My Name Was Eden

by Eleanor Barker-White

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Suspense; Horror

Synopsis

In this edge-of-your-seat psychological debut, a mother’s experience with Vanishing Twin Syndrome triggers disturbing changes in her teenage daughter, perfect for fans of The Push and The Undoing.

One twin vanished. The other twin remained. Until now...

When her daughter Eden came home from the hospital, Lucy was profoundly relieved. Eden had survived a drowning incident and had no apparent brain damage, no serious injuries, not even a scratch on her. Lucy fervently welcomed having a second chance at being the good mother she should have been before her teenager’s accident.

Until Eden tells her that Eden isn’t her name. Until she starts calling herself Eli. The name Lucy had reserved for Eden’s unborn twin.

Don’t worry, says the doctor. Eden is completely fine, says her husband. Of course I’m fine, Eden says, with that strange new smile of hers. I didn’t die. I’m here.

But Lucy knows something’s very wrong with Eden. She’s not her maddening, complicated teenage girl anymore—this straight-backed, even tempered, steady-eyed child in her house is someone else entirely. Eden, it seems, is the twin who disappeared…

Release date: February 27, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 304

Sample

Prologue

His skin feels tight and itchy, as if it belongs to someone else. Sometimes he wishes he could unzip it, watch it fall to the ground like a heavy overcoat. Maybe then they would see the parts inside that are pulpy and decaying, the parts that are real.

On other days, he enjoys the pretense. The power. She tells him, in urgent whispers when they are alone, that she can’t get him out of her head.

And so, he waits. He watches how she carries mascara in the bag. Hairbrush. Lip gloss. She does that laugh, that one that rises and falls, bubbling, like water over pebbles. It’s as if they have a secret language all of their own. She doesn’t know that when she lies, there’s always the faintest whisper of a laugh at the end of her denials. It’s so imperceptible that most people would miss it.

He doesn’t.

She thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t; not really. Still, she pretends, too. She hides him away, like a dirty secret. He doesn’t like that.

She doesn’t know what he is capable of.

He loves her, he really does. And all love comes with sacrifice. He is tired of skulking in the shadows, tired of being silenced.

Now, it’s time to break free.

 

1

I tug clothes from the washing machine. There are so many, too many, the threads of my family emerging in a conjoined tangle. James’s trousers are twisted, like a double helix, around my satin nightie. The rest of our sodden laundry leaps out in fits and starts: pants, pajama bottoms, an old T-shirt. Eden’s bra; innocent and yet not, with its small black bow between the cups. I still can’t believe that my dimple-cheeked, curly-pigtailed daughter is changing so fast—only yesterday she seemed to be dressing up, dancing and singing. Now she’s fourteen: in three years she’ll be old enough to drive, in four, old enough to vote and leave home.

I fold the laundry neatly into the basket and sag against the kitchen island. Outside, a flight of swallows dips and rises against the bruise of the late afternoon sky, and a smell drifts into the kitchen, sweet and oaky: bonfire smoke from the farm up the road. At first, I wasn’t sure about buying a converted barn—what are we, cattle?—but the wide hall windows, which offer an all-seasons eye to the expanse of gently sloping fells, took my breath away from the very first viewing. With less than an hour’s drive to Lake Windermere, we are lucky—I know that. It’s the first thing people say when they come to visit, their eyes roving hungrily from the flagstone tiles up to the triple Velux windows set into the ceiling. “Wow, look at this place. You’re so lucky.” James laughs at that. “No luck involved. Just hard work.” I’m not sure he’s right; he was blessed with good looks, a private school education and an upbringing that many people can only dream of. But still—it’s important, isn’t it? To be grateful for all the things you have. What’s the point, otherwise?

It’s too quiet in here. I hit the dishwasher button and leave it murmuring as I carry the washing basket into the utility room. Barney, James’s boss, and Tia, his new PA, will be here in less than three hours and I still need to vacuum and finish preparing dinner. The spiced aubergines and lamb are already chilling in the fridge, but I’d planned to make some crusty bread to accompany them and now I’m wondering if I’ve left it too late, whether I’d be better off popping to Sainsbury’s and grabbing a few French baguettes. Yes. I’ll warm them in the oven, the smell will permeate the house, and James will return, tear a horn from the crust; self-discipline isn’t his strong suit. I picture Barney and Tia turning up: her in a burgundy dress that complements her olive complexion, him wearing dark jeans and a white, or perhaps dark blue, shirt, both of them depositing quick, small kisses on each of my artfully rouged cheeks. Right now, I want nothing more than to indulge in a little mindless Facebook browsing, but there is too much to do, too many other things to think about.

