Chapter 16
Jess
It’s midnight again. And again, she can’t sleep. But it’s not Tom this time who plagues her thoughts. It’s Carrie. Not the nightmare version she’s grown into, the shadow of guilt and regret looming over her life, but the Carrie of before all this. When it was just the two of them and the whole world glinted with promise and magic. Before Elodie, even before Tom, they walked to school every day, arms linked at the elbows. They would stop in at Ivy’s candle shop in town on the way home, sniffing all the candles, and Ivy would drop paper packets of lemon sherbets and chocolate limes into their pockets.
She smiles into the dark, the scent of Ivy’s winter candle lingering, pluming around her in a cloud. She carried on buying them, every winter. Stealing into Ivy’s shop like a thief, barely making eye contact as Ivy accepted the notes, handing over the candles for Jess to stow in her cloth tote. Her heart aches, knowing Ivy’s shop is closed now. Knowing that there will be no candles this wintertime, no gentle flickering light on the mantelpiece. That the scent weaving through her house, the tenuous connection to her former life before all this domesticity, now wafts only through her memories.
Listening to everyone at the book club, she had the peculiar feeling of floating out of her own body, up above them all, and watching the gossipy twitch of everyone’s heads below as they discussed Carrie Morgan’s return. Betty had many opinions, of course, about how Carrie wouldn’t last the winter, about how she was too wayward, too flaky. Jess’s own mother tried in vain to lead the conversation back to The Night Circus.
Jess gave up in the end on steering the conversation back to the book. She cleared away the plastic cups, tuning out the discussion about Ivy’s cottage and the sheer volume of work it needed, about how that girl would ever manage alone, about how every Morgan woman had an unpleasant streak of pride. They don’t know Carrie, she thinks, not like she does. The Carrie of before, anyway. Carrie always felt like she inhabited the edges of Woodsmoke, she told Jess. She never felt like she completely fit in. But that Morgan pride will carry her through a winter of hard work, Jess is sure of it. That cottage will be renovated come springtime. Then Carrie will disappear once more.
Jess doesn’t want Carrie to leave. She mourned the loss of Carrie for years, carrying it with her like a death. They were inseparable, as close as sisters, and since Carrie left no one else has come close to that, not even Gillian, even though she tries to inhabit the space Carrie left. It just isn’t the same. You simply can’t replicate that kind of friendship with someone else.
Jess rolls onto her side, bringing her knees up to her chest. She misses Carrie like she misses summer. It’s as though the cold rolled in the day she left, and Jess hasn’t been able to get warm since. She misses that person she just had to glance at to feel a bubble of giggles building in her throat. She realizes now that this kind of friendship is irreplaceable. And she wishes more than anything that she had reached out to Carrie in the last ten years, but now . . . now it’s too late.
The next day is Saturday, and even though Jess is tired down to her very bones, she wants to create memories. It’s Halloween. Elodie has started to understand what Halloween is, especially that it’s another chance, like Easter, to fill herself with sugar. She wakes Jess up at seven, wearing her fairy wings and a black tutu dress.
“I’m Isadora Moon!”
she says, twirling beside Jess and knocking a box of tissues off her bedside table.
Jess blinks down at the tissues, then back at Elodie. “So it seems.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
Elodie asks, creeping closer, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. Jess can see eyeshadow smeared on her cheeks and forehead. She hopes it’s not her new Charlotte Tilbury duo. “It’s Halloween!”
Jess remembers to smile as Elodie flutters around the room, trilling in a silly singsong voice, but she wants to roll over and stuff her head under the pillows. She wants to pretend she has a migraine and blot out the day. But . . . she can’t. She just can’t. So she takes a deep breath, swings her legs over the side of the bed, and grins at her daughter, so small and unburdened by the tangle of worries that collect like cobwebs as the years pass. “We should have pancakes. And choose a pumpkin! Is Daddy downstairs?”
“He’s on the sofa,”
Elodie says, already shimmying from the room.
Jess swallows, her heart thudding dully in the cage of her ribs, and glances over at the empty space beside her in bed. She summons up a wall, a shield to hide her thoughts, determined to create a perfect day for Elodie and for herself. Determined to ignore the fact that her husband is drifting away and that, internally, she wants to scream.
She thumps down the stairs, dragging her dressing gown around her body, and blearily reaches for the coffee machine as soon as she enters the kitchen. She has switched from tea to coffee over the past few days. She needs the kick in her bloodstream as soon as she wakes, to stir her, to make her seem present, real. It must be the time of year making her mind slower and more sluggish than usual.
“Coffee?”
she calls to Tom, pulling the eggs and flour from the cupboards and fridge. She bites her lip, calculating whether there’s enough milk left to make pancakes for all of them.
