‘We had a baby but he died.’ A statement. Flat like the valley. Unemotional. There’s a twist in my voice but it’s too distant for anyone to perceive. It comes from across the valley, beyond the horizon.
The woman does not react.
I add: ‘Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.’ The twist moves closer. It could be a tornado.
‘Your baby’s death played a significant part in your decision to leave?’
‘Yes. I left soon afterwards. It was exactly three years ago. That’s why I stayed home all weekend. That’s why I didn’t answer the phone.’
She nods and closes her notebook.
‘That’s all I have for you right now. Thanks for your help.’ She tries it both ways but the notebook won’t fit back into her briefcase. It has grown fat on my grief.
‘I was expecting my colleague, Detective Michael Rougemont, to join us this morning,’ Kirsty says, ‘but I guess he’s been detained elsewhere. He’ll want to talk to you soon.’
I rise but she is still reorganizing the contents of her bag. After a moment, I realize the movements she makes aren’t necessary. She takes out a small notebook and puts it back twice. She’s stalling while she thinks about something else, something else she wants to say, wondering what words, what tone to use. She’s so distracted that I can watch her openly. The dark-clothed detective has her own quiet beauty. I see that now for the first time and for the first time I notice the thin, criss-cross lines around her eyes. Shadows beneath them. She gets home and she’s tired. When she’s asleep her children call for her in the night. She goes to them like a sleepwalker. Then she lies awake thinking. She thinks about her homicide cases. She thinks about people who kill other people.
She stands up suddenly and her eyes are exactly level with mine. We’re the same height. We’re probably about the same age, too. She says carefully: ‘The death of a parent can bring the past right up close. Have you already felt that?’
I nod, acknowledging the past’s new clarity.
‘Maybe when you went to New York you thought you could leave everything here behind,’ she adds. ‘But now you’re back you could just decide that it’s time for you to stop running. I have a feeling that you’re going to turn around and look at whatever it is that’s been chasing you. You’re going to look it right in the eyes.’
The woman waits for me to say something.
I ask: ‘Where is Daddy’s body now?’
It’s not what she was expecting to hear. She pauses a moment before she replies. ‘In a police mortuary.’
‘I’d like to see him.’
‘That’s really not necessary. Your brother-in-law has already identified the body for us.’
‘I’d still like to see him.’
She looks kind. ‘I don’t advise that.’
‘I must.’
She flicks back her ghost hair and smiles sadly. ‘I’m supposed to encourage idents so I won’t argue with you.’
In Daddy’s den she makes a call and after a brief discussion we agree that I will go this afternoon to the police mortuary at Bellamy, a coastal town to the north of the city which must be the nearest mortuary to Big Brim and Retribution.
I watch her car bounce down the rocky drive and then I do not return indoors. I walk right around the house until my body is aslant on the steep hillside. One leg long and the other bent, I edge along the base of the deck. The tree trunks are big enough to hold on to now, big enough for a treehouse. I remember how much I wanted a treehouse when I was a kid, my disappointment when Daddy examined all the trees and said we didn’t have one strong enough. I guess his house will be sold now and whoever buys it can build a treehouse if they want to. I am arrested by jealousy for the family which lives here next. I cling to a tree, the valley glimmering through the foliage behind me. I close my eyes and try to imagine the faceless people who will replace us. But the house, the barn and the yard are already fully inhabited by my own family’s past.
I skirt the sunken garden, overgrown now, and at the Holler orchard I cut back up through the trees towards the barn. Thorny branches catch at my clothes, bushes emit herbal aromas. I’m watching the ground. Not so far from the Holler orchard, I find a rock. Its shape is familiar. I pick it up. It is not a rock but a shoe heel. I examine the heel and then pocket it but before I can move on up the hill I hear a sound. Crack. It lasts only a moment but within that moment I am seized by a new knowledge. I am not alone. Crack. The snap of a dry, fallen branch underfoot. I recognize it like my sister’s voice, like the slam of the screen door, the squeak of the swing.
I reel rapidly around. The branches, the leaves, the grass seem to stare back at me, as though surprised into motionlessness. I swing to the right and left, quickly, anxiously, and then more systematically turn through a hundred and eighty degrees, staring through the trees, up into trees, around the trunks of trees. A few are thick enough to hide a human figure. I stand so still that I don’t breathe. The hillside seems to hold its breath too. There is no sound and nothing moves but way back, through the Holler orchard, a shadow flickers which could be a man moving fast or it could be a tree shuddering in the far breeze.
Reluctantly I go back up to the house. I turn around twice more before I get there but see nothing. When the screen door has slammed behind me, I find my purse and tuck the shoe heel into one of its small compartments. I snap it shut. The snap echoes into the silence like the twig which snapped out in the yard, snapped beneath someone, face unknown, intent unknown.
