The front door clicked shut and Sarah did not move.
She sat where she had sat. Her hands were round the mug. The milk on the table had stopped spreading. She looked at it. She looked at the chair he had been sitting in. She looked at the spoon he had left in the bowl in the sink.
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Stupid. Stupid fucking — stupid fucking bitch.
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Sarah did not say it. Sarah thought it in the shape of a voice, which was her own voice, which was the voice she used on herself when there was no one else in the room.
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Over milk. Over fucking milk.
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Sarah closed her eyes.
She could still hear herself. She could hear the shape of what she had sounded like. The crack in her own voice going up. The chair hitting the cupboard. The hand pointing with the mug in it. She could see his face the way it had been — not looking at her, looking at the table, with the tear sitting on his lashes that he had not let fall because he was thirteen and he did not want to make it worse for her.
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He did not want to make it worse for me.
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Sarah put her face in her hands.
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You piece of shit. You absolute fucking piece of shit.
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She took her hands away from her face. She put them flat on the table on either side of the mug. She made them stay there.
She had nearly said it. At the sink. Sorry. It had been in her mouth. She had felt the shape of it behind her teeth. And then it had not come out, because sorry was not a word, sorry was a door, and she could not open the door, because behind the door —
She did not finish the thought.
She never finished the thought.
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Fucking coward.
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The kitchen was very quiet. On the windowsill the small radio was on, low, where she had tuned it out earlier. Somebody was talking about something. She was not listening.
Then.
A key in the front door.
Sarah’s hand went still on the mug.
The turn was slow. Too slow. It was the turn of a person who did not want to be heard turning a key. She heard the latch give. She heard the door come open three inches at a time.
Sarah did not move.
She did not turn her head. She did not call out. She did not get up. She kept her eyes on the table and she did not breathe for a second and then she made herself breathe because if he came to the kitchen door he would hear her not breathing.
He did not come to the kitchen door.
She heard him take his shoes off in the hall — the small scuff of a heel against a heel — and carry them. She heard the stairs. She heard the particular stair that creaked, the fifth one up, and she heard the tiny shift of his weight as he tried not to put his full foot on it and failed.
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He is sneaking back into his own house.
He is sneaking back into his own fucking house because of me.
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Sarah looked at the mug.
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I should go to him.I should get up, now, and go up the stairs, and knock on the door, and say —
Say what.
Say what, Sarah.
What are you going to say.
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She did not know what she was going to say. She knew what she wanted to say. She wanted to say I’m sorry and she wanted to say I love you and she wanted to say please don’t remember me like this and she could not say any of it because to say any of it she would have to go up the stairs and look at his face and his face, this morning, was the face of a boy who had nearly cried at breakfast because his mother had screamed at him about a teaspoon of milk, and Sarah could not — could not — look at that face right now.
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You’ve done enough. Leave him alone. Just for fucking once leave him alone.
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She sat at the table and she let her thirteen-year-old son creep past her in his own house.
She was going to remember this. She knew, sitting there, that she was going to remember this for the rest of her life, and she sat through it anyway.
She heard him moving upstairs. She could not tell what he was doing. Something in his room. Something on the landing — the airing cupboard, the soft thunk of the door. Back into his room. He was doing something she did not understand. She did not understand what he had come back for.
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He forgot something. A book. A — something. Leave it.
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She could not think what he had forgotten. He had his bag. He had his shoes. He had —
She stopped thinking about it. It hurt to think about it. Everything about him, this morning, hurt to think about.
On the windowsill the radio changed segments. A woman’s voice, warmer, slower.
”…and a year ago this week, the country went into its third lockdown of the H7N4 crisis. It was on this day last year that the Prime Minister addressed the nation from Downing Street with the news that the autumn wave had reached—”
Sarah did not want to hear it.
She heard it anyway.
She thought, without meaning to, about the queue at the Tesco car park. The volunteer in the puffer jacket. The little cardboard card with the purple stamp. Registered Recovering Household. Ethan’s name in biro in someone else’s handwriting. He had asked if he could keep it forever. She had said yes.
He still had it. It was in the tin under his bed. She knew because he had shown it to her once, months ago, when he was sorting through things, and she had been half-drunk on the sofa and she had said something like yeah, love, that’s nice, and he had gone away with the tin, and she had not looked at his face properly at the time but she thought about his face now and she thought —
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You were on the sofa. You were on the fucking sofa. He came to show you a thing and you were on the sofa.
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She remembered being ill.
She remembered him in the doorway of her bedroom with the glass of water, too full, some of it on the carpet, apologising, apologising again, and her saying it’s fine, come here, come here, and him not coming. He had stood in the doorway. He had looked at her in the bed. He had decided something. She had not known, at the time, what he was deciding. She knew now.
He had decided she was not safe to come close to.
Not because of the virus. Because of her.
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Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ, Sarah, what have you done.
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She heard him come down the stairs.
