by Monica Ali
“Yes, I’ve just been measuring for the brochure.”
“Will she . . . be back later, do you think?”
“She had to go overseas at short notice, dropped off the keys this morning.”
“Ah,” he said, “where’d she go?”
The Realtor shrugged.
“Do you think the crockery and glassware should be packed before or after the open house?” The voice called from inside the front hall.
“I’m just coming, Amber,” said the Realtor.
But Amber, the little rabbity blonde from the boutique, came out on the porch. “Oh, hello,” she said. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “How are you?”
“I’m great. I was going to drop by your store later on.”
“Oh, do,” said Amber. “My assistant will be there, she’s got a good eye, she’ll be able to help you. I’d come and help you myself, only I’ve got to get Lydia’s house sorted out. I’m not actually doing it today, I’m just making lists of what needs doing and then if I get some time on Sunday, I’ll come in and make a start. The clothes to Goodwill, whatever she’s left behind, the lamps and so on to the antiques store on Fairfax, the crockery we haven’t decided what to do with . . .”
She burbled on and he listened, and waited for a chance to steer the conversation.
The Realtor checked her watch, anxious to get moving, but Amber, in full patter, didn’t notice. “ . . . The furniture we decided we’d leave and see if we could include it in the sale. If not, there’s an auction house I know and can go there. Of course the cost of shipping it all the way to South Africa is prohibitive. Anyway, we’ll all miss her.” She fidgeted with the tie of her wraparound dress. “Did you not know that she’d gone? Were you hoping to see her?”
“There was something,” said Grabowski, “that I was wanting to talk to her about. Did she leave a forwarding address by any chance?”
Amber shook her head. “No, she’s going to be in touch just as soon as she’s settled.”
He looked at the Realtor, who was dangling the clipboard, swinging it slightly, growing more and more impatient. “Guess she’ll be keeping in touch with you because of the house sale,” he said.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I need to get back to the office.”
“Didn’t mean to keep you. If you’ve got a phone number, an e-mail address, anything?”
The Realtor had her car keys out, she was striding down the drive. Grabowski pursued her. “Sorry,” he said, “but she can’t be selling the house without keeping in touch.”
She had her car door open. “Not that it’s any of your business,” she said. She got in the seat. “Not that it’s any of your business, but she signed over power of attorney for the sale. I believe there’s been some kind of family crisis, but I don’t know, I didn’t pry.” She closed the door.
He knocked on the window and she opened it. “What happens to the money then? How does she get that?”
“What’s it to you?” She started the engine.
“All I’m saying is, you must have a way of getting hold of her if necessary, and if you could just . . .”
“The money will go into a client account and then when she’s ready she’ll claim it. Anyway, in this market that’s many months off. Maybe a year.” She raised the window and backed the car down the drive.
Amber was at his shoulder. “If you like,” she said, “I’ll tell Lydia you’re wanting to speak to her. When I hear from her, that is.”
He felt sorry for Amber, the way she’d been duped by the woman she thought of as a friend. “You won’t,” he said.
“Won’t what?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got to get going. Don’t think I can make it to your store after all. I’ll have to pick up something for my wife at the airport.”
“Oh, are you leaving us?” said Amber. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay in little old Kensington. Perhaps you’ll come back one day. I know there’s not a great deal that goes on here, but it’s a very friendly place,” she said, smiling up at him. “I hope you’ve found it that way.”
He managed to get a window seat in coach on a direct flight. There was some turbulence on the ascent and he looked out at the scudding black clouds. The plane jolted and shuddered as if it were scraping along a hard surface. And then they were clear and the clouds were below, draping a tattered veil over the earth.
She had a brother in Cape Town. He knew that the chances were slim but he had to try. If she was there and he watched the house day and night, it was possible that he’d find her again. There was no guarantee that she was in South Africa, just because that’s what she’d told her friend. The reality was she didn’t have any friends, they didn’t know her, but he knew her and if he gave it long enough, thought hard enough, never gave up, he’d find her in the end. She’d beaten him once but it wasn’t over yet, he would find a way to track her down.
He had to get some sleep on the flight. Grabowski closed his eyes and tried to float on the sound of the engines, allow the deep vibration to fill his consciousness so that he could drift away. He saw her, she came to him, sitting on her bed. The sun slanted in through the window, lighting her up beautifully, and she was radiant and calm and he stood there transfixed, drinking her in. Were you looking for me? He could see the longing, the yearning, in her eyes. It was an accident, he said. She nodded in encouragement and he took a step forward, lifted his camera, and she lifted the gun and held it to her head.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The cabin stood a spit away from the lake, tucked in among the pines. It had been around two thirty in the morning when she arrived and she hadn’t made it as far as either of the bedrooms, lying down on the dusty couch in the moonlight with her hands between her knees, and waking with a crick in her neck and the sun lapping around her ankles. She was hungry. Yesterday she hadn’t eaten. Amber had packed provisions, and she walked outside to retrieve them from the car.
