The Girl in the Mirror(54)
That’s when I remember that there’s still one flaw in my plan. Like at the pageant, I’m only pretending to be Summer. I can almost hear my brother’s voice, the voice of unwelcome truth: There’s blood running down your leg, Iris.
Adam wraps his arms around me, and I breathe in his sweet spicy aroma, but it doesn’t do its usual magic. Part of me wants to push him away.
But I can’t. There’s no way I can turn my back on this triumph. Even if I knew Summer’s safe word, I wouldn’t use it. Not until the last piece of the puzzle is in place. As soon as I’m pregnant, everything will be perfect.
The first days in Australia are tough. Annabeth leased her penthouse out till November when Adam and I left to sail around the world, and it turns out that she thinks she can keep living with us until the lease is up. I try to persuade her to book into a hotel, but it isn’t easy. I have to spin all sorts of shit about needing to grieve in peace. If I were Iris, I could have gotten her out of here in half an hour, but as Summer it’s much more difficult. How do nice people get other people to do what they want? I’m reduced to hinting that Adam wants her to go, even though, in truth, Adam has some weird ideas about extended families living together that I can only blame on his Seychellois heritage.
At first, I hide from my mother, using the size of the house to keep her at bay. One morning, she fixates on how Noah will be coping with his grief, and insists on sending him a care package, but by the afternoon she has forgotten all about him and has moved on to worrying about the effect of all this stress on my unborn child. At one point, I jump in the pool in my clothes and swim over to the far side to evade her questions about my lack of weight gain.
But within a few days, I begin to relax. This is the woman who doesn’t acknowledge that Ridge cheated on her even though his will declares that Virginia is his biological daughter. Annabeth’s reality is whatever Annabeth wants it to be. On top of this, losing Iris has addled her brain. She glides around in a fog of confusion, floating from joy to grief and back again in the space of a single sentence.
“How lovely to have you home, Tarky,” she says to the kid, “only it’s for a dreadful reason . . . But your mummy needs to be back for baby’s sake . . . Oh, just think, a newborn in the house for Christmas!”
I still need her out of here. Even a zombie can stumble upon the truth, and besides, she has become super annoying lately, the way she talks about Iris.
“Iris was such a lost soul,” she bleats, in the middle of wiping Tarquin’s filthy face. “I had hoped, Summer, that with this sailing trip you’d set her straight, that you might rub off on her a bit.”
Another time she bursts into tears in the middle of breakfast. “At least you and Adam and the children are safe,” she sobs. “It would have been worse if it was you. It’s not that I loved her less, really, but you and I have always been so much closer. I never understood Iris.”
“Do you know,” she adds, “when Adam phoned me, he sounded so distraught, that for one awful moment I thought it was you?”
So she had to go. But as I close the door on her taxi and walk back up the driveway, it hits me that I have no one to help me with the kid anymore.
Sure enough, with just me and Tarquin at home all day it’s unbelievable how clingy he becomes. Tarquin is only happy if some part of his skin is touching me, unless we’re near a busy road, in which case he wants to run away from me faster than I would have thought possible.
I wouldn’t mind the constant cuddles, but he’s hungry for my attention, too. It’s as though he believes that if I think about anything other than him for a second, he might cease to exist. I was never keen on motherhood, but I thought at least I would get to take it easy for the stay-at-home years. I thought I could sit and read as long as the kid had a toy to play with. Turns out no. You can’t read in the same house as a small child. The child will sense that Mummy is relaxing and will hunt you down.
Whenever Tarquin sees me with my feet up he fetches a picture book and waves it in my face. If I ignore him, he wails and hits me over the head with the book. The kid who can’t talk wants to read books all freaking day. And picture books are so predictable. The baddies get caught, the truth will out, and right will triumph. Yawn.
One of Tarq’s books I don’t mind so much—it’s a story about a girl who goes to live under the sea. The illustrations are eerie; the ocean is black and gleaming, and as the girl slips below the surface her legs transform into a fishtail bejeweled with sapphires and emeralds. Everyone assumes I want to forget my ordeal at sea, but when I read this story, I dream of Bathsheba; I ache for heaving swells and salt spray. But Tarquin hates the book; when I ignore his protests and keep reading, he rips a page.
Summer’s life is a lot more boring than I imagined. She has beautiful dresses but no occasion to wear them. I can’t do the housework in chiffon.
I can’t read her Millennial Kama Sutra while Tarquin is awake thanks to his maternal-relaxation radar, and the kid barely naps. Summer must have accepted her fate, since she seems to have chucked out all her books, even her leather-bound copies of Frankenstein and Dracula and the other Victorian thrillers that used to hold pride of place on her bookshelf.
As I search for them, I have the urge to dwell on Summer’s flaws and sins, as small as they were. Not that her taste in books was really a sin, but I disliked it when I was a kid. Her books scared me to death. Her love of horror stories, so at odds with her otherwise girlish tastes, was perhaps the one thing she shared with Dad. Maybe it stemmed from the time he took us to Carmichael Bridge after it was taken out of commission and dropped a live chicken onto the crocodile-infested riverbank.