Big Little Lies (13 page)

Three Months Before the Trivia Night

C
eleste and Perry sat on the couch, drinking red wine, eating Lindt chocolate balls and watching their third episode in a row of
The Walking Dead
. The boys were sound asleep. The house was quiet, except for the crunch of footsteps coming from the television. The main character was creeping through the forest, his knife drawn. A zombie appeared from behind a tree, her face black and rotting, her teeth snapping, making that guttural sound that zombies apparently make. Celeste and Perry both jumped and screamed. Perry spilled some of his red wine.

He dabbed at the splash of wine on his T-shirt. “That scared the life out of me.”

The man on the screen drove his knife through the zombie’s skull.

“Gotcha!” said Celeste.

“Pause it while I get us a refill,” said Perry.

Celeste picked up the remote and paused the DVD. “This is even better than last season.”

“I know,” said Perry. “Although I think it gives me bad dreams.”

He brought over the bottle of wine from the sideboard.

“Are we going to some kid’s birthday party tomorrow?” he asked as he refilled her glass. “I ran into Mark Whittaker at Catalinas today and he seemed to think we were going. He said the mother mentioned we were invited. Renata somebody. Actually, did I meet a Renata that day when I went to the school with you?”

“You did,” said Celeste. “We were invited to Amabella’s party. But we’re not going.”

She wasn’t concentrating. That was the problem. She didn’t have time to prepare. She was enjoying the wine, chocolate and zombies. Perry had only gotten back less than a week ago. He was always so loving and chipper after a trip, especially if he’d left the country. It somehow cleansed him. His face always seemed smoother, his eyes brighter. The layers of frustration would take weeks to build up again. The children had been in feral little moods tonight. “Mummy gets a rest tonight,” Perry told the boys earlier, and he’d done the whole bath, teeth, story routine on his own, while she sat on the couch, reading her book and drinking a Perry Surprise. It was a cocktail he’d invented years ago. It tasted of chocolate and cream and strawberries and cinnamon, and every woman he ever prepared it for went crazy over it. “I’ll give you my children in return for that recipe,” Madeline had once told Perry.

Perry filled his own glass. “Why aren’t we going?”

“I’m taking the boys to Disney On Ice. Madeline got free tickets, and a group of us are going.” Celeste broke off another piece of chocolate. She’d texted her apologies to Renata and hadn’t heard back. As the nanny did most of the school pickups and drop-offs, Celeste hadn’t run into her since the first day of school. She knew she was aligning herself with Madeline and Jane by saying no, but, well, she
was
aligned with Madeline and Jane. And this was a fifth-birthday party. This was not a matter of life or death.

“So I’m not welcome at this Disney thing?” said Perry. He sipped his wine. She felt it then. In her stomach. A tiny squeeze. But his tone was casual. Humorous. If she trod carefully, she might still save the night.

She put down the chocolate. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d appreciate a bit of alone time. You can go to the gym.”

Perry stood above her with the wine bottle still in his hand. He smiled. “I’ve been away for three weeks. I’m away again next Friday. Why would I need alone time?”

He didn’t sound or look angry, but she could feel something in the atmosphere, like an electrical charge before a storm. The hairs on her arms stood up.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think.”

“You sick of me already?” He looked hurt. He
was
hurt. She’d been thoughtless. She should have known better. Perry was always looking for evidence that she didn’t really love him. It was like he expected it, and then he was angry when he believed himself proven right.

She went to stand up from the couch, but that would turn it into a confrontation. Sometimes, if she behaved normally, she could gently nudge them back on track. Instead, she looked up at him. “The boys don’t even know this little girl. And I hardly ever take them to see live shows. It just seemed like this was the better option.”

“Well, why
don’t
you take them to live shows?” said Perry. “We don’t need free tickets! Why didn’t you tell Madeline to give the tickets to someone who would really appreciate them?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t about money, really.”

She hadn’t thought of that. She was depriving some other mother of a free ticket. She should have thought of the fact that Perry would be back and he’d want to spend time with the boys, but he was away so often, she was used to making social arrangements that suited her.

“I’m sorry,” she said calmly. She was sorry, but it was fruitless,
because he would never believe her. “I probably should have chosen the party.” She stood up. “I’m going to take my contacts out. My eyes are itchy.”

She went to walk past him. He grabbed her upper arm. His fingers dug into the flesh.

“Hey,” she said. “That hurts.”

It was part of the game that her initial reaction was always one of outrage and surprise, as if this had never happened before, as if he maybe didn’t know what he was doing.

He gripped harder.

“Don’t,” she said. “Perry. Just don’t.”

The pain ignited her anger. The anger was always there: a reservoir of flammable fuel. She heard her voice turn high and hysterical. A shrieking shrewish woman.

