Jess watched her attempt to cover it. "So where is he?"
"You . . . I think you should talk to him." Maria Costanza brought a hand to her mouth, as if to prevent herself saying more, then extricated herself gently from her grandchild. "Hold on. I'll get you his address."
"His address?"
She left Tanzie and Jess standing on the doorstep, and disappeared down the little hallway, half closing the door behind her. Tanzie looked up quizzically. Jess smiled reassuringly. It wasn't quite as easy as it had been.
The door opened again. She handed over a piece of paper. "It will take you maybe one hour, maybe an hour and a half, depending on the traffic." Jess registered her stiff features, then looked past her to the little hallway, where nothing had changed in the fifteen years she had known her. Nothing at all. And somewhere in the back of Jess's head a little bell began to chime.
"Right," she said, and she wasn't smiling anymore.
Maria Costanza couldn't hold her gaze. She stooped then, and put her palm against Tanzie's cheek. "You come back and stay with your nonna soon, yes?" She looked up at Jess. "You bring her back? It's been a long time."
That look of mute appeal, of acknowledgment in her duplicity, was more unnerving than almost anything Maria Constanza had ever done in the years of their relationship.
Jess swept Tanzie toward the car.
--
Mr. Nicholls looked up. He didn't say anything.
"Here." Jess handed him the paper. "We need to go here." Wordlessly he began to program the postcode into the GPS. Her heart was thumping.
She looked in the rearview mirror. "You knew," she said when Tanzie finally put her earphones in.
Nicky pulled at his fringe, gazing out at his grandmother's house. "It was the last few times we've spoken to him on Skype. Granny would never have had that wallpaper."
She didn't ask him where Marty was. She thought she probably had an idea even then.
--
They drove the hour in silence. Jess couldn't speak. A million possibilities ran through her head. Occasionally she looked into the mirror, watching Nicky. His face was closed, turned resolutely toward the roadside. She began slowly to reconsider his reluctance to come here, even to speak to his father these last few months, casting it in a new light.
They drove through the dusky countryside to the outskirts of a new town and a housing development where the houses were box fresh, laid out in careful, sweeping curves, and new cars gleamed outside like statements of intent. Mr. Nicholls pulled up to Castle Court, where four cherry trees stood like sentinels along the narrow pavement upon which she suspected nobody ever walked. The house looked newly built; its Regency-style windows gleamed, its slate roof shone in the drizzle.
She stared at it out of the window.
"You okay?" They were the only two words Mr. Nicholls had spoken the entire journey.
"You wait here a minute, kids," Jess said, and climbed out.
She walked up to the front door, double-checked the address on the piece of paper, then rapped with the brass knocker. Inside she could hear the sound of a television, and see the vague shadow of someone moving under bright light.
She knocked again. She barely felt the rain.
Footsteps in the hallway. The door opened and a blond woman stood in front of her. She wore a dark red wool dress and matching pumps, and her hair was cut in one of those styles that women wear when they work in retail or banking but don't want to look like they've entirely given up on the idea of being a rock chick.
"Is Marty here?" Jess said. The woman made as if to speak, then looked Jess up and down, at her flip-flops, at her crumpled white trousers, and in the several seconds that followed, from the faint hardening of her expression, Jess could see she knew. She knew about her.
"Wait there," she said.
The door half closed, and Jess heard her shout down the narrow corridor. "Mart? Mart?"
Mart.
She heard his voice, muffled, laughing, saying something about television, and then the woman's voice dropped. Jess saw their shadows behind the frosted-glass panels. And then the door opened and he stood there.
Marty had grown his hair. He had a long, floppy fringe, swept carefully to one side like a teenager. He wore jeans she didn't recognize, in deep indigo, and he had lost weight. He looked like someone she didn't know. And he had gone quite, quite pale. "Jess."
She couldn't speak.
They stared at each other. He swallowed. "I was going to tell you."
Right up to that point a part of her had refused to believe it could be true. Right up to that point she had thought there must be some huge mistake, that Marty was staying with a friend or he was ill again and Maria Costanza, with her misplaced pride, just couldn't face admitting it. But there was no mistaking what was right in front of her.
