Try Not to Breathe: A Novel Read online

  “I can’t really help there. I wouldn’t have the first clue about my patients’ love lives. I can barely get my own on track.” Peter Haynes looked up briefly and then back down at his hands.

  “Oh yes, of course,” Alex said, feeling her cheeks flush a little. “Just one more thing. Last time we spoke, you said that Amy had shown signs of brain activity. Does that mean there’s a chance she might wake up?”

  “Well, she’s not asleep, Alex. That’s an important distinction; this isn’t a coma. She’s in there somewhere, to a small degree at least. But after fifteen years, and with such slow progress, I think it’s highly unlikely she’ll ever improve.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “Well, it’s not entirely impossible. But it’s highly unlikely. Alex, I’m sorry to rush you, but I really need to get to another meeting.”

  “No problem at all. And thanks so much, you’ve really helped iron things out. It’s been hard to piece together from news clippings alone.” Alex stood up quickly and grabbed her bag.

  “Well,” said Dr. Haynes, extending a hand to shake. “You can’t trust everything you read in the newspapers.” And he smiled, holding Alex’s hand for a little too long.

  —

  The chill of Dr. Haynes’s touch stayed with Alex long after she’d left the office and made her way, blinking, out of the hospital and into the sunlight.

  She walked with sore feet to her car, which was parked in the farthest corner, shaded by a thick tree. She sat down with a heavy “hmph” and placed her bag, notepad and phone on the empty passenger seat. She yanked off her shoes and lobbed them into the back foot well. For just a few moments, she closed her eyes in the cool quiet. Her head thumped and she was sweating last night’s Sauvignon Blanc.

  Her conversation with the doctor had stitched together some assumptions—and scorched some guesses where they lay. As grotesque as she found the crime, the challenge of unpicking Amy’s final conscious moments stirred a small part of her, buried beneath the rubble.

  Once upon a time she had been a bright young thing, a celebrated writer, a “voice of her generation.” She’d had fire and ambition and ideas…now most of the time she felt dry. Her moment had passed, and she’d spent it wasted.

  Alex slipped her flip-flops on and headed home. Her mind churned over her conversation with the doctor as she drove slowly past the white villas of Tunbridge Wells’s moneyed “village” area.

  Amy Stevenson was not a virgin. Apparently she’d willingly had sex in the run up to her attack and it must have been protected sex. According to the clippings, there was no forensic evidence, no semen. That word only used in biology class and sex crime reporting. He—they—must have used a condom, but that would have been long lost or long hidden.

  Police had been satisfied that Amy and her boyfriend hadn’t slept together. So it looked like Amy had been unfaithful to him. Poor kid, thought Alex. Did he know one of her last decisions was to betray him? Would he have known that her “rape” wasn’t rape? Or perhaps he did find out, and was so angry that he attacked her? It seemed far-fetched, but it was foolish to discount anything.

  It had become a standard phrase in the later newspaper clippings, “the rape and attempted murder of Amy Stevenson.” But that wasn’t the real story. The police couldn’t have known that when they brought Bob in, could they?

  Alex shook her head, it was a far knottier story than she’d thought. The best article she could produce would be found in the kinks left behind from unpicking those dusty knots. She wished she could skip to the end and find out what those kinks looked like.

  As she pulled up outside her brick terrace, heaved her bag out of its seat and walked along the path, Alex checked the time, 11:22 a.m. The deadline for her piece on Dr. Haynes loomed in a few days and she had thirty-eight minutes of work time left today.

  —

  Getting to sleep wasn’t a problem for Alex. Her eyes tended to shut as the final sip tingled her lips. It was often a battle of will over fatigue just to get the glass of water down her neck before passing out in a deep, throaty sleep.

  It was staying asleep that was hard.

  Since Matt had left, the witching hours were wakeful. As the tide of alcohol washed away, a heightened sense of self-preservation kicked in. Every night brought different creaks and groans to the little house, a variety of imagined terrors creeping in the shadows.

