Lonely Girl

by Lynne Vincent McCarthy

  His skin is warm under her fingers and Luke remains submissive in her hands. He continues to drink from the bottle as she works her way along the length of his wound, using her fingers to delicately pinch the edges of it together, laying the strips of tape firmly across it. All the while she can feel his eyes on her.

  ‘The cop … What was all that about? Why did he come?’

  Ana pauses and looks up at him. Is there any harm in telling him the truth? It’s not like he’s going to be sticking around.

  ‘The drugs I sedated you with. I stole them from my work. He came to warn me.’

  She returns her eyes to her task.

  ‘They weren’t meant for you, not when I took them anyway … I stole them for myself.’

  She doesn’t have to say the words, he already knows.

  ‘Because your dog is dying?’

  It sounds pathetic, hearing it out loud like that.

  ‘He must care for you a lot to risk his job.’

  Ana takes that in as she lays the last strip of tape down and passes a satisfied eye over her work. It’s a neat job.

  ‘I should cover it to keep it clean.’

  When Luke doesn’t move Ana reaches for the bandage and starts to wind it around his arm. She keeps her face and her mind as blank as she can, trying not to think about that other time she bandaged his arms.

  ‘Can you hold this in place?’ she asks.

  Luke brings his finger down to replace hers on the end of the bandage while she finds a couple of butterfly clips and uses both hands to attach them. With the bandage secure she immediately separates from him.

  ‘Thank you, that’s a better job than I could’ve done.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  She starts packing up the first-aid kit while Luke takes another slug of her mother’s bourbon, watching her.

  They simultaneously glance up to the ceiling, hearing the click-clack of River’s claws above their heads. He’s wandering about, probably looking for her. She immediately starts to worry but then he stops. She hears the soft thud as he drops himself into his day bed.

  ‘Have a drink with me.’

  Ana looks back at Luke in surprise as he pours a good slug of bourbon into the glass, pushing it along the concrete towards her.

  ‘We were drinking this that night … Rebecca and I. I thought it might help with the recall. You know, sense memory and all that.’

  Is he still pretending he doesn’t know what happened?

  Ana keeps her eyes on the glass.

  ‘How’s that going for you?’

  ‘Not so good, so far.’

  There he goes again with the ambiguous meanings. Not so good as in nothing new, or not so good as in something bad?

  While Luke makes a start on his eggs, Ana picks up the glass and brings it to her mouth. The smell hits her with a sudden rush. The sense memory exercise might not be working so good on Luke but it seems to be working on her. She’s smelt it on him before of course, the night when she hit him. For at least a day it lingered in the close confines of the basement until the alcohol left his system, to be gradually replaced by other smells. How could she have forgotten it? So much a part of her childhood, and now so utterly indistinguishable from her mother’s breath. Is that why she couldn’t let go of him? Some weird olfactory connection to her past? To her mother?

  Ana brings the glass back to her lips, suddenly remembering the sensation of running her tongue around inside Ellen’s empty glasses. In one hit she swallows it all, feeling it burn its way down her throat before pushing the glass back across the concrete.

  Luke looks at her, smiling curiously as he pours her another. With the alcohol working in her system she’s suddenly emboldened.

  ‘Tell me about her. About Rebecca.’

  His smile instantly vanishes.

  ‘She’s the reason you’re here. The reason you can’t leave.’

  ‘You’re the reason I’m here.’

  Luke looks down at his plate.

  ‘Maybe talking about her will help bring it all back.’

  He pushes the food away. ‘Okay. I’ll tell you everything that I remember, but only if you go first.’

  His eyes drill into hers.

  ‘I want to know why you’re here.’

  Ana shifts uncomfortably. She looks around at the bare walls, the shadowy spaces.

  If you want to get to know someone you’ve got to be prepared to reach out, to reveal something of yourself.

  His words.

  ‘What do you want? The sad story of how I ended up a psycho?’

  Again he smiles.

  ‘I heard a little already from your friend upstairs,’ he says. ‘Enough to pique my interest in hearing more. Come on, I’ll be gone soon.’

  He pushes her drink closer.

  ‘Tell me about your mother.’

  He is good.

  Ana picks up the glass, holding it in two hands.

  What are you gonna do, Rabbit? Hide away for the rest of your life? How much longer is that going to be?

  She keeps her eyes down, reliving the sensation of her mother’s hand lingering on her head. She’s already exposed. Already taking a risk just by being down here. She’s already taken the first steps.

  ‘She drove her car into a tree when I was twelve.’

  Ana takes another quick sip of the bourbon and glances into the shadows, almost expecting Ellen to step out and join them. Luke would have piqued her interest, Ana has no doubt about that.

  ‘My grandmother always said she was an accident waiting to happen.’ She shrugs, like that’s the end of the story.

  ‘I’m more interested in what you think.’

  ‘I think it wasn’t an accident.’

  Ana looks back at Luke and can see he wants her to go on. She has no idea where to start but she finds she wants to talk to him.