On the seventh attempt she got the stove lit and set the kettle to boil. While the water was heating she ate a bread roll, scattering crumbs everywhere. Rufus sat at her feet, waiting with exaggerated patience. She didn’t have dog food but she had half a meat loaf from Amber’s refrigerator. She found a saucer in the cupboard and chopped up a slice for him.
After breakfast she put on her boots and they walked through the pine trees on a bed of needles that was springy damp, a few mushrooms sprouting here and there, the occasional fern glowing emerald green against earthy brown. From time to time they came to a clearing painted with wildflowers, dabs of pinks and whites and yellows across the grass canvas. She kept the lake just in view in the distance to her right so that eventually they would come full circle, back to where they’d started.
When she’d hung up the phone yesterday before it had connected to Amber’s number, she’d driven around to say good-bye in person. They’d all been there, waiting for her. She’d intended to stay for a short while but hadn’t left until after midnight, while all the plans were being worked out.
She walked out of the pines toward the lake, Rufus scampering ahead to the slate shore. They’d been out three hours and had come two-thirds of the way around, another hour and a half to get back to Tevis’s cabin, she could see the long sloping roof, like a letter A written in the trees. They’d passed a few other houses and crossed a couple of tire-made dirt tracks that suggested more cabins deeper in the woods, but they had seen no one. She looked out across the shimmering water, the dense green of the forest, to the blue hills smudged across the horizon. A shadow passed overhead and swooped to the lake and rose up in slow and silent commotion, the fat silver fish wagging in the eagle’s claws.
She’d told them something had happened that meant she had to leave and wouldn’t be coming back.
“Why don’t you let us help you?” said Esther. “Maybe we can fix it.”
“There are things I can’t tell you,” Lydia had said. “And I don’t want to lie to you.�
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“What you can’t tell us we don’t need to know,” said Esther. “Tell us what needs to happen now.”
She walked to the edge of the water, sat down on a rock, and pulled off her socks and boots, her jeans and T-shirt. The slate was sharp on her soles and then gave way to shingle that massaged her feet as she waded into the water, bright insects skimming the surface, chasing trails at her fingertips. She tried to keep her feet on the bottom as she went deeper, the water at her waist, sternum, clavicle, she wanted to walk until it was over her head but her feet were rising, her hips lifting weightless in the water and she started to swim.
When she grew tired she turned on her back, stirring her wrists and ankles to keep herself afloat, staring at the flat blank blue overhead. She flipped over and swam back to shore and sat on the rock to dry.
Last night, Suzie had called her husband and he had called back as soon as he’d picked up Grabowski and taken him in. “You feel bad about what you did?” said Suzie. “Man breaks into your house, comes into your bedroom, he needs to get what’s coming to him.”
“Take my car,” said Tevis. “I can borrow one from work. Go to the cabin. I haven’t got it cleared out and set up, but no one will know you’re there except us.”
“What else do we need to do,” said Esther, “to make it possible for you to come back?”
She put on her clothes and called to Rufus, who had ambled into the woods. They set off, this time hugging the shoreline, and she marched with the sun on her back, and in the red, brown, and black slate, flecks of gold sparkled out.
By the time they reached the cabin her legs were aching and she kicked off her boots and sat down on the couch. There were cobwebs in each corner of the ceiling and rivulets of dust everywhere. The curtains, which were half-drawn, were pale yellow, almost translucent, at the top and solid mustard below the ledge, as if over the years the color had trickled ever downward to form a thick crust at the hem. The air smelled of old carpets and damp cardboard and very faintly of the thickets of dried lavender that were bundled up on the table.
Her cell phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket.
“He’s gone,” said Tevis. “I followed him to the airport.”
“It’s beautiful up here,” said Lydia. “I’d like to stay a few days.”
“Take all the time you want. Amber went to Mrs. Jackson’s this morning and got that thing you needed out of his desk. The stick with all the photos. She threw it away.”
“I still don’t know,” said Lydia, “if I’ll be able to come back. Will you call me if . . . if anything else happens?”
“I will, but Lydia—this is the last place he’s going to look for you now.”
“If I could tell you . . .” said Lydia. “You know, if I could tell you, I would.”
“It’s like Esther said. You don’t have to tell us anything.”
She stretched out on the couch with her hands behind her head. If Grabowski had lied to her, if he’d already sent the pictures, then by this weekend at the latest Kensington would be under siege. That’s why she’d come out here, in case it all went up in flames.
All the cobwebs were abandoned, dilapidated, spiderless. There were boxes half-filled with books and magazines on the floor below the empty shelves. Perhaps the previous owner ran out of space in the car and didn’t think it worth another trip back. Would Grabowski have lied? If he’d lied to her, he wouldn’t have been so desperate to reach the bed-and-breakfast to get that stick. He’d hit Mike on the nose. Poor Mike. She’d caused a lot of trouble for her friends. Perhaps it would be best for everyone if she moved on, started again.
She thought about calling Carson. She hadn’t replied to his text. But what could she say? She’d allowed herself to start spinning a fantasy about telling him everything. The fantasy had been that he would understand. That one person in this life would understand. What she had to understand was that she would always be on her own.
