‘I can’t see anything,’ Elliott says gently.
Gabby lifts her head up. ‘Oh, that’s right. I just dyed them. Still, they’re there. And I’m never going to get into my size six clothes again. I’m not even going to manage size eight. I can just about squeeze into size ten, but only when they’re stretchy. Oh God. When did I turn into such a fat, frumpy mess?’
‘First of all, you’re not a fat, frumpy mess, and second of all, even if you were, you’re my fat, frumpy mess, and I love you exactly as you are.’
‘No, you don’t,’ grumbles Gabby, as Elliott sits down on her side of the bed. ‘When I was thin you always used to say how sexy I was.’
‘You’re even sexier now,’ he says with a smile, pulling the covers down and reaching a hand to cup one of her full breasts. ‘You never had these when you were thin, and I don’t want to have to say goodbye to these.’ Gabby rolls her eyes. ‘And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks you’re pretty damn hot,’ Elliott reminds her, astonished to see her blush.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she says, embarrassment rising, because she knows exactly what he’s talking about.
‘Whoa Relax. I just meant that you were a hit last night, right? Some young guy? Whatever insecurities you may have, and however much you refuse to believe me, you’re still beautiful. Even Claire said it. How did she describe you?’ He laughs. ‘A MILF! See? You’ve still got it.’
‘Maybe,’ Gabby concedes. ‘But only for about five more minutes.’
‘That’s okay. I’m not going anywhere – not when my wife is so gorgeous.’ And he unbuttons her nightie then tips his head to kiss her right breast.
‘DAD!’ The door handle is rattled. ‘Open the door! Why is the door locked? Mom?’
‘Jesus,’ Elliott hisses through his teeth, rolling off Gabby, who pulls the covers back up. ‘In a minute. Go back to your room. I’ll be there in a minute.’
‘Why is the door locked?’ Alanna persists, rattling the door back and forth. ‘Mom? Will you come and say goodnight? Let me in!’
‘She’ll be in in a minute,’ Elliott says. ‘Go, Alanna.’
‘But just op–’
‘NOW!’ Elliott barks, and they both listen to Alanna’s footsteps stomping down the corridor. ‘Whose idea was it to have children?’ He turns to Gabby, reaching for his shorts as Gabby smiles and pulls on her robe.
Elliott pauses by the bedroom door. ‘We’ve lost the moment, haven’t we?
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, you’re not going to want to finish what we started. I know you. You’ll get back into bed and grab your Kindle, and there’ll be no more passion tonight.’
Gabby grins. ‘You’re the one who always refers to the children as passion-killers.’
‘With good reason.’
‘Actually, I think tonight you may get lucky.’
‘Really?’
Gabby moves towards him and pulls him down to kiss him deeply. ‘Meet you back here in ten minutes.’
She can’t say no to Alanna’s request to have her mother tuck her in, not when Alanna wants so little to do with her these days.
‘Is everything okay?’ Gabby asks, sitting on the bed as Alanna climbs in. ‘Want me to snuggle?’ This was never their thing, always hers and Olivia’s, but, to her surprise, Alanna nods.
Gabby lies down and draws her daughter close, burying her nose in Alanna’s hair, feeling the small body solid against her own as she wraps her arm around her and holds her.
‘Is there anything you want to talk about?’ she whispers, sensing there is something going on for Alanna to be so affectionate, but Alanna simply shakes her head wordlessly, shuffling back to fit perfectly into the safety of her mother’s body.
Gabby knows there is something wrong. She suspects Alanna is struggling with middle school, but she also knows there is nothing she can do unless and until Alanna chooses to share it with her. As hard as everyone warned her it would be, Olivia had sailed through middle school, despite being their more challenging child. So there was no question in Gabby’s mind that Alanna, easy since the day she was born, would also by-pass the social pressures and bitchy cliques that Olivia had avoided.