Where is Eden? She’s normally home from school by now. I move back into the kitchen and gaze down the farm track, but apart from a small brown rabbit waiting beside the brutally trimmed hedgerows, it’s empty. For a moment, I think I can hear the roar of a bus—Eden’s bus—pulling away, but then I see the tractor several hundred yards ahead, rolling into one of the fields. It’s 4:40 p.m. The bus always drops her off at the lane opposite the farm at 4 p.m.

I snatch up my phone and call her mobile: it rings and rings and rings. This is just like Eden—I imagine her looking at the screen, seeing Mum, and shoving it back in her pocket with a huff of annoyance. She doesn’t want to hear from me. To her, I’m a fossil, a specimen from the unthinkable era before mobile or internet technology: “What, you had, like, no mobiles? At all?” And then she would shake her head as though imagining a sepia picture of cobbled streets, men on horseback, women clad in hoop 

dresses.

4:45 p.m. I’m trying not to think about pedophiles and road accidents, but they’re there anyway, creeping about in my head, treading on the creaky floorboards of my mind. Perhaps she’s gone with James. Perhaps he met her at the bottom of the road, and when she asked where he was going, he told her he was off to buy me some flowers. Perhaps.

James’s mobile goes to voicemail. I can hear his voice: You’re being ridiculous, Lucy, always imagining the worst. I don’t understand how he can live his life not thinking the worst, and while at times his nonchalance is a comfort, other times it’s an irritation. There’s no point pretending it doesn’t happen: people do get abducted, raped and killed. How can he have such an absence of imagination?

In the hall, Bluey the budgie starts squawking—three sharp bursts—before crooning softly to himself inside his cage. The school. I’ll call the school. They would normally let me know if the bus had been delayed, but maybe their message to me slipped through the net. Maybe Eden lost her phone . . .

I lift my mobile again and scroll to the school’s number, hoping to get through to Mrs. Stanton, the nasal Scottish receptionist who has always looked out for my daughter. I’m standing there, waiting for the call to connect and hoping that Eden will stroll past the window so I can hang up, berate her and get on with preparing for this evening, when I hear it: a panicked shout, somewhere up the lane. And then I see the young tractor driver running across the field, his dark green jacket flapping out behind him.

I put down the phone. There is something cold and slimy crawling through my veins. Somehow, I am at the front door, registering the cold of the handle, the lemon-sharp brightness of the light. A dog is barking and at the edge of the field, where a brush of trees leads to a mound, there is a small crowd of people gathering. I break into a run, pumping across the track, clods of mud bouncing up around my calves, gasping, gasping. Two men and a woman are standing, brows pinched, arms folded, one with a phone to his ear—guests of Tony and Pippa, our neighbors from the farm, I see now—and in the lake that dips below the row of trees, the tractor driver is wading across the water.

Something submerged. A cobwebbing of fine blonde hair, bobbing gently as the water ripples. My daughter.

No. No, no, no. Please.

But it is. It’s her.

Eden.

 

2

The ambulance is here. My daughter is waxen, a motionless clay figure, devoid of breath, devoid of life, her head pressed against the sunbaked soil. They are thrusting her chest, blowing into her lips, and I can’t take my eyes off her wet school clothes, the black tights that she snatched off the radiator this morning, the shoes I argued about buying a few months ago because they barely fell inside the remit of school uniform policy. “God, Mum,” she said. “Literally everyone wears these. I seriously don’t get your problem.”

Pippa, the farm manager’s wife, puts her arm around my shoulders. She smells sweet, like silage. “Go and get a blanket,” she says to her husband, Tony, before turning back to me. “Do you want me to call someone?”

I am fizzing, incapable of speech. The sun is scattering tattoos of light across the lake and it feels ghoulishly inappropriate, this beauty. I am here but not, watching as though we are actors on a stage: the men with their broad shoulders, ready for the weight of burdens, the sharp echo of the barking dog, Pippa at my side, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, as though her hand is an eraser, trying to rub out the terror of it all.

Seconds stretch into minutes. Or perhaps hours, it’s impossible to tell. I can’t move, for fear that I will tear this fragile membrane of hope. Please, I beg silently. Come on, Eden. Please.

I don’t realize it comes from her, at first. The cough is deep, rough, like a man clearing his throat, and when the male paramedic stops thrusting, I run forward. Eden’s head is lifted now as she is turned onto her side, and she is making a gargling sound as she retches violently, bringing up green and brown soup. I take her hand and say her name, over and over, and someone—the female paramedic, I think—brings out a silver sheet, wraps it around Eden’s skinny shoulders. I’m shivering too; my teeth chattering.

Oh my God. She’s alive. She’s alive.

There is another flurry then—the small crowd draws closer before being asked to move back, move back, give Eden space. Pippa squeezes my arm and there is chatter now: a frisson of exclamations. “Wonderful!” “Oh my goodness.” “Thank God.” Underneath it all is my daughter, being lifted onto a stretcher, an oxygen mask clamped around her nose and mouth. It looks too big for her face. Is it working? I haven’t yet heard Eden speak, and amongst the relief a tentacle of fear is still twisting inside: dry drowning, brain damage, words I’ve heard and seen in books and magazines. “Is she going to be okay?”

