by Sant, Sharon
I shoot upright and a voice from close by shouts a panicked warning.
‘Careful! You’ll pull out the drip!’
I whip my head around to see a nurse rush over. She puts a soothing hand on my chest and tries to gently push me back to the pillow. I notice that my arm is in plaster.
‘Lie down. You’re safe now.’
I fall back to the bed. I try to speak but nothing comes out. She looks at me, sympathy etched into every line of her face. Propping the headrest up, she holds a glass to my lips.
‘Not too much,’ she says as I slurp greedily. She takes the glass away again.
Karl enters the room, giving the nurse a friendly nod.
‘Dante…’ I whisper.
Karl and the nurse exchange a sad glance. Then he fixes his sorrowful gaze on me. I turn my face to the wall. I don’t want to be awake any more.
‘I killed him,’ I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else.
‘He’s in a bad way,’ Karl says. ‘We lost him for a short few moments, but the paramedics managed to bring him back.’
I face him again. ‘He’s ok?’
‘No,’ Karl says sombrely. ‘He’s far from ok. There are no guarantees at this stage.’ He takes a seat by my bed and nods for the nurse to leave us. ‘But I need to know exactly what happened. Right now, his parents are hell-bent on prosecution.’
‘Me?’
‘It would seem that you were the person who stabbed him, so, yes, that would mean you.’
I try to imagine how much his mother must hate me right now. Not as much as I hate me right now.
‘It was an accident.’
‘Accident or not, they’re about to lose their only child. They want answers.’
‘You said he might be ok…’
‘It’s a very small might, Cassie.’ He takes a seat by my bed. ‘There’s no point in lying to you. It’s about as touch-and-go as it gets.’ His voice is kinder now. ‘He was your boyfriend?’
I nod.
‘His parents said they didn’t know about you.’
This news doesn’t surprise me. I don’t suppose I’m the sort of girl a good Irish boy takes home to his mother. ‘We haven’t been seeing each other long.’
‘What were you doing there with him?’
Something else suddenly crashes into my memory. I bolt up.
‘The guy! The murderer, he’s –’
‘We know,’ Karl puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Lie down and calm down. He’s in custody.’
‘How did you find him?’
‘He was injured. I presume you had something to do with that?’
I nod. ‘He tried to kill me.’
His tone is grave and he fixes me with a bushy-browed stare. ‘That’s something else you’re going to have to defend in court.’
‘What!’
‘Two people were injured by you with a knife. There will be repercussions, Cassie. I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen; you can’t just go vigilante without repercussions.’
I sink back into my pillow and close my eyes. I want to close the world out right now.
His voice opens them again. ‘I’m angry at myself more than anything for getting you involved in this.’
I wonder how he’s going to explain all this to his superiors. Will he lose his job? I make a promise to myself that I won’t wreck another life. I’ll think of some convincing story for my involvement and pray to God that Mark doesn’t give us away. At least we caught the killer, though. That has to count for something? But then I’m gripped by uncertainty. What if all this has been for nothing?
‘He’s the right man?’ I ask.
‘I think so.’
I want to heave a sigh of relief and believe that it’s over. If this was a Hollywood blockbuster, it would be – the bad guy would be defeated and Dante and I would emerge from the smoking wreckage and ride off into the sunset. This isn’t Hollywood, though, and things are far from over.
‘Can I see Dante?’
‘He’s in intensive care with his parents in constant attendance. Somehow I don’t think you’d be welcome there right now.’
We’re silent for a moment. Karl doesn’t flinch under my questioning gaze.
‘What happens now?’ I finally ask.
‘I can’t say yet. There are a lot of factors to play out before we know what’s going to happen.’
‘You mean you need to see if Dan will die?’
‘Our suspect is quite badly injured too.’
My lip curls into a sneer. ‘Does anyone care about that?’
‘The law does, Cassie. We don’t have the death penalty in this country and it’s not for our citizens to inflict their own. Besides which, he is innocent until proven otherwise in the eyes of the law.’
‘He might die?’
Karl sighs. ‘I don’t think that’s likely. But he did lose a lot of blood.’
‘He’s not here, in this hospital, is he?’ I fight to keep the panic from my voice.
‘No.’ He stares at me pensively, as though trying to figure out a complicated equation. ‘What on earth were you thinking of? You could have been killed.’
‘Maybe. Better me than Dan.’ I think back to Dante’s last words. I had been his nightmare all along. He knew I was destined to kill him, but still he came for me. When he asked about our paths, it was because he thought he might be able to change his. And stupid, stupid me, I let him think that he could. I even thought I was protecting him when all along I was leading him to his end. I realise that this means his fate has already been decided and no amount of intensive care is going to save him. The thought leaves me hollow. I want to curl up, fold in on myself and vanish.
‘I don’t know how Dante knew where to find me, but he had nothing to with any of it. I had missed calls from him,’ I say slowly, trying to reconstruct events in my head. ‘I suppose he must have followed me or something when he realised I was missing from the house. We’d been drinking quite a lot and I left him asleep…’ I swallow the lump rising in my throat. ‘I wish I could tell you right now, but I’m as confused about that as you are.’ I don’t want to believe that there are bigger forces at work, that somehow Dante was there because he was meant to be and that this was destined to happen. For a start, it sounds crazy. But is it any more crazy than a teenage girl coming back from the dead to catch a killer?
