by Owen Sheers
“I know,” Michael said. “It’s okay. Really.”
Josh leant back against the bench. “At least that’s done with now, anyway. The DCI, or whatever he’s called. Her boss. He said there was no case.” He let out a breath in disbelief. “No case? Of course there’s no fucking case!”
“I’m sure it was just procedure,” Michael offered. “Standard stuff.”
“Yeah?” Josh said more quietly. “Well, then they should take a hard look at their fucking procedures.”
There was no case. Michael leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he took in what Josh had said. For the last two days he’d been sure he would see her again. Detective Sergeant Slater. He’d waited, each morning, for the intercom to buzz, to hear the taps of her footsteps in the stairwell. To watch as she drew out her notebook and pen once more. He was sure his false day would have been tested and found untrue, his deleted minutes resurrected.
“The coroner gives his judgement today,” Josh said from beside him. “They did the autopsy—” His voice broke over the word, the images it conjured. The smallness of her body. Silently, he began to cry.
Michael reached out and laid a hand on his back. It was the first time the equation of their contact had been reversed. He felt the muscles of Josh’s shoulder blades spasm under his palm; the physicality of his pain.
“Christ, Mike,” Josh said, when he could speak again. “I’m telling you. When you have kids. No one tells you…I mean, they do, but…” He rubbed his hands roughly across his face, then looked at them, as if expecting to see a stain of his grief. “The love,” he said. “It’s…it’s…” He couldn’t find the word, and when he did it came in a whisper. “Cruel.”
Michael took his hand away. To feel Josh’s fragility, to touch it, was too much. “How’s Sam?”
Josh took a breath, gathering himself. “Not good,” he said, frowning at the constellation of cigarette butts at their feet.
“She’s beating herself up over the gate. The child gate.” He sighed and began shaking his head again. “We took it away. I don’t understand. She was always fine. Careful, like we’d taught her.” He shrugged. “I…I just didn’t hear her. Nothing. Only when she…” He trailed off again, unable to say what had killed his daughter.
Michael looked towards the city, the dome of Saint Paul’s dwarfed by cranes, shafts of sunlight bursting against glass towers. He didn’t understand, either. Had Josh been there? Is that what he was saying? Did he know? Michael swallowed, trying to naturalise his voice. “You were downstairs?” he asked.
For a moment Josh said nothing. When he looked back at Michael, his expression was defensive. “Of course I was downstairs.” The vein was proud across his forehead again. “Where else would I be?”
“I just meant if you were in the garden,” Michael said. “When it happened. Then you couldn’t be…”
Josh looked away from him. “No,” he said, as if this was an answer he’d given too many times before. “I wasn’t in the garden.”
A woman walking two pugs came and sat down on a bench to their left. Rummaging in her handbag, she took out a pack of cigarettes, drew one out and lit it, the lighter cupped in her palm. The pugs at her feet breathed short and heavy from the climb.
For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Josh stared at the ground again. Michael sat beside him, still processing what he’d said. Josh must have told Slater he’d been in the house. Sam, too. Without knowing it, the two of them had conspired to make each other’s versions of those minutes true. Josh in the house, Michael not. So where had Josh been? He’d never know and he could never ask him.
Michael felt a flush of desperate anger. If only Josh hadn’t left the house—but he had, so it no longer mattered. All that did, and all that would now, over the coming months and years, is whatever Michael might do to help heal the wound they’d both made. This is all he had left to place in the scales against what had happened on that landing, on those stairs. His actions would have to be many, countless. But it was all he had to offer.
“If there’s anything,” Michael said eventually, “I can do. To help.”
Josh didn’t seem to hear him, and Michael was about to repeat himself, when he finally spoke. “It’s because I moved her,” Josh said, more to himself than to Michael. He was nodding, as if he’d worked out the answer to a puzzle. “That’s why they questioned me.”
