Chapter 12
The text came on a Thursday in the middle of March.
are you in sb tomorrow
Clara was standing in the Ellwood's laundry with Denise and a man from the linen company, and she read it four times before she answered.
Yes. All day. Do you want me to come to the house?
Three dots. A long time.
no
Then:
the kitchen at ladera. 4. dad wont be there i checked
She got there at half past three, because of course she did, and sat in the car outside the gate for twenty-five minutes.
The code still worked.
The eucalyptus needed cutting back; nobody had booked the crew, because booking the crew had lived in a paper calendar inside a pantry door.
There was a dead patch on the lawn where a sprinkler head had gone and nobody had noticed.
The gutter over the garage had a stripe of dirt down the stucco under it.
Six months. Six months, and the house was going the way the company had gone — not dramatically, not visibly to anybody who did not know it, just a thousand small things nobody had ever been told were things.
Clara sat in the car and looked at the gutter and had to stop herself getting out a notebook.
Willa was at the counter with a glass of water she was not drinking.
She had cut her hair. That was the first thing — it was short now, blunt at the jaw, and it had been long since she was ten, and Clara had a whole physical reaction to it that she put away immediately.
"Hi," Clara said.
"Hi."
They stood there.
"You cut your hair."
"In November." Willa turned the glass a quarter turn on the counter, which was Clara's own gesture, which Clara had never once noticed her copy. "Do you want a coffee or something."
"I'm okay."
"Right."
The house made a sound somewhere, a pipe or a settling.
"Willa —"
"Don't do a speech," Willa said. "Please. I've had six months of people doing speeches at me and I'll leave, I actually will."
"Okay."
"Okay."
Clara put her bag down on a stool and stood on the other side of the counter, which was where she had stood ten thousand times, and did not sit, because sitting would have been a decision.
"I asked you here because I want to say some things," Willa said. "And they're not nice. And then I want you to say things, and I'm going to listen, and I don't know what happens after that."
"That's fair."
"Don't tell me what's fair."
Clara shut up.
"You came into my room."
That was the first one.
"That night," Willa said. "You came in and you stood in the doorway.
I've thought about this a lot so I'm going to be exact.
You were there about a minute. Then you pulled the door to three-quarters, the way I like it, and you went down the stairs.
I heard the third one, because it does that thing. "
Clara's hands were on the counter.
"You were awake."
"I was awake," Willa said.
The kitchen went very quiet.
"I heard you come in the mudroom and I heard you walk around downstairs for ages, and I thought — I actually thought, she's had a fight with him, she's going to come up and be weird and tomorrow it'll be fine.
" Her voice was completely level and her eyes were not.
"And then you came in and stood there. And I kept waiting for you to say my name. "
"Willa."
"You didn't say my name."
"No," Clara said. "I didn't."
"Why?"
And Clara — who had rehearsed a version of this in a car and in a shower and lying awake in a room above a hardware store for six months — heard every single one of those sentences go out of her head.
"Because I couldn't promise you anything," she said, "and I knew that if you asked me when I was coming back I was going to say something to make you feel better, and it would not have been true."
"So you left."
"So I left."
"That's worse," Willa said. "You understand that's worse, right? You did the considerate version. You worked out what would hurt me least in the long run and then you did that, and you didn't ask me, and I was sixteen and awake in the room."
Clara opened her mouth and nothing came out.
Because it was the folder.
It was exactly the folder. It was a plan drawn up for somebody's life, in the corridor, by a person who was very good at working out what was best — and handed over without one single question being asked of the person it was about.
She had done it. In that house, on that night, at the top of those stairs.
"Oh God," Clara said.
"What."
"Nothing. No — not nothing." She put both hands flat on the counter.
"You're right. I want to say that before anything else, because I've spent six months building a version of that night where I did a hard, kind thing.
" Her voice did something and she let it.
"I didn't. I did the thing that was easiest for me and I decorated it. "
Willa stared at her.
"I didn't think you'd say that," she said.
