Good Girl Bad (44)

“Let’s go home,” Leroy says softly. “We’ll get Gen. We’ll go round to your dad’s. Until Rebecca has got some help. Or something.” Leroy looks uncertain. He’s about as certain as Tabby in regards to how to solve this mess. But he does know getting Tabby somewhere warm and safe is at least a first step.

But Tabby just starts to cry again.

“I can’t,” she says. “There’s nothing left for me.” She can’t explain it to Leroy—she can’t admit to falling in love with Fred, or being left hanging by him. She’s ashamed that she needs him, that she could be so stupid as to think he really loved her.

Of course he didn’t love her.

Nobody loved her.

She can’t articulate the depth of despair she feels about Charlie, or Freddy. She can’t make any sense of her desperate desire to be loved by her mother, and the murky notion that it must be her that is faulty, because mothers love their children, don’t they? All of them except her. It’s only her whom a mother seems to hate.

In her mind, she knows her mother is wrong. She knows there’s something dysfunctional about Rebecca. But in her body, she knows something else.

That she has nothing, is nothing, is not worth loving.

And with sudden ferocity, she lunges to her feet and leaps up onto the thick cobblestone wall of the bridge, the swirling water underneath the only solution her tortured mind can fathom.





41





Thursday

Rebecca is marvelling at the bright blue sky.

She can’t seem to stop walking. One foot in front of the other. She walks to the bridge where Leroy’s car was found. Loses time staring over it.

Pain pulses through her in waves.

What was he doing out here?

She knows the answer to that though.

Trying to comfort her daughter.

What was Tabby doing?

Would a dead dog be enough to inspire her to jump?

Her heart skips a beat.

Rebecca knows it’s not just a dead dog, though.

Something has cracked open, between the torrent of thoughts in her head that even a sleeping tablet couldn’t slow, and the thought of Genevieve, grieving with her parents, like she might have done.

Should have done.

Somehow, all the pushing down the memories of Moira, all the clamping down the pain, all the pretending it never even happened, seems almost peculiar to Rebecca. And as the memories rush out through that crack, storming out, flooding over her, the surrender seems so much easier than the resistance ever did.

She thinks about Charlie and shivers.

Whatever she’s told herself in the past seems suddenly ludicrous. You can yell too much at your kids. You can lose your temper. You can even regret some of the things you say, sometimes.

Regret that surge of power in you, when you see how it crushes someone else.

“Why does Tabby drive me so crazy” is no longer the question. Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how crazy Tabby drives her. She still doesn’t get to attack her.

Attack.

Rebecca stops abruptly.

Her mind keeps going.

She doesn’t get to attack her daughter, emotionally speaking.

And she doesn’t get to kill her dog.

Her heart skips another beat. Did she really do that? Was that really her?

She looks out at the brilliant spring day, and wonders how she is functioning at all.

Is she not overwhelmed, because she already knows? She’s hidden it from herself on the surface for years. But deep down, she knows. She pretended she forgot about the dog. But she didn’t forget. She just didn’t want to think about it.

Moira’s little face drifts in front of her eyes. That look, at the river.

Does everything end at the river?

The uncertainty on Moira’s face. Halfway between fear of the river, and a yearning to please her sister. Loving her sister so much she will try to overcome her fear.

That look has haunted Rebecca’s dreams for thirty-five years.

She still remembers the coldness. It knocked her breath clean away, like a physical blow. The pull of the current something so unknown, so insistent.

She should have known.

But she didn’t.

A lump rises in her throat, a wail caught there, and she swallows and frowns. Quickens her pace and keeps walking. She thinks that if she keeps walking and keeps walking, she will work it out, she will think it all through. Her steps will unravel the tangle she has found herself in.

She has put herself in.

For the first time, she can see that she needs to take ownership of it. This hasn’t happened to her. She chooses it. She hides it. Maybe she can change it.

Left, right, left.

Her eyes lose focus.

Left, right, left.

Somehow, her rage toward Tabby is related to Moira, but she can’t work it out, it makes her head hurt, it makes everything hurt.

Why am I like this?

Last night’s question surfaces again, relentless.

How can I stop?

She shivers.

She knew Leroy was trying to fix it. She knew that’s why things were tense between Tabby and him. She knew that, and she took no responsibility herself. And now Leroy was dead, and Tabby was— God.

Where was Tabby?

Her steps quicken even more.

She’s hurrying toward a destination she can’t pin down. It’s compulsive. This rhythm, this walking. She must keep going. It’s like a drumbeat toward the finale, the climax, a crescendo toward an ending she doesn’t want to know, and yet, for the first time, she knows she must. If anything is ever going to be different.