Everything She Forgot (8 page)

“I should have had this all organized,” he said, smoothing the scant hairs on his scalp.

“You sit down and let me do it,” she said, placing a protective hand on his arm. She was grateful to have a distraction from her own unease.

John settled into a chair at the head of the table as Margaret placed the food on plates. She gave instructions to Eliot and Paula and they laid the table and folded napkins.

“So how's the house-husband thing going?” said John with a smirk, slapping Ben lightly on the shoulder.

It was a joke that John always found more amusing than Ben did.

“Hard work,” Ben conceded.

“Only kidding. How's
the writing
going?”

Her engineer and scientist father always gave a grandiose emphasis to the words. Margaret knew that part of her father didn't think what Ben did was
real
work; while another part of him admired Ben, as if his son-in-law were an alchemist.

“Not bad. I'm working on a piece on children and social media at the moment.”

John nodded. “I read your article on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons winning the Nobel. That was marvelous.
Marvelous.
I passed it on to a friend of mine.”

“Oh really?” said Ben, and Margaret turned to watch the gentle color rise in her husband's cheeks. He was bad with praise.

“Yeah . . . it's all going well at the moment. There's a chance I might get to go to Brazil next year. I've pitched an article about child footballers in the favelas, to run at the same time as the World Cup.”

“That would be jammy,” said John, winking.

They were all hungry after the drive, and there was silence as they ate. Eliot had red sauce from his strawberry tart dotted on his cheeks and nose. Margaret was suddenly flooded with exhaustion and found it difficult to eat.

“So you're on the mend then?” said John, raising an eyebrow at Margaret as he took a sip of tea.

Margaret nodded. “Yes, just some bumps and scratches. It was scary but I was . . . lucky . . .”

“It doesn't bear thinking about what could have happened to you,” said her father, his brown eyes murky with worry. “It terrified the life out of me . . .”

Margaret turned to him and watched the concern gather on his face. He had always had difficulty expressing his emo
tions. It reminded her of times in her childhood when she had needed him, and he had been unable to comfort her.

“But she's doing well, aren't you, Mags?” said Ben, smiling across the table at her. She could tell from the way her husband spoke that he was trying to protect the children from hearing the details about the accident.

Margaret cleared her throat and took Ben's cue to change the subject.

“Hey, Dad, I wanted to go up in the loft and have another sift through the stuff from the old house—if that's OK?” she said.

“Of course,” said her father, eyebrows raised. “What's it you're after?”

“It was some stuff of Mum's. I think I know where—”

“I told you I gave away some of her things last year?”

It had taken over a decade, but her father had finally sorted through her mother's possessions and given her clothes to charity.

Margaret smiled at him. “Yeah, and it's fine if . . .”

“You're welcome to whatever. You'll need to go up yourself if that's OK. My knees are playing up a bit today.”

T
here was a rope swing attached to the big oak tree at the bottom of the garden, which her father had made when Paula was small. It was almost identical to the one that John had made for Margaret when she was a child. Ben took the children outside to play on it while Margaret stayed in the house with her father. She watched the children push each other on the swing before she turned away to follow him upstairs.

Her father had been a young man—in his early fifties—
when her mother died. He had shown no interest in marrying again and had thrown himself into work until retirement.

John used a hooked stick to pull down the stepladder from the hatch that led into the loft. He held the bottom of the ladder to steady it as Margaret climbed.

“The light's on the left-hand side,” he called as she neared the top. “There's a box of her jewelry that's behind the beams on the far right.”

“Thanks,” she said over her shoulder. “It wasn't jewelry so much, just some bits and bobs I remembered were up here.” She twisted on the stairs to watch his expression. The skin on his brow wrinkled as he looked up at her.
From that time
, she might have added, but did not.

They had not spoken of it, as a family. Even when her mother was alive it was avoided, brushed over. What had happened to Margaret had sculpted the space between each of them, the way grief sculpts the soul, so that the unspoken took on a tangible shape, defining their family.

She pulled herself up and found the light. She was aware of him standing below, looking up expectantly at the hatch, listening to the creak of the boards as she moved around.

The attic was filled with boxes that were still labeled from the move. Her parents had moved houses in the mid-nineties when her father changed jobs. It had been shortly before her mother's diagnosis. Margaret had helped them move into the house and she remembered seeing the box that she was now searching for.

She shifted two or three packing crates labeled “bedding,” “sleeping bags,” “dinner service,” then glanced down the hatch to see if her father was still there. He was gone and she was relieved.

It was a large green-cardboard shoebox, she remembered, unlabeled, unlike all the other containers, which her mother had obsessively inventoried. Margaret had only glanced at the box. She had found it during the move and had just opened the lid before her mother took it from her.

