Page 23 of The Elements

“Not a thing,” I tell her. “Your grandad gave us the deposit for a wedding present but insisted on putting my name on the deeds. We always meant to change them but never got around to it. So I can do whatever the hell I want. I’ll empty the joint account too and split that between the pair of us.”

“Then what will he do for money when he gets out?”

“He can live on the streets, for all I care. Do you care? If you do, tell me now, and I’ll split it three ways.”

She thinks about it. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t. But maybe we could take his third and—”

She makes a suggestion for what to do with Brendan’s share and it tells me what a marvelous young woman she is. She wants to help others. Girls like those who my husband, her father, has destroyed. I agree immediately.

“Thank you,” she says. “I wasn’t asking so you’d say something like that. But my share will give me options.”

“Just use it wisely, that’s all I ask.”

Always the mother.

She smiles.

I feel I have done something good for her at last.

Another lengthy pause. I can sense this question is coming. He’s still her father, after all.

“Have you spoken to him?” she asks.

“Just the once,” I tell her. “But we didn’t talk for long.”

“What did he want?”

“To tell me how miserable he was. And how innocent he was. And what a terrible wife I was.”

“Fuck him,” she says, and it shocks me a little to hear my daughter use this language. It would never have been allowed when she was growing up. But:

“I couldn’t agree more,” I tell her.

“I hate him.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes, I’ve hated you too.”

“There’d be something wrong with you if you hadn’t.”

“Why did you let it happen?”

“I didn’t,” I protest. “If I had known—”

“If you had known what?”

“About those poor girls.”

“And Emma?”

Mentioning her name is like pressing a sharp knife deep into my heart. The pain of it.

“I don’t know,” I whisper, looking down at the floor, for I cannot look her in the eyes. “I came here to find out whether I was—”

“What?”

“Complicit,” I say.

“And?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her truthfully. “Maybe I’ll never be able to answer that question.

I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried, but I think I’m condemned to ask it of myself every hour of every day until I breathe my last. I tried to be a good mother.

” To my surprise, I realize that tears are running down my cheeks.

I wipe them away—both hands, it takes—but they continue to fall.

“Truly, I did. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out for it, but I did my best. I loved you both.

You were my daughters. Nothing mattered more. ”

“I know,” she says.

“I would die for you, Rebecca, do you realize that? I would throw myself under a speeding train if it kept you safe. And I would die to bring Emma back to life.”

“She never told you? What he did to her? You promise me?”

“I swear it on my life,” I say.

A lengthy pause. She waits. I bow my head. I feel my body collapse into itself. I must be honest. If I’m not, then how can we ever be what we should be to each other?

“Once, she asked me to put a lock on her bedroom door,” I tell her. “I didn’t like the idea of it, so I said no. It was… it was a mistake.”

“Did you know why she was asking?”

I want to throw my head back and scream at the moon.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I can’t put myself back in that moment.”

And now I am weeping.

“I don’t know if I guessed and chose to do nothing, or if it didn’t cross my mind at all.

I don’t know. I don’t, I swear it. If she had told me and I’d accused her of lying, or just ignored it, then I would have been a monster.

But never even to notice? Never even to suspect?

That’s what shames me the most. That’s what makes me question myself. Was I blind, or just stupid?”

She’s crying now too but she shakes her head. She cannot answer this question for me. Neither of us can.

I stand up and make my way toward the sink for some paper towels to wipe my eyes dry. “That is what haunts me more than anything else,” I tell her. “I don’t know if I knew or not. I don’t know. One makes me blind, but the other makes me inhuman. Either way, I don’t come out of it well.”

I stare at her. She is looking down at the floor.

I’ve never known her to cry so much, for she’s never been an emotional person, not even when she was a child.

Even when Emma died, she was more brittle than demonstrative in her grief.

At the funeral, she simply stared ahead and refused to speak to anyone.

“What?” I ask her. “What’s wrong?”

“You can’t guess?” she asks, looking up at me.

“No. What is it?”

She breathes heavily, as if she has just finished running a race, before putting her head in her hands.

“She told me,” she says in a low voice. “The night before she died, she told me. We were on holiday, remember?”

I nod but say nothing. Of course I remember.

“She told me that night in the hotel bedroom. She told me what he did to her. What he’d been doing to her for years.

She told me because she didn’t want him to do it to me.

And I called her a liar. I said it wasn’t true, that she was only saying it for attention, because he never touched me.

I said some terrible things to her. She begged me to believe her, but I wouldn’t.

I threw her out of the room. I told her that I didn’t care where she slept, but that she wasn’t sharing that room with me.

I locked the door. I went to bed. And, in the morning, she was gone.

So, you see, I blame you but it’s really my fault.

If I had just listened to her, if I had believed her… ”

I’m in shock. There’s a part of me that wants to slap her across the face, to drag her to the floor and kick her until she curls up into a ball.

And there’s another part that wants to wrap her up in my arms and tell her that we are none of us innocent and none of us guilty, and we all have to live with what we’ve done for the rest of our lives, and that the only way through this terrible thing, if we are to survive it at all, is to be kind to each other and to love one another.

Instead, I tell her that I need a moment on my own and retire to the bathroom, locking the door behind me, and stare at myself in the mirror.

“My life,” I whisper under my breath. “What has become of my life?”

When I finally emerge, she is standing by the window, and, to my astonishment, she has taken the kitchen scissors and cut her hair to match my own. Her long tendrils are on the floor around her feet.

“We’re the same now,” she says. “As bad as each other.”

“The Carvin women,” I say, shaking my head sadly.

“No,” she replies. “Not me. Not anymore.” I frown, uncertain what she means.

“I changed my name. Well, my surname, at least.”

“When?”

“The day you left. Well, later that day, actually. Probably when you arrived here.”

I remain silent for a moment.

“To what?” I ask.

“I didn’t have many options. I could invent a new one or choose yours. Your maiden name, I mean. So that’s what I did.”

“Hale,” I say.

“Hale,” she agrees.

I feel a flood of love wash over me. I don’t bother to tell her that I did the same thing at the same time. I will, some day. But not just yet. It is wonderful. It is right. We are no longer Carvins, either of us. We are no longer his.

I step toward her. I place my hands on her shoulders and lean forward, and she does the same.

Our foreheads meet and we close our eyes.

If it were possible, I would stay in this position forever.

Between us lingers the presence of another.

It is Emma. We three are here together, a mother and her daughters.

He, that man, is absent. He is no longer part of us.

He is a demon, exorcized. Emma pulls us together, restful, serene, wrapping her arms around us, happy to see the two people she loved the most are at peace with each other.

Or are at the beginnings of a peace anyway, which is almost the same thing.