by Candice Fox
‘Amanda,’ Superfish said.
‘I’m not responsible for Hogan’s death,’ Amanda sneered at Joanna. ‘You heard me. You heard me say he was unarmed and you nailed him without thinking when you heard my voice.’
‘I didn’t –’
‘You probably didn’t even look at who it was. You spotted me running towards the back of the petrol station as you pulled up in your car. You heard me calling out not to shoot. It could have been anyone. It could have been Ted.’
‘An innocent man …?’ Joanna’s hand fluttered theatrically to her lip. ‘How do you know he was innocent? You … you made me kill …’
‘Stop it.’ Superfish took a step towards his partner but she backed away. ‘Stop this, Joanna.’
‘You ruined my life.’ Joanna was sidestepping around Amanda, out of her partner’s reach. ‘You took my best friend, and then you made me kill, just like you.’
Her words fell away. Joanna drew the gun from her belt. Superfish snatched for his own, flicking the safety off as he raised the weapon and aimed at his partner.
The phone made another sound in the shaft. A reminder about the text message. Amanda held on to the twine, her face hard and her body still as she listened to Superfish trying to shout his partner down. She was prepared for an impact, if that was what was going to happen now. A bullet to the heart. Joanna was aiming there. Two shots, the way she’d been trained, the way she took down Hogan. The way Pip Sweeney had died. Amanda watched the bodies twisting, almost in slow motion, before her, Superfish reaching for Joanna, Joanna tightening her finger on the trigger of her weapon.
There were men in the doorway to the fire stairs. Officers. More guns pointing, sweeping over Amanda.
‘Drop it! Drop it! Everybody drop it!’
Amanda let the twine go.
The emotions came in waves. The first was terror. Sheer, blinding terror that caused flashes of false realities to zing through my brain, as visceral as if they were occurring before me. Lillian’s belly being slit open, spilling her insides. Her throat being slashed. I saw in an explosion of colour every murder victim I’d walked in on during my drug squad career, men and women sprawled on beds, collapsed in corners, curled in the boots of cars, burned, or sunk into rivers. I held back sickness, tried to blink away the visions and keep the car on the road. A swell of hellish whispers rose, speaking my numbing, paralysing guilt. They weren’t fully formed thoughts but they meant something to me.
Her only trip out. Your responsibility. Your fault. The last time you’ll see her. Kelly. Jett. Victim of your circumstances. Cursed man, spreading his curse down the bloodline, ruining her life before she’s even had a chance. Taking her life. Taking her life.
I didn’t know where we were going, but the terror became so hard and hot and painful that I had to take the car off the road. A steel hand had gripped my skull, seemed to want to shove my jaw out and my head down between my shoulders. I was shaking even as I gripped the wheel so tight the leather squeaked.
‘What are you doing?’ Sara asked. ‘I told you to drive.’
‘You have to know something,’ I said, watching my own blazing eyes in the rear-view mirror, afraid that if I looked at either of them I wouldn’t be able to maintain control. ‘If you hurt my child, that’ll be it. I’ll have lost everything. You’re threatening the only thing I have left in the world, the only string that connects me to reality.’
‘So what?’ Sara asked, but her voice was small.
‘So you better plan what you’re doing very carefully,’ I said. ‘Because if anything happens to her, I’ll rip you to shreds with my bare hands.’
There were other threats coming, sizzling and boiling through my brain, but I left them unspoken. They were dark, obscene, nonsensical things. A mind gripping at white-hot fury and trying to squeeze it into words. Sara shifted in her seat.
‘Drive,’ she said. ‘Just drive. If you do what I say, your daughter will be fine.’
I got back on the road, breathed through the rage with long, shuddering breaths that in time softened and slowed. I didn’t know where we were going, but I could guess. She was taking me to where the boy was. Lillian kicked her legs in her seat, babbled a few things about what she saw out the window, asked where her mother was once or twice. Neither Sara nor I spoke. I watched my enemy in the mirror, scratching the flaking skin at the back of her neck, meeting my eyes steadily.
