Then She Was Gone Read online

  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, you know, some fathers and daughters just have that sort of thing, don’t they? Daddy’s girls. They usually turn into the sort of women who can only be friends with men.”

  Laurel nods gratefully. Yes, that all makes perfect sense. She has seen that bond before between fathers and daughters. Not with her own daughters. Ellie was both a mummy’s and a daddy’s girl and Hanna is just a law unto herself. And maybe the surprise she is feeling is due to her own issues and nothing to do with Floyd and Poppy. Poppy is entertaining in a gauche kind of way and Floyd is clearly a wonderful, nurturing, and loving father.

  By the time Laurel leaves the office at five thirty and gets into her car in the underground car park she is feeling clearheaded and right-footed.

  She cannot wait to see Floyd again.

  Laurel and Floyd spend the whole of the following weekend together. It wasn’t planned that way, but there never seemed to be a point at which leaving his house made any sense. They had dinner out on Friday night, a late breakfast on Saturday morning, a trip to the cinema with Poppy that afternoon followed by a detour to M&S for new underwear and a toothbrush, Chinese take-out on Saturday night, and then brunch in a café around the corner on Sunday before Laurel managed to tear herself away and back to her flat on Sunday evening, ready for work on Monday morning.

  At the office Laurel feels as though she has shed a skin, that she is somehow reborn and that she needs to mark the transition in some landmark way.

  She calls Hanna.

  “How would you feel . . .” she starts tentatively, “if I invited my new boyfriend to our birthday dinner?”

  The silence is black and heavy.

  Laurel fills it. “Totally don’t mind if you say no. Totally understand. I just thought, in the spirit of us all moving on? In the spirit of a brave new world?”

  The silence continues, growing in depth and darkness.

  “Boyfriend?” says Hanna eventually. “Since when did you have a boyfriend?”

  “The guy,” says Laurel, “the guy I told you about? Floyd.”

  “I know the guy,” she replies. “I just wasn’t aware that he’d made boyfriend status.”

  “Yes, well, if you ever answered your phone . . .”

  Hanna sighs. Laurel sighs too, realizing she has just done the thing she always promised herself she would never do. When the children were small, Laurel’s mother would occasionally make small, raw observations about gaps between phone calls and visits that would tear tiny, painful strips off Laurel’s conscience. I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are able to give.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to nag. It’s just, yes, things are moving quite fast. I’ve met his kids. I’ve stayed at his. We talk all the time. We’ve just spent the whole weekend together. I just . . .” Ridiculous, she suddenly realizes. A ridiculous idea. “But forget I mentioned it. I mean, I haven’t even asked Floyd yet if he’d like to come. He’d probably rather saw his legs off. Forget I said anything.”

  There’s another silence. Softer this time. “Whatever,” Hanna says. “Invite him. I don’t mind. It’s going to be so fucked up anyway, we may as well go the whole hog.”

  Floyd says yes. Of course Floyd says yes. Floyd has made it very clear from the moment she headed home after their second date that he is wholly committed to their romance and that he is not interested in playing games or hard to get.

  “I would love that,” he says. “As long as your family are OK with it?”

  Paul had been OK about it. Hugely surprised, but OK. Jake had said it was fine. No one was jumping up and down about it but no one had said it was a mistake.

  “And Poppy?” Laurel adds. “Would Poppy like to come too?”

  She half hopes he’ll say no.

  “She’ll be thrilled,” Floyd says. “She keeps saying how much she’d like to meet your children.”

  “And my ex-husband. And my ex-husband’s girlfriend.”

  “The whole shebang.”

  The whole
shebang. The whole hog.

  She books a table for eight at a restaurant in Islington, a legendarily chichi place down a narrow cobbled alleyway off Upper Street.

  She must be mad, she tells herself. She must be absolutely insane.

  20

  On her birthday, Laurel receives a large bouquet of purple hyacinths and laurel from Floyd. Paul always used to put laurel in her bouquets. But this doesn’t take away from the pleasure of it, the startle of his thoughtfulness. And a comparison to her ex-husband is no bad thing, no bad thing at all.

