The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

‘Miss, I’m sorry if your husband’s behaviour is unusual, but I don’t understand why you’re calling here.’ The man is beginning to sound mildly agitated.

  ‘Because I thought you might be able to tell me if you’ve noticed anythi—’

  He cuts me off. ‘Are you under the impression that I know your husband?’

  My skin turns cold. No, no. This can’t be.

  ‘Of course I am!’ I almost spit the statement into my phone. ‘He’s been your co-worker since before we were married. At least two years, maybe two and a half.’

  ‘And his name is?’

  ‘David!’ I cry. ‘David Howell! Your counter assistant. He’s there every day. He’s probably there right now!’

  Again, the long pause.

  ‘Miss, I think you have the wrong number. We don’t have an employee here by that name.’

  Ice, travelling through my body.

  ‘That can’t be true,’ I answer. ‘He always comes in early. Stays late, to miss the traffic back across the bridge.’

  ‘I’m telling you, I don’t know a David Howell.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ I can’t stop the accusation coming. The tears welling in my eyes have already broken over the lids.

  ‘Listen, lady, all our employees are listed on our website. Take a look for yourself. And don’t call here again unless you want a prescription filled.’ No more words, and the line dies.

  I slam down the phone, almost cracking it on the hard surface of the desk, and wipe the tears from my eyes. A sweep of the touchpad and the laptop is awake again, and I call up Bayside Inland Pharmacy’s website from its Google listing. Three clicks in, and the ‘Meet our Staff’ page loads in front of me.

  A listing of five names beams into my face.

  And I suppose in that moment, I’m not actually surprised that David’s isn’t among them.

  45

  The third body was predictable. It didn’t feel a shock now. There were no surprises in this move down the line. His features, too, were those of a man who would be found in this situation.

  He looked, indeed, like the portrait all humanity carries of him. Fat, not pudgy, beer belly protruding over trousers belted far too tightly around his midriff. Balding, with a terrible comb-over, thin hair so greasy that even the struggle didn’t displace it from his scalp. His shirt was plaid, or maybe a fake tartan, with edges in the darker tones of a garment that wasn’t regularly washed.

  In the symphony of life, what is really lost by the omission of a note such as this? Does the song really suffer?

  46

  Amber

  The thought that torments me as I continue to stare at the pharmacy website’s employee listing, David’s name absent, is one I can’t bring myself to vocalize, even mentally. My world is disintegrating, melting away, but I still can’t say it.

  I simply have to be on the wrong track. The scene in front of me, with all its apparently definitive dimensions – it can’t be leading me to the actual conclusion. I know David after all. Know him more intimately, more thoroughly, than I’ve ever known anyone else. To think he’s been lying about the most fundamental aspects of our lives … no. He’s just not that convincing a liar, at the end of the day. He’s too blundering and sweet to maintain a ruse for long. He’s tried once or twice, for reasons of romantic surprise. It’s never worked. I’ve always managed to find him out. Now this same man is suddenly a deceiver so masterful that he can hide entire dimensions of himself from me, and for years? It’s nonsense.

  But a panic has long since set in, and won’t be rationalized away. David has lied to me about his best friend, who doesn’t exist. He’s lied to me about the pharmacy, where he’s not actually employed and where no one has ever heard of him. What else has he been lying to me about?

  Everything in me goes rigid. I can’t stop the thought. It’s taken on a power of its own, and my fingers are already moving. The phone is back in my hand, Chloe’s contact is up on the screen, and my thumb is on the green button.

  I hold the phone to my ear as I rise from my seat at the desk and start to pace the not-too-posh, not-too-scrappy hotel room that’s been my campout for the past night. By now David’s got be truly frantic over what’s become of me, however guilty or innocent he may be.

  Guilty or innocent.

  A vision of my yellow duffel bag flashes back into mind, the blood-caked knife secreted away within. The way I’d walked up to it, so cavalier. My stomach tightens even further.

  Chloe finally answers, and sounds of fumbling fingers draw my attention her way.

