by A J Grayson
Hell of a way to raise your kids.
Dr Williams scribbles down something on a notepad. Therapists. Never known one who doesn’t do that. Living stereotypes, all of them. I can see the muscles in his face tighten, though the old man tries so hard to appear emotionless. Can’t pull it off, jackass. Not quite cunning enough. That kind of deception takes commitment.
‘Do you think it’s really because they didn’t care?’ he asks. He doesn’t look up.
I shrug. ‘Don’t know.’ But then, ‘Yes, yes I do. If they cared, they’d have said something. Have paid at least enough attention to their own daughter to notice something was wrong with her before it got bad enough for her to … you know.’
‘Maybe they wanted to know what was wrong, but didn’t have the answers.’
‘Maybe, maybe, maybe.’ I don’t say more. We’ve been down this road so many times. Trying to rehabilitate the fallen. They didn’t care, that’s the simple fact. My parents barely did more parenting before their death than after, and what they did was rough. I’m tired of therapists trying to convince me they were really after the best, deep down inside. But this one’s definitely of the time to always aim in that direction.
‘Maybe they actually were deeply concerned and simply didn’t know—’
‘Damn it, Doc, can’t you just let it go?’ I lean forward, my annoyance peaked. ‘Just push it aside, man. It’s over. Long, long over. I was twelve, and now I’m about to go off to college. They weren’t good folks. You’re not going to make them into that now. Just let the dead rest.’
‘You were twelve when Evelyn died, but you were sixteen when your parents were killed. That’s not exactly that long ago, David.’
‘It’s in the goddamned past!’ I slam down a fist on his posh glass coffee table. I could never afford therapy in digs as elegant as this, from a man who charges as much as Dr Williams, but my parents’ will had contained a clause reserving a segment of their assets for a trust ’to provide ongoing counselling for our son as he deals with the aftereffects of the loss of his sister’.
Damned hypocrites. They never gave a good goddamn about her, or me. Thought they could just shovel a little cash out to take care of me, even after death.
But I shouldn’t think like that. Not the remark about them – that’s accurate enough. But I should watch the swearing. Even if it’s just in my own head. Evelyn wouldn’t have approved.
‘And my parents weren’t killed,’ I suddenly feel compelled to add, sinking back into the sofa. ‘It was a boating accident. I don’t know how many times I have to say that.’
‘Right. I realize it was an accident. But still.’
Still nothing.
‘You’ve never really wanted to talk about any of it, not in all these years,’ he adds. As if this weren’t perfectly obvious to us both.
We moved here a few months after Evelyn died, not so far from my father’s sister’s place, as my parents were too ‘sorrow-ridden’ to stay in our home. Had to rob me even of that – the familiar sites she and I had known together. I can’t think they had any real grief at all, nothing that required them moving to console themselves. Evelyn had always been a burden to them. Their mourning move was just a chance at new scenery, and maybe to be close enough to my aunt that they could pawn me off once in a while. They’d even found this shrink to ‘help’ me, together with a few others now and then. It had all been counterproductive from day one.
I don’t need to talk about her. Or them. And that’s all this is. Talk, talk, talk.
I need to forget.
Not the good stuff. I’ll never forget that. How happy Evelyn had been. How beautiful. It’s not just a mourning brother’s rose-tinted memory, either: Evelyn had rosy cheeks, a delicate face, deep eyes. A doll, alive and vibrant.
But a doll who wept, and too often. A doll they tortured. And I can’t keep remembering that. I can’t. I just goddamned can’t.
Just goddamned can’t.
24
David
With The Admissions Officer
‘What is it about the UCLA pre-med program that interests you, Mr Penske?’ The man who is interviewing me has a slightly condescending tone, but it’s a friendly rather than disturbing one. I can tell he’s been through a number of these interviews already today.
I sit upright and attempt to appear well-kept and eager. ‘Like I put in my essay, I have a desire to understand how the person … works. How the pieces make the whole. How the whole can function better.’
‘Yes, we liked that answer.’ He nods. ‘A good, nicely articulated motivation.’ I’m pleased that he’s pleased. I feel the interview is going well.
‘But it’s also a bit of a given,’ he adds, and I feel something within me tense. ‘We hear similar kinds of things from most applicants. Yet we all felt – the admissions panel, and me personally – that you had something more to you than just the stereotypes.’ He pauses. ‘You indicated in your forms that you have … personal reasons for approaching this major.’
I squirm slightly. I don’t remember having written that in my application, but must have done. I don’t particularly want to discuss my personal story with this stranger, any more than I wanted to with the shrink for all those years. It was only when eighteen came and I was no longer a ward of my aunt that I was finally able to send him packing.
The whole point of college is new beginnings, right?
‘Every guy has challenges in life,’ I say, trying to keep my tone energetic while deflecting the conversation away from my own situation. ‘Everyone has struggles, problems. I think that’s safe to say. I’ve had a few. So I can either wallow in them, or get moving towards something that has the ability to be different. A field in which I could help people.’
‘So you feel medicine can lead you to that goal, to be able to help people?’