"My mother left on a Tuesday," Willa said, later, when they had both moved — Clara onto a stool, Willa onto the counter itself, sitting on it, which she had been told not to do for seven years by the woman now sitting opposite her.
"I know."
"I was six. I don't remember it. I remember after.
" She picked at the edge of the counter.
"I remember for about a year I used to check.
Like, if she was in the house, or in the car, or wherever.
I'd just — check where she was. All the time.
And then she wasn't in the house at all so there was nothing to check and that was actually easier. "
Clara did not say anything.
"And then you came," Willa said. "And I did it again. For about two years. Did you know that?"
"No."
"You never knew, because I got good at it." She shrugged. "I could tell where you were in a building from the sounds. I used to know if you were in the office or the laundry or the garage from about thirty feet away."
Clara sat with that.
"And then at some point I stopped," Willa said. "That's what I actually wanted to tell you. That's the whole — I stopped checking. Somewhere around when I was twelve or thirteen I just stopped, because you were always there, and it stopped being a thing I had to know."
"Willa —"
"And then you weren't there," Willa said. "And I went straight back to six."
Clara cried and Willa did not, which she thought about afterward.
"I'm not going to tell you it was different," Clara said, when she could. "From your mother. I'm not going to sit here and explain to you why my version was better, because you'd be right to walk out."
"It was different."
"You don't have to —"
"No, listen to me, because this is the part I actually rehearsed." Willa's jaw was set. "It was different. I know it was different. I know what he did and I know what was in that folder — "
"You know what was in the folder?"
"Esther told me." A flat look. "In October. She came to the house and she sat where you're sitting and she told me exactly what was in it, because she said I was going to hear a version of it from somebody and it might as well be the true one."
Clara put her hand over her mouth.
"She brought a copy," Willa said.
"She what."
"She had it in a folder. Same kind of folder." Willa's mouth went hard. "She put it on the counter and she said, I'm going to leave the room for ten minutes, and you can read it or not read it, and either way nobody is ever going to be able to tell you it said something different."
"And did you read it?"
"Obviously I read it."
Clara's hand was still over her mouth.
"She came back in and she took it away again and she said one thing," Willa said. "She said: nothing in that document is your fault, and nothing in it is a description of you."
"That's —"
"Yeah."
"That's the kindest thing I have ever heard about that woman."
"She's not kind," Willa said. "That's what's good about her. She didn't hug me. She didn't ask how I was feeling. She just — decided I was a person who was allowed to know things." She looked at the counter. "Nobody else in this family has ever decided that."
Clara thought about a phone call in February. I'm on the side of a woman having the whole file.
Two of them, then.
"Did you tell your father she'd shown you?"
"No."
"Willa —"
"I'm not protecting Esther," Willa said.
"I'm not protecting anybody. I didn't tell him because he never asked me what I knew.
" She said it without any heat at all, which was so much worse.
"That's the whole of it, actually. Six months.
He's asked me to lunch about nine times. He's never once asked me what I know."
"So yeah," Willa said. "I know it was different. My mother left because she wanted to. You left because he made a schedule with my name on it and expected you to book the restaurant."
"That doesn't —"
"It doesn't help," Willa said. "That's the thing nobody gets.
I know all of it. I've known all of it since October.
And it does not make one bit of difference to the part of me that was awake at four in the morning waiting for you to say my name, because that part of me is six, and she can't read a folder. "
They sat in a kitchen for a while.
"What do you want?" Clara said, eventually. "Not — I'm not asking rhetorically. You said you didn't know what happens after. Neither do I. So tell me what you want and I'll tell you honestly whether I can do it."
Willa considered that for a long time.
"I want you to stop being careful with me," she said.
"Okay."
"That's it. That's the whole thing." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, fast and furious about it.
"Everyone in my life is careful with me.
Dad's careful. Grandpa's careful, in his creepy way.
The school counselor's careful. You've been careful with me since I was nine and I thought it was — I thought that was what having a mother was, and then in October I worked out that it's what people do when they think you might break. "
"I don't think you'll break."
"You left me asleep."
"Yes," Clara said.
"So."