“You threatened her,” I said. “With exposure.”
“Yes,” Lena said, barely audible. “I did.”
• • •
LOUISE LEFT WITHOUT A WORD. Lena sat motionless, staring at the river outside the window, not crying and not speaking. I had nothing to say to her, no way of reaching her. I recognized in her something I know I used to have, too, something maybe everyone has at that age, some essential unknowability. I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one. I remember you at seventeen and me at thirteen, and I’m certain that our parents had no idea who we were.
“I lied to her.” Lena’s voice broke my train of thought. She hadn’t moved, she was still watching the water.
“Lied to who? To Katie?” She shook her head. “To Louise? What did you lie about?”
“There’s no point telling her the truth,” Lena said. “Not now. She may as well blame me. At least I’m around. She needs somewhere to put all that hate.”
“What do you mean, Lena? What are you talking about?”
She turned her cold green eyes on mine, and she looked older than before. She looked the way you did the morning after you
’d pulled me from the water. Changed, weary. “I didn’t threaten to tell anyone. I would never have done that to her. I loved her. None of you seem to get what that means. It’s like you don’t know what love is at all. I would have done anything for her.”
“So, if you didn’t threaten her . . .”
I think I knew the answer before she said it. “It was Mum,” she said.
JULES
The room felt colder; if I believed in spirits I would have said that you’d joined us.
“We did argue, like I said. I didn’t want her to see him anymore. She said she didn’t care what I thought, that it didn’t matter. She said that I was immature, that I didn’t understand what it was like to be in a real relationship. I called her a slut, she called me a virgin. It was that sort of fight. Stupid, horrible. When Katie left, I realized that Mum was in her room right next door—I’d thought she was out. She’d overheard the whole thing. She told me she had to speak to Louise about it. I begged her not to, I told her it would ruin Katie’s whole life. So then she said maybe the best thing was to talk to Helen Townsend, because after all Mark was the one doing something wrong, and Helen is his boss. She said maybe they could get him fired but keep Katie’s name out of it. I told her that was stupid, and she knew it was. They wouldn’t just be able to fire him, it would have to be done officially. The police would get involved. It would go to court. It would be made public. And even if Katie’s name wasn’t in the papers, her parents would find out, everyone at school would know . . . That stuff doesn’t stay private.” She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I told Mum at the time, I said Katie would rather die than go through that.”
Lena leaned forward and opened the kitchen window, then fished around in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke out into the air. “I begged her. I mean it, I actually begged, and Mum told me that she’d have to think about it. She said that I had to convince Katie to stop seeing him, that it was an abuse of power and that it was totally wrong. She promised me that she wouldn’t do anything without giving me time to persuade Katie.” She crushed her barely smoked cigarette on the windowsill and flicked it towards the water.
“I believed her. I trusted her.” She turned to face me again. “But then a couple of days later I saw Mum in the car park at school, talking to Mr. Henderson. I don’t know what they were talking about, but it didn’t look friendly, and I knew I had to say something to Katie, just in case, because she needed to know, she needed to be prepared . . .” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. “She died three days later.”
Lena sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “The thing is, when we talked about it afterwards, Mum swore she never even mentioned Katie to Mark Henderson. She said they were arguing about me, about problems I was having in class.”
“So . . . Lena, hang on, I don’t understand. You’re saying your mum didn’t threaten them with exposure?”
“I couldn’t understand it either. She swore she hadn’t said anything, but she felt so guilty, I could see it. I knew that it was my fault, but she kept acting like it was hers. She stopped swimming in the river, and she became obsessed with telling the truth, she kept going on and on about it, how it was wrong to be afraid of facing the truth, of letting people know the truth, she just went on and on.”
(I wasn’t sure if that was odd or perfectly consistent: you didn’t tell the truth, you never did—the stories you’d been telling weren’t the truth, they were your truth, your agenda. I should know. I’ve been on the dirty side of your truth most of my life.)
“But she didn’t, did she? She never told anyone or wrote about Mark Henderson. In her . . . story about Katie, there’s no mention of him.”
Lena shook her head. “No, because I wouldn’t let her. We fought and fought and I kept telling her I would have loved to see that piece of shit go to prison, but it would have broken Katie’s heart. And it would have meant that she did what she did for nothing.” She gulped. “I mean, I know. I know what Katie did was stupid, fucking pointless, but she died to protect him. And if we went to the police, that would mean her death meant nothing. But Mum just kept going on about the truth, how it was irresponsible to just let things go. She was . . . I don’t know.” She looked up at me, her gaze as cool as the one with which she’d fixed Louise, and said, “You would know all this, Julia, if you’d only spoken to her.”
“Lena, I’m sorry, I am sorry about that, but I still don’t see why—”
“Do you know how I know my mother killed herself? Do you know how I know for sure?” I shook my head. “Because on the day she died, we had a fight. It started over nothing, but it ended up being about Katie, like everything did. I was yelling at her and calling her a bad mother and saying that if she’d been a good parent she could have helped us, helped Katie, and then none of this would have happened. And she told me she had tried to help Katie, that she’d seen her walking home late one day and had stopped to offer her a ride. She said Katie was all upset and wouldn’t say why, and Mum said, You don’t have to go through this by yourself. She said, I can help you. And, Your mum and dad can help you, too. When I asked her why she’d never told me about that before, she wouldn’t say. I asked her when it happened and she said, Midsummer, June the twenty-first. Katie went to the pool that night. Without meaning to, it was Mum who tipped her over the edge. And so, like that, Katie tipped Mum over the edge, too.”
A wave of sadness hit me, a swell so forceful I thought it might knock me from my chair. Was that it, Nel? After all this, you did jump, and you did it because you felt guilty and you despaired. You despaired because you had no one to turn to—not your angry, grieving daughter and certainly not me, because you knew that if you called, I wouldn’t answer. Did you despair, Nel? Did you jump?
I could feel Lena watching me, and I knew that she could see my shame, could see that finally I got it, I understood that I, too, was to blame. But she didn’t look triumphant or satisfied, she just looked tired.
“I didn’t tell the police any of this, because I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want anyone to blame her—more than they already do, in any case. She didn’t do it out of hate. And she suffered enough, didn’t she? She suffered things she shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t hers or mine.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “It wasn’t yours. It wasn’t Louise’s or Josh’s. It wasn’t our fault.”
I tried to embrace her, but she pushed me away. “Don’t,” she said. “Please, I just . . .” She tailed off. Her chin lifted. “I need to be by myself. Just for a bit. I’m going to go for a walk.”
I let her leave.