  Later on he takes her to a bar in Covent Garden called Champagne & Fromage, which delivers what its name promises. Throughout the evening Laurel keeps her eyes on her surroundings, hoping for a glimpse of Hanna, who said she was “going somewhere in town with mates” when Laurel had inquired about her birthday plans. But she doesn’t see Hanna anywhere and so the mystery of the man called “T” stretches on.

  “When’s your birthday?” she asks Floyd, her knife breaking into a tartine.

  “The thirty-first of July,” he replies. “Roughly.”

  “Roughly?”

  He shrugs and smiles. “Things were a bit chaotic when I was born.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It was a steep trajectory for my parents. From the gutter to the stars.”

  “And the gutter was . . . ?”

  He narrows his eyes and she hears a small intake of breath. “My mum was fourteen when I was born. My dad was sixteen. No one wanted to know. They were homeless for a time. I was born in a public toilet, I believe. In a park. They took me to a hospital . . . and left me there.”

  Laurel’s breath catches.

  “I was dressed in a blue suit and a fresh nappy, wrapped in a blanket. I had on a soft hat and mittens. I was in a box lined with a cushion. They’d written my name on a piece of paper. ‘This is Floyd, please look after him.’ My parents came back for me three days later. By that time I’d been taken into emergency foster care. There was no way they were giving an abandoned baby back to a pair of scrawny teens with no means of support. It took them nearly a year to get me back. I think it was the fight to do so that fueled my parents’ ambition.”

  “And how did you find out about it? Did they tell you?”

  “Yes, they told me. My God, they told me. All the time. Whenever I was misbehaving they’d march it out: ‘We should have left you there in the hospital. We’ll take you back there, shall we?’ ” A muscle twitches in Floyd’s cheek.

  “But do you remember anything about it?” she asks. “Anything about those days?”

  “Nothing at all,” he replies. “My very first memory is my dad bringing home a plastic car. It had a little ignition”—he mimes turning a key in a lock—“and it made a noise when you turned it, an engine starting. And I remember sitting in that car for an hour, maybe more, just turning that ignition, over and over. I was about four then and we were living in an apartment in Boston with a balcony, views across town, all the bright lights and the ocean. So, no, I don’t remember the bad days. I don’t remember them at all.”

  “You know,” she says, “you’re the first person I ever met in my whole life who didn’t know their birthday.”

  He smiles. “Yup. Me, too.”

  Laurel glances about herself. For so long she has been the story: the woman whose daughter disappeared, the woman at the press conference, the woman in the papers, the woman who had to bury her daughter in tiny fragments. But now here is another human with a terrible story. What other stories surround her? she wonders. And how many stories has she missed all these years while she’s been so wrapped up in her own?

  “Your parents sound amazing,” she says.

  Floyd blinks and smiles sadly. “In many ways I suppose they are,” he says. But there’s a chip of ice in his delivery, something sad and dark that he can’t tell her about. And that’s fine. She’ll leave it there. She understands that not everything is conversational fodder, not everything is for sharing.

  They go back to Floyd’s house after dinner. Sara-Jade is curled up in the big armchair again, a laptop resting on her thighs, headphones on. She jumps slightly as Laurel and Floyd walk into the room.

  “Happy birthday,” she says in her whispery voice. “Did you have fun?”

  Laurel is taken aback by the unexpected overture.

  “Yes,” she says, “yes, thank you. We did.”

  Floyd squeezes Laurel’s shoulder and says, “I’m just popping to the loo, be back in a minute,” and Laurel knows his withdrawal is deliberate, that he’s hoping she and SJ might finally have a chance to bond.

  “I’m a bit tipsy,” she says to SJ. “We went to a champagne and cheese place. Had more champagne than cheese.”

  SJ smiles uncertainly. “How old are you?” she says. “If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “No, of course I don’t mind. I’ve never understood people being ashamed of their age. As if it’s a failure of some kind. I’m fifty-five,” she says. “And a few hours.”

  SJ nods.

  “Are you staying over?” Laurel asks.

  “No,” says SJ. “No. I think I’ll go home and sleep in my own bed. I’ve got work tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” says Laurel. “What sort of work do you do?”