“Don't, love,”
her mother had said, her eyes desperate and misting with tears.
“You don't want to dredge all that up.”

At the time, she had been confused by her mother's words but had agreed.

Margaret recalled a happy childhood, but she could not remember much from her lower primary school years. As an adult, she had decided she simply had a poor memory, but there had always been hints of what she had forgotten. She remembered being in the hospital but could not remember why. She had asked about it when she was a teenager, but sensed that her parents didn't want to discuss it. Margaret had not pushed for more information. She knew that a portion of her childhood was missing, but there was a sense that she had
chosen
to forget.

The loft space smelled of the unsanded wood of the beams. The floor was covered in plywood, but it was uneven in places. There were toys from her childhood, which her own children had rejected: dolls that her daughter had considered ugly. An old-fashioned kettle sat beside an electric heater. Near a box of old books were her mother's jam jars, which she would retrieve every summer before she became ill and fill with fresh batches of gooseberry, redcurrant, and raspberry jams.

Margaret recalled the day after her mother's funeral, watching John sit by the fire and thinking how her tall, strong father seemed smaller now. Only a few days since her death yet he seemed shrunken, as if grief had caused part of him to dissipate, like air from a tire.

She had been young and in love and heartbroken all at once, yet she had said to her father: “You know when I was little, did something happen to me? Did I nearly die?”

Her father had looked at her, his eyes shining.

Margaret had pressed her lips together, not sure why she had spoken out. “I was in the hospital, wasn't I?” The long service watching her mother's coffin had made her recall all the things she had wanted to ask her mother, which would now go unanswered.

“You had a . . . fever,” her father had said, but then his face crumpled and he hid it in his hands.

Now she could hear muffled screams of laughter as her children played outside on the swing. As Margaret grieved for her mother and then got married, became a teacher, and had children, the fever had seemed a good enough explanation.

In the warm loft space she smoothed the palms of her hands on her thighs, aware again of the smell of fire: thick black smoke. The fire seemed to have reached further into her mind than she herself had ever been willing to go. She could remember no more than she had before, but for the first time in her life she was fixated on those missing years from her childhood. It felt as if her present self was crumbling and she would discover why only if she could find out what she had forgotten.

It took her some time, but she finally spotted the box she was looking for hidden under a pile of suitcases, wedged in the eaves. The suitcases were filled with sheets and old clothes and were heavy when she shifted them, but she managed to restack them and free the box beneath. Despite the weight that had been stacked above it, the cardboard box had kept its shape because it was packed tight.

She carried it to a space underneath the bare lightbulb that
hung from the eaves, then sat down on a crate of bedding as she lifted the lid. The box was filled with yellowing newspaper articles, some of which had been carefully cut out, while others had been roughly torn. The box smelled of old books: intimate as skin. She riffled through the papers quickly and saw that there were also several sheets of typed paper and envelopes stuffed with photographs.

She had to work out some way to get the box to the car without anyone seeing what she was taking. She didn't want to discuss it with Ben or her father. It was a box that her mother had always kept private, but Margaret had known that it was somehow related to her.

She touched the rough, yellowed pages at the top of the box. Memories: clean, unearthed as a bone from the ground, came to her, but they did not make any sense on their own.

Margaret picked up the newspaper clipping that sat on top of the pile and read the headline:
YOUNG GIRL ABDUCTED BY SUSPECTED PEDOPHILE
.

She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry.

The suitcase tower she had created on the far side of the loft toppled and fell suddenly, making her gasp.

“Are you all right up there?” her father called from below.

CHAPTER 8

K
ATHLEEN HUMMED A SONG AS SHE STOOD
BEFORE THE
hall mirror and pinned up her hair. She put on some pale pink lipstick, then went into the kitchen and leaned over the counter to write her list. She had messages to get eggs, cheese and bananas, steak for dinner; the beds needed changing, and she was meeting a friend for lunch.

She skipped up two flights of stairs and stripped the beds, then carried the sheets downstairs and put in a wash. She moved quickly: not rushed but with energy. The radio was on and she sang along in places as she washed the breakfast dishes.

The day was changeable, at once sunny and bright—warm shafts of sunshine catching the soap bubbles in the sink—but then the light would vanish and Kathleen would feel a chill and look up to watch the wind shaking the leaves of the oak tree, as if to remind her that it was autumn after all.