  ‘Hallo, Ambs?’ she asks, excited. It’s a nickname almost as bad as Amby. ‘That really you?’ There is gum smacking between her teeth.

  ‘It’s me,’ I answer, trying to keep the dread out of my voice. I’m impatient. I don’t want a lengthy conversation. There is only one reason I’m phoning.

  ‘Was beginning to think we were going to have to call in a missing person report on you,’ she teases. ‘What’s this, day two of The Great Amber Absence?’ She pronounces the words with emphasis, like the title of a Hollywood blockbuster.

  ‘It’s only the first full day.’ Breathe in. Calm. ‘Yesterday was just balking out after lunch, remember?’

  ‘So does that mean you’re not coming in today, either? Because I’ve got to tell you, I’m not sure how many more excuses I can make to Mitch about your—’

  ‘Chloe,’ I interrupt, my impatience past its threshold, ‘please. I need to ask you something.’

  A pause. ‘Ok, hon. Ask away.’

  I take a breath. There is no way to ask this but bluntly. ‘Chloe, what’s the name of my husband?’

  Silence. Longer than the ten seconds I’d experienced with her a few days ago. A record-breaker. I think it might never end. All I can hear is my own pulse.

  ‘Amber,’ Chloe finally says, ‘what’s got into you lately? You must be more sick than you were letting on.’ She sounds worried. Deeply, presciently, worried.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I snap back, too hastily to be believable. ‘Just tell me my husband’s name. Say it. You do know it, right?’

  ‘Of course I know David!’ she says, I’ve known him since—’

  Her voice trails on, but I can’t hear it. My relief is so powerful it deafens me. Someone, at least, actually knows David. He’s really there. He’s really my man.

  I snap back to attention and cut Chloe off mid-sentence.

  ‘What do you know about him?’ Chloe goes silent at the question, so I persist. ‘Concretely. What do you know about David?’

  She stutters, but full words don’t come.

  ‘Is he really who he says he is, Chloe?’ I finally give voice to the question that’s been tearing away at my innards all morning. ‘Tell me just that much. Is he really the man I know at all?’

  There is only silence on the other end of the line. My question has driven Chloe mute. She either can’t answer, or won’t.

  I don’t care which.

  I’m in motion again, ending the call and gathering up my laptop and the contents of my handbag from the bed, shoving them back into place.

  I am horrified, and I’m a damned sight beyond confused. Yet in this moment I have a plan.

  I am going to find out the truth.

  Four steps later, I’m out my hotel room door.

  47

  Amber

  The Assessor-Recorder’s Office for San Francisco County is located in City Hall, smack in the middle of the city. Its website, examined from my car, lists options for phoned-in records searches, but only with a five-day waiting period after a query is made over the line. Fuck it if I’m waiting for that. In-person response time is listed as twenty minutes after payment, and that sounds good to me. There are other sites that say I can search records online for a fee, but I have neither the patience nor the trust that such ‘public service’ sites ever really provide what you’re looking for. Besides, more time holed away with my laptop doesn’t fit with the keep-moving-or-go-insane str
ategy I know is a necessity right now. A drive into central San Francisco seems like a good solution. Out, but nowhere near work or home. A densely packed metropolis where there’s absolutely no likelihood of running into anyone I don’t want to see.

  I check out of my Calistoga hotel with a few signatures and the handing over of a few more folds of bills from my wallet. Is it wrong that I’m keen enough on staying hidden from David that I impulsively paid for my room in cash? Do I really think he’s going to try tracking me through the credit card? Part of me suspects there’s nothing positive about my character to be gleaned from the fact this seemed like such an obvious thing to do – that I so easily drifted into subterfuge. Or that I thought David aggressive enough to need such thoughtful deceiving.

  It isn’t ‘aggressive’ for a husband to want to know where his wife’s gone, I scold myself, or to use whatever means he’s got to try to find her if she disappears. I’ve never before felt so aware of how hair-thin the line is that stands between loving and obsessive.

