Summer Secrets (36 page)

“So there I was, thinking things were great, thinking that it was only a matter of time before something happened between us, because there was chemistry. I know there was chemistry there. Toward the end there was a night where I felt something was going to happen, and it was confusing, I could see it was confusing for him too, so he went out. He didn’t come back for hours, and because I’m a woman and a little bit crazy, I started panicking, so I went looking for him. And I found him in a bar, not drinking, he’s a recovering alcoholic too, but kissing someone.” I pause and take a deep breath. “My half sister.”

There is an audible gasp around the room, and it actually makes me laugh. “I know! Right? And not the one who was a bitch, who wanted nothing to do with me, but the one I thought had forgiven me. The one who was pretending to have forgiven me. He didn’t see me. But she did. And she looked into my eyes, at my shocked expression, and smiled. I knew instantly that this had nothing to do with him, that her accepting my amends was crap; this was all about revenge. She could see how much he meant to me; she knew that the best way to hurt me was through my daughter, or him. And she did. I have no idea if they slept together. I imagine they did. I imagine she would have had to do the same thing to me as I did to her all those years ago. And had I not showed up at the bar, had I not happened to see them, I know she would have found another way to let me know she had seduced the man I love.”

I pause to wipe the tears from my eyes. “I haven’t spoken to him since then. I avoided him the next day, and I’ve managed to avoid him since. I have no idea if he knows anything. Probably not. And I have been sick with grief, and anger, and hatred. Fury with both of them, with her, and so much fury and pain with him. It’s my half sister. He knew it was out of bounds. I still can’t believe he did it. But I also know that avoiding the pain, avoiding my feelings, avoiding him, is old behavior. If anything was painful, I would just run away, cut people off, pretend it had never happened, and I can’t do that now. I can’t do that because avoiding all the painful stuff is going to ultimately lead me to picking up a drink, and I won’t do it; I have to do things differently. But my God, I have wanted to drink. I get to the end of every day thanking God that I managed not to, because it’s all I want to do, to drown the pain. But I haven’t, because I know it’s a few moments of reprieve, and then the spiral down to hell, and I can’t go back there, no matter what’s going on in my life.

“The reading today tells me not to hide. It tells me to tell my ex-husband what I know, and how hurt and betrayed I feel. I don’t know that I necessarily have to tell him I’m still in love with him, but I have to tell him how upset I am. The only person I’m hurting by keeping this all in is me, and if I want to stay sober, I have to do this. What was it the reading said? That the wrongs are never made right? I can’t go back and unsleep with my half sister’s boyfriend. And I can’t change that she then slept with my ex-husband for revenge. But I can express my feelings honestly, and move on. I can love and forgive, and move on in a place of peace.” And as I say these words out loud, it is as if a cloud is lifted, and I know, suddenly, that this is absolutely true, and that by saying it out loud, I
am
able to let it go.

I still have to talk to Jason, though. Not Julia. I’m letting go of her. I wish her well, I know the girls will stay in touch, but there’s nothing there for me. She may be related to me by blood, but she’s not my family. Maybe at some point in the future we’ll be able to work things out, but I can’t see it today. Today, we’re equal. Two wrongs have not made a right, but they have canceled each other out. It is time for me to move on. I will keep in touch with Ellie. Her honesty has made room for us to have a relationship, and we need a relationship for our daughters.

The meeting continues. More people share. We pass the basket for the seventh tradition, where we make a voluntary donation. I put a couple of pounds in, and I think, once again, how this is my therapy, how extraordinary it is that a group of strangers can make me feel not only so happy, but so completely at home.

At the end, a couple of people stop me as I’m walking out, tell me how my story really resonated with them, or that they hope I’ll come back. I thank them and keep walking, and just as I’m at the door I turn my head and find myself looking straight at the last person I want to see right now. The last person I expected to see right now, and the blood drains from my face.

Jason.

Fuuuuuuuccccckkkk.

*   *   *

He was in the meeting. I am rooted to the spot in horror, unable to believe what I talked about, unable to believe how honest I was, unable to believe that he was in here, listening to every word.

