Big Little Lies, Page 34

  Celeste sat behind a long table with a white tablecloth, waiting for her name to be called. Her heart thumped. Her mouth was dry. She picked up the glass of water in front of her and watched her hand tremble. She quickly put it back down; she wasn’t sure if she could get it safely to her mouth without spilling it.

  She’d spoken in court a few times recently, but this was different. She didn’t want to cry, although Susi had told her it was fine, and understandable, and even likely.

  “You’ll be speaking about some very personal, very painful experiences,” said Susi. “It’s a big thing I’m asking of you.”

  Celeste looked out at the small audience of men and women in suits and ties. Their faces were blank, professional; some of them looked a little bored.

  “I always pick someone in the audience,” Perry had told her once when they were talking about public speaking. “A friendly-looking face somewhere right in the middle of the crowd, and when I get up, I speak to him or her as if it’s just the two of us.”

  She remembered that she’d been surprised to hear that Perry needed any techniques at all. He always appeared so scrupulously confident and relaxed when he spoke in public, like a charismatic Hollywood star on a talk show. But that was Perry. Looking back it seemed that he’d actually lived his life in a state of perpetual low-level fear: fear of humiliation, fear of losing her, fear of not being loved.

  For a moment, she wished he were here to see her speak. She couldn’t help thinking that he’d be proud of her, in spite of the subject matter. The real Perry would be proud of her.

  Was that delusional? Probably, yes. Delusional thinking was her specialty these days—or perhaps it had always been her specialty.

  The hardest thing over the past year had been second-guessing and mistrusting her every passing thought and emotion. Every time she cried over Perry’s death it was a betrayal of Jane. It was foolish and misguided and wrong to grieve for a man who had done what he’d done. It was wrong to cry over the tears of her sons when there was another little boy who didn’t even know that Perry was his father. The right emotions were hatred and fury and regret. That was how she should be feeling, and she was happy when she felt all those things, which she often did, because they were appropriate, rational feelings, but then she’d find herself missing him, and looking forward to when he returned home from his trip, and she’d feel idiotic all over again and remind herself that Perry had cheated on her, probably on multiple occasions.

  In her dreams she screamed at him. How dare you, how dare you? She hit him over and over. She woke with tears still wet on her face.

  “I still love him,” she told Susi, as if she were confessing something disgusting.

  “You’re allowed to still love him.”

  “I’m going crazy,” she told her.

  “You’re working through it,” said Susi, and she listened patiently as Celeste talked through every misdemeanor for which Perry had punished her, in what must have been excruciating detail—“I know I should have gotten the boys to tidy up the Legos that day, but I was tired”; “I shouldn’t have said what I said”; “I shouldn’t have done what I did.” For some reason she needed to pick endlessly over even the most trivial events over the last five years and try to get it straight in her mind.

  “That wasn’t fair, was it?” she kept saying to Susi, as if Susi were the referee, as if Perry were there listening to this independent arbiter.

  “Do you think it was fair?” Susi would say, just like a good therapist should. “Do you think you deserved that?”

  Celeste watched the man sitting to her right pick up his glass of water. His hand trembled even worse than hers, but he persevered on bringing it to his mouth, even as the ice cubes clinked and water slopped over his hand.

  He was a tall, pleasant-looking, thin-faced man in his midthirties, wearing a tie under an ill-fitting red sweater. He must be another counselor, like Susi, but one who suffered a pathological fear of public speaking. Celeste wanted to put her hand on his arm to comfort him, but she didn’t want to embarrass him when he, after all, was the professional here.

  She looked down and saw where his black trousers had ridden up. He was wearing light brown ankle socks with his well-polished black business shoes. It was the sort of sartorial mishap that would give Madeline a fit. Celeste had let Madeline help choose her a new white silk shirt to wear today, together with a pencil skirt and black court shoes. “No toes,” Madeline had said when Celeste had modelled the outfit with her choice of sandals. “Toes are not right for this event.”

