Chapter 8: The Weight of Returning

Chapter 8: The Weight of Returning

Lila POV

On Monday morning my mother brings me tea.

She knocks first. She has never knocked. She stands in my doorway holding a cup on a saucer, as if I were a guest, and says, "You didn't come down for breakfast."

"I wasn't hungry."

"You should eat." She crosses the room, sets the cup on my bedside table, and, after a moment's hesitation, lays the back of her hand against my forehead. "You're pale."

I hold very still. It is the first time she has touched my face since I was small enough to be carried.

I want to lean into it. That is the humiliating part. Twenty-two years of practice, and my body still wants to lean.

"I'm fine, Mum."

"Mr. Hale will ring on Wednesday. And I've arranged for the archive on Friday, at ten." She takes her hand away and smooths her skirt. "You won't need to be there. I'd prefer it if you weren't."

"Because it's a clerical matter."

"Yes."

"Which needs three days of lawyers."

Her smile doesn't move. "Drink your tea, darling."

She leaves. I look at the cup for a long time.

Friday, at ten. St. Anne's, I assume, though she hasn't said it. I haven't said it either. I have the photograph on my phone, a crooked, glare-struck image of one page, and I have not told her I have it. I am learning what it feels like to hold something in a house where everyone is holding something.

The tea smells of bergamot. My stomach turns over, sudden and sour, and I put the cup down in the hall and stand with my hand flat against the wall until it passes.

No sleep, I think. Two nights of no sleep.

My phone has been quiet in a way that feels loud.

Eleven missed calls from Chloe, spread across two days. A voicemail, forty seconds long, that I haven't played. Seven texts from Jason that I haven't opened, though I can read the first line of each on the lock screen.

Lila please.

I know I handled it badly.

Can we just talk like adults.

I don't know why that last one makes me laugh, standing alone in my bedroom, my back against the door. Like adults. As though I were the one who had behaved like a child.

I don't delete them. I don't answer them. I put the phone in my bag and put my coat on and go to work, because the bookshop opens at ten and it is the only place in my life where nobody has ever needed me to be anything but punctual.

The shop smells of paper and floor polish and Mr. Abara's peppermints. It sits on a corner of Aldrich Street between the bakery and the boutique with the gold-lettered window, and on a Monday morning it is nearly empty.

"There she is." Mr. Abara looks up from the till, glasses halfway down his nose. "You look as if you've been dragged through a hedge."

"Thank you."

"I mean it kindly." He pushes a peppermint across the counter. "Sit. Shelve the poetry. Don't speak to anyone."

I shelve the poetry. I don't speak to anyone. For two hours I put small books in alphabetical order and think about nothing, which is, I suppose, what I came here for.

Except that every time I reach up for a high shelf, my other hand goes to the side of my head.

A small, bare place above my ear.

I think of the man in the lamplight, holding something gold up to the window, and the careful way he put it down. I think of his voice. I expect nothing from you. I think of how, when I woke, his arm had moved across the space where I'd been.

I could not find that building again if I tried. I know the name of a hotel I'd never set foot in before that night, and the colour of a lift, and the smell of rain on a stranger's collar. That is all.

That is exactly what I wanted, I tell myself, and shelve a collection of Yeats upside down.

At one, I take my sandwich out the back, to the yard behind the shop where the bins are kept, and sit on an upturned crate with my phone.

I don't open the letter.

Instead, I do something smaller. I open my email, attach the photograph to a message, and send it to an address I made at fifteen and never used, the one that belongs to nobody, the one with no name on it. I send it twice. Then I delete the photo from my phone, empty the recently-deleted folder, and sit there looking at the bare screen.

It feels ridiculous. It also feels, absurdly, like the first solid thing I've done in three days.

If they take the phone, they won't find it.

The thought is so cold, so practical, that I sit there a moment feeling it settle. Three days ago, I'd have been ashamed to think about my own parents like that.

The back door opens.

"Lila?" Mr. Abara, with his glasses pushed up. "Mrs. Okafor's here from next door. She'd like a word. Something about a customer."

Mrs. Okafor owns the boutique with the gold-lettered window. She is sixty, upright and elegant, with silver braids wound on top of her head, and she has been selling small beautiful things to the wrong people for as long as I have been walking past her shop.

She is waiting in the shop with her hands folded, and she smiles at me the way a person smiles when they're deciding how much to say.

"Lila, dear. Do you have a moment?"

---

We stand by the poetry shelves, out of Mr. Abara's hearing.

"A gentleman came into the boutique this morning," she says, low. "Very well-dressed. Very quiet. Not a customer, though he bought a scarf, which I thought was courteous." Her dark eyes rest on mine. "He asked about a hairpin."