  ‘I didn’t really know her, not in the usual way of knowing people. Not in the way daughters usually know their mothers. We had this … long-distance relationship. Even though we lived in the same house. I watched her. It was my way of being close to her, I guess.’

  She keeps her eyes on Luke, studying his response. He seems genuinely interested – curious, like he said – and now that she’s started Ana is curious herself. She wants to see how far she can go. How much of the truth she can bring herself to say.

  How much he can hear.

  ‘I saw things a kid probably shouldn’t.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  He has to know she’s talking about sex.

  ‘You’ve studied me, what do you think.’

  She notices Luke has stopped drinking, his focus completely on her.

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘The first time?’

  She holds a hand up indicating the height of a small girl.

  They both stare at the spot, as if they can see young Ana standing there, innocence in the process of being lost.

  ‘Back then I didn’t know what I was looking at, I just liked the feeling it gave me.’

  Her eyes remain on that invisible girl, remembering the excitement she felt in the beginning. How she revelled in having her own private window onto her mother’s secrets. All those things she did behind the locked door of her bedroom. Even then Ana knew it wasn’t about the men or the sex. Not at first. It was her she craved. It didn’t matter what Ellen did, Ana wanted a piece of it.

  ‘What about him?’ Luke asks. ‘The cop, how does he fit in?’

  Ray Lynch. The only one who ever caught her watching.

  Ana hesitates but she wants to face it now. She’s been running from it for too long.

  ‘Ray was different to the others … younger. The first who bothered to make any effort with me. The first one my mother was really serious about. He was a keeper, she said, and we all agreed on that, even my grandmother, who didn’t much care for men. Even she was charmed by Ray.’

  Ana was old enough by then to know that spying on your mother having sex
wasn’t something all little girls did but knowing it was wrong only made it more addictive. And it wasn’t just about Ellen anymore.

  The sex had always been interesting in a sort of forensic and even entertaining way. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes simply bizarre, occasionally it was brutal and frightening but with him Ana was struck by the raw beauty of it. Especially by the beauty of her. She saw a tenderness in her mother she’d never seen before. It wasn’t gentle, it was still intense, even painful to witness at times, but it was always there.

  ‘He opened something up in her. And in me too, I guess. It made me less careful.’

  In retrospect she thinks a part of her must have wanted it. For him to see her in that way. She wasn’t a kid anymore, she was twelve years old. She might have still looked like a kid but she felt different. Most of the girls at school had boyfriends by then, but not her. She’d started watching them too … when she was sure she could get away with it. She remembers feeling superior to them. She may have done less but she already knew so much more.

  ‘It was because of the mirror that he caught me. That first time.’ The moment was gone in a flash and she wasn’t even positive at first that he’d seen her. Not until later, when he came looking for her. It was an accident, she said, she was playing outside and heard them through the window. Ana could tell he didn’t believe her so she was surprised when he didn’t tell. He knew as well as any of them how volatile Ellen could be, and that it would only mean trouble for Ana. But at the time she’d managed to convince herself that he liked it. Being watched.

  He must have sensed something because it sat there between them from then on. The strange and compelling awkwardness of their secret. It was there in the looks that passed between them that no one else noticed. It was there in the churning in her belly whenever he came near. That too she thought he could sense.

  And then one day, she heard raised voices and knew he’d told. Her mother tried to play it down. She’s a curious kid. What was the big deal? But he knew that what he’d seen that day, what he’d felt from Ana since, was more than curiosity. He dragged Ellen out to the garden and showed her the bare patch under her bedroom window. The dead spot where nothing grew. This wasn’t a one-off thing, it wasn’t normal behaviour. She’d been doing it for a long time.

  Ellen still tried her best to make light of it but it only made Lynch angry that she didn’t take it seriously. Her lifestyle wasn’t something she should be exposing a young girl to, he said. Ana could hear it in his voice, his unease. His guilt. He was a cop for fuck’s sake, it wasn’t something he could be around. Her mother lost it then, furious that he would blame her. The kid had always been a strange one, she said. She came out of the womb that way, it had nothing to do with her! Ana had heard it all before from her mother, that was water off a duck’s back, but his words stung.

  She wasn’t normal.

  Before he left that day he tried to find her but Ana had already run into the forest and didn’t come out until she knew he was gone. By that time her mother had locked herself away in her room.

  Her grandmother had been off running errands and had missed the whole thing. She just assumed Ellen was in one of her moods and Ana didn’t tell her otherwise. Not then and not later.

  ‘When she finally came out she didn’t say anything, she didn’t even look at me. I’d ruined everything, just like I’d been doing from the day I was born. She didn’t say it, not out loud, but she didn’t have to. I’d studied her my whole life. I knew what she was thinking. She didn’t care that he’d left me too. Didn’t even see my pain. That was my mother all over. She could never see past her own shit to see anyone else clearly. Not me. Not even him. He’d made me feel wrong but she made me feel like I was nothing. A parasite that she never wanted and couldn’t love.’

  Ana keeps her eyes on Luke’s hands, watching him reach across and pour her another drink. He settles the bottle within her reach. Ana ignores the glass, focusing on the surface of the brown liquid swaying inside the bottle, until it’s once again calm.

