People LIke Her(57)

By the third day I am checking the RP account once every five or ten minutes. Rereading what has been posted. Seeing what new comments have appeared. Scrolling through the latest followers. Driving myself fucking crazy.

The new post drops at seven p.m. on the dot.

Emmy and I are sitting at opposite ends of the living room couch, phones clutched tightly in our hands. The instant she sees the picture, I hear her sharp intake of breath. I stare at the screen.

“What the fuck?” I ask.

The photo is one of Coco curled in a ball on a hospital bed, looking sad, a drip just in shot behind her. It’s not a picture I’ve seen before. A photo I can’t really understand—where it comes from or where it was taken. It takes me a minute to work out that the drip is not actually attached to my daughter. Even then I have more questions than I know what to do with. As my brain slowly, laboriously, pieces together where the photograph was taken, and when, and by whom, and to what purpose, I feel with each realization a little sicker, a little angrier, a little more disgusted. That Emmy could do that. That Emmy could do that to our daughter. That Emmy could even think of doing that to our daughter.

I have to read the words underneath the picture several times before they start to sink in, before they start to make sense as sentences. The post begins with an announcement that it has been a difficult one to write. There follows a load of stuff about what a long day it has been but how brave and cheerful little Rosie was and how proud they are of her. There is a long section about how much it means to them both to know that they are in people’s thoughts and prayers and how they are hoping to reply personally to everyone eventually.

“For the moment,” it concludes, “we’re just waiting for the results and taking things one day at a time.”

“What does that mean?” I keep asking Emmy. “Read that. What does that mean?”

Her face, in the blue light of the screen, is drawn. Her mouth is a tight, straight line. As she reads, she’s turning a bracelet on her wrist. Around and around and around.

“I don’t know,” she says.

She scratches at the corner of her mouth, bites a nail.

“I don’t know what it means, Dan,” she says again.

For the first time my wife looks like she’s genuinely spooked.

I should have done more. I could have done more. This is what haunts me. That if I had known what to do, what to say, who to turn to for help, then Grace might still be here.

I did try to talk to her. I did encourage her to see her GP, see if he could suggest anything. I was always trying to persuade her to get out and do things, talk to her friends, see people, even just come for a walk and get some fresh air. Grace would just look at me and say nothing. Sometimes I would speak to her and it was as if she had forgotten I was there at all. Those last few weeks she looked thinner and more tired every time I saw her. Great dark bags under her eyes. Drawn cheeks. Really unwell. The shaved head did not help. Every time I saw her I asked whether she was going to grow it again, just a little, one of these days. She would get cross with me. I would let it drop.

She always used to have such long, beautiful hair, my daughter.

I just kept hoping the house would sell, that she would get a good price for it and could start over somewhere else, somewhere a bit closer to me and all her friends. Somewhere with fewer memories.

That weekend, that last weekend, Grace seemed, if anything, a bit brighter, compared to how she had been. I spoke to her on the Friday night and she even laughed once, at something I told her, something about one of my neighbors, something silly they had said to me. “I love you, Mum,” she said, as she was hanging up.

It had been agreed that I would pop in on Sunday afternoon for a cup of tea.

I had my own keys to her place. I always had done, just in case she or Jack ever lost theirs, found themselves locked out, or needed me to drive over and wait in for a parcel or a repairman. I would never usually have used them, if I had known Grace was in the house.

I rang the bell for about fifteen minutes.

In the front hall, I shouted her name. I looked into the living room to see if she was in there. I checked the kitchen. Upstairs I stuck my head around the bedroom door. When I tried the bathroom door, at first I thought it was locked. Then I gave it another try and realized it wasn’t locked, that it gave slightly when I put my shoulder to it, but that there was something piled up against it on the other side, stopping it from opening. I kept pushing and the door gave a little. I pushed harder and I could see something trapped under it, stuck between the bottom of the door and the floor of the bathroom. It was the sleeve of one of Grace’s sweaters. I gave it a tug. It was stuck fast. I gave the door another shove. It moved another centimeter or two. I called Grace’s name again. Nobody answered.

The coroner’s verdict was that she had been dead since late Saturday afternoon. She had been to the shops that morning and bought some milk and bread from the co-op. As she was leaving she bumped into someone she used to work with, stopped for a chat, talked about setting a date to meet up some time, seemed in good spirits. Then at some point later in the day she put the cup of tea she was drinking down on the kitchen counter, half finished, and went to the bathroom and lined up everything she needed on the closed toilet seat lid and ran herself a bath and ended her own life. She was thirty-two years old.

Emmy

Just so you know, that little blue tick, the one that Instagram bestows upon you, the sign that you’ve really made it? Those discreet symbols that mark me and my pod out as the alpha mums?