The shop goes very still.

"What kind of hairpin?"

"Gold. A single leaf. It carries a maker's mark, a small bird." She watches my face. "I sold one. Last spring. I remembered it because you stood in my window for twenty minutes, and then you came back the following Saturday with your tips in an envelope."

I say nothing.

"He wanted to know who bought it."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I couldn't recall." She says it simply, like a woman reporting the weather. "I told him I sell a great deal. That I never keep names. That the only person I could say for certain had looked at it was a tall girl who tried it on in the spring, with a very pretty smile and no money, who left it on the counter and said it wasn't quite her colour."

My throat tightens.

Vanessa.

"I didn't say your name," Mrs. Okafor says. "He didn't ask for yours. He asked about whoever bought it, and I do not give out the names of customers to men who are polite in that particular way."

"What way is that?"

"The way that means he has never been refused."

I look at her. Her face is perfectly kind and perfectly steady.

"He left a card," she says, and takes it from her pocket.

It's plain white, thick, expensive. No firm name. No logo. Just a mobile number in small black type and a single handwritten line beneath it, in a hand so precise it might have been printed.

For the woman who owns the hairpin. I only want to know she is safe.

I read it twice.

I don't remember reaching for the shelf. My back finds the wood of its own accord, and it holds me.

I only want to know she is safe.

It could be anyone. A debt collector. A jealous husband. One of my father's lawyers, sent to find out where I've been. A man could write a sentence like that and mean any number of things.

But I know the way he looked at the little gold leaf in the lamplight. I know the stillness of him, and the way he gave me time to say no.

"Lila?" Mrs. Okafor says. "You don't have to do anything. I only thought you should know."

"Thank you."

"He'll be back, I think. Men like that don't ask once."

I turn the card over. Blank on the back. A number, eleven digits, in black.

I could call it. I could call it right now. I could stand in the poetry section of a bookshop on a Monday afternoon and dial a stranger's number and say, It's me. The woman from the Marlowe.

And then what?

My mother's hand is still cool on my forehead, somewhere in the back of my mind. Friday, at ten. A solicitor's letter, with two hospitals on it. A house where everyone is holding something. A man at the end of a telephone who knows about a hairpin and nothing else about me, and who might want to find out.

I do not know what I am. I do not know whose daughter I am. I cannot hand a stranger a name when I'm not sure I've got one.

I fold the card in half and put it in the pocket of my coat.

"Mrs. Okafor?"

"Yes, dear?"

"If he comes back."

"I sell a great deal," she says gravely. "And I never keep names."

She goes. The bell on the door chimes behind her.

I get home at seven, after a bus I don't remember getting on.

The dining room is laid for four. Mum has changed into a green cardigan, and Dad has his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, and Vanessa is already seated with her chin propped on one hand.

"There she is," Dad says. He doesn't look up from the paper.

I sit. A plate arrives. Roast chicken, potatoes, a small pile of peas. I look at the chicken, and the smell of it climbs straight up into my head, rich and greasy and warm, and I put down my fork so quickly it rings against the china.

"Not hungry?" Mum says.

"It's the smell. I think I'm coming down with something."

"You should go to bed early."

"I will."

Across the table, Vanessa doesn't say anything. She is looking at me with her head tilted, the way she looked at me on Sunday morning. A pleasant, patient, pane-of-glass look.

"Did you find it?" she says.

"Find what?"

"Your little gold leaf. You haven't worn it since Saturday."

Dad's paper rustles. Mum's knife stops moving.

"It's safe," I say.

"Where?"

"Somewhere I put it."

"That's not an answer."

"It isn't," I agree, and pick up my water.

She smiles. It is a lovely smile. It is the one she uses on waiters and neighbours, and it doesn't reach any part of her face I can see.

"I only ask," she says softly, "because someone might come looking for it."

My glass stops halfway to my mouth.

Someone might come looking for it.

I know I'm imagining the weight on those words. I know I'm exhausted. I know a man left a card in my pocket three hours ago, and I'm hearing him in every sentence.

But she hasn't looked away. And when I put the glass down, very carefully, so it makes no sound, she lifts her fork and returns to her dinner as if nothing at all has been said.

Upstairs, I sit on the floor with my back against the bed and take the card out of my pocket.

I only want to know she is safe.

The number is eleven digits, black on white. I can say them without looking now, as I could a poem.

I don't call.

Instead I open my email, and the unnamed address, and the photograph of the letter. Re: Verification of birth registration. St. Anne's Maternity Hospital, Ridgemont.

Two hospitals. One beginning.

And downstairs, behind a closed study door, my mother's voice rises and falls on the telephone, saying a name I can almost make out.