It took her a moment to find her voice. "This? This is . . . where you've been living?"
Jess stumbled backward, now taking in the immaculate front garden, the living room, just visible through the window. Her hip bumped against a car on the drive and she put out her hand to support herself. "All this time? We've been scratching around for the last two years just to stay warm and fed and you're here with an executive home and a--a brand-new Toyota?"
Marty glanced awkwardly behind him. "We need to talk, Jess."
And then she saw the wallpaper in his dining room. The thick stripe. And it all fell into place. His insistence that they only speak at set times. The lack of a landline phone number. Maria Costanza's assurance that he was sleeping whenever she rang outside the usual time. Her determination to get Jess off the telephone as quickly as possible.
"We need to talk?" Jess was half laughing now. "Yes, let's talk, Marty. How about I talk? For two years I've not made a single demand on you--not for money or time or child care or help of any kind. Because I thought you were ill. I thought you were depressed. I thought you were living with your mother."
"I was living with Mum."
"Till when?"
He compressed his lips.
"Till when, Marty?" Her voice was shrill.
"Fifteen months."
"You were with your mum fifteen months?"
He looked at his feet.
"You've been here fifteen months? You've been here more than a year?"
"I wanted to tell you. But I knew that you'd--"
"What--kick up a fuss? Because you're here living a life of luxury while your wife and kids are back at home scrabbling around in the crap you left behind?"
"Jess . . ."
She was briefly silenced as the door opened abruptly. A little girl appeared behind him, her hair a virgin sheet of blond, wearing a Hollister sweatshirt and Converse trainers. She tugged at his sleeve. "It's your program, Marty," she began, and then she saw Jess and stopped.
"Go to your mum, babe," he said quietly, his gaze flicking sideways. He put his hand gently on her shoulder. "I'll be through in a minute."
She looked at Jess warily. She was the same age as Tanzie. "Go on." He pulled the door behind him.
And that was when Jess's heart actually broke.
"She . . . she has kids?"
He swallowed. "Two."
Her hands went to her face, and then her hair. She turned and walked blindly back down the path. "Oh, God. Oh, God."
"Jess, I never set out to--"
She spun round and flew at him. She wanted to smash his stupid face and his expensive haircut. She wanted him to know the pain he had put his children through. She wanted him to pay. He ducked behind the car, and almost without knowing what she was doing, she found she was kicking at it, at its oversized wheels, its gleaming panels, the stupid bright white shiny stupid immaculate stupid car.
"You lied! You lied to all of us! And I was trying to protect you! I can't believe . . . I can't--" She kicked and felt the faint satisfaction as the metal gave, even as the pain shot up her foot. She kicked again and again, not caring, her fists raining blows on the window.
"Jess! The car! Are you fucking mad?"
She rained blows down on that car because she could not rain the blows on him. She hit with her hands and her feet, not caring, sobbing with fury, her rasping breath loud in her ears. And when he wrenched her off it, wedging himself between her and the car, his grip tight on her arms, she felt a momentary flicker of fear that her life had spun utterly out of control. And then she looked into his eyes, his coward's eyes, and there was a loud buzzing in her head. She wanted to smash--
"Jess."
Mr. Nicholls's arm was around her waist, easing her backward.
"Get off me!"
"The kids are watching. Come on now." A hand on her arm.
She couldn't breathe. A moan rose up through her whole body. She allowed herself to be pulled a few steps back. Marty was shouting something she couldn't hear through the din in her head.
"Come . . . come away."
The kids. She looked at the car, and saw Tanzie's face, wide-eyed with shock, Nicky a motionless silhouette behind her. She looked to the other side, at the house where two small, pale faces watched from the living room, their mother behind them. When she saw Jess looking, she lowered the blind.
"You're mad," yelled Marty, staring at the dented panels of the car. "Completely effing mad."
