Marshmallows for Breakfast (38 page)

She sat scrunched up in the hallway, holding herself, shaking, staring blankly at the wall opposite.
What happened?
She kept asking herself.
What happened?
The door had clicked shut a few minutes ago. Or was it seconds ago? Or was it hours ago? The door had clicked shut and she was alone. She couldn't move and she couldn't talk.
What happened?

The door opened again and she scrunched herself up tighter, afraid he was back. But it was a woman's voice, asking her what had happened. I don't know, Gabrielle wanted to say, but she couldn't speak. She looked up at the woman with the voice and it was her flatmate. And then there were police, asking her questions. And then she was in the hospital. More questions. She answered them. But all the while, in her mind, she was asking,
What happened?
All the while, in her mind, she knew she wasn't going to get an answer.

“He was arrested and, long story short, all hell broke loose. My parents fell out with his parents. My parents tried to get me to move back to Cornwall. Our relationship went through a nosedive. My brothers went after him—thankfully, they never found him. It went to court, he was found guilty, but got a suspended sentence because the judge said he hadn't hurt me that badly. I had to move out of my flat, I slept with the lights on, I lived in the shower but he hadn't hurt me, right?

“I'm thirty-nine now and that's about how long it's taken me to get to this point. Where I can talk about it. I don't talk to many people about it, obviously, only the ones I know will understand, but before I didn't talk about it at all. Even though everyone knew, I kept my true feelings to myself because most people thought I should get over it. That a bit of counseling and a bit of positive thinking would ‘sort me out.’

“And it kind of became this unspoken thing lurking in the background of our family closet. I always think that somewhere in the future someone will come searching for stuff about our family history and they'll discover there's a hideous secret. And that secret is me. And what I let happen to me.” Gabrielle smiled with the lights put out in her eyes. “Don't get me wrong, my family never blamed me; it's taken me this long to realize that they didn't understand. They were doing the best they could. I mean this huge thing had been dumped on them—what happened to me affected them, too. They had their lives upended, too. Course they never blamed me.

“Anyways, we all moved on. I had that bit of counseling,
got on with my life. Or so I told myself and everyone else. I even got married. Which is a very strange thing to do when you have a pathological fear of trusting people.” She took another gulp of wine. “I reached a turning point about seven years ago when I went to see
Thelma & Louise
at a movie retrospective down at the National. I must have been the only woman over thirty who hadn't seen it, didn't know what it was about. Didn't realize about
that
scene.

“When it started, I lost it. Ran out of the cinema, threw up outside, spent the night crying. That's when I realized I had to get help. Properly this time. I called a help line. Then I went to see a counselor and then I went to see the chiropractor I recommended to you that you didn't go to see.

“He doesn't just adjust your back, he helps to release all the memories that are physically trapped in your body, the ones that keep you stuck in a situation. He'd explain it better if you went to see him, but everything that ever happens to you is trapped in your body and when you talk it through with him and he adjusts your spine it releases the memory from your body. Helps you to let that physical part of it go.

“If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be talking to you like this. I wouldn't be feeling as comfortable with myself as I am now. I'm not saying I'm ‘over it.’ I still see my counselor every so often, and I became a counselor and I'm doing my master's in trauma psychology because I want a better understanding of what happened to me, but I've learned to deal with it.

“I'm back. Well, I'm Gabrielle again. The Gabrielle before what happened is gone forever, and I'll never ‘get over it.’ I'm just in a different place. I don't let it define me any longer. I'm not the scared woman trapped in that moment— unable to move forwards, unable to go back to who she was. Stuck in this never- ending loop of terror… You know what I mean, don't you?”

Gabrielle changed her line of sight from her wineglass to me as she repeated, “Don't you?”

I said nothing, did nothing. I hadn't been prepared for this, for this horror, this exercise in butchery. How do you respond when someone slices open their heart and gives you a guided tour of their pain? Now I knew why she looked at me like that back in the woods, now I knew virtually everything about Gabrielle and I had no idea what to say. What she expected me to say.

Her eyes searched mine. “Now, Kennie, I've just told you all that about me for one reason. I want you to tell me what Janene said to you. I have a pretty good idea what it was, which is why I can understand your reaction. I've told her that the second you tell me what she said I'm going to sack her. Tell me, I need an official explanation, and then I can help you.”

I looked down at my hands, clinging to each other in my lap. “It was nothing,” I said. It was everything. Words are sometimes everything. And those ones would not come out of my mouth. Especially not after what Gabrielle had just shared. I wasn't going to do that to her.

“I can't let you come back to work until you give me a good reason for what I witnessed,” Gabrielle said.

“I can't come back to work, then,” I said.

“Kendra,”
Gabrielle said, frustrated. “Why are you fighting me? Do you want to lose your job?”

“No, but I'm not repeating what she said. Not for you, not to save my job.”