  Alex’s night nerves were almost as irrational as her childhood fear of ghosts. It was always possible that someone could break in. If they did, it was possible they’d get up to something really sadistic, rather than look for easily pocketed, high-value goods. But it was incredibly unlikely.

  By day, Alex recognized her paranoia for what it was. By night, she often spent the darkest hours rigid and dripping with sweat.

  After a late supper of toast dipped into a half-eaten tub of hummus, she’d fallen into a hot, dreamless sleep at around 10 p.m., chickpea residue on her hands.

  At 1:37 a.m., Alex burst into total wakefulness, on high alert, convinced that someone was in the house.

  Downstairs, the polished floorboards creaked in rhythm with the wind and the trees tapped warnings on the windows.

  She heard slow, deliberate movements around her living room. She heard the first three steps of the staircase sigh underfoot, then nothing. Alex remained paralyzed, making no moves to investigate or protect herself. She just lay prone, peeping from under the covers, coated in thick sweat.

  A few more noises dotted the house. A little way up the street a car door slammed, and a cat shrieked as gears crunched and tires drove away.

  Two hours passed, with Alex dry-eyed and sweating. Finally, having braved a trip to the bathroom and finding no harm on the journey, she was able to fall back into a just-below-the-surface slumber.

  —

  The morning found Alex red-eyed and agitated. Since her mid-twenties, she’d lost the ability to lie-in and felt a strong pull to the thick black coffee her kitchen offered.

  Her bed was dry, but the bedding still smelt bittersweet. Out of habit, Alex stripped it all off and padded downstairs. As she set the coffee machine off with a sigh, something caught her eye.

  Her Moleskine notepad was closed. She was sure she’d left it open on the first blank page, weighted by her pen. Now it was tightly shut.

  The sudden sound of blood in her temples drowned out clear thought as Alex thundered back up the stairs and into the bathroom, locking the door as quickly as her shaking fingers could manage.

  Was she imagining it? It had been a heavy night. Could she have returned to her notes before bed, thumbing through and then closing the notepad tight? It was all possible but it didn’t feel right.

  Alex stepped into the scorching shower. Nothing added up, but she was an unreliable witness. Supper was a blur and she definitely didn’t remember going to bed. She couldn’t be sure of anything. Fuck.

  As the thick steam and the sharp, citrus zing of the shampoo cleared her sinuses, Alex’s heart rate slowed and she became more sure that she must have been the night crawler. Thinking logically, there really was nothing else to suggest anything undue had happened. The pen could even have rolled out and the notepad snapped closed all by itself.

  Leaving her hair wet in the Indian summer heat, Alex threw on knickers, sweatpants and a vest.

  Back in the kitchen the coffee was ready, the rich chicory fragrance turning Alex’s delicate stomach almost as much as it comforted her. She needed food and started to make toast when something else caught her eye and made her stop dead, butter knife in hand.

  When Alex had inherited the house, she had remodeled the kitchen and the bathroom. She’d stripped the floors herself, painted every inch of wall and replaced the front door. She’d had enough money left to replace the windows at the front of the house and keep a little cash in the kitty.

  The back windows were the old sash variety, thick wood with a brass hook and catch. No one could see them from the street so she’
d left them as they were, a distant plan to update them at some point.

  She never opened her kitchen window. Never. But her kitchen window was open. It was definitely open.

  The little garden at the back of Alex’s house had been untouched for years. It was really just a yard, with a few dead sprigs of once-were-plants and a lopsided whirligig dripping with cobwebs.

  Still reeling at the window, Alex jumped as the toast popped up, spinning around instinctively. There was no denying it, the window was definitely open. She fumbled in the “stuff drawer” by the sink for the back-door key.

  The lock was stiff but once outside she could see that the back gate was shut at least, and the catch was down.

  She tiptoed closer, her eyes focused on the bolt. With the laughter of neighbors’ children in the near distance, Alex inched forward. The bolt had clearly been pulled back, a spider’s home broken in the process. But when?

