The Woman Outside My Door Page 3

  “I’ll pop up to the shops.” She felt a sudden, visceral need to get away from her husband.

  “I can go. It’s—”

  “No, really. I’d like the walk.” She avoided looking directly at him. She was ashamed of how overwhelming this sudden anger was.

  Petty. Small.

  Those were the words with which Georgina berated herself as she walked to the shops, bundled up in her warmest coat and scarf. It was a clear night. Ice glittered on car windshields. A crescent moon hung delicate and white in the black sky.

  Let it go.

  Walking back, with the milk in her bag, she reflected on this. She wanted to let it go, to release that sharp shard of anger she was still holding on to. But how? How did people learn the art of letting go?

  Lost in thought, she turned her key in the lock and stepped into her home.

  “Georgie.” Bren met her in the hall, speaking in a whisper. “Come here.”

  “What’s up?” Instinctively responding in hushed tones, she followed him to the kitchen.

  Bren took a deep breath. “I don’t want you to get upset.”

  This sent an alert running through her. “What is it?”

  “Cody is pretending to be on the phone to his grandmother again.”

  Georgina froze.

  “I know,” said Bren. “I know it’s—”

  “Where is he?”

  “The front room.”

  She dropped her bag on the table and made for the hall.

  “Georgina.” Bren spoke quietly, but with a timbre that caused her to pause. “Where are you going?”

  “I just want to check on him.”

  Bren’s brow furrowed.

  “All right,” he said. “But let’s be careful not to disturb him, okay?”

  Together they tiptoed down the hall and peered through the half-open door into the front room. Cody was on the sofa, with his back to them. Phone to his ear, he chatted away, oblivious to their gaze.

  There was something about his giggles and long pauses in conversation that made it seem very, very real.

  Bren put a finger to his lips and beckoned Georgina. They tiptoed back to the kitchen. Once out of Cody’s earshot, he said, “It makes me feel uncomfortable too. But he used to talk to Rose on the phone all the time, and he must miss that.”

  Georgina, only half listening, was looking around for the other house phone. In that moment, she didn’t care how silly she was being. Nothing would give her greater peace than to listen in on Cody chatting away to a dead line.

  “Where’s the other house phone?”

  “I don’t know.” Bren shrugged. “Under a pile of laundry somewhere, out of battery.”

  Okay. She was just going to say it.

  “How do we know for sure he’s not really on the phone to someone?”

  Concern softened Bren’s features.

  “Georgie, come here. Sit down.” He steered her to the sofa in the kitchen corner. “Take a few deep breaths.”

  She complied.

  “Right.” His voice was declarative. “For one thing, there’s the simple fact that it’s impossible for Cody to be on the phone to his grandmother…”

  Georgina opened her mouth to protest—she had never suggested anything supernatural was going on and felt insulted by the insinuation—but Bren was still talking.

  “… and anyway,” he said with finality, “the phone didn’t ring, Georgina. I would have heard it.”

  Georgina considered this. She looked at Bren’s earnest face. His hair, damp from the shower, looked almost black. His eyes looked bluer when his hair was darkened like that, blue and serious. He reached for her. She hesitated a moment longer, then let Bren pull her close. Let herself be soothed.

  “I know this is difficult,” he said. “But seven-year-olds play imaginary games. We have to let Cody grieve in his own way.”

  Georgina nodded, though she had to suppress the urge to march into the front room and grab the phone from Cody’s hand.

  Chapter 6

  No matter how quickly she rushed from the bookshop at the end of her shift, the dash to pick Cody up from school was tight, and Georgina didn’t always make it on time. Cody hated being the last child left.

  You’re working, studying, and mothering, she told herself as she struggled to find parking. Being a few minutes late once in a while doesn’t make you a failure.

  But it wasn’t enough to dissipate the guilt, and she was relieved to find a spot on the next street over, which allowed her to arrive at the gates out of breath and ruffled, but with two minutes to spare.

  “Hiya, Georgina!”

  “Hi, Kelly-Anne.”