  “Bits and bobs. Babysitting. Dog walking.” She lowers the lid of the laptop and uncurls her legs. “Modeling tomorrow. For a life-drawing class.”

  “Wow. Is that clothed, or . . . ?”

  “Naked,” SJ says. “Just as you say that there’s no shame in getting older, I think there’s no shame in being naked. And don’t you think,” she continues, “that if people say you shouldn’t be allowed to ban burkinis on the beach then, really, the natural extrapolation of that is that full nudity shouldn’t be banned either. Like, who decides which bit of a body should or shouldn’t be seen in public? If you’re saying that one woman legally has to cover her breasts and her minge, then how can you tell another woman that she’s not allowed to cover her legs or her arms? I mean, how does that even make sense?”

  Laurel nods and laughs. “Good point,” she says. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

  “No,” she says. “No one thinks about anything properly these days. Everyone just believes what people on Twitter tell them to believe. It’s all propaganda, however much it’s dressed up as liberal right thinking. We’re a nation of sheep.”

  Laurel feels suddenly very drunk and has to resist the temptation to say baaaaa. Instead she nods solemnly. She has barely absorbed another person’s opinion for over a decade. She is no sheep.

  “Your daughter was Ellie Mack,” says SJ, as if reading the changing direction of Laurel’s thoughts.

  “Yes,” Laurel replies, surprised. “Did your dad tell you?”

  “No,” she says. “I googled you. I’ve been reading everything on the Internet about it. It’s really, really sad.”

  “Yes,” Laurel agrees. “It’s very sad.”

  “She was really pretty.”

  “Thank you. Yes, she was.”

  “She looked really like Poppy, don’t you think?”

  Laurel’s head clears, suddenly and sharply, and she finds herself saying, almost defensively, “No, not really. I mean, maybe a little, around the mouth. But lots of people look like people, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” SJ replies, “they do.”

  21

  Laurel visits her mother the next day. She’d seemed a bit perkier during her visit last Thursday, interested in Laurel’s romance, gripping Laurel’s hand inside hers, her dark eyes sparkling. No talk of death. No empty gaze. Laurel hopes that she will find her in a similar mood today.

  But the joy seems to have seeped out of her in the days between her visits and she looks gray again, and hollow. Her first words to Laurel are “I think there’s not much time left for me now.” The words are seamless, said without pause or hesitation.

  Laurel sits down quickly beside her and says, “Oh, Mum, I thought you wer
e feeling better?”

  “Better,” says her mum. And then she nods. “Better.”

  “So why the talk of dying again?”

  “Because . . .”—she stabs at her collarbone with stiff fingers—“. . . old.”

  Laurel smiles. “Yes,” she says, “you are old. But there’s more life left in you yet.”

  Her mother shakes her head. “No. No. No life. And y . . . y . . . you. Happy. Now.”

  Laurel takes a sharp intake of breath. She feels the meaning of her mother’s words. “Have you been staying here for me?” she asks, tears catching at the back of her throat.

  “Yes. For y . . . y . . . you. Yes.”

  “And now I’m happy, you’re ready to go?”

  A huge smile crosses her mother’s face and she squeezes Laurel’s hand. “Yes. Yes.”

  A heavy tear rolls down Laurel’s cheek. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, Mum. I still need you.”

  “No,” says her mum. “Not n . . . n . . . now. Ellie found. You happy. I . . .” She prods at her collarbone. “I go.”

  Laurel wipes away the tear with the back of her hand and forces a smile. “It’s your life, Mum,” she says. “I can’t choose when to let you go.”

  “No,” says her mum. “N . . . n . . . no one can.”

  That afternoon, Laurel takes Poppy shopping. It’s raining, so she suggests Brent Cross as an alternative to Oxford Street.

  Poppy greets her at her front door wearing smart trousers with a jade-green round-neck cardigan and a floral raincoat. Her hair is in two plaits, one on each shoulder. She loops her arm through Laurel’s as they run through the rain to her car across the street. Then she rolls down her window and waves frantically at her father, who stands in the doorway in his socked feet waving back at her.

  “How are you?” Laurel asks, turning to glance at Poppy as she pulls out of her road.