Marshmallows for Breakfast (21 page)

“Anything,” he said.

A week later Will turned up for their first counseling session. They'd slept in the same bed, carried on going through the motions of normal life, had found a counselor and made that emergency appointment. He sat there for twenty minutes be-fore he realized that she wasn't coming. He paid the counselor, he rang his wife and got no answer. Not at the house, not at her work, not on her mobile. He was scared, as he rushed home, that she'd been hurt.

He was right to be scared. She had been hurt. And now she was going to hurt him back.

She had decided to use the time she knew he'd be at the counselor's office to put all his belongings outside. To change the locks. To leave outside the solicitor's letter informing him of her intention to file for divorce exactly one year from the date of the letter, when she was legally able to.

Will's wife couldn't forgive him. He hadn't slept with someone else—she had done that, and she probably would have been able to forgive a physical act. But what he did violated the sanctity of their marriage; it was like a knife driven deep into the heart of what they'd built together. What Will didn't realize was that you didn't admit—even by omission—that you'd fallen in love with someone else and stay married. Love isn't like that.

“So, that's Australia. You wanted to know and now you can tell me off. Just like the few friends I had before all of this have done. I'm stupid. I'm selfish. Go ahead, let me have it.” I was being flippant because I was steeling myself for the lecture. For being told I was stupid to get involved, that he was a bastard, that I was wasting the best years of my life hanging around waiting for a man who had used me. I'd heard it—and a million other versions of it—all before.
Every time it damaged a friendship and cut me deep inside because no one knew. No one understood what he meant to me, why he was so special. I could never tell them, either.

Gabrielle's eyes checked her rearview mirror, checked her wing mirror and then her long, slender fingers hit the right-hand signal just before she violated several laws to pull across two lanes of traffic, causing a chorus of horns to flare up behind us. She took the exit for the service station we'd just been about to pass.

Oh Jeez, she's really going to let me have it,
I thought as I eyed up the soft line of her jaw, which was hard and angular now that it was set with her eyes fixed ahead. She'd been married. She never told me why she and Ted had split and then divorced. Probably because of someone like me. Another woman who had entered their relationship. Maybe she was going to tell me to get out and walk to Sussex or walk home. Either way, I wasn't welcome in her car anymore.
Oh Jeez. Oh Jeez. I can t afford to lose my job,
I thought as she prowled the car park looking for a parking spot.
I'll be hard put to find one with such a senior title, so near to where I live and on the money I'm getting. This is karma: a ruined life for a ruined life.

Silently and carefully, Gabrielle pulled into a parking space, cut the engine. The sound of her unlocking her seat belt filled the car for a moment, then was replaced by the elastic spring of the belt being snatched backwards. I closed my eyes and counted to ten as I heard her shift in her seat. I braced myself for the sharp sting of a slap on the cheek.

“I'm really hurt that you think I'd ever judge you,” Gabrielle said quietly.

Startled by her words and the genuine wounding in her voice, I opened my eyes, stared straight out of the windscreen.
This
I had not been expecting.

“Kennie, we're friends, which means I know you. I know
how many morals you have, how if there's a cause, hopeless or otherwise, you're going to back it. So I know how much you must have already beat yourself up about this. He must have been so special to make you go against everything you believe in.

“In all the time I've known you I don't recall a single time when you've spoken about a man like you did him. Why would I discount that? Because he's married? What you feel is more important than that.

“And no, I'm not saying it was an ideal situation or that it's a great idea. Or that there aren't some people who go out especially to date married people—you're not one of them. He doesn't sound like a serial cheater from what you said, but even if he was, what good would me telling you off do? It'd just push you closer towards him, make you hide things. And if you can't talk to people, then you start to do crazy things.

“Sweetheart, I've been married, I know how complicated things are, especially when you're going through a hard time. Should he have talked things through with his wife? Yes. Would staying away from him have made it easier for them to talk through things and maybe get things back on track? Yes. But it didn't work out that way. And from how you've been acting since you got back, I'm pretty sure you're in the depths of hell right now. You don't need me to make you feel bad—I'm sure you can do that all by yourself.”

I closed my eyes again and braced myself. A tidal wave of everything that I hadn't been able to let out in nearly two years was welling up inside. I couldn't stop myself. I tried, I truly tried, but I couldn't stop it. It all came pouring out in an undignified, uncontrollable torrent. It all came out and suddenly I was sobbing my heart out.

Never underestimate the ability of understanding to make you feel truly awful.

TOAST, BUTTER & GINGER
MARMALADE

CHAPTER 17

T
here are many shades of darkness.