“We hope so,” the paramedic says, and I think what a small word it is: hope, just four letters, so easy to pronounce—too easy, for all that it represents. She’s the one who came to talk to me when they first arrived, supporting Eden’s head and asking questions as the other paramedic began CPR. “But she’s coughed up quite a bit of fluid and we’ll need to take her in, check everything just to be sure.”

I call James from the ambulance, and this time he picks up. Eden has nodded her head to confirm her name, but her eyes are closed again now, the lids drawn, a milky-white curtain against the harsh artificial light. “What happened?” James asks, and I have no answer for that; I do not know. I think I asked—no, screamed—the same question of our neighbors when I saw her body being dragged from the water, but no one had any idea.

“Oh my God,” James says. “Oh God. Oh . . . ,” and I can picture him, rubbing that thin dent on his temple left by his reading glasses, a self-soothing gesture. He sounds small, and he is not a small man, not in physique or personality. He is a man’s man, a back-slapper, a man sure of his own worth, secure in his success

He tells me he’ll meet me at the hospital, and we both hang up without saying goodbye. There is no need for extraneous words. Not now.

 

At Westmorland Hospital, we wait. Despite the warmness of the day, Eden is mildly hypothermic, we are told. Given her medical background, and because they don’t know how long she was in the water, they want to closely monitor her, although they are “cautiously optimistic”—her vital signs, GCS score and blood oxygen results are good. But she is not back with us, not yet. Not in the sense that you might call normal. She is pale-faced, tight-lipped and, for the moment, there is no evidence of our little girl beneath the layers of exhaustion. I see more than a teenage girl in a bed: I see Eden, the way she crept into the house soon after we moved here, her eyes round with wonder, hands cupped into a tight ball, before she opened them to reveal Bluey, our rescue budgie that she’d found stuck in the hedgerow. I see her at the age of four, spinning around in a pink princess dress, and later—eight or nine—running up the stairs after her friends as we hosted her first-ever sleepover. Bex, her best friend’s mum, had laughed at the shrieks of excitement coming from upstairs, and she’d stayed with me in the kitchen, drinking coffee and chatting until Eden clattered back downstairs with her hands on her hips and insisted that it was their sleepover, not ours, and could we please stop talking so loudly?

The paramedic asked what Eden was like. Maybe she was just making conversation, but somewhere in the paranoid depths of my mind, I thought: She knows. She knows that Eden and I haven’t seen eye to eye, not for a long time. I told her that my beautiful, crazy teenage daughter is confident, happy, always smiling. It’s true; she is.

Just not with me.

The truth is, I don’t know my daughter anymore; not really. Perhaps I never did. I think of how, very occasionally—and from a young age—Eden would talk nonchalantly about the fact that she would never live to grow up. That she would never live to “be a lady.” It makes me cold to think about it now.

 

Eden is taken for an MRI scan; they want to check if there are any signs of hypoxic brain injury. These words are spoken by a nurse—Sarah—who has a face scribbled with the horrors of the job. “It’s not a catch-all,” she admits. “The most important thing will be how Eden responds afterwards—we’ll be looking at whether her speech, communication and motor function are all back to normal, things like that. But her blood and oxygen levels are all looking good, and she had spontaneous breathing and circulation upon admission here; all these things give her a really good chance.”

“Do you need to do any other tests? When will we know . . . if she’s in the clear, I mean?”

Sarah puts her hand on my arm. Her fingers are heavy, warm. “It’s difficult to give you a timescale until we’ve got more information. They might want to do an EEG as well—we’ll see what the MRI says first. We will do our best to look after her, but don’t forget to look after yourselves. Have you managed to have anything to eat or drink?”

James takes this as his cue to stand up. He likes a chance to take charge, to be doing. “I can grab some coffee. My parents are on their way; I’ve texted Barney and Tia as well, to cancel. Lucy, do you . . . ?”

“I’ll come with you.”

We leave our coats on the chairs and head down to the canteen. There’s a huge queue for the lift and I want to wait with them, talk and cry with them, absorb the comfort of strangers, but James is already pushing open the door that leads to the stairs. “What happened?” he asks as we descend, even though he knows I don’t have the answer. “What happened, Lucy? I don’t get it.”

I don’t get it either. I imagine our child now, sliding into a mechanical tube, magnets spinning, trying to see inside her mind. The brain is still a mystery to modern science, with its billions of neurons, trillions of connections, so complex, so fragile. What happened, Eden? What happened? I should be delighted that our child is alive—and I am, my God, of course I am—but there is something else scratching away inside me like a wedge of broken glass; a terrible sense of unease, deep inside my gut. ...