  She didn’t dare open the gate but instead yanked the bolt back across and ran straight into her kitchen. She slammed the door, locked it and reached for the wireless phone, unsure who to call.

  It didn’t look like anything had been taken. Her laptop was on the sofa, her TV was where it always was and she had precious little jewelry anyway. She ran upstairs to check it, but everything was present and correct, even her engagement and wedding rings lay where they had long lived, in the mirrored box on her nightstand.

  She had to get her head together. It was a long time since she’d felt so vulnerable and violated. But nothing had been taken, and she’d not been touched. As far as she remembered.

  As she scrabbled for the back page of her Moleskine and that number in thick, black writing, she knew she was making a mistake.

  Alex dialed with shaking hands and walked into the kitchen to pour another strong black coffee.

  She lifted the mug to her lips just as Matt answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Matt, it’s Alex.”

  “I know, your number came up on my screen again. What’s up?”

  “Matt, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know who else to call,” she started, her wobbly voice barely more than a whine.

  “Oh God, Alex,” Matt hissed. “It’s eight in the morning, what’s wrong with you?”

  “No, no I’ve not been drinking, I’m not…I…look, I don’t know what to do, I think someone’s broken into my house.”

  She heard a sigh.

  “Alex, if you think someone’s broken into your house then you need to call the police. Your local police. They’ll send someone round.”

  “No, Matt, you don’t understand, nothing’s been taken. I know they won’t believe me because nothing’s been stolen, but the kitchen window was open and the bolt on the back gate has been moved.”

  “Nothing’s been taken?”

  “Well, no, but I’d left my notepad open last night and it was closed this morning…” She trailed off.

  “Alex, no one has broken into your house. What you’re saying is your back gate’s unlocked, just like most of your neighbors’ back gates are probably unlocked, and your kitchen window isn’t closed. It’s still warm at night, you probably opened the window yourself and forgot.”

  Alex was as certain as she could be that she’d not opened her own window, she’d never opened that window, to prevent this precise scenario. She was petrified about forgetting and going to bed with the outside able to get in.

  “The police won’t be interested unless you’ve had something stolen or there’s actual evidence that someone’s been in.”

  Matt’s measured tone only loosely disguised his annoyance. It was breakfast time at the weekend, he’d probably had to leave his fiancée and step outside of the room, she’d put him in a difficult spot.

  “I’m sorry, Matt, I thought you’d understand but—”

  “Alex, enough. We’re not married anymore, and I thought you’d finally got to grips with that. I’m not the one you call now. I was very understanding when you asked me to help with this wild-goose chase, I’ve helped you more than I should have because I felt sorry for you. And if I’m honest, I knew that nothing would ever come of it, but—”

  “Why not? Why would nothing come of it?” Alex squeaked down the phone.

  “Why? Because you haven’t seen anything through in years, Alex. Look at yourself.”

  “Matt, there’s no need to be cruel, I just didn’t—”

  “Alex,” he hissed. “I thought we’d stopped all this, I hoped you’d sorted yourself out.”

  A pause. A breath.

  “You drank away your career, you drank away our marriage, you drank away—you know what you drank away—and now it looks like you’ve drank away your fucking sanity. Do yourself a favor and get some help before it’s too late. You have to move on. Like I have.”

  “Like you have,” Alex repeated.

  She’d just started to apologize, as the phone clicked. He’d gone. Again.

  Alex tore out the page with his number on it, screwed it into a ball and ran it under a blast of cold water until it stuck together in a clump. She threw it into the bin with the cold toast, too embarrassed to acknowledge to herself what had just happened, ignoring the chill creeping up her chest.

  Jacob knew from the flash in Fiona’s eyes that he was in deep trouble. Not just “forgetting to put the bins out” trouble, but something genuine. At least to her.

  He remembered the first time he’d seen that flash. They’d been together for nearly six months, no longer “dating,” just always with each other. Her toothbrush was in his bathroom and her underwear was in his laundry basket. She hadn’t moved in officially, but she had one foot in the door and he liked the way that felt.