Out on the deck the silence persists. I lean on the railings and keep a constant vigil across the yard. I’m looking for movement but, apart from the occasional, startling bird, there is none. Gradually the valley claims my attention. My eye meanders over the usual landmarks. The place the car turned over. The intersection. The farm where I arrived with Lindy after so long and hot a walk that it seemed like the orchard was inside our mouths. The dirt roads along which they drove us home, bouncing in the back of the farm pick-up, Lindy’s blonde hair flattened by the heat, the pair of us grinning as the pick-up weaved and we were thrown to right and left. Lindy Zacarro. When I think of her I feel a small circle of pain inside my belly. Lindy Zacarro, the girl who sat on the porch swing giggling with me. My best friend, for a while.
I feel the small hairs on my arm and my neck stand up. At first I don’t know why. Then I see that, far below me, cutting slowly across the valley floor, glinting like a silver fish, fin uppermost, is a tow truck. From here it is no bigger than a toy and its progress is silent. When it reaches the intersection it turns north. I watch until it has disappeared in the mist, which is never mist when you’re down there but just the edge of your vision.
9
As I drive away from the house, heading for the coast and my family, I recall, involuntarily, Lindy Zacarro’s face. I haven’t thought about her for years and then yesterday I remembered her presence on the creaking swing and today fragments of her keep surfacing in my memory, as though there’s some mad filing clerk who’s determined to put everything we have on Lindy Zacarro right on the desk in front of me. I recall her face. Round, very pretty, blonde, and a lot of pink. Pink tongue, pink lips, invariably pink clothes. The prettiest, pinkest girl in the class.
When the farmer, the back of his neck brown and creased like thick leather, brought Lindy and me home, Lindy gave him directions to the Zacarro house. She didn’t even have to look at me to know this was the right answer. Once Mother came out of the clinic, we didn’t play at my house any more. I had hoped when Mother was finally discharged that she might be the way she used to be, before she went crazy in the canyon. But after Daddy took us to visit her in hospital a few times, I knew this was impossible. Mother sat in her small room and regarded the three of us in distasteful silence, as though we were hitchhikers who had ambushed her car and were demanding a ride. I waited for her to recognize me and put her arms around me. I wanted her perfume and that smell of sugary cookies to envelope me. I thought if I could touch her maybe this
strange new shell would shatter and Mother would break out from inside it and start to make cookies and tell stories. But when I advanced across the room towards her, she looked shocked and Jane immediately pulled me back. As we filed silently out, Mother began to cry. Daddy gestured for us to wait in the hallway but I lingered a few minutes, watching him crouch as close to her as she would allow, talking softly, reassuring her. I hoped his words would coax Mother out from inside this stranger.
When at last she came home I could see that she was trying to resume her old self, her old life. She tried hard but now this was a mask. When she laughed it was too loud and when she told stories they were strange, jumbled narratives which collapsed before she had reached any satisfying conclusion. When she attempted physical affection she either clutched me to her, suffocating me, or her touch was so light it felt like insects and sent me scuttling irritably across the room. She found small practicalities, like cooking, almost impossible. Cookies emerged hot from the stove, smelling right but with the consistency of rocks. We pretended to eat them while we hid them in our pockets. We pretended, to Mother and to each other, that she was normal.
‘Luce, maybe it’s not a good idea for friends to come home with you right now…’ Jane warned me sagely. Her hair ran down her back in one neat braid and I admired her for doing this braid all by herself. If I wanted to braid my hair I’d try for ten minutes and finally ask Jane to do it.
‘But Mother’s better,’ I insisted. I was playing real hard at normal.
‘Sure. We know she is… but other people may not see it,’ she warned me, her voice kind like Daddy’s.
‘Sure they will,’ I insisted. What she meant was, other people couldn’t be trusted to join in our make-believe, but I didn’t understand that. ‘I mean, maybe just Lindy can come here,’ I added, cajoling, not pleading.
Jane’s face wrinkled. ‘Not even Lindy,’ she told me quietly. ‘I’m saying this to protect you. I know what could happen.’
I was mad at her. I was often mad at her, and I see now that this was the sort of anger children feel for their parents whenever their parents prevent them from doing something which jeopardizes their safety. The parent seems unreasonable to the uncomprehending child. The parent appears to be using their authority arbitrarily to prevent the child from growing up or away, to be issuing prohibitions in their own interests and not the child’s. So I sulked. I sulked all the way over to the Zacarro house and it was some while before I could bring myself to tell Lindy that Jane said she couldn’t come over to our house any more and, when I did, she sulked too.
About twenty minutes south of Scott’s house, I stop at a place where you can pull off the road and park right by the edge of the cliff with only a thin safety barrier between you and the sea. This place is called Seal Wash but there are no seals visible today. I switch off the car’s engine and I can hear the sea hammering against the rocks below as though it’s trying to break down the cliff and my car along with it.