  Celeste had acquiesced. She’d been letting Madeline do a lot of things for her over the past year. “I should have known,” Madeline had kept saying. “I should have known what you were going through.” No matter how many times Celeste assured her that there was no possible way that she could have known, that Celeste would never have permitted her to know, Madeline had continued to battle genuine guilt. All Celeste could do was let her be there for her now.

  Celeste looked for her friendly face in the audience and settled on a woman in her fifties, with a bright bird-like face, who was nodding along encouragingly as Susi did her introduction.

  She reminded Celeste a little of the boys’ Year 1 teacher at their new school just around the corner from the flat. Celeste had made an appointment to see her before they started. “They idolized their father, and since his death, they’ve been having some behavioral issues,” Celeste had told her at her first meeting.

  “Of course they have,” said Mrs. Hooper. She looked like nothing would surprise her. “Let’s have a weekly meeting so we can stay on top of this.”

  Celeste had managed not to throw her arms around her and cry into her nice floral blouse.

  The twins had not coped well over the past year. They were so used to Perry being gone for long periods that it took a long time for them to understand that he wasn’t ever coming home. They reacted like their father reacted when things went wrong: angrily, violently. Every day they tried to kill each other, and every night they ended up in the same bed, their heads on the same pillow.

  Seeing their grief felt like a punishment to Celeste, but a punishment for what? For staying with their father? For wanting him to die?

  Bonnie did not have to do jail time. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act and sentenced to two hundred hours of community service. In handing down his sentence the judge noted that the defendant’s moral culpability was at the lower end of the scale for this type of offense. He took into account the fact that Bonnie did not have a criminal record, was clearly remorseful and that, although it was possibly foreseeable that the victim would fall, this was not her intent.

  He also took into account the testimony of expert witnesses who proved that the balcony railing was beneath the minimum height requirements of the current building code, that the bar stools were not appropriate for use on the balcony, and that other contributing factors included the weather, the consequent slipperiness of the railing and the intoxication of both the defendant and the victim.

  According to Madeline, Bonnie had performed her community service with great pleasure, Abigail by her side the whole time.

  There were letters going back and forth from insurance companies and lawyers, but it felt like something between all of them. Celeste had made it clear she wanted no money from the school and that she would be donating back any payouts she received to cover higher insurance premiums as a result of the accident.

  The house and the other properties had been sold, and Celeste had moved the boys into the little apartment in McMahons Point and had gone back to work three days a week at a family law firm. She enjoyed the fact that she didn’t think about anything else for hours at a time.

  Her boys were trust-fund kids, but their trust funds weren’t going to define them, and she was determined that Max and Josh would one day be asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

  She’d also set up a trust fund of equ
al value for Ziggy.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Jane had said, when she’d told her, over lunch at a café near Celeste’s apartment. She’d looked appalled, almost nauseous. “We don’t want his money. Your money, I mean.”

  “It’s Ziggy’s money. If Perry knew Ziggy was his son he would have wanted him to be treated exactly the same as Max and Josh,” Celeste had told her. “Perry was—”

  But then she’d found herself unable to speak, because how could she say to Jane that Perry was generous to a fault, and scrupulously fair. Her husband had always been so fair, except for those times when he was monstrously unfair.

  But Jane had reached across the café table and taken her hand and said, “I know he was,” almost as if she did understand everything that Perry was and wasn’t.

  Susi stood at the lectern. She looked nice today. She’d cut back on the eye makeup, thank goodness.

  “Domestic violence victims often don’t look at all like you’d expect them to look,” said Susi. “And their stories don’t always sound as black-and-white as you’d expect them to sound.”

  Celeste searched for her friendly face in the audience of emergency department doctors, triage nurses, GPs and counselors.

  “Which is why I’ve asked these two lovely people here today. They’ve very generously given up their time to share their experiences with you.” Susi lifted her hand to encompass Celeste and the man sitting next to her. He had placed one hand on his own thigh to try to stop his leg from jiggling up and down with nerves.