How did I not see him? Why did I not check the room more carefully? How did I not realize there was a corner, and more chairs squeezed into the space round the corner?

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.
What am I supposed to do now? I open and close my mouth, like a fish, and then I do what every recovering, serene, self-possessed forty-something woman does when faced with an uncomfortable situation: I turn on my heel and run.

*   *   *

“Cat!” He’s behind me.

Go away, go away, go away.

“Cat! Wait!”

I’m sobbing now, the pain and humiliation too much. I just want to get in my car and drive off a cliff somewhere, except I don’t even have my car here, I took the bloody tube, and I turn the wrong way and it’s away from the tube station and I frantically scour the streets for a taxi but there’s nothing, and then a hand on my arm, and Jason has caught me.

“Cat. Stop. Please. You can’t just run off. I am so sorry you saw me. And I’m sorry that anything happened with Julia. I didn’t sleep with her. I didn’t mean to do anything. I went for a walk and she saw me out the window of the bar and grabbed me. She was drunk, Cat, and I kept trying to leave, and she wouldn’t let me.”

I can’t look him in the eye. “You don’t have to explain anything to me,” I say. “It has nothing to do with me.”

“Bullshit. It has everything to do with you.” The urgency leaves his face as it softens. “Cat, I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what?” I am so uncomfortable, I’m actually fidgeting, moving from foot to foot, desperate to stop this conversation and get out of here.

“I didn’t know how you felt about me.”

“I can’t.” It comes out in a howl, as the tears start to fall. “I just … can’t. I’m sorry, Jason. I’m sorry you were there. I’m sorry I opened my big mouth. But I can’t talk about this. I just can’t do it.” And this time, when I turn and run away, my whole body wracked with sobs, he doesn’t come after me.

Thirty-five

The only place I can ever kick my shoes off and feel completely at home is at my mum’s. It may not be the place I grew up in, almost all of the furniture may be completely new, but when I need to feel comforted by something other than a couple of tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and binge-watching
Celebrity Big Brother
for hours on end, it is to my mother’s flat I go.

I tell her everything.

It is not like me to tell my mother everything, and it is not like me to burst into tears on her sofa as she tucks me up under a fluffy throw and brings me cups of hot, sweet tea, and listens. Really listens, murmuring in all the right places.

Her own depression and my father’s controlling nature pulled her away from me as a child. When I was in pain, or upset, or hurt, I learned to figure it out for myself. I never doubted she loved me, I just knew I couldn’t turn to her for help.

Now, I can turn to her for help.

Where else would I go?

The story comes out in between sobbing like a child, tears spouting from my eyes and my nose running as I pluck tissue after tissue from the box she conveniently keeps on the coffee table.

“How am I ever going to face him again?” I cry, when I have finished the story. “He knows I still love him. It’s the most horrific, humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me. Mum, I want to die. I swear to God, I actually want to die.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while, just smiles gently and rubs my back, waiting for my hiccups to go, passing me more tissues.

I think about when Annie is upset, lying on her bed, crying, and how I sit on the bed, just as my mother is sitting on the sofa, and rub her back, and pass her tissue after tissue.

I have a story about my mother, that she was always in bed, that she was depressed, unhappy, wasn’t able to love me. I have a story that I was raised by wolves, by a father who didn’t want me and a mother who couldn’t stand up to him, who in having to retreat from him, retreated from me too.

I have a story that that is why I turned to alcohol. Because I had no one; because alcohol was my only friend. As I lie here, sodden with grief, I remember. I remember my mother doing this when I was a child. I remember her loving me, and looking after me.

I was jealous of Julia and Ellie, jealous that they had a father, but I had a mother. She might not have been there all the time, but it doesn’t matter.

I was loved.

I know, suddenly and without any shadow of a doubt, I was always loved.

Which only serves to bring on a fresh set of tears.

*   *   *

“You still love Jason?” my mother asks, when everything seems to have dried up and I am finally able to breathe.

“Yes. Of course. I never stopped loving him.”

