Big Little Lies

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  “Abigail is having a ‘beautiful experience’ with Bonnie at the homeless shelter,” Madeline said to Ed.

  Ed took his pillow off his face.

  “That’s revolting,” he said.

  “I know,” said Madeline. This is why she loved him.

  “Coffee,” he said sympathetically. “I’ll get you coffee.”

  “PRESENTS!” shouted Chloe and Fred from down the hallway.

  Chloe and Fred couldn’t get enough of the crass commercialism of Christmas.

  Harper: Can you imagine how strange it must have been for Madeline to have her ex-husband’s child in the same kindergarten class as her own child? I remember Renata and I talked about it over brunch. We were quite concerned how it would affect the classroom dynamics. Of course, Bonnie loved to pretend it was all so nice and amicable. “Oh, we all have Christmas lunch together.” Spare me. I saw them at the trivia night. I saw Bonnie throw her drink all over Madeline!

  9.

  It was just becoming light when Celeste woke up on Christmas morning. Perry was sound asleep, and there was no sound from the adjoining room where the boys were sleeping. They’d been almost demented with excitement about Santa Claus finding them in Canada (letters had been sent to Santa informing him of the change of address), and with their body clocks all confused, she and Perry had had terrible trouble getting them off to sleep. The boys were sharing a king-size bed, and they’d kept wrestling in that hysterical way they sometimes did, where laughter skidded into tears and then back again into laughter, and Perry had shouted from the next room, “Go to sleep, boys!” and all of a sudden there was silence, and when Celeste had checked in a few seconds later they were both lying flat on their backs, arms and legs spread, as if exhaustion had simultaneously knocked them out cold.

  “Come and look at this,” she’d said to Perry, and he’d come in and stood next to her, and they’d watched them sleep for a few minutes before grinning at each other and tiptoeing out to have a drink to celebrate Christmas Eve.

  Now Celeste slid out from underneath the feathery quilt and walked to the window overlooking the frozen lake. She put her hand flat against the glass. It felt cold, but the room was warm. There was a giant Christmas tree in the center of the lake, glowing with red and green lights. Snowflakes fell softly. It was all so beautiful she felt like she could taste it. When she looked back on this holiday, she’d remember its flavor: full and fruity, like the mulled wine they’d had earlier.

  Today, after the boys had opened their presents and they’d eaten a room service breakfast (pancakes with maple syrup!), they’d go out to play in the snow. They’d build a snowman. Perry had booked them a sleigh ride. Perry would post pictures of them all frolicking in the snow on Facebook. He’d write something like: The boys have their first white Christmas! He loved Facebook. Everyone teased him about it. Big, successful banker posting photos on Facebook, writing cheery comments about his wife’s friends’ recipe posts.

  Celeste looked back at the bed where Perry was sleeping. He always slept with a tiny perplexed frown, as if his dreams puzzled him.

  As soon as he woke he’d be desperate to give Celeste his gift. He loved giving presents. The first time she knew she wanted to marry him was when she saw the anticipation on his face, watching his mother open a birthday present he’d bought for her. “Do you like it?” he’d burst out as soon she tore the paper, and his family had all laughed at him for sounding like a big kid.

  She wouldn’t need to fake her pleasure. Whatever he chose would be perfect. She’d always prided herself on her ability to choose thoughtful gifts, but Perry outdid her. On his last overseas trip he’d found the most ridiculously tizzy pink crystal champagne stopper. “I took one look and thought Madeline,” he’d said. Madeline had loved it of course.

  Today would be perfect in every way. The Facebook photos wouldn’t lie. So much joy. Her life had so much joy. That was an actual verifiable fact.

  There really was no need to leave him until the boys finished high school.

  That would be the right time to leave. On the day they finished their last exams. “Put down your pens,” the exam supervisors would say. That’s when Celeste would put down her marriage.

  Perry opened his eyes.

  “Merry Christmas!” smiled Celeste.

  Gabrielle: Everyone thinks Celeste and Perry have the perfect marriage, but I’m not sure about that. I walked by them, sitting in their car parked on the side of the road on the trivia night. Celeste looked gorgeous, of course. I’ve personally witnessed her eating carbs like there’s no tomorrow, so don’t tell me there’s any justice in this world. They were both staring straight ahead, not looking at each other, all dressed up in their costumes, not saying a word.