  ‘After that, it was like I was a ghost. I just didn’t exist for her anymore.’

  ‘And Lynch?’

  ‘He came back. But not for me.’

  It was about a month later. That day Ana had come home early from school and despite herself felt the familiar charge when she saw his motorbike parked in the driveway alongside her mother’s beaten-up old station wagon. She’d flitted in through the front door, passing by her grandmother who was napping on the couch in the living room, the little shell of her hearing aid balanced on the armrest.

  Ana knew by the half-empty bottle on the kitchen table that they were already in there but she didn’t go to the window then. Not straight away. First she drank as much of the bottle as she could stand, then she passed quietly by the closed door and went to her own room. As she sat on the bed and took off her shoes the initial excitement had already left her, replaced by a burning anger. She could feel it building inside of her. The urge to lash out, to hurt them both.

  ‘She’d been giving me the silent treatment for weeks by then, but him, she welcomed him back with open arms. Literally. All was forgiven. I could hear her laughter through the wall, the lightness in her voice. I could tell she’d already had too much to drink. She would have been nervous and probably started well before he turned up.

  ‘I think what made it worse was that I knew it was a fantasy. He might have been crazy about her – so crazy that he couldn’t stay away – but she was never going to be what he wanted. I knew that. My grandmother knew it too and wasn’t shy about rubbing it in my mother’s face. I understood that urge. For all her wildness there was something still innocent about her – my grandmother said she was naïve – but whatever it was that day I wanted to crush it.’

  So she took off her uniform and the bra she’d only just started wearing. She slipped out of her underpants and she walked naked back through the house, past her sleeping grandmother, out into the garden and around the side of the house to the window. If the curtains were closed that would have been it but they weren’t closed. They thought she’d still be at school, had probably planned it that way, there was no need to be careful.

  She stood there staring in.

  ‘The minute he saw me it was done. He was out of there, just like I knew he would be. I thought she’d come after me, that she’d scream or hit me, maybe even kill me, but she didn’t do any of those things. Her face … she looked at me with such horror … like I was a monster. And then she went after him.’

  Ellen was in her car before Ana even made it to the front of the house. All she could do was watch as she sped off down the road, knowing her mother shouldn’t be driving, already regretting what she’d done. The fury had left her completely, her body now consumed by dread. In that moment she knew her mother wouldn’t be coming back.

  ‘There was talk of it being suicide, everyone knew how out of control she could be. That was one of the reasons why my grandmother could never cope. Her mess was always so public, such an embarrassment. In the end the coroner ruled it an accident but I knew. It was me. I hadn’t driven the car into the tree but I had killed her.’

  ‘You were just a fucked-up kid.’

  Ana glances up, meeting Luke’s gaze. The face looking back at her holds no judgment but she feels utterly exposed.

  Above their heads, River starts his roaming again, crossing to one side of the kitchen and back, his pace erratic. It sounds like he’s walking in circles. She didn’t mean to leave him for so long.

  ‘I should go check on him.’

  She shifts to get up but freezes as Luke leans towards her. She feels his hand graze her face. She stays perfectly still as his fingers find her mouth and move across it.

  Ana pulls away, confused by his touch, unsure what his game is now.

  ‘It’ll be dark soon. I’ll leave the garage doors open.’

  She gives him no chance to argue. She picks up the first-aid kit and heads for the stairs.r />
  ‘Don’t you want to know? About her? About what I remember?’

  He’s still fucking with her but Ana is done with him now. It’s over.

  ‘It’s time for you to go.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  Ana stumbles over the landing on her way through the door. She pauses there, collecting herself. The alcohol has affected her more than she thought but it’s not just that. You can’t go digging up the dead without consequence. That’s what has her off balance.

  She glances back at the basement. There’s no sign of Luke coming out.

  Not yet.

  Ana steps quietly back to the door and peers down. If he knows she’s still there he gives no indication. He’s just sitting there, head down, staring at his hands. Then he reaches for his bottle and continues to drink.

  Despite it all she feels a wave of compassion but pushes it away. She’s left River on his own for long enough.

  Ana moves around the car and makes as much noise as she can unbolting the garage doors and pushing them open. It’s not dark yet but it won’t be long now. She’s hoping the cover of night will draw him out.

  She leaves the basement door ajar and heads into the house.

  She expects to find River in the kitchen where she last heard him but he’s not there. The day has turned overcast and the house grown dim. He probably got sick of waiting for her and took himself off to bed. There’s a storm coming. Ana can feel it in the air. River has always hated storms.

  Ana grabs his medication from the bench. She’s ashamed to admit it even to herself but she can’t remember giving him his dose this morning. That’s probably why he was restless and wandering around – he’s been in pain.

  ‘I keep seeing her face.’

  Ana stops in the doorway at the beginning of the hall. She hangs on to the doorjamb, feeling the fine hairs on the back of her neck rise. For a moment she thinks Luke’s behind her, that he’s followed her up, but it’s his voice coming through the monitor on the bench.