A Window Breaks

by C. M. Ewan

  ‘Holly, I—’

  ‘Relax, Dad. I’m just saying, if I wanted to have a major teen sulk about it, I totally could. I mean, it would be totally justified.’

  As Holly talked, Buster reversed backwards towards us with a completely different stick to the one I’d thrown. It was much bigger, for starters, coming in at approximately twice his body length and weight. It was also far too heavy for him to carry, so he was having to drag it across the ground, ass-backwards, snarling in the back of his throat. And yet, out of the two of us right now, I still felt like he was the smarter one.

  ‘OK,’ I said, carefully. ‘And are you having a major teen sulk?’

  ‘Right now, I’m pretty much still deciding.’

  ‘Then can I just tell you that I think I have some idea of how tough things have been for you and I’m sorry about it. But the situation between your mum and me is complicated, Holly. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. I never wanted to move out. I only did it because—’

  Holly sucked air through her teeth and tore a strip of bark off the tree. ‘Now see, Dad? Teenage Holly would have to let you know that you totally walked into that one. She’d probably say something like, Yeah, I got it. Mum explained it to me after you’d gone.’

  I felt stranded. I wanted to go to Holly and close the distance between us. But I also instinctively knew that would be the wrong move to make. And still that stick of dynamite burned down fast.

  I fumbled for the right thing to say. I was pretty sure I didn’t have it, but I gave it a shot all the same.

  ‘Then I suppose I would have to tell Teenage Holly that I deserve that. But I’d also want to tell her that I didn’t only come here this week because she got hurt.’ I leaned to one side to catch Holly’s eye but it was a difficult thing to do while she focused on her hands, tearing and crumbling the flake of bark. ‘That would be something really important for Teenage Holly to know. And I’d want to emphasize that it’s been a trial separation between her mum and me. Because we are trying to fix things. We want to fix things. And, Holly, sweetheart, I never stopped loving you or missing you when I moved out. Not ever. Not once. I couldn’t. OK?’

  Holly hitched her shoulders. She was silent a long time. When she eventually spoke, the wobble in her throat made me want to hit myself about the head with the branch Buster was playing with.

  ‘I’m mad at you, Dad.’

  ‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I’m mad at me too.’

  ‘And at Mum and Michael?’

  ‘I try not to be.’

  Holly nodded, taking that in. ‘I’m going to go for a walk now.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘I think I just want Buster with me for a while.’

  She slunk by me without pausing, then grabbed one end of the branch Buster was gnawing on and dragged it away across the forest floor with Buster prancing alongside her, his tail wagging and the branch bumping off tree stumps and roots.

  ‘Is she giving you a hard time?’

  I spun round, my heart in my throat. Rachel ducked low under the pine limbs hanging over the edge of the deck. She had on a patterned sweater and mud-smeared hiking boots. Thick woollen socks were rolled up over her ankles. And yes, she was tired, she was anxious – and we were only tentatively feeling our way forwards here – but still, when I saw her, I felt a fast ticking in my blood and everything else seemed to fall completely away.

  ‘Nothing I shouldn’t expect,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t prying, Tom. I was trying to give you two some space. She’ll come round. She loves you.’

  ‘I’ve missed her.’

  ‘And she’s missed you. We both have. You know, I never asked you to leave.’

  But she hadn’t asked me to stay. When Rachel had found me packing my things in our bedroom, she’d taken one look at my bags and turned without a word, crossing the hall into Michael’s room and shutting the door behind her. I’d tried knocking. Rachel hadn’t answered. When I’d gone in, she’d been sitting on Michael’s bed with her back to me and his old dressing gown pressed to her face. She wouldn’t look at me when I asked her to. It was as if she’d travelled somewhere else entirely. Locked away.

  ‘Michael would have loved it here,’ she said now, and I followed her gaze to where Holly and Buster were walking. The melancholy tone in her voice told me she was picturing him with them, and for a moment I could almost see him too.

  He would have been larking around. They would have started a game of tag. Michael would have run up tree trunks, flipped backwards athletically, swung from high branches like an orangutan and whooped with crazed laughter.

