Marshmallows for Breakfast (27 page)

“You think I'm going to leave the kids here with you? You'd go crazy in a minute.”

“We'd work it out. You have to get help, Ashlyn. I don't want you to leave, I want you to get help. But if you don't, then I want you to leave.”

“You can't have the kids,” she said.

“No one would give you custody, not with all the things you've done while you've been drinking.”

“It's called a residency order, actually,” she snarled. “It's not called custody, it's called a residency order. How do I know that? Because I wanted to leave you before. When I was doing everything and you were doing nothing I wondered if it wouldn't be better if you weren't here permanently. So I found out about it. But I'm not like you, I wouldn't go through with it. Because no matter how much of a shit you are, I wouldn't hurt you like you obviously have no problems hurting me.”

Kyle didn't even flinch. He was like a pillar of rock. Nothing she said could penetrate this exterior. Not for the first time she wondered what she had to do to get through to him. He seriously didn't give a damn that she was going to leave him. He didn't give a damn that she decided not to. He didn't give a damn about anything to do with her. Had he ever?

“And they would give them to me, Kyle, because I'm here for them. I work around them, I work half the night so that I can be here during the day. I make their meals, I pick them up when they fall over. I'm always there when they go to bed. I love them. Of course I'll get the kids, because I'm their
mother.
“

“So why don't you try acting like it? Put them first for a change.” His arms folded tightly across his chest, Kyle spun on his heels and walked out.

She couldn't know. She couldn't know that he'd almost said he didn't mean it. That he couldn't live without her and the kids. That he was nothing without her. She couldn't know that the idea of her leaving him was something he couldn't bear. Those days when she took Jaxon and Summer to visit her mother he thought he'd go crazy at the quiet in the house, that he'd wander from room to room, sitting on their beds, picking up their toys, hugging their clothes, remembering their conversations. She couldn't know that if she didn't get help, he might not be able to make her leave.

“It was OK for a while, after that. Surprisingly. She went to meetings for alcoholics. The very next day. I think I'd scared her as much as she scared me with her admission. She went to meetings every day and stopped drinking. I
don't know why, but I thought it'd get magically better. You know, she stops drinking, all our problems go away.

“Not exactly like that. She was in a permanent bad mood, almost like a permanent hangover. But at least she wasn't drinking. We started arguing more, but at least we were communicating.” Kyle rolled onto his back, spread himself out on the picnic blanket, stared deep into the sky as though he wanted to be there. As though his place was amongst the clouds rather than here on earth with me and the kids. “Then I messed up.” His eyes glazed over as he immersed himself further in the world above us. He sighed.

“Boy did I mess up. She asked me to come to some meetings with her. But…” His voice trailed away. I watched him. He was obviously suffering as he remembered. “Couldn't do it, Kendra. The thought of sitting there, listening to people talk about why they drank. Why it was their partner's fault. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want someone looking at me sitting beside her and judging me.”

“I don't think that's how it works,” I said. “They don't apportion blame to anyone.”

“No, it probably isn't. But I didn't want to find out. I judged myself for not saying something sooner about what she was doing. I judged myself, I didn't need anyone else to do it.”

“And it was a way of making sure she got her punishment, making her go to meetings with the threat of losing everything hanging over her,” I said.

Kyle turned to me, eyed me with trepidation. Wondering if I was condemning him.

“Not judging you,” I added. “I mean, she put you through hell, Kyle, you wouldn't be human if you weren't pissed off with her. And not that keen on helping her out, even if it meant she was getting better. She became an alcoholic
alone, why shouldn't she get better alone? And, if you're blaming yourself on top of that, I'm not surprised you didn't want to go along.”

“I did want her to get better. And I helped as much as I could—I didn't drink, I asked her how the meetings were going, asked her how she was feeling. But I couldn't do what she wanted. I couldn't help her in that way.

“When I said no, Ashlyn thought I'd betrayed her. That I'd forced her to do this thing and now I wasn't supporting her. We had a few rows about it, nothing over the top, more low- level ones. No real shouting, just sniping. We stopped talking except if it was about the things to do with the kids. Then, one night, she just didn't come to bed. Then another night, and another. I think it was Summer who asked her why she wasn't in the big bed anymore—I sure as hell wasn't going to ask—and she said she'd been working all night and had fallen asleep in the studio. I didn't say anything, and that became the way things were—she basically moved into the studio permanently. That's why the children know how to open the door and to come on over anytime—they started going over there in the mornings to see her. And then one morning she was gone. She'd moved out. Gone in the middle of the night. Except Jaxon had seen her. He'd had a bad dream and was awake when she came in to his room to say good-bye. Summer was asleep in our bed so she didn't say good-bye to her. But Jaxon, who liked to sleep in his own bed, was awake. She told him not to say anything. And he took her literally and stopped talking. Two days later she called wanting to see the kids. Not me, just the kids. So I dropped them off at her mother's place—she wasn't staying there but didn't want me to know where she was staying so asked me to leave them there. The next time I saw her was a few weeks later when we went to New York.”

He exhaled deeply. “If I could go back in time, I'd just go to the meetings with her.”

