When Harlan awoke, the house was silent, except for the sound of pots and pans being moved around in the kitchen. He smelled the aroma of cooking. He glanced at the carriage-clock. Four-twenty. He’d been asleep for an hour or so. He checked his phone. No missed calls. Nash was obviously still holding out. Slowly, stiffly, he rose and made his way to the kitchen. Susan was stood at a grease-stained cooker, shoving sausages around in a frying pan. A scarred wooden table against a wall of the tiny room was laid with cutlery, salt and pepper and sauce bottles.
Noticing Harlan, Susan said, “Hungry?”
Now that she mentioned it, Harlan realised he was. “Yes.”
“I thought you would be after living off hospital food.” Susan nodded towards the table. “Sit yourself down.”
Harlan did so, and Susan placed a mug of tea and a plate of chips and sausages in front of him. She headed out the room with a second plate, saying, “I’ll just take this up to Kane. Don’t wait for me. Start eating.”
The food tasted good — better than any meal Harlan had eaten in weeks. When Susan returned, he asked through a mouthful of sausage, “How’s he doing?”
“He’s not talking to me. Won’t even look at me. I left the food for him, but I doubt he’ll eat it. Last time I saw him like this was a couple of years ago, when I first started seeing Neil. He didn’t eat properly for weeks. I ended up taking him to the doctor.”
Susan sat down opposite Harlan and sparked up a cigarette. “How about you?” he asked. “Aren’t you eating?”
She shook her head. “I can’t stomach anything. Every time I think about Ethan, about where he might be, about what might’ve happened to him, it makes me want to puke.”
Harlan finished his meal quickly, feeling Susan’s eyes on him the whole time. “You’re a good eater,” she said, reaching for his empty plate. “Rob was a good eater too. I used to love watching him eat.”
Harlan winced internally.
“Neil eats like a bird. It drives me mad watching him peck at his food.” Susan dumped the plate in the sink and scrubbed it clean.
Noticing that she spoke about Neil in the present tense, Harlan asked, “Is it over between you two?”
“He lied to me. I can’t be with someone who lies to me.” Susan spoke with decisive quickness, but there was a quiver of uncertainty in her voice.
“Everyone lies sometimes.”
“Yeah, sure, about small things. But not about things like that at a time like this.”
“He was afraid of losing you.”
Susan turned to Harlan, frowning. “What are you saying? That I should get back with him?” That same little quiver was in her voice.
Harlan no longer had any suspicions about Neil. And looking into Susan’s sunken eyes, he could see she was desperately hoping he’d say yes. But he couldn’t bring himself to. The thought came to him that she deserved better than Neil. She deserved someone who could give her a future free from debt and worries about bailiffs coming knocking, a future where she wasn’t always just scraping by.
Another thought rose to his mind: and who’s going to give her that, you?
Maybe, he replied to it.
And are you going to hold her through the night when all she can see is Ethan’s face? Are you going to be a father to Kane?
Harlan didn’t need to think about the answers to those questions. He could never be there for them in that way, even if by some incredible stretch of improbability they’d have him. He thought back to when Tom was born. Eve had given up work. They’d just scraped by on his salary, but they were happy — happier, perhaps, than at any other time in their lives. He sighed. Maybe Neil was the right man for Susan. But then, who was he to say one way or the other? He gave a weak little shrug, dropping his eyes to his mug.
Susan flinched at a knock on the front door. “Will you go see who it is? Don’t open the door. Just have a peep through the curtains.”
Harlan crept into the living-room and did as she asked. It was Lewis Gunn. He returned to the kitchen and told Susan. The knock came again. She made no move to answer it. After a moment, she said, “Go see if he’s gone.”
Again, Harlan peeped through the curtains. The preacher was walking away. “He’s gone.”
“Thank fuck for that.” Pulling out another cigarette, Susan added a touch guiltily, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for everything Mr Gunn’s done, but…the thing is, I’m sick of listening to all his God bullshit. I keep wanting to say to him, what kind of fucking God would let this happen? How am I supposed to believe in a God like that?”
“I remember thinking the same thing when Tom died.” The words were out before Harlan realised it. Straight away, he wished he hadn’t said them. He’d never really spoken about Tom’s death with anyone other than Eve. Not even Jim. Like Kane’s anger, his grief possessed him, and he possessed it. Part of him wanted — was desperate — to let go of it, but another part of him recoiled from anything that might cause him to do so.
“Who’s Tom?”
“He was my son.”
“What happened?” Seeing the pained look that passed over Harlan’s face, Susan added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Harlan was silent a moment, then, almost whispering, as if he didn’t want to hear his own voice, he told Susan what’d happened. When he finished, he saw that she was looking at him with a new understanding on her ravaged face, as if what he’d said had completed a puzzle she’d been struggling to solve. “So you know how I feel,” she said with a softness he hadn’t heard before.
“I know how it feels to lose a child. I don’t know how you feel, and I never want to find out.” Exhausted, more from talking about Tom than from his wound, Harlan lowered himself onto the sofa. “Do you mind if I close my eyes for a while?”
“Go ahead.”
Harlan slipped into an uneasy doze. He lay half-sleeping, half waking, drifting in and out of dreams he didn’t want to remember, thinking thoughts he didn’t want to think, cracking his eyelids every few minutes to check his phone. And with every time he saw that there were still no missed calls or new messages, a heaviness grew in his chest, until it seemed as if a concrete block was resting on it. The fingers of sunlight probing the curtains had been replaced by the cindery glow of streetlamps, when Susan’s raised voice brought him to full wakefulness. “How did you get this number?” she was saying. “No, I’m not fuckin’ interested…I don’t give a shit…Don’t fuckin’ ring here again.” She stamped into the living-room and slammed the phone back into its cradle. “Fucking bastard journalists,” she said to Harlan, her voice taking on that same edge of hysteria as earlier. “I’m going out of my fuckin’ head waiting to hear if my little boy’s dead or alive, and they’re calling me up for a fuckin’ quote.” She took out a cigarette and lighter. When the lighter wouldn’t ignite, she yelled, “Fuck,” and flung it across the room.
Harlan retrieved the lighter, shook it and got the flame going. He held it out to Susan, and she sucked her cigarette into life. “Thanks,” she said, her voice a little calmer. As she smoked, Harlan took his next round of pills. Susan switched the telly on. The evening news was just beginning. Like a child watching a horror movie, she put her hand to her face and peered through her fingers. There was nothing new reported — the police were still searching the woods, still questioning an unnamed man. Susan switched the telly off and flung the remote aside. “Christ!” she groaned, her voice raw with emotion. “How much longer? How much longer?”
Not much longer, thought Harlan, not if they’re going to find Ethan alive.
Susan pressed her hands to her head as if to keep it from bursting. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
“You can take it,” Harlan said evenly. “You can take it because Kane needs you.”
Susan took a breath and took hold of herself. She lit another cigarette, leaning back against the armchair, inhaling deeply. “Will you stay here tonight? I don’t want to be alone if…if they find anything.”
Harlan nodded.
“I’ll make you up a bed on the floor.”
“The sofa will do me fine”
“No it won’t. Not the state you’re in. There’s a fold-down mattress-” Susan broke off at a knock on the door,