  Grief is a strange companion. I know it will accompany me until the day I die, a shadow on my heart. Most times when I think of Michael now it feels like I’ve run into an invisible wall that knocks the air clean out of me. But it doesn’t always grind me down. In some ways – strange ways – it can also buoy me up. It felt that way today, imagining the ghost of my dead son hurtling through the woods with his sister and our family dog for company – forever sixteen in my mind.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Rachel asked me.

  I turned to her and nodded. I couldn’t talk right then, but Rachel saw the truth in my eyes.

  ‘I miss him so much,’ she said. ‘And it never stops hurting, does it? All the things he’s missing out on. So many things we’ll never see. And the horrible truth is that we couldn’t and didn’t help him. We were his parents, Tom. We were supposed to keep him safe.’

  My wife loves helping people. She has a kind soul. If she has one flaw as a GP, it’s that she cares about her patients too much. So hearing her say those words didn’t surprise me, exactly, but I’m really not sure there was anything she could have done to prevent what happened to our son.

  When Michael was killed, Rachel’s grief was all-consuming, like her whole world had collapsed into a black hole. I’d tried everything I could think of to pull her out again – for Holly, and for me – but it was hard to escape the feeling that too much of the old Rachel was gone now. Until coming here, I wasn’t sure we’d ever get her back.

  Then she stepped forwards into my arms, and suddenly the simplest, most ordinary things felt so sharp and so real. The shape and warmth of Rachel’s body. The drumbeat of her heart. The smell of chlorine on her skin. I looked up at the treetops, green and blurred overhead. They seemed to tangle and spin.

  From a distance, I could hear Holly’s voice calling to Buster, but when I turned my head I couldn’t see them. They were lost to me now – like Michael – somewhere far off in the woods.

  Rachel sniffed and moved clear of me, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  ‘Was Brodie bothering you?’ she asked me.

  ‘No. Was he bothering you?’

  She shook her head and smiled, like it was nothing she wasn’t used to handling. ‘Something to tell you,’ she said, and the nervous look on her face made something inside me tighten and knot. ‘Lionel wants to expand my role at JFA. He wants me to join the board as an executive director. He’d like me to become the main spokesperson for the charity.’

  The forest floor seemed to fall away from beneath my feet.

  ‘You hate the idea, don’t you?’

  Yes.

  And I did. I really did. Because Michael had killed someone. He’d stolen my car. He’d crashed it into a tree. And he’d killed someone. And now Rachel wanted to take on a more high-profile role at a charity aimed at rehabilitating criminals.

  Like my son.

  It’s an odd thing for your wife to become a stranger to you. Odder still to be so in love with the person you remember that you’ll do almost anything to find your way back to them again.

  Somehow, I dredged up the words I knew she wanted to hear from that pit of fear and horror in my gut. ‘If it’s what you really want, I’ll support you.’

  ‘You will?’

  I nodded, feeling a tumbling sensation deep inside of me. Rachel squeezed my hand and looked up into my face. I sa
w tears of surprise in her eyes. And maybe even – though perhaps I was overreaching here – a new kind of fragile belief too.

  ‘Will you do me one more favour?’ she whispered. ‘Just while we’re here? Will you think about forgiving Michael? Just . . . can you allow yourself to think about how that would feel, OK?’

  And there it was again. That invisible wall. I felt like I’d run into it flat out. I felt like there was no air in my lungs at all.

  I didn’t say I would do it. I didn’t know if I could stand to try. Right then, it was a struggle even to speak.

  ‘Let’s catch up to Holly,’ I mumbled. ‘She shouldn’t be on her own out here.’

  7

  By the time we stepped out of the trees onto the shoreline the rain had swept in. It was blowing in drenching gusts off the sea. Holly was crouched next to Buster on a mound of stacked boulders in the rain. She was holding him back by his collar, like he was primed to attack. Buster was growling, low and guttural. Holly was wet and shivering, her clothes pressed against her skin.