“So why be humiliated? Lucky him, having someone as wonderful as you love him. You wouldn’t have told him under different circumstances. Maybe what happened today is a good thing. You couldn’t have gone on avoiding him forever, and isn’t it better for everything to be out in the open?”

“But he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t want me,” I moan, suddenly hit by the full fact of my divorce in a way I wasn’t in the beginning, too busy getting sober, getting my daughter back, assuming that Jason would come back, assuming he would forgive me because we had been through this so many times, and he always had.

This grief I am feeling is completely disproportionate with what was a pretty bad exercise in humiliation, but was just that: an exercise in humiliation. I, however, feel like my world is ending, and I realize, as I lie here, that I am finally accepting this is over.

Jason is never coming back. I may meet someone else, and he may be wonderful, but he won’t be the father of my child; I will never have a whole, intact family again.

I break into a fresh set of tears.

“Do you know he doesn’t love you?” asks my mother, when I have calmed down again.

“Yes. Of course. He doesn’t. It was clear on Nantucket that he wasn’t interested.”

“I thought you said there was a moment when you thought he might have been. In the kitchen. Making popcorn.”

“I thought that at the time, but two hours later he had his tongue down Julia’s throat, so, no. I don’t think it was a moment. I think it was my overactive imagination working overtime.”

“What if you’re wrong?” my mum says simply. “What if he still loves you? Then how would you feel?”

“But he doesn’t,” I groan. “If he did, he would have said something. Oh God. It’s just so awful. I can’t believe he knows.”

“It might not be so awful,” she says. “It might all turn out to be for the best.”

Thirty-six

Jason is now avoiding me. Which is a huge relief. I don’t need to skulk around the flat or suddenly find a reason to go out if he’s dropping Annie at home, because he’s clearly feeling as humiliated as I am, not to mention quite possibly appalled, and is staying as far away as possible.

While I try to get on with my life.

Like an awful flashback, the scene from the meeting, the things I said, the knowledge that Jason heard them, come back to haunt me on a regular basis. Usually when I’m lying in bed at night, and I often throw the pillow on top of my head and groan in horror.

But as the weeks have gone by, it has got a little easier. Not seeing him has helped.

I speak to Maureen, my sponsor, every day, go to my meetings, write my articles, look after Annie, and as the pieces of the puzzle of my regular old boring life have fallen into the same place they were before we left for Nantucket, so the pain has eased.

It is beginning to feel like a bad, but distant, dream.

I even bit the bullet and signed up for Match.com. I didn’t want to do it, but Sam threatened to divorce me if I didn’t, so even though I haven’t met anyone yet, I have spent quite a few evenings winking away and having some … interesting chats.

I don’t know that I feel quite ready to actually go out on a date yet.

Until I meet Matthew, who has blue eyes, and likes windsurfing, and go-karting, and good wine, and basically we have absolutely nothing in common, except his messages are very quick, and clever, and when he asks if he can call me, I say yes, and his voice is warm and lovely, and when he asks if I’d like to meet for a drink, I say no.

Two or three weeks go by, during which we talk every night. This isn’t real, though, I tell myself. Anyone can be anyone they choose during a phone conversation. This means nothing. Who can predict chemistry?

Sam phoned yesterday to see if I would be interested in writing a piece on middle-aged online dating. Great. Everything I write these days has to be prefaced with the word “middle-aged,” which doesn’t exactly make this middle-aged single woman feel particularly good about herself.

“Get over it,” said Sam. “It happens to the best of us.”

Tonight, I have finally agreed to meet Matthew for a drink. We’re going to the Queens in Primrose Hill, and because this is my first date in years, and even though I’m almost certain he’s going to be awful in real life—did I mention we have nothing in common?—I have still put an inordinate amount of time into getting ready today.

I went to the hairdresser this morning and had a few highlights put in. A few more highlights, to be correct. And I got a spray tan, because even though technically it’s autumn, it’s entirely possible that I just went to somewhere like Marbella for the weekend, and I do look so much better with a tan.