EIGHT MONTHS LATER
Theo and Hanna walk hand in hand through a bower of white roses and baby’s breath. Petals of pastel-colored confetti float around their heads and a tinny recording of church bells peels across the urban streets of Finsbury Park. For a brief moment the sun breaks through the bank of clouds that’s been brooding overhead since early this morning.
Laurel holds Poppy’s hand in hers and watches as her newly married daughter greets her friends and well-wishers on the street outside the church. Hanna’s in pure white and her hair glitters with gems. She looks glowing and golden. Her husband stands beside her handsome and assured, his hand resting gently on the small of her back, his face bursting with pride.
How, she wonders, could she have ever thought that Hanna would be Theo’s consolation prize? How, she wonders, could she have allowed herself ever to feel that way?
After a short while the wedding party, only thirty strong, climbs aboard an old red Routemaster bus. Poppy sits on Laurel’s knee, her hands still clutching the bouquet she’d carried into the church in her role as a flower girl. Laurel loops her arms around Poppy’s waist and holds on to her as the bus lurches forward. Poppy calls her Mama. Not Granny. Not Mum. Not Laurel. Mama. She chose the appellation herself. Poppy is the bravest and most brilliant child. She has cried when she has needed to cry and she has been cross when she has needed to be cross. And she misses Floyd every moment of every day. But mostly she has been the light and the joy, the sun around which Laurel and her family all orbit. Mostly she has just been a miracle.
The atmosphere on board is high-octane and chatty. Bonny and Paul sit together at the front of the bus, Bonny’s extraordinary hat almost entirely
obscuring the view through the front window. Behind them sit Jake and Blue. Blue is holding a tiny puppy in a bag on her lap. It’s called Mister and apparently will grow not much bigger than a small rabbit. She and Jake have been fussing over it like a newborn baby since they arrived from Devon last night.
On the seat next to Laurel is Sara-Jade. Poppy had asked if she was allowed to invite her, even though she doesn’t really know Hanna and Theo. And although Poppy now knows that Sara-Jade is not her biological sister, she still wants her to be part of her family. Sara-Jade looks, as always, thin and otherworldly in a silver bomber jacket and a shapeless pink dress. She is with a bearded man called Tom, who may or may not be her partner. She has thus far introduced him only as her friend. Jackie and Bel sit opposite Laurel, with a twin on either side. The boys are only a couple of years older than Poppy and Laurel has found to her delight that her life is back in sync, once more, with those of her closest friends.
On the seats to her right are Theo’s parents. Mr. Goodman looks old but Becky Goodman still looks unfeasibly young for her age. Laurel sees the drag of skin away from her jawbone and toward her ears and holds the observation inside herself reassuringly.
Elsewhere she sees friends of Hanna’s from her schooldays, she sees Paul’s father and she sees strangers, twenty-somethings in uncomfortable shoes and too much makeup, friends of Theo’s, she assumes, or colleagues from Hanna’s office.
But there are, as at every wedding, people who are not here: ghosts and shadows.
Laurel’s mother finally passed away eight months ago. But not before she’d had a chance to meet Poppy.
She’d clasped her hand and she’d said, “I knew it, I knew there was a reason why I was still here, I knew you were out there. I just knew you were.” A nurse took a picture that day of the three of them. It should have been four, of course, but three was better than two. Ruby died a week later.
Laurel’s hopeless brother is not here either. He’d flown back from Dubai for Ruby’s funeral in January and said he couldn’t make two trips in one year.
And, of course, Ellie is not here.
Laurel hasn’t told Poppy the full truth about Ellie. She said that Ellie ran away from home and then got run over and left in a wood and that at some point
between running away and getting run over she’d had a baby and that Noelle had adopted the baby and given her to Floyd when she couldn’t cope anymore.
Neither has she told Poppy about the body in Floyd’s garden. She’d simply packed a small bag for Poppy and brought her to her flat in Barnet for a few days while the big plastic tent was erected over the flowerbed, helicopters buzzing overhead. As for Floyd himself, Laurel told Poppy that he’d taken his own life because he felt so guilty about pretending to be Poppy’s father when he wasn’t. Poppy had swallowed back tears and nodded, in that grim, brave way of hers. “I really didn’t mind, you know,” she said. “Because he was a very good dad. He really was. He didn’t need to feel guilty. He didn’t need to die.”
“No,” Laurel had said, wiping a single tear from Poppy’s cheek with her thumb and then rocking her in her arms. “No. He didn’t.”
The bus pulls up outside the canal-side restaurant where Theo and Hanna will be holding their wedding reception. The party duly dismounts and smooths down its skirts and rebuttons its jackets, adjusts its hair against the sharp wind blowing in off the top of the water. Paul approaches. “Are you OK?” he asks, his hand against the sleeve of her jacket.
Laurel nods. She is OK. Her life is upended in every way. She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life. And she is still, of course, traumatized by the revelations of the last months of Ellie’s life. Some nights when she closes her eyes she is in that basement, trapped inside those pine-clad walls, staring desperately up at a window that no one will ever see her through. But the nightmares are starting to fade.
Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK. Laurel is OK. She really is. Because she has Hanna and she has Jake and now she has Poppy and Theo, too. Her relationship with Sara-Jade has grown deep and strong in the months since Floyd’s death. She sees her frequently, for Poppy’s sake but also for her own. She sees something of herself in Sara-Jade, something important in some way, something to nurture.
Hanna lives with Theo now. She rents out the miserable flat in Woodside Park and Laurel no longer needs to be her cleaning lady. Everything about their
previous dynamic has been transformed. They are friends. And Hanna and Poppy are the best thing to come out of the horror of Ellie’s disappearance. Poppy hero-worships Hanna and Hanna adores Poppy. They are virtually inseparable.
Laurel catches Hanna’s eye across the room as they find their way to their seats. She smiles and Hanna winks at her and blows her a kiss. Her beautiful daughter. Her golden girl.
Laurel catches the kiss and holds it next to her heart.