“Perry, this is not a big deal! Don’t turn everything into a big deal.”

Because now it was no longer about the party. Now it was about every other time. His hand tightened further. It looked like he was making a decision: exactly how much to hurt her.

It hurt, but not that much.

He shoved her, just hard enough so that she staggered back clumsily.

Then he took a step back and lifted his chin, breathing heavily through his nostrils, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. He waited to see what she’d do next.

There were so many options.

Sometimes she tried to respond like an adult. “That is unacceptable.”

Sometimes she yelled.

Sometimes she walked away.

Sometimes she fought back. She punched and kicked him the way she’d once punched and kicked her older brother. For a few
moments he would let her, as if it were what he wanted, as if it were what he needed, before he grabbed her wrists. She wasn’t the only one who woke up the next day with bruises. She’d seen them on Perry’s body. She was as bad as he was. As sick as he was. “I don’t care who started it!” she always said to the children.

None of the options were effective.

“I will leave you if you ever do that again,” she said after the first time, and she was deadly serious, my God she was serious. She knew exactly how she was meant to behave in a situation like this. The boys were only eight months old. Perry cried. She cried. He promised. He swore on his children’s lives. He was heartbroken. He bought her the first piece of jewelry she would never wear.

A week after the twins had their second birthday, it happened again. Worse than the first time. She was devastated. The marriage was over. She was going to leave. There was no doubt at all. But that very night, both boys woke up with terrible coughs. It was croup. The next day Josh got so sick, their GP said, “I’m calling an ambulance.” Josh was in intensive care for three nights. The tender purple bruises on Celeste’s left hip were laughably irrelevant when a doctor stood in front of her saying gently, “We think we should intubate.”

All she’d wanted was for Josh to be OK. And then he
was
OK, sitting up in his bed, demanding
The Wiggles
and his brother in a voice still husky from that awful tube. She and Perry were euphoric with relief, and a few days after they brought Josh home from the hospital, Perry left for Hong Kong, and the moment for dramatic action had passed.

And the unassailable fact that underlay all her indecisiveness was this: She loved Perry. She was still
in
love with him. She still had a crush on him. He made her happy and made her laugh. She still enjoyed talking with him, watching TV with him, lying in bed with him on cold, rainy mornings. She still wanted him.

But each time she didn’t leave, she gave him tacit permission to
do it again. She knew this. She was an educated woman with choices, places to go, family and friends who would gather around, lawyers who would represent her. She could go back to work and support herself. She wasn’t frightened that he’d kill her if she tried to leave. She wasn’t frightened that he’d take the children away from her.

One of the school mums, Gabrielle, often chatted with Celeste in the playground after school while her son and Celeste’s boys played ninjas. “I’m starting a new diet tomorrow,” she’d told Celeste yesterday. “I probably won’t stick to it, and then I’ll be all filled with self-loathing.” She looked Celeste up and down and said, “You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you, skinny minny?”
Actually I do,
Celeste thought.
I know exactly what you mean.

Now she pressed her hand to her upper arm and battled the desire to cry. She wouldn’t be able to wear that sleeveless dress tomorrow now.

“I don’t know why . . .” She stopped.
I don’t know why I stay. I don’t know why I deserve this. I don’t know why you do this, why we do this, why this keeps happening.

“Celeste,” he said hoarsely, and she could see the violence draining from his body. The DVD started again. Perry picked up the remote and turned off the television.

“Oh God. I’m so sorry.” His face sagged with regret.

It was over now. There would be no further recriminations about the party. In fact, the very opposite. He’d be tender and solicitous. For the next few days up until he left for his trip, no woman would be more cherished than Celeste. Part of her would enjoy it: the tremulous, teary, righteous feeling of being wronged.

She let her hand drop from her arm.

It could have been so much worse. He rarely hit her face. She’d never broken a limb or needed stitches. Her bruises could always be kept secret with a turtleneck or sleeves or long pants. He would never lay a finger on the children. The boys never saw. It could be worse.
Oh, so much worse. She’d read the articles about proper domestic violence victims. That was terrible. That was real. What Perry did didn’t count. It was small stuff, which made it all the more humiliating, because it was so . . . tacky. So childish and trite.

He didn’t cheat on her. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t drink to excess. He didn’t ignore her, like the way her father had ignored her mother. That would be the worst. To be ignored. To not be seen.

Perry’s rage was an illness. A mental illness. She saw the way it took hold of him, how he tried his best to resist. When he was in the throes of it, his eyes became red and glassy, as if he were drugged. The things he said didn’t even make sense. It wasn’t him. The rage wasn’t him. Would she leave him if he got a brain tumor and the tumor affected his personality? Of course she wouldn’t.

