Her mum nodded, and it was as though Jess could feel her family’s foundations shifting beneath her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me think he didn’t care about us when all along it was your fault he killed himself?’ She was shouting now, her voice hot, her throat raw. ‘Why did you never tell me the truth? Why did you let me think Zoe might get better? Why didn’t you let me say goodbye?’
Decades of confusion and grief swam in Jess’s head until a single, lonely thought rose to the surface, a thought Jess had kept submerged for almost thirty years.
‘All I ever wanted was to say goodbye.’
Chapter 62
Audrey
As Jess staggered up from the bench, Audrey reached out a hand and heard her own plaintive cry: ‘Jess, please don’t go.’ But Jess wrenched her arm away and ran along the path, back in the direction of the hotel. Audrey felt her legs prepare to follow but as she tried to raise herself to her feet, it was as though her muscles had dissolved and there was nothing solid to hold her up. Her eyes followed Jess through the park until she rounded a corner and disappeared.
She turned to Lily, a horde of questions lining her throat. ‘Why did you never say anything? Why did you never tell me that you’d seen what happened?’
Lily was fiddling with one of the shiny black buttons on her jacket, popping it through the hole and then doing it back up again. ‘I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.’
‘Why not? I can’t bear to think of you having kept that to yourself all these years. It must have been torture for you.’ The thought of Lily alone with that burden of knowledge pressed down hard on Audrey’s windpipe, squeezing the air from her lungs.
‘Because I knew it would be worse for you if you found out I’d seen it all. I knew it would make it so much harder for you.’
It took a moment for the lump in Audrey’s throat to make space for her voice to find its way out. ‘You were fifteen, Lily. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that all by yourself.’
Lily shrugged, and there was something in the gesture that rolled back the decades to the weeks after Zoe’s death, when Lily had demanded so little time and attention. Now Audrey couldn’t understand why she had failed to see that Lily was perhaps the most disturbed of them all. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I’m sorry for what you saw, and I’m sorry you’ve been alone with it all this time. Have you never told anyone?’
Audrey watched the slow rise and fall of Lily’s ribs, wondering how she could love someone so much and yet know so little of what had troubled them for decades.
‘No. But you don’t need to apologise. It’s not your fault I’ve kept it to myself. I couldn’t say anything …’ Lily shook her head, deep vertical grooves indenting the skin between her eyebrows.
‘What is it? What were you going to say?’
Audrey kept watch on Lily’s profile as she stared out across the boating lake into the distance as if looking back in time.
‘I couldn’t say anything because I was worried it was all my fault.’
The words were almost a whisper, as if even now, after all this time, they still weren’t quite ready to come out of hiding.
‘What do you mean? How could it have been your fault?’
Lily didn’t immediately reply. Audrey could hear squeals coming from somewhere on the lake but she didn’t turn her head to look, didn’t care about anyone else’s joy or pain. She kept her eyes on Lily, searching for clues.
‘Because of what I said in the kitchen that morning.’
A single plump tear crept over Lily’s bottom eyelid before trickling onto her cheek below.
‘When? What did you say?’
Lily turned to her, her expression caught somewhere between a question and remorse. ‘In the kitchen, with you and Dad, a few days after Zoe came home from the hospital. It was a Sunday morning. You must remember?’
Audrey tried to rewind her memory in search of the conversation Lily might be referring to. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I honestly don’t know what conversation you mean.’
‘You must remember. Zoe and Jess were still in bed but you, me and Dad were up really early and you made me some hot chocolate and I got really upset about Zoe …’ Lily’s words trailed off and her eyes drifted across the park as if watching her voice disappear, unsure whether to chase it back.
‘What, Lily? What did you say? I honestly don’t remember.’
There was a heartbeat of silence.
‘I was really upset about Zoe. Really upset. I said that people treat pets better than humans. I begged you and Dad to do something. I begged you to put an end to her suffering—’
Lily stopped abruptly and Audrey felt the past lurch into the present. She remembered now. Sitting at the kitchen table, she and Edward flanking Lily on either side, their arms around her shoulders. Lily had been hysterical and all Audrey had wanted was to stop her crying, soothe her distress. All she had really wanted, the memory squeezing her throat, was to calm Lily down so that she could return to Zoe’s bedside.
‘Sweetheart, we were all upset in those last few weeks. We all said things in the heat of the moment we didn’t really mean. But nothing you said – nothing you did – contributed to my decision. I promise you. You are not in any way responsible for what I did.’
‘But I am. I must have been. I must have planted the seed.’
Audrey shook her head, trying to slot all the new information into place. All these years Lily had blamed herself for Zoe’s death because of a conversation Audrey hadn’t even remembered. ‘You didn’t, Lily. I promise you didn’t. You mustn’t think that, please.’ She took Lily’s hand, felt the New York humidity between their clammy palms.
‘What about Dad?’ Lily’s voice was low and flat as though she’d ironed all the creases before letting it out.
‘What do you mean? What about Dad?’
‘I heard you. After Zoe’s funeral. I heard you tell Dad what you’d done. I know he was furious with you. And I can’t help thinking …’
‘What? What can’t you help thinking?’
A slow trickle of tears fell down Lily’s cheeks. Audrey smoothed her thumb over the back of Lily’s hand wondering whether she could ever soothe away a past that had, for so long, contaminated the present.
‘I should have said something. I should have stopped you. Because if I had …’
‘If you had what?’
Lily didn’t speak for a few seconds and when she did, the words sounded small, far away, as though they belonged not to the forty-three-year-old woman sitting next to Audrey on a bench in Central Park but to the teenager who’d first thought them almost three decades before.
‘If I’d stopped you then you wouldn’t have needed to confess to Dad and he’d never have got so angry and maybe he’d still be alive today.’ The tears dropped, one after the other, onto the pale grey silk of Lily’s skirt where they dilated into large, dark circles.
‘Lily, Dad’s death was not your fault. If anyone’s responsible for Dad’s suicide, it’s me, not you. It was not your job to stop me doing what I did. And it was certainly not your job to stop Dad doing what he did. You were fifteen, Lily. Fifteen. Two years younger than Phoebe is now. You were just a child. You are not responsible.’
Audrey put her arms around Lily and held her tight, hoping that somehow, in the closeness of their embrace, Lily might find enough love to forgive herself. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to help you come to terms with it.’
They sat holding one another as all the years of lonely guilt began to seep out through Lily’s tears. As the sun beat down on them, Audrey wondered whether there might be a way for it to burn through the secrets that had poisoned her family for decades.
As they sat there, a single desire nudged its way into Audrey’s thoughts: the possibility that perhaps it wasn’t too late to rewrite this story with a different ending. ‘Lily, I know this is all still very raw, but do you think you could do something for me?’
Lily turned to her, mascara smudged across her mottled skin.
‘Can you go and find Jess, talk to her, try to sort this out? It’s all such a mess of misunderstandings. None of this ever needed to happen.’ The truth scorched Audrey’s throat: all those wasted years because of a collection of tales told in lieu of the truth.