  My God, thought Celeste. She blinked back a sudden rush of hot tears. He’s not a counselor. He’s someone like me. It happened to him.

  She turned to look at him and he smiled back at her, his eyes darting about like tiny fish.

  “Celeste?” said Susi.

  Celeste stood. She glanced back at the man in the sweater, and then over to Susi, who nodded encouragingly, and Celeste walked the few steps to stand behind the wooden lectern.

  She searched the audience for that nice-looking woman. Yes. There she was, smiling, nodding a little.

  Celeste took a breath.

  She’d agreed to come here today as a favor for Susi, and because, sure, she wanted to do her bit to make sure health professionals knew when to ask more questions, when not to let things go. She’d been planning to give them the facts, but not to spill her soul. She would keep her dignity. She would keep a little piece of herself safe.

  But now she was suddenly filled with a passionate desire to share everything, to say the bare ugly truth, to hold nothing back. Fuck dignity.

  She wanted to give that terrified man in the uncool sweater the confidence to share his own bare ugly truth. She wanted to let him know that at least one person here today understood all the mistakes he’d made along the way: the times he’d hit back, the times he’d stayed when he should have left, the times he’d given her another chance, the times he’d deliberately antagonized her, the times he’d let his children see things they shouldn’t see. She wanted to tell him that she knew all the perfect little lies he’d told himself for all those years, because she’d told herself the same lies. She wanted to enfold his trembling hands between her own and say, “I understand.”

  She gripped both sides of the lectern and leaned in close to the microphone. There was something so simple and yet so complicated that she needed these people to understand.

  “This can happen . . .”

  She stopped, stepped away slightly from the microphone and cleared her throat. She saw Susi standing to one side with the held-breath expression of a parent whose child is performing in public for the first time; her hands were held slightly aloft, as if she were ready to run onstage and scoop Celeste to safety.

  Celeste put her mouth closer to the microphone, and now her voice was loud and clear.

  “This can happen to anyone.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I am so grateful to all the wonderful, talented people at Amy Einhorn Books, with special thanks to the amazing Amy Einhorn herself, as well as Liz Stein and Katie McKee.

  Thank you to my agent, Faye Bender, and my publishers and editors around the world, especially Cate Paterson, Celine Kelly, and Maxine Hitchcock.

  Thank you so much to Cherie Penney, Marisa Vella, Maree Atkins, Ingrid Bown, and Mark Davidson for generously giving up your time so I could benefit from your various professional fields of expertise.

  I have a terrible habit of scavenging through conversations looking for material. Thank you, Mary Hassal, Emily Crocker, and Liz Frizell for allowing me to borrow tiny pieces of your life for fictional purpose. Now seems like a good time to make clear that the parents at the lovely school where my children currently attend are nothing like the parents at Pirriwee Public, and are disappointingly well-behaved at school functions.

  Thank you to Mum, Dad, Kati, Fiona, Sean, and Nicola, with special thanks to my sister, the brilliant author Jaclyn Moriarty, who always has been and always will be my very first reader.

  Thank you to Anna Kuper for making my life so much easier in so many ways.

  Thank you to fellow authors and friends Ber Carroll and Dianne Blacklock for turning book tours into girls weekends away. (Ber even manages to make shopping fun.) We produce a joint newsletter called Book Chat. To subscribe, visit my website at www.lianemoriarty.com.

  Thank you to Adam, George, and Anna for making my world complete. And kind of loud and crazy.

  In the end, this novel turned out to be a story about friendship, so I’m dedicating it to my friend Margaret Palisi, with whom I share thirty-five years of memories.

  The following books were useful to me in writing this novel: “Not to People Like Us”: Hidden Abuse in Upscale Marriages by Susan Weitzman (2000) and Surviving Domestic Violence: Voices of Women Who Broke Free by Elaine Weiss (2004).