This seems to light a spark in the admissions officer’s eyes. I try to fan it.
‘Absolutely. Helping others has to be the end goal, right?’ He gives a slight not. ‘And it’s not just pre-med that interests me; I’d like to maybe double it with chemistry, something along those lines. Dig into that whole side of things.’
‘That’s a pretty heavy combination.’
‘But the two go together, don’t they? If I’m going to go on to med school later, it’d be good to have the pair. Medicine and chemistry are kind of like synonyms.’
He seems interested by this comment. ‘You’re thinking of med school after your undergraduate degree?’
‘It’s a possibility, yeah.’
It’s not a lie, either.
He smiles. ‘It’s encouraging to see such an altruistic streak in such a young man. That is, unless you’re aiming for a medical career just for the money.’
A wink, and I know it’s a joke. Predictably, he’s laughing at his own stale wit. I smile and laugh back.
Old people.
‘I’d normally say you should just take on one major at the beginning and think about a combination as you go, David,’ he says, ‘but your school records are impressive. You’re obviously smart. Math and science scores are in the top fifth percentile nationally. The chemistry angle should be a breeze.’
I nod, pleased he recognizes this. Studying has always been my best therapy. Shove your head into a book and there’s no need to think of other things.
‘Which is another way of saying,’ he adds, ‘that I think you’ll be very happy at UCLA, and will excel in our programs. You’ll meet new people, make new friends. I think it will be good for you, son.’
And I catch the words. Will be, not might be. And I know I’m in.
The first truly good news of my life.
25
David
What can I really know about my future? What can anyone? I’m eighteen, nineteen in four months, and all I can really say is that I know my past and I’ve had enough of it. Evelyn’s dead. Mom, Dad, dead. It’s been tough – no, it’s been shit. And it’s hurt, and it was evil and all
that. But it’s over. They’re all gone.
From my life, and from this moment, from my head.
I wasn’t lying to UCLA’s blazer-clad admissions officer yesterday at my interview. I really do want to go the pre-med line, and maybe even chase that chemistry trail into pharmaceuticals and drugs. Lord knows I’ve seen plenty of examples of why healing needs those tools. Talking just doesn’t cut it. Dr Williams was wrong from day one until the last, with all his attempts at ‘therapeutic conversation’ and digging through the past. Remembering doesn’t help. Dwelling on emotions doesn’t help. It doesn’t help a thing.
What helps is letting go. Pushing the past back into the past where it belongs. I’ve learned that lesson, and learned it well. When your life is shit you don’t learn to come to grips with it. You let go of it, let it disappear. And if I can help someone else to do that, someone else who’s hurting, then maybe I could actually do some good with my life. More than I was able to do when I was a kid.
Of course, Dr Williams would say I’m falling into some pattern of self-perpetuating punishment. He was fond of phrases like those. Convinced I was unable really to let go of anything. He’d probably say I’m going into medicine because it will keep me in the world of suffering I’ve grown used to. Keep me exposed to people in pain, where I feel comfortable. Maybe even hoping to find those whose pain matches my own, who know what I’ve been through, so I can commiserate – if only by proxy. Even predicted I’d go into counselling myself, seeking out the types behind my pain; but as I’ve said before, the man knows nothing. Counselling doesn’t interest me. Nothing he said does.
So I’m starting at UCLA at the end of summer. UCLA. Not a bad beginning to whatever’s going to come next. And I will make something of it, that much I’m completely committed to. Because the one thing I am willing to remember about my sister, about her death, is that I could’t help her. I was young, I had no understanding, no tools.
But that’s not going to be my future.
PART THREE
THE PRESENT
26
To deal with the man’s body was not an easy task. It was not a question only of the weight, though this was significant. His mass was twice what the woman’s had been, even with the water logging. But emotion, it seemed, weighed heavier than flesh.
The deepest challenge with him wasn’t physical at all. The silver-haired man’s life had ended, like the woman’s; but what had to follow could not be the same.
This was a fact on which everything rested. Because the man was gone, and that was right; but the sun and the moon now seemed forever off their proper course, beaming down that nothing would ever be as it should be again. Not in the way it once had been.
But it could go on. It could get better.
It could be cleansed.
27
Amber
My thoughts fire like a cannon as I hold Sadie’s red leash in my hands. Never before has something so innocuous seemed do damning. This length of rope has led us through walks in Muir Grove, along lakesides, through cities. It’s been linked to so many outings and so much joy. But at this moment it has become something else entirely.
The moisture in it stinks of stagnant water. I can smell algae and mud.
Emma Fairfax, found along the river.
He knows, her, somehow. David knows her. This is proof, and proof that can’t be controverted.
Though actually it isn’t, I chide myself. We can’t possibly be the only couple in existence with a red rope leash for their dog. Christ, there must be dozens of them in our little town alone.
But he knows her. I just feel it, like a rock in my gut. David knows her.
