The Perfect Son Read online

  They’re all wrong.

  Shelley nods, businesslike, confident. “OK, let me call the office and see what’s happened.

  “May I?” she says, pointing her phone at the living room before striding inside.

  I wait in my spot by the front door for a moment, listening to one side of a conversation about me. My head is spinning. Slow, looping spins—the final rotations of the roundabout in the playground—until I can’t stand it any longer and trudge to the kitchen to sit down.

  I’d like to say I had an inkling then, a shiver down my spine, a foreboding of what was to come, but I didn’t. Not even the faintest whisper.

  It’s not your fault, Tessie.

  Easy for you to say, Mark.

  CHAPTER 6

  I just love your house,” Shelley says a few moments later, running a hand over a dark oak beam as she moves along the hall and into the kitchen. “It’s so oldie . . . like a smaller version of something from one of those historical dramas. I’ve always wondered what type of people live in old houses like this now.”

  My mind is slow, my thoughts clunky. Shelley’s compliment may as well have been a question on quantum physics, and I’m incapable of reaching for a response.

  “So it seems . . . um . . . your mother called us. I’ve just spoken to my colleague who took the call. They had a long chat. Your mum was worried about you, although she did say you’d agreed for us to visit, which clearly isn’t the case. So I’m very sorry for the intrusion.”

  A memory of my mother’s tearful good-bye flashes in my thoughts. Me standing in the doorway of the nook, shivering and numb while my mother’s clawed fingers struggled to unravel a handkerchief and dab away the tears resting on her cheeks.

  After two weeks of her hovering and the thump thud thump of her walking stick on the wood floors, I was desperate for her to leave, to just get in the taxi waiting too patiently on the driveway. Jamie was at the kitchen table, listening to who knows what on your old iPod. He was closed up, not speaking, and I didn’t want him to feel shy anymore. I wanted Mum gone.

  She was talking at me as I closed the door. Could she have mentioned the appointment then and I didn’t listen?

  Shelley pulls out a chair and sits across from me. At least I’ve cleared the breakfast bowls. The box of Rice Krispies is still out. The blue of the box is suddenly too bright against all the brown wood.

  “Tess,” Shelley says, her voice soft and coaxing. “We don’t have to speak now if you don’t want to, but it might help.”

  I shrug. “Now’s fine.” Better to get it over with.

  “OK, that’s good. How are you feeling?” she asks, leaning a little closer.

  “Fine.”

  Shelley raises her eyebrows and fixes me with a look like a concerned mother talking to a child. A wave of sadness throngs through my body. I wish I had the energy to lie, to paste a smile on and nod, but I can feel tears welling in my eyes. Besides, something tells me this woman in my kitchen would see straight through me.

  “It’s my birthday today.” I sigh.

  “Oh, Tess. Happy birthday.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much happy in it.”

  “How are you doing?” Shelley asks again.

  “Not fine,” I whisper. “Nowhere close.”

  “Your mum mentioned on the phone that you’d booked to see the doctor.” Shelley’s voice is soft and tentative. She’s trying to tiptoe around my privacy, I can see that, but it’s not working and I feel myself bristle. How much does she know about me? How much did my mum tell her? Everything, no doubt. “How did it go?”

  “OK, I guess.” My mind is no longer blank but flashing with memories of the past five weeks. The times I’ve snapped at Jamie for no reason. The weekend before last when my period started and I cried in the bathroom all day, forgetting to take Jamie to Liam’s football birthday party that had been on the calendar for months. The hours and hours we’ve spent on the sofa together, eating oven pizzas and watching old episodes of Scooby-Doo because that’s all I was capable of doing.

  “Did the doctor give you any medication? Or suggest anything else?”

  I nod and feel a single tear roll down my cheek. All I can think about is the scrunched-up frown on Jamie’s face when he looks at me. Seven-year-old boys shouldn’t have to worry about anything other than winning at tag and having friends. They especially shouldn’t have to worry about their mums.

  I focus on picking at the flake of skin hanging from the edge of my thumbnail. “He said I’m depressed. He gave me antidepressants, but . . . I don’t feel depressed. I wanted something to help me sleep.”

  “Nightmares?”

  My eyes shoot up. Shelley’s smile is gone but her eyes are still sparkling. I wonder how she knows. “Just one nightmare. I’m . . . I’m in an airplane. I don’t know where I’m going, but the plane isn’t flying, it’s sort of tumbling and spinning downward, and I know it’s going to crash. There’s smoke everywhere. Thick gray smoke coming from somewhere and it’s stinging my eyes and hurting my lungs. There’s luggage from the overhead compartments flying all over the cabin, and I’m trying to protect my head from the suitcases, even though I know the plane is about to hit the ground. Then I wake up and I swear I can still taste the smoke.”

  I gasp for air and feel something wild surging through me. It’s the same heart-pounding, hopeless fear that I feel every time I wake up. And every time I remember you’re gone.

  “I lit a bonfire in the garden the day Mark died,” I tell Shelley. “I didn’t know Mark had died until later, but I guess the two are stuck together now—the bonfire and Mark’s death.”