‘Rest for a while,’ Karl says gently. ‘You can tell me what you know later.’ He reaches for a little plastic control that seems to be hooked up to the drip in my arm. ‘Know what this is?’ he asks with a slight smile.
I shake my head.
‘A morphine pump. You only get them for the first day or so. They’re very good for helping to forget for a while. Make the most of it.’ He presses the oblong of plastic into my palm before standing to leave. ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’
He grabs his jacket from the chair and makes for the door. Before he’s even out I’ve pressed the button and wait for the hit.
I put my head around the door of Dante’s room, slightly surprised that I’ve been allowed to get this far. I can only assume that the nurse on duty doesn’t know about me. Two days have passed and I’ve been told I can go home. He hasn’t woken yet. A woman sits by his bed, gazing out of the window. She turns at the sound of me pushing open the door. She’s in her forties, slim and well groomed, was once pretty – I can see that, despite the tell-tale puffiness of hours spent crying. Her eyes are dark and soulful like his, but at the sight of me they become fierce with black anger. She doesn’t look like a woman who dances to terrible music and weeps for cut flowers.
‘You’re her,’ she says. It’s a statement, not a question.
I nod.
‘What do you want? Haven’t you done enough damage?’
‘I wanted to say I was sorry.’
‘To him? He can’t hear you. He may never hear you. If he ever wakes I’ll make certain he never sees you again.’
‘I wanted to say sorry to y
ou,’ I say. ‘I know he can’t hear me.’
‘Sick little bitch,’ she spits. ‘Get out.’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt him,’ I say. ‘He wasn’t supposed to be there.’
‘Damn right he wasn’t. If I’d known what was going on I’d have stopped it.’
‘What was going on?’ I repeat. ‘What does that mean?’
‘If I’d known he was seeing a freak like you.’
‘What makes me a freak?’ I try to fight it, but anger starts to build like a fire. ‘Because I went to counselling like he did?’
‘Because…’ Her sentence trails off. ‘Just get out. Don’t come near my son again.’
She turns back to face him. I glance at the bed properly for the first time and my fury drains to nothing. He’s white, like there’s no blood left in him, dark circles around his eyes. His hair is swept back from his forehead, showing his already pronounced cheekbones in sharper relief. He looks thinner, tinier, more vulnerable. Hooked up to so much machinery, I’m reminded of just how close to death he is. How he already died once. I saw him. I was him. We’re the same now. He has to live. For me.
‘Are you still here?’ she asks without looking at me.
‘Yes,’ I say in a quiet but steady voice. ‘And I’m going to keep coming back until he wakes.’
‘Come near him again,’ she growls, ‘and I’ll kill you myself.’
I know she won’t. Because now I understand. We’re the same, me and Dante, we’re meant to be together. I’m about to say so when I’m grabbed roughly by my good arm. I spin around in the doorway, panic stealing the breath from me, a million flashbacks turning my skin to ice. A man I’ve never seen before pulls me around to face him.
‘You heard her. Get away and stay away.’
I stare up at him. He’s fairer than Dante and his wife, but the cheekbones tell me that it must be Dante’s dad. I catch a glimpse of his fist curling at his side and for a moment I think he’s going to hit me. But he lets it relax again, though his anger still burns a hole through me.
I nod and he relinquishes his grip. I take one last look at Dante and leave.
Three weeks have passed. I’ve spent so many hours at the police station that I can barely remember what my home looks like. I answer the same questions, over and over. I give the same answers. The DNA matches, Karl tells me, so we have the right man. Karl doesn’t expect there to be much sympathy for the injuries I’ve inflicted on him. What I’ve done to Dante, though, that won’t be so easy to fix.
I go to the hospital every day. He’s been moved into another room now, which means he’s getting better. I’m not allowed to see him but some of the nurses take pity on me and tell me how he is. There’s relief that he’ll most likely recover. But there’s a hollowness too, a deep cavern growing daily that only he can fill. He may never forgive me but I just want to tell him once that I’m sorry. I still get flashbacks every day, but most of them are his brief death now, that image of me screaming for him to live.
One morning, flowers arrived from the newspaper. It was a bribe, of sorts, dressed up as sympathy. I guess they don’t want me to get Robert in trouble for the information he must have been passing on to his colleague about the police investigations and about me too. He wouldn’t have meant any harm but he caused plenty. That’s when the obsession with me started, after Robert’s story and what he had told people in his office about me. That’s what Karl tells me anyway.
‘How are you?’ Helen smiles. ‘You look better.’
I try to smile back as I take a seat and fold my coat across my lap. ‘One day at a time, just like Gran used to say. I’m getting there.’
‘And the flashbacks?’
‘Not so much now. Not the murdered girls anyway. When I get them, they’re about Dante, mostly.’
Her smile becomes tense. I’m guessing she’s fond of him. I’m guessing that she feels partly responsible for his fate. She can’t let me know that, though.