  Ahead of them was a green void in the woods.

  No, something else.

  A trick of the eye.

  I peered harder. There was a small building at the edge of the sea, with a pitted concrete slipway leading up to it and a fieldstone base, much like the lodge. An opening was carved out at the front of the ground floor where a small boat could be berthed. But it was the upper part of the structure that was the truly remarkable part. It was triangular and faced entirely in large mirrored panels.

  The mirrors reflected the landscape all around. The green trees, grey skies, slate sea. The effect was almost enough to render the building invisible. It was a strangely unnerving sight.

  ‘He keeps barking,’ Holly called down to us through the rain. ‘I think the mirrors are freaking him out.’

  Rachel offered me her hand and we clambered up over the boulders together, past where Buster had abandoned his branch. When we reached the top I put my palm on his head and stroked him. His growls vibrated through his skull like the buzzing of a dentist’s drill.

  I wasn’t overly concerned by his behaviour. Buster senses danger with all the accuracy of a dog flying a plane. I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s leaped back and barked at the wheelie bin at the end of our drive. So I was ready to dismiss his reaction and the way the hackles were raised across his back, but as I looked at the angular, futuristic shack – and the trick of light at its heart – I experienced a sensation like spiders crawling across my skin.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ Holly asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Rachel said. ‘Some kind of fancy bird hide?’

  ‘Dad?’

  I turned and scanned our surroundings, trying to get a sense of how far we’d walked. Several hundred metres to the north I could see the blurred triangular point of the deck at the front of the lodge, extending out into the ruptured ocean. To the south were windswept trees and deserted strips of hardscrabble beach, hammered by the rain and the onrushing waves.

  Beyond that, a gnarled ridge poked out into the sea. Running along its back was a stretch of perimeter fencing that I guessed marked the southern border of Lionel’s estate. The barbed fence angled up and down over the finger of rock like the scales of some sleeping prehistoric beast, plunging under the sea.

  ‘I don’t know, Holly.’ As I stared again at the hut, the mirrored shell seemed to suck all the bleak afternoon light into its centre and I had the absurd and sudden urge to grab hold of Holly and Rachel to prevent them from being dragged in. ‘Brodie didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Can we go down there?’

  I contemplated the rain-greased boulders in front of us and the wash of waves at the bottom of the slipway. We were close to soaked already but I didn’t want anyone to fall in.

  ‘I just want Buster to know it’s OK, Dad. If he sniffs it all out, I think he’ll relax. He’s got himself all worked up.’

  I looked down at Buster, tugging against his collar, his teeth bared, legs trembling. Maybe it wasn’t the worst idea ever. Plus, with everything Holly had been through, I didn’t want any doubts about this place plucking at the strings of her mind in the small hours of the night.

  ‘OK. But be careful.’

  As soon as Holly released Buster, he shot forwards and zigzagged down the cascade of boulders with nimble ease. It took us a good while longer to catch up to him in the mooring space. It was cold down there and it echoed with a vacuum silence that seemed to absorb sound in the same way the mirrored tiles absorbed light.

  Buster flitted to and fro with his nose down and his tail up, sniffing the dank, cave-like scent on the air. A flooded trench had been carved out of the cement foundations of the building. It was lined with a frothy scum of curdled black water, decaying woodland matter and litter. Beyond it was a sleek timber door faced with brushed aluminium panels. Holly tried opening the door but it was locked. When we searched around, there were no keys to be found.

  I don’t know why exactly, but I felt a small kick of relief to know we couldn’t get in, like a sudden buoyancy in my gut. Behind us, even Buster seemed to relax. He laid down on his belly with his tail beating dust off the ground and his jaws parted in a toothy smile.

  ‘All good now?’ I asked him.

  He panted and beat his tail some more.

  ‘I wish we could get up there,’ Holly said. ‘It looks cool.’

  ‘There’s probably a key at the lodge. I can phone Brodie and ask him.’

  ‘Then let’s head back.’ Rachel wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I’m getting cold and I want to get out of this rain and into some dry clothes. I’ll make us all hot chocolate?’

