Woman Last Seen(46)
Suddenly, I don’t feel hungry. What have I done? I picture Oli and Seb, mops of dark hair, tanned skin and long lashes in common. Seb skinny and angular, all elbows and feet that in the last few months have grown too long for his body, which has yet to catch up. Oli is filling out; he wears a hint of the stocky strength of the man he will become. I envisage them as I usually do, huddled over their phones or eyes glued to the TV, oblivious to everything else around them, including me. This is an image I have often been assaulted by in the past. When I am with Daan. On those many occasions I have immediately forced the thought of them out of my head, slammed the door on the room in my brain where the boys sat. I have to sectionalize and bracket, it is the only way. Shut down, blank out. I trained myself so it was as though once I was away from them, I viewed them through tracing paper. The memory of them a pale and poor copy of the original. So far away and indistinct, they did not quite exist. The thought of them did not have the force to rip through the tracing paper, insist on their reality, their notability. I feel awash with shame that I have ever shut a door on them, even mentally. Now I ache for my boys. My children.
And they are my boys.
If either Oli or Seb ever woke in the middle of the night with a terrible dream or a high temperature, it was always me who climbed into their beds to comfort them. Mark would have done it, in a heartbeat—he had done it before I came along, but he knew that if he went into their rooms, I wouldn’t sleep alone in our bed anyway. I wanted to be involved, I wanted to soothe and comfort. I wanted to feel needed. So he let me tend them. Joking that he wouldn’t “fight me for a night with a kid in a single bed.” I have made their beds, picked up Legos, built papier maché volcanoes, shopped, cooked, cleaned bathrooms. Stove to loo. In one end, out the other. Relentless. I’ve performed these daily devotions, this worship, uncomplaining, with joy, mostly. I have watched them grow. These small beings, stretched out, reached me in a way no one else had until I mothered. And I’ve listened to them. Heard their funny observations turn from charming to challenging, but not always wrong or rude. Sometimes very thought-provoking. I’ve been with them as their vocabularies became more complex, their friendship groups more unknown, their desires more secretive. As they’ve grown, I have tried to store them up but because they constantly changed, my memories are unreliable, they spill, seep away. I want them to be less liquid, more solid.
And I’ve wanted all of this, felt all of this, while leading a double life.
It’s a comfort to think that the boys won’t even know I’m missing yet. They won’t have cause to be scared. That’s something. I wonder, is there a chance this could be over by Thursday? How long does Mark or Daan, whichever, think he can keep me like this? Obviously not indefinitely. Neither man is a killer. I am their wife. The sentence makes my scalp crawl. The wrongness of my situation has lurked in my subconscious for years, a dark stain on the periphery of my vision, a small catching in my nostrils that meant I chose to breathe through my mouth. I’m not used to articulating it even to myself.
I am Mark’s wife.
I am Daan’s wife.
I belong to them both.
They both belong to me.
If Mark is my abductor, Daan will already know I am missing as he was expecting to see me on Monday. If Daan is responsible, then because of the way I’ve constructed my life, Mark won’t know I’m missing until Thursday afternoon. But this is madness. They will have to let me go eventually. Exposed, humiliated, brought to my knees, lesson learned, but he—whichever he it is—has to let me go. Doesn’t he?
“Mark?” I call out. I scramble on all fours, as close to the door as the chain will allow and listen. I know someone is on the other side of the door. I can’t see or hear them, but I can tell there is someone there by the way the light falls. “Mark, is it you? I think it is. I understand. I’m sorry.” I start to cry. I don’t want to. I don’t want to appear weak, defeated or pathetic, but I am. I’m all three. “Think of the boys. I know, I know, you always do. I should have. That is what you are thinking right now, isn’t it? That I should have thought of them. I am so sorry. Don’t let this get out of hand, Mark. Please. If you let me go by Thursday, they will never need to know this has happened, we can carry on as normal.”
The words tumble out, without me really thinking about them. How can we carry on as normal? What is my normal? Two husbands. Mark is never going to agree to that. That isn’t even what I mean. Is it? Am I asking him to take me back? Am I saying I’ll give up Daan? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just need to get out of here.
The typewriter throws out a short, angry-sounding burst. I should wait to see what it says but I don’t. I talk over the clatter, desperate to get my point across. Desperate to convince. “Is that what’s happening here? Will I be given a choice? A chance? I’ll have been taught my lesson without the boys being affected. Mark, I know that matters to you. They, above everything, matter to you.”
The note slides under the door.
Wrong.
Reading the word. I clamber, scamper like an animal, back toward the radiator away from the door. As though the word has burned me. Shit. The room seems to tilt, I’m on a rolling ship in a storm. Wrong husband? Wrong that I’ll get a choice, a chance? Wrong that the boys matter above everything? Maybe not above anger, jealousy, fury. My heart is beating so fast now that I can feel it in my throat, in my gut.