‘That’s good,’ she says, bending to her notes quickly. ‘That’s real progress.’
‘I hope so,’ I say, and this time I mean it.
‘Have you thought any more about moving house?’ she asks.
‘I looked at some nice flats the other day: South of the city, private gardens, security on the door, good neighbourhood.’
‘You’re taking one?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
‘It sounds like you have.’
I sigh, groping for the words to express myself. ‘My house has too many ghosts in it. I’m different now, I feel like I’ve closed a necessary chapter in my life and I’m ready to move on. But it feels like a betrayal, leaving my family home and that’s the only thing keeping me there now. And I might be running away from what I’ve done.’
‘Done?’
I look her square in the eye. ‘To Dante.’
‘It was an accident,’ she says. Something in her eyes betrays that she doesn’t quite know whether to believe that or not. After all, I’m unstable, right? She shifts in her seat slightly. Maybe she doesn’t feel entirely safe with me; maybe she thinks I’ll turn on her. ‘He’s on the mend now too.’
‘His parents blame me and they’re right to. I was stupid and arrogant and selfish. They nearly lost their son and even though he survived he’ll never be completely well again. I’ll always carry that guilt.’
‘In time, they may forgive you.’
‘I won’t forgive me.’
‘That’s what I’m here to help with,’ she says.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘Do you think moving house can help you move on, make a fresh start?’
‘I don’t know.’ I tug a hand through my wind-tangled hair and look to the window where a fat, grey canopy of cloud billows across the sky. ‘But the house is becoming too difficult to manage. That’s without all the whispers from the neighbours.’
‘I can understand that.’ She pauses. ‘What about other plans? Have you thought about resuming your studies?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I don’t know. I just can’t think about it now. How can I think about that when I’ve ruined someone else’s chances of it?’
‘There’s no reason why Dante can’t resume his own studies once he’s up and about.’ She measures me with a thoughtful gaze. ‘Do you miss him?’
‘Yes,’ I say, more honestly than I wanted to. ‘I think about him every minute of every day.’
‘Did you get the kitten you talked about?’ she asks with a smile.
All at once I feel that little chink of light in my soul start to widen. I looked everywhere for Marmalade, but I never saw her again. Karl pointed out to me that if the killer had taken my cat he would have left the body for me to find, like he did the other things. I’m pretty sure he’s right about that. Which leads me to conclude that Marmalade ran away again. There was blood on the windowsill and scratches on the killer’s hands. Maybe he tried to get her but clever, tough, resourceful Marmalade managed to escape his clutches and do him an injury to boot. A strike back for all the people he has destroyed, even if it is only a small one. I like to think that’s what happened. I hope she’s happier and safer, wherever she is now. But the house felt big and lonely without her.
‘I did,’ I say. ‘There was a grey tabby in the paper. Someone found him in a bag on waste ground. He was lost, just like me; it seemed like a good thing to do to give him a home. I called him Benedict.’
She laughs lightly. ‘That’s a very grand name for a little grey tabby found on waste ground.’
‘I know. I hope that his grand name means he’ll do grand things in the cat world.’
She laughs again and scribbles in her notebook.
‘He’s adorable,’ I say. ‘I think he’s going to help me a lot, and I hope to help him too.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ she says.
Outside the clinic building the wind rises, dragging up dust and litter from the s
treets and swirling it around my feet as I begin to walk. I pull my scarf up high around my neck and plunge my hands into my coat pockets. The traffic is busier than when I went in but night is further away now that spring is coming and everything seems almost normal.
My phone bleeps in my jeans and I fish it out to read the message. I freeze as I see that it’s not from Karl or Gail, as it usually is now, but Dante. I stare at the display for a whole minute before opening the text.
How r u?
My legs feel like someone snatched the bones from them. I stand in the middle of the pavement with the wind whipping my face, looking at the words of the text like they’re some ancient script, until they begin to make no sense at all and each word is just a meaningless sequence of curves and lines. How r u?
He’s asking me how I am. A range of feelings that I can’t even begin to comprehend course through me. I want to laugh and cry, to shout and curl up in a humiliated ball of guilt, all at the same time. After all that’s happened, after all that I did to him, he’s asking how I am. How do I reply to a question like that?
I reach the hospital panting and dripping with sweat. I take the stairs to Dante’s ward at a run, but when I buzz for entry, I show my face to the security camera and the answer is the same as always.
‘I’m sorry, but we’ve been asked not to admit you.’
‘I have to see him, he wants me.’
There’s no reply. I buzz again.
‘We can’t let you in.’
‘Please…’
‘You have to leave.’
‘I can’t leave! I have to see him, I have to explain!’
There is silence again. I push my finger on the buzzer and hold it in.
No reply this time. I buzz again and again. There is nothing but the echoes of voices from a distant corridor and the clanging of trolleys.
I pull my phone from my pocket and stare at Dante’s message. I want to reply but I don’t know how, at least, not by text. My eyes burn with tears of sheer frustration as I stand helplessly staring around the corridor wondering what to do next. Ten minutes is all I want. Ten minutes to tell him I’m sorry.
Karl sets another drink down on the desk in front of me.