But Alanna, at eleven, is not the sunny, quiet child she used to be. She is suddenly determined to be in with the right crowd, seeing middle school as the opportunity to reinvent herself. Abandoning her old friends, she has been excitedly making new ones since she started middle school in September. Gabby misses Alanna’s old friends, who have been deemed ‘uncool’ by Alanna and her new friends, and these new friends make Gabby nervous. They seem too sure of themselves, too advanced, all of them flicking straightened hair over their shoulders, posting provocative poses online, chewing gum as they check their iPhones for texts.
Gabby tucks Alanna in, and heads back to their bedroom. She wants to talk to Elliott about her fears, but Olivia has now talked him out of bed and back downstairs to watch an episode of The Voice, and Elliott, who can resist anything except his daughters, is now sitting on the sofa discussing the pros and cons of a one-hit wonder, who came on the show desperate to prove he was more than that but has chosen to sing his one-hit-wonder song.
Alone, Gabby reaches for the iPad rather than the Kindle, idly flicking through her Facebook newsfeed, before going to Trish’s page. She has a personal page, and a business one with eighty-four thousand likes. Which upsets Gabby.
She and Trish have always been friendly without being friends, but there is a chasm between them now that can’t be bridged. Gabby knows exactly when the crevice appeared.
It happened a couple of years ago, when Alanna was nine. Trish had phoned Gabby to organize a playdate, asking what her diary looked like in three weeks’ time. Gabby had resisted the urge to laugh. She barely knew what day of the week it was, let alone what the girls were doing in three weeks’ time. The playdates she organized tended to be last-minute, with neighbourhood kids, and more often than not the girls arranged it all themselves with little or no input from the mothers, other than the picking up or dropping off at the end of the playdate.
She dutifully looked in the diary and came up with a day. Trish explained she would be dropping Alanna back at five p.m. as she had to take her son to basketball at five thirty, on the other side of town.
‘Are you sure I can’t pick her up?’ Gabby offered, knowing it would have been impossible, for Olivia had a dance class in Fairfield, twenty minutes away, which ended at five.
‘It’s no problem,’ Trish said.
‘Fine. My sitter will be home,’ Gabby said confidently. Gabby didn’t actually have a sitter, but made a mental note to make sure to find one for the day.
A week before the playdate Trish phoned again to check if Alanna had any food allergies. ‘Don’t worry about snacks,’ Trish had reassured Gabby. ‘We’re a gluten-free, sugar-free household so it’s only healthy snacks!’ Gabby eyed her own snack drawer, stuffed with Pirate’s Booty, Fruit Roll-Ups, crisps and individual packets of chocolate-chip cookies.
She forced a smile. ‘Great!’
It was too late to cancel the playdate – Alanna was so excited – but Gabby already suspected these preliminary check-up calls didn’t bode well.
Trish’s daughter, Skylar, had always seemed lovely, but Gabby had learned not to organize playdates with kids whose parents didn’t share the same sensibilities. Many of the parents at Alanna’s elementary school were helicopter parents, desperately seeking opportunities, any opportunities, to muscle their way into their kids’ classroom. They would always be volunteering to help in some way, to make costumes for shows, to bake class treats. Trish was one of those parents; Gabby was not. She was happy searching the local area for pieces of old furniture to restore at home. She went to a knitting class at the local yarn shop. She volunteered at the town farm. She cooked from scratch every day, proper family suppers, so they could all eat together as a family. Her days were busy; she figured the kids were perfectly fine w
ithout her pitching up at school all the time.
Her friends tended to be other mothers who were equally laid back. They let their kids ride around the neighbourhood on bikes; they pushed the children out through the back door telling them to play, not worrying about them, nor giving them a second thought, until they came home because they were hungry.
Sure enough, on the day of the playdate Alanna went home on the bus with Skylar, and Gabby took Olivia to dance, only remembering that she had meant to find a sitter when her mobile phone rang, at 5.02 p.m., her own home number flashing on the screen. Her heart plummeted to her stomach.
