‘Thank you, darling,’ said Rachel, and Cecilia was reminded of an adult thanking a child for a homemade bookmark made out of cardboard and glitter. Rachel lifted a hand, as if she was about to wave at someone, and then she let it brush gently against Cecilia’s shoulder, before dropping it in her lap. ‘That’s just so Janie. “Only stupid marching.” You know what? I think I remember it. All the children tumbling to the ground. Marla and I giggling our heads off.’
She paused. Cecilia’s stomach tensed. Was she about to burst into tears?
‘Gosh, you know, I am a tiny bit drunk,’ said Rachel. ‘I actually thought about driving myself home. Imagine if I’d killed someone.’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have,’ said Cecilia.
‘I really did have fun tonight,’ said Rachel. Her head was turned, so that she was addressing the car window. She gently knocked her forehead against the window. It seemed like something a much younger woman would do after they’d had too much to drink. ‘I should make the effort to go out more often.’
‘Oh, well!’ said Cecilia. This was her thing. She could fix that! ‘You must come to Polly’s birthday party the weekend after Easter! Saturday afternoon at two. It’s a pirate party.’
‘That’s very nice of you, but I’m sure Polly doesn’t need me crashing her party,’ said Rachel.
‘You must come! You’ll know lots of people. John-Paul’s mother. My mum. Lucy O’Leary is coming with Tess and her little boy, Liam.’ Cecilia was suddenly desperate for her to come. ‘You could bring your grandson! Bring Jacob! The girls would love to have a toddler there.’
Rachel’s face lit up. ‘I did say I’d look after Jacob while Rob and Lauren are seeing real estate agents about renting out their house while they’re in New York. Oh, this is me, just ahead.’
Cecilia stopped the car in front of a red-brick bungalow. It seemed like every light in the house had been left on.
‘Thanks so much for the lift.’ Rachel climbed out of the car with the same careful sideways slide of the hips as Cecilia’s mother. There was a certain age, Cecilia had noticed, before people stooped or trembled where they didn’t seem to trust their bodies as they once had. ‘I’ll send an invitation to you at the school!’ Cecilia leaned across the seat to call out the window, wondering if she should be offering to walk Rachel to the door. Her own mother would be insulted if she did. John-Paul’s mother would be insulted if she didn’t.
‘Lovely,’ said Rachel, and she walked off briskly, as if she’d read Cecilia’s thoughts and wanted to prove she wasn’t elderly just yet, thanks very much.
Cecilia turned the car around in the cul-de-sac, and by the time she came back, Rachel was already inside, the front door pulled firmly shut.
Cecilia looked for her silhouette through the windows but didn’t see anything. She tried to imagine what Rachel was doing now and what she was feeling, alone in a house with the ghosts of her daughter and her husband.
Well. She had a slightly breathless feeling as if she’d just driven home a minor celebrity. And she’d talked to her about Janie! It had gone pretty well, she thought. She’d given Rachel a memory, just like the magazine article said she should. She felt a mild sense of social achievement, and of satisfaction in finally ticking off a long procrastinated task, and then she felt ashamed for feeling pride, or any sort of pleasure, in connection to Rachel’s tragedy.
She stopped at a traffic light and remembered the angry truck driver from that afternoon, and with that thought her own life came flooding back into her mind. While she’d been driving Rachel home, she’d temporarily forgotten everything: the strange things Polly and Esther had said about John-Paul today in the car, her decision to open his letter tonight.
Did she still feel justified?
Everything had seemed so ordinary after speech therapy. There had been no more peculiar revelations from her daughters, and Isabel had seemed especially cheerful after her haircut. It was a short pixie cut, and from the way Isabel was holding herself, it was clear that she thought it made her look very sophisticated, when it actually made her look younger and sweeter.
There had been a postcard for the girls from John-Paul in the letterbox. He had a running joke with his daughters where he sent them the silliest postcards he could find. Today’s postcard featured one of those dogs with folds of wrinkly skin, wearing a tiara and beads, and Cecilia thought it was stupid but true to form, the girls all fell about laughing and put it on the fridge.
‘Oh, come on now,’ she said mildly as a car suddenly pulled into the lane in front of her. She lifted her hand to toot the horn and then didn’t bother.
Note how I didn’t scream and yell like a mad person, she thought for the benefit of that afternoon’s psychotic truck driver, just in case he happened to have stopped by to read her mind. It was a cab in front of her. He was doing that weird cabbie thing of testing the brakes every few seconds.
Great. He was heading the same direction as her. The cab jerked its way down her street, and without warning suddenly stopped at the kerb outside Cecilia’s house.
The lights in the cab went on. The passenger was sitting in the front seat. One of the Kingston boys, thought Cecilia. The Kingstons lived across the road and had three sons in their twenties still living at home, using their expensive private educations to do never-ending degrees and get drunk in city bars. ‘If a Kingston boy ever goes near one of our girls,’ John-Paul always said, ‘I’ll be ready with the shotgun.’