The Spite Game

by Anna Snoekstra

  “What do you say we blow this joint?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to go tell Saanvi I’m leaving. She’s going to think I’m an absolute dickhead, and she’ll be right. Although, she’ll really be glad. I think I’ve started to annoy her.”

  “You, annoying?”

  “Yeah, crazy, right? I’ll be back in one minute.” He reached forward and kissed me lightly, but even that made my insides fizz with nerves. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He dropped my hand and walked back up toward the light.

  * * *

  I’m not going to say in that moment I felt better. That I felt fixed, whole again. I didn’t. I was hollowed out, exposed. I was wearing my guts on the outside and it was terrifying. But, standing there in the gray light, in the vines stretching out all around me, there was something different niggling at me. It might have been hope.

  It’s hard for me to think about that moment, considering where I am now. What I’ve done since.

  Part 8

  CUNNING

  2018

  45

  The door opens. I flinch, though it hasn’t been loud or sudden. I’ve gotten used to this space. I’ve gotten comfortable.

  A young man in a blue-and-white police uniform looks in on me. He smiles, and obediently I smile back.

  “Sorry to have left you in here for so long,” he says.

  Is this you? The person to whom I am to give my confession? This man is not what I expected, not what I pictured at all.

  “The detective got held up,” he’s saying now. So it isn’t him. I still have time. The relief is exquisite. “It should only be another ten minutes or so.”

  “Great.”

  “Do you want anything, a water or cup of tea? Sorry, someone really should have asked you before?”

  I shake my head on reflex, although my mouth is parched and my throat dry. I want to tell him that I have been asked before, but I can’t bring myself to speak. He nods and closes the door, returning me to the solitude I’ve gotten used to.

  Ten minutes. It’s not long. I need to focus. My mind has been doing loops and cartwheels this whole time, jumping from topic to topic, time to time. I need to get my thoughts in order if I’m ever going to explain all this to someone else.

  Mel. That’s what you’ll really want to ask me about. You might let me talk about the other stuff, sure. You might even write down some of the worst of it, pass it on, check if it’s all valid. It is. I promise. But really, I’m sitting here in this small concrete room for one reason. Mel. It always comes back to Mel. Well, it always did for me anyway.

  It started up again with an envelope. A cheap, white envelope with my name and address printed neatly on the front in blue ballpoint, nothing on the back.

  I didn’t open it for a few days; I’d been getting a lot more mail recently and it piled up quickly. Things had been very different since the wedding. I’d tried, really tried this time, to stop. I deleted all my social media accounts; I couldn’t trust myself with them. Still, my fingers had itched to look, just look. I’d caught myself thinking of excuses to go to the suburb Cass lived in, or to walk past the bar on Brunswick Street, but I’d stopped myself. It was an obsession, an addiction, and I knew how easy it would be to slip.

  I still sometimes dreamed of escape, thought about Paris or Léa, or being free, but I tried my best to swallow that away as well. To just be normal. To be what everyone expected of me. Everything we’d spoken about that night at Cass’s wedding quickly became something that Evan and I didn’t talk about. Maybe that was part of the problem.

  Perhaps if I’d told him everything, whispered my truths within the comfort of bed and darkness and warm arms around me, then I wouldn’t be here right now. But I can’t blame anyone but myself. Apart from that—the unspoken “it” that existed between us—things with Evan were good. Unimaginably good.

  So, like a rubber band around my wrist, every time I thought of them, I forced myself to focus on work. On building instead of destroying. When I woke up sweating, thinking of Cass’s broken expression as she stared at me from across her wedding party, I called a property lawyer. When I thought of Saanvi, sitting alone as the power came on and off in her apartment, I booked in a meeting at the liquidation firm. You see, Aiden had been right. Lakeside Estate was a steal. The liquidators were gagging to get rid of it. Buying it was easy. It had taken longer, and cost more than I’d ever anticipated to fix the place. But bit by bit, I did. Those short courses I’d done in business and finance started to feel relevant. I employed builders, carpenters and electricians. The community center got a roof. One at a time, the houses were finished and people started moving in.

