by Paul Cleave
“David gave it to her for her birthday.”
“Is David her boyfriend?” I ask, careful not to say was.
She nods. “I’ve already told the police all I know.”
“But I’m not the police,” I say, “and that means I can approach things differently.”
She takes a few seconds with that, slowly nodding as she thinks it over. “You think she’s dead, don’t you,” she says. It’s not a question.
I think of the flowers in the passenger seat of my car, and I regret not driving out to see my wife first. I could have talked to her. Told her about my day. Told her how much I missed her. Could have held her hand and told her everything.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Then what makes you think you can help her?”
It’s interesting she has asked how I can help Rachel, and not her and her husband. Interesting isn’t the word. It’s devastating. This woman isn’t just holding out for the possibility that her daughter is alive—she’s holding on to the reality of it. But the question is more than that. It makes me think of exactly what I can do to help Rachel: nothing. Not now. I can’t even help the others who have followed.
“I would imagine Rachel wants as many people helping her as she can get.”
The point seems to hit home with her and she starts up again with the nodding, and then she starts up with telling me about her daughter. I realize I could be anybody in the world and she’d still be happy to speak about Rachel. She’d probably be the same way if I had been at the door selling encyclopedias or God. She talks for nearly twenty minutes and I don’t interrupt her. I know what it’s like to have lost somebody. I know what it is like to hold out hope. False hope is cruel, but perhaps not as cruel as no hope at all. It’s a judgment only those who have been there can make.
“And David?” I ask, after she has told me what she can about Rachel’s life, including in detail the days before she disappeared. “What can you tell me about him?”
“I thought he knew what happened,” she says. “For those few weeks I was sure she was living with him. See, they were living together, but not really. All her things were here, are still here, but she wouldn’t come home for days on end. When we didn’t see her for a week we tried contacting her, then him, but he said he hadn’t seen her. I thought he was lying, and that he was shielding her from us for something we must have done. But I knew, I knew something wasn’t right. I don’t know how, but I just knew. So Michael, my husband, called the police. We filed a missing persons report. We hadn’t heard from her in nearly a week. It wasn’t like her.”
“What happened when the police spoke to David?”
“Nothing. They said they had no reason to believe he was lying. Still, I wasn’t convinced. I would . . .” she starts, then takes a few seconds to gather her thoughts. She looks down at her feet. “I would go to his house at different times, but there was never any sign of her. I would knock on his door in the middle of the night. After a while I began to see that David was just as distraught as we were, and I started leaving him alone. I don’t know if he really believes Rachel is still alive.”
She looks back up. I nod sympathetically. Then I throw a couple of names at her: Bruce Alderman and Henry Martins. She shakes her head and tells me she’s never heard of them, and asks me who they are. I tell her the names have come up, but I’m not sure where they fit into it, and that it may be unlikely they even do. She gives me a list of Rachel’s friends, places she liked to go, photographs of her, people she worked with, David’s address. She’s giving it all some real serious thought, hoping for a connection, hoping she is going to mention a name that’s the key to getting her daughter back.
She walks me to the door. She seems reluctant to let me go. I feel guilty I’ve deceived her, that I’ve given her more hope today than she had yesterday, and the guilt becomes a sickening feeling that makes the world sway a little as I make my way to the car. The police will identify Rachel Tyler. They will come here tomorrow or the next day, and they will tell Patricia that her daughter is dead. I can’t stop it from happening. I can’t prepare her for it.
It’s getting close to eight o’clock and within the next twenty minutes it will be dark, the thick clouds bringing the night earlier than usual for this time of year. The flowers in the front seat still look fresh enough to keep on growing. I start my car and pull away, the small voice inside my head questioning what in the hell I am doing and the bigger voice, the one I use every day to justify my actions, telling me I have no idea.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Perception is a funny thing. Especially when you’re dealing with luck. Somebody who survives a plane crash is considered lucky. Is he considered lucky to have even been on that flight? Or unlucky? Does the bad luck of being seated on a doomed flight cancel out the good luck of surviving? I don’t get it that people are lucky to have lost only an arm.
My wife was lucky. That’s what people say. An inch here or a second or two there, and things would have been different. I would have ended up burying her, and the flowers I keep buying would be going to a grave. Inches. Seconds. Luck. Good luck for her. Good luck for all. It doesn’t add up. She wasn’t lucky. Not at all. Wasn’t lucky when the car plowed into her. She was lucky that her head hit the sidewalk at forty kilometers an hour and not fifty, but unlucky her head hit the sidewalk at forty and not twenty. Wasn’t lucky when her legs were shattered, her ribs broken. Lucky to have lived, yes, but not lucky.
The nursing home is out of the city where suburbia kicks in and city noise dies away. It covers five hectares of land, with grounds scenic enough to be used for a wedding. The buildings are forty years old, gray brick with the occasional flare of polished oak windowsill—a combination of bad ideas or perhaps good ideas that didn’t work. The driveway is long and shaded by giant trees that flourish in the summer and look like skeletons in the winter. I pull up outside the main office and for a few seconds try to imagine that this world hasn’t gone mad.
