by C. J. Tudor
“No.” Gabe shook his head. He took the folder out of his pocket and shook out the hair bobble, holding it up for Harry to see.
“I found this. It’s Izzy’s.”
Harry stared at the bobble and his lips thinned.
“Okay.” Gabe took out the notebook, pulling out the map with it and then somehow managing to drop them both on the ground. He bent and snatched them back up, frantically brushing off the dirt.
“What about this?” He opened the notebook. “Does this mean anything to you? The Other People?”
“Gabe, this has gone far enough—”
“No! Everyone is always telling me I must be mistaken. But what about you? What about Evelyn? You said yourself that little girls that age look alike. What if it wasn’t Izzy you identified? What if you were mistaken?”
“You really believe that I wouldn’t recognize my own granddaughter?”
“You believe I wouldn’t recognize my own daughter.”
They glared at each other. Stalemate. Harry’s face was calm, but Gabe could tell that, behind his eyes, there was a lot going on. Harry was not a stupid man. He never spoke or acted without considering all outcomes.
“Just think for a minute about what you’re suggesting,” he said. “For me to have wrongly identified Izzy’s body, there would have to have been another body. Another dead little girl. Who is she? Why has no one reported her missing? What you’re saying makes no sense, even if I was mistaken, which I was not.”
Gabe could feel his conviction wavering. Harry was good at that—being convincing. His calm, measured tones. His logic, his reasoning. Trust me, I’m a doctor.
“This hair bobble, Gabe. It could belong to any little girl.”
“It’s Izzy’s.”
“Okay, then maybe it is Izzy’s. Maybe you kept it. Maybe you have convinced yourself you found it in the car.”
“What?”
“Not consciously.”
“You think I’m making this up?”
“No, I think you believe it. And that’s the problem. That’s why you need help.”
Gabe snorted out a laugh. “Help. Right.”
“I have a friend who you could talk to.”
“I bet you do. Let me guess—nice, plush office and a ready prescription of happy pills.”
“Gabe—”
“I don’t need a psychiatrist. I need you to tell me the truth about that day.”
This time, Harry’s face did change. The bushy eyebrows furrowed, the blue eyes darkened.
“You’re accusing me of lying about the identification.”
Gabe didn’t reply. He had tried to think of other explanations: Harry and Evelyn didn’t see their granddaughter that often—another bone of contention between them and Jenny (“They live two hours away, not on the bloody moon”). It must have been at least three months since their last visit. They hadn’t even seen her on her birthday. Kids grew fast at that age. Izzy had had her hair cut. Lost a tooth.
Was it possible, in Harry’s grief, in the messy confusion of that day, that he had got it wrong? Terribly, hideously wrong? And now, he was too scared to admit it? Or was there another reason?
He still couldn’t say it. Still could not accuse Harry of something so awful, so unthinkable. Because to do so raised so many other questions, not least: Why? Why? Why?
“If I was a younger man, I’d punch you in the face for that,” Harry muttered.
He’d like to, Gabe thought, but there was the rub. Harry was not the man he used to be. He had aged in a way that had nothing to do with the march of time. Grief did that to you. Added decades in a day. He recognized the ache in his own weary bones. Sometimes, he felt like a ghost already, draped in the skin of a man who had once lived.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Harry shook his head, the fight that Gabe had seen fleetingly rise in him subsiding again. “No, I’m sorry. I always hoped you’d eventually snap out of it, see sense. I even hoped that you would find the damn car and realize you were wrong. But it seems that’s not going to happen.”
He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out an A4 envelope folded in half.
“Hope is a powerful drug. Believe me, I’ve seen it work miracles in my patients. But there’s a difference between hope and delusion. That’s why I’m giving you this. Evelyn wanted you to see it before. I didn’t want to hurt you. But it’s time, Gabe.”
“What is it?”
“The post-mortem report.”
Gabe felt a hollowness opening in his stomach. “I read the post-mortem report. There’s nothing in it that says the body is definitely Izzy.”
Harry sighed. “Age, weight, hair color, even the missing front tooth.”
We’ll leave it under the pillow, for the tooth fairy.
“It all matches. But you don’t want the truth. You want to cling to a fairy tale.” He placed the envelope down on the bench between them and slowly stood. “I think it’s best if we don’t meet again for a while.”
Gabe didn’t reply. He was barely aware of Harry leaving. He stared at the envelope as if it were an unexploded grenade. Of course, he could leave it. Not look. Burn it, throw it in a bin. But he knew he wouldn’t.
He picked up the envelope and opened the flap. There were two sheets of paper inside. He slid them out. Lines of black type blurred before his eyes. Impenetrable medical terms, but some words stood out. Gunshot wounds. Artery. Perforation. Organ damage. He laid the papers to one side. There was something else inside the envelope. He tipped it up. Two Polaroids fell out.
Jenny and Izzy. Just their faces, green sheets pulled up to their necks.
Morgue photos.
He heard a noise. Like a moan. One of the undead. He realized it was him.
How the hell had Harry got hold of these? But then, Gabe supposed, he was a doctor. He had contacts.