There was a gun under my seat. I remembered the weapon just as the thought also seemed to take form in Sara’s mind. She hadn’t prepared for this, had calmed when she remembered to get rid of my phone. But she’d seen me walking around the hotel with a gun tucked into the back of my jeans.
‘Do you have a gun?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was taking my child to the fucking zoo. Why would I have a gun on me?’
Sara judged my eyes in the mirror. Then she began fishing around the car. I leaned and reached under the seat as far as I could, trying not to make my actions known, but she spotted the movement. I felt her fingernails scratch against the back of my hand as she grabbed the weapon and fumbled for the magazine beside it.
‘You stupid lying fuck,’ she snapped.
I said nothing, sweat rolling down my sides, making my shirt stick to my chest. I was speeding. There was no telling what she would do if we were pulled over, now that she had a gun and a knife. I forced myself to slow.
‘You don’t know how to use that thing,’ I said.
‘It can’t be that hard,’ she said. I heard her load the magazine into the gun. ‘There are only so many buttons.’
Visions, flashes. An accidental discharge through the back seat and into my spine. The car slamming into a tree. Lillian broken, a lifeless doll.
The tension in the car was almost a sound, a high ringing. I needed to bring it down, on both her end and mine. Lillian didn’t seem to sense it. When I glanced at her she was drifting off, her head sagging against the side of her car seat.
‘We need to talk,’ I said.
She smirked, humourless. ‘You sound like Henry.’
‘There’s a way out of this,’ I said. ‘It might not look like it right now, but there is a way.’
‘The only way out of this is to get rid of you,’ she said. ‘John told me you’d been around to his hotel room. That you found out about us. I can’t have the police continuing to look at me. They’ve got to believe the maintenance man did it. I need them to keep believing that.’
‘My partner knows about John,’ I lied. ‘If you kill me, she’ll tell them anyway.’
‘She’s my next stop, then,’ Sara said.
We watched each other in the rear-view mirror until I couldn’t look at her anymore. I locked my eyes on the road and asked the question I didn’t want to ask.
‘Is Richie …’
‘He’s dead,’ she said.
She talked, and I drove, the road before me disappearing, becoming the rooms she described; small, cold rooms untouched by the cheerfulness of fluffy, woollen toys that sagged on nursery room shelves and sat with glowing, unpushed musical buttons on the living room floor. The house she and Henry had owned at the beginning of their marriage had been like a black hole, she said. It ate light and colour, sucked greedily at her limbs, so that within its walls she felt heavy and tired all the time. It was always cold. The food she took out of the oven seemed already cold by the time it got to the plate, and the baby was cold all the time, resisting the blankets and heating pads she swaddled her in, resisting the warmth of her body. She knew it wasn’t the house itself, but something inside her that had failed to ignite, a pilot light that was switched off, had never been switched on. She’d been wandering around her whole life seeing the glow in other people’s eyes, hearing them talk about it. She’d glow on her wedding day, and when she was pregnant, they said. The glow would drive out the cold.
She hadn’t smothered Anya, their first baby. She’d gone into the room and found her blue like the walls, like the light that hung i
n the air, like the uniforms of the officers who attended. Though she hadn’t killed the child with her hands, with a pillow, she knew she’d killed her just by not loving her. She’d failed to warm the infant with her breast, with the glow she and Henry were supposed to have created when they slipped gold rings onto each other’s fingers. The baby had been frozen by the sheer fact of being unwanted.