She’d forgotten to book a sitter.
‘Mom? Where are you? Skylar’s mom just dropped me home and there’s no one here.’
‘Oh, honey. I’m sorry. The sitter must have forgotten. I’ll be home in five minutes. I know Skylar’s mom has to be somewhere so tell her to leave you. It’s only five minutes.’
Gabby listened while Alanna relayed this to Trish, who then came on the phone.
‘Gabby? Hi. There’s no sitter here.’
Was it Gabby’s imagination or was there judgement in her voice? A wave of defensive panic washed over her.
‘I don’t know what happened. But I’m literally five minutes away,’ she lied, knowing she was twenty-five minutes away. ‘Just leave her. She’ll be fine for five minutes. I know you have to go.’
‘I’m not leaving her by herself,’ Trish said. ‘I’ll just wait for you.’
‘No, really. I’m so close and I know you have to take your son to basketball. Alanna’s fine.’
‘I’m not leaving a child on her own,’ Trish said. ‘We’ll wait.’ She didn’t sound happy.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Gabby said again, now feeling sick, knowing she’d be caught out. There was no way in hell she’d be home in five minutes, or anything close.
In the end, she phoned her neighbour and begged her to run over so Trish could leave. She did, but Gabby knew Trish knew she’d lied, and there was no more talk of another playdate, nor did Gabby reciprocate.
It was, as she said to Claire at the time, too much pressure.
She is happy to be friendly at social events, but they will never be friends; of that, she is certain.
Scrolling through Facebook keeps her distracted until Elliott comes back up to bed. On a normal night, she might well curl up in bed and read a couple of pages on the Kindle before going to sleep, leaving Elliott’s bedside lamp on for when he comes up. But tonight she needs to make love with him, needs to erase, finally, the evidence of her mental infidelity – and thank God it was merely in her head – and the only way to do that is to feel him inside her.
‘You’re still awake?’ He crawls onto the bed, pleasantly surprised.
‘I told you we had unfinished business,’ she replies, and smiles, pulling him to her and kissing him deeply. Her concerns for Alanna can wait.
Their lovemaking has become a well-worn routine. Tonight Gabby pulls out all the stops. She pushes him back on the bed and climbs on top of him, feeling a passion for her husband she hasn’t felt in years.
She closes her eyes and moves on top of Elliott, sighing as she gives into the temptation of fantasizing that it isn’t her familiar husband underneath her, but the smooth, strong body of a thirty-something; it isn’t her husband moaning as she kisses his neck, but Matt.
Chapter Seven
This house was not a house they were ever supposed to have looked at when they were wanting to upgrade to something bigger. They had a long list of houses to visit, mostly fifties and sixties ranches and splits – all that was affordable given Elliott’s new residency at Norwalk Hospital.
Their realtor, flapping and stressed, announced they would have to make a quick pit stop at a house where she needed to check the back-door key.
Elliott was in the front of the car, Gabby in the rear, as their realtor turned onto a pretty street close to town, with picture-book cottages lining each side.
The house, a grey shingle, was set back from the road with a beautiful dogwood tree in the front garden. There was a natural-wood barn in the backyard, a large copper star hanging on the side of it. Once upon a time it had been a horse barn, but it was now used for storage. The house was a small Cape style; too small for Gabby and Elliott and their two young girls, the realtor pointed out, seeing how excited they were.
The downstairs had been added on to extensively and now had two newer, light-filled rooms: a sunroom and a playroom; but the upstairs had just two bedrooms and one bathroom, all of them tiny.
‘Couldn’t we add on above the sunroom?’ Elliott peered out of the window, pointing out the flat roof.
‘You could,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But I just don’t know how much you want to put into this house.’
‘Surely adding a bedroom and bathroom would be an investment?’
‘Yes, but only if you got it at the right price. They’re asking about thirty thousand too much, and so far they’ve refused to move.’
