or not, I can’t, won’t let that man break me. If I did, he’d be breaking us. George. Archie.
Tomorrow, however scared I feel, I will drop Archie off at nursery and go to work. Ask for more hours. Step up to my responsibilities. I am an adult now, not the scared eight-year-old girl I once was, however much I still feel her presence inside me with every decision I make. Everything I do. For me. For my family, it is time to move on. Perhaps there is something in Marie’s words. Twenty years of suffering is twenty years too much. In a few days the anniversary will be over. But I can make it lose its power now. Like throwing water over the wicked witch and watching her shrivel. Forging a normal life will be my bucket of cold water.
Enough.
I can cope now, I can. Even if it is the fear of George slipping away from me, fear of losing something, someone else, that has made me determined to do more. Be more. I won’t let another family fall apart. Not when I can stitch our fraying threads back together.
I fall asleep.
It’s still dark. A noise wakes me. I lie motionless. My body rigid. Fingers gripping the duvet.
Waiting.
My eyes scan the room. The digital clock shouts 6 a.m. in neon green digits. There’s a warm orange glow emanating from the plug-in night light by the door. Archie thinks it’s funny we have one too. He thinks it’s so we’re the same as him but what he doesn’t know is that I hate the way the night-time swallows me, the suffocating blackness. The fear that something bad, someone bad, will spring out of the shadows.
I know that sometimes they do.
There’s nothing to be heard except George’s breath rattling in his throat. Slowly, my hands relax.
My pyjamas are damp with terror. In my nightmare I had taken Archie to the circus but we were the only ones in the Big Top, the smell of sawdust rising from the empty ring as we took our rickety front-row seats, fluffy pink candyfloss balanced on sticks. The lights went out, Archie had whimpered.
‘It’s okay,’ I had whispered but my heart was pounding. The urge to run immense.
Brightness had filled the tent but only for a second but that second was enough for me to see it. The clown. The lights began to strobe and each time they flashed on, the clown’s face loomed closer and closer. His smiled his slashed red grin, sharp teeth dripping with blood.
And that was when I woke.
There’s a circus coming to the meadow in town in the new year. We won’t go. We never do.
I know I won’t get back to sleep now and so I roll onto my side and gently push George onto his. His snoring stops. I wrap my arms around his waist and press my cheek against his back.
When I get up, Archie is still starfished in his racing-car bed. The mountain of cuddly toys he adores have slid onto the floor in the night, as they always do. There’s a panda, a sloth, a tiger. I’ve never bought him a traditional teddy.
I never will.
The belt on my dressing gown hangs loose and I tighten it as I pad down the landing, relishing the thought of a quiet cup of coffee in a house that will soon be filled with noise.
I see it as I soon as I reach the bottom of the stairs. My feet sinking into the pile of the carpet. My heart sinking into my stomach.
A white envelope on the mat. The noise that woke me must have been the letterbox. It’s too early for the postman. I don’t want to pick it up.
I don’t want to open it.
Somehow I know that whatever is in the envelope has the power to shatter my already shaky resolve to be more.
There’s one word written on the outside:
Leah.
I don’t want to open it.
Where I had felt cold moments before, I now feel hot.
My fingers slips under the seal, the paper rips.
I don’t want to open it.
The world shifts beneath my feet as I read what is scrawled on the paper inside.
I’m still standing there when Archie thunders down the stairs demanding Weetabix, orange juice, a kiss.
I’m still standing there when George sidles up behind me, reading over my shoulder, seeing those two words that shift and blur and move in and out of focus.