She had begun to shake. Mr. Nicholls put his arms around her, and steered her into his car. "Get in. Sit down," he said, closing the door once she was inside. Marty was walking slowly down the pathway toward them, his old swagger suddenly visible now that she was the one in the wrong. She thought he was about to pick a fight, but when he was about fifteen feet away he peered into the car, stooping slightly as if to check, and then she heard the rear door open behind her and Tanzie was out and running toward him.
"Daddy!" she cried, and he swept her up in his arms and then Jess had to look away because she no longer knew what she felt about anything.
--
She wasn't sure how long she sat there, staring at the footwell. She couldn't think. She couldn't feel. She heard murmuring voices on the pathway, and at one point, Nicky reached forward and touched her shoulder lightly. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice cracking.
She reached behind and gripped his hand fiercely. "Not. Your. Fault," she whispered.
The door opened finally and Mr. Nicholls put his head in. His face was wet, and rain dripped from his collar. "Okay. Tanzie's going to stay here for a couple of hours."
She stared at him, suddenly alert. "Oh no," she began. "He doesn't get to have her. Not after what he's--"
"This isn't about you and him, Jess."
Jess turned toward the house. The front door was slightly ajar. Tanzie was already inside. "But she can't stay there. Not with them . . ."
He climbed into the driver's seat, then he reached across and took her hand. His was ice cold and damp.
"She's had a bad day and she asked if she could spend some time with him. And, Jess, if this really is his life now, then surely she has to be part of it."
"But it's not--"
"Fair. I know."
They sat there, the three of them, staring at the brightly lit house. Her daughter was in there. With Marty's new family. It was as if someone had reached in, gripped her heart, and ripped it out through her ribs.
She couldn't take her eyes from the window. "What if she changes her mind? She'll be all alone. And we don't know them. I don't know this woman. She could be--"
"She's with her dad. She'll be okay."
She stared at Mr. Nicholls. His face was sympathetic, but his voice was oddly firm. "Why are you on his side?"
"I'm not on his side." His fingers closed around hers. "Look, we'll all go find somewhere to eat. We'll be back in a couple of hours. We stay close by and we can come back for her anytime if she needs us."
"No. I'll stay," said a voice from behind. "I'll stay with her. So that she's not by herself."
Jess turned. Nicky was gazing out of the window. "Are you sure?"
"I'll be fine." His face was a blank. "Anyway, I sort of want to hear what he says."
--
Mr. Nicholls saw Nicky to the front door. She watched her stepson, his long, lanky legs in his skinny black jeans, his diffident, awkward way of standing as the door opened to let him in. The blond woman tried to smile at him. She peered surreptitiously past him at the car. It was possible, Jess observed distantly, that the woman was actually frightened of her. The door closed behind them. Jess shut her eyes, not wanting to imagine what was going on behind that door.
And then Mr. Nicholls was in the car, bringing with him a blast of cold air. "Come on," he said. "It's okay. We'll be back before you know it."
--
They sat in a roadside cafe. She couldn't eat. She drank coffee and Mr. Nicholls bought a sandwich and just sat there, opposite her. She wasn't sure he knew what to say. Two hours, she kept telling herself. Two hours and then I can have them back. She wanted to be back in the car with her children, away from here. Away from Marty and his lies and his new girlfriend and pretend family. She watched the clock hands edge round and let her coffee cool. Every minute felt like infinity.
And then, ten minutes before they were due to leave, the phone rang. Jess snatched it up. A number she didn't recognize. Marty's voice. "Can you leave them with me tonight?"
It knocked the breath clean out of her.
"Oh no," she said when she could find her voice. "You don't get to keep them, just like that."
"I'm just . . . trying to explain it all to them."
"Well, good luck with that. Because I'm damned if I understand it." Her voice lifted in the little cafe. She saw the people at the nearby tables turn their heads.
"I couldn't tell you, Jess, okay? Because I knew you'd react like you did."
"Oh, so it's my fault. Of course it is!"
"We were over. You knew it as well as I did."
