Cecelia Ahern - Roar

They’d feed the ducks together and he’d make her feel safe.

He sounded very much like the duck she’d spoken with.

So now she sits on the bench in the park by the lake, stunned, remembering him, smelling him, hearing him, feeling him all over again. She cries through her smile, and smiles through her tears, and then, feeling lighter, she stands and walks back to her office.

She noticed the mark on her skin on her first day back at work after nine months’ maternity leave. It had been a stressful morning. She had packed and repacked her work tote the previous night like an anxious child before her first day of school, and still, despite the endless planning, the thinking and rethinking, the freshly puréed food in pots packed away in the freezer and one in the fridge for the next day, the lunches prepared, schoolbags ready, diaper bag packed, changes of clothes in case of after-school sports grass stains, potty-training failures and explosive diarrhoea due to new formula, the school uniform washed and ironed, afterschool tracksuit ready for activities – still, after all that organization, the constant run-throughs of what-if scenarios, they ended up late.

She couldn’t sleep with all the thinking, planning, organizing, preparing, fallback-plan-making; everything was going through her mind and on top of that she had to cope with anxiety about her first day back at work. Would she be able to pick up where she’d left off? Would she muddle things up as she had been doing at home – adding bubble solution to the chicken dinner and only realizing when she went outside to blow a tin of chopped tomatoes into the air for her confused children? Would she be able to function? Was she still relevant? Had her portfolios been given away? Would her clients be happy to see her return? What if her replacement had been more efficient, quicker, faster, better ? What if they were looking for flaws, examining her under the microscope, looking for a reason to get rid of the woman with three kids? There were people who wanted her job, people who could stay longer in the evening, arrive earlier in the morning, change their schedule at a moment’s notice. Young men, older men with children, young women, women with no children because they didn’t want them, couldn’t have them, or who were afraid to risk it all.

She had dropped the six-year-old at school, then the three-year-old at Montessori, then the nine-month-old at daycare. Every single drop-off had broken her heart, each one more than the last. Each child howled as she left him, looked at her with sad searching eyes as if to say, ‘Why are you leaving me like this?’ Stamping images in her mind of their crumpled-up faces, tormented and accusing. Why was she doing this to them? Nine months at home had been lovely – stressful at times but lovely, with at least one daily psychotic screaming episode that scared her more than the kids, but still, they’d been together and she’d loved them and they had felt loved. So why was she putting them through this? Most of her salary went on childcare. She could get by without working if she really had to, if they economized even further. It wasn’t about the money. Well, it was a little, but not completely. She was going back to work because she needed to. She loved her job. She wanted her job. Her husband wanted her to have this job, not just so she could help pay the mortgage but because he loved that other woman that she became when she worked, the one that felt a little more contented, a little more useful, satisfied, relevant, a little less cranky. Though she certainly wasn’t feeling that way on her first day back.

She watched her baby in the arms of the stranger whose nametag said ‘Emma’ and her heart twisted. She hated Emma. She loved Emma. She needed Emma. The baby screamed and she felt her nipples twist and leak. Her silk shirt was already soiled, not by the kids for once but by her own body. She blasted the heating, directed the fan towards her wet boobs, placed a cabbage leaf in each bra cup against her breasts, and searched the radio for anything to take her mind off abandoning her children.

That night as she was inspecting her body after the shower, she noticed the red mark. It was on her right breast, the fleshiest part of her body.

‘It’s a heat rash,’ her husband said.

‘It’s not.’

‘You always get these spots when you take a hot shower.’

‘The shower wasn’t very hot. I’ve been out for twenty minutes.’

‘It’s dry skin, then.’

‘It’s not. I’ve just moisturized.’

‘Well then, what is it?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you.’

He pushed his head closer to her breast and squinted.

‘Did Dougie bite you? It looks like a bite mark.’

She shook her head. Not that she remembered. But maybe he had. Though he’d barely looked at her when she’d collected him from daycare that evening and had fallen asleep in the car on the way home so she’d had to put him straight to bed. She recalled the struggle while handing him over to Emma at daycare. She didn’t remember him biting her, but maybe.

She’d slept well that night after the emotional day, despite a bed-wetting incident, an unscheduled night bottle and a sleepwalker. The two eldest ended up in bed with her husband while she ended up in the spare bedroom with the baby. Still, the best night’s sleep one could ask for under the circumstances.

The following day the mark on her chest had turned a purple colour and she found another. She’d noticed it after lunch, when she managed to sit alone in the local restaurant and order food for herself, by herself, actually finishing her cup of tea while it was still hot, then went to the toilet alone for the first time in a very long time. She thought she’d sat down on a pin or a thumbtack but found nothing on her desk chair. In the toilet cubicle, she pulled out her compact mirror and found an even larger red oval-shaped mark on the white flesh of her buttock. She didn’t show her husband that one but she was careful with the children, making sure none of them were nipping at her when she wasn’t looking.

It was during an overnight business trip to London that she began to grow really concerned. One too many stares at her on the plane – on which she had been able to sit alone, without having to share a seat belt or a seat, or distract her children from kicking the seat in front of them or running up and down the aisles, or screaming at the top of their lungs – caused her to rush to the bathroom as soon as they landed. She discovered that her neck was covered in red marks, which were much larger than the previous ones and definitely bite marks, with tiny tooth incisions clearly visible. She hid her neck beneath her scarf, despite the stifling heat in the car she shared with her male colleagues, and later in the hotel realized the marks had spread all the way down her left arm. While on Skype, talking to the kids, who were too hyper to pay her any attention, she showed her husband the bite marks.