The main doors are heavy and made from oak, as if to stop the weak from leaving or tempt the grieving to turn away. The nurse behind the reception desk smiles at me. Her dark red hair matches the sunset in the painting behind her.
“Hi, Theo. What have you done with the weather?”
I fake a smile of my own, the type anybody with social skills would apply when the weather suddenly becomes the topic of conversation. “Tomorrow I’m organizing sun. God owes me a favor.”
She nods, maybe agreeing that yes He does. “Flowers for me this time?” she asks, like she always does, like she always will.
The nurses and doctors are always nice, always friendly, always professional, their questions and pleasantries always clichéd. The alternative is unthinkable. You’d ask how their day was going and they would tell you the truth and you’d never come back.
“Next time,” I say, which is what I say every time. “How is she?”
“She’s doing fine, Theo. But what about you? Is that you I saw on the news?”
“Yeah, it’s been one of those crazy days.” A fairly accurate summation, I feel. Not that all crazy days end up with somebody swimming in a lake full of corpses.
She nods. “Every day this city shows us a little more how things don’t make sense.”
“Sometimes I think Christchurch is broken,” I say, “and nobody is ever going to fix it.”
I walk down the corridor, passing empty seats and closed doors and a nurses’ station that looks empty, but most likely isn’t. The entire floor is speckled green linoleum, the sort that is easy to clean blood and vomit and shit off and will last two hundred years. The day is cold, but the air in here is comfortable. It’s always comfortable, and so it ought to be. Some of the people in care here don’t know how to complain, and some who do know simply don’t have the ability anymore. There are more paintings with water and sunsets, peaceful scenes that are perhaps supposed to help calm the residents here before they move on from this world and into the next. There are
pots full of artificial plants. And there are decorations for the people who come here who are on the verge of losing it.
I climb a flight of stairs, and halfway down another corridor I stop at Bridget’s room. The door is open. She is sitting by the window, looking out at the misty rain and the trees and the lack of good weather that the nurses mention every time I arrive. She seems interested in all of it. I don’t know whether she hears me come in. I close the door behind me. She keeps staring outside.
“Hey, babe, I’ve missed you,” I say, but she doesn’t answer.
I take yesterday’s flowers out of the vase and put today’s flowers in. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice as I shuffle them around in an attempt to make them look nicer. I sit in the chair next to her and take her hand in mine. It’s warm. It’s always warm, no matter how cold the room gets. I’m glad for it, because it helps remind me my wife is still alive.
She occasionally blinks as I tell her about my day. There is no expression on her face as I run a brush through her hair, stroking it over and over, searching for the recognition that isn’t there. She does not laugh when I tell her how I slipped into the water. She doesn’t chide me for not telling Patricia Tyler that her daughter has been dead the entire time she has been missing. Other noises—the shuffling of patients, the squeaking of caster wheels—come from the care home, which, for the last few years, I have quietly nicknamed Death Haven. I’m not sure why I’ve come up with the name. I’m not sure whether thinking of it as Death Haven has made it more personal to me or less. Every day I have this romantic notion that I will come in here and Bridget will look up at me and smile. Every day. But she doesn’t. I hold on to the hope, I have become attached to it sentimentally, in the same way Mrs. Tyler has become attached to the idea her daughter has run away and is living the perfect life in a perfect town and is so perfectly happy she just hasn’t had the chance to call.
I keep talking until my throat is sore and I’m out of words. Bridget has remained in her catatonic state the entire time, happy in the world she is in, or perhaps sad; I wish I had a way of knowing. The window and the trees beyond hold for her the same fascination as they have done every day for the last two years. I feel exhausted, as I always do when I purge myself of the day’s events. The silence in the room is peaceful, and in these quiet times I often think that I would be better off if I could be catatonic too, unknowing and unfeeling, and keeping Bridget company. I sit holding her hand for a few more minutes, then I stand, pulling her hand up slightly. She comes with me and steps toward the bed. Her actions are involuntary, her body just following the motions. She can move from the bed to the chair, and back again. Sometimes the staff will find her standing in the corridor, motionless, and twice she has made it down into the foyer. Guide a glass up to her lips and she can drink. Raise a fork to her mouth and she can eat. But she cannot fend for herself, cannot speak, cannot look at you with an expression that suggests she knows you are there. Everything is a thousand miles away, and her eyes are fixed on that point in the distance, continually searching, searching, but never finding.
She lies down. I kiss her on the side of her cool face—her hands are always warm, her cheeks always cool—then slowly make my way from her room. I don’t turn back. I never do, not these days. I will see her tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after.
Patricia Tyler isn’t the only person in this city playing the waiting game. Or holding out hope.
Outside, the cold air feels like silk against my face. I stand next to my car for nearly five full minutes. I stand doing nothing as the rain dampens my jacket. I’m not even really sure whether I’m thinking about my wife or dead girls or bad luck and bad omens, all I’m really doing is getting wet and not caring too much about it. Finally I find the strength to drive away.
