Nine Perfect Strangers

by Liane Moriarty

  He’d hoped that doing this retreat might make him feel calmer about the approach of the anniversary. It was a marvellous house, so peaceful and, yes, ‘tranquil’, and the staff seemed kind and caring. Yet Napoleon felt skittish. At dinner last night his right leg had begun to tremble uncontrollably. He’d had to put a hand on his thigh to still it. Was it just the anniversary? Or the silence?

  Probably the silence. He didn’t like having all this time with only his thoughts, his memories and regrets.

  The sun rose higher in the sky as the Tranquillum House guests moved in unison with Yao.

  Napoleon caught a glimpse of the profile of the big chunky guy who had tried to smuggle in the contraband. It had seemed like he might be a troublemaker, and Napoleon had kept his teacher’s eye on him, but he appeared to have settled down, like one of those students you thought was going to be your nemesis for the whole year but then turned out to be a good kid. There was something about this guy’s profile that reminded Napoleon of somebody or something from his past. An actor from some old TV show he used to enjoy as a child, perhaps? It felt like a good memory, there was something pleasant about the feelings he invoked, but Napoleon couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Somewhere in the distance a whipbird called. He loved the sound of the whipbird: that long, musical crack of the whip that was so much a part of the Australian landscape you had to leave the country to realise how much you missed it, how it settled your soul.

  ‘Repulse the monkey,’ said Yao.

  Napoleon repulsed the monkey and remembered three years ago: this day, this time. The day before.

  It was around this time three years ago that Napoleon was making love to his sleepy wife for the last time in their marriage. (He assumed it was the last time, although he hadn’t given up entirely. He would know if she was ever ready. All it would take would be a look. He understood. Sex felt cheap now, tawdry and tacky. But he’d still be up for some cheap, tawdry sex.) She’d fallen asleep again – she used to love her sleep back then – and Napoleon had quietly left the house and headed for the bay. He kept the surf ski on the roof rack of his car throughout the long summer holiday. When he came back, Zach was eating breakfast at the sink, shirtless – he was always shirtless – hair sticking up in tufts. He looked up, grinned at his father, and said, ‘No milk,’ meaning he’d drunk it all. He said that he might come with Napoleon for a paddle the next day. After that Napoleon worked for a few hours in the garden and cleaned the pool, and Zach went to the beach with his friend Chris, and then Napoleon fell asleep on the couch, and the girls went out – Heather to work, Zoe to a party. When Zach came home, Napoleon did ribs on the barbecue for the two of them, and afterwards they had a swim in the pool and talked about the Australian Open, and Serena’s chances, and conspiracy theories (Zach liked conspiracy theories) and how Chris had told Zach he wanted to go into gastroenterology. Zach was gobsmacked by the bizarre specificity of Chris’s career plans because Zach didn’t even know what he wanted to do tomorrow, let alone for the rest of his life, and Napoleon told him that was fine, there was plenty of time to settle on a career, and these days no-one had just one career anyway (he absolutely told him it was fine; he’d double-checked his memory about a thousand times), and then they played table tennis in honour of the tennis, best of three, Napoleon won two, and then they watched a movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. They both loved the movie. They laughed a lot. They stayed up too late watching the movie. That’s why Napoleon was tired the next morning. That’s why he hit the snooze button on his phone.

  It was a split-second decision he would regret until the day he died.

  Napoleon knew everything about that day because he’d examined his memories over and over, like a homicide detective combing through the evidence. Over and over he saw it: his hand reaching for the phone, his thumb on the snooze button. Over and over he saw the other life, where he made a different decision, the right decision, the decision he normally made, where he didn’t hit snooze, where he turned off the alarm and got out of bed.

  ‘Grasp the bird’s tail,’ said Yao.

  It was Heather who found Zach.

  The sound of his wife’s scream that morning was like no sound he’d ever heard before.

  His memory of running up the stairs: it seemed like it took a lifetime, like running through mud, like something from a dream.

  Zach had used his new belt to make the noose.

  It was a brown leather belt from R.M. Williams that Heather had bought him for Christmas, only a few weeks earlier. It cost ninety-nine dollars, which was ridiculous. ‘Expensive belt,’ Napoleon had said to Heather when she showed it to him. He remembered fishing the receipt from the plastic bag, raising his eyebrows. She shrugged. Zach had admired it once. She overspent every Christmas.

  You broke your mother, mate.

  The kid did not leave a note or a text. He did not choose to explain his actions.

  ‘Carry the tiger over the mountain,’ said Yao, who was a young man, maybe only ten years older than Zach. Zach could have worked somewhere like this. He could have grown his hair long. He would have looked good with one of those beards they all had these days. He could have lived a fantastic life. So many opportunities. He had the brains, the looks, the facial hair. He was good with his hands. He could have done a trade! He could have done law or medicine or architecture. He could have travelled. He could have done drugs. Why didn’t he just do drugs? How wonderful to have a son who made bad choices but not irreversible bad choices; a kid who did drugs, who dealt drugs even, who got arrested, who went off the rails. Napoleon could have got him back on the rails.

  Zach never even owned his own car. Why would you choose to die before you knew the pleasure, the spectacular pleasure, of owning your own car?

