“Are you going to let her get away with this?” Robin cries at her dad, snot and tears running down her crumpled-up face. “She can’t take Sarah away from us. If Mum wants to run off with him, let her go. I want Mum to go! I hate her! But she can’t take my sister.”
As Sarah hears about her new house and her new room and her new life and the weekends that they’ll all see one another and the pony she’ll maybe get and the new bedroom set she can pick from the catalog, probably, she lifts her hands to her ears and covers them. Robin pulls at her sister—“Tell them you don’t want to go!”—and Sarah curls herself even tighter into a hard little ball. When Angie reaches across the table, Sarah shrugs the touch on her shoulder away. When her dad reaches along the bench to stroke her hair, she suddenly screams at him: “Get off!” Robin starts to cry and thrash about. Callum climbs away and sits on the other side of his mum, clinging to her like a limpet. He’d got what he wanted. He was getting away from his dad.
Jack grabs Robin’s wrists and pulls her to him, hugging her and restraining her at the same time. The people at nearby tables have stopped talking and are openly staring at the Marshalls and Grangers. Only Drew seems to have noticed and is glaring back at them.
“You don’t understand,” Angie says as she climbs out from the bench and walks around to Robin, trying to hold her shoulders. Robin wriggles free and turns toward her dad, rubbing her face into his top and grabbing the fabric in her fists. She’s never felt so angry, and the red heat of it was pouring from her eyes and her heart.
After a moment, Jack gently pushes her away but holds her in front of him so she can see his face. “This wasn’t just Mum’s decision,” he says, but the tears are balling up in his eyes like when his dad died, and when he looks at his daughter, they fall fast down his face.
“This has been a long time coming, love. And it’s not just Mum who realized that something wasn’t right and that we weren’t happy. We’ve not been happy for a long time, not really.”
“You pretended to be happy, then! You’re just horrible liars!” Robin cries, breaking free of her father’s grip. She notices that, rather than look to Angie for backup, he looks past her to where Hilary is now standing with Callum. But it’s Drew who speaks.
“Now, Robin,” he says, “you need to be a big girl about this. We’ve all sat down and talked it through and we’ve decided that this is the best thing for everyone.”
“This is best for you and Mum, not Sarah and me. Or Dad. Or Callum. Or Hilary. So fuck off!” Robin shouts, and Drew Granger looks like he’s been shot in the head. Then he looks outraged. At a nearby table, a group of young men in paint-splattered overalls are laughing.
“Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck—” Robin keeps shouting until her dad pulls her back to him, and she cries until she’s burned out and yawning. The men laugh harder and Drew Granger’s face glows red. It’s highlighted even more by the yellowness of his hair. He’s twitching and pursing his lips. Callum slips behind his mum like he’s trying to crawl away undetected.
“Why can’t he stay with you and Sarah stay with us?” Robin asks, jerking her thumb at Callum, who looks down at his feet and continues to sob.
“He needs to stay with his mum, Robin,” Drew says.
“Why?” Robin yells.
“It’ll be fun,” Angie says to Robin. “You always said you wanted a brother.”
“Yeah, but not instead of my sister!”
“Well, you did say that sometimes,” Angie says, and she tries to laugh, but Jack looks at her like she’s terrible, and Hilary leaves Callum for a moment to crouch in front of Robin and say, “I know it’s hard to understand, Robin. I know you’re very upset about your mum leaving.”
“I’m not,” Robin says. “I hate Mum. She started all this and now she’s taking Sarah away.” Angie chews her lips but her eyes fill with tears.
“You’ll still see Sarah a lot,” Hilary continues, trying to touch Robin’s arms, but she swings them away. “And you’ll stay over there and Sarah will stay over with…” she falters, “with us, and we’ll try to make it the best it can be. And you do get on very well with Callum, don’t you, and you’ll be able to have fun together too.”
“I don’t want him, I want my sister,” Robin says, quieter now but with chest-bucking sobs. “He’s just some boy. I don’t want him in my house.”
Quietly, to the side of Robin, Sarah speaks in a low voice to her dad. “Please don’t make me go, Dad. Please let me stay.”
“She can share my room,” Robin says louder, “and Callum can still come then, I don’t care.” Jack glances over at Angie, a look of pleading on his face, but she mouths, “I’m sorry,” and Drew shakes his head. “We’ve worked this all out,” he says. “Let’s not get it all messy again.”
Robin figures that if she just makes it “messy,” then maybe they’ll work it all out differently. So she keeps screaming and yelling everything she can think of. If she can just keep this going all day, they’ll have to go back to their houses and rethink it all. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, as if they’ve already talked it through, Angie goes in Drew’s car back to the Grangers’ house alone for the night, and Hilary and Callum pile into the Rover and go back to the Marshalls’ house. Before the cars leave, there is an exchange of overnight bags. Sarah’s is not one of them; she will stay until the end of the next week, pack her things and prepare for her new home. Robin is desperate not to let this happen. But no one seems to care.
FIFTEEN
SARAH|PRESENT DAY
8. The Internet Searches
This was the one that stopped my heart. The last item on the list: the Internet searches. The false comfort of an empty room. Free to spend a child’s nap time at the screen with no little eyes peeping over your shoulder. How liberating, to be able to really dig in, to be able to allow your brain free rein to go off in any direction, scratch itches, get answers and snap the computer off if you reach saturation point.
With no thought—well, I certainly never gave a thought—to repercussions. I never considered that there would be any record, those lines of code recording every scraggly, knotty thought I’d tried to smooth out and tie up neatly.
I would never have thought to look at Jim’s Internet search history. I would never have cared. I wouldn’t even look now, except perhaps to understand what his intentions are.
But he’d certainly gone through mine. He, his parents, his brother. Raking over every absent-typed doodle and whim. Not to mention every deliberate and hard-typed word.
“Angel cake recipe”
“Calories burned sleeping”
“Vitamin E deficiency”
“Homemade face masks”
“How to hide effects of child trauma”
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
The Magpies are arguing again. They’ve been at it for a good hour. This isn’t just sniping, this is hammer and tongs. A wall rattler.