She stared balefully back at me as she shoveled Shreddies into her mouth, but didn’t reply.
“Swimming? Cinema?”
Still nothing.
“Shopping for a new toy?”
She shrugged.
“Shopping it is, then!”
We drove to the nearest town with a large toy store in its center. “We can go for tea and cakes first,” I suggested. “Isn’t this fun? Us girls together? You’re such a big girl now, perhaps we can choose a pretty dress for you.” She stared out the window while I prattled on.
The shop was one of those lovely old-fashioned ones selling tasteful and expensive handmade toys for the sort of parents allergic to plastic. It wasn’t the kind of place I usually shopped in, but I’d wanted to buy Hannah something really special and original. We wandered the aisles, but though I pointed out countless dolls, games, and stuffed toys, she barely glanced at them, gazing back at me with undisguised boredom. I began to lose my patience. “Come on, love, you can have anything you want. Just take a look!”
It was at that moment that I spotted, at the far end of the shop, someone I used to know from the village I grew up in. I completely froze, my heart pounding at such a strange and unexpected shock. I ducked my head and turned quickly away, hurrying along another aisle. I couldn’t face the questions that would have been asked, the inevitable fishing for details as to why Doug and I had left so suddenly all those years before, severing all links with a community I’d been a part of my entire life.
Hiding behind a display of teddy bears, I looked around for Hannah, my heart sinking when I realized she wasn’t there. “Hannah!” I hissed. “Where are you!” At last I spied my former neighbor leaving and heaved a sigh of relief as Hannah appeared from around the corner.
“I want to go home,” she said.
I was too drained to argue any longer. “Fine. Have it your way.”
It was as we were leaving that I felt the hand on my arm. I turned to see a middle-aged woman staring at me with obvious distaste. “You’ll have to pay for these,” she said, tight-lipped.
It was then that I noticed her manager badge. “I’m sorry?” I asked.
She held out her hand, filled with what looked like little wooden sticks. “She did this. I saw her,” the woman said, nodding at Hannah. “You’ll need to pay for them. Would you come this way, please?”
I realized then that what she was showing me was the beautiful set of hand-painted wooden dolls from the eye-wateringly expensive dollhouse I’d pointed out to Hannah when we’d first arrived. Every single one of them had had its head and limbs snapped off. I looked at Hannah, who stared innocently back at me.
We drove home in silence. When I unlocked the front door, I all but ran to Toby, grabbing him from Doug’s arms and burying my face into his comforting, warm little neck, hurrying up to my bedroom and shutting the door behind us.
—
From the beginning, Doug and I dealt with Hannah’s behavior very differently. I still had the faint scar at the corner of my eye, the sight of Lucy’s empty cage stashed forlornly in our garage, to remind me just what she was capable of. Toby was a very clingy baby who hated to be put down, and occasionally I’d glance up to see Hannah watching us together, gazing over at us in such an unsettling manner that it made me shiver.
So, yes, I guess I was a little overprotective of my baby son, wary and watchful of my daughter whenever she was near. As he was breastfed, I always had an excuse to keep him close by me, but soon Doug began to resent me for what he saw as me monopolizing our boy. “You’ve made him clingy,” he’d complain when Toby would cry for me the moment Doug tried to pick him up. It was as though he thought I was deliberately keeping his son from him, but that just wasn’t true.
Doug’s way of dealing with Hannah was to lavish her with attention, no matter what she did, as though he hoped the force of his love alone might steer her on the right track. If he came home from work, for example, and found her on the naughty step, he would—much to my annoyance—scoop her up and give her a biscuit, taking her with him to the living room to watch her favorite cartoon on TV, while I played with Toby in a separate room. Slowly our little family began to divide into two, with Toby and me on one side, Doug and Hannah on the other. It was true that she was much better behaved when she was with her father, but I sensed that she enjoyed the growing rift between Doug and me. I saw the spark of pleasure in her eyes when we argued, how happy she seemed when we ate our meals in offended silence.
And through it all, through the constant worry over Hannah, the demands of caring for our baby son, and the thousand other pressures of daily life, the secret Doug and I shared festered. I had hoped that it would get easier, the guilt we felt—had hoped that time would help us to accept the part we’d played in the whole awful business back then. But a young woman had died that night, leaving behind a grieving family, parents to endure the agony of not knowing what really happened to her. And our guilt weighed more heavily every day, adding to the steady corrosion of our once-happy marriage. We could not forgive ourselves, it seemed, or each other, for the choices that we’d made.
