Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  It reminded me of Devon, of trudging around the coastal cliff path, following my father and his map, footsore and sunburnt but enjoying the views. Except this time there were no views. A blanket of fog out to sea on our left-hand side, crumbly cliff to our right, a dirt path underfoot, bits of spiky bushes and trees grabbing at my clothes. I was getting warm and I'd given Rivers back his jacket. He crumpled it up and shoved it in the backpack he was carrying. I followed him, keeping his strong, sturdy back in sight. Every few minutes he'd look behind him to check I was okay, or to apologise for the weather. 'It'll be worth it,' he kept saying.

  The path levelled out and suddenly we were on a flat, grassy headland. A few yards away, incongruously, stood a huge, elaborate building that looked like a palace. In front of it was a sculpture – twisted bodies and a barbed wire fence. 'The Palace of the Legion of Honor,' Rivers told me. 'It's an art gallery. And that's a memorial to the Holocaust.'

  I ran in to use the loo. Stupid, the things you remember. I ran into the museum and persuaded the woman on the desk to let me in without paying so that I could use the loo. 'The restroom,' I remembered to call it. And I had always wondered – did she remember me? Did she read about Rivers's death, about how they discovered his body, and then remember the English girl, hot and red-faced, in jeans and dirty trainers, running into the museum that day to use the restroom? Was she a witness to what happened?

  Beyond the museum, the path turned into tarmac and took us down into a curved road full of huge, luxurious houses. Rivers took a left-hand turn down a narrow alleyway and there we were on another beach. 'Look,' he said, and pointed around the curve of rocks to our right.

  Sure enough, the fog was beginning to lift and I could just make out the top of the Golden Gate Bridge, absurdly red against the grey sky. We climbed back to the dirt path, and now we could see glimpses of the sea far beneath us, jagged rocks at the foot of the cliff we were walking along. We didn't talk much; we were putting all our efforts into the trek.

  And then it happened. There was a point on the path where you could – carefully – step out to your left onto a little piece of headland. We ducked under some trees and found ourselves right on the edge of the cliff. And from where we stood we had the most extraordinary view of the bridge. It was suddenly enormous, looming up bold and red from the mist that swirled around its girders. I tried to get closer to the edge, to get a better view, but felt the dirt and gravel slip under the treads of my shoes. Rivers caught hold of my arm to steady me, and then put his arm around my waist and kept it there. Looking down, I could see that the cliff dropped almost straight down – there was a ledge a couple of feet below us, and then the cliff fell down to the sea and the rocks hundreds of feet below.

  Rivers had his arm around me because he was just trying to hold on to me, to keep me safe. But my romantic teenage head told me that this was the moment. I reached my arm around him and hugged him closer to me. He fidgeted slightly, but didn't pull away. I reached up and kissed him on the cheek. He looked at me, puzzled. 'It's beautiful,' I said.

  'Isn't it?' he said, and tousled my hair.

  What he needed to say next was, 'And so are you.' But he didn't. He said nothing. He just stood there, holding me, gazing at the bridge.

  Something had to happen. I had to make something happen. I kissed him again, this time reaching around for his lips. He pulled away; I was insistent and eventually he kissed me, closed-mouthed but tenderly. I moved closer. 'Careful,' he said, and 'What are you trying to do?'

  I settled for snuggling up against him. I had to say something. I had to initiate a romantic moment, and the kiss hadn't really worked. 'When will I see you again?' I said.

  Rivers laughed. 'You're going home tomorrow.'

  'We can see each other again, can't we? You could come to England. Or I could come back here. We'll keep in touch, won't we? This is special, isn't it? I mean, I want to carry on seeing you.'

  This was his moment; the moment where he should gruffly declare his love and ask me to marry him. But he didn't. He just laughed again, a little uneasily.

  I can still hear my voice getting desperate and shrill. I can still almost taste the panic I was feeling. 'I love you. I want to stay with you. I want to live with you.'

