Simone
Simone is showering when she hears a door open. Her entire body flashes there, under the heat, and she gets out, hoping it’s Damien, hoping it’s nothing.
It’s Lucy. Fully clothed, coming in the front door. Simone stares at her, confused. And as she does so, she can’t help but think there might have been a near miss. Lucy’s expression is slightly frantic.
‘Where have you been?’ she asks her.
‘Walking.’
‘Why? Where? It’s not safe out.’
‘I think the worst has happened, don’t you?’ Lucy says, her tone acerbic.
Simone winces. Ouch. She has never once considered this angle. That maybe Lucy might feel she doesn’t have anything to lose.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t – I know you need time to walk and breathe.’ Simone spreads her arms wide. ‘I’m sorry. Just … you weren’t followed? No one saw?’
‘No.’
‘I know it’s hard,’ she says.
‘So we’re on the run forever and we’re never walking alone forever, too, right?’ Lucy asks, her head cocked.
‘We didn’t say that exactly – we’re still waiting to hear from Moody.’
Lucy sighs, then, a gust of air, and Simone catches it on her breath: wine. Their eyes meet, and Simone knows Lucy knows she has smelled it. And maybe it’s the legacy of her parents, maybe it’s just fear, but Simone throws her arms up in the air and says, ‘How could you jeopardize us by going out to a fucking bar? Are you not thinking straight?’
Lucy’s body freezes. ‘I haven’t been to a bar,’ she says immediately, and, God, Simone is long enough in the tooth to recognize that lie, an immediate, flat, toneless denial.
‘I can smell alcohol,’ Simone says. She doesn’t add the unsaid: that she is a pro at this. In the kitchen, Damien clatters about, oblivious or perhaps abdicating. Simone doesn’t tell Lucy that she’s pretty sure it is white wine, probably Pinot Grigio and dry. Simone’s nose is at least half her work skill, and it’s well trained.
‘Not mine,’ Lucy says, and, suddenly, Simone simply cannot be bothered.
She walks off into the bedroom, leaving Lucy there.Fuck her, Simone thinks recklessly. And, this time, it isn’t trauma talking, just fear.
Lucy comes to stand at Simone’s door, saying nothing. Arms folded, one foot crossed over the other, just looking at her. The Venn diagram of mother and daughter is not yet two circles, not yet entirely separate. There is still the sliver of overlap where they finish each other’s thoughts. Simone therefore knows this stance to be an apology. Something in her yields. If she were in Lucy’s position, eighteen and on the run, might she sneak out, too? Probably. Her brain is not formed yet into its adult state. Less than two weeks ago, she was kidnapped.
Her poor daughter. Her high-schooling beset by a pandemic,and then her approaching freedom curtailed by this. What does the future truly hold for them? Living in the Bahamas on cash-in-hand jobs until somehow the charges become spent or forgotten, which is probably never going to happen?
‘It was just a glass,’ Lucy says quietly. ‘It was … just one glass. I felt I needed it. Gave off over-twenty-one energy and got served. Maybe no one really cares around here.’
‘I do really understand needing it. To cope,’ Simone says.
‘But in the bar … I don’t know. It was horrible, actually,’ she says. ‘I felt like I was being watched.’
‘And were you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lucy answers. She drops her gaze. ‘I’m sorry. For going. For sneaking out.’
‘It’s understandable,’ Simone says.
‘I am desperately hoping Moody comes through for us.’ Lucy goes to say something else, maybe, then hesitates, and then stops. ‘I was there, just sipping a wine. Just … mind racing,’ she adds simply again, with a little shrug. She’s in a vest top, and one of the straps falls down past her shoulder as she moves. That skin Simone used to bathe. That skin that used to stick against her own, skin to skin, mother and baby.
‘I know,’ Simone says thickly, ignoring a guilty and persistent thought that is bubbling up within her: at least, if they are on the run, Lucy is not leaving her.What an awful thought, Simone admonishes herself, but she can’t help it. She wishes she could have paused time fifteen years ago. When Lucy still reached up vertically to hold her hand, when she earnestly told Simone things she already knew, like the colour of the sky. But it’s gone. That particular Lucy gone. Parenthood, what a bum fucking deal, as Lucy would say.
‘If I found the kidnapper, you know, I think I might kill him,’ Lucy says suddenly, with just the slightest tremor in her voice that brushes Simone’s nerve endings like a feather.
Simone freezes. She runs her eyes over her daughter’s face, and there isn’t a trace of dark humour. ‘That wouldn’t help anything,’ she says slowly, ignoring the prescient feeling as it returns once more.