This was just a glitch in an otherwise perfect relationship. Every relationship had its glitches. Its ups, its downs. It was like motherhood. Every morning the boys climbed into bed with her for a cuddle, and at first it was heavenly, and then, after about ten minutes or so, they started fighting, and it was terrible. Her boys were gorgeous little darlings. Her boys were feral little animals.

She would never leave Perry any more than she could leave the boys.

Perry held out his arms. “Celeste?”

She turned her head, took a step away, but there was no one else there to comfort her. There was only him. The real him. She stepped forward and laid her head against his chest.

Samantha:
I’ll never forget the moment when Perry and Celeste walked into the trivia night. There was like this ripple across the room. Everyone just stopped and stared.

I
sn’t this FANTASTIC!” cried Madeline to Chloe as they took their really very excellent seats in front of the giant ice rink. “You can feel the cold from the ice! Brrr! Oh! Can you hear the music? I wonder where the princesses—”

Chloe had reached over and placed one hand gently over her mother’s mouth. “Shhh.”

Madeline knew she was talking too much because she was feeling anxious and ever so slightly guilty. Today needed to be stupendous to make it worth the rift she’d created between herself and Renata. Eight kindergarten children, who would otherwise be attending Amabella’s party, were here watching Disney On Ice because of Madeline.

Madeline looked past Chloe at Ziggy, who was nursing a giant stuffed toy on his lap.
Ziggy
was the reason they were here today, she reminded herself. Poor Ziggy wouldn’t have been at the party.
Dear little fatherless Ziggy. Who was possibly a secret psychopathic bully . . . but still!

“Are you taking care of Harry the Hippo this weekend, Ziggy?” she said brightly. Harry the Hippo was the class toy. Every weekend it went home with a different child, along with a scrapbook that had to be returned with a little story about the weekend, accompanied by photos.

Ziggy nodded mutely. A child of few words.

Jane leaned forward, discreetly chewing gum as always. “It’s quite stressful having Harry to stay. We have to give Harry a good time. Last weekend he went on a roller coaster— Ow!” Jane recoiled as one of the twins, who was sitting next to her and fighting his brother, elbowed her in the back of the head.

“Josh!” said Celeste sharply. “Max! Just stop it!”

Madeline wondered if Celeste was OK today. She looked pale and tired, with purplish shadows under her eyes, although on Celeste they looked like an artful makeup effect that everyone should try.

The lights in the auditorium began to dim, and then went to black. Chloe clutched Madeline’s arm. The music began to pound, so loud that Madeline could feel the vibrations. The ice rink filled with an array of colorful, swooping, whirling Disney characters. Madeline looked down the row of seats at her guests, their profiles illuminated by the blazing spotlights on the ice. Every child was looking straight ahead, little backs straight, enthralled by the spectacle in front of them, and every parent had turned to look at their child’s profile, enchanted by their enchantment.

Except for Celeste, who had dropped her head and pressed her hand to her forehead.

I have to leave him.
Sometimes, when she was thinking about something else, the thought came into her head with the shock and the force of a flying fist.
My husband hits me.

God almighty, what was wrong with her? All that insane rationalizing. A
glitch
, for God’s sake. Of course she had to leave. Today! Right now! As soon as they got home from the show she would pack her bags.

But the boys would be so tired and grumpy.

•   •   •

I
t was fantastic,” said Jane to her mother, who had called up to ask how Disney On Ice went. “Ziggy loved it. He says he wants to learn how to ice-skate.”

“Your grandfather loved to ice-skate!” said her mother triumphantly.

“There you go,” said Jane, not bothering to tell her mother that every single child had announced after the show that they now wanted to learn how to ice-skate. Not just those with past lives.

“Well, and you’ll never guess who I ran into at the shops today,” said her mother. “Ruth Sullivan!”

“Did you?” said Jane, wondering if this was the real reason for the call. Ruth was her ex-boyfriend’s mother.

“How’s Zach?” she asked dutifully as she unwrapped a new piece of gum.

“Fine,” said her mother. “He’s, er, well he’s engaged, darling.”

“Is he?” said Jane. She slipped the gum in her mouth and chewed, wondering how she felt about that, but there was something else distracting her now, a tiny possibility of a tiny catastrophe. She began walking around their messy apartment, picking up cushions and discarded clothes.

“I wasn’t sure I should tell you,” said her mother. “I know it was a long time ago, but he did break your heart.”

“He didn’t break my heart,” said Jane vaguely.

He did break her heart, but he broke it so gently, so respectfully
and regretfully, the way a nice, well-brought-up nineteen-year-old boy did break your heart when he wanted to go on a Contiki tour of Europe, and sleep with lots of girls.