  Until that point his visits to the hospital had been sporadic, maybe once every couple of months. But the tighter he felt bound to Fiona, the stronger he felt a sense of duty to Amy.

  He’d arranged to go to work late one day so he could have a lie-in and then visit the ward for a little longer. He wanted to tell Amy that he had found someone and that he was sorry. Just in case she was in there somewhere, waiting for him. He wasn’t going to drop her, like everyone else had, but he was going to level with her.

  Jacob had waited until long after Fiona had left for the print shop, snoozing his alarm and sleeping fitfully. He’d spent the rest of the morning in the ward, sitting with Amy and trying to build up the courage to tell her he had moved on in a way she couldn’t. He’d stared at her face. She was still wired up back then and her body frequently rejected its drip, convulsing with an automatic determination at odds with her passive condition.

  As a result Amy had been incredibly thin. Her beauty hidden behind razor blade cheekbones and dark dips under her eyes. He’d held her hand in lieu of her gaze then bottled out. Rather than tell her he was moving on, Jacob had committed to coming back to visit sooner next time—imagining a glimmer of eye movement as he whispered his promises.

  When he’d been back at work for a couple of hours, Jacob had realized that he’d forgotten to switch his phone back on. As soon as it sprang to life he found several texts and voicemails. He’d called Fiona straight back but got no response.

  That night he saw the flash in her dark eyes for the first time. “Where were you today?” she’d asked.

  “I was at work, why?”

  “I called and you weren’t there.”

  “When, this morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jacob paused for just a split second. The truth, as it stood, was half-finished and did no one any favors.

  “I was visiting a client.”

  “You said you had loads of paperwork to catch up on.”

  “I did, I still do, but I had to go out to Sussex at the last minute, why?”

  The fire in her eyes had cooled. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m acting like a crazy person.”

  That time they’d laughed about it. When it happened again a few months later, again due to a clandestine hospital visit and a number of mis
sed calls, the fire had taken longer to put out. They’d channeled it into bed, not knowing what else to do with the friction.

  “I’m sorry, J,” Fiona had said afterward, lying in his nook and staring up at the ceiling. Hair had been stuck to her forehead and clothes lay strewn on the floor.

  “Dan was such a fuckwit for this kind of thing. I felt like a real mug when I found out he’d been cheating on me. And it wasn’t just once or twice. I can’t handle the thought of that happening again. That’s not fair on you though, I know you’re not him.”

  “I’m sorry I worried you.”

  “Don’t apologize to me, I’m being an idiot. It’s a stupid trap that everyone falls into, isn’t it? Bringing old relationships into new ones.”

  He hadn’t said a word.

  “Except you,” she’d teased. “Look at me, taming a stud!”

  “Oh, Fiona,” he’d laughed.

  “You know those girls you think were just flings probably didn’t see you that way. You probably broke their hearts.” Fiona’s eyes twinkled mischievously.

  “Oh God, stop. Actually, carry on. No, I mean stop.” He’d smiled.

  “You really didn’t have any proper girlfriends at Uni or college?”

  “No, not really, just the odd thing that fizzled out.”

  “So I’m your first proper girlfriend, really?”

  “Yes, for the fifty-millionth time, you’re my first proper girlfriend since school,” he’d said.

  “School doesn’t count, that’s a fact. So I’m your first proper girlfriend. La, la, la, look at me,” she’d sung. “Your first proper girlfriend. The one you ditched your womanizing ways for.” He’d pulled her into him and kissed her, laughing. “You’re so silly.”

  Other times she would ask him about his university affairs, only to stop him the moment he started to cobble a description together.

  “Actually, don’t tell me anything. I don’t like thinking of you with other girls.”

  “You’re my number one girl,” he’d say, and kiss her with relief.

  Jacob hated to see that flash in her eyes, and he’d seen it more and more in pregnancy. He was meticulous about doctor’s appointments, midwife checkups, antenatal classes, ultrasounds and everything else marked in thick pen on the kitchen calendar. He’d never missed a single meeting with his son or daughter.