Gabe reached for the picture of Jenny. Her face was pale, waxen, unfamiliar in death. And yet he knew it was still the face he had once stroked, kissed, loved, dreamed of. He put the photo to one side and forced himself to pick up the second one.
Izzy’s face was perfect, unblemished. She looked like she was sleeping. A cold, forever sleep.
He stared so hard his eyeballs burned. No mistaking. Izzy. His Izzy.
He started to cry. He cried until he thought his eyes must surely be squeezed from their sockets; he cried until his chest hurt and his throat felt like he had been gargling ground glass. He bawled like a child, letting snot flow freely, scrubbing at his face and nose with his sleeve.
Evelyn wanted you to see it…it’s time.
“Are you all right, love?”
Gabe glanced up. An elderly woman stood in front of him. Dirty white hair, skin crinkled into flaccid folds. Her body was bowed by osteoporosis and she wore a stained beige raincoat. Gabe caught a whiff of musty, stale urine.
She pushed an old Silver Cross pram. More rust than silver now. Instead of a baby, a cat was curled up inside it. A large tabby with surly green eyes. It reminded Gabe of their grumpy old cat, Schrödinger. Not that he was ever called that. Izzy couldn’t pronounce it, so his name became Soda.
After Gabe moved out permanently, their neighbors had taken him in. Gabe was glad. He had never really liked the mean old tom. One minute he would be purring, the next his claws would rake down the nearest bit of exposed flesh.
“Here you go, love.”
The old woman held out a crumpled pack of Kleenex. Her nails were embedded with black dirt. His first instinct was to tell her to go away, but then his resolve withered in the face of her small act of kindness.
“Thank you,” he croaked, taking one and handing the packet back.
“You keep it.” She shuffled away.
He rubbed at his eyes and blew his nose. Then he picked up the photog
raphs and slipped them carefully into his wallet.
He had been so sure. And they had found the car. But what did it really prove? And the body? Maybe best not to think about that. Could he even trust the Samaritan?
Perhaps Harry was right. He needed help. If not, maybe he was destined to end up like Kleenex Lady, shuffling around a cemetery, smelling of stale piss and wheeling his very own cat in a pram.
And then something poked him in the back of his mind. Hard.
The cat.
Not the cat in the pram.
Their cat. Schrödinger.
“Daddy, Soda scratched me.”
Izzy’s tear-stained face. An ugly red line on her chin.
Gabe had applied Savlon. “There you go. All better.” But the scratch had still looked sore when he dropped her off at school.
That morning. Before the phone call. Before his life fell off the edge of a cliff.
Gabe fumbled the photographs back out of his wallet. He peered at the one of Izzy more closely. He squinted, held it up this way and that. He could see her eyelashes, the faint freckles on her nose. Every detail laid bare in the unforgiving light.
There was no scratch on her chin.
Of course, when you’re young, scratches heal quickly. But not in a few hours. Gabe was no doctor, but he knew that. And he knew something else.
They didn’t heal when you were dead.
Rain pattered on umbrellas. A bobbing sea of black. Mourners massed outside the Chapel of Rest. Black clothes, grey sky. A picture in monochrome.
Fran watched her family, staggering slowly along the uneven gravel path, her sister supporting their mother, not just through her grief but through her drunken stupor. Fran stood apart, watching from a distance. Why wasn’t she there?
Because this is a dream. Of course.
But then, in reality, she always had been on the periphery. She loved her family, but she had never felt close to her mum or her sisters. Maybe that was the way with the eldest. You grew up and away first. It was only her dad she had been really close to. And now he was gone.
The funeral party filed in and sat down. “Funeral party.” It always seemed an odd name for a mass of mourners. “A sadness” or “a weep.” That seemed more appropriate.
The coffin was perched upon a plinth at the end of the chapel. Flowers had been arranged around it. They looked too bright against the dark oak. Out of place. Dad had loved his garden, but he hated cut flowers. Preferred to see them alive and blooming. “Cut flowers are already dead flowers,” he always used to say. He didn’t want bouquets at his funeral. They’d ordered potted flowers from the florist that could be replanted. And Dad had not been cremated. He was buried.
This was wrong, she thought suddenly. All wrong. This wasn’t his funeral. It couldn’t be her family.
She walked slowly down the center of the chapel, between the row of mourners, who had now put their umbrellas back up. Rain poured down and when she looked up the roof of the chapel had disappeared, and tumultuous charcoal clouds rolled by overhead.
She walked up to the open casket and stared at the pale, still body of the little girl inside. Blonde hair fanned out around her small, heart-shaped face. She was dressed in a pretty pink dress that Fran didn’t remember buying. But then, she didn’t buy the dress, did she? Not for her funeral.
Tears started to roll down her cheeks. The rain darkened the little girl’s hair and soaked the pretty pink dress. Fran raised her head and screamed…and her mouth filled with water, pouring down her throat, choking her…
* * *
—
WATER. RUNNING WATER. Fran blinked her eyes open. Shit. Where was she? The hotel room. So why could she still hear water? She sat up, glanced across automatically at Alice’s bed. Empty. Water. Running water. She looked back at the closed bathroom door, a dark stain just starting to spread below the chipped edge.