  The hot chocolate swung it for Holly. We retraced our steps, climbing away from the shack and over the rain-dampened boulders again, then up onto the craggy shore, where Buster bit hold of his stick once more and dragged it into the trees at an angle, moving in an awkward, crabbing trot with the branch bumping across the ground.

  We followed him in our damp, clingy clothes, the rain spattering against us, and were maybe a third of the way back, tracking the coastline, when Buster snarled and grunted and hunkered down on his front paws, playing tug-o-war with his stick.

  ‘Buster,’ Holly told him. ‘Just leave it. Stop messing around.’

  But Buster wouldn’t let go. And he was getting more and more agitated. I walked up to him, ready to free the stick from whatever root or tree stump he’d got it caught up in, but when I reached down and pulled, I felt a hot wrenching pain in my shoulder.

  The stick wouldn’t come.

  I bent and peered closer and felt something cold and greasy slip down under the collar of my shirt.

  A nylon snare was attached to the end of the branch.

  ‘Tom?’

  The slight quaver in Rachel’s voice matched the flutter in my heart. She’d walked ahead of me with Holly and the two of them were standing on a patch of scuffed grass close to the shoreline. The trunks of the nearby pines were bowed and twisted around them, forming a small clearing. In the middle of the clearing were the charred remains of a campfire, ringed by a cluster of sooty stones.

  I pushed Buster away from the branch and shooed him on until he finally moved off with a snort and trotted over to sniff at the burned and blackened wood, the grey-white ashes. When I got nearer, I could see the remains of an empty and scorched tin can. A buckled fork.

  We stood in silence, the salt wind flinging rain in our faces, the sea falling away into wide, shallow trenches and rising on vast, crested swells.

  ‘It could have been Lionel,’ Holly said. ‘With some of his guests, maybe?’

  But I didn’t think so. The Lionel I knew was all about the fine linen sheets, statement furniture and expensive artwork we’d found inside the lodge. He wasn’t the type to lay snares and sit around a campfire in the woods eating food from a tin. Besides, he had the fire pit in the deck if he wanted to do something like that. Maybe even the strange, mirrored sha
ck.

  ‘Seems more like Brodie’s style,’ I said.

  He could have come out here fishing, I thought. He could have stood at the edge of the clearing and cast out a line. Put down a snare. Maybe he’d lit a fire for warmth and had hunkered down, rubbing his hands, the flames spitting and flickering across his bearded face.

  ‘I guess that makes sense.’

  Rachel nodded, like she agreed with me, but then she clenched her jaw, swiped the rain from her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater and stared off in the direction of the main lodge. Glimpses of it were just visible through the breaks in the trees.

  8

  Sometimes I wonder how old your kids have to be before they see clean through you. Holly might be clever, verging on precocious, but she still missed the strain in Rachel’s voice and her studied nonchalance when she told Holly to go upstairs and get on with the schoolwork her teachers had set for her while we were away.

  Maybe it helped that Rachel gave Holly a plate of cookies to go along with her hot chocolate, and that Buster followed her up to her room. We’d been back at the lodge for twenty minutes by then and all of us had changed into warm tracksuit bottoms and hoodies. There was a laundry room just down the corridor past the kitchen where Rachel had hung our outdoor coats when we’d first arrived. She’d sent me in there to stash our muddy boots and toss our wet clothes in the tumble dryer, and before I was done, she’d snuck in for a quick, whispered conversation about how we shouldn’t call Brodie until we were on our own.

  The moment Holly’s bedroom door closed, Rachel took down the landline phone from a cradle on the kitchen wall, put it on speaker and dialled Brodie. While we waited for him to pick up, I studied an intercom on the wall that matched the one on the front gate. It had a screen for transmitting images from the gate camera and a button marked GATE OPEN.

  ‘Brodie?’ Rachel said, when our call was answered. ‘It’s Rachel Sullivan. At the lodge?’

  There was a confused silence for a brief moment. ‘Oh. Did I forget something? Is everything OK?’