The relief lasted a long time. It lingered quietly, guiltily through the sadness after Anya’s passing, then it seemed to grow, blossom, create a strange warmth of its own. She had a secret from Henry, and that felt good. Perhaps by merely being a secret, the relief she felt that she was childless again rubbed against the sadness she presented to the world, and the rubbing created a glow. She began spending more time out of the house, bathing in the relief, bringing back a candle flame inside herself that kept her warm through the cold, cold nights beside Henry. When she was out she felt the thrumming of the world, the call of the horizon. She’d been told all her life to get married. Have children. She’d done both, but neither made her organs twist the way they did as she met the gaze of a strange man across the room in a cafe in a suburb that was not her own. As they walked up the stairs to his apartment together. As she arrived home in the morning smelling of his breath. She felt little tingles of it as she followed fantastical ideas, lying beside Henry in the bed. She could walk out any time. Blow their savings on a plane ticket. Change her name. Cut her hair. Drop the weight. New girl in town with eyes full of mystery.
The cry of a baby sent shivers up her spine. She would not make that mistake again.
And then Richie had come.
It was easier, the second time, to go through the motions. Other people came in and took over, not wanting a repeat of the first ‘incident’. They moved, and Henry took on a job that kept him out of her way. His parents and her own took the baby, sometimes for days on end. She lay around and fantasised about her trip away, some truck driver on a lonely highway picking her up as she hailed a ride to nowhere. A slick-haired businessman asking her name across the aisle in first class as she flew to Paris. They were romance-novel fantasies, she knew. But even if they’d had some whiff of possibility to them, the baby and Henry and the mortgage and her parents and her out-of-date passport and her flabby belly and her thick ankles made all of it unreachable.
She moved slowly; heavy, drained. Walking through water, carrying bags of lead. When Richie was out of the house, he took half the gravity with him. Henry took the other half.
The absence of the child made her curious. She was surprised when he grew old enough to be genuinely amusing, challenging. She could see the changes in his body almost daily. He stopped needing her, stopped crying and squealing and started surviving on his own. He became the candle that warmed the house around her, a heat that occasionally distracted her from the fantasies. She started to admire the little flame, growing and growing, burning bright through the windows of the house when she arrived home. She could feel the heat of her love for the boy pulsing through the walls sometimes while he slept. She’d creep from the bed and stand over his sleeping form until her skin burned.
She separated from Henry. The boy was all she needed. She stopped messing around with anyone who held her eye for long enough, with Richie’s third grade teacher, with John Errett, with an old friend she’d known from high school. Sara had been ready to be the warmth that Richie needed, and for him to be that for her, and for the call of the night to be silenced. It was time to stop playing games. Thinking about faraway highways and expensive hotel rooms and rendezvous in flashy bars in trendy corners of the city. It was time to grow up. She was not childless. She had a child, and she loved him.
Then he’d turned against her.
Sara was staring out the window. She glanced at me in the rear-view mirror, coming to herself. I didn’t know how long we had been driving. The sun was red through the tops of the trees, something burning at the base of the mountains – a small spot bushfire being battled by local volunteers. The fields were featureless, scraped-back earth between rainforest and the wandering, endless reach of creek and mangroves. The wilds.
‘You get married,’ Sara said. ‘You have kids. You fantasise about what you could have done instead, about what you’re going to do when it’s over. And then you realise it’s never over. I was staring down the barrel of the next thirty years sitting across the table from Henry at weddings, Christmases, graduations. Sitting through Richie’s inevitable teenage crisis caused by my leaving his father. His inevitable daddy issues. His own divorce.’
Lillian stirred in her chair, turning away from a drool patch she’d made on one side. Sara reached over and swept a sweaty strand of hair from my child’s head.
‘Richie loved his father more than me,’ Sara said. ‘After everything I’d done. Everything I’d lost. He acted out after the separation, and I started threatening him that if he didn’t behave himself I’d make him go live with his father. Well, that worked a few times, and then one day he said that was fine – he’d go live there. Can you believe that? His father was living in some shitty dive hotel. In the fridge at his place there was milk and cheese, and that’s it. And Richie says he wants to go live there. I couldn’t believe it.’