Gabrielle gritted her teeth, inhaled deeply through her nose, exhaled deeply. “OK, tell me what happened to you,” she said. “Why have you come back from the conference a different person? I saw it on your face when I walked in on Monday. Something happened.”

I stared off across the bar, watched a man in dirty jeans
and a hoodie feed coin after coin into a fruit machine. The lights flashed as he slipped in money and pushed the colored buttons. I grabbed my glass intending to drink, but my hand, trembling and unsteady, shook half its contents all over the table. I put the glass down and hunted around my bag for a tissue. I was breathing hard. If I didn't, if I didn't take in as much oxygen as possible, I'd lose my grip. This state I was in, the one where I could talk to someone else, was fragile. Any more pressure and it would crack; I would shatter.

“Sweetheart, talk to me.”

“What about?” I wiped off my hand.

“About what happened to you,” she said.

“Your skin is still as smooth as silk. I love your skin.”

“There's nothing to tell,” I said to Gabrielle.

“I'd believe that if you weren't the poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder,” Gabrielle replied. “For as long as I've known you you've exhibited all the classic symptoms— jumpiness, isolation, the ability to talk about what happened to you as though it happened to someone else but still react like it happened to you. The way you always dress down or wear multiple layers. And you have flashbacks, don't you? Feeling as though you're reliving the event over and over? It's all normal. And it'll get easier to handle if you talk about it. Let me in, tell me about it.”

“Please stop this, Gabrielle. I can't…” That was all I could manage, my surface was thinning out like the overstretched plastic of an overinflated balloon. Another press or two and it would come apart.

“Did you see him? Is that it?” she asked.

I closed my eyes. I was so tired. Suddenly very, very tired. I couldn't stay any longer. I slipped my bag strap over my shoulder, moved to get up.

“Don't go, Kennie,” she said desperately, reaching out to stop me. “I'm sorry, we'll talk about something else. OK? Don't go.”

I stayed in my seat, slipped my bag handle off my shoulder, resettled myself on the seat and the bag in my lap.

“I can't cope at the moment without you, so you can come back to work on Monday, but I'll have to give you a verbal warning. It'll go on your record,” Gabrielle said.

I nodded. That sounded more than fair. I'd behaved badly and I deserved to be punished.

“Consider yourself warned. But what I said to Janene still stands: if you tell me what she said I'll sack her.”

“So,” I said, using every last molecule of strength to inject sunshine into my tone, “I'll get the next round in, shall I? Same again?”

“Yes, Kendra, same again,” she said. And I pretended I thought she was talking about the drinks.

CHAPTER 34

Y
ou're doing it wrong!” Summer proclaimed. She stared with despair, genuine, deep despair at her plate. It was all wrong. It was just a bowl of cornflakes.

“What do you mean?” Kyle asked.

“You're doing it wrong!” she shrieked in reply.

That sound, the shriek, cut through Kyle's head, set his teeth on edge and ignited his temper. He looked at Jaxon. He was staring at his plate with an identical look of despair.

This is Kendra's fault,
Kyle thought. He didn't know how or why, but he knew she was behind this.

“How can I be doing it wrong. It's cornflakes.”

“It's Saturday,” Jaxon said quietly.

“I'm well aware that it's Saturday. What does that have to do with anything?”

“You're doing it wrong!” his daughter repeated. “I want Kendie to do it.”

I knew it!
Kyle thought.

“Kendie does it properly. Kendie makes Saturday breakfast properly. You're doing it wrong.”

Kendra. What had life been like before Kendra?

The woman coaxed out new behaviors in both his kids. They'd latched onto her and hadn't let go. At first he'd thought it was the novelty factor, the fact there was someone new to play with, then he realized that it was because Kendra was constant. They knew she'd always be there. In the midst of Ashlyn's drinking, none of them had known
whom they would be dealing with from one day to the next. Sometimes she was fun and buoyant, other days she wouldn't stop crying. Some days she would love them all, other days she'd tell them they'd ruined her life.

She would say unbelievable things to him. None of it she remembered. He'd thought, at first, that it was shame and regret that made her act as if nothing had happened; then he discovered she genuinely didn't remember. She didn't remember saying he was the worst lover she'd ever had. She didn't recall telling him it was a good thing they had two children at once because even the thought of having him rutting on top her was more than she could stomach. She didn't remember crying in his arms saying she'd kill herself if he ever left her. He dreaded to think what she said to the twins when he wasn't there. When Ashlyn was drinking, they never knew who was going to walk through the door in the morning.

It wasn't simply life with Ashlyn that made the kids cling to Kendra, Kyle knew, it was him, too. He'd been at work. Always. He'd hidden from the problem in his technical drawings and models and projects, subconsciously telling himself that the children were too young to understand. Subconsciously telling himself there was no problem to understand.