Chapter 6 Jess
He knows.
Jess realizes before Tom is even home. She knows before he leaps up the steps that lead to their front door, tugging Elodie in his wake. And when he throws the door open, letting it crack back on its hinges, her whole body runs cold.
He scrubs his hands down his face, his eyes wild and unfocused. She’d forgotten how he is around her. How he can unravel so easily. She’d forgotten this whole other side to the man she loves, the side that was there before she loved him, before Carrie left and they found their way to each other the year after. Jess’s thoughts fracture and blur. Does he still care about Carrie? Is this just shock? Or . . . or . . .
Jess busies herself with Elodie, taking off her shoes, hanging up her coat. Her brown curls are plastered to her skin, her face a wide moon as her eyes dart to him. Her father. The man she has never seen in this state. As though he’s rolled in a patch of nettle leaves and the spines have burrowed in deep, right to his very soul.
“Tom . . .”
Jess sighs, frowning down at Elodie, who still hasn’t said a word. Jess notices the green paint tingeing her hands. Tom picked her up from school and took her straight into town for a treat. She can smell the chocolate on Elodie’s breath as she leads her into the bathroom, then turns on the tap, and pumps the soap into her pudgy little hands.
“There were hailstones, Mummy,”
Elodie whispers, drying her hands on the towel on the back of the bathroom door. “I don’t think Daddy liked them. I didn’t like them either.”
Jess swallows, staring down at her daughter. She’s not ready to face what lies beyond the bathroom door. She thought she had exorcised those demons long ago. “Were they big?”
“Kind of like skittles?”
Elodie says, considering. “Bigger than Coco Pops. I like the snow better.”
“It’s just winter beginning early, sweetheart. There’ll be proper snow soon,”
Jess says, opening the bathroom door. Elodie starts her usual tinny tirade about another girl at school, about her shoes pinching her toes and how it’s so unfair that she’s allowed only one hour of TV time when her friend Gus gets two whole hours. But Jess isn’t listening. Her focus is on Tom, standing next to the sofa, hovering over his mobile phone. It irritates her when he just hovers like that, and she wants to tell him to sit down on the damn sofa. But there’s a charge in the air, in the silence that streams from him in waves. It plumes outward, like a cloud, engulfing her and their life together. She coughs, turning away, needing to form a plan, needing to do something . . .
“Are you, er . . . going out later still? The pub, was it?”
she asks Tom carefully as she moves into the kitchen and reaches into the fridge for the ingredients for dinner. Her hands, automatically closing around the onion, the tomatoes, the mince, need to stay busy. She wants to make a Bolognese sauce from scratch. She needs this house to smell like a home. Like their home, the one they’ve built together. Then maybe Tom will snap back to himself. She needs him to make a joke, to wink at her and trick a grin from her lips. She needs him to be the Tom she fell in love with, the nineteen-year-old with the too-long hair who played bass in a band in the cramped back room of their favorite bar on the edge of town. The Tom she met up with on every university break, the one she couldn’t stay away from. Who turned out to be less of a fling and more of a permanent fixture after she finished her degree.
Or maybe she’s just fooling herself.
“I . . . after dinner? Are you okay to put Els to bed?”
he asks, distraction dragging out every syllable as he pockets his phone. He blinks at her owlishly, as though just remembering who she is. And the choices he made.
“Sure,”
Jess says, her tone a touch too high and pitchy. She flicks on the kettle, needing the familiar comfort of her favorite mug warming her hands against this sudden winter chill. He’s not being himself. “Be back before ten, though? That series is starting, you know the one—”
“What? Oh yeah. Yes. Of course.”
He lunges toward the staircase, still wearing his boots. Jess winces when he doesn’t take them off, picturing the germs and dirt trailing their way up the stairs. She makes a mental note to steam-mop later. Her hands are already itching to snatch up a cloth and the disinfectant, to balance a reprimand on her tongue to shoot in Tom’s direction. But it dies in her throat. Suddenly, she’s treading on eggshells again. Wondering when he’ll say her name, the name of his childhood sweetheart. The girl he offered his heart to before he offered it to Jess.
He doesn’t get home at ten. Midnight comes and goes, and the hours creep ever closer to daybreak. She tosses in their bed, back and forth, back and forth. He’s left her, she’s sure of it. He’s with Carrie. He went to her the minute he left the house. She pictures them, imagining their rekindling. How he will stare at her in reverence, closing the distance until she’s in his arms. Then the past decade will melt away, and they’ll both admit they made a mistake, that it was always Tom and Carrie, asking themselves: How did we let it slip away? And Jess, with her meddling and her own wants and wishes, will be swept aside for this woman who has remained perfect in his memories.
Jess kneads her eyes with her fists, trying to banish her imaginings. He could be crashed out at his dad’s, and not for the first time. Drank too much and stayed there with his sour breath and fogged-up head, instead of bringing that back home with him.
But she still can’t help thinking Tom has gone to her. To Carrie. And that Carrie’s return this winter is a repeat of what happened last time. Does he still think about her? Does he cling to her memory the way she does, never able to stop thinking about her? Jess has never asked. Never had the nerve to bring her up, to invite the ghost of Carrie into their home from the cold edges to sit wedged between them.
Jess finally gets a handful of hours’ reprieve when her mind falls into a troubled slumber. She wakes at six, before Elodie is up, and shambles down to the kitchen in her old dressing gown and slippers. She finds Tom in the lounge, sitting on the edge of the sofa. His eyes when he turns to her are bloodshot and haunted. Fear clutches her insides, stilling the breath in her throat.
“Carrie’s back.”