  'Ha!' he said, abruptly. 'I don't think my wife would be too happy with that.'

  I thought he was joking. For a split second I thought it was an awful joke. I started to laugh – and then I saw his face. He'd turned to face me, his back to the cliff edge. He was serious. 'Look, kiddo. You know the rules. You know the game. We've had fun. But it ends here. I'm going back to Indiana in September, back to my job, back to my wife. You're flying back to London tomorrow. It's been fun. I like you. I've enjoyed it. But the game is over. We won't be seeing each other again.'

  Rivers was actually quite tender, quite caring as he said these words. He was trying to let me down as gently as he could, I'm sure of it. He wasn't a bad person, he wasn't evil. He didn't deserve to die. If only I could have left it there. But my whole world, everything I'd spent the last few weeks dreaming about, had just been ripped apart. My brain was muddled. Where to start? He was married. It was all a game. He didn't want to see me again. 'But we had sex!' I shouted it, as if it was irrefutable proof that he was wrong, that this wasn't just a game.

  'Sure we did. And I'm sorry it wasn't better for you. But you wanted it. I didn't hear you complaining.'

  'It was horrible.' I was crying now. 'The sex was horrible, but I wanted to do it again. I didn't want that to be the only time with you. I wanted you to show me what I'm supposed to do. I love you. That can't be all.'

  Maybe it was that second 'I love you' that made Rivers angry. He took me by the shoulders and shook me. 'You stupid girl. Y o u stupid little girl. You want sex? You want to sleep with me again? Here? Will this do? Now?'

  He pushed me back against the tree behind us. He pushed himself against me. He kissed me, hard, forcing his tongue into my mouth. I could feel his growing erection as he forced himself on me. One of his hands was working its way into my blouse while the other held me firmly by the shoulder. I could feel his finger and thumb tweaking my right nipple, hard. He pulled his mouth away from mine and said, 'You want this, do you?'

  I hit him on his arms and against his chest. I struggled against him. I slapped him around his face and he just smiled. And then I started kicking. I kicked him in the shins, over and over again, hard, just in the centre of the shin where it really hurts. And he started moving backwards, almost dancing, to get away from me. While he was off balance I pushed him, hard, with the heel of my hand, right in the middle of his chest. And he fell backwards over the cliff.

  Thirty-nine

  From where I sat on the edge of the cliff I could see Rivers's body on the rocks below. It was sprawled and broken and covered with blood. I had never seen a dead body before, but there was no doubt at all that he was dead. His neck was twisted around awkwardly, in an unnatural position, and half his head was smashed in. His brains had leaked onto the rocks.

  The minute it happened, I regretted it. Of course I did. I'm not a monster. The minute it happened, the second it happened, the moment it happened. Even as he was falling down, down to those rocks, I wanted somehow to fly down and catch him up again. I wanted to be able to turn back time. I wanted to close my eyes and then open them again, and watch time move in reverse – watch his broken bones knit themselves together again. Rivers Carillo: one minute he was there, big and strong and alive; and then he was down on the rocks, broken and bleeding and dead. If you've ever been in a car accident you'll know a little bit what it was like. You'll know that feeling when time turns to treacle, and you're aware that something awful is happening but you can't stop it. It was a bit like that. Something awful had happened and I would never be able to stop it, and there was nothing I could do to make it better.

  Seagulls shrieked. The sea rushed against the rocks, lapping over Rivers's body, lifting it slightly with each wave. I watche
d for quite a long time. I watched as the waves washed relentlessly against his corpse, scouring away the blood and the brains. I watched until his body eventually slipped under the sea and away from the rocky coast.

  What was I supposed to do? I didn't have a phone. There was no one around, no one to report it to. And besides, what good would it have done? He was dead; his body was being washed out to sea. And no one had seen what I had done.