She dried the dishes and put them away, opening cupboards that were covered in Moll's artwork: macaroni collages, self-portraits, still lifes, and family paintings. Kathleen's favorite
was a large colorful picture that was Blu-tacked to the fridge. It was a painting of a house with a smoking chimney and green hills in the background and in the foreground were John and Kathleen, with Moll in the middle, holding hands. They all had circle faces and rectangle bodies and stick arms and hands, and Moll was the largest figure. Her mother was smaller than she was, and John smaller still, which Kathleen found interesting, as he was such a tall, thin man. Below the picture, Moll had painted the words
my family
, choosing a different color of paint for each letter.

Moll had always been bright. Kathleen had been criticized by the school for it, but she had taught her daughter to read and write before she started primary. Her teachers had worried that she would be bored and cause trouble, but Moll had never needed attention like that. Even at home, she was content to play by herself. She liked to take John's thick hardback books from the bookcase and pretend that she could read them.

Kathleen dried her hands and glanced outside to see if it was raining, just as the telephone rang.

“Hello?”

It was John. He stopped for a tea break at ten and would often call her.

“You're lucky you caught me.”

“You don't have to tell me that. I've always known I'm a lucky man.”

“You know what I mean,” she said, elbows on the bunker, raising her eyes and smiling as if she were talking to him face-to-face. There was a paperweight by the telephone, which Moll had also crafted: a smooth, heavy stone that she had found on the beach. She had painted
MUMY
in green across
it and often told Kathleen that she hated it because it was spelled incorrectly. Her daughter frequently asked for the gift to be returned so that she could paint over it, but Kathleen wouldn't allow it.

“You can find another stone and paint it with the correct spelling if you want, but I like this one.”

“I won't ever find another stone that flat.”

Kathleen and John talked for a few minutes, low murmurs into the telephone. They had nothing new to say, but simply enjoyed the sound of each other's voices.

“I'm meeting Fiona for lunch.”

“Well, you enjoy your day.”

“When will you be home?”

John sighed. “After six, I should think. We'll see.” She could hear the stress returning to his voice.

“See you later, then.”

“Tatty-bye.”

K
athleen put on her jacket and was counting the money in her purse when the phone rang again.

“Are you bored today or something?” she said, laughing, expecting it to be John again.

It was not her husband, but the head teacher of Ravenshill Primary.

“Mrs. Henderson, is that you? It's Barbara Wainwright.”

“I'm sorry,” said Kathleen, tossing her bag onto the kitchen bunker. “I thought it was . . . How can I help you? Is everything OK?”

“I don't want to alarm you at all, but I'm just checking that you didn't ask for Molly to be collected from school this morning by a friend or family member?”

Kathleen's lip stiffened. “Moll? Collected by whom? I saw her off this morning.”

There were a few seconds of silence on the line and Kathleen's thighs began to tremble.

“Moll didn't make it to school today, and some classmates witnessed her talking to a strange man and getting into his car. We're going to call the police . . .”

Kathleen hung up the telephone. She had tried so hard to listen as Mrs. Wainwright spoke of the next steps, but the only thing she could think about was finding Moll. A notepad hanging on the wall next to the telephone listed important numbers. Kathleen's forefinger shook as she found the one for John's work. She misdialed twice because she was trembling so badly, but finally got through.

His secretary answered.

“I need to speak to John right now.”

“Kathleen, is that you?”

“I need to speak to John.”

“He's at the plant. I can try to get a message passed but it might take some time.”

“I need to speak to him now
.
Right now.”

“Kathleen, love, is everything all right?”

She hung up, her hand over her mouth. It couldn't be true. It couldn't happen to her. She'd read about little girls being taken, but it couldn't happen to Moll. No one would hurt Moll.

She felt as if her skin had fallen off; raw, she ran out into the street and toward the school, following the steps her daughter had taken when she waved her off this morning. Kathleen could remember her small wet lips against hers and the uneven strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail, which Kathleen had tried to straighten on the doorstep. She could imagine every
last pore of her—bone, skin, hair, and smell. Tears blinded her as she mentally hugged her, squeezing her tightly, tighter than she ever had, as if she could push her back inside her own body and protect her forever.

This wasn't happening. It couldn't happen. Moll was never to come to any harm.
She was too loved.

The streets were a blur of faces and cars and trees. She bumped into one woman and another called after her to watch where she was going.

It was less than a ten-minute walk from the house to the primary school, but Kathleen had been running too hard. By the time she reached the school gates she could hardly breathe. She bent over and had put a hand over her mouth to stop herself from vomiting. Her hair, which she had carefully pinned earlier, was now wild and loose. She ran a hand over her face and hair as she prepared to enter the school.

They had made a mistake, she decided. Moll was inside, in her classroom, stretching up her hand to answer the teacher's question.

In the school parking lot, she saw two police cars.