When she thought about Zach now it was like remembering an old school friend, someone she would hug with genuine teary tenderness if they met at their school reunion, and then not see again until the next reunion.

Jane got down on her knees and looked under the couch.

“Ruth asked about Ziggy,” said her mother meaningfully.

“Did she?” said Jane.

“I showed her the photo of Ziggy on his first day of school, and I was watching her face, and she didn’t say anything, thank goodness, but I just
knew
what she was thinking, because I have to say, Ziggy’s face in that photo does look a
teeny
bit like—”

“Mum! Ziggy looks nothing like Zach,” said Jane, getting back to her feet.

She hated it when she caught herself deconstructing Ziggy’s beautiful face, looking for a familiar feature: the lips, the nose, the eyes. Sometimes she thought she’d see something, a flash of something out of the corner of her eye, and then she’d die a little, before quickly reassembling Ziggy into Ziggy.

“Oh, I know!” said her mother. “Nothing at all like Zach!”

“And Zach is not Ziggy’s father.”

“Oh, I know that darling. Goodness. I know that. You would have told me.”

“More to the point, I would have told
Zach
.”

Zach had phoned her after Ziggy was born. “Is there something you need to tell me, Jane?” he’d said in a tight, bright voice. “Nope,” Jane had told him, and she’d heard his tiny exhalation of relief.

“Well, I know
that
,” said her mother. She quickly changed the subject. “Tell me. Did you get some good photos with the class toy?
Your father is e-mailing you this wonderful place where you can get them printed off for . . . How much is it, Bill? How much? No, Jane’s photos! For that thing she has to do for Ziggy!”

“Mum,” interrupted Jane. She walked into the kitchen and picked up Ziggy’s backpack where it lay on the floor. She held it upside down. Nothing fell out. “It’s fine, Mum. I know where to get the photos done.”

Her mother ignored her. “Bill! Listen to me! You said there was a website . . .” Her voice faded.

Jane walked into Ziggy’s bedroom, where he was sitting on the floor playing with his Legos. She lifted up his bedclothes and shook them.

“He’s going to e-mail you the details,” said her mother.

“Wonderful,” said Jane distractedly. “I’ve got to go, Mum. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She hung up. Her heart pounded. She pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead. No. Surely not. She could not have been so stupid.

Ziggy looked up at her curiously.

Jane said, “I think we’ve got a problem.”

•   •   •

T
here was silence when Madeline picked up the phone.

“Hello?” said Madeline again. “Who is it?”

She could hear someone crying and saying something incoherent.

“Jane?” Madeline suddenly recognized the voice. “What’s the matter? What is it?”

“It’s
nothing
,” said Jane. She sniffed. “Nobody died. It’s sort of
funny
, really. It’s
hilarious
that I’m crying over this.”

“What happened?”

“It’s just . . . Oh, what will those other mothers think of me
now
?” Jane’s voice quavered.

“Who cares what they think!” said Madeline.

“I care!” said Jane.

“Jane. Just tell me. What is it? What happened?”

“We’ve lost him,” sobbed Jane.

“Lost who? You’ve lost Ziggy?” Madeline felt the panic rise. She was obsessed with losing her own children, and quickly confirmed their respective locations: Chloe in bed, Fred doing his reading with Ed, Abigail staying at her dad’s place (yet again).

“We left him sitting on the seat. I remember actually thinking what a disaster it would be if we left him behind. I actually
thought
that, but then Josh got his nosebleed and we all got distracted. I’ve left a message on the lost-property number, but he wasn’t labeled or anything . . .”

“Jane. You’re not making any sense.”

“Harry the Hippo! We’ve
lost
Harry the Hippo!”

Thea:
That’s the thing about these Gen Y kids. They’re careless. Harry the Hippo had been with the school for over ten years. That cheap synthetic toy she replaced it with smelled just terrible. Made in China. The hippo’s face wasn’t even friendly.

Harper:
Look, it wasn’t so much that she lost Harry the Hippo, but that she put photos in the scrapbook of the little exclusive group who went to Disney On Ice. So all the kids get to see that, and the poor little tots are thinking,
Why wasn’t I invited?
As I said to Renata, that was just thoughtless.

Samantha:
Yes, and you know what’s really shocking? Those were
the last photos ever taken of Harry the Hippo
.
Harry the Heritage-Listed Hippo. Harry the . . . Sorry, it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.

Gabrielle:
Oh my God, the
fuss
when poor Jane lost the class toy, and everyone is pretending it’s not a big deal, but clearly it
is
a big deal, and I’m thinking, ‘Can you people get a life?’ Hey, do I look thinner than when we last met? I’ve lost three kilos.