  Things were getting better. I felt like I was going to be okay. That all of it was finally behind me.

  46

  It was less than a month ago, but it feels like longer. Evan pulled me closer, squeezed me into his bare skin and sleepy sweaty smell. The rain pattered against the window outside, the gray morning light trickled in.

  “I wish we could just stay here, watch movies all day,” he whispered. “People shouldn’t have to go to work when it’s raining.”

  “Yeah, or just stay in bed all day.” I kissed his jawbone.

  “I like that idea.”

  “Nope.” I pushed myself up and shook my hair in his face. “I’ve got loads to do. And you’re going to be late.”

  “You’re hot when you’re commanding.”

  I got out of bed, the cold air prickling my skin, and headed for the shower. As I stood under the stream of hot water, as it poured down my neck and warmed my skin, I imagine now that I thought of how serene I felt. How everything, finally, was in place. But I’m sure I didn’t. I’m sure I was just running through lists in my head of what I had to get done that day, thinking how the rain would hold back construction and the best method to accommodate that.

  After Evan left for work, I made myself a strong black coffee. I pulled on a thick woolen sweater and turned the heater on and sat at my kitchen table, which had become my desk. It was littered with bills and agreements and contracts. There was a pile of mail waiting to be answered, and a pile of mail that hadn’t been opened. I’d sipped my coffee and stared at the Bureau of Meteorology website on my laptop, hoping, somehow that the rain it forecast would disappear as I stared. But the blue shapes kept sliding across the map. It was autumn after all, but I’d hoped we had another few weeks before the rain started. I was waiting on a truckload of asphalt to arrive for the limning of the lake. The original diggers hadn’t gone deep enough, so instead of hitting clay they’d just left it with mud. Hiring a new crew of diggers was too expensive, so unless I wanted a swamp instead of a lake I had to line the basin with asphalt. If the asphalt was down now, the early rain would be filling the lake and saving me on a water pump. Instead it was just creating more mud. Sitting there, I imagined it. That, and the sodden orange leaves that were streaming into gutters and clogging down pipes.

  I closed my laptop lid and looked over the papers for a distraction. I’d pulled the unopened letters toward me, thinking it would be the easiest job. I’d flicked through them, stacking the bills to go to my accountant, throwing the junk mail into a pile for recycling. Finally I reached a letter with handwriting on the front. My name and address printed neatly in blue ink. A stamp with a picture of a butterfly on it. I flipped it over; there was no return address. Tearing the envelope open I pulled out the last thing I expected: a black-and-white playbill.

  Delusions of the Damned, it was called. The heading in bold font above an image of figures blurred in movement. I turned the page, and there she was. Mel. The black-and-white headshot, the same one they are using on the missing posters now, would you believe.

  I sat at my table, beginning to sweat under my woolen sweater as the heater whirred hotter and hotter. Mel had sent it to me. I knew
that. It was an invitation. An attempt to lure me back in, to make me keep playing.

  The production was on all week at a small warehouse theater just outside the city. I’d never been there, but I knew the place; it was squashed between a student pub and a car park. Immediately, without any conscious decision, I started planning. I could tell Evan it was a work meeting that had run late, that I’d gotten stuck in rush hour traffic, decided to have dinner alone somewhere, bumped into an old friend. I could sit right at the back where she wouldn’t notice me, I could see where she went afterward, where she was living now, if she was dating anyone. I hadn’t even known she was back in town; she could have been back for weeks or months or even longer. I had no idea. All thoughts of asphalts and clogged drainpipes became irrelevant. I opened my laptop and typed in the address for Facebook and my stomach clenched and my fingers trembled. Then my phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me.” It was Beatrice. “Are you home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, do you mind looking after Layla for a few hours? I know you’re crazy busy but I’ve got this insane headache and—”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah, it’s no problem.”