  I wait for Shelley to squeeze my hand and tell me that the nightmares will pass. Instead she stands. “Do you mind if I put the kettle on? I’m desperate for a cup of tea.”

  I almost don’t hear her next question over the purr of water boiling in the kettle and the banging of one cupboard, then another as Shelley locates the mugs and the tea bags. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  “Did you hear about the airplane, the one that crashed last month?”

  “Oh God, the suicide by pilot? Of course I heard about it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know the details.”

  The wild something morphs into anger, thrashing out of me before I can stop it. “Why does everyone keep calling it that? It wasn’t suicide. It was murder.” The kettle has stopped boiling and my voice carries loud and angry in the silence. “That pilot destroyed my family. No one else on that plane chose to die. It . . . it was a mass killing. Murder.”

  “You’re right,” she says, opening the fridge and pulling out a bottle of milk. Her voice is even, controlled, next to mine. When she closes the fridge her fingers rest on a photo of Jamie—the magnet of his school photo taken before we moved, when his school uniform was bright red and his hair short, the curls stuck down with the gel I’d smeared on that morning. Shelley stares at the photo for a long second.

  “This is your son.” She says it like a statement, more of a comment to herself than to me.

  “Yes. Jamie.” I nod and feel the anger shrink back into its cave.

  All of a sudden my throat feels as though it’s being squeezed by an invisible hand and tears blur my vision. “Does it make a difference how? Would I be feeling any less . . . broken if it had been a heart attack behind the wheel?”

  Shelley touches my shoulder as she places a cup of tea on the table in front of me. “I guess not,” she says, sitting down again. “We had a son—Dylan. He was perfect in every way. A beautiful smiling baby, an energetic toddler. We always thought Dylan would be a footballer. He was kicking a ball before he could walk properly. Or a swimmer. He loved the water.” She draws in a breath and fiddles with the locket around her neck before she continues. “He was two years old when he was diagnosed with a rare leukemia and four when he died. It was long and drawn-o
ut. We’d spent half his life in and out of hospital. We knew he was dying, but it didn’t make the hurt any less when it happened.”

  “Oh God.” My hand flies to my mouth. “I’m so sorry,” I mumble, feeling shitty again. Shitty because losing a child is worse than losing a husband. Even in my current state I know this. I would be nothing without Jamie.

  “Thank you,” she says. Our eyes meet and I feel something pass between us—some kind of shared knowledge of the rawness of grief. That’s how Shelley knew about my nightmares. I wonder if she still has hers.

  “It was four years ago this summer,” Shelley continues. “I had lots of people who helped me through the grief in those early days. My sister moved in with us and took care of everything. She forced Tim and me—that’s my husband—to eat and to get out of the house. It’s why I started volunteering for the charity, and why I took a course and qualified as a grief counselor. I run my own private practice from a room in my home. The thought of going through something like that without my friends and family, I just don’t know if I’d have survived.”

  A silence settles over us. Shelley blows on the top of her mug, changing the direction of the steam and reminding me of the bonfire. I can feel the scratch of the smoke in the back of my throat just thinking of that day.

  “Do you have any family nearby?” she asks.

  “My mum is an hour away. She lives on the seafront in Westcliff. She has arthritis and is very frail. She stayed here for a few weeks but the stairs were too much and I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t look after her on top of everything else. She calls me most days, but I don’t always pick up. It’s hard to tell her how I’m feeling when I know it’ll only worry her, so I lie, or more often than not, I let the answerphone get it.”

  “What about brothers and sisters?”

  “One older brother, Sam. He lives in Sheffield with his boyfriend, Finn. They’re both hospital doctors and work all hours. Sam would come if I asked him, but I can’t bring myself to. He’s worked so hard to get where he is, and anyway, I don’t know how it would help.

  “Mark’s brother lives nearby in Ipswich. He stopped by earlier to check on me—”

  “That’s good.”

  I pull a face. “Not really. We’ve never got on. I always got the impression he wasn’t interested in me and Jamie. He isn’t married and doesn’t have children, and it’s like he couldn’t understand why Mark did want those things. Mark said I was worrying over nothing. He thought I was trying to compare Ian to my brother, Sam, and that the two weren’t comparable. He thought the only reason Ian was cool toward us was because I was cool toward him.”

  “Ah. Maybe not the best person to go to for support then.”

  “Probably not.”

  “How about friends locally? Neighbors you can turn to?”

  “We haven’t lived here long. Have I said that already? Sorry if I have. We don’t exactly have neighbors. I think an elderly couple live in the house nearest to us. I had, still have I guess, plenty of friends in Chelmsford where we used to live, but I haven’t met anyone here.

  “I used to say hi to a few school mums when I saw them in the playground at drop-off and pickup. We’d chat about the weather and school stuff. Nothing much. Then the plane crashed, and . . . well . . . look at me.” I gesture at my clothes—a saggy T-shirt and a worn cardigan, bobbled and fraying at the cuffs. “You’d keep well away, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I have to learn to cope at some point, right?”