“It might not have made any difference,” I said.

“But at least then I'd know.”

“True. How about the next time she's back you tell her you'll go to meetings with her?”

He turned his head to me. “It's too late now.”

“Even if you were divorced it wouldn't be too late—if you wanted it to work out. If you wanted to try anything to make it work.”

I could see him thinking it over. As he thought I caught sight of the children running in our direction. Was it my imagination or had they grown several meters in the past few days? All right, maybe not meters, but their bodies looked longer, as though they were both going to take after their father when it came to height. Jaxon arrived first and threw himself bodily onto his father. Kyle, who hadn't been expecting it, was winded by the blow and made an
ouf
sound as he almost doubled up. Seconds later Summer was on top of him as well and he was flailing under his children, all of them laughing. In a few hours, Ashlyn would call. Then they would become transformed, they'd stop laughing and joking, they'd go and hide in their rooms, devastated that their mumma wasn't here, devastated she was another world away.

Kyle owed it to them, really, to try everything. And if that meant going to meetings with his wife then that's what he had to do. Isn't that what for better or worse meant?

SPANISH OMELETTE

CHAPTER 23

O
h, Kendra, there's a message for you,” Janene said to me.

She was using her normal voice. The one with which she spoke to Gabrielle and Teri. It immediately made me suspicious. It'd been an age since we'd gone camping and her silent threat to get me back hadn't materialized.

“Your phones rang when you were in the loo so I took a message. Forgot to give it to you.” I'd been to the loo over an hour ago. It was probably an important client who expected to be called back within fifteen minutes. This was her revenge, trying to lose me business.

She came across the office, her flat, beady eyes not receiving the message that her face was “smiling” at me. She handed me the note.

Mrs. Chelner,
she'd written, along with a mobile number. She'd also printed
URGENT,
and carefully scored under it three times. She cocked her eyebrow a fraction as she waited for me to fall apart. To rip the phone from its cradle and dial frantically. Our business worked on maintaining good relationships and running an efficient service. Either this person needed a temp quickly or the temp they had wasn't working out. Whatever the situation, they were not going to be impressed by an unreturned phone call.
Bitch.

“Thanks for that,” I said smiling sweetly and placing the yellow square on the desk. No way was I giving her the satisfaction of being riled about this. I'd probably already lost
the business, wasn't going to add to my distress by giving Janene even a splinter of pleasure.

Gritting her teeth, unimpressed—veritably peeved—that she hadn't managed to get a rise out of me, she turned on her LK Bennett heels and stalked back to her desk. Gabrielle was monitoring all of this from her desk, even though to the outside world she was still typing away on her computer. If she was honest—as she had been with me once—she wasn't particularly enamoured with Janene, but she wanted to give the girl a chance. She thought that with understanding and training, she could mold Janene into a decent worker—the irony of course being that Gabrielle thought
I
was queen of the lost cause. Teri was staring open-mouthed at Janene's audacity. She had confessed to me that she didn't like Janene, but did her best to get on with her so as not to upset the office dynamic. We all, in our own ways, pandered to Janene's bad behavior like overindulgent parents pandered to a brat for a quiet life. That annoyed me more than I cared to admit to anyone, myself included. I hated people getting away with bad behavior.

Mrs. Chelner.
I groped around my memory to place her. The name seemed familiar, but the company wasn't immediately coming to mind. As I ransacked my brain, what Janene had said replayed itself in my head.

“Did you say my
phones
rang?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” Janene said. “Your mobile kept ringing so I turned it off. It's in your top drawer.”

I will not let you get to me,
I thought at her,
because that is what you want.
I'd sat here for over an hour with my mobile off. That wouldn't be so bad if I'd turned it off, but for someone else to do it… I opened the top drawer and picked up my silver phone. Calmly, not revealing even a sliver of the irritation that was building inside me, I turned it on and dialed my answer machine.

I had six messages. Six. They'd obviously been calling and calling and not getting hold of me. Inhaling deeply, taking in tranquillity and exhaling the urge to go slap Janene into April next year, I listened to the first message.

Mrs. Chelner had a very soothing voice. You could tell she was a person who could put “calm under pressure” on her CV or on an application form without feeling guilty that she'd never actually been tested. She
had
been in a highly charged, stressful situation where she needed to keep herself and everyone in her immediate vicinity from coming apart at the seams, and she hadn't even begun to panic. Mrs. Chelner really could be calm under pressure.

Take now, for example: she was calling me, had called me more than eight times, to tell me that Jaxon had had an accident and they were taking him to the hospital. And could I possibly meet them there because they hadn't been able to get hold of Kyle, Ashlyn or their grandmother and I was the fourth person on their contact list.

Well, of course you can t get hold of Kyle, he's at the bank trying to rework his finances and get a loan because he's so broke at the moment. He'll have turned off his mobile,
I thought as I hung up the phone and stowed it in the depths of my bag.
And you can't get hold of Ashlyn because she's in New York,
I told the Mrs. Chelner in my mind as I switched off my computer.
And you can't get hold of Naomi because she's on holiday in the Algarve,
I thought as I stood up.