I’ve always wondered what it would feel like if I let out the secret. Sometimes I daydream about it and can hear myself saying: “My husband saw Bella the day she was taken.” And I feel the physical release, like a rush to the head.
But I can’t, can I? I’m as guilty as he is. It’s a strange feeling, owning a secret. It’s like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it. My friend Lisa used to talk about being pregnant like that—the baby pushing everything out of its way. Overwhelming her body. My secret does that. When it gets to be too much, I switch to being Jeanie for a while and pretend the secret belongs to someone else.
But that didn’t help when Bob Sparkes was questioning me the first time after Glen’s arrest. I felt heat rising through my body, my face red and my scalp pinpricked with sweat.
Bob Sparkes was trespassing in my lie. “So what did you say you did on the day Bella disappeared?”
My breathing became shallow, and I tried to catch and control it. But my voice betrayed me. It became a breathless squeak, a deafening dry gulp as I swallowed midsentence. I’m lying, my treacherous body said.
“Oh, in the morning, work, you know. I had a couple of highlights to do,” I say, hoping the truths in my lie will convince. I was at work, after all. Justify, justify, deny, deny. It ought to get easier, but it doesn’t, as each lie feels sourer and tighter, like an unripe apple. Unyielding and mouth-drying.
The simple lies are the hardest, funnily enough. The big ones seem to just fall off the tongue: “Glen? Oh, he left the bank because he has other ambitions. He wants to start his own transport company. Wants to be his own boss.” Easy.
But the little ones—“I can’t come out for a coffee because I’ve got to go to my mum’s”—stick and stutter, making me flush. Lisa didn’t seem to notice in the beginning, or if she did, she hid it well. We’re all living in my lie now.
I was never a liar as a child. My mum and dad would’ve been able to tell immediately, and I didn’t have a brother or sister to share a secret with. With Glen, it turned out, it was easy. We were a team, he’d say, after the police came around.
Funny, that. I hadn’t thought of us as a team for a long time before that. We each had our departments. But Bella’s disappearance brought us together. Made us a real couple. I always said we needed a child.
Ironic really. You see, I was going to leave him. After he was released by the court. After I knew all about his online stuff. His “sexcursions,” as he called them in the chat rooms. The stuff that he was going to put behind him.
You see, Glen likes to put things behind him. When he says it, it means we’ll never talk about it again. He can do that, just cut off a part of his life and let it drift away. “We need to be thinking of the future, Jeanie, not the past,” he’d explain patiently, drawing me closer, kissing my head.
It made sense when he said it like that, and I learned never to go back to the things we’d put behind us. It didn’t mean I didn’t think about them, but it was understood that I wouldn’t mention them again to him.
Not Being Able to Have a Baby was one of the things. And Losing His Job. And then The Chat Rooms and all the awful things with the police. “Let’s put it behind us, love,” he said the day after the court case ended. We were lying in bed; it was so early, the streetlights were still on, shining through a gap in the curtains. Neither of us had slept much—“Too much excitement,” Glen said.
He’d made some plans, he said. He’d decided to get back to a normal life—to our life—as quickly as possible to make things like they were before.
It sounded so simple when he said it, and I tried to put all the things I’d heard out of my mind, but they wouldn’t go. They kept hiding in corners and leering at me. I stewed for a few weeks before I made a decision. In the end, it was the pictures of children that made me pack a bag.
I’d stood by him from the day he was accused of Bella’s murder because I believed in him. I knew my Glen couldn’t do something so awful. But that was over now, thank God. He’d been found not guilty.
Now I had to look at the other stuff that he did do.
He denied it all when I said I couldn’t live with a man who looked at pictures like that.
“It’s not real, Jeanie. Our experts said in court that they’re not really kids in those pictures. They’re women who look really young and dress up as kids for a living. Some of them are really in their thirties.”
“But they look like children,” I shouted. “They do it for people who want to see children and men doing those things.”
He started to cry. “You can’t leave me, Jeanie,” he said. “I need you.” I shook my head and went and got my bag. I was shaking because I’d never seen Glen like this before. He was the one who was always in control. The Strong One.
And when I came downstairs, he was waiting to trap me with his confession.
You see, he told me he’d done something for me. He said he loved me. He knew I wanted a child so badly it was killing me and that was killing him, and when he saw her, he knew he could make me happy. It was for me.
He said it was like a dream. He stopped to eat his lunch and look at his paper in a side street and saw her at a garden gate, looking at him. She was alone. He couldn’t help himself. When he told me, he put his arms around me and I couldn’t move.
“I wanted to bring her home for you. She was standing there, and I smiled at her, and she put her arms up to me. She wanted me to pick her up.
“I got out of the van, but I don’t remember anything else. Next thing, I was driving the van home to you. I didn’t hurt her, Jeanie,” he said. “It was like a dream.
“Do you think it was a dream, Jeanie?”
His story is so shocking, I’m choking on its details.
We’re standing in our hallway, and I can see our reflection in the mirror. It’s like seeing it happening in a film. Glen is bending down so our heads touch, sobbing on my shoulder, with me, deathly pale. I’m patting his hair and shushing him. But I don’t want him to stop crying. I’m afraid of the silence that will follow. There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don’t want to know.
Glen stops after a while, and we sit on the sofa together.
“Shouldn’t we tell the police? Tell them you saw her that day?” I ask. I have to say it out loud or my head will burst. He stiffens beside me. “They’ll say I took her and killed her, Jeanie. And you know I didn’t. Even seeing her will make me the guilty man, the man they put in prison. We can’t say anything. To anyone.”
I sit, unable to speak. He is right, though. Seeing Bella would be as good as taking her, as far as Bob Sparkes is concerned.
I just keep thinking Glen can’t have taken her.
He just saw her. That’s it. He just saw her. He didn’t do anything wrong.
He’s still gulping from the sobs, and his face is red and wet. “I keep thinking maybe I did dream it. It didn’t feel real, and you know I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he says, and I nod. I think I know, but really, I don’t know anything about this man that I’ve lived with all these years. He’s a stranger, but we’re bound together tighter than we’ve ever been. He knows me. He knows my weakness.
He knows that I would’ve wanted him to take her and bring her home.
I know that I caused all this trouble with my obsession.
Afterward, when I’m in the kitchen making him a cup of tea, I realize he didn’t use Bella’s name, like she isn’t real to him. I take my bag back upstairs and unpack my things while Glen lies on the sofa, watching football on the telly. Like normal. Like nothing has happened.