Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
The next morning, Andrew and Erica kept their distance like two opposing magnets. Using a jar of instant coffee while he was making something frothy in his stupid new machine was petty but satisfying. Determined not to ask him outright whether the woman he’d been ‘for a few drinks with’ was Celeste, she opted instead for cool politeness which was the exact opposite of the burning rage in her gut. Did their marriage mean nothing to him? How could he move on so quickly and easily?
Today was the planned back-to-school interview after Mollie’s suspension, but when she and Andrew floated the idea to Mollie of taking the rest of the week off to get over the events of yesterday, she was more than eager to agree with them. ‘Yes, please. I can’t face going in and seeing everybody.’
Across the kitchen table, trying not to be irritated by the hiss and clunk of Andrew still making himself a coffee, Erica began to lay the groundwork for what she planned to do next. ‘I think I should go in anyway and explain what’s happened.’
Mollie reddened. ‘No. I don’t want my teachers to know.’
Erica could understand why she’d feel like this. ‘I know, sweetheart. But we need to keep the school informed. And it also explains why you were acting so out of character.’
Everything she said was true. What she wasn’t saying was that she had a second motive for wanting to go into the school alone: to meet with Celeste and have it out with her. Was she the woman Andrew had been meeting for ‘just drinks’?
Pushing cornflakes around the bowl with a spoon, Mollie’s face had darkened. ‘I just don’t want my teachers knowing what I did.’
That, she could help with. ‘They won’t tell all the teachers. With an issue like this, it’s kept strictly on a need-to-know basis. I could make an appointment to talk to Celeste. You know her. She’s not going to judge you or make you feel embarrassed about this.’
Looking sideways at Andrew, she waited to see his reaction at Celeste’s name, but he had his back to her. Mollie continued to stare into her cereal bowl. ‘Okay. You can tell Celeste. She’d be okay.’
It was a good thing she’d agreed, because Erica had already sent a text to Celeste last night to ask whether she had any free time tomorrow and Celeste had offered to squeeze her in at the beginning of period three.
Erica arrived at the school just as the students were streaming out of the building for break time. There was such a huge difference between the youngest and oldest students in a school this size. They began as small children – blazer arms longer than their fingertips, backpacks as big as they were – and left at the end as fully fledged adults. School felt like a lifetime to kids, but it was a blink of an eye in their whole life. Friendships that had been everything at school were often lost before they even hit twenty. That’s what she’d tried to convey to students who were having a tough time. But it was impossible to understand without the benefit of age and hindsight.
Celeste was waiting for her in reception and walked her straight to her office. ‘I only have about thirty minutes. I’m sorry. It’s a full teaching day normally, but my class are in the hall for a road safety presentation with the rest of their year group so I can sneak out for a short while.’
Erica’s priority was Mollie and how they were going to navigate her return to school. The other issue would have to come second. ‘No problem, I probably should’ve just called you, but I wanted to see you. Sorry.’
Pressed for time, Erica got straight to the point as soon as they’d sat down, explaining in more detail than she had on the phone what had happened and what they’d discovered about why Mollie had needed the money she’d stolen.
Celeste looked as if she might cry herself. ‘That’s awful. Poor Mollie. We had no idea she was struggling. It’s so difficult: things like this are going on a lot more than we’re aware of. I know that the internet is a wonderful thing but sometimes I do think it would be a lot easier if it never existed. Especially for kids. I could tell you so many stories of the issues that we’re having right now because of Snapchat and Instagram and whatever other fresh hell of an app that’s about to appear next.’
It was so difficult: trying to stay one step ahead of what was going on. Celeste had always been such a brilliant teacher. She cared as much as Erica had when she was here. She worked as hard, she was as diligent, but she had an ability that Erica had never mastered. The ability to switch off. Erica had always struggled. If something happened with one of the kids at school, she would lay awake worrying about it, playing it over and over in her mind to see if she could have done something different or helped them more. Andrew had tried to help her. As a police officer he’d told her that he’d had to find a way to leave cases at work. He said that, if she didn’t manage to develop that ability, she’d drive herself crazy. Maybe that was one of the many reasons that Celeste had been a much better fit for senior leadership than she had been.
Maybe it was also the way she’d managed to spend time with Erica’s husband and daughter without considering that she should tell her best friend. ‘How do you do it? How do you manage to switch off and not let this job completely take over your life?’
Celeste smiled. ‘I’ve learned to compartmentalise. When I leave here, everything stays in my in-tray. I can’t allow it to travel home with me in my brain. It’s not always possible; some things really do get to me. But if I let everything from here – every petty parental complaint, every argument with a student – take up residence in my head, I would never be able to do this job.’