  Apparently, that young bloke in front of him drove a Lamborghini.

  Zach had chosen to turn his back on this beautiful world of whipbirds and Lamborghinis, long-legged girls and hamburgers with the lot. He chose to take a gift from his mother and use it as a murder weapon.

  That was a bad choice, son. It was the wrong thing to do. It was a really bad choice.

  He heard a sound and realised it was him. Zoe turned to look at him. He tried to smile at her reassuringly. I’m fine, Zoe, just yelling at your brother. His eyes blurred.

  ‘Needle at the bottom of the sea,’ said Yao.

  My boy. My boy. My boy.

  He was not broken. He would never stop grieving for Zach, but he had made a decision in the week after the funeral. He must not break. It was his job to heal, to be there for his wife and his daughter, to get through this. So he studied the literature, he bought books online and read every word, he downloaded podcasts, he Googled the research. He attended the Tuesday night Survivors of Suicide group as faithfully as his mother once went to Sunday mass, and now he ran the group. (Heather and Zoe thought he talked too much, but that was only in social situations. On Tuesday nights he hardly spoke a word; he listened and he listened on his fold-out chair and did not flinch while a tsunami of pain crashed all around him.) He gave speeches to parent groups and schools and did radio interviews and edited an online newsletter and helped with fundraising.

  ‘It’s his new hobby.’ He’d overheard Heather say that on the phone one night to someone, he never found out to whom because he never mentioned it, but he never forgot it, or the bitter tone; it sounded close to hatred. It hurt because it was both a malicious lie and the shameful truth.

  He could find hatred in his heart for her, too, if he went looking for it. The secret of a happy marriage was not to go looking for it.

  He saw his wife’s thin arms curved up towards the sun to ‘master its life force’ and his heart filled with painful tenderness for her. She could not heal and she refused to even try. She never went to the support group except for that one time. She did not want to hear from other parents who had lost sons because she believed
Zach was superior to their stupid sons. Napoleon thought Zach was superior to their stupid sons too, but he still found solace in giving back to this community he had never asked to join.

  ‘The white crane spreads its wings.’

  Sometimes there are no signs.

  That’s what he told the newly grieving parents at the Tuesday night group. He told them there was research to suggest that teenage suicide was often the consequence of an impulsive decision. Many had suicidal thoughts for only eight hours before their attempts. Some idiotic kids put as little as five minutes’ thought into their catastrophic choice.

  He did not tell them other things he had learned from his research, such as that suicide survivors often reported that their first thought after they’d swallowed the pills, after they’d jumped, after they’d cut, was a version of: My God, what have I done?! He did not tell them that many survivors of suicide are transformed by their experience and go on to live happy lives, sometimes with little psychiatric intervention. He didn’t tell them that if the decision to take their lives was in some way thwarted, if the means was removed, their suicidal thoughts often disappeared with time and never returned. He didn’t tell them how Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by a third when coal gas was phased out, because once people no longer had the option to impulsively stick their head in the oven, there was time for their dark and dreadful impulses to pass. He didn’t think it was helpful for parents to know just how much bad luck was involved in the loss of their children; that perhaps all they’d needed was a well-timed interruption, a phone call, a distraction.

  But Napoleon knew it, because that was Zach. Impulsive. The absolute definition of impulsive. He never thought things through. He never thought of the consequences of his actions. He lived in the moment, as you were meant to do. He practised mindfulness. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Just now. I feel this now, so I will do this now.

  If you chase the waves along the beach your new runners will get wet and they will stay wet for the rest of the day. If you run about outside when the pollen count is high (even though we told you to stay indoors), you will have an asthma attack. If you give up your life, you won’t get it back, kid, it’s gone.

  ‘Zach, you’ve got to think!’ Napoleon used to yell at him.

  That’s why Napoleon knew without a doubt that if he’d got up at the time he’d originally planned, if he hadn’t pressed the snooze button on his alarm that morning, if he’d knocked on Zach’s door and said, ‘Come paddling with me,’ then right now he’d have a wife who wasn’t broken and a daughter who still sang in the shower and a son about to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.

  Napoleon was meant to be the one who knew and understood boys. He had a drawer full of cards and letters from the boys he’d taught over the years, and their parents, all telling him how very special he was, how much he’d contributed to their lives, that they would never forget him, that he’d pulled them back from some terrible brink, a wrong path, that they’d be eternally grateful to their wonderful teacher, Mr Marconi.

  Yet he’d somehow failed his own boy. The only boy in the world who mattered.

  For a year he’d searched for answers. He’d talked to every friend, every teammate, every teacher, every coach. None of them had answers. There was nothing more to know.

  ‘Fan through the back,’ said Yao.

  Napoleon fanned through the back and felt his muscles stretch and the sun warm on his face as he tasted the sea from the tears that ran heedlessly down his face.

  But he wasn’t broken.

  chapter twenty-seven

  Zoe

  Zoe saw the tears slide down her father’s face and wondered if he knew he was crying. Her dad cried a lot without seeming to realise he was doing it, like a scratch he didn’t know was bleeding, as if his body excreted grief without his knowledge.

