Before I Let You Go(118)

I close the door, and I lock it. First I close the bottom lock – the original one, then the middle one that David installed to keep me here after Zoe was born, and then the sliding lock I had installed myself just after The Tragedy when I felt so unsafe everywhere and I was trying everything to make myself feel better again. I listen for the sound of Ivy’s footsteps on the path, and then I rest against the door and I close my eyes and I breathe deeply until I’m close to calm again.

I look down at Zoe – she’s the one thing that keeps me going. I might have stopped altogether by now – maybe I still will. The thought of crawling into a hole and disappearing somehow is still the most appealing idea I have for my future.

But I just can’t do it, because I have a baby to think about, and she needs me.

‘Come on, sweetie,’ I say to my daughter, as I force a sing-song tone into my voice. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’





Ivy


My life was never supposed to go the way it did.

I was supposed to finish high school and go straight to uni. I was going to do something with my brain – maybe law, maybe business, I wasn’t really sure. But I was the smartest kid in my year, the perpetual teacher’s pet, a high achiever in every domain. I was also the quintessential nerd, and I made it all the way to the last year of school without a single boy so much as offering me a second glance.

But then Wyatt Gillespie asked me if I wanted to watch a movie with him one weekend.

He was the school captain, and also the captain of just about every sporting team worth a mention in that year. Wyatt had a shock of thick, wavy black hair and deep blue eyes that seemed to sparkle whenever I dared look into them. Everyone wanted Wyatt, and then suddenly – for some completely unfathomable reason – Wyatt wanted me. It was the most startling, amazing thing that had happened in all of my seventeen years.

‘Come to the pictures with me,’ he said. We were walking out of the school gates, and I assumed he was talking to someone else, so I ignored him. ‘Ivy. Come to the pictures.’

I frowned at him.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you to,’ he said, and he stared at me in a way that made my stomach dance. What I was thinking was What on earth would you be interested in me for and why don’t you ask one of the pretty girls instead? – but what I said instead was a rather dumbfounded, ‘Okay.’

Even in the heady haze of lust and excitement that Wyatt brought to my life, I was lucid enough to think we were being cautious – but I underestimated our easy, youthful fertility. I had realised that I was pregnant by the time our final exams rolled around, although I prolonged the frankly awful conversation with Wyatt himself until after my final assessment. I said the words as if they were a guilty, distasteful confession – I’m so sorry, Wyatt, I seem to be pregnant. As I expected, he reacted with horror – staring at me in an aghast shock for some time before he managed to whimper something helpless like My Dad is going to kill me.

He was wrong about that – they didn’t kill him, but his parents were suitably outraged. Wyatt’s parents owned the local grocery store, at the time named simply Gillespie’s Goods and Groceries. My Mum ran the local branch of the Country Women’s Association and Dad was a farmer – humble occupations all round, but in a small town like Milton Falls, each set of parents were as well known as celebrities. The end result was that there were no two ways about it – Wyatt and I were having a baby, so we were going to be married – and the ceremony needed to be arranged for yesterday if possible. The day the uni offers came out, I was at the courthouse suffering through our shotgun wedding.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry Wyatt, or even that I didn’t love him – I did. The problem was that I was smart enough to know that this was infantile love – shallow love – and its roots ran only as deep as the physical attraction between us. I feared it would fade, and indeed – even in all of the stress of the pregnancy and the hasty wedding – we stopped sneaking kisses and quiet moments alone together. Wyatt and I had never really talked. We’d skipped the conversational step in building our relationship and leapt all the way to flirting and making out.

So when we found ourselves pregnant and married, it was rather a shock to realise that we had almost nothing in common. It certainly wasn’t that Wyatt was stupid – but he was a simple man with simple interests and tastes. I desperately wanted to travel, and he was happy to consider the possibility – as long as the end destination of our journey involved some kind of cricket match or football game. I wanted to go to the theatre, he wanted to go to the movies. I’d spend hours balancing spices to make a curry from scratch, and he’d walk in from work, sniff the air suspiciously and ask me to make him a ham sandwich. I told him that once the baby came, I wanted to try to figure out some way to study, but from the get-go he told me that would be a waste of time – what did I need a degree for? He would support us, and he was perfectly content in the knowledge that his entire working career would be spent at his father’s supermarket.

I could barely believe that in the space of only a few months, I’d gone from a life of infinite possibilities to a future where our tiny little town would be my whole world forever. Possibly the only thing that saved me from despair during the early months of our marriage was the realisation that out of all of the chaos and shock of it all – a miracle was about to emerge. All was not lost; there was still a way that I could make my life worthwhile.