From nowhere Michael saw Lucy fall again. Slowly, a bare foot searching, her blonde hair, her hand opening. And he always would. He knew that now. She would always be with him. She would never leave him. Just as the sight of his daughter lying in that turn on the stairs would never leave Josh.
“But, who wouldn’t?” Josh said. “I mean, for fuck’s sake, she’s my daughter…”
“It’s more likely,” Michael said softly. “They were just following procedure. Honestly Josh. Going by the book.”
Josh nodded, but with less conviction. Suddenly, he stood up. “I need to go home,” he said.
Michael rose from the bench, too. The woman with the pugs looked over at them, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“On my own, Mike,” Josh said, holding up a hand.
He looked as if he might cry again. Like a man at odds with the world, a man who was losing. “Sure,” Michael said. “Of course. Give my love to Sam,” he added, as Josh turned from him. “And I meant what I said. If there’s anything…”
But Josh was already walking away down the path. Michael watched him go, this man whose life, in less than a second, he’d torn apart. A man who, like him, had chosen to save himself, and who in making that choice had unknowingly brothered them, bonded as they now were by their lies and the false minutes they’d conjured.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THAT’S IT. NOW walk away. Slowly now. Just walk away. Take it easy.”
Daniel lowered the lunging whip, turned from the horse, an old bay mare, and walked towards where Sally leant, against a fence at the far end of the scrubby field.
“Don’t look back,” she called to him. Her two dogs, lying at her feet, raised their heads at his approach. “That’s it,” she said. “Nice and steady. Keep coming.”
After five months at West Valley this was the first time Daniel had let Sally give him a lesson. Up until now he’d preferred to stay away from the horses and occupy himself with his maintenance jobs instead. But this morning, when she’d offered again, he’d accepted. He couldn’t say why, but he was glad he had. In the role of teacher Sally seemed more settled than usual. As if everything else in her life was a distraction or a disturbance. As she spoke to him now her voice was coaxing, more gentle than Daniel had ever heard it before. And she was smiling too. So it must be working, he thought, as he neared her. The horse must be following him.
―
When Daniel had first come to work for Sally he hadn’t been sure what to make of her. She was gruff, short-tempered, fiercely independent. Years of living on her own had made her terse, as hard-worn as her sun-leathered skin. How she’d managed to run a guesthouse all these years he couldn’t tell. But she had. And not just any guesthouse, but one of the most highly regarded in all Sonoma County.
At some point there’d been a husband, but he’d left her, years ago. Daniel still didn’t know the circumstances, only that because of his leaving, Sally, now in her seventies, needed help through the high season—with the garden, the maintenance, and all the other jobs she’d rather leave to someone else while she worked with her horses.
“No, it ain’t fucking horse whispering,” she’d said to him when he’d first asked her about it. “Just common sense, that’s all. Listening, looking. Just taking some goddamn time to stop thinking all human for once. Realise ours isn’t the only way of being, of talking.”
Daniel had driven down her track from the nearby town of Sebastopol just a few days before. A simple handwritten sign had prompted him to turn off the road. HELP WANTED, written in red-marker capitals. Above it was another
sign, painted and faded—West Valley Guesthouse & Equine Harmony Centre. It was early in the season, February. Which is why, Sally had been quick to tell him, she’d taken him on. Because he’d been the first one to drive down that track. One mistake, she’d told him as she’d led him to his quarters—a spare room with a single bed and a hotplate—and he could drive right back up it again.
But Daniel hadn’t made any mistakes. Not anymore. So now, five months later, in July, as Sally guided him through her techniques, he felt secure in his position. Over the months the two of them had got into a rhythm. He thought they understood each other. Maybe, even, that they were growing to like each other.
―
“Okay, that’s far enough,” Sally said, raising her hand. “Now turn back around. Nice and slow.”
Daniel followed her instructions and turned to find the mare close behind him, her head low, her flanks shivering under the touch of morning flies.
