Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell Page 0,28

kids is not a sign of maturity, but a sign that you’ve missed a whole set of steps on the road to maturity.

This child, Laurel suddenly feels with the immediacy of a kick to the gut, needs a mother. And this mother, she acknowledges, needs a child. And Poppy, she is so like Ellie. The planes and lines of her pretty face, the shape of her hairline, of her skull, the way her ears attach to her head, the shapes her mouth makes when it moves, the precise angle of her cupid’s bow, they’re almost mathematically identical.

The differences are pronounced, too. Her eyebrows are thicker, her neck is longer, her hair parts differently and is a different shade of brown. And while Ellie’s eyes were a hazel brown, Poppy’s are chocolate. They are not identical. But there is something, something alarming and arresting, a likeness that she can’t leave alone.

“Maybe you and I could go shopping together?” Laurel says brightly. “One day? Would you like that?”

Finally Poppy looks to her dad for his approval before turning back to Laurel and saying, “I would absolutely love that. Yes, please!”

Laurel goes to work on Friday. She works Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays at the shopping center near her flat. Her job title is “marketing coordinator.” It’s a silly job, a mum job, a little local thing to fill some hours and make some money to pay for clothes and the like. She comes, she smiles, she makes the phone calls and writes the emails and sits in the meetings about the inconsequential things she’s being paid to pretend she cares about and then she goes home and doesn’t think of any of it again until the next time she walks through the door.

But she’s glad to be there today. She’s happy to be surrounded by familiar people who like her and know her, even if it’s only on a superficial level. The previous evening had been strange and unsettling and she’d awoken thinking that maybe she’d dreamed it. Her flat had felt odd in the wake of her dinner guests, as though it didn’t really belong to her. The cushions on the sofa were in the wrong order, the result of Poppy’s attempt to tidy up after themselves, food was stacked in the wrong parts of the fridge, and there was a pile of washing up on the draining board that Poppy had insisted on doing in spite of Laurel trying to persuade her that she needn’t, that it would all just go in the dishwasher. The lilies on the dining table gave off a strange deathly perfume and Floyd had left his scarf in her hallway, a soft gray thing with a Ted Baker label in it that hung from a hook like a plume of dark smoke.

She’d been glad to leave the flat, to put some distance between last night and herself. But even as she switches on her computer and stirs sweeteners into her coffee, as she listens to the messages on her voicemail, it’s there, like a dark echo. Something not right. Something to do with Floyd and Poppy. She can’t pin it down. Poppy is clearly a strange child, who is both charmingly naïve and unsettlingly self-possessed. She is cleverer than she has any need to be, but also not as clever as she thinks.

And Floyd, who in the time that Laurel has spent alone with him, is virtually perfect, warps into something altogether more complicated when he’s with his daughter. Laurel finally crystallizes the issue while discussing her evening with her colleague, Helen.

“It was like,” she says, “you know, like when you’re supposed to be having drinks with a friend and they bring their partner along and suddenly you’re at the pointy end of a triangle?”

The evening had essentially been the Floyd and Poppy Show with Poppy as the star turn and Laurel as the slightly dumbfounded audience of one. Floyd and Poppy shared the same sense of humor and lined up jokes for each other. And Floyd’s eyes were always on his precocious child, sparkling with wonder and pride. There was not one conversation that had not involved Poppy and her opinions and there had not been one moment during which Laurel had felt more important, special, or interesting than her.

She’d closed the door on them at midnight feeling drained and somewhat dazed.

“Sounds like she’s got the classic only-child syndrome,” says Helen, neatly shrinking the issue down to a digestible bite-sized chunk of common sense. “Plus,