  Within a few minutes, I opened my door for them. Bea looked tired and stressed. Layla was in her arms in her thick red coat. She was grabbing Bea’s sweater tightly. The cold air was nice on my face; it smelled of damp leaves and wet grass.

  “Thanks heaps.” Bea pulled the wool out of Layla’s hands and passed her over to me. “This one has a been a little terror this morning, haven’t you, Layla?”

  “Yes,” Layla said sheepishly.

  “I think I can handle her.” I rearranged her weight on my hip; she was almost getting too heavy to carry this way. “You alright?”

  Bea rubbed her face. “I’m fine. I just need a long sleep I think.”

  “Take as long as you need.”

  Bea left and I arranged Layla on the rug and pillows that I kept for her visits. I rubbed her head. She had hair now, about four inches of it, and it was so fine and soft that I could never be close to her without touching it.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head and smiled sweetly at me. “Kitty?”

  “Alright, but remember to be careful this time, okay?”

  She nodded solemnly. Layla loved the brass cat that used to belong to Celia, the one that Mel had stolen. It was one of the few things of Celia’s that Nancy had left behind, so I’d kept it, even though it made me think of Mel as well. The last time I had let Layla play with it, she’d swung it at the wall and left a dent. I took it from up off the shelf and put it on the floor in front of her.

  “Thank you, Auntie Ava,” she managed, then in a whisper to the statue, “Hello.”

  Auntie Ava. It made me think of Evan. I thought of that morning, and it was like I could still feel the warmth of his body pressed into mine, as I sat back at my computer. The familiar blue and white colors filled the screen and in black letters: Would you like to reactivate your account? It all seemed unnecessary and juvenile all of a sudden, when I had so much to lose. Not just that, but maybe I didn’t need to know. Maybe I didn’t even care. Somehow, Evan’s belief that I could be my best self made me want to prove him right. I wanted to live up to his expectation. Be that real, solid, good person he saw in me. So I closed the window, ripped the playbill in half and put it with the rest of the recycling. That was it—I’d taken control, made the choice. I was done. It was over.

  Of course, I was forgetting that Mel knew me too. Mel knew the other me, my shadow self, and that was just as real. I don’t know, I still haven’t decided, but maybe the bonds of trauma and darkness are stronger than those of love.

  * * *

  A week later she called me.

  “Hey, bitch,” she said, “how are you going? It’s been forever!”

  “Mel?” I don’t know why I asked. I knew straightaway it was her. Her voice was an echo from a nightmare. One that had woken you up screaming, but you thought you’d forgotten.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t come to my play,” she went on. “It wasn’t the same without you.”

  “What do you want?” I tried my best to sound exasperated, whereas really I desperately wanted to know the answer.

  “Listen—” her tone changed, she sounded sincere, but maybe she’d just got better at acting “—I feel like you and I have unfinished business. We were such good friends, remember? I think you owe me a chance to explain.”

  47

  The door opens once more. I’m ready for it this time, I don’t startle. The moment feels stretched out, the sound of the door gliding ajar until it bangs softly onto the wall. I don’t look up. I can feel you there, standing in the doorway, a shape blocking the light. I know you are looking straight at me, expecting my head to rise, for me to say hello, meet your eyes. But I can’t. My muscles are quivering, my hands shaking. It’s happening. Right now. Everything, my whole life, all that I’ve done and that has been done to me, has led me to this moment.

  The light changes as the shadow shifts, the door swings back across and clicks shut. Then I hear something I was never expecting. The clack of women’s shoes as you walk toward the table. So, you are a woman. I wouldn’t have thought it, but now it makes sense. It’s perfect.

  “Sorry it’s taken me so long,” you say. “I thought you’d have just left to be honest, but thanks for sticking around.”