Was she on her own? Her friends had done more for her than she had any right to expect, but what kind of burden, what kind of strain, would be placed on those friendships now?
Always spinning fantasies. They were as empty as those cobwebs up on the ceiling. She’d thought she would be able to see her boys again, that she would find a way. If, ten years ago, she had been the person she was now, then she would still be with them, they wouldn’t be motherless children. They weren’t children any longer. It was hard to imagine now the person she had been. If she met that younger self, how much would they have in common, and what would they say to each other?
The next morning she walked and swam and then she started to straighten up the house. There was no vacuum cleaner but there was a broom and she rolled up the rugs and started with the ceilings. She found a duster and a can of polish under the sink and cleaned the shelves and the table, unfolded the chairs and wiped them down. Then she swept the floors, and Rufus got in the way and sneezed and sneezed. In the kitchen she mopped the linoleum, scrubbed the tiles with a nailbrush, and scraped the mold off the grouting. She polished the taps until they shone.
Whenever she paused for breath, John Grabowski floated into her mind. There was a moment when she had considered squeezing the trigger. What if she’d done it? Could she have done it? Was she capable of killing a fellow human being? She couldn’t have done it. She told herself she couldn’t have done it. There was a moment when she might have. And for what? For doing, as he’d said, what anyone else in his position would do.
She took down the curtains in the sitting room and bedrooms, washed them in the sink, and hung them over the fence that ran around the front deck. She cleared out the cupboards in the kitchen and washed the plates and dishes, wiped the shelves with a damp rag, and put the crockery away. Then she started on the bathroom, scrubbing the stains on the toilet, scouring the inside of the bathtub, washing and drying the mirrors, buffing them up with a twist of old newspaper.
Amber had given her some sheets that she now stripped off the bed. She dragged the mattress outside to air. Took the other one out as well. Then she dusted and swept the bedrooms and cleaned all the windows. By now it was getting dark, and she ate some bread and cheese and gave Rufus a pâté sandwich.
She looked through the boxes for something to read. There were fishing and gardening magazines, more old newspapers, a bird-spotting handbook, an old car manual, an encyclopedia, cookbooks, travel guides, a series of hardback atlases, and a few battered paperbacks. All but two of the paperbacks were novels in French and her French wasn’t good enough. She set them aside. Of the remaining two, one had lost its cover and the first few pages. The other was Crime and Punishment, one of the books Lawrence had given her.
She switched on a lamp and sat down on the couch with the book in her hands. She read the back cover, turned the book over, and set it on her lap. She hoped Lawrence hadn’t been alone when he died, she would have been with him if she could. “If I’m not there on that date,” he’d said, “it can mean only one thing.” She’d stayed up all that night, waiting, knowing in her heart that he wouldn’t come, knowing what it meant. At dawn she had gone into the yard with a lighted candle, picked some flowers to lay at the foot of an oak, and said a prayer, a funeral without a body.
Lawrence had thought she could read this book. She opened it to the first page but she couldn’t see the words for the tears. And he was always so kind to her, thought so much of her, that it was probably another way of showing his love. It didn’t mean that she was actually up to it. She closed it and put it down.
She went outside and looked at the star-strung sky and at the silver moon that had fallen onto the velvet lake.
On Friday she swam first and then walked for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon she polished the wardrobes and tried to get the brass handles to shine. The oven looked as though it had seen a few cremations and there was no oven cleaner, but she did her best to scrape out the worst of the charred remains with a knife. When she was nearly through, her hand s
lipped and she cut her thumb. She ran it under the water until the skin turned puckered white and the bleeding had stopped. Then she cleaned the stove top and the kettle, scalded the pans with boiling water, and scrubbed them with a wire brush.
She swept the deck and pulled the weeds out of the gaps in the wooden steps. What else was left to do? She wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans and her forehead with the back of her arm.
The rugs were still rolled up at the back of the sitting room and she fetched them outside and beat them with an old baseball bat until the dust no longer exploded with each swipe. She took them inside and laid them down.
After supper she sat outside with Rufus on her lap and thought again about calling Carson. Would he want her to call? If she told him who she had been would he still see her for who she was now? There was no way to tell him anything without telling him about her monstrous crime. He had given up his daughter, but she had already been taken from him. And a mother who leaves her children can never be forgiven by anyone.
Every day, for the rest of her life, she would ask herself the same question: could she have stayed?
To begin to know the answer she had to meet herself again, the way she was then, to remember how things had been. It was like meeting a stranger. Could she introduce that troubled stranger to Carson? Expect him to understand?
She stroked Rufus’s ears and he whimpered in his sleep.
On Saturday her cell phone bleeped a text message alert and her spirits soared. If he’d texted again she would call him and they would find a way through. It was Amber, Just checking you’re okay. She sent a message back to say she was fine, not to worry, and thank you for everything.
She walked and swam, wired up the tears in the window screens, and rubbed linseed oil into the deck furniture.
She thought about Carson cutting up the tree in her backyard, the specks of sawdust across his collarbone. She tasted his sweat. She heard his voice. She felt it in her chest. “Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, that’s part of the job. I never thought he was crazy.”