Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

the final nail in the dry box of bones of their marriage.

May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.

It was during those years that she finally lost touch with her remaining children. She had nothing left to give them and they grew tired of waiting.

For three years she had put Ellie from her mind as much as she was able. She’d strapped herself into a new routine, tight and hard, like a straitjacket. For three years she’d internalized her madness, shared it with no one. But now the madness was back.

removed Noelle Donnelly from the bit of her brain that concerned itself with the here and now. The here and now was oversubscribed as it was.

The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind… all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.

He’s not handsome in the traditional sense of the word but has the air of a man who has long ago accepted his physical limitations and shifted all the focus to his personality.

But as she watches the sparkles on the silver spoon she feels something inside her begin to open up. Something like hope.

She knows this is utter nonsense; losing a child ages you faster than a life spent chain-smoking on a beach.

she has no energy for practicalities; she just wants to keep herself tight inside the bubble that she and Floyd made together tonight, not let life crawl in through the gaps.

She had been unable to comprehend how he had managed to get to such a place, a place of softness and butterflies in your stomach, of making plans and holding hands. And now it is happening to her and all of a sudden she aches to call him.

Her mother’s care home in Enfield, a twenty-minute drive away, is a new-build, redbrick thing with smoked-glass windows so that no one can peer in and see their own devastating futures. Ruby, her mum, has had three strokes, has limited vocabulary, is half-blind, and has very patchy recall. She is also very unhappy and can usually be counted upon to find the words to express her wish to die.

Laurel takes her mother’s hand and strokes the parchment skin.

she’d understood, because she was both a romantic and a realist. Which in many ways was the perfect combination.

And her mother laughs, a strange, warped thing that comes from too high up her throat. But it’s a laugh. And the first one Laurel can remember hearing from her mother in a very long time indeed.

“As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.”

Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient; it nurtures the chef.

Silly her, not to have seen the conversational cul-de-sac she was walking straight into.

“Poppy is basically forty years old,” says Floyd admiringly. “You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life. Well, Poppy’s already there.”

They are not identical. But there is something, something alarming and arresting, a likeness that she can’t leave alone.

Floyd had left his scarf in her hallway, a soft gray thing with a Ted Baker label in it that hung from a hook like a plume of dark smoke.

Poppy is clearly a strange child, who is both charmingly naïve and unsettlingly self-possessed. She is cleverer than she has any need to be, but also not as clever as she thinks.

“Sounds like she’s got the classic only-child syndrome,” says Helen, neatly shrinking the issue down to a digestible bite-sized chunk of common sense.

At the office Laurel feels as though she has shed a skin, that she is somehow reborn and that she needs to mark the transition in some landmark way.

When the children were small, Laurel’s mother would occasionally make small, raw observations about gaps between phone calls and visits that would tear tiny, painful strips off Laurel’s conscience. I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are able to give.

But now here is another human with a terrible story. What other stories surround her? she wonders. And how many stories has she missed all these years while she’s been so wrapped up in her own?

“In many ways I suppose they are,” he says. But there’s a chip of ice in his delivery, something sad and dark that he can’t tell her about. And that’s fine. She’ll leave it there. She understands that not everything is conversational fodder, not everything is for sharing.

He’s without context, a man who walked into a cake shop and changed her life from the outside in.

“Stories,” she says, “are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.” Laurel and Paul smile and nod. Then they turn to each other and exchange a look. Not a wry look this time, but one of disquiet. Ellie used to read two books a week and when they teased her about always having her nose in a book, Ellie used to say, “When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

We were all too young. Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”

I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.

So whatever you’re feeling now, it’s temporary. But what will happen to that family if they find out about their father’s betrayal will have repercussions forever. The damage will never heal.”

“And you know,” SJ continues, “there’s another thing, something really strange, about Poppy’s mum—” She stops talking and they both turn at the sound of the door opening. It’s Floyd.

Laurel and Sara-Jade exchange a look. They have started a conversation that needs to be finished. But it will have to wait for another time.

have all left her feeling shaky and full of holes. She needs to get home and breathe in her own space. And she needs to do something else, something she hasn’t done for a very, very long time.

she’d thrown one notebook bodily away from herself at a reference to giving Theo a hand-job.

She squeezes her eyes tightly shut and her hands into fists. There’s something in there, but she can’t get to it. And what could it possibly be anyway?

It’s a bland day, newspaper gray,

Laurel closes her eyes and suddenly the face of Noelle Donnelly flashes to the forefront of her consciousness, clear and precise as if she’d seen her only yesterday.

the mum and dad who judged more than they loved.

Laurel gazes at him for a moment, willing him to provide her with the strand that will unfurl the knot of threads in her head.

It felt like one of those days that you have sometimes in life, where you feel like you’ve reached a branch in the road, that you’re setting off on a new journey, suitcases packed, full of trepidation and anticipation. The day felt clean and new, disconnected to the days that had come before and to the days that would follow.

Your hand came away from my hand. You sighed. And it wasn’t a sigh of sadness. It wasn’t even a sigh of disappointment. It was a sigh of annoyance. A sigh that said, You couldn’t even do this properly, could you? More even than the lost baby, that sigh virtually killed me.

found myself thinking, Just imagine the babies that these two lovebirds could make, would they not be just spectacular. That might well have been the root of it, thinking about it now.

because then everything about them, about Floyd and Laurel, all of it would be squashed and remade, like a clay pot on a wheel. And it’s such a lovely pot and she’s worked so hard on it and so much depends on it staying exactly as it is.

and a wide smile on her face. She hands one bag to Theo and then stops to pet the small dog, who seems overjoyed to see her. Then they go on their way, the lovely young couple and their dog. And it is only then that Laurel really registers what she has just seen. It was the smile that threw her. She hasn’t seen Hanna smile for so long she’d forgotten what it looked like.

And she felt it then, like a needle in her heart, the love her mother always talked about. “You won’t understand how much I love you until you’re a mother yourself.” But she felt it now and all the pain in her heart was for her mother, her mother who she knew would be crying and worrying and feeling the meaning of her life slipping away from her. She couldn’t bear it. She truly couldn’t bear it.

Then she turned and left the room. Ellie heard one lock click into place. And then she heard another. And then one more.

“I want to go home!” Ellie yelled out at Noelle’s back. “I really really want to go home!” Noelle didn’t reply. The three locks clicked into place. The room turned black.

Now come along, let’s name these little monsters. Come along.” Her voice had lost its singsong tone and was hard and immovable.