Adam

ADAM

Books can be mirrors for whoever holds them and people don’t always like what they see.

The last six months have been good, and I feel as if my life is back on track. Robin is home again, and has redecorated every inch of our house; it’s almost as though Amelia was never here. I’m so happy that Robin is back, so is Bob, I think we both needed her far more than I ever realized. I might not be able to see what she looks like on the outside, but my wife is a beautiful person inside. Where it matters. Nothing she could ever do will change the person I see when I look at her. Rock Paper Scissors is finally getting made, and even though the opening titles will say “based on the novel by Henry Winter” I can live with that. Dealing with difficult authors is so much easier when they are dead. It turns out my wife is just as good at writing thrilling horror stories as her father was. Perhaps it isn’t surprising. The scariest haunted houses are always the ones in which you are the ghost.

I think there comes a point in everyone’s life when you just have to do what you want to do. Chasing the dream becomes involuntary, you have to, because we all know time is not infinite. And I’ve been chasing this for so long, didn’t I deserve to catch up with my dreams eventually? I like to think so. I have the best job in the world, but writing is a hard way to make an easy living. If I thought I could be happy doing anything else, I would absolutely do that instead.

Despite everything, I’m sleeping better than ever before. My nightmares have stopped completely since we returned from Scotland, almost like I left the pain of my past behind. Perhaps because I finally have some sense of closure about what happened when I was a boy.

I still think about my mother and the way she died every day. And although the nightmares have stopped, the guilt has never gone away. It was my fault and nothing will ever change that. If I’d walked the dog myself—like my mother asked me to—she wouldn’t have been out on the street that night, and the car wouldn’t have hit her. But thirteen-year-old me was angry because he watched my mother do her hair, spray her perfume, paint her face, and wrap herself up in the red kimono like a free gift. She only wore it when a man was coming to stay the night at ours. She said they were friends, but the flat had paper-thin walls, and none of my friends made noises like that.

Different men stayed over a lot. I. Didn’t. Like it. So when that evening’s friend knocked on the door—another face I didn’t recognize but was sure I’d never seen before—I stormed out. Thirteen-year-old me met a girl in the park that night, behind the tower block where I lived. We sat on the broken swings and shared a large bottle of warm cider. It was the first time I drank alcohol, the first time I smoked a cigarette, and the first time I kissed a girl. I was in no rush to go home. It made me wonder how many firsts a person can have before life only offers them seconds.

The girl tasted like smoke and bubble gum, and she said that I could do more than just kiss her if we could find somewhere to do it. She taught me how to steal a car—she’d clearly done it before—then she taught me how to drive it behind a disused warehouse. She taught me how to do other things for the first time too in the backseat, we made noises of our own, and teenage me thought he was in love.

That’s why I did what she said when she told me to drive around the estate. I remember the sound of her laughter, and the rain bouncing off the windscreen making it almost impossible to see. “Faster,” she said, turning up the car radio. “Faster!” She put her hand on my crotch and I looked down. I took the corner too fast and we started to spin. When I looked up, I saw my mother.

And she saw me.

It all happened so fast: the sound of screeching brakes, the car mounting the pavement, my mother’s red kimono flying in the air, the smash when her body hit the windscreen, and the thud of the wheels rolling over the dog. Then the silence.

I couldn’t move at first.

But then the girl was screaming at me.

When I didn’t respond, she pushed me out of the car, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove away. Some of the neighbors came out not long after that, they found me leaning over my mother, crying, and covered in her blood. Everyone presumed I’d been walking the dog with her when it happened.

I didn’t even know the girl’s name. And I’d never been able to recognize faces. When the police asked me to ID some pictures of a teenage girl they suspected of driving the stolen car, I genuinely couldn’t help.

I thought I’d never see her again so it was a shock to discover we were married.

Do I feel bad about what happened to Amelia?

No.

Sadly, people die every day, even the good ones. And she wasn’t one of them. None of us know when we’re checking out, life isn’t that kind of hotel. I’m happy now. Happier than I thought I could be again. I just want to put everything behind me, and now I finally can. Sometimes a lie is the kindest truth you can tell a person, including yourself.