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‘Boo!’ she’ll shout, head thrown back, giggling with relief.
It will be all I can do not to yell at her.
Matt is outside the house. He must have cycled past while I was in the car park. He’s wearing his lightweight raincoat, his helmet, his cycling gear. He looks down to my legs, to where Abi should be, her little hand in mine. Concern wrinkles his brow. Rain falls black on the pavement. I know it’s time to call the police. It is almost nine, my God.
I burst into tears and run to him. ‘Matt.’
‘Hey.’ He pulls me to him. ‘Come on, she’ll be somewhere. She can’t have just disappeared.’
I wrestle myself out of his arms. ‘She has though. She’s just wandered off or… someone’s snatched her off the street. Someone’s just pulled up and thrown her in a van.’
‘Don’t say that. That’s not… that won’t have happened, come on.’
‘She’s been gone too long. Too, too long! We need to call the police. Oh my God, where is she, where the hell is she? This is my fault. I left the door open. I thought I’d closed it but I didn’t. She was in her buggy but she’s never undone the clasp herself before. Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.’
He holds me by the arms, holds me up while I sob into his chest. ‘People leave their front doors open all the time. An open door is not going to kill a kid, not in this neighbourhood, Ave. Come on – this is a safe, safe place. Let’s just try and think calmly.’
I can tell by how quietly he speaks that he is rattled. He’s keeping his tone level for my sake but I know him too well to be fooled.
‘Matt?’ My voice is a whimper. ‘We need to call the police.’
His bottom lip pushes out. He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t saydon’t be silly. I don’t want him to agree. But he is nodding. He has agreed. My throat blocks. My scalp shrinks against my head.
‘You’re sure you’ve checked the house?’ he says quietly, but he is pulling out his phone.
‘I’m going to check again.’ I unlock the front door and fly upstairs, clearing the laundry in one great stride, taking the stairs three at a time, calling her name, her name, her name. ‘Abi? Abi. Abi. Abi. Abi.’
I look under the beds. I look in the laundry basket – empty. I emptied it. In the wardrobes. The bath. The shower cubicle. I have already looked.
‘Abi?’ I run downstairs, grab the banister and lever myself over the last few steps. ‘Abi? Please come out, love. Mummy’s getting worried.’
Matt is striding from room to room, phone at his ear. ‘Abi?’ he calls out. ‘Abi, come out, darling. If you’re hiding, it’s time to come out now, Mummy and Daddy are getting worried.’ Then, ‘Yes, hello. Yes, police, please.’
The thump, thump, thump of my heart. Everything is white – bleached out, strange. Everything is slow.
Matt steps out of the house, stops on the square porch. I am cringing and sobbing in the bright hall. The back of my husband is a silhouette. How thin he looks, bent over his phone in his black kit.
Second by second. Beat by beat. A clock. A metronome. A heart.
His head twitches.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Hello, yes, I need to report a missing child.’
Three
Ava
Almost a year ago and yesterday all at once. No matter how much time passes, that day will always be yesterday and I will have to make my peace with that somehow. Yesterday and everything I should have done, would have done differently, exists in my every moment, its shadow dark and long. I’m fighting off yesterday every second of today and tomorrow and forever. The laundry tumbles from my arms. I fall after it. The pushchair is empty. The front door is open. I left it open. Me. Over and over again. My ignorant self. My stupid self. My selfish, selfish self. I have to watch myself, her. I have to stare at her from the other side of a glass wall, fingertips white: myself that morning – ignorant, stupid, selfish. I push my hands to that glass and I shout: ‘Ava! Forget your online life, just today. Forget how lonely you feel. Go downstairs. Go now. Be with your little girl. She is enough.’
But she doesn’t hear me shouting. She doesn’t hear my fists pounding on the glass wall.
‘Close the door. Close it, Ava. Please! Close the door.’
Tears are endless. I am a woman who has a daughter. I am a woman who had a daughter. Both those things are true. I live in the past; I survive in the present. I was she; I am me. My daughter is alive; she is dead. She is simply lost; she is gone forever. Her heart is the tick, tick, tick of the metronome on my piano top, stopped still in my silent living room now that all music has stopped. My daughter is a perfect cadence. My daughter is the dissonant devil’s chord, that jarring combination of notes played deliberately to unsettle, to leave the listener tense, hanging. So I have been left, waiting for resolution that never comes. I am hanging – yesterday, today, forever.
The neighbours are coming out of their houses. They fold their arms. They look about. The seconds. The beats. A black weight gathering in my gut. Thickening there. Lodging there.
Each day is new. If today goes badly, tomorrow will be new again. And so on. I was ill for a time. That’s the favoured term.When you were ill.Then I was in a clinic, my belly rounding with new life while I tried to hold on to my own. Now I am at home. My therapy sessions are down to once a week. Trauma counselling. CBT. Stop checking the door. Stop, if you can. Yesterday is a long, dark shadow. I’m trying to see my way forward in this darkness.
