The Playdate (40 page)
The cafeteria is a different place today, I note. Crowds of people queue for lunch; visitors, young doctors in striped shirts with stethoscopes proudly hung round their necks; exhausted-looking surgery staff in scrubs; patients with tubes and sticks and bandages. I didn’t notice on Saturday night, but the cafeteria has been done up since the last time we were here. It is bright and fresh and clean. The air is full of chatter. Of purpose. Of things moving forward. Of hope that things will heal.
And then I see him. In the far corner, his head slumped down over a newspaper, a large plastic coffee cup in his hand. Still in his bloody suit. But this time, his hair has a greasy sheen to it. It falls forward onto a hint of a dark shadow around his chin.
He doesn’t see me at first. I watch and I think. I think about how Jez has always taken the pain away.
And then I focus on the hard line of his jaw, and I allow myself, finally, to accept that this is not actually true. Because after the euphoria, Jez does other things to me. He creeps around my system, collapsing veins, suppressing my breathing, slowing the neurons in my brain, poisoning my heart, and clogging the arteries that keep me alive.
No, I think, watching his eyes, and starting to walk toward him. If I am honest with myself, apart from giving me Rae, Jez has never done me any good at all.
* * *
“How is she?” I say, pulling up a chair beside him.
His head jerks up in surprise. He immediately looks behind me. Looking for Tom, probably. Wondering if there’s going to be a scene.
“They’re keeping her in. For observation,” he says.
“What—in A&E?”
He pauses. “No. The psychiatric unit.”
I raise my eyebrows, and he looks away.
“How’s Rae?”
“Good.”
He nods. “That’s good to hear.”
I sit and say nothing. I just keep looking at him.
“So, what is it, Jez? Why did you ring?”
He taps his fingers on the table and attempts a smile.
“I need to ask you a favor.”
I stare at him. “You want to ask me a favor?”
He rolls his eyes. “I know. Not very apt in the circumstances.”
I sit back.
“Well, I tell you what, Jez. Before you ask me that favor, why don’t you answer a few questions for me? Then we’ll see.”
He looks at me, and I realize something. For the first time, I have the upper hand. There is a softness around his face that I have never seen before. Jez is scared, I think. Lost. Suddenly he looks like a big fat child dressed up in his dad’s suit.
A wave of revulsion takes me by surprise.
“OK . . .”
“OK. Well, first, I want to know something about Suzy. I want to know where you met her. Did you meet her at work?”
He lowers his eyes. “In a way. Yes.”
“At your office, in Denver?”
He wriggles uncomfortably in his seat. “No. At her work.”
“Which was . . .”
“In a cl . . . I mean a bar. Near my office.”
He looks uncomfortable. “A bar or a club?” I ask carefully. “Which was it?”
He sighs. “A club.”
“And should I be asking what sort of club?”
“Probably not,” he murmurs.
I nod, taking it in. Thinking of the folder the police officer had in front of me when she asked me about Suzy.
“OK. Well, and you married her—why?”
He purses his mouth. “She got pregnant in the first week. On purpose. Then it just seemed like a good idea. Pissed the old man off.”
“And at what point did you realize your gorgeous, sexy new wife that you married to piss off your dad was a total nutcase?”
He glances at me sharply. “Cal. I know what she’s done to you. But you’re talking about my kids’ mother.”
I hold his gaze.
“I said, at what point, Jez?”
He sighs and leans forward, picking fluff from his sleeve. “It started pretty soon after. She started turning up at my office, giving dirty looks to the women I worked with. Following me to bars. Screaming at me in front of friends. She slapped me once in front of the boss I was contracting for in Denver when he got his driver to drop me back home late after a work thing.”
“So, why didn’t you leave?”
“I thought it was the pregnancy. But after Henry, it got worse. She wouldn’t let anyone near him. She wanted me and him in the house all the time with her. I tried to get a childminder in to break it all up a bit, but Suzy said she heard the woman threatening to put Henry in a microwave if he didn’t stop screaming. The woman denied it, but I had to let her go. And then Suzy got pregnant again. That was when I brought us back and started working from home. At least if I’m around she calms down, then she can’t
track me down when I go out and see clients and friends. I can have a life.”
“Well, from what I hear, you’ve certainly been having that,” I say. Jez bites his lip. “But you knew. You knew she was crazy?”
“What’s crazy? Jealous, maybe, mixed up. It was all about her sister. She . . .”
“Sister?” I exclaim. “What bloody sister?”
“Faye. She lives in Denver. Suzy doesn’t speak to her, but she tracked me down one day at work and told me everything. She reckons that’s what caused it. That she stayed with their mother and Suzy got sent off to some old nutter of an aunt. The mother only ever turned up for appearances’ sake if the school or social services started sniffing around.”
I take it all in. “So this is why you were always on her back to put the twins in nursery? Is that what the boarding school thing is about, too? To get them away from her as much as possible? And what? Get them away from her completely at some point?”
He fiddles with a sugar packet.
I shake my head.
“So what was the favor you wanted to ask me?”
He sits up and attempts a smile.
“She’s going to be in here for weeks, maybe months. My parents left for South Africa this morning and won’t be back for two weeks. I don’t want them to know what’s really going on. So, I’m going to try to get the nursery to extend the twins’ hours from nine to six, and get Henry into after-school club. I just wondered if you’d be able to help out. I’ve got to get this Vancouver contract bid finished and I’m not going to be able to find a childminder that quickly.”
