”
“Don’t be angry with me!” she sobs. “I can’t stand when you yell at me, Lexi, please don’t, please don’t be mad.”
“You said you told him and he didn’t want anything to do with the baby!”
“It was the easiest thing to say!” she cries. “And what did it matter? He didn’t want a kid! He was a kid! I felt like this was better for everyone, the baby included, and…”
“You weren’t thinking about Mae,” I snarl. I am hot with rage. “You were thinking about yourself. You were thinking about avoiding a difficult conversation and getting exactly what you wanted, no matter the consequences for anyone else.”
She looks horrified. “Is that what you think of me?” she whispers.
“There have been…” I press my hand to my eyes. “How many times have you had the opportunity to tell us the truth? You let us raise Mae thinking her father didn’t want her, and in reality you never even gave him the chance to.”
“You know that’s not what she thinks!” Penny says, and there’s fire in her now; she straightens her shoulders. “I have never let my daughter feel unloved. Don’t you dare make me feel like a bad mother.”
“I’m—you’re—” I break off to let out a growl of emotion, turning back toward the car. “Why would you tell me this now ? I’m hours away from getting interviewed on the television and—and seeing him and…”
“That’s why, Lex. You had to know. I didn’t realize you cared so much about him, or I would have said sooner, but it just seemed like…” She sounds so miserable. “It seemed like it was better to stick to the story.”
“Better for you.”
“Better for you . Better for Mae!”
“How? How is this better? No, I don’t have time for this,” I say, walking away from her.
I scowl at the person in the window of that house, the woman with the limp handful of dandelions in her front garden. I give no shits about causing a scene. I feel like I want to burn something down, let this whole street char and smoke like the oil rig, as if that might help with the roaring emotions tearing through me. Aside from the years of lies, the thing that hurts the most right now is knowing that the agony of the last month has been built on nothing . Knowing that Zeke is hurting, too, that I’ve been hurting him, and he never even did anything wrong.
I yank open the car door, getting into the front seat. Fuck her car sickness. I don’t want to have to look at the back of her head right now.
“Drive,” I say to Marissa, as Penny climbs in the back.
“Lexi, please,” she sobs.
“Just drive.”
Marissa pulls out into the traffic. The only thing that will help with this storm in my chest is seeing Zeke. Telling him I love him. I want to run into his arms and bury myself there the way I would when the wind was raging around the boat, when he felt like the only safe place in the world.
I have no idea how the hell I’m going to handle all this. But at least I know where to find him.