Claiming Noah (28 page)

Tom laughed as Ninja jumped up on him. ‘We can even take this crazy animal with us, let him burn off some energy.'

‘I think he's right, darling.' Once again, Eleanor had been listening to the conversation from the kitchen. ‘It will do you both a lot of good.' As if pre-empting what Diana was thinking Eleanor added, ‘Liam doesn't have to come if he doesn't want to.'

Diana watched Noah play with the fire engine. The poor kid had barely left the house in the past month.

‘What do you say, buddy?' Diana called over to him. ‘Do you want to go to the beach for a holiday? We'll bring Ninja with us.'

Noah looked up at her from his fire engine and nodded, a small smile on his lips.

‘So, it's settled then,' said Tom. ‘Noah has the deciding vote.'

‘Well, how are we going to get there?' Diana asked. ‘I can't take the car if Liam doesn't come with us.'

‘I have my car. Stop trying to get out of this.' Tom poked her in her side to make her laugh. ‘Say yes, sis, say yes.'

Diana laughed. ‘Yes, all right, we can go.'

Tom clapped his hands together and looked at each of them in turn. ‘Well, go and pack your bags. We'll leave this afternoon.'

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

I
n the aftermath of James's committal hearing and the media attention that accompanied it, the majority of the people Catriona knew reacted to her in one of two ways. The first was to ignore her. Most of the people at her office, even those she had worked with for a number of years and regarded as friends, steered clear of her as if she were suffering from a contagious disease. Catriona was sure they were just pretending to be busy at their desks so they didn't have to enter into conversation with her. She noticed people looking the other way as they passed her in a corridor, and people who used to be friendly to her seemed now to purposely miss the elevator she had walked into so they didn't have to share the space with her. ‘What do you want to ask me?' she wanted to say to them. ‘How did I not know that it wasn't my son? Why did James do it? Was I involved in the kidnapping?' She spent her days incensed at her colleagues, wishing they would ask their questions so she could answer them and then get on with her work. But after she learned that there was another way for people to react to her, she decided she preferred being ignored.

Catriona was in the office lunch room one afternoon with a woman who had joined the company a few months earlier. They were heating up their leftovers in the two communal microwaves. Catriona didn't know the woman well, but their interactions had always been polite, if not necessarily friendly. The woman stood next to Catriona for a full minute, watching her lunch turning around in the microwave, before she spoke.

‘How could your husband do such a hateful thing to a family?' she asked. ‘I have two small children, and if anyone ever stole one of them from me I'd want to die. Your husband should be jailed for life for what he did. He's a monster.'

Catriona was taken aback. She didn't know if the woman expected an answer and, if she did reply, what could she say? After a moment of silence she managed to give the fabricated, apathetic response she had been forced to use on several occasions. ‘It's a terrible tragedy, but at least it's all out in the open now. I hope you can appreciate that I'd prefer not to discuss it at the moment.'

‘You don't get to use the word tragedy. Tragedy implies there's no-one to blame.'

‘I resent that,' Catriona said. She felt her body temperature rising to match her anger. ‘You don't know what really happened, and frankly it's none of your business. If
you
lose your husband and your son, then we can talk. Until then, keep your opinions to yourself.'

But the woman wasn't going to let her get away that easily. She turned and faced Catriona, her lunch now forgotten. ‘Regardless of whether or not you knew about what your husband did, and I find it very hard to believe that you didn't know, the man you married destroyed a family. I heard about that poor couple on the news; they spent nearly two years of their lives trying to find their lost child. They didn't even know if he was alive or dead.'

‘I know,' Catriona stammered. ‘It must have been awful for them, but—'

‘But nothing. There is nothing you or your husband could say to take away what that family had to deal with. Just think about all the things they missed out on with their baby. They can never get them back. It's a big gaping hole in their lives that they'll never be able to fill.' She paused and took a breath, not yet finished with her tirade. ‘I hope you don't decide to have another child. No child deserves to have you as a mother.'

Catriona felt tears pooling in her eyes out of shock and rage, but she held them back. She no longer felt like standing up for herself. She didn't even know if she deserved to. Maybe she was partly to blame for what James did. If she hadn't struggled so much after she had Sebastian then maybe he wouldn't have died. Maybe, if she had been there, she could have changed something. Or at least she and James would have been able to deal with his death together and James wouldn't have done something as ludicrous as kidnapping a baby. It was becoming clear to her that from the moment she and James had decided to have children, things had gone wrong in her life. Perhaps she should have taken her fertility issues as a sign that she wasn't meant to be a mother. Perhaps Sebastian should never have been born and then she wouldn't have to deal with the grief that enveloped her like a thick coat. Grief for Sebastian's death, and grief for the loss of a child she loved who she would probably never see again.

Catriona turned and left the lunch room, leaving her lunch, her dignity and any feelings of self-worth behind.

After that encounter, she suspected that other work colleagues shared the same sentiment. She had assumed they felt sorry for her because she had lost her husband and son, but now she looked closer and saw that the emotion was closer to resentment than to sympathy. She booked a meeting with her boss that afternoon, intending to ask for advice on how to deal with the hostility directed towards her.

Terry was five minutes late to the meeting. She entered the room without looking at Catriona, jangling her bracelet as she sat in the seat furthest away from her and stacked her laptop, mobile and security pass into a neat pile.

Catriona waited for Terry to look at her, but when she didn't look up from the tabletop Catriona began to speak.

‘I'm finding it really difficult here at the moment,' she said. ‘I know people are uncomfortable around me because they heard about what happened with James, but it's nearly impossible for me to get any work done. No-one's turning up to meetings I book, or replying to my emails. Sometimes, when I speak, people pretend they haven't heard me.'

Terry nodded, her eyes still on the table. ‘I know, I've noticed.'

