TARA
CLEO: Hey @ Tara. How are you feeling, love?
ESTHER: Yeah. We heard you’re back, please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.
CLEO: We’re here for you, sweetie. Sending hugs.
Tara shut her eyes when she heard the bedroom door open. Jem moved quietly across the room, tiptoeing, careful not to disturb her. It had been this way since the police car dropped her off at their front door at three in the morning. Missing, they had called it; missing for eight hours. She hadn’t thought of it that way. She hadn’t planned it, hadn’t meant to vanish.
Instead of turning home, she had sat at the bus stop under the cool night sky, watching each bus groan to a halt and glide away without her. She lay down eventually on the filthy bench, curling into herself, as if suspended outside of time. Watching herself, but not inhabiting herself.
She must have drifted because she heard the voice as if from a dream:
“Ma’am? Ma’am…are you okay?”
For the first time in forever, she’d been asleep, deeply, blissfully asleep, without anyone crying.
“Ma’am? Are you…drunk?”
Her eyes snapped open. A uniformed man stood over her, blond hair catching the harsh white glow of the streetlamp. For a moment, he looked like Jem, luminous in the dark.
Jem. Jem!
The thought jolted her upright.
“I’m not drunk,” she blurted. “I’m a mum. My name is Tara. I have two girls…twins. I went for a run and just got tired, I guess…I…”
The policeman kept pressing: had she taken anything, was she sure she was okay. She didn’t look at his face, couldn’t bear to read judgment there. The cruiser was warm when she climbed inside, its seats smelling faintly of old fries. The scent made her stomach twist with hunger. Had she eaten dinner? What time was it?
“Nearly three a.m.,” the officer said.
It couldn’t be. Surely she hadn’t been out that long.
He draped a heavy jacket across her shoulders, one she guessed was kept in the back for people like her. Only then did she realize she was shivering, her teeth clicking faintly in the silence. She kept apologizing as if it would earn her invisible points from parents who weren’t there.
“Just doing my job, ma’am,” he said each time.
He sounded patient and kind, but also like a school teacher tolerating their errant pupil.
Shame burned in her chest. What would Jem think? What had she done to him, to the girls? As the car slowed before their building, she almost told the officer to keep driving, to take her far away, back across an ocean to Nigeria, to her parents. This life felt like wearing a dress two sizes too small, unfitting, suffocating.
She had thought by thirty she would be done making mistakes. That she would be a woman sure of herself, no questions asked. Instead, she was thirty-one and some mornings woke up convinced her real life had been switched for a charade.
“I don’t…” she started, then stopped. What was the point of explaining any of this to a stranger?
The officer glanced at her as he parked. “Everything okay, ma’am?”
She wanted to scream I’m not a ma’am, I’m just a girl. Instead, she nodded, muttered thanks, peeled off the jacket, and stepped into the night’s sharp air.
She was ashamed. What would her mother think? Being the only child for a long time had meant she had to be good. She didn’t want to be the cause of ache or angst to her parents, so she didn’t rebel like the other kids; she learned to suppress her anger or discontent when her parents annoyed her because she felt responsible for the peace in their family. She had no choice but to be the model child. It wasn’t until her mother had gotten pregnant when she was thirty-nine and Tara twelve, that Tara felt like she could breathe. She didn’t need to be perfect all the time; now her parents had options. They had other children who could make them proud and happy if Tara was disappointing them.
She’d been excited at the prospect of being a big sister (she’d thought they were going to be girls), but when her brothers finally came, Tara found the experience underwhelming. They were babies, and they cried a lot, and because they were two, it meant Tara almost always had one in her hand when she was home from school. She was a teenager, and she didn’t necessarily want to spend her time changing diapers and soothing fussy babies. She’d thought having siblings would take the spotlight off her, but it had only succeeded in creating a different kind of light. Whereas before she only had her parents to disappoint, now she had brothers who looked up to her, as her mother often reminded her.
And Tara felt herself retreating into that imaginary straitjacket – the one that held her in place, that told her she couldn’t afford to loosen up otherwise…
She wondered as she climbed the stairs to their apartment whether something was wrong with her. What kind of woman left her children for hours and didn’t care if they were okay?
At the door, Jem stood waiting, as though rooted there for hours in his sweatshirt and worn pants. He didn’t speak at first, just pulled her in, arms tight, his chest trembling against her cheek.
“You scared me,” he murmured finally.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, meaning it for more than just that night. She was sorry for a lot of things, sorry that she was no longer satisfied with the life they had, sorry she didn’t love the girls enough, and sorry that she disappointed her parents.
“The girls are asleep,” he said. “They missed you at bedtime. I missed you at bedtime.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes.
She said nothing.
“You’re shaking.”
“I’ll take a warm bath. I’ll be fine.”
She’d wanted him to push, to demand to know where she’d been. She wanted him to lash out, to get mad at her for jeopardizing her life, their life. She wanted him to do anything else but pretend that everything was okay. But Jem was Jem. That stoic part of him that she’d previously admired had become a snare. She didn’t want a wall; she wanted a human being.
That was yesterday. Since then, she’d barely moved from bed. Jem took the day off to care for the girls. She only rose to use the bathroom, nipples aching until she squeezed out enough milk for relief. Food turned her stomach. Her phone lay untouched; she had no strength for her mother’s silence, no energy for Cleo and Esther in the group chat.
She’d told Jem she didn’t feel so good, and she didn’t want the girls to catch anything, so they’d better stay away from her. The only thing she didn’t want them to catch was her depression, because yes, that’s what it was, she’d finally arrived at that conclusion, didn’t even need Mr Google to confirm it.
She would have booked an appointment with Dr Leila, her online therapist, but she didn’t have the strength to do even that.
Jem had brought her phone to her that morning, and she’d groaned and told him to take it away.
Now she heard him rummaging in the bedside drawer. She blinked into the dim light. “Where are the girls?”
“My mother took them. Since you were sick, I didn’t want them catching anything.”
“Your mother knows how to handle twins?” Tara almost laughed.
“She raised me, didn’t she?”
“And look how well she did.” Her voice came out flat, her body sinking back into the mattress.
She trusted Jem’s judgment when it came to the girls more than she did hers. So, if he thought they were better off at his mother’s, then so be it.
He sighed, long-suffering. “Do you want anything to eat? There’s toast. I could make chamomile.”
“No thanks.”
“Well, you have to eat something. You haven’t eaten since morning.”
“Just leave me alone, Jem. I’m fine.”
Another sigh, heavier this time. Then gently: “Your friend’s been calling. Cleo. She wants to know if she can come see you.”
Her stomach clenched. “How do you know Cleo? Why does she have your number?”
“I called her the day you…disappeared. She was at the top of your messages.”
Tara groaned, pulling the blanket over her head. “I don’t want to see anyone. I’m sick, remember?”
Mean words, but she felt raw, peeled back, like a banana browning in the open air, turning soft, soggy, unrecognizable even to herself.