“No.”
She leaped out of her bed and ran over, yanking the door open. The bath was overflowing, a small sea of water flooding the linoleum and seeping out on to the carpet.
Alice lay in the bath, head just starting to slip below the surface of the water. Asleep.
“Fuck!”
Fran grabbed her beneath the arms. Jesus Christ, the water was freezing.
“Alice. Alice. Wake up!”
Her skin was almost blue, her lips a cracked line of purple.
No, no, no. How had she let this happen?
She grabbed towels, wrapped them around Alice and carried her, dripping, out of the bathroom. She laid her on the bed, rubbing her gently dry, whispering into her wet hair.
“Alice, Alice, wake up.”
“M—…Mummy.”
For once she didn’t correct her. “I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here.”
Alice’s limp arms encircled her. She felt her body start to shiver. A good thing, Fran thought.
“We need to get you warm.”
She wrapped the duvet tightly around her. She needed more towels. She walked back to the bathroom. The water was still running. Crap. She squelched over to the bath and turned off the tap. She reached for the plug and then paused. What the? The plug was still wrapped around the tap. So why wasn’t the water draining away?
She stuck her hand into the freezing water and felt around. Something was blocking the plughole, wedged tight. She fumbled around and managed to dislodge it. The water began to gurgle down the drain. Fran pulled her arm back out, peppered with goosebumps, and stared at the object in her hand.
A small, pinky-white conch shell.
She sleeps. A pale girl in a white room.
The nurses look after her well every day. But this morning there is more activity than usual. Today is a special day. Today is visiting day.
Miriam helps the juniors as they hoist the girl and change her bedding. She supervises the cleaners and ensures that every speck of dust has been removed from every room; from the machines, the piano keys and the shell.
She arranges fresh flowers in vases, washes and dries the girl’s hair and then brushes it until it shines. Later, she will make tea and cakes and sit with the girl to wait.
This is Miriam’s domain. Yes, there are nurses, and a doctor visits occasionally, but she is the one who spends the most time here and has done for over thirty years, since before that awful day. Since before the girl’s mother became a virtual recluse and the girl ended up like this.
Perhaps if it had never happened, Miriam wouldn’t have stayed. She would have moved on, made a life of her own. But they both depended on her so much. Mother and daughter. She couldn’t desert them. She always feared what might happen if she did. So, she had stayed and, in many ways, this was her family now, her life. She doesn’t begrudge it. In fact, often Miriam feels that she is here for a reason.
She reaches into her pocket and takes out a piece of paper. Soft and much folded. A child’s face stares out. Have you seen me? Miriam sighs and looks back at the girl. Then she leans forward and gently pats her still hand.
“Soon,” she whispers. “Soon.”
Gabe drove. It was all he could do. Maybe if he was a detective or a private investigator, someone with “a team” and experts to summon, he would be doing something more productive.
But Gabe was neither of those. He didn’t know what he was any more. No job, no home, no longer a father or a husband. A driver with no destination and empty passenger seats.
But now he had something. The photo. The scratch. As he drove, he went over and over it in his mind. Prodding and pulling at his memory, trying to pick holes in his recollection. Was it really that morning he had applied the plaster? Could he be getting confused with another morning? No. You did not forget something like that. You did not forget the last time you saw your wife and daughter alive.
And that Monday morning had not been like any ot
her morning. It wasn’t normal for him to take Izzy to school. In fact, he remembered arguing with Jenny about it.
“It’s a bit short notice. Can’t you change your meeting?”
“No. It’s a big client.”
“But I’ll be late.”
“So? It’s just one morning. Maybe you could actually leave on time, too—push the boat out.”
“Jesus, Jenny.”
“I am serious, Gabe. You missed Izzy’s birthday party at the weekend.”
“One party. I had to catch up on work.”
“You almost missed her bloody birth.”
“Oh, here we go.”
“Here we go. Always work, isn’t it? Yet whenever I call you, you’re never there. You’re always at a client’s, on the road, or your mobile is turned off. Where were you last Monday, Gabe? Work didn’t know.”
“Christ. I thought we’d been through this. All the accusations.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“Then what are you saying?”
A long pause. A look on her face that almost tore the truth from him. Almost.
“I’m saying—I want you home on time tonight. Just once a week. That’s all I ask. One night when we eat together, you read your daughter a bedtime story and we pretend we’re a normal, happy family.”
Leaving that barb buried deep, she had shrugged her coat on, flung her bag over her shoulder and gone to say goodbye to Izzy.
Gabe had started after her then almost fell over Schrödinger, who was winding around his feet and mewling for breakfast. Gabe had cursed, shoved the cat roughly aside with his foot and picked up his phone.
That was when Izzy had emerged into the kitchen, sleep-tousled and red-cheeked.
“Hi, Daddy!”
She’d yawned and bent down to pick up the cat…
“Owww!”
It had definitely happened that morning. He remembered the bright red blood welling in the shallow wound. Soothing her a little impatiently. Fumbling for the small Disney bandage to stick on the scratch. He remembered it all.