  10.

  Jane woke to the sound of people shouting “Happy Christmas!” from the street below her apartment window. She sat up in bed and tugged at her T-shirt; it was damp with sweat. She’d been dreaming. A bad one. She’d been lying flat on her back while Ziggy stood next to her, in his shortie pajamas, smiling down at her, one foot on her throat.

  “Get off, Ziggy, I can’t breathe!” she’d been trying to say, but he’d stopped smiling and was studying her with benign interest, as if he were performing a scientific experiment.

  She put her hand to her neck and took big gulps of air.

  It was just a dream. Dreams mean nothing.

  Ziggy was in bed with her. His warm back pressed against her. She turned around to face him and put a fingertip to the soft, fragile skin just above his cheekbone.

  He went to bed each night in his own bed and woke up each morning in with her. Neither of them ever remembered how he got there. Maybe it’s magic, they decided. “Maybe a good witch carries me in each night,” Ziggy said, wide-eyed but with a bit of a grin, because he only half believed in all that kind of stuff.

  “He’ll just stop one day,” Jane’s mother said whenever Jane mentioned that Ziggy still came into her bed each night. “He won’t be still doing it when he’s fifteen.”

  There was a new freckle on Ziggy’s nose Jane hadn’t noticed before. He had three freckles on his nose now. They formed the shape of a sail.

  One day a woman would lie in bed next to Ziggy and study his sleeping face. There would be tiny black dots of whiskers across his upper lip. Instead of those skinny little boy shoulders, he’d have a broad chest. What sort of man would he be?

  “He’s going to be a gentle, lovely man, just like Poppy,” her mother would say adamantly, as if she knew this for an absolute fact.

  Jane’s mother believed Ziggy was her own beloved father, reincarnated. Or she pretended to believe this, anyway. Nobody could really tell how serious she was. Poppy had died six months before Ziggy was born, right when Jane’s mother had been halfway through reading a book about a little boy who was supposedly a reincarnated World War II fighter pilot. The idea that her grandson might actually be her dad had gotten stuck in her head. It had helped with her grieving.

  And of course, there was no son-in-law to offend with talk that his son was actually his wife’s grandfather.

  Jane didn’t exactly encourage the reincarnation talk, but she didn’t discourage it either. Maybe Ziggy was Poppy. Sometimes she could discern a faint hint of Poppy in Ziggy’s face, especially when he was concentrating. He got the same puckered forehead.

  Her mother had been furious when Jane called to tell her what had happened at the orientation day.

  “That’s outrageous! Ziggy would never choke another child! That child has never harmed a fly. He’s just like Poppy. Remember how Poppy couldn’t bear to swat a fly? Your grandma would be dancing about, yelling, ‘Kill it, Stan! Kill the damned thing!’”

  There had been silence then, which meant that Jane’s mother had been felled by an attack of the giggles. She was a silent giggler.

  Jane had waited it out, until her mother finally got back on the phone and said shakily, “Oh, that did me goo
d! Laughter is wonderful for the digestion. Now, where were we? Oh yes! Ziggy! That little brat! Not Ziggy, of course, the little girl. Why would she accuse our darling Ziggy?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane. “But the thing is, she didn’t seem like a brat. The mother was sort of awful, but her daughter seemed nice. Not a brat.”

  She could hear the uncertainty in her voice, and her mother heard it too.

  “But darling, you can’t possibly think Ziggy really tried to choke another child?”

  “Of course not,” Jane had said, and changed the subject.

  She readjusted her pillow and wriggled into a more comfortable position. Maybe she could go back to sleep. “Ziggy will have you up at the crack of dawn,” her mother had said, but Ziggy didn’t seem overly excited about Christmas this year, and Jane wondered if she’d failed him in some way. She often experienced an uneasy sense that she was somehow faking a life for him, giving him a pretend childhood. She tried her best to create little rituals and family traditions for birthdays and holidays. “Let’s put your stocking out now!” But where? They’d moved too often for there to be a regular spot. The end of his bed? The door handle? She floundered about, and her voice became high and strained. There was something fraudulent about it. The rituals weren’t real like they were in other families where there was a mum and a dad and at least one sibling. Sometimes she felt like Ziggy might be just going along with it for her sake, and that he could see right through her, and he knew he was being shortchanged.

  She watched the rise and fall of his chest.