  Your voice is calm and even. It’s firm, but not unkind. Self-assured. You’d have to be in order to be a detective, I guess. You’d have to be more than ready to deal with any bullshit thrown at you. I want to look up at you. I’m desperate to see your face. But I can’t. The quivering has taken over now. Even my kneecaps seem to shuddering. I thought I’d be confident; I thought this would feel good somehow, to get it all off my chest. It doesn’t feel good. I’m terrified.

  Your shoes come into my field of vision. They are black leather, practical, but still with a square of heel. The chair across from me slides out, the metal squealing against the cement floor. You sit down on it, and pull it back in under the table. I look across the desk. You have a notepad in your hand, which you open to an empty page. You unclick the lid of your pen and push it onto the end. Your fingernails are short and pink, unpainted. They are clipped sensibly short but not bitten.

  “So, the desk sergeant said you had some information for me. About the Melissa Moore case.”

  I understand then. Your dismissive tone, why I’ve been waiting so long. The relief pours through me, relieving the quivers, making me want to laugh. Giggle inappropriately like that stupid teenage girl I once was. It’s so obvious now. You don’t realize I’m here to confess. You think I’m another one of those bored losers who want a piece of the glamour. You think I don’t have anything important to say, that I’m just wasting your time.

  “So, what did you want to tell me?”

  Your tone is becoming irritated. You want me to look at you, that’s clear. You are flicking the pen against the pad. I’ve been staring at your hands too long; you think I’m acting strangely. But I can’t look up. If I see your face, meet your eye, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. The urge to laugh is dead now. Knowing that you don’t know what I am makes it feel even harder, somehow. I don’t know where to start. After all this thinking, it’s all gotten muddled up. I’m starting to sweat. I take my jacket off, biding time. The air feels cold against my wet underarms.

  There’s a squeak. You’ve leaned back in your chair; you’re getting impatient. I have to do it. Now. Now is that time to seal my fate.

  “It all started so long ago.” My voice sounds hoarse. I swallow, wet my tongue, start again. “Mel and I were friends when we were... Well, no. Not friends exactly.”

  I stop. This is all coming out wrong
. I had planned this whole thing, I can do it. I have to. I take a breath. Remember what I’d planned. I have to start at the beginning.

  “It started in high school. It started in the change room—”

  “Ava?”

  There’s familiarity in your voice. I wasn’t expecting that. The surprise makes me look up. Finally, I see you. Your face is unknown to me, the short haircut, the lines on the forehead. But your eyes, I know your eyes. They are exactly as they were.

  “Miranda?”

  “Yeah. God, I should have recognized your name, made the connection. How are you?”

  I don’t answer, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She continues, “What a blast from the past this whole case is turning out to be.”

  I try to laugh. It sounds strangled.

  “I didn’t know you were a cop now,” I say, but then that’s not quite true. I vaguely remember Cass mentioning it when we drank cocktails at that bar.

  “Yeah, well I don’t blame you.” She smiles at me. “I was hardly the athletic type. God, it seems like a different lifetime, doesn’t it? There can’t be anything worse than being a fat girl in high school, fuck. I joined the army when I finished—they sorted me out fast.”

  “It’s amazing how people change.” The cliché slips from my mouth. This isn’t the conversation we are meant to be having. It isn’t the time for chitchat, for catch-up sessions and nostalgia. I’m trying to confess to a crime.

  “Some people do, sure. Don’t think Mel Moore did though, looking at her life now. Borrowed money from everyone she could you know—after all this time she was still a user. Still expected to get everything for nothing. Although I guess I shouldn’t be repeating that.”

  She looks me up and down. “You look good you know, Ava. I’m glad we both managed to get out of that hellhole alive.”

  I shrug stiffly. “So you’re the head of the investigation?”

  “Nah. I’m just part of the team.” She smiles warmly, like we are on the same side. “You know, I’ve imagined telling my teenage self about this, that I’m in the investigation to find the girl that made my life hell. It’s the ultimate poetic justice, don’t you think? God, I remember the crap she used to do to you as well. All that ‘psycho’ stuff—it was horrible.”