But then, I do, too. Somehow, even if only intangibly. The two facts collide within me, each equally incomprehensible. Her name had come to me in the car. David had reacted, but I’d known it. I know this isn’t the same thing as really knowing her – I’d been reading about her all day. It could have been simply distracted focus. Details I’d forgotten I’d learned until the heat of the moment. It’s not the way David knows her – the way this damnable length of rope makes clear.
I see her face …
It’s there again, in my head. A phantom’s outline, as if she’s coming at me through the air. Accusing me, because I’m married to him, to the man who has this in his house, in his briefcase, in his —
I drop the dirty leash as trembling takes over my hands, and it falls to the floor and bounces off my feet.
There is no explanation for why David would hide this here. Having it – no problem. Everyone with a dog has one, and we’ve got several. And David’s the dog-walker, so they’re pretty much his kit. Sadie’s trained him well. And hell, there’s water around here, and mud and dirt, and there are a dozen reasons the leash could be in the state it’s in.
But not the place.
In the midst of the wreckage of my emotions, I know it. There is no justification for David locking it away beneath files. We have a hook by the kitchen door. The leash lives there. It sure as hell doesn’t belong with his paperwork.
‘I know we’re open with each other,’ I remember David saying to me. The words come crashing into my head, a memory that demands to make itself known at this moment. I can’t remember how long ago he said them, but their sound is fresh in my skull. ‘But some things have to remain off limits, and so I’m going to keep the combination to this case to myself.’
‘Off Limits.’ The words sound vile now. This sure as hell isn’t an insurance document or medical form requiring spousal confidentiality. This is a goddamned murder weapo—
No, I can’t bring myself to say it. Even to think it. Not with such directness. The full reality of this moment is too much. David is a pharmacy assistant, for heaven’s sake. A man who fills prescriptions and sorts pills into little orange bottles. He doesn’t take Sadie’s leash and wrap it around some woman’s neck and turn it into a …
I look down at my feet, my pulse bashing away like a drum in my head.
He doesn’t take something good, and transform it into something so …
Then, as my eyes linger on the red coil at my feet, I notice something else.
And with it, the strength in my legs evaporates.
28
Amber
Of the next moments of my life I have only the vaguest of perceptions.
I want, with everything in me, to disregard everything I’ve found. I want, I need, to believe that the leash in David’s briefcase means nothing, just like I wanted to believe the briefcase even being in the closet meant nothing. Potentially normal things, both of them. But I’m well, well beyond anything being normal.
I love my husband. Deeply. Madly. He’s the most sincere, gentlest, kindest, scrupulous—
But the rope is at my feet, and beside it …
My vision is slightly blurry, and I strain to see. I’ve drunk far too much wine, and on an empty stomach. I think I’m having one of the worst migraines of my life.
But something’s there.
I’m teetering on my feet, my suspicions fired to a degree I’d never have imagined possible until this moment, and there’s a voice whispering from somewhere in the air:
He’s lyyyyyyying.
I know it. The voice is right.
I try to bend down to look at whatever it is I’ve spotted near where the leash has fallen, but I can’t seem to keep my balance. The whole world angles off to the side and threatens to slide away. I reach out for the front of the desk and force my bare feet further apart, commanding the world to stop fucking around and be still. It takes a few moments to obey, but it gradually comes to a trembling halt.
The way I’m positioned, my eyes are facing directly into the footspace beneath the desk.
It’s in the spot where David normally slides his briefcase when he isn’t using it, but that case is now open on the desktop above me, its contents strewn about it. Yet something is where the case ought to have been. My brain has spun upside down in my head, but I still k
now it’s unusual for something else to be there. It’s brown, almost the same colour as leather, and yet it isn’t. I try to focus.
Cardboard, the word at last flashes into my head. Cardboard. A box.
I slide it out, slinking myself into a crouch, propping a shoulder against the desk’s front drawers to keep the world from going all wobbly again. I gaze at this little box. Looks like it was once for shoes. There’s print on it, but my eyes are past making sense of letters.
Maybe he’s gone and got me a present …
And, shockingly, I almost forget entirely about everything that’s happened to that moment. The thought of a gift, of David’s smile and that lovely look his eyes take on when he surprises me with something he knows I’ll love. Like yellow tulips or tickets to Les Miséra—
I don’t want to wait. Impetuous little thing, I chide myself, though it’s my mother’s voice that’s doing the scolding, of course. Shrill and impatient and always harsher than the words suggest. But she’s gone and she doesn’t matter any more, and I have a present despite her. I almost giggle again, but control myself.
I lift the lid off the box.
It doesn’t contain flowers or tickets or a new pair of shoes. Instead, my mother’s voice is back in the air, and so is David’s, and I can hear Sadie’s barking and feel the Marin Headlands wind on my face, and I hear wedding bells, and taste warm tea, and the whole world is swirling around me as it all begins to collapse and disappear.
The box is stuffed with a wrinkled, white t-shirt. It’s filthy, stained with something rust-coloured. There’s dirt, and mud, and sand, and I can smell the blood even more vividly than I can see it.
I try to lean down for a closer look, but my eyes cross and I can vaguely sense my body collapsing to the floor as I hear David’s beautiful voice from somewhere behind me, above.