CHAPTER NINE
I turn my cell phone on and wait for it to ring, but it doesn’t. Could mean people are getting killed elsewhere in the city and the reporters flocking there have forgotten about me. Could be the police know who put the bodies in the water and don’t feel the need to let me know. Could be Tracey hasn’t noticed the ring missing on the dead girl’s finger and I’m sailing through trouble-free waters. Could be none of that. Might simply be a poor signal. Or that taking it for a swim has finally caught up with the inner components.
I go through the motions of changing gears and avoiding other cars before realizing I’m not heading home, or even to my office, but back to the cemetery where my day suddenly became interesting. Where there is death there is life—at least at the moment. Police cars are scattered across the landscape, but mostly localized by the lake. They are no longer guarding the entrance. I ignore them and head to the opposite side of the cemetery where the dead are still at peace.
I make the walk through the dark without need of a flashlight. It’s a walk I could make with my eyes closed. The grass is wet and soon the bottoms of my pants and shoes are wet.
It’s been a while since I last stood over my daughter’s grave. After her funeral, I never wanted to come back. Seeing the smooth headstone with the brass plate carved with her name and the dates hurt too much. But it hurt even more staying away, and I ended up visiting her grave two or three times a week for the first year, and less often since then, and not at all in two months now. The doctors tell me they don’t think Bridget knows that Emily is dead or even that Emily ever existed. I hope they’re right—though I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me. Emily didn’t have the good luck to become catatonic, but the bad luck to be killed: she had twice as many bones in her body broken as my wife; she hit the pavement just as hard, just as awkwardly, and just like that she was gone. No luck there at all, unless you count bad luck.
The tears don’t come as much these days. The pain is part of who I am now. Getting rid of it would be like losing a limb.
There are flowers on her grave that have wilted and died, put there I imagine by either my parents or Bridget’s parents. The coffin beneath the earth is child sized, and the mere fact there is a market for child-sized coffins in this world proves it’s a messed-up one—and for the briefest moment I think about the condition the coffin is in, whether it’s as dented and damaged as the one pulled out of the ground earlier today, or whether its smallness helped it withstand the weight of the earth above it. Then I wonder if she is even in there.
I don’t bother to tell Emily about my day because she can’t hear me. Emily is dead, and none of the romanticized ideas I have at Death Haven reach out here.
I walk toward the lake and come to a stop near the police tape. It seems that every year the people who manufacture this stuff have to add another mile to the roll to keep up with the Christchurch crime rate. A good year for them means a bad year for the rest of us. The scene looks like an archaeological dig. There are more cranes and trucks than before. Strings of lights around the edges of the tents are glowing brightly as if a pageant is going on in the middle of it all—except that here the performers are women and men in different-colored overalls marching back and forth, cataloging death along with the different types of samples that come with it. There is a mound of dirt from another coffin that has been dug up. I thank God that Emily is buried far away from this scene, and then I curse Him for making me bury her in the first place. Then I think of the irony of that statement since I know there can’t possibly be a God—or, if there is, that He abandoned this city a long time ago.
I’m about to duck under the tape when an officer who wasn’t here earlier in the day approaches me and tells me in his sternest voice that I can walk no further.
“I just want to know how things are going,” I say.
The officer gives me his practiced stone-cold glare, and tells me to read tomorrow’s paper. I feel like hitting him.
“Has anybody spoken to the caretaker yet?” I ask him.
“Listen, mate, none of this is any of your business.”
“I came to visit my daughter,” I say, about to play the sympathy
card. “Her grave is here.”
His eyes narrow, and he looks like he is about to tell me that having a dead daughter doesn’t give me a free invitation to go wherever the hell I please, but slowly he seems to become aware it’s the type of comment I’d make him regret saying.
“I’m sorry, mate,” he says, “but you’ve picked a bad time to come.”
“Yeah, well, she picked a bad time to die.”
He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing, figuring this is best, and I figure he’s right. I stay at the line of police tape, trying to make eye contact with anybody who will tell me anything, but there’s too much going on for that to happen. The officer keeps looking at me like I’m a shoplifter. I feel his eyes on my back the entire way as I walk to my car. He’s probably wondering if I’m for real.
The cemetery grounds are like a golf course, separated into many sections divided up by hedges and trees and bushes, and it’s easy to get lost in here. The main road through it branches off to these different areas, and one of the bigger branches leads to the Catholic church, which sits left of the cemetery, back some forty meters from the road. A belt of trees forms a horseshoe barrier around its sides and back, so that if you’re at the lake or even in other parts of the cemetery you might not even know it was there. This is the church that once held a ceremony for my dead little girl, but more recently gave me somewhere to serve the priest with an exhumation order for Henry Martins.
I park as close as I can to the huge oak doors that could pass entry to a fairy-tale giant and I walk up the stone steps. The wooden door on the right swings open easily and noiselessly. Inside the church the temperature seems to drop another degree with every step I take. Most of the lighting is coming from candles, with a few overhead lights dimly illuminating the chapel. There are dozens of pews, all of them empty except for one at the very front where a man is staring ahead, lost in thought, seemingly unaware or uncaring of my presence.