  I picked up his backpack. I looked through it, to see if there was any evidence of me. His little Moleskine notebook and his diary – I threw them into the sea separately, skimming them, using the motion that Rivers had taught me earlier. I wanted them to soak through and disappear, just in case he'd mentioned me. I tried to throw his backpack out to sea as well but the strap got caught on a pointed piece of rock and it stayed there, resisting the tug of the sea as hard as it could. There was nothing I could do about it. I prayed, a stupid prayer, not a prayer of forgiveness but a prayer that said: Please God, let the sea move the backpack. And please don't let me get caught.

  And then I went back to the path and carried on walking in the direction we'd been heading. I just carried on, as if nothing had happened. I put one foot in front of the other, and I counted my footsteps as I walked along that narrow rocky path, and I tried to concentrate on anything apart from what I'd just done. I felt completely numb.

  The path took me right under the bridge and out onto a concrete plaza, with an information centre and some bus stops. The fog was beginning to come down again, and it was warm and muggy. There were lots of people around. There were official people, National Park rangers with uniforms and hats. I could have told one of them what had happened, but I didn't. I checked my map and my public transport guide, and I got on a bus to the Marina District. I sat in a coffee shop while the fog descended again, and I tore up the pamphlet I had in my bag, the one full of Rivers Carillo's poetry. I stuffed it in a rubbish bin, wrapped up in the pages of a magazine. Then I got on another bus and went back to Joanna's house, let myself in and climbed upstairs to my bedroom.

  I finished packing. I remember doing that. I remember getting out my plane ticket and my passport, and putting them in my handbag. I remember deciding which toiletries I'd be using the following morning and which I could pack already. I remember checking that I'd ordered the bus to the airport to pick me up at the correct time, and I remember setting my alarm clock. And then I brushed my hair and cleaned my teeth and wandered down to the big kitchen where I discovered Joanna, cooking me a surprise farewell dinner. I remember all these little, trivial things that I did, but I don't remember how I felt.

  It was on the plane home that I became Beth. I sat curled up in my seat and I planned my future. First of all, I tried to work out what would happen to Rivers's body. I guessed that in due course it would get washed up on one of the beaches or coves around the Golden Gate area, depending of course on the tides, and I knew nothing about those. Then I worked out how long it would be until someone realised he was missing. I didn't even know where he'd been staying in San Francisco, but I assumed that his absence might not be noted for a couple of days. After all, sometimes he stayed over at people's houses.

  That was when I realised about Joanna. Suddenly I realised how stupid I'd been. They were lovers. That's why I'd seen him at breakfast time at her house. She would miss him. She would report him missing. Did she know about us? Did she know that Rivers had been sneaking around behind her back to romance her young house guest from England? He wouldn't have told her; no way. But did she guess?

  And who else might have known about us? The friend who owned the bookstore? The friend who had loaned Rivers the houseboat? Did he ever tell them? Did he ever say, 'I have this hot eighteen-year-old English chick who's dying to sleep with me and I need a place to do the deed'? Did the friend ever work out whose blood it was on his sheets?

  And Rivers's wife, this mysterious figure back in Indiana – what about her? Was she really expecting her husband back? Did she guess what he really got up to on his summers in San Francisco, 'finding his muse'? Would she assume he was dead, or would she imagine that he'd just left her, gone off somewhere, maybe faked his own death to start a new life with someone else? Was he even married? Or had that just been a lie to put me off?

  I tried to decide what I should do. For a while, I thought about changing my identity utterly. I thought about doing what I'd read about in a thriller – finding a grave or a newspaper report of the death of a baby, a girl, back around the time when I was born. I'd read that you could apply for a birth certificate that way, and then a passport, and create a whole new identity. For at least a couple of hours of my flight home I thought that was what I would do.

  But I didn't want to lose my family. I didn't want my parents and siblings to lose me and have to hunt me down. I remembered my father watching a television show about some teenager who'd disappeared, years before, and his parents had spent their whole life since then dedicated to finding him. And my father had cried while watching it. He'd said, 'That must be the worst thing in the world, never to know.'

  I couldn't have done that. I might have been a killer but I couldn't cause that grief to my father.