  Kelly-Anne, Patrick’s mother, was never ruffled. Her jet-black hair hung silky-straight to her waist (Georgina presumed some of that glossy mane must be fake, but it was hard to tell). Her makeup looked like it had been done by professionals. She was always immaculately turned out: the tan, the nails, the eyeshadow-earring-handbag color coordination. The attention to detail made Georgina feel dizzy. She could never understand where Kelly-Anne found the time.

  “Good Christmas, Georgina? Did you get away at all?”

  Georgina’s first Christmas without her mother had been a low-key, difficult affair. “No, we stayed in Dublin.”

  “Ah, did you? Lovely time, though?” Kelly-Anne asked a lot of questions but rarely paused to listen to the answers. “Myself and Mark spent a week in Dubai. Not very Christmassy, ha-ha-ha, but it was gorgeous. Got a great color.”

  She pulled up her sleeve to show Georgina her deeply tanned arm.

  “Did Cody enjoy his holidays? Patrick got one of those bloody Mega-Power Purple Slinger things and spent all Christmas Day firing little plastic animals at everyone.”

  Georgina had to laugh.

  The school door opened, and children came pouring out, Cody and Patrick pushing to the front.

  “Mom!” Cody burst out. “Can I go to Patrick’s house today, please?”

  “Well, I don’t know, sweetie.” Georgina had been looking forward to spending the afternoon with her son. But before she could gently suggest that Patrick come over at the weekend instead, Kelly-Anne swooped in.

  “Oh, it’s no bother, Georgina. He’s welcome.”

  “Yes!” The two boys jumped up and down with happiness, then raced off, Kelly-Anne drifting after them.

  “I can drop him home if picking him up is a hassle,” she called. “Just give me a text and let me know.”

  And she was gone, leaving a blast of overly sweet perfume in her wake, and Georgina with nothing to do but say “Great, thanks, then,” rather lamely, and a few beats too late.

  * * *

  With Cody at Patrick’s, Georgina had all afternoon to study uninterrupted. Notes spread across the table, eating peanut butter off a spoon, she knew she should be appreciative of this rare opportunity to relax like a twenty-year-old student.

  Still, she missed Cody. And by the time she texted Kelly-Anne to tell her she was on her way, she couldn’t wait for her son’s noisy chatter to fill up the house again.

  When she arrived to collect him, he was hyper and bouncy and high-pitched.

  “Did you have fun with Patrick, sweetie?” she asked as they walked home hand in hand along the pavement.

  “Yes! We went to the park, and we saw lots of dogs, and a pigeon nearly flew into Patrick’s head, and…”

  She smiled at him wryly. “And I’d say you ate some sweets, did you?”

  “Lots! Patrick’s mom bought us ice cream, and fizzy green bars that make your tongue go tingly.”

  “Hmm,” said Georgina, not wanting to know what ingredients went into those.

  “And guess who I saw in the park?”

  “Who?”

  “New Granny!”

  Georgina’s stomach jolted. She forced herself to keep walking, keep smiling. She remembered Bren’s words: We have to let Cody grieve in his own way.

  “Did you?” was all she could think to say. />
  “Yes. She gave me a chocolate bar.”

  Feeling ridiculously clichéd, Georgina said, “Cody, if a real stranger ever offers you sweets, you say ‘No, thank you’—you know that, right?”

  “Why? She wants to be my granny and I said okay because I don’t have any grannies now.” Cody was hopping over the cracks in the pavement, and his hand nearly slid out of hers. Georgina held on tighter.

  “You told her she could be your granny?”

  “Well, she is an old lady,” said Cody reasonably. “So I said she could be New Granny.”

  He was concentrating hard on avoiding the cracks. Georgina had to compose herself before saying, “This is a game, Cody, right?”

  “No,” said Cody casually, without looking at her. “It’s real.”

  “Where’s the chocolate bar, then?”

  “I ate it.” Cody was still focused on his steps. Georgina tugged at his hand.

  “Cody. Then where’s the wrapper?”

  “I don’t know. Let go, Mom. You’re pulling me.”

  She released him. “Sorry, sweetie.”