Elliott turned to Gabby, whose face had lit up. ‘I love it,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
They made their offer, and raised it twice, only to have it rejected. Losing heart, they settled on a sixties ranch on the other side of town; it had a huge backyard, and no charm whatsoever.
The day they were going to sign the contract their realtor phoned. The owners of the cottage had rethought. They would now accept the third and final offer if Elliott and Gabby still wanted the house.
‘We do,’ Elliott said, ‘but I have to offer lower because of the money we’ve spent since then.’ He named his price, shockingly low, even to the realtor, while deciding not to tell Gabby unless and until the offer was accepted.
Three months later, they moved in.
Empty, the house needed more work than they had imagined. Paintings that had been removed left huge rectangular stains on the walls; wooden floors were stained and thirsty as they emerged after hiding underneath rugs for more than twenty years.
They worked evenings and weekends to restore the house, while the builders worked during the day to build Olivia’s bedroom, and reconfigure and enlarge the rooms that were there. The job became larger, the contractor pointing out how easy it would be to cut off a chunk of the now-oversized master suite to create a walk-in closet and a spare bedroom. How could they not?
The walls were covered with fresh paint, the floors stripped and sanded before being stained a dark brown then oiled with Tung Oil for a glossy, rich finish. Gabby ran up simple curtain panels in a pale mushroom linen, the same panels in a fuchsia pink for the girls’ rooms.
They had little money back then. Their furniture was a mix of consignment store and hand-me-downs. If ever anyone said they were getting rid of anything, Gabby and Elliott took it, regardless of what it was, what it looked like, or whether they had room.
What they couldn’t use was stored at one end of the barn. The other was turned into a workroom where Gabby would restore furniture for their home. A huge old dresser they found at the dump one day, covered in a vile shade of green paint, was transformed into a beautiful bleached-pine period piece. Lined with linen it was perfect for their Crate & Barrel plates and bowls.
Gabby became an expert at stripping furniture and repurposing it. Where others would see a heavy, dark, utilitarian chest of drawers, she would see an object of beauty, and once stripped and painted a soft ivory, the intricate and ugly brass pulls replaced with pretty, antique, crystal knobs, these pieces of furniture were invariably more stunning than even she expected.
Elliott made the outdoor table, and the pergola under which it sits. Gabby collected old mason jars of all shapes and sizes, filled them with votive candles and hung them at varying heights underneath the pergola.
It has become a house others describe as magical. Tiny lights twinkle from the dogwood tree in the front garden and the two apple trees in the back. It is a house that feels happy, feels like it is home to a happy family, and everyone
who comes over immediately feels comfortable.
This has always felt like Gabby’s haven, a place where she is safe from the world. It is the quietest, most peaceful house she can imagine, a world away from the house in which she spent her childhood.
Gabby grew up in England. She moved to the States after university, at the age of twenty-one, initially coming just for the summer, to work as a counsellor at a girls’ camp in Maine. But life seemed so filled with possibility here that she never went home. First, she applied for a student visa, working as a nanny and studying in the evenings, then she met and married Elliott.
The London house in which she grew up was always filled with people. Her mother, once well-known as a stage actress, had, in later years, retrained as a therapist. Never a woman who fully understood boundaries, Natasha de Roth (no one is sure where the ‘de’ came from – Gabby’s father went only by the surname of Roth) offered up their home as a sanctuary to waifs and strays, anyone who had nowhere else to go, including an assortment of rather scruffy dogs and unhappy cats.
Living in the large and once rather grand Roth/de Roth house at the top of Belsize Park Gardens always felt a bit like a game of Russian Roulette to Gabby – opening the front door after school you never knew what you were going to get.
There might be a woman standing shouting in the kitchen, being coached through a bipolar rage by her mother, who would smile cheerily and wave Gabby along as if this was perfectly normal and she should come back later.