She heard him stop on the second step from the bottom. She heard the small scrape of a shoe going on, and then the other one, the double rhythm of laces being done, and she thought — she could not help it, she had not thought it in years — that’s where he always did his shoes. When he was little. He sat on the second step and he did his shoes.
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I’d forgotten.
I’d forgotten he did that.
What else have I forgotten.
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The front door opened.
The front door closed.
He was gone.
The crying was not a decision.
It arrived. It sat in her throat and then it was in her face and then it was coming out of her, in the ugly wet way that grief comes out of a person when there is nobody to see it, the way it had come out of her so many times in this kitchen that the kitchen was, at this point, a place that knew her by the sound of it.
She did not cover her face. There was no point. She let it happen. Her shoulders did what they did. The mug was still under her hands. She let the mug be the thing that held her up.
She cried until the first wave stopped, and then she sat with it, and then another wave came, smaller, and she let that one happen too.
Then it was done. For now. For the next hour. She knew her own grief the way you knew the tide.
She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. She lifted the mug. There was enough in it for one more swallow. She swallowed it. It was cold. It did not help.
She stood up.
The chair went back and she did not push it in.
She took the mug with her because her hand wanted something to hold.
The stairs took longer than they should have. Sarah was not drunk yet, but she had not been not-drunk for a long time, and her legs knew it. She held the banister. She went up.
On the landing she stopped outside Ethan’s door.
She put her hand on the handle.
She almost didn’t.
She pushed it down.
The door opened onto his room and Sarah did not, at first, understand what she was looking at.
The Superman doll was in the middle of the bed.
It was tucked in.
The duvet had been pulled up to its chin. Not thrown over it — tucked. Tucked under, on one side, and on the other side, the way you tucked in a child. The cape was outside the duvet, laid flat, arranged. The head was on the pillow. The little red boots stuck up under the cover in a line.
Sarah stood in the doorway.
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. A wet, small, broken sort of sound.
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Oh.
Oh, love.
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Her eyes went. She put the back of her wrist against them. She did not want to cry again, not yet, not here, in his room.
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He tucked it in. He’s thirteen and he tucked it in.
He tucked it in because nobody tucks him in.
When did I stop tucking him in.
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She did not know when she had stopped.
She took one step into the room and her foot went onto the carpet and the carpet was wet.
Sarah looked down.
There was a dark patch on the carpet beside the bed. Not large. Damp, pressed-in, the outline of something that had been soaked up. She crouched, slowly, and put her fingers on it. Still wet, underneath. The skirting board was damp. The plug socket on the wall above it had been unplugged — the lamp cable, the radio cable, both hanging up over the back of the bedside table, clear of the floor.
Sarah looked at the sockets.
Sarah looked at the cables.
Sarah looked at the wet circle on the carpet.
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Oh.
Oh, no.
A glass. A glass of water. He spilled a glass of water and he thought —
He thought it was going to —
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She could not finish the sentence.
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He ran out of the house with a shirt buttoned wrong because I was screaming at him and then he walked twelve steps down the pavement and he turned around and came back because he was scared the house was going to burn down.
He is thirteen.
He is thirteen and he is scared the house is going to burn down with me in it.
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Sarah put her hand over her mouth.
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Oh, Ethan.
Oh, sweetheart.
Oh — you stupid — you stupid, stupid, good boy.
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She stayed crouched on the carpet for a moment because she did not trust her legs.
When she stood up, she stood up slowly, and she turned to the bedside table, because that was where the photograph was.
She knew the photograph. Everyone in this house knew the photograph. It was the one Ethan straightened every morning without picking it up.
Sarah picked it up.
She held it in both hands.
It was him. Ethan on his shoulders. The back of his head, and the curve of his shoulder, and the one hand on Ethan’s ankle, holding him steady. She remembered the day. She remembered the sky. She remembered taking the photograph — her own hands shaking slightly, not from cold, because she had not known at the time that happiness could make your hands shake. She had not known, then, that it was a thing happiness could do. She knew now.
She touched the glass with one finger. She touched the back of his head.
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You. You absolute — you.
Look what you did. Look what you left me with. Look what you left him with.
He tucks in a doll because you’re not here to tuck him in.
He thinks the house is going to burn down because I’m — because I can’t —
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She stopped.
She did not blame him. She had never let herself blame him. She did not blame him now.
She touched the glass again. Lighter this time.
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I miss you. God, I miss you. I miss you so much I cannot — I cannot —
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Her hands shook on the frame. She made them stop.
She put the photograph back.
She was very careful. She placed it exactly where it had been. She angled it towards the bed. She stepped back and looked at it. She leaned forward and adjusted it by a fraction of an inch. She stepped back again. She checked. It was right.
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He notices. If it’s wrong he’ll notice.
He notices everything.
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Sarah stood in his room a moment longer. She looked at the doll in the bed. She looked at the photograph. She looked at the posters she had not properly looked at in years.
She smiled. It was a small smile and it hurt her face.
Then Sarah turned and left the room, and she pulled the door to behind her with both hands, holding the handle down and releasing it slowly, so it would not make a sound.
