Free Where Have You Been? by Wendy James

doesn’t come straight out and accuse Dad of murdering Karen.’
    â€˜Accuse your father of what, Suse?’ Ed is completely bewildered by her digression. ‘What are you going on about? What have missing teenagers got to do with your dad? Why would she think your father murdered Karen? She died of meningitis. Didn’t she?’
    But Susan has her head down, is staring into her half-empty cup of coffee, is studiously avoiding his eyes.
    Ed clamps his hand around her wrist, shakes it to get her attention. ‘Susan. What’s going on?’ He feels a strange knotting sensation in his bowels. ‘Did something happen to Karen, something you haven’t told me about?’ He is surprised that his voice sounds so normal. His throat is unaccountably tight and it’s an effort to breathe normally. ‘Susan, is there something you haven’t told me?’
    Ed weeps a little when she tells him, feels his eyes fill and has to dab at them with his coffee-stained serviette. He is saddened not just by the enormity, the tragedy, of the particular events – the story itself seems half-familiar – the teenage girl missing on formal night, the searches, the uncertainty, the ultimate presumption of her death in some brutal manner. This is all pathetic and worthy of tears, but it is the manner of Susan’s telling that really discomposes him. The way she sits up straight in her chair and looks him in the eyes as she speaks,the detached, matter-of-fact manner in which she relates the story. The way Susan shrugs when the tale is told and says: ‘It was a long time ago, Ed. I was very young. I can truly barely remember her now. It’s not important anyway,’ she concludes. ‘Not any more. Not to us.’
    Not important! His brave girl.
    It’s only later – lying alone that night in his lumpy childhood bed, unable to sleep – that Ed wonders why it is that Susan hasn’t told him before this. He can understand, excuse even, the uncomplicated, frequently told lie, proffered at the outset – when they were little more than acquaintances, really, when the relationship was tentative, its future uncertain. But why hadn’t she revised the story earlier? Let him know before this? Why had she kept up the lie? He finds it hard to believe Susan’s claim that it doesn’t matter. Her sister’s disappearance, or as Susan insists, her death, was surely a defining moment of her childhood, hardly incidental. It had, after all, led to her parents’ separation, her mother’s decline, her madness. He wonders too whether such an omission, such evasion, such an unwillingness to share, should be considered treacherous, traitorous (or is he being melodramatic, oversensitive?), a betrayal of their commitment. Of their love.
    And just before he floats off into dreams of floods and tidal waves, Ed wonders – and this is the first and indeed only moment of doubt that he will experience for many years – Ed wonders whether his mother might not be entirely wrong, wonders whether she might not have her reasons. Wonders what it is exactly he’s getting himself into: marrying Susan.
    ***
    Thinking about it later, Ed has to admit that his mother (why is it so frequently the way?) is right. He is worried. Nobody has actually asked Ed what he thinks, how he feels, not evenSusan. And why would they? It’s not his problem. But if anybody were to ask him how he felt about the situation and Ed were to answer truthfully (which, being Ed, he most probably would. To the best of his ability, anyway), he would have to say that he is not happy, that he feels decidedly unsettled by the turn of events, even anxious, though he’s not quite sure why.
    So unsettled is he feeling that – and this is unusual, perhaps without precedent – Ed’s work is suffering. Though he is getting through each day’s appointments, though he is still selling enough to keep