When Terry didn't elaborate, Catriona leaned back in her seat and stared out the window. The sun glinted off the harbour, which was just visible through a gap between two office buildings. A pair of window washers balanced on an unnervingly narrow platform, cleaning the windows of a tall building in the distance. Catriona could see the platform swaying in the breeze and she imagined herself in their place, trying to maintain her footing as the wind pushed against her. She doubted that anyone would care if she toppled right over the side.

‘To tell you the truth,' Terry said, ‘I'm surprised you're here. I don't think I could manage it.'

Catriona sighed and looked away from the window washers. ‘I need the distraction. It's too quiet at home. My mind goes crazy with all that silence.'

Terry finally looked up from the table. Her eyes looked wary, her mouth drawn tight. ‘I feel for you Catriona, I really do, but I think it's best if you stay away from the office for a while. Just until all this passes.'

Catriona couldn't believe those words had left Terry's mouth. She had always admired Terry's tenacity when it came to solving problems, but this problem was obviously too much for her to handle. She was just like the rest of them, wanting to get Catriona out of her sight so she didn't have to see her every day.

‘Are you firing me?' Catriona asked quietly.

Terry cleared her throat and resumed her study of the table. ‘No, of course not. I'm just talking about taking some time off. A few weeks, at least. Maybe go away for a while, clear your head. Let the dust settle here.'

Catriona tried to keep her voice from wavering. ‘If that's what you think's best . . .'

‘I do.'

‘When should I . . .'

‘We may as well make it immediate. You can take off now if you want. I'll tell the team.'

Catriona stood up, collected her things and walked back to her desk, her shoulders slumped. As she switched off her computer she imagined she heard a collective sigh of relief from the people around her. She could feel their stares boring into her back as she slunk out of the office, her handbag clutched tightly to her body as if it were a lifesaver.

She left her office building and walked towards the bus stop. Was she imagining it, or were people on the street staring at her? The homeless man on the corner, the woman in business attire walking past her speaking on her mobile phone, the bus driver who greeted her as she boarded the bus to go home. Catriona felt they were all staring at her, judging her, hating her, seething with anger at a woman who caused a baby to be kidnapped and kept from his parents. Catriona longed for the bus ride to be over so she could hide away in her house, away from the rest of the world. She could feel darkness wrapping its black arms around her again, squeezing so tightly she had to work to draw breath. How could she go on like this, with no husband, no child and the whole world hating her? What type of life was that? She couldn't even use work as a distraction any more. Her friends had stopped calling, even her parents seemed unsure of what to say to her. She had no-one. Maybe it was time to end it all; there was nothing for her in this life any more. No reason to get up in the morning. No reason to go on living.

A man sitting across the aisle from her on the bus stared at her with what felt like loathing and she knew he recognised her from images they had shown of her on television and in the newspapers. He sneered, turned away and looked out the window while she bowed her head and tried not to cry. She would have this for the rest of her life, the recognition and resentment. The whole world hated her for what James had done. His arrest wasn't enough for them; they wanted her to pay for it too. Well, then, maybe she should give them what they wanted.

•  •  •

When she got off the bus and walked down the street towards her house, Catriona could see Spencer sitting on her front steps. He was idling with his phone, his long legs casually crossed at his ankles. Summer had refused to leave even though they were well into March, and the frangipani tree in the front yard was brimming with clutches of white flowers among the dark green leaves. Catriona paused in the middle of the street when she saw Spencer, but when he noticed her she forced a smile and resumed her walk towards the house.

‘What are you doing here?' she asked as she pushed open the front gate.

‘You haven't returned my calls,' he said. ‘I wanted to see if you were okay.'

‘I'm okay.' She walked up the stairs, stepped around him and opened the front door.

He followed her inside as she busied herself with the lights, closed the shutters on the windows, opened the mail that was sitting in a pile on the kitchen counter where she had dumped it several days earlier – anything to avoid looking at Spencer and having to enter into a conversation with him that she didn't want to have.

‘How have you been?' she said in a tone that she hoped came across as casual.

‘Fine. Good. You?'

‘Yeah good, great.' That didn't sound believable. He obviously wasn't going to believe she was great.

Spencer was standing at the door to the living room, watching her as she pretended to be busy. He seemed just as uncomfortable as she felt.

‘Has the media been harassing you?' he asked. ‘James has received a fair bit of publicity.'

‘Not too bad. A bit in the beginning, but it's stopped now.' She wondered if the reporters had been trying to get a comment from him as well, but she didn't want to ask. ‘I didn't say anything to them,' she added as she slowly ventured back into the living room, closer to Spencer.

‘Me neither.'

They stared at each other for a while and then, once the pause in conversation became too long to pretend it wasn't there, they broke their eye contact and looked around the living room as if searching for suitable topics for discussion.

‘How are your parents?' Spencer asked, perhaps prompted by the photo in a frame on the mantelpiece.

‘Fine, I guess,' Catriona said. ‘I haven't spoken to them much. They don't know what to say to me, so it's easier if we don't speak. Why do you care about my parents anyway? You've never met them.'

‘I'm just being polite. Give a guy a break.'

‘Oh. Sorry.'

Catriona occupied herself for a few more minutes by clearing the coffee table of empty cups and old newspapers while Spencer watched her, seeming envious that she had something to do while he remained standing in the doorway.

‘Why are you really here?' Catriona eventually asked when the coffee table was cleared and she had run out of things to do. ‘Did James ask you to look after me?'

‘No, not at all. He knows you can look after yourself. I just thought maybe you could do with some company. We could order takeaway and watch a couple of movies. Do you want company?'

‘I don't care. You can stay if you want.' She had nothing to do, nowhere to go. She didn't know what she would do if she was left alone by herself, but she couldn't admit that to Spencer.