  He was so beautiful. There was no way he hurt that little girl and lied about it.

  But all sleeping children were beautiful. Even really horrible children probably looked beautiful when they slept. How could she know for sure that he hadn’t done it? Did anyone really know their child? Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you. New personality traits could appear overnight.

  And then there was . . .

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

  The memory fluttered like a trapped moth in her mind.

  It had been trying so hard to escape ever since the little girl had pointed at Ziggy. The pressure on Jane’s chest. Terror rising, flooding her mind. A scream trapped in her throat.

  The bruises were black, purple and red.

  “She’s going to have bruises!” the child’s mother had said.

  No, no, no.

  Ziggy was Ziggy. He could not. He would not. She knew her child.

  He stirred. His blue-veined eyelids twitched.

  “Guess what day it is,” said Jane.

  “Christmas!” shouted Ziggy.

  He sat up so fast, the side of his head slammed violently against Jane’s nose and she fell back against the pillow, tears streaming.

  Thea: I always thought there was something not quite right about that child. That Ziggy. Something funny about his eyes. Boys need a male role model. I’m sorry, but it’s a fact.

  Stu: Bloody hell, there was a lot of fuss about that Ziggy kid. I didn’t know what to believe.

  11.

  Do you fly as high as this plane, Daddy?” asked Josh. They were about seven hours into their flight from Vancouver back home to Sydney. So far so good. No arguments. They’d put the boys on either side of them in separate window seats and Celeste and Perry were in adjacent aisle seats.

  “Nope. Remember I told you? I have to fly really low to avoid radar detection,” said Perry.

  “Oh yeah.” Josh turned his face back to the window.

  “Why do you have to avoid radar detection?” asked Celeste.

  Perry shook his head and shared a tolerant “women!” grin with Max, who was sitting on the other side of Celeste and had leaned over to listen to the conversation. “It’s obvious isn’t it, Max?”

  “It’s top secret, Mummy,” Max told her kindly. “No one knows that Daddy can fly.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Celeste. “Sorry. Silly of me.”

  “See, if I got caught, they’d probably want to run a whole battery of tests on me,” said Perry. “Find out just how I developed these superpowers, then they’d want to recruit me for the Air Force, I’d have to go on secret missions.”

  “Yeah, and we don’t want that,” said Celeste. “Daddy already travels enough.”

  Perry reached across the aisle and put his hand over hers in silent apology.

  “You can’t really fly,” said Max.

  Perry raised his eyebrows, widened his eyes and gave a little shrug. “Can’t I?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Max uncertainly.

  Perry winked at Celeste over Max’s head. He’d been telling the twins for years that he had secret flying abilities, going into ridiculous detail about how he’d discovered his secret powers when he was fifteen, which was the age when they’d probably learn to fly too, assuming they’d inherited his powers and eaten enough broccoli. The boys could never tell if he was serious or not.

  “I was flying when I skied over that big jump yesterday,” said Max. He used his hand to demonstrate his trajectory. “Whoosh!”

  “Yeah, you were flying,” said Perry. “You nearly gave Daddy a heart attack.”

  Max chuckled.

  Perry linked his hands in front of him and stretched out his back. “Ow. I’m still stiff from trying to keep up with you lot. You’re all too fast.”

  Celeste studied him. He looked good: tanned and relaxed from the last five days, skiing and sledding. This was the problem. She was still hopelessly, helplessly attracted to him.

  “What?” Perry glanced at her.

  “Nothing.”

  “Good holiday, eh?”

  “It was a great holiday,” said Celeste with feeling. “Magical.”

  “I think this is going to be a good year for us,” said Perry. He held her eyes. “Don’t you? With the boys starting school, hopefully you’ll get a bit more time to yourself, and I’m . . .” He stopped, and ran his thumb across his armrest as if he were doing some sort of quality-control test. Then he looked up at her. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make this a good year for us.” He smiled self-consciously.

  He did this sometimes. He said or did something that made her feel as besotted with him as she’d been that very first year after they’d met at that boring business lunch, where she’d first truly understood those four words: swept off my feet.

  Celeste felt a sense of peace wash over her. A flight steward was coming down the aisle, offering chocolate chip cookies baked on board the plane. The aroma was delicious. Maybe it was going to be a really good year for them.

  Perhaps she could stay. It was always such a glorious relief when she allowed herself to believe she could stay.