She wanted to stay focused on Mollie. On a strategy for helping her through the next few months, but she had to get this suspicion out of the way. ‘What were you about to tell me last time I was here?’
For a moment, Celeste looked wrong-footed. Then she blushed. ‘I’m not sure how to say this.’
Erica’s heart plummeted: she’d really wanted to be wrong. ‘You’ve been seeing Andrew.’
When she nodded, Erica felt sick. ‘Yes. I mean, not really Andrew. It’s Mollie. Andrew asked me to come and spend some time with her. I know it’s a little weird, because I’m her teacher. But I’m also friends with her parents.’
Friends? ‘You’re not dating Andrew? You haven’t been out for a drink with him?’
Celeste’s eyes widened. ‘Dating Andrew? Absolutely not. What made you think that?’
Momentary relief flooded through Erica. ‘I just thought…well, he said he had been out with someone and then I saw a picture of you and Mollie…I’m sorry. I jumped to conclusions. But why the secrecy? Why didn’t you tell me?’
Celeste blushed again. ‘I wanted to. Twice, I saw your neighbour on the way in and I was sure it’d get back to you, but Andrew begged me not to say anything.’
That would be what Lynn had wanted to tell her about Andrew when she spoke to her in the front garden on Sunday. ‘Why didn’t Andrew want me to know?’
‘He said you’d think he wasn’t coping. I think he’s struggling, Erica. I think he really misses you and Ben. They both do. When you were in here last, I almost told you, but you seemed so laden down already that I thought it might make you feel worse.’
Erica swallowed hard. If only she had been as good as Celeste at compartmentalising. Teacher. Wife. Mother. School. Andrew. Benjamin. Mollie. Where did one end and the next begin? And where was she in all of it? ‘I’ve made such a mess of all of this, Celeste. I’ve let Mollie down so badly.’
Celeste looked amazed. ‘What do you mean? You’re a fantastic parent!’
The kindness in her tone only made Erica feel worse. ‘I’m not. I’ve tried to do everything right and I’ve ended up letting everybody down.’
That’s how it felt. She tried so hard to do right by all three of them, to sacrifice everything that she had wanted to ensure that everybody else’s lives could run smoothly but that hadn’t been a solution, had it? Her marriage was in ruins, Mollie was going through this awful thing and even Benjamin – she couldn’t help but think – might be making more progress if she wasn’t too frightened to let him experience anything without her.
Celeste was shaking her head. ‘You need to stop thinking that right now. You know as well as I do what some parents are like out there. You’ve done nothing but the best you could at every stage.’
‘I’ve spent so much time trying to help Benjamin that Mollie has felt completely abandoned. And I had no idea.’
There was a pause while Celeste considered what she’d said. ‘Like glass child syndrome?’
‘What’s that?’
Celeste rested her elbows on the desk, steepled her hands and dropped her chin onto her knuckles. ‘Okay, I am not saying this is you for a moment, but glass child syndrome is a term used for the sibling of a special needs child who is unseen – looked through like glass – because their parents’ attention is focused on the child with the needs.’
Erica’s stomach lurched. ‘It’s a thing? There’s a name for it?’
‘Again, I’m not saying this is you or Mollie, but often the child without the additional needs tries to be as well behaved as possible, becomes a people pleaser, because they don’t want to give their parents any more work to do.’
Hot tears burned at the back of Erica’s eyes. ‘And I’ve done that to her?’
‘The twins have two parents. This is not all on you, Erica.’
Guilt flooded through her. ‘But maybe that’s my fault too? That Andrew isn’t more involved? Because I shut him out?’
Celeste’s face reddened. ‘Okay, you need to stop heaping hot coals on your own head. Andrew is big enough and ugly enough to have made you listen if he felt that was happening. He needs to take responsibility for the fact that he didn’t do more.’
Of course, she was right. Erica knew that. But she also knew that sometimes you had to leave space for somebody else to fill. Like in class when you asked a question of a student and you had to wait for them to answer before rushing in to put words in their mouth. You need to leave the step empty so somebody else can climb onto it.
‘I want to make this right, Celeste, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how to untangle any of this and make it work.’
Her friend’s face was sympathetic and kind. ‘What about starting with what you want for a change? If you know how you want things to be, you can aim for that. What do you want?’
What did she want? The easy answer was that she wanted her whole family together in one home. She wanted Ben and Mollie to have the best life they could. She wanted her and Andrew to be able to repair their relationship.
If she wanted to sort out this mess, maybe she needed to go back to where it started.