He ambles in, eyes bloodshot, hair a scruff across his forehead. For a moment, she’s pulled back to when she first watched him play at the bar on the edge of town, after Carrie left and she was out with Gillian, one term into university and back for the holidays. He was on the scrap of a stage with the rest of the band, while the crowd pressed around her in the hot space. She wriggled to the front and his eyes drifted to hers, then lit up when he saw her. When he played, the bar, Woodsmoke, everything, slid away. And something, somehow clicked. She was lost.
The memory leaves a smile on her lips as she makes the coffee, hands him a cup, then sips her own as she heats up a pan on the stove. Elodie’s cartoons blare from the lounge, cutting into the ghost of that charged, wild night, and she wishes for a minute’s silence. But instead she gulps her coffee, so hot it sears the roof of her mouth, and melts tiny chocolate stars on the pancakes. She rolls the first one onto a plate for Elodie. On automatic now, she heats up the next pancake as Tom sets the table. She catches his wince as he drinks his coffee and has to bite her tongue. What is it this time? Too bitter? Too sweet? Or is it that it’s not made by Carrie?
She coughs, that thought snapping her spine straight as she serves up the final pancake. She sits with Elodie and Tom, cutting up Elodie’s pancake into perfect, bite-size chunks and listening to her talk about the pumpkin she wants to find today.
“Thought we could go to that farm? What’s it called, the one with the shop and indoor jungle gym . . .”
“Edgewood.”
Jess nods. “That’s the one.”
“Sure,”
Tom says, rubbing his eyes. He smiles at Elodie. His whole being lights up when he looks at her, just as he used to do when he looked at Jess. He’s a good dad. Doting, in his own way. But Elodie tires him out so much. Fatherhood seems to have smoothed out all his corners, making him as bland and amenable as the rest of the men in Woodsmoke. Jess can’t remember the last time he picked up his bass guitar, but she wipes off the fuzz of dust beneath the strings every month, just in case. “We’ll make a day of it, get lunch . . .”
They’re on the road an hour later, and as they leave the confines of Woodsmoke, the snow recedes, revealing the autumnal day Jess was hoping for. Elodie babbles in the back, holding a pink plastic wand, with vampire fangs drawn on her face with black eyeliner. Tom focuses on the road, Jess sits in the passenger seat, and they avoid making eye contact with each other. Jess papers over the fractures in her fatigued heart by talking excitedly with Elodie, pointing out the sheep in the fields along the way, playing “I Spy,”
singing along to the Moana soundtrack when Tom cranks the volume.
When they arrive, Tom follows Elodie to the pumpkin patch while Jess, thinking of the family photos she wants, stays behind to check her makeup in the pull-down mirror on the back of the sun visor. Then she strides across the pumpkin patch and sees Tom pushing the wheelbarrow toward Elodie. Jess stops to watch them both. Her daughter has her hands on the biggest orange pumpkin she can find. Tom, his skin the color of ash beneath his eyes, puts his daughter in the wheelbarrow and then wheels her around, pretending to tip her out, back and forth, making her shriek and giggle as she cries for him to do it again. Tom is relaxed and laughing as he wheels Elodie back and forth between the pumpkins, and Jess sees the glimmers of the man she fell in love with, the cheek of his humor shining through.
She stuffs her hands in her pockets, breathing in the crisp air, letting it cool the bile collecting inside her. This is perfect, she tells herself. This is always how it was supposed to be. Her little family, brought up in her hometown, minutes from her parents, from the school she attended growing up.
They flag down a passing family and ask them to take photos. Jess hands her phone over to them, then joins Tom and Elodie to pose for the photos. When they return her phone, she flicks through the photos, smiling in satisfaction. Her golden hair is carefully tousled, the blond streaks catching the low autumn light, Elodie looks fit to burst with elation with her pink wand and vampire fangs, and Tom—Tom is actually smiling. Jess sniffs, pocketing her phone. She’ll send the photos off to get printed. She wants the day to be perfect, and if she has these photos, then maybe in a few years she’ll forget how she was feeling. Maybe she’ll convince herself that it really was perfect.
“Shall we get our pumpkin to the car and get some lunch? Maybe a chocolate milkshake?”
she says, raising her eyebrows at Elodie.
Elodie whoops and they high-five, then help Tom get the pumpkin in the wheelbarrow. They make their way off the pumpkin patch, nodding at the other families doing the same. Jess purses her lips, keeping her eyes focused on the horizon, thinking only about the next step, then the next. No one would think they weren’t perfect. This is everything she always wanted: Tom, a family, these Instagrammable days caught and pinned in a photo album as real memories.
This is exactly how it was always meant to be.