Big Little Lies(66)

Jane didn’t laugh. “Please don’t Google him, Madeline. Please don’t. I don’t know why I hate the thought of your looking him up, but I just do.”
“Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to, I was being flippant. Stupid. I shouldn’t make light of it. Ignore me.”
She held her arms out and gave Jane a hug.
To her surprise, Jane, who always presented a stiff cheek for a kiss, stepped forward and held her tightly.
“Thank you for bringing over the cardboard,” she said.
Madeline patted Jane’s clean-smelling hair. She’d nearly said, You’re welcome, my beautiful girl, like she did to Chloe, but the word “beautiful” seemed so complicated and fraught right now. Instead she said, “You’re welcome, my lovely girl.”

Chapter 33
33.

Are there any weapons in your house?” asked the counselor.
“Pardon?” said Celeste. “Did you say weapons?”
Her heart was still pounding from the fact that she was actually here, in this small yellow-walled room, with a row of cactus plants on the windowsill and colorful government-issued posters with hotline numbers on the walls, cheap office furniture on beautiful old floorboards. The counseling offices were in a federation cottage on the Pacific Highway on the Lower North Shore. The room she was in probably used to be a bedroom. Someone had once slept here, never dreaming that in the next century people would be sharing shameful secrets in this room.
When she’d gotten up this morning Celeste had been sure she wouldn’t come. She intended to ring up and cancel as soon as she got the children to school, but then she’d found herself in the car, putting the address into the GPS, driving up the winding peninsula road, thinking the whole way that she would pull over in the next five minutes and call them up and say so sorry, but her car had broken down, she would reschedule another day. But she kept driving, as if she were in a dream or a trance, thinking of other things like what she’d cook for dinner, and then, before she knew it, she was pulling into the parking area behind the house and watching a woman coming out, puffing furiously on a cigarette as she opened the door of a banged-up old white car. A woman wearing jeans and a crop top, with tattoos like awful injuries all the way down her thin white arms.
She’d envisaged Perry’s face. His amused, superior face. “You’re not serious, are you? This is just so . . .”
So lowbrow. Yes, Perry. It was. A suburban counseling practice that specialized in domestic violence. It was listed on their website, along with depression and anxiety and eating disorders. There were two typos on the home page. She’d chosen it because it was far enough away from Pirriwee that she could be sure of not running into anyone she knew. Also, she hadn’t really had any intention of turning up. She’d just wanted to make an appointment, to prove she wasn’t a victim, to prove to some unseen presence that she was doing something about this.
“Our behavior is lowbrow, Perry,” she’d said out loud in the silence of the car, and then she’d turned the key in the ignition and gone inside.
“Celeste?” prompted the counselor now.
The counselor knew her name. The counselor knew more about the truth of her life than anyone in the world besides Perry. She was in one of those naked nightmares, where you just had to keep walking through the crowded shopping center while everyone stared at your shameful, shocking nudity. She couldn’t go back now. She had to see it through. She’d told her. She’d said it, very quickly, her eyes slightly off-center from the counselor’s, pretending she was keeping eye contact. She’d spoken in a low, neutral voice, as if she were telling a doctor about a revolting symptom. It was part of being a grown-up, being a woman and a mother. You had to say uncomfortable things out loud. “I have this discharge.” “I’m in a sort of violent relationship.” “Sort of.” Like a teenager hedging her words, distancing herself.
“Sorry. Did you just ask about weapons?” She recrossed her legs, smoothing the fabric of her dress across them. She’d deliberately chosen an especially beautiful dress that Perry had bought for her in Paris. She hadn’t worn it before. She’d also put on makeup: foundation, powder, the whole kit and caboodle. She wanted to position herself, not as superior to other women, of course not, she didn’t think that, not in a million years. But her situation was different from that woman in the parking lot. Celeste didn’t need the phone number for a shelter. She just needed some strategies to fix her marriage. She needed tips. Ten top tips to stop my husband from hitting me. Ten top tips to stop my hitting him back.