  “Let’s go down to the beach when we get home,” said Perry. “We’ll build a big sand castle. Snowman one day. Sand castle the next. Gosh you kids have a good life.”

  “Yep,” Josh yawned, and stretched out luxuriously in his business-class seat. “It’s pretty good.”

  Melissa: I remember I saw Celeste and Perry and the twins down on the beach during the school holidays. I said to my husband, “I think that’s one of the new kindergarten mums.” His eyes nearly popped out of his head. Celeste and Perry were all loving and laughing and helping their kids make this really elaborate sand castle. It was kind of sickening, to be honest. Like, even their sand castles were better than ours.

  12.

  Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: We’re looking at all angles, all possible motives.

  Samantha: So we’re, like, seriously using the word . . . “murder”?

  Four Months Before the Trivia Night

  I want to have a playdate with Ziggy,” announced Chloe one warm summer night early in the new year.

  “All right,” said Madeline. Her eyes were on her older daughter. Abigail had taken an age cutting up her steak into tiny precise squares, and now she was pushing the little squa
res back and forth, as if she were arranging them into some sort of complicated mosaic. She hadn’t put a single piece in her mouth.

  Ed said quietly to Madeline, “Wasn’t Ziggy the one who . . . you know?” He put his hands to his throat and made his eyes bulge.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Chloe giggled fondly. “Daft Daddy.”

  “You should have a playdate with Skye.” Abigail put down her fork and spoke to Chloe. “She’s very excited about being in the same class as you.”

  “That’s nice, isn’t it?” said Madeline in the strained, sugary tone she knew she used whenever her ex-husband’s daughter came up in conversation. “Isn’t that nice.”

  Ed spluttered on his wine, and Madeline gave him a dark look.

  “Skye is sort of like my sister, isn’t she, Mummy?” said Chloe now. Unlike her mother, she’d been thrilled to learn she was going to be in the same kindergarten class as Skye, and she’d asked this question about forty thousand times.

  “No, Skye is Abigail’s half sister,” said Madeline with saint-like patience.

  “But I’m Abigail’s sister too!” said Chloe. “So that means Skye and I must be sisters! We could be twins, like Josh and Max!”

  “Speaking of which, have you seen Celeste since they got back from Canada?” asked Ed. “Those photos Perry put on Facebook were amazing. We should have a white Christmas one day. When we win the lottery.”

  “Brrrr,” said Madeline. “They looked cold.”

  “I’d be an awesome snowboarder,” said Fred dreamily.

  Madeline shuddered. Fred was her little adrenaline junkie. If something could be climbed he climbed it. She could no longer bear to watch him skateboard. At just seven, he flipped and spun and hurled his skinny body through the air like a kid twice his age. Whenever she saw those cool, laid-back dudes interviewed on TV about their latest BASE-jumping/rock-climbing/how-can-we-do-our-best-to-kill-ourselves adventure, she thought, There’s Fred. He even looked the part with his scruffy, too-long surfer-boy hair.

  “You need a haircut,” she said.

  Fred wrinkled his freckled nose in disgust. “I don’t!”

  “I’ll call Ziggy’s mum,” said Madeline to Chloe, “and arrange a playdate.”

  She’d actually been meaning to call Jane since before Christmas, but work had gotten busy, and they’d been away up the coast in between Christmas and New Year’s. Poor Jane didn’t know anyone in the area, and she’d seemed so devastated that day after that awful incident at orientation.

  “Madeline, are you sure that’s a good idea?” said Ed quietly. “He sounds like he might be a bit rough.”

  “Well, we don’t know for sure,” said Madeline.

  “But you said Amabella Klein pointed him out in a lineup.”

  “Innocent people have been picked out of police lineups before,” said Madeline to Ed.

  “If that kid lays a finger on Chloe—” began Ed.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Madeline. “Chloe can look after herself!” She looked at Abigail’s plate. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  “We like Renata and Geoff,” said Ed. “So if their daughter says this kid, this Ziggy, hurt her, then we should be supportive. What sort of a name is Ziggy, anyway?”

  “We don’t like Renata and Geoff that much,” said Madeline. “Abigail, eat!”

  “Don’t we?” said Ed. “I thought I liked Geoff.”

  “You tolerate him,” said Madeline. “He’s the bird-watcher, Ed, not the golfer.”