Kyle was thinking this as he lay, fully clothed, on his bed in between his daughter and his son. His arms were crossed over his chest, the palms of his hands resting on his shoulders. He used to lie like that when he was boy. He hadn't been a fan of the night. Bad things happened at night, he used to think when he was a boy. In the blackness of his bedroom, he could make out the shapes of the closet door to his right, the doorway to the en suite bathroom ahead of him, the bedside tables on each side of the bed, the folds—thick and thin—in the floor-length curtains at the windows, the smooth lines of the dressing table. His children curled up like warm, living bookends on each side of him.

He wasn't remotely tired, it was only 9 p.m., but he had to stay in bed. They'd refused to sleep without him because Kendra was gone. Only for the night, but they'd been wild-eyed and paranoid that she wasn't coming back. As she was leaving with the Lolly Lady, Summer stood on the doorstep, repeatedly making Kendra promise she was coming back. Jaxon had just sat at the far end of the corridor playing with his steam train pretending that it wasn't happening. When Kendra had tried to talk to him, he'd pretended not to hear. She'd managed to get him to talk to her by talking to Garvo. Then she'd gone outside again to another round of “promise you'll come backs” from Summer. The whole thing had added another fifteen minutes to their departure.

When Summer was in bed earlier she'd asked to call Kendra. He'd reminded her that she was camping, was sleeping under the stars tonight and would be back at some point tomorrow. Summer had looked at him as though he was an idiot. As though she hadn't OK'd that plan and wasn't impressed that Kyle had allowed it to happen.

The only way to appease them both was to suggest they camped out in his bedroom so they could tell Kendra that they'd been camping, too. They'd made a canopy with the sheets and read their stories by flashlight. It'd been a pretty lame attempt since he'd had no time to plan it, but it'd worked and they'd both eventually fallen asleep with Kyle in the middle. The last two times he'd tried to leave the bed he'd looked down to find one or other of them staring at him, silently asking where he thought he was going. They had a tag team system guarding him. He understood what they felt. He felt it himself: a trickle of worry that Kendra would disappear from their lives. It was irrational, but real.

Especially since he hadn't been very pleasant to her in the days after she'd asked about Ashlyn. It wasn't her fault. After saying it to Kendra, Kyle had realized how powerful words could be. How they could set you free, how they could chain you, how they could propel you back to the midst of the place called hell. It was hard to look Kendra in the eye after he admitted his secret. Virtually impossible to talk to her.

He hadn't seen her reaction to the handful of words that explained everything. He'd mumbled them while staring into the middistance. She hadn't gasped dramatically, nor reached out to him in comfort. She'd been silent for a moment then said, “If you want to talk about it, I'm listening. If not, no worries.”

Had he been imagining it or had there been a slight Australian inflection in her voice when she'd uttered “no
worries”? His mouth had moved upwards with the ghost of a smile.

He'd jumped to his feet and said he was going to play with the kids. “OK,” she'd said. He hadn't looked at her for the rest of the day.

Now, a week later, he was lying in the dark, held hostage by his children's fear of abandonment, wondering if she would come back. Kendra. Or Ashlyn. Either one. Both. Except, did he want Ashlyn back?
Really?

Almost violently he moved his mind away from that train of thought, back to the report he had to write and the presentation he needed to rework. It wasn't the most interesting thing on earth, most of his work wasn't now, but this job paid the bills—just—and allowed him to work from home.

She was lying on the sofa when he got in.

Her slender form stretched out, her eyes half closed, staring in the direction of the television but probably taking in very little. He reached down to kiss her and paused as usual as the whiff of alcohol hit him.

She must have just had a couple of glasses with dinner
he told himself, carefully ignoring the fact that, as usual, her dinner plate sat on the floor beside the sofa, still heaped with uneaten, untouched food.

Kyle dropped a kiss on her forehead and she smiled a languid, dreamy grin.

“Hello lover,” she said. Her voice was drowsy with sleep, he reassured himself. She'd dozed off because she'd been waiting up for him, he who was working late in the office as usual. “I thought you were never coming home.”

“Where else would I go?” he said. He used to say, “I have nowhere else I'd rather be” but not anymore. Now it was, “Where else would I go?”

In the kitchen, he hated himself for doing it, but he went to the large chrome bin, checked how many bottles were in there. Two. Two bottles of cheap red wine. One on the table, two in the bin. He stared at the bottles, his foot pressed on the black pedal, the chrome lid of the bin gaping open to show him what his wife had been doing while his back was turned. She'd found a new lover and it was lying amongst the other trash, its white label and its body's sleek, smooth lines mocking him.
It'll pass,
he told himself.
It'll be fine.
He was ignoring the empty liter bottle of tonic water also lying in the bin. And he was ignoring the semicircle of lipstick on her glass on the table. He was pretending he didn't know that she never left the house without her lipstick, which meant she'd taken the children half a mile down the road to buy the wine and gin to drink with the tonic water, or she'd left the children alone. Which she'd never do. Never.