I take the shoe heel from my purse. I get out and stand close enough to the cliff to look down on the massive body of water pressing against the land like a threatening crowd. Watching the water hit the rocks and swing, hissing, in all directions makes me dizzy. I look up at the coast road, winding along the land’s edge. When there is no car in sight, I fling the shoe heel as far out to sea as I can. Either the throw is feeble or the wind catches the heel but it bounces back against the cliff face beneath me, slowly as though weightless, before it disappears into the water.
After Seal Wash there are a couple of sandy bays, then Big Brim. My heart beats fast and I try to slow down but the other traffic, seeing the sudden straight stretch of blacktop, accelerates. There is a parking lot alongside the road on the right and, on the left, high sand dunes mask the sea. In a moment I am through, the coastline is rocky again and the road winds around it once more.
When I reach Needle Bay and see the gentle curve of the beach where I lived with Scott, I am almost overwhelmed by emotion. Instead of swinging down the track which leads through the pines to the beach house, I stop at the hilltop parking lot. Soundlessly I visit again that inner landscape of loss, quiet and empty after Stevie’s death.
The little wooden cottage is invisible among the tree tops but the beach screams white and beyond it the sea stretches away forever, its colour darkening with its depth. I have been here many times in my dreams and now that I am back at last I feel a sort of relief. There is even nostalgia for that brief period when we moved here, right after Stevie died, when my grief was as fresh and spongy as new-made bread. Life was straightforward then. It consisted of grief. There was nothing else to feel and nothing else to do but relive, tirelessly, relentlessly, the night of Stevie’s death. Since then that night has been so often recalled that, like some over-used toy, the colours have washed out of it. It has been laundered, ironed and allocated its place in some deep closet. And now I am back at Needle Bay the closet door swings suddenly open.
I spent the last day of Stevie’s life working. Most people had already started their Easter vacation but an important Pacific Rim client was in town and before meeting the client at his hotel I thought I should go into the office to study his portfolio. I’d tried doing that kind of work at home but somehow Stevie, although he was so small, took up the whole house.
He was asleep when I showered and dressed, probably because he had awoken many times in the night. Then, just before I was due to leave, he woke. I fed him and changed him and Scott held him but it was no good. He started to cry with that tenacity, that dogged determination, which meant he had no intention of stopping.
‘Go,’ Scott said. ‘Just go. He’ll be fine.’
As I drove down the pretty street where we lived, I could hear Stevie’s protests echoing inside my head and mostly what I felt was relief. I was going to a job which I was good at and leaving behind a situation which was completely outside my control.
I spent the day with the client. He was demanding but at the end of the afternoon he congratulated me on my work. I hadn’t thought about Stevie all morning but during the afternoon I had experienced sudden flashes of longing and by the time I returned to the house I just wanted to smell him and feel his small, soft body in my arms. Larry’s car was in the drive and so was Daddy’s Oldsmobile. I parked on the street and, the moment I switched off the engine, I heard the sound which had followed me down the road that morning. Stevie was crying again. I sat in the car listening and my body reacted involuntarily. Each repetition penetrated a little deeper until my muscles were stiff.
Inside, the house was filled by Stevie’s misery. Scott appeared from the kitchen with an avocado and gestured helplessly with it up the stairs.
‘We fed him, we changed him, we distracted him but he won’t stop. Jane’s up there with him now.’
‘Has he been crying all day?’
‘Nope, he saves it up for you.’
It was hard not to take Stevie’s tears personally.
I didn’t go straight upstairs. First I looked into the living-room where Larry and Daddy were playing chess before dinner, apparently oblivious to the sound overhead.
‘Hi, Lucy,’ Daddy said to me. ‘Check,’ he told Larry.
Larry turned and gave me a conspiratorial nod, trying to suggest he was letting the old man win. But I knew that the hunch of Larry’s shoulders was probably the hunch of defeat. I never beat Daddy at chess, although perhaps that was because I didn’t want to.
I climbed the stairs and the noise increased with every step. Jane was sitting by the window holding the baby against her shoulder. The slim late afternon light fell on to the book she was reading while Stevie’s wails were directed behind her. As she read, Jane stroked the baby’s back.
‘I tried everything,’ she said when she saw me. ‘And in the end I just gave up and let him cry.’
I took Stevie from her, very gently. He turned his wet face to me and, for a moment, it unscrewed itself. The skin whitened and his eyes widened and it see
med the noise would cease. But the silence was fragile and when I placed his body against mine his back arched and he lifted his head and roared with renewed vigour.
‘Thought you’d done it for a moment there,’ said Jane. I shook my head. Stevie seemed to be drawing on some well of human misery and it was a deep well.
‘He was crying when I left. He’s crying when I get home. And yet they say in daycare he’s quiet as a mouse. What am I doing wrong?’
‘Nothing. He just needs to cry, some babies do.’ Jane’s tone was professional.
‘Why am I such an incompetent mother?’
Jane was even firmer. ‘You’re not.’
The noise was increasing in intensity. The meal was ready. Jane and Scott tried to persuade me to leave Stevie in his crib.
‘Holding him isn’t helping and you need to eat