  And so I did the next best thing. I made myself as different as possible. If Rivers had told anyone about me, he would have talked about a bubbly English teenager called Lizzie. A loud, flirty, fun, dramatic, silly girl called Lizzie. And so I became Beth: quiet, sensible, studious, unnoticeable, plain and dull. I became Beth, who no one would ever look at twice. I arrived home and told my parents when they met me at the airport that I wanted to be called Beth now. And they seemed pleased that I'd grown up.

  I kept worrying over details in my mind. Joanna worried me. One day I'd convince myself that she knew all about us, the next day I'd be sure that she'd guessed nothing. A few weeks after I got home I got a letter from her, enclosing a bunch of clippings. First, Rivers had disappeared – they'd found his backpack and one of his shoes – so he was listed as missing, presumed dead. And then his body was found, washed up on the shore; he'd been identified by his dental records. A tragic accident while he was out walking on his favourite path. Joanna had written in her letter: 'I think you met him while you were over here. I thought you'd be interested in this.'

  I was utterly unable to tell her tone of voice from that.

  Joanna died about ten years ago, of cancer. It was sad, but I'd also felt a huge sense of relief. But there were still things to worry about, and every time I thought about it I found something new. Rivers's wife might have hired a private detective, or pestered the police to investigate further. DNA from the blood on the sheets in the houseboat: could they still identify it? Would they be able to match it to mine, if somehow someone were able to remember my name and to find me? Would that constitute evidence, or simply give proof that I'd known Rivers and had slept with him?

  The friends who knew about me, the woman who'd let me use the toilet at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, maybe the park rangers who'd seen me looking stunned on that foggy afternoon at the bus stop by the Golden Gate Bridge: could a good detective put them all together and work out what had happened? All these things that had occupied my mind for seventeen years, all these fears and worries filling my brain; leaving me almost no room to grieve for the man I'd killed.

  Forty

  'He tried to rape you,' said Danny. 'He tried to rape you, you pushed him away, and he fell over the cliff.'

  I fidgeted. Danny's précis of the story made me uneasy.

  'He tried to rape you,' he said again, and his voice had an insistent note. It seemed that he wanted confirmation, that he needed me to assure him that the killing had been self-defence and entirely accidental. I couldn't assure him. It might have sounded like that, the way I had told him, but it wasn't the full story.

  'I knew he was on the edge of the cliff when I pushed him. I could have just fought him off but I didn't. I pushed him, and I knew he would fall.'

  'But he was trying
to rape you.' I could picture Danny sitting there at his kitchen table, his sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened, struggling to process the information that I had just told him to make it fit within his world-view. He was trying hard to be understanding. He was trying hard to convince himself that it didn't matter that I'd killed someone. He was trying to find grounds on which he could still care for me.

  So I agreed. 'Yes, you're right. He tried to rape me. So I fought back.' And thus I wiped out everything I had ever felt for Rivers Carillo. I wiped out everything I had done that made me culpable. I took away all the ambiguity in that situation on the cliff, all the tenderness and love and anger and hatred that I had felt, and the way things could have gone either way, and I denied them. I denied all those emotions. I pared it down to a few short words. Hard words, single syllables: words that washed away my guilt and made it into an acceptable story.

  'You didn't tell anyone because you were scared. You were just a kid. Jesus, you were eighteen years old. No one can blame you for what you did.' Danny was warming to his theme now. He was making me into the victim so that he could still care for me with a clear conscience.

  'Someone does, Danny. Someone says I murdered him. Someone killed Zoey to get back at me.'

  'Are you sure that's what it's all about? There's nothing else you've done that could have caused all this?'

  A weird laugh escaped my lips. 'Oh God, you're right. It must be about one of the hundreds of other people I've murdered in my life. I'd forgotten all about them.' He said nothing. He had never liked it when I was flippant. 'No, Danny. Don't worry. I've only ever killed one person. That's quite enough to wreck my life.'