  I make the hour and forty-minute drive south along Highway 101 as far as the Golden Gate and the little post-bridge district of Cow Hollow, when I decide to switch to public transportation. Finding parking there isn’t exactly a treat, but it’s a damned site better than trying to find a free spot anywhere downtown. I eventually slide my car into a free space along the straight stretch of Lombard Street, then walk a few blocks to the nearest bus stop. A few dollars lighter and I’m on the 47 line, heading down Van Ness to my destination.

  The journey is unremarkable, save for one fact that I only become fully cognisant of there on the bus. A thought, or rather a realization, so foreign that it actually startles me.

  I don’t have a headache.

  They’re so customary, and they’ve been usual for so long, that I can’t think of the last day I didn’t feel one grabbing at the sides of my face. Every day, until today. And today seems like the most unlikely of days not to have a headache.

  I chide myself. Feeling good, rather than poorly, shouldn’t be upsetting me. I sense I’m as close to paranoid as a sane person can get, suspicious of the fact that, for once, I feel physically well in the middle of the day.

  No, not well. That’s the wrong way to put it. I’m not feeling my customary pain, but I can’t help but feel that what’s replaced it is far worse. In the place of that familiar agony, a deep hole, buried within me, is showing its shape. A forgetting, sucking pieces of myself into it, leaving only empty space behind.

  Less than half an hour after entering the overcrowded bus, I exit through its central doors and make my way the last few yards along bustling Van Ness Street towards the looming edifice of San Francisco City Hall. It’s an awe-inspiring building, built in Beaux-Arts style after its predecessor had been destroyed in the great 1906 earthquake, looking like a cross between a French palace and the US Capitol – though its gilded dome rises even taller than the glistening white version in Washington.

  I’d been here once before, to go through the formalities of registering my marriage to David. I’d been overwhelmed by the building, and the moment.

  The memory is no longer drenched in sweetness, but at least it confirms I’ve come to the right place. This time I’m here for what is going to be the worst discovery of my life. I desperately don’t want to find it, but I’m as certain as I’ve ever been of anything that I will.

  I locate the appropriate door and enter. It’s a matter of minutes before I’m at the front desk of the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, tucked into room 180 of the massive complex.

  ‘I need to look up a marriage record,’ I announce to the twenty-something clerk behind the counter. She’s clearly trying to look older than her years, using a loosely knitted jumper and bunned-up hairstyle to effect a moderately maternal appearance. She’s wearing make-up my mother would have approved of, if my mother had ever approved of anything, light and not too showy.

  She nods at me. ‘Good morning. I’ll be happy to help you with that.’ Her voice is as rehearsed as her gestures. ‘Do you happen to have an index reference number for the record you want?’

  I shake my head, stopping before the motion becomes too energetic. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. I was hoping I could look it up through the family names.’

  ‘Can do that for you, sure.’ There is a bit of tapping on the young lady’s keyboard. Finally, she peers up at me. ‘Could I have the last names of both parties in the marriage?’

  ‘Howell,’ I answer. ‘The husband’s first name is David, and the wife’s is Amber.’ My voice trembles. The Howells.

  ‘And the date the marriage was registered?’

  ‘Just over two years ago, in this building, July the seventeenth.’ The date comes off my lips automatically. I’d sat out on one of the granite benches in the corridor, back on that day, while David went into the office to take care of the paperwork. I was as happy as I’d ever been, dreaming of everything ahead of us.

  More typing. The woman focuses on her screen. At last she looks back up, dropping her wrists to the surface of her desk. I grab a sheet of scratch paper from a pile on the counter and take hold of a plastic pen shackled to a metal chain.

  It’s my last gesture of hope that this could still go right. But, of course, it was never going to.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no file in the registry for those names,’ the clerk announces impassively.

  The words thunder through me as fiercely as if she’d yelled them. Though for a moment my lips stay silent, my physical reaction is immediate. My skin goes cold and my pulse starts to become audible in my ears; yet I can’t think of anything to say. That isn’t possible. Of course there’s a record! But then, of course there’s not a record. You knew he was lying. You just needed the proof!