  He went back to jumping over the cracks, and she walked alongside him in silence for a bit.

  “Sweetie, you weren’t really on the phone the other night, were you?”

  “I was! I was talking to New Granny.”

  “Cody, you can tell me the truth. I won’t be annoyed. Pretend games don’t count as lying.”

  “It’s not pretend!”

  Georgina ruffled his hair gently, unsure how to proceed. “Okay, so it was real,” she said, treading carefully, “but the phone didn’t really ring, did it?”

  “It did ring,” Cody said serenely. “You were at the shops and Dad was in the shower.”

  Georgina did stop walking now. Had Bren had a shower the previous evening? She couldn’t remember. And even if he had, that didn’t prove anything. It was probably just a detail Cody was using to embellish his story.

  “Mom?”

  Cody was looking up at her with big eyes, and Georgina felt suddenly ashamed. Bren’s voice echoed in her head once more: He used to talk to Rose on the phone all the time, and he must miss that…

  She took her son’s hand again. “Tell me about your afternoon with Patrick. What else did you two get up to?”

  * * *

  The next day, at the school gates, Kelly-Anne appeared in a pink faux-fur coat that was enormous in volume. She looked like a fuzzy cloud over legs.

  “Nice coat,” said Georgina, only because it was impossible not to comment on it.

  “Oh, thanks! Mark nearly killed me when he saw the price tag, but I just couldn’t resist!” Kelly-Anne launched into a detailed story about a shopping spree she had gone on in New York. Georgina nodded along, waiting for Kelly-Anne to pause for breath.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” she said when an opening occurred. “It’s kind of a weird question, actually.”

  That caught Kelly-Anne’s attention. She waited, peering at Georgina from beneath false eyelashes.

  “You didn’t see an old woman talking to Cody in the park yesterday, did you?”

  “What?” Kelly-Anne blinked at her.

  “I know it sounds odd, but… you didn’t notice a gray-haired woman hanging around at all?”

  “In the park? No. Why?” Kelly-Anne’s lipsticked mouth was an O of curiosity. “What old woman?”

  “It’s nothing. Forget it.” Georgina tried to wave a hand airily, but she could feel herself going red. “I think Cody’s going through a phase of making up stories.”

  Kelly-Anne was clearly about to ask something further, but Georgina was saved when Cody rushed over. “Hi, Mom!”

  “We’d better be off.” She seized her son’s hand gratefully. “Thanks again for the playdate yesterday, Kelly-Anne.”

  As they walked away, Georgina felt unsatisfied by the conversation. She had been somewhat hopeful Kelly-Anne would say, “What? We didn’t go to the park at all yesterday!” Then she would have known for certain that Cody was making all of this up.

  Which he was. Of course he was. But she’d feel comforted by some definitive proof, all the same.

  Chapter 7

  Infidelity, Georgina and Bren had promised each other long ago, was unforgivable. “Any cheating and it’s over” had seemed straightforward in the haze of twentysomething love by the firelight of their first home in Phibsboro.

  But when Bren had confessed to putting a toe over that line, years had passed, and much had changed.

  On an ordinary Wednesday evening last spring, he’d turned to her out of the blue and blurted out, “I can’t not tell you.” His mood had been low since the weekend, but Georgina had put it down to an extended hangover.

  Bren had been on a hiking trip with a group of friends from university. They’d walked part of the Wicklow Way, and spent Saturday night in a hotel. Georgina had encouraged him to go. That was what they did for each other: took turns taking care of Cody so they could each have experiences outside parenthood. “You don’t go hiking enough anymore. You used to love it.” She had kissed him goodbye at the door and told him to have a great time. She had not let herself become preoccupied with the fact that Emma would be there.

  Emma. Bren’s long-ago girlfriend from his university days. Dark-haired, green-eyed, petite, pretty Emma, for whom Georgina had suspected Bren still felt a faint attraction. However, it hadn’t particularly bothered her. After all, she still thought dreamily of her first boyfriend from time to time. Still felt a sweet nostalgia for that long hot summer when she was seventeen, which felt like a movie now, scenes from someone else’s life. It had no bearing on her relationship with Bren: real, solid, tangible.