I tried to think of things to say. That Richie was a child. That his father’s new house was probably foreign and exciting to him. I remembered Lillian crying hysterically for her mother after she had dropped her at my place. The jealousy and hurt I had felt.
‘Richie bit his fingernails down to stubs while he was with me,’ Sara said. ‘And he didn’t do that at his dad’s house. What does that tell you?’
‘It tells me you were very sensitive to his relationship with his father, and you took it too seriously. It tells me you probably have postnatal depression,’ I said.
‘Please.’ Sara rolled her eyes at me. ‘Richie was eight years old.’
‘Anya was a newborn,’ I said. ‘You had it then. That’s maybe why –’
‘I didn’t kill Anya,’ Sara snapped. ‘She was a fucking baby.’ Her eyes in the rear-view mirror were livid. Insulted. As though murdering a newborn baby was any worse than murdering a healthy eight-year-old boy.
‘The fibres.’
‘It was exactly as the police said.’ Sara looked away from me in disgust. ‘She’d had the pillow in the cot with her. I don’t know who put it there. Maybe it was me. I was tired, and I wasn’t thinking. You do crazy things when you’re tired. Put the phone in the fridge. Park the car and walk into the house without turning the engine off. When I found Anya I must have thrown the pillow across the room. It’s hard to remember. The shock hits you and you forget details like that.’
I waited for some of her rage to cool, squeezing the steering wheel so hard it creaked.
‘You must have been depressed after Anya died. You were depressed when Richie was born. That’s why you handed him off to your parents. Henry’s parents. I’m not an expert, Sara. But I think you’re sick and you need help. You can get that help.’
Sara gazed at the passing cane.
‘There’s still time,’ she said after a moment, so softly she might have been talking to herself. ‘There’s still time to have the life I deserve.’
She directed me to turn off the highway. I looked at a football field wedged between two farms, kids playing in the dappled light, parents pointing and directing as the kids wrestled and trudged in the grass.
We were soon on a dirt road heading into the rainforest, the little huddles of suburban houses we’d passed gone. I couldn’t see the mountains anymore. I heard whispers of the ocean in the distance as we rose and fell over hills. There were only towering walls of green, fingers and arms of palms and vines embracing or kissing overhead against the pale purple sky. I wondered what she had told Richie as they drove here. The boy in the back seat, watching the last of his world sail by.
‘Richie was never in the hotel the second night, was he?’ I asked.
‘No.’ Sara was watching m
y child sleep. ‘He never came back from the crocodile farm. He so loved crocodiles, I thought that might be a good way to end it. You probably saw them do the same show we did. Where they coax the thing out of the water.’
I didn’t answer. There was a lump in my throat.
‘I worked it all out the day before,’ Sara said. ‘It was easier than I thought. They make the cameras around the hotel really obvious so you won’t do the wrong thing, but then you kind of know where they are, so you can figure it out if you try. It was like a puzzle. I drove into the car park and parked so that the passenger side doors were close to the elevators. When the police officers took me through the footage it was believable. I told them Richie was sitting in the back seat, so you couldn’t see him from the overhead camera on the boom gates. And then I said he got out of the back and went straight to the elevators, so you couldn’t see him over the top of the car. He was too short.’
‘The sunburn,’ I managed, swallowing, on the edge of sickness.
‘I told the other parents that we both got fried,’ she said. ‘Made sure they really got a good look at me. I ran into the Sampsons outside our room and said Richie had already gone in and fallen asleep. We were dehydrated and sore. So they set the other boys up in the room and we said we’d come later, after I knew the parents would have gone downstairs.’
‘What did you tell the boys?’ I asked.
She smirked. ‘I hardly told them anything.’ I watched her smile in the mirror, reflective, almost amused. ‘When I came in they were all lying on the floor watching a movie. I said Richie was going to come soon and they all mumbled and grunted. You know what boys are like. They’re idiots. They can only pay attention to one thing at a time.’