She was standing. She wasn't aware of having got to her feet. Mr. Nicholls, for some reason, stood, too. "I couldn't give a flying fuck about you and me, okay? But we've been living on the breadline since you left, and now I find out you're living with someone else, supporting her kids. Even as you said you couldn't lift a finger for ours. Yes, it's just possible I'm going to react badly to that one, Marty."
"It's not my money I'm living on. It's Linzie's money. I can't use her money to pay for your kids."
"My kids? My kids?" She was out from behind the table now, walking blindly toward the door. She was dimly aware of Mr. Nicholls summoning the waitress.
"Look," said Marty, "Tanzie really wants to stay over. She's obviously upset about this maths thing. She asked me to ask you. Please."
Jess couldn't speak. She just stood in the cold car park, her eyes closed, her knuckles white around the phone.
"And I really want to sort things out with Nicky."
"You are . . . unbelievable."
"Just . . . just let me sort things out with the kids, please? You and I, we can talk afterward. But just tonight, while they're here. I've missed them, Jess. I know it's all my fault. I know I've been rubbish. But I'm actually glad it's all out there. I'm glad you know what's going on. And I just . . . I want to move forward now."
She stared ahead of her. In the distance a police car's blue lights flashed. Her foot had begun to throb. Finally she said, "Put Tanzie on."
There was a short silence, the sound of a door. Jess took a deep breath.
"Mum?"
"Tanze? Sweetheart? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, Mum. They've got terrapins. One has a gammy leg. It's called Mike. Can we get a terrapin?"
"We'll talk about it." She could hear a saucepan clash in the background, the sound of a tap running. "Um, you really want to spend the night? You don't have to, you know. You just . . . you do whatever makes you feel happy."
"I would quite like to stay. Suze's nice. She's going to lend me her High School Musical pajamas."
"Suze?"
"Linzie's daughter. It's going to be
like a sleepover. And she has those beads where you make a picture and stick it together with an iron."
"Right."
There was a brief silence. Jess could hear muffled talking in the background.
"So what time are you picking me up tomorrow?"
She swallowed, and tried to keep her voice level. "After breakfast. Nine o'clock. And if you change your mind, you just call me, okay? Anytime. And I'll pick you up straightaway. Even if it's the very middle of the night. It doesn't matter."
"I know."
"I'll come anytime. I love you, sweetie. Anytime you want to call."
"Okay."
"Will you . . . will you put Nicky on?"
"Love you. Bye."
Nicky's voice was unreadable. "I've told him I'll stay," he said. "But only to keep an eye on Tanze."
"Okay. I'll make sure we're somewhere close by. Is she . . . the woman . . . is she okay? I mean, will you all be okay?"
"Linzie. She's fine."
"And you . . . you're all right with this? He's not--"
"I'm fine."
There was a long silence.
"Jess?"
"Yes?"
"Are you okay?"
She screwed her eyes shut. She took a silent breath, put her hand up, and wiped at the tears that were running down her cheeks. She hadn't known there were that many tears in her. She didn't answer Nicky until she could be sure they hadn't soaked her voice, too. "I'm fine, lovey. You have a good time and don't worry about me. I'll see you both in the morning."
Mr. Nicholls was behind her. He took his phone from her in silence, his eyes not leaving her face. "I've found us somewhere to sleep where they'll let us take the dog."
"Is there a bar?" Jess asked, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.
"What?"
"I need to get drunk, Ed. Really, really drunk." He held out an arm and she took it. "And I think I may have broken my toe."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ed
So once upon a time Ed met a girl who was the most optimistic person he had ever known. A girl who wore flip-flops in the hope of spring. She seemed to bounce through life like Tigger; the things that would have felled most people didn't seem to touch her. Or if she did fall, she bounced right back. She fell again, plastered on a smile, dusted herself off, and kept going. He never could work out whether it was the single most heroic or the most idiotic thing he'd ever seen.
And then he stood on the curb outside a four-bedroom executive home somewhere near Carlisle and watched as that same girl saw everything she'd believed in stripped away until nothing was left but a ghost who sat in his passenger seat gazing unseeing through the windscreen. The sound of her optimism draining away was audible. And something cracked open in his heart.