  She had thought they were above such petty things as jealousy. Had thought herself wonderfully mature and sensible.

  “It just happened.” Bren’s face, across the kitchen table, was all crumpled and sorry. “It was a stupid, drunken mistake. We got to the hotel, we went to the pub… Christ, we were pissed. Emma and me were the last ones awake…”

  Georgina felt like her heart had turned to ice.

  “You slept together?”

  “No—no! It was just drunken kissing, that’s all. For maybe half an hour. Then I sobered up and realized what I was doing and went to bed.”

  She would wonder later if he had deliberately told the story that way so that her anger would be mitigated by relief. If so, it had worked—to an extent.

  But Georgina knew the kind of kissing that happened between old lovers at two a.m. The hungry, urgent, pressed-up-against-a-wall kind. The kind that happened not in marital beds but in dimly lit bars, in hotel rooms. The relentless desire that could only be found in stolen moments.

  She herself had given up that kind of secret, stolen kissing; considered it a fair trade for the security and happiness she had found with Bren.

  How it burned to think he’d been kissing someone else like that. While she was at home looking after their child, doing the laundry, putting away his socks. Sending him a message that said Send me some photos of the views! Hope you’re having a great time xxx.

  Christ, reading that afterwards was humiliating. Had Bren glanced at his phone, felt guilty, then returned to groping his ex-girlfriend?

  “Promise me nothing else happened.”

  “That’s all, Georgina, and even that’s killing me. I feel sick to my stomach whenever I think about it. I’d do anything to take it back.”

  Twentysomething Georgina might have called her a doormat, but thirtysomething Georgina knew that the days when they’d promised each other “any cheating and it’s over” were long ago in more ways than one. What was she supposed to do—throw away her marriage over a drunken kiss, over half an hour?

  In the following days, her anger came in waves. She tried not to torture herself too much with thoughts of precisely where hands might have been during that half an hour. She tried to remind herself this was a small blip in the lifelong story of a marriage. And her effo
rts to keep her feelings in perspective were working, more or less—until the phone call she received that Friday.

  It was her mother. She said “hospital.” She said “tests.” And she said that one word beginning with C that nobody ever wants to hear.

  Georgina’s world fell apart.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going for tests, Mom?”

  “Oh, you know. I didn’t want to worry you if it turned out to be nothing.” Rose had sounded lighthearted, breezy; that was how she faced tragedy. “But I’m afraid it is something after all.”

  Georgina’s anger at Bren’s slipup mixed with her fear and grief until she didn’t know where one emotion ended and another began. How could he have driven this wedge between them at the very moment she needed him most? How could he?

  Of course, when Bren decided to put his tongue in Emma’s mouth, he’d had no idea those test results were hanging over them. No idea that later that week his wife would learn her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. Georgina would never forget his stricken expression when he heard. She knew it was the timing that made him look like a bigger bastard than he was—and yet. If he just hadn’t. That was the train of thought she tortured herself with. If he just hadn’t done it in the first place! If he’d just acted like the married man he was!

  The following months were the worst of Georgina’s life. Rose, who had decided against chemo, grew sicker with frightening speed. Within weeks, she was shrunken, barely able to move for the pain. Georgina, who had anticipated a long-drawn-out battle, had been shell-shocked by the sheer pace of her illness. It wasn’t a battle so much as an annihilation.

  During that traumatic time, she put aside the issue of Bren and Emma’s drunken kiss. It felt small and embarrassing. It was the last thing she wanted to bring up when her mother had this huge, terrifying monster to face.

  And within eleven weeks of her diagnosis, Rose was gone.

  In the time since, Georgina had often regretted not asking for her mother’s opinion. She wished she knew what Rose would have said. Would she have called Bren an arsehole and advised Georgina to be harder on him? Or would she have told her daughter that marriage was long and monogamy difficult and she should make room for these kinds of missteps? Both seemed plausible responses for Rose, who had never been one to hold back from saying what she really felt.