Abby
Abby
The words puncture Abby’s ears. She feels them reverberating inside her, defying any coherent meaning.
‘Mrs Forrester – are you admitting to driving the car that killed Isla Richardson?’
Abby listens to the officer’s question, watches Nicole’s eyes dart around the room – to Andrew, to Nathaniel, to Jack – before she responds.
‘Yes.’
Abby feels as though she has stepped into a parallel universe where everything has been debased, corrupted, contorted beyond recognition. She cannot get her bearings, like a sailor lost at sea, no compass to show her the way.
‘Nicole, what the hell—’
‘Mum, please—’
‘Mum, don’t—’
Abby hears the trio of voices – Andrew, Nathaniel, Jack – and watches as Nicole exhales deeply, squeezes Nathaniel’s arm, pulls Jack tight into an embrace, whispers something into his ear that Abby cannot hear.
‘I don’t understand.’ Abby looks around the room, stunned that they are all standing there, immobile, as though Nicole has not just placed a bomb in the centre of the kitchen and detonated their lives.
Nicole turns to her, tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Abby. I don’t know what to say.’
The words are like treacle in Abby’s ears, and she cannot make sense of what is happening. Nicole is her best friend, has been her best friend for almost two decades. It is not possible that what she is saying is true.
But then Nicole begins to talk, her confession an unrelenting torrent, and they are words Abby does not want to hear, words so vivid and graphic that she wishes she could close her ears to them, knows they will haunt every dream and plague every grief-stricken moment.
Nicole describes how she had been driving to the late-night pharmacy to get some medicine for Jack – Jack, who’d had a terrible upset stomach, who’d not been able to stop vomiting, more ill than Nicole had seen him for years – and she was texting Andrew, asking when he was going to be home, angry with him for being so late yet again, annoyed that she’d had to leave Jack by himself because Andrew was still at the office. She only glanced at her phone for a few seconds – sporadically at that, keeping half an eye on the street – but it was late, dark, her visibility impaired, and then a figure ran across the road – just bolted into the path of Nicole’s car, like a deer startled by the headlights – and there was no time for Nicole to stop, no time for her to slam on her brakes. She wasn’t even speeding, there just wasn’t time. It all happened so quickly, the impact and the sound and the terrible realisation of what had happened. She didn’t know it was Isla – she turns to Abby and swears she didn’t know it was Isla – but she panicked, and she doesn’t know what came over her, doesn’t know what happened in those few brief, heinous seconds, doesn’t know what she was thinking, only that she understood something awful had happened, something truly terrible. She felt as though she was in a nightmare from which she could not awaken: no clear thoughts in her head, just blood roaring in her ears, hands shaking so much she could not keep them still. She does not remember making a decision, does not remember the moment in which she put the car into reverse, turned it around, averted her eyes from the scene she was leaving behind. She does not remember the thought process that led her to drive away, in the opposite direction, does not know what sent her to the industrial estate, a place she had driven past countless times but never visited, does not know what it was beyond desperation that made her park on a derelict piece of land and leave her car there. She only knows that this is what she did. She ran the one and a half miles home as fast as she could, her whole body convulsing with shock, knowing she needed to get back to look after Jack before Andrew and Nathaniel arrived home and saw she was on foot, clocked that her car was missing, began asking questions for which she had no answers that would not destroy all their lives. Nicole talks and talks, about how everything spiralled out of control, about how it was only later – she promises Abby it was only later – that she heard about Isla, made the connection, realised the true horror of what she had done. How she knew, at that point, it was too late to confess, that time and circumstances had overtaken her. She could not bear to contemplate what it would do to Nathaniel and Jack if she admitted her crime. She knew she would go to prison for having driven away from the scene, could not bear the thought of what that would do to her boys.
And all the time Nicole is talking, she is crying, and Jack is crying, and Nathaniel looks stunned, and Andrew looks bewildered, and one of the police officers listens while the other makes notes in a small pocketbook.
And then the female officer is placing a hand on Nicole’s shoulder, telling her she is under arrest on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, and Jack is pleading with Nicole not to go, and Nathaniel is clinging to Nicole as though he may be able to prevent her from leaving, and Nicole’s expression is that of a woman whose heart is being ripped from her chest. Abby watches, unable to move, as Nicole wrests herself from her boys, allows herself to be led away by the officers, out of the kitchen, trailed by Andrew asking which station she is being taken to, when they can see her, what will happen next, Nathaniel and Jack following closely behind.
And then Abby is left alone, unable to believe that this is real, this is happening, that this is not some sort of terrible, cruel, sick joke.