  Shelley nods and takes a tentative first sip from the mug cupped in her hands. “You do, but it’s about baby steps, Tess. After my son died, I didn’t wash for days. I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed, or get dressed. I just lay there feeling half-dead myself. You’re up, you’re wearing clothes, you’re washing, you have milk in the fridge.”

  I’m crying all the time, neglecting Jamie—or, worse, lashing out at him, I think but don’t say.

  “No one is expecting you to be all right tomorrow or next week,” Shelley continues. “And you shouldn’t expect yourself to be either. At this stage in your grief, try to focus on achieving one small thing each day, rather than looking ahead to the future. Even if it’s just opening a letter you’ve been putting off.”

  My gaze pulls to the post pile beside the microwave. I guess Shelley saw it too. It’s not one letter I’ve been putting off, but all of them.

  “Shall we go through them together now? I bet most of it is junk anyway. It might make you feel better just to get them out of the way.”

  I bite my bottom lip, torn between wanting Shelley to leave me alone and wondering if this woman with her sleek blond hair and shining eyes, who survived the worst tragedy I can think of, is right. Shelley takes my hesitation as acceptance and is out of the chair, scooping up the pile of letters before I can muster the energy to shake my head.

  “I’ll divide them into four piles. Ones that are obviously bills,” she says, dropping a letter down with the red mobile phone logo on it. “Another for what looks like junk, a third for bereavement cards, and a fourth for everything else.”

  “Put the cards straight in the bin,” I say. “I can’t look at them. I don’t want them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod. “I don’t need reminding.” Nor does Jamie, for that matter.

  “How about I pop them all to one side? There may come a time when you find comfort in them,” Shelley coaxes before sliding a few letters toward me.

  I won’t ever find comfort in those cards, but I don’t tell Shelley that. My heart is pounding so hard inside my chest, and there is a gale-force panic whipping around my stomach. Most of this stuff is rubbish, so why am I so afraid to open them?

  My hands shake but I reach for the first letter. The envelope is plain white with a window, and your name is printed inside. I watch Shelley working her way through one of the piles as the noise of tearing paper fills the kitchen. Her confidence reminds me so much of you, and there’s a smidgen of reassurance in that, enough to make me slide my fingers under the lip and prize open the envelope in my hand.

  The letter is from a car dealership, reminding you to book a test drive of their new Audi. It’s rubbish, and all of a sudden I don’t know why I allowed the post to mount up like this.

  I reach for another envelope. This one is addressed to me.

  I know the instant the letter is in my hands that it’s from the airline. Their swooping dark logo cries out at me from the top corner. Tears fill my eyes, and even though every part of my being wants to drop the letter—never read the words—my gaze is fixed.

  Dear Mrs. Clarke,

  Please accept our deepest sympathies for the tragic loss of your husband . . .

  My eyes skip forward.

  Further to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) ruling: [ . . . the copilot leaving the pilot alone in the cockpit without another member of the aircrew present, the CAA finds the airline named above negligent]

  We are attaching two compensation forms—one for each passenger on your late husband’s booking.

  An involuntary noise escapes my mouth and I have to clamp my lips together to stop myself from crying out. How can they even think of sending compensation forms? It feels like a cruel joke. As if there is anything in the world the airline could give me to make it right.

  Then it hits me. Two compensations. Two seats. Not one.

  Who was the other seat for, Mark? I try to think back. Who were you going with? I don’t remember if you told me. Someone from the sales team, I guess. I wonder for a moment if they had a family too, if they are being missed like you are, but then I push the thought away. I can’t think about all the other people who died that day. All the gory details are still being hashed out in the news, splashed across the front pages, but I’ve stayed away. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to share our grief with anyone.

  “Tess?” Shelley say
s, reaching a hand out toward me. “Are you all right?”

  I nod, fumbling with the letter and sliding it into the pocket of my cardigan.

  “I can’t do this,” I whisper. “I’m sorry. I think I need to lie down.”

  “But it’s done—look.” Shelley smiles and waves her hands over the table. “It was mostly rubbish. Two bills that probably aren’t urgent, and these three left—” She pushes them forward. “One looks like a bank statement and the other is from a solicitor’s. I thought it might be to do with Mark’s estate. And this is from the passport office. Feels like a passport.”

  I take the letters, tucking them into the pocket of my cardigan. “I renewed it just before Mark died. We were going to take Jamie to Spain in the summer holidays,” I mumble.

  Shelley reaches out and gives my hand another squeeze. “Well, the rest,” she says, standing up and scooping up a pile of paper and torn envelopes, “can go straight in the bin. See, I told you it wouldn’t take long.”

  “Oh” is all I can say as the lid of the silver bin in the corner shuts with a clang.

  Shelley turns back toward me, reaching into her bag. For a moment I think she’s going to leave, and I feel a trickle of disappointment. I don’t want her to go.

  But Shelley doesn’t make a move for the door; instead she pulls out a spiral bound notebook from her bag. It’s bigger than pocket-sized but not by much and the cover is thick cardboard and plain brown.

  “This is for you,” Shelley says, sliding the notebook across the table and returning to her seat. “It’s to write things down in.”

  “Is it? Thank you.” I brush my fingertips over the smooth cover. “What kinds of things?”