Page 67 of We Live Here Now

I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe she’s drugged me like this. I’m going to be a father but I’m never going to see my child.

I moan and tears slip from the corners of my eyes.I don’t wantto die. I want to see my child. I want to have a family. I want so many things.

My vision is getting black at the corners. I’m running out of time to make my choice. She’s right in everything she’s said. I won’t get to the phone before her. And she definitely wouldn’t be able to carry me. I have to make a choice while I still can. She hasn’t really left me with one, I realize, as I stop crawling forward. Life or death. What would anyone choose?

How bad can it be? I’ll come back out alive. Some of me will. I’ll still be alive.

Sobbing, I try to turn myself around, to face the door before I pass out completely. “The room,” I mumble, even though the words are a mess. “I choose the room.”

“I love you, Freddie. You know that, don’t you? I want the best for you. I want the bestofyou. You’ll just fall asleep,” she says softly as she crouches beside me and rests my head in her lap. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”

And she’s right. It doesn’t.

Them

85

Emily

The raven with the dull damaged wing pecks at the window relentlessly. The sharptap tapis almost constant. I am so fucking tired of the cold and the dark and the fucking awful stench and Freddie’s relentless weak whining about the fucking unfairness of it all. The bird caws, then taps some more. If I could kill it, I’d throttle the life out of it with my bare hands.

“Just look at them.”

Freddie’s over by the window and I join him and the raven even though the daylight is so unnaturally bright against the constant gloom of the room, and the sight of the other us—them—makes me want to scream with rage. Freddie said I screamed for three days solid once he’d joined me, but I don’t remember. I remember that our other selves—the best of us—carried on downstairs all sugar and spice and everything nice as if we weren’t even here.

“They’re finally moving out,” I say, and it’s like a punch in my hollow gut seeing my body down there with a full pregnancy bump, Freddie’s arm around me, tanned and happy.

Laughter drifts up as Freddie hands the house keys over to Russell and Cat and the other Emily chatters some more and smiles as if she has no cares in the fucking world. Russell and Cat look so happy. Russell can’t believe his luck. This house, a new life in the country.

Cat looks like she’s making the best of it now that it’s over with Mark. I know what she’ll be thinking. At least Russell didn’t find out. Not yet, anyway, Cat dearest.

I understand the house now. The kind of couples it attracts. The type it’s hungry for. Couples in trouble. Couples with secrets. Couples it canplay with. Russell was snared by Larkin Lodge the moment he saw it, just the same as Freddie was.

If I hadn’t been so susceptible to picking up Sally’s energy, maybe it would have been me the house targeted. Freddie was the one with the secret—maybe I would have killed him and he’d never have known. It could be me free down there with the wonderful version of my husband. Even with the way things turned out, it still could have ended that way. But no. Instead I betrayed myself. I could have made myself whole and killed Freddie, but no, holier-than-thou, butter-wouldn’t-melt idiot Emily decided she liked being the good little woman. Never mind the raven, if I could throttle myself, I would.

“Which room do you think they’ll choose to sleep in?” Freddie asks me. “Want to bet on it not being this one?”

I don’t answer. He’s always trying to bet on something. God, why didn’t I kill him first?

I can’t look away from my own happy pregnant body. One about to disappear into the sunset.

“I can’t believe they’re going to France. With my hundred and fifty thousand pounds,” I mutter.

“And the money I got from him. We could have got more if we’d worked together. We could have got out of here laughing.”

“We could, we could, we could,” I mimic. “If you hadn’t fucked up in the first place, this would never have happened.”

“If you hadn’t fucked your boss and got knocked up, maybe you wouldn’t have been so distracted and moody that you fell off the cliff.”

There’s a moment of silence where we both bite our nonexistent tongues because otherwise we’ll go round and round in circles of recriminations, like we have so many times in however long we’ve been trapped in this hell. Months, judging by my stomach below.

I touch the damp windowsill—everything’s always so wet in here—and feel the liquid suck at my fingers, wanting to pull me in. I tug my hand away. I haven’t beenintothe house yet. I’m going to have to start trying though, if I ever want to get out of here.

We stand at the window, shadows in shadow, and watch them, the other Freddie and Emily, get into their car, suitcases and passports packed,and head off to their new lives all full of love for each other. Neither of them looks up.

“Don’t worry.” Freddie puts his arm around me. It’s a surprise, but I let him. He’s the only thing I can touch in here, other than the pecking bird, that isn’t trying to absorb me. “There are plenty of our things up in the attic in storage.”

“How will that help us?” I ask, shivering into his cold chest, my leg and my stab wound both throbbing. But I’m already seeing what he means. We have stuff here.

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