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tom
I hold my daughter’s hand under the blanket as the ambulance races to the hospital, sirens blaring. I can’t forget Peter’s face as the paramedics loaded his sister onto the stretcher. Practicallysalivating.
Meddie is very much my wife’s child, made in her image: cool, unemotional, self-contained. But Peter was supposed to bemine. I gave him a straightforward name, an ordinary boy’s name for the ordinary boy I’d longed for: tousled and tow-haired, all scraped knees and conkers and smelly socks, a sunny-natured ally in a hitherto all-female household.
He was an easy baby: he slept well and rarely cried. He grew into an affable, good-natured child. That open, sunny smile, the dishevelled mop of hair like macaroni curls, the freckles and the wide-eyed, innocent gaze: the little boy I’d always dreamed of having.
On theoutside.
I’ll never admit it to a living soul, but there’s something about our son that gives me the creeps. Even when he was a baby, I didn’t warm to him the way I did to Meddie. He has my wife’s eyes: the same shape, the same rich amber flecked with green, but they lack their mother’s … I don’t know, I’m not good with words –aliveness, maybe? Millie’s eyes change with her mood, from warm honey to cold coffee, heremotions scudding across the surface like clouds in the sky. Peter’s eyes are flawed stones, absorbing the light instead of sparkling it back at you. There’s a deadness to them, a flatness, like the eyes of a shark.
What kind of father thinks like that about his own kid? I feel guilty about it every day. I’ve done my best to get past it. Bent over backwards, in fact: I’ve always been the first to defend him – that business with the school rabbit, for example. I told Millie she was being paranoid. Peter wassix.
But I saw him at the Holocaust Museum the other week as he pressed his face to the glass, transfixed by the exhibition of clothes and letters and shoes from the Auschwitz death camp. I felt sick just watching him. There was a dark, crackling energy to him, as if he wasfeedingoff the misery and suffering the artefacts represented.
Adults always love Peter, but other kids know better. They can sense there’s something not quite right about him. He rarely brings a schoolfriend home, and when he does, they don’t come back.
Maybe my wife was right after all.
Before we had kids, I never bought into Millie’s genetic curse nonsense. Her parents fucked her up, sure, but underneath all that emotional repression she’s a good person. With her background, she could easily have become an addict, or a drunk, or just married a man like her father and repeated her mother’s mistakes. But despite everything that happened to her, she chooses every day to go out andsave lives.
The first time we discussed having a baby I told her: we weren’t like her parents. We’d give our children a stable, loving home. There was no reason our kids shouldn’t turn out perfectly fine. And our daughter was the proof of the pudding: fearless, loving, loyal to a fault, a stickler for fair play. I’d lay down my life for her in a heartbeat.
No, if we’d stopped after Meddie, I wouldn’t have given Millie’s dire prognostications about bad seeds and psychopaths another thought.
I squeeze my daughter’s hand beneath the blanket, my whole being concentrated on a single wordless prayer:please let her be all right please let her be all right please let her be all right.
The worst of it is, this is all my fault.
Harper called me in a panic this morning, insisted we had to meet, wouldn’t tell me what it was about. If it’d been as innocent as I told myself it was, I’d have invited her over to the house instead of arranging to meet her at a restaurant in Chelsea. But the truth is, I didn’t want the kids to see us together.
Didn’t want my wife to know.
Millie’s enough for me. She’salwaysbeen enough for me – I literally can’t remember a time in my life without her. And I know her veneer of cool self-sufficiency is just that: a veneer. She’s vulnerable and insecure and fragile, just like the rest of us.
But now and again, it’s nice to beneeded. Millie loves me, I’ve never doubted that, but she’s neverlooked upto me. She’s the one with the big job: I make more money than she does, but I’m fiddling with computer codes and she’sholding people’s beating hearts in her hands.
I’m not some unreconstructed Neanderthal who thinks women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. But I am still aman. It feels good when a pretty woman hangs on your every word.
Especially a pretty woman in tears.
Why Kyle Conway is having an affair is beyond me. Harper’s a lovely girl: she works hard, she’s a good mother, and her heart’s in the right place. Why would her idiotic husband risk it all for a quickie with the woman next door?
The poor girl’s heartbroken, and obviously I’m flattered she turned to me for advice. But while I was congratulating myself on navigating the dangerous waters of her daddy issues with skill and care, I took my eye off the ball at home. And now my daughter’s in an ambulance, and my son is a—
—no. Even Peter wouldn’t go that far. He loves his sister. It was anaccident.
He didn’t mean to hurt her.
chapter 19
millie
‘Jesus Christ, Tom,’ I say. ‘What’s it going to take for you to see it?’
Tom casts a glance at the medics conferring by the desk along the hall. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he says. ‘We’ll have bloody social services on us.’
‘That might not be a bad thing.’