She did not realise she had closed the door the way he closed it.
Sarah’s bedroom was across the landing.
She opened the door.
The smell was the first thing. Stale air. Something sweet underneath it that was wine and something sour underneath that that was her.
She did not see the mess. She had stopped seeing the mess a long time ago.
What Sarah saw was the windowsill.
The photographs.
They caught the morning light, because they faced the window, because she had arranged them to face the window, years ago, before she had understood that arranging photographs to face the window was the kind of thing a person did when they had started building a shrine without noticing.
Him and her on a beach. Him and her at someone’s wedding, her in a dress she could no longer fit into, him laughing at something off-camera. Him on the sofa with a much younger Ethan asleep on his chest, both of them with their mouths slightly open, both of them out cold. On the chest of drawers, the wedding photograph — him in a suit that did not quite fit, her in a dress that did, both of them grinning like they had got away with something.
On the bed, on her side, the cushion. She had ordered the cushion online. She had been drunk when she had ordered it. It had arrived a week later and she had cried for an hour and then she had put it on the bed and now it was on the bed and it was on the bed every day. Him kissing her cheek. Her eyes closed. Her laughing. She looked — Sarah could not look at herself in that photograph for more than a second at a time. She looked so young. She looked like a woman who thought nothing bad was ever going to happen to her.
On the bedside table, the hospital photographs.
The first one: her propped up, a mess, hair everywhere, Ethan less than an hour old in her arms in a blanket, and him standing next to the bed, leaning over, crying. Not crying prettily. Crying the way a man cries when something has happened to him that he has no frame for. Mouth open. Eyes screwed up. One hand on her shoulder and one hand on the baby’s foot.
The second one: him in the chair beside the bed, holding Ethan. Ethan tiny, a wrapped thing, a face. Him looking down at the baby. And his face — his face was doing something she had never seen any human face do before or since. Smiling and crying at the same time and being completely destroyed by his own happiness. It was the best day of his life. Anyone who looked at that photograph would know it was the best day of his life.
Sarah looked at that photograph for a long time.
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You never got to see him grow up.
You never got to see what he turned into.
He is so — he is so good. He is so good and he is so quiet and he is so —
You would have loved him. God. You would have loved who he is.
You would have been better at this than I am.
You would have been — you would have been so much fucking better than I am.
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Sarah sat down on the bed. On her side. She did not sit on his side. She did not sit on his side.
She opened the drawer of the bedside table without looking.
The packet of tablets was where it always was. Half empty. She had been through it faster this month. She took the packet out.
Sarah popped two tablets out of the foil into her palm.
She looked at them.
Then she popped a third one out. And a fourth.
Four sat in her palm. White, small, blameless.
She looked at them.
She looked at the photograph of him holding the baby.
She looked at the four tablets.
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Do it.
Go on. Do it. Do it and be done.
He’ll be better without you. Look at him. Look at what you’re doing to him. He’ll — he’ll be better with — he’ll go to his sister, he’ll go into care, he’ll —
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Sarah stopped.
She stopped because the thought had moved forward by one step and the one step had been Ethan.
Ethan in a room somewhere that was not this room.
Ethan being told.
Ethan being told by someone who did not know him, who did not know how he processed information, who did not know that he took words in in layers, that the first layer was sound and the second layer was shape and the third layer was meaning, that he needed time, that you had to give him time.
Ethan being told that his mum — on top of his dad — that his mum —
Sarah made a sound.
It was not a word. It was a small animal sound that came out of her chest and went into the empty bedroom and did not come back.
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No.
No. No. No no no no no.
Not that. Not that as well. Don’t you fucking dare, Sarah. Don’t you fucking dare do that to him.
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She looked at the four tablets in her palm.
She put two of them back.
She put the other two back.
She put all four back in the packet and she put the packet back in the drawer and she closed the drawer.
She held the edge of the drawer with her fingertips for a second after she had closed it. Just held it. She was shaking.
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You absolute — selfish — you selfish piece of —
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She closed her eyes.
She breathed.
She took one tablet out. One. The amount she was supposed to take. She put it on her tongue and she reached for the glass on the bedside table, which was not water, which was the wine from last night, and she swallowed the tablet with the wine because she did not have the energy to go downstairs for water.
She lay down.
On her side. On her side of the bed.
She put her hand out across the sheet to the empty half. The sheet was cold. It was always cold. It was always going to be cold.
She left her hand there.
The tears came again, quieter this time, and she let them. Her shoulders moved under the duvet. Her face did things she would never let anyone see.
I’m sorry, she thought, to him. To the man in the photograph. To the baby in the hospital blanket. To the boy who had just crept out of his own house in a shirt buttoned wrong because she could not get out of her own way long enough to do up his buttons for him.
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I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so — I’m so sorry.
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Her eyes closed.
The photograph of him holding the baby was in her eyeline, going slightly out of focus.
Sarah held the empty side of the bed.
She slept.24Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyIgSq2InMa
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