“Now walk to your left,” Sally said from the fence. “Still nice and steady, now. That’s it.”
Daniel did as she said, slowly walking up the slope of the field. The mare turned with him and walked on beside him as if tethered, nodding into the incline. He went to say something, but at his intake of breath Sally cut him off.
“Don’t talk,” she commanded. “Just walk. Walk and feel her beside you. That’s it. She’s with you now. She’s with you.”
As Daniel walked on with the mare he thought how much Sarah and Kayce would have loved to have seen this. And Cathy, too. But they were all still in Las Vegas. It was one of the things he’d found hardest to get used to. Not being able to turn to his wife or his daughters and share a sight, a thought. But for the last year, apart from one single day, that’s how it had been, ever since he’d reversed out of their drive in Centennial Hills and driven west to leave them.
―
After those first few days on the Sonoma coastline Daniel had decided to stay. To keep the sea close. But at the same time he’d had to keep moving, too, so he’d carried on driving. He couldn’t go any farther west so he’d travelled the coast road instead, as far north as Florence, Oregon, and as far south as San Diego. As he’d travelled he’d avoided newspaper stands, bars with TVs, radio stations with regular bulletins. He soon realised, however, there was no need to be so careful. In a matter of weeks the story that had so ruptured his life had already slipped from the media’s interest, surfacing again only when the inquiry reached its conclusion. “Accidental killing”—that’s what they called what he’d done. It had been an accident. People had died. She had died. A couple of columns on page three or four. An item on the occasional news channel. Even in Australia and Britain the Pentagon statement had been little more than acknowledged. The world had moved on. To other stories, other deaths, feeding its hunger for now, not then.
Through it all they’d managed to keep his name out of the press. Whether Agent Munroe had deployed suppressing tactics or the juggernaut of military protocol had just taken over, in the eyes of the world the drone had remained unmanned.
But so had he. In those first months travelling the coast, tracing its cliffs and fishing towns, Daniel had been unable to settle. His nerves were raw and his sleep, unless he drank enough, was cursory and restless. He’d known he couldn’t return to Las Vegas while he was like that. But he also couldn’t bear stopping anywhere for long. He was still getting by on his discharge pay, so with no job to root him, he’d drifted the Californian coast like a sixties throwback, exiled from his vocation, in possession of a home, but unable to return there. That home was, though, still his final destination. He was sure of that. Not the house in Centennial Hills itself, but Cathy and the girls. They were his home, and why he was staying away from them now, so that one day in the future they might continue to be so.
Although part of Daniel’s agreement with Cathy had been to give her space, they’d still kept in regular contact. Weekly phone calls, emails. He’d Skyped the girls regularly too, close-shaving in guesthouse bathrooms to maintain his previous military smoothness. As far as Sarah and Kayce were concerned, their father’s work had taken him away again. Which in a manner of speaking, Daniel had convinced himself, was true. It wasn’t a difficult story for them to accept. Over the years of his service his absence had become as familiar to them as his presence. But even when on tour he’d always got leave, so a few months ago with Cathy’s consent, he’d travelled back to Las Vegas to see them.
He’d been with them for only a day. Cathy had said it would be too disruptive—for her and for the girls—if he’d stayed for any longer, or come to sleep at the house. So instead he’d arrived the night before, checking in to a serviced MGM apartment just off the strip. As usual, he hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d spent much of the night strolling the covered malls and the casinos, watching the gamblers feed the machines.
They met over breakfast at one of the Paris restaurants, a foot of the Eiffel Tower planted through the ceiling above them. Seeing the girls had almost been too much for Daniel. But he knew Cathy would be watching him, weighing his responses, his behaviour, so somehow he’d held himself together, suppressing his desire to just take them in his arms and hold them. As he’d paid the bill Cathy had thrown him a look, one in which the wife he’d known and the wife he was coming to know both seemed to be imploring him to understand how fragile this was, to understand what he held.