I stare at him.
“Let me get this right. You’re asking
me
to look after your kids?”
He tries the lowered eyebrow and lips combination he used the night of Rae’s accident, clearly hoping it will do the trick. “I mean, the boys and Rae,” he says in a voice meant to convey some sort of sentimentality. “I mean, they are family. Sort of.”
“Family,” I snort. “Is that right, Jez? That’s how you see Rae, is it? Family. That’s why you were at home snoring your way through the night while she was having her chest cut open.”
I stand up and have to fight the urge to smile. “You know, Jez, the thing is, you let that insane woman near my daughter, even though you knew what she was capable of. So, as far as I’m concerned, all of this happened because of you. Because it suited you to have me and Rae keep Suzy busy and off your back. Even though you knew what she might do.”
His face darkens.
“So, I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to decline your kind offer. Because what I think you should do, Jez, is pull out of your Vancouver contract and look after the kids yourself for a while. You might not have enough money for a nice new suit, but you’ll survive. After what the boys have been through, they could do with having their dad around for a while. And, as we both know—you never know who you can trust with your own kids.”
He thinks for a minute. Then reaches out one of his cuff-linked hands and touches mine. “I know what you’re saying, Cal, but I’m in a bit of a situation here. If you don’t think of us as family, then I’m asking you to help me as a friend.”
I pull my hand away and resist the temptation to laugh. “Jez, you know as well as I do what we’ve been doing, and it has nothing to do with friendship. But, if you get stuck, I’m sure Sassy Sasha would be delighted to help.”
And with that I march off through the canteen. The clatter of steel pots and pans from the kitchen sounds like wild cheering in my ears.
* * *
I arrive back in Rae’s room to find Tom on the parents’ pullout bed, snoring softly. Rae has rolled over again and their faces lie opposite each other, a few feet apart, noses and foreheads and chins pointing in different genetic angles to each other, but fixed in the same tranquil father-and-daughter expression.
I shut the door to the room, walk over to Rae’s bed, and climb gently onto the end of it, so as not to wake her.
Then I look at Tom and I look at Rae, and I look at my own reflection in the sunlit window, and I lie down between them, a hand drifting close to both.
THE END
* * *
This is my first novel so there are many people to thank.
First, my husband, for supporting me through the “year” I decided to take off to write a novel, and then not complaining when it stretched into two . . . and to my kids for never complaining when I made tea late and hogged the laptop.
I doubt I would ever have got there without the invaluable encouragement and expert guidance of my agent Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates. I’ve said it a thousand times but thank you, again, Lizzy—and to Laura West at DH, too. A big thank-you also to Katy Regan for her generosity and inspiring ways, and to my magazine fairy godmothers Marie O’Riordan, Vanessa Thompson, and Charlotte Moore, for setting me off on this path to fiction.
I am indebted to Maria Rejt for taking an interest in
The Playdate
at the early stages, and to my editor, Trisha Jackson, for making publishing my first novel so enjoyable. Also, for their sterling work selling
The Playdate
abroad, Harriet Sanders, Liz
Johnson, and Jon Mitchell, and to Thalia Suzuma for her much-appreciated enthusiasm.
I am hugely grateful to my editor Emily Bestler for publishing
The Playdate
in the United States. I have spent many happy hours in wonderful bookshops all over America on my travels, and it is a thrill to imagine
The Playdate
on their shelves. I would also like to thank Judith Carr, Chris Lloreda, Jeanne Lee, Hillary Tisman, Ariele Fredman, Josh Karpf, Jill Putorti, and Jim Thiel at Atria, and the fantastic team at Emily Bestler Books: Kate Cetrulo and Caroline Porter. A big thank-you also to my UK publishing team at Pan Macmillan UK.
As for the content of the book, I am very grateful to Dr. Iain A. Simpson for helping me to understand infant aortic coarctation, and to Dr. Beth Macmillan and Dr. Neil Mantan for taking the time to diagnose my plot needs, early on. Any errors in the use of that information are mine.
I’d like to thank Ingrid Holmquist and Simon Natas for lending me their professional expertise in psychology and law. Also, Dan Weinberg, for doing an admirable job of helping a technophobe like myself understand sound design. I’d also like to mention David Holmes at Rocket Music in Australia who was so nice about me inadvertently copying the name. The two Rockets and their staff are, of course, completely unconnected.
My thanks, too, to the friends who shared a contact or an experience, from potato farming to Turkish translation—Astrid, Flic, Gary, Sonja, Kat, Pete, Wes, and Anita—and to the writer friends who guided and cheered me on—Sita Brahmachari, Wendy Jones, Wendy Hatton, Jonny Zucker, and Karen McCombie. I’d like to thank Sarah Habershon for lending me her beautiful
desert cabin toward the end of writing the book, and both her and Adriana Craciun for their endless inspiration in so many ways. I doubt also that I would have got there without my family heroically flying in from north and east, as deadlines loomed, or my very own “Beatties”: Laura, Lara, and Fran—the kind of London neighbors I hope Callie has now.
Emily Bestler Books/Atria proudly presents
The next psychological thriller by Louise Millar
Turn the page for a preview of
Accidents Happen
. . .
