Big Little Lies(91)

Did she have a responsibility to tell Eleni what her husband had done? Did she have a responsibility to the tipsy, impressionable young girls Saxon might still be picking up in bars?
But they didn’t even know for sure it was him.
Celeste drove her car into her driveway, flicking the switch for the triple-car garage and seeing their lavish panoramic view: the twinkling lights of homes around the bay, the mighty black presence of the ocean. The garage door opened like a curtain revealing a lit-up stage, and her car purred on in without her having to lift her foot off the accelerator.
She turned the key. Silence.
There was no garage in that other pretend life she was planning. There was an underground parking lot for the apartment block, but the spaces looked tiny, with big concrete posts. She’d have to reverse into her spot. She already knew that she’d smash a taillight. She was a terrible parker.
She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and looked at the bruises on her arm.
Yes, Celeste, stay with a man who does this to you, because of the great parking.
She opened her car door.
At least he wasn’t as bad as his cousin.


Chapter 47
47.

What is this petition-writing woman’s name?” said Jane’s father.
“Why? What are we going to do to her, Dad?” said Dane. “Break her knees?”
“I’d bloody like to,” said Jane’s father. He held a tiny jigsaw piece up to the light and squinted at it. “Anyway, what sort of name is Amabella? Silly sort of a name. What’s wrong with Annabella?”
“You have got a grandson called Ziggy,” pointed out Dane.
“Hey,” said Jane to her brother. “It was your idea.”
Jane was at her parents’ place, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, eating biscuits and doing a jigsaw puzzle. Ziggy was asleep in Jane’s old bedroom. She was going to give him the day off school tomorrow, so they would stay the night and just hang around here in the morning. Renata and her friends would be happy.
Perhaps, thought Jane as she looked at her mother’s 1980s apricot-and-cream kitchen, she would never go back to Pirriwee. This was where she belonged. It had been a kind of madness moving so far away in the first place. Almost a sickness. Her motives had been warped and weird, and this was her punishment.
Here, Jane felt bathed in familiarity: the mugs, the old brown teapot, the tablecloth, the smell of home, and of course, the puzzle. Always the puzzles. Her family had been addicted to jigsaw puzzles for as long as Jane could remember. The kitchen table was never used for eating, only for the latest puzzle. Tonight they were beginning a new one Jane’s father had ordered online. It was a two-thousand-piece puzzle of an Impressionist painting. Lots of hazy swirls of color.
“Maybe I should move back over this way,” she said, seeing how it felt, and as she spoke she thought for some reason of Blue Blues, the smell of coffee, the sapphire-blue shimmer of the sea, and Tom’s wink as he handed over her takeout coffee, as if they were both in on a secret joke. She thought of Madeline holding up the roll of cardboard like a baton as she walked up the stairs of her apartment, and Celeste’s bobbing ponytail as they went on their morning walks around the headland, beneath the towering Norfolk pines.
She thought of the summer afternoons earlier in the year when she and Ziggy had walked straight from school to the beach, Ziggy taking off his school shoes and socks on the sand, peeling off his shorts and shirt and running straight into the ocean in his underpants, while she chased him with a tube of sunscreen and he laughed with joy as the white froth of a wave broke around him.
Recently, thanks to Madeline, she’d picked up two new lucrative local clients within walking distance of her flat: Pirriwee Perfect Meats and Tom O’Brien’s Smash Repairs. Their paperwork didn’t smell. (In fact, Tom O’Brien’s receipts smelled of potpourri.)
She realized with a shock that some of the happiest moments of her life had taken place over the last few months.
“But we actually do love living there,” she said. “Ziggy loves school too—well, he normally does.”
She remembered his tears earlier tonight. She couldn’t keep sending him to school with children who told him they weren’t allowed to play with him.
“If you want to stay, you stay,” said her father. “You can’t let that woman bully you into leaving the school. Why doesn’t she leave?”
“I cannot believe that Ziggy would be bullying her daughter,” said Jane’s mother, her eyes on the jigsaw pieces she was sliding rapidly back and forth on the table.
“The point is that she believes it,” said Jane. She tried to slot a piece into the bottom right-hand corner of the puzzle. “And now the other parents believe it too. And, I don’t know, I can’t say for sure that he didn’t do something.”