  ‘Touch the sky,’ said Yao.

  Zoe followed the graceful arc of Yao’s arms and turned now in her mother’s direction, and saw the deep crevices in her mother’s face and heard once more the sound of her mother’s scream that awful morning. Like the scream of an animal caught in a trap. A scream that tore straight through Zoe’s life like a razor blade.

  Tomorrow it would be three years. Would it ever get any easier for her parents? Because it sure didn’t look like it was getting any easier. There was no use hoping that once they got through this next anniversary, things would get better, because she’d thought that the last two anniversaries. She knew that when they went back home it would all be just the same.

  It felt like her parents were sick with a terrible, incurable disease that ravaged their bodies. It felt like they’d been assaulted. As if someone had come after them with a baseball bat. She had not realised that grief was so physical. Before Zach died, she thought grief happened in your head. She didn’t know that your whole body ached with it, that it screwed up your digestive system, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, your skin. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.

  Sometimes it felt like Zoe was just waiting out her life now, enduring it, ticking off events and days and months and years, as if she just had to get herself through something unspecified and then things would be better, except she never got through it and it never got better and she would never forgive him. His death was the ultimate ‘fuck you’.

  ‘At least you weren’t close,’ said her friend Cara in her head.

  At least we weren’t close. At least we weren’t close. At least we weren’t close.

  chapter twenty-eight

  Heather

  Heather didn’t see Napoleon’s tears as they did tai chi.

  She was remembering something that had happened last week, after a long, exhausting night shift when she’d helped to deliver two baby boys.

  It was impossible not to think of Zach every time she held another newborn baby boy and stared into those sad wise eyes. All babies had that same wise look, as if they’d just come from another realm where they’d learned some beautiful truth they couldn’t share. Every day brought an endless stream of new life.

  Heather had gone to get her coffee from the hospital cafe after her shift and run into a familiar face from the past. There was no time to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen. She recognised her instantly. One of the soccer mums. Before Zach gave it up. Lisa Somebody. A friendly, bubbly lady. It had been years. Lisa Somebody’s face lit up when she saw Heather. Oh, I know you! And then, as so often happened, a moment later her face fell, as she remembered what she’d heard on the grapevine. You could virtually read her thoughts: Oh fuck, she’s that mother, but no time to look away!

  Some people crossed the street to get away from her. She’d seen them do it. Some people recoiled. They literally recoiled, as if what had happened to Heather’s family was vile and shameful. This woman was one of the brave ones. She didn’t duck or hide or pretend.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear about Zach,’ she said. She even said his name without lowering her voice.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Heather, longing for coffee. She looked at the boy standing next to her on crutches. ‘This must be . . . Justin?’ The name came to her on a flood of memories of shivering Saturday mornings on the soccer field, and suddenly, without warning, the anger exploded in her chest, and this kid, this living, stupid kid, was her target.

  ‘I remember you,’ she hissed at him. ‘You were the kid who never passed to Zach!’

  He stared at her with blank, slack-jawed horror.

  ‘You never passed to Zach! Why didn’t you pass?’ Heather turned to Lisa. ‘You should have made him pass!’ Her voice rose beyond the bounds of what was acceptable in a public place.

  Most people would have made their excuses and scurried away. Some people might have retaliated. Your dead son doesn’t give you the right to be rude. But this Lisa, this woman Heather barely knew, a woman who (Heather now remembered) had once taken
Zoe home to her place and fed her lunch after Zach had an asthma attack on the field, just looked at Heather steadily and sadly and said, ‘You’re right, Heather, I should have made him pass.’

  And then Justin, who had been nine years old when he played with Zach, had spoken up in his deep young man’s voice and said, ‘Zach was a great striker, Mrs Marconi. I should have passed to him more. I used to be really bad at passing the ball.’

  The generosity, the kindness, the maturity that young man showed that day. Heather had looked at his face – the freckles on his nose, the tiny black whiskers around his young boy’s mouth – and seen the grotesque face of her son on the last day of his life.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she’d said, weak and trembling with regret, and she’d left without making further eye contact with either of them, without picking up her coffee. Yet again she’d turned the anger that should have been directed only at herself on someone else.

  ‘Snake creeps through the grass,’ said Yao.

  She saw herself sitting alone in Zach’s room, her hand opening the drawer of his bedside cabinet. Heather was the snake that crept through the grass.

  chapter twenty-nine

  Frances

  It was nearly 3 pm as Frances made her way, with some eagerness, downstairs to the meditation studio for the breaking of the silence. She hadn’t eaten anything solid since the night before and she was very hungry. When the breakfast and midday bells had rung today, Frances had gone to the dining room to find a row of smoothies set out on the sideboard, labelled by name. Frances had found hers, and tried to drink it slowly and mindfully, but it was gone before she knew it, and her stomach had begun to rumble, loudly and embarrassingly.

  She was not really starving, but she was yearning; not so much for food, but for the ritual of food. Maybe if she’d been at home, running around doing errands, it would be easy to skip a few meals (not that she ever did, she’d always had difficulty comprehending the phrase ‘I forgot to eat lunch’), but here, especially during the silence, meals were crucial to break up the day.