‘Just didn’t want to.’
‘You’re kind of supposed to want to,’ Simone says delicately, marvelling that Lucy felt the same as she did, her shameful secret. ‘You didn’t want to leave me because you didn’t want to leave me, or because you didn’t want me to be without you?’
It’s a nuanced question, and Simone watches Lucy comprehend it. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I guess, both. Worried when I saw the drink that I’m some sort of – linchpin, I suppose.’
‘Ah. I see,’ Simone answers. ‘I can see how you’d think that.’ She pauses, thinking. ‘The plight of the only child. You thought I’d fall apart without you.’
‘Right,’ Lucy says, a quick smile. ‘Loved too much.’
‘You can never love anybody too much.’
‘I just thought of all the things we wouldn’t do. You bringing leftovers home for no one. I didn’t want to do it yet.’
‘Right,’ Simone says softly, thinking. ‘You think I need you in order to be stable and happy. And sober?’
‘Well, yeah,’ Lucy answers.
‘Not so. I’m not an addict. Lucy, I can’t tell you that enough.’
‘But you will be so sad without me.’
And Simone closes her eyes, now, against this statement. For all her careful parenting, for all the books she read and the reactions she controlled and tried not to have, still, it got her in the Achilles’ heel.
‘God, Lucy,’ she tells her, and though she wants to say,Yes! I don’t want you to go! The meaning of my whole life has been you! For almost twenty years!she doesn’t. She says instead, ‘I would always want you to go and live your absolute best life. It makes me so, so happy that you would do that. Happier, actually, than if you stayed.’
‘Thank you for saying that,’ Lucy says.
And it isn’t a lie. It’s just that both things are true: the pleasure/pain of parenthood. ‘I’m here. I love you. You are my raison d’être, but I have many of them. You never need to worry about me.’
‘The drink was nothing?’ Lucy checks.
‘No!’ Simone says.
‘It’s like –’ Lucy appears to be trying to find the words – ‘parents have to let their children go?’ As she says this, her eyes lock on to Simone’s. A beat. ‘You know?’ she adds softly.
‘I know,’ Simone replies, her mind whirring. But what does Lucy truly mean, here? Such a strange and direct statement. Simone wonders if she doesn’t know, or isn’t ready to know, even here, in the blue hour of four o’clock in the morning.
Later, Simone goes back to bed. Lucy lets herself out on to the porch. This time, Simone doesn’t stop her.
They wake up to the smell of meringue, which feels a little like home. Simone does her best to forget what Lucy said. What Lucy meant, what she could possibly mean. And how she could do it. Parents have to let their children go.
CHAPTER 60
‘Another day, pissed away,’ Lucy says sharply at ten o’clock that evening, a cup of tea sloshing as she gestures around them. She’s been on the porch for some of the evening, then on a walk that Simone tried her best to ignore, then inside again, clearly bored. Simone walks out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Every time Simone sees Lucy, she thinks about what she said. Parents have to let their children go.
They’ve watched four films today while Damien has begun tentative enquiries about the identities. ‘What about tomorrow?’ she continues. ‘I was thinking, sitting in and hiding?’
Simone hesitates, wanting so primitively to meet Lucy’s needs, to tell her to go out shopping, horseback riding, see the sights. But she doesn’t even know about the news, about the reward that has made everything just another turn worse on a wheel that is already wound too tight.
Damien raises his shoulders, reaches and pours some more tea for her. ‘Might add some vodka to it,’ he says, gesturing.
‘Go for it,’ Lucy says, a small laugh escaping her mouth. Then her whole body goes still. ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’ Simone asks.
‘That noise.’
And then the three of them hear it, all at once. A softtalking. Voices: many voices, tinny, through radios or megaphones. Their eyes meet, there in the kitchen, and it is in that precise moment that they know that they have been found.