That evening Daniel took the girls to Disney on Ice, but before that they’d had a whole day together. They’d spent most of it walking the strip, Daniel pushing Sarah in her stroller, Kayce holding his hand. Between shopping in the malls and eating snacks they’d seen New York, Paris, Venice, Egypt; dwarf versions of the Empire State, the Arc de Triomphe, the Pyramids. Later, on their way to the show that evening they’d stopped to watch the choreographed fountains in the lake before the Bellagio, their towering plumes shooting from shadow into light.
After his months in the wine country and coast of Sonoma, the city felt heavily present to Daniel, and yet film-set ephemeral too. He’d never noticed before how there was music piped everywhere on the strip. From the lampposts, potted plants, all along the fake cobbled malls. Even the walkways above the highway felt like themed zones of homelessness, these being, as far as he could tell, the only places where the city’s beggars were allowed to ply their trade.
As Daniel watched the Bellagio fountains, the girls shrieking and jumping at his sides, he realised he’d been wrong. For all the time he’d worked out at Creech he’d always seen what he did there as a strangely jarring disconnect from the rest of Las Vegas. Here, in the city’s heart, fantasy, escape, and gambling were the dominant notes of its song. Out there, in the desert, they faced reality, war, death. The strip was about forgetting death. Creech was about dealing in it.
But it wasn’t that simple, and as those fountains had danced in unison he’d seen that, with a sudden clarity. Creech wasn’t a disconnect from the aspiration of the city, but a continuum. In Las Vegas, versions of the world were translated to America so America didn’t have to go there. In doing so, other countries, other places, were simultaneously brought closer and pushed farther away. Just like they had been on those screens he’d watched out in Creech. Because isn’t that what they’d done out there too, he and Maria with their coffees cooling on the shelf? Brought a version of the war to America. A close-up yet far away version, a safe equivalent, so they didn’t have to go there themselves.
All through the show that evening, as the dancers at Cinderella’s ball had spun and pirouetted over the ice, Daniel felt the city’s culture of imitation bleeding through his previous life there. All of it, he saw now, had been simulacra, representation. The broad streets and ochre houses of Centennial Hills were communal, but no more than an image of community. The desert bushes and trees planted in the gravel were miniature models of the real desert spreading beyond the locked gates of the cul-de-sacs. Even the Charleston Mountains, he realised, looked like a shrunken version of those ran
ges through which he’d flown in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as if they’d been bought in the same job lot as the Eiffel Tower under which they’d had breakfast. And them, too, he had to admit. He, his daughters, Cathy, sitting to eat pancakes like a real vacationing family. They, too, were no more than an imitation. A pretend family, hollow at the centre, and all because of him.
When Daniel handed the girls back over to Cathy that night, strapping them into their car seats in the Thomas & Mack Center’s parking lot, he’d made a silent promise to all of them that whatever it took, he’d fill that hollow. That they would not, one day, be just the image of a family, but the real thing, living a life together, not making one up.
As he’d driven back west the following day, taking his old route towards Creech, Daniel finally turned off the highway and drove up into the mountains he’d only ever seen from afar when he’d lived in the city. Pulling up beside the road at the crest of a high valley, he’d got out of the Camry and breathed in the scent of eucalyptus on the breeze. At that altitude snow was still patching the ground below the bushes. Bending to it, Daniel had brought a handful to his face and pressed it against his cheek, its sting gratefully real.
“Are you getting help?” That’s what Cathy had asked him the previous night before she’d driven the girls away. “Because you should, Dan,” she’d said, one hand on the open driver’s door. “You really should.”
“I am,” he’d told her. “And it’s working. I’m feeling much better, Cathy.”
“That’s great,” she’d said, giving his arm a squeeze. “God, that’s so good to hear.” For the first time since they’d met at breakfast Daniel had believed the honesty of her emotion. So maybe she really did want him back? Maybe he could make his promise to them true, and sooner than he’d hoped?