  ‘I think … maybe …’ I finally stutter, ‘maybe you typed the last name wrong.’ I have to try every possibility. ‘It’s Howell, H-O-W-E-L-L.’ I can’t think of any variation on spellings for my own first name or David’s, so I don’t add them.

  The clerk looks back to her screen, but her head is shaking even before her eyes come to a stop. ‘That’s the spelling I used,’ she confirms. ‘And the date was July seventeenth, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says back. ‘There’s nothing here. You’re absolutely sure of that date? It couldn’t perhaps have been another?’

  Of course I’m sure of the fucking date! I want to scream at this young woman, grab at the bun at the back of her head and swing her around by the hair until she starts talking sense. Of course I know the date of my marriage. Don’t tell me there isn’t a file!

  ‘Maybe it’s not in your electronic records?’ I quietly ask, holding back tears and screams, grasping for solutions. ‘Not everything’s been digitized, right? Maybe you have it in a filing cabinet out back?’

  ‘If a marriage has taken place in San Francisco County since we established this office in 1915, it’s in these files, ma’am,’ she answers. There’s a glimmer of pride in her eyes. ‘So unless you’re searching for a record from somewhere else, I’m afraid this database is exhaustive.’

  The marriage had taken place in the tree-covered Presidio, in a little chapel connected to the old Officers’ Club that dated back to the site’s life as a naval base, before being turned into a city conservation district. It’s there in my mind, vivid and beautiful. A whitewashed wooden structure on a hillside, as Californian as it comes. A moment only for us, hidden away from the world in a quiet corner of a park tucked into the centre of a city.

  Hidden away.

  I glare back at the woman. A thought has just occurred to me. I don’t know about government databases and registries, but I know enough about looking things up on the Internet to recognize that sometimes things just don’t get cross-referenced in every file as they should.

  ‘Can you look up records by birth certificate in that same system?’

  The clerk lifts a brow slightly. This is more quizzing than she usually gets. ‘Sure
, it’s possible. Give me just a second.’ Typing, keystrokes coming out in rapid bursts. ‘Okay, I’m ready. What name would you like to search?’

  ‘Look up the husband,’ I answer. ‘Howell, David. Middle name Joseph.’

  She nods. ‘His date of birth?’

  The detail comes to my lips automatically. ‘November fourteenth, nineteen—’

  But then my words stop in my throat. I’m unexpectedly mute.

  I can’t remember the year of David’s birth.

  The black hole in my mind is suddenly, spontaneously back, and it’s grown into a cavern. What I am feeling is so far beyond fear, beyond panic, that I simply don’t know how to react. It’s one thing to be confronted with the fact that you’re being lied to, but when you can’t remember something yourself … when your own thoughts are leaving you, hiding from you …

  The woman is peering at me, waiting, but I can’t complete the year.

  ‘Nineteen …’ I stutter aloud again, hoping impulse will do the trick, but no clarity comes – muscle memory holding nothing over the stunning absence in my recall. I look to the clerk, imploring, but she’s obviously in no position to help me.

  Then, a memory that can. David is four years older than I am. By quick math that makes him forty-two. I quickly subtract from today’s date and give the clerk the year.

  ‘Do you happen to know his place of birth?’

  ‘La Jolla, outside San Diego,’ I answer. California born and bred, David has always said. That memory is still vivid.

  ‘One day we’ll visit La Jolla together, hon,’ he whispers in my ear, a campfire crackling in front of our toes. ‘There’s a little cabin, tucked into a nice grove of trees that sits just above the beach, where we used to play as children. You’ll love it. Like a postcard. Everything down there’s so gorgeous. It’ll make me happy to share it with you.’

  To date, we’ve never gone.

  The clerk is typing again, but rather than focus on her actions I’m trying to squash the frog in my throat and force my pulse out of its sprint. Neither act of will is working.