Visiting Family

I do something that night that I am not proud of, and I am going to tell you anyway, because I have promised myself this is the honest version and the honest version includes the parts where I behaved badly. I message Adam. I tell my husband I am taking the dinner plates through and instead I stand in the dark dining room and I type, to Claire's husband, a message so warm and so reasonable that reading it back later makes me feel ill. *Hi Adam! Hope you're holding the fort ok with Claire away. The kids miss Theo at the gate. If Claire fancies a chat while she's at her mum's tell her to ring me — and if you need anything in the meantime just shout. M x.* I send it because I want to see what he does with it. I have stopped being able to lie to myself about that. I am not reaching out. I am testing a door. He replies in nine minutes. *Thanks Marin, you're so kind. She's having a proper rest, phone off, doctor said she's been run down. I'll pass it on when she's back on the grid! Theo's loving the grandparent spoiling. A x.* I read it standing in my dark dining room and every sentence in it is a small smooth stone laid carefully over the last. *Phone off* — so that no one will wonder why she does not answer. *Doctor said* — so that the silence has a respectable author. *Run down* — so that if Claire comes back pale and quiet and diminished, we will all already have the word for it. He is not lying to me. That is the thing that frightens me most, standing there. He is doing something more careful than lying. He is *furnishing*. He is putting a story in place around his wife's absence, room by room, so that when anyone steps into it, it will feel finished and lived-in and there will be nowhere for a question to stand. And it is working. It is working on Janelle and it is working on Priyanka and the awful truth is that it would be working on me too, it would have worked on me beautifully, if I had not spent a winter looking at a wrist. I do not sleep much. In the morning I go to the gate, and Janelle is first, and I am second, and Priyanka is breathless at eight-forty, and the gap in the railings is empty, and it is the fourth morning now, and something has shifted in the way the other two are standing. They are not slowing the conversation to leave a chair anymore. The chair has been put away. Four days is long enough for the agreement to do its repair work, and Claire has been smoothed over into a woman having a break, and the gate has closed itself like a wound healing wrong, over the top of something still inside. "Morning," Janelle says to me, and she means it kindly, and I look at her and I understand that I am about to break the agreement, here, at the gate, at eight-thirty-five in the morning, and that I cannot do it gently because there is no gentle way and the manageable-piece version has already cost Claire four days. "I rang Claire's phone," I say. "Yesterday. And the call didn't go to voicemail and it wasn't declined. Somebody silenced it. And Adam loaded her overnight bag into his car on Thursday afternoon, three days after she's supposed to have packed it and left. And I have watched that woman's wrists since September and they did not get like that from a dishwasher." The gate goes very quiet. Priyanka's face is doing the complicated thing again. Janelle has gone still in a way I have never seen Janelle go still. "Marin," she says, low, glancing at the children. "You can't — that's Adam. You can't just *say* —" "I know what I'm saying." My voice is shaking and I let it shake. "I know exactly how it sounds, and I know that's why none of us has said it for six months, because of how it sounds. We made a deal, the four of us, without ever agreeing to it out loud. We pass each other the easy pieces and we keep our sleeves down and nobody has to carry anything heavy before nine. And it's a good deal. It got me through a lot of mornings." I make myself look at both of them. "But Claire's not at the gate. And the deal only works if everybody who's missing from it is missing because they're *fine*. And I don't think she's fine. I think we've all known she wasn't fine for a long time, and I think the deal is the thing that let us not know it, and I'm — I'm not in it anymore. I can't be. I'm sorry." Priyanka looks down at her phone. For a long moment I think she is going to retreat into it, into the sun-emoji chat, into the welcome-back-coffee version of the world. Then she says, very quietly, not looking up, "She told me once. In October. She started to. We were doing the cake sale stuff and she said *Adam doesn't like it when* — and then she stopped herself, and she laughed, and she said it didn't matter." Priyanka's voice cracks. "And I let her say it didn't matter. I was glad she said it didn't matter. I helped her not finish the sentence, Marin. I *helped* her." Janelle has not moved. Janelle, who is first every morning, who treats lateness like a house fire, who put the sun emoji in the title of the chat all those years ago. When she finally speaks her voice has nothing in it at all. "Her mum's not in Westbourne," she says. We both look at her. "Claire's mum died. Two years ago. There was a collection — I organised it, the flowers." Janelle lifts her eyes from the empty gap in the railings and they are frightened in a way that makes my stomach drop. "There is no mum's house. There is nowhere for her to have gone." The bell goes. All around us children are running to the line, ordinary and loud and alive, and the three of us stand at the gate with the agreement lying broken on the ground between us, and the cold March morning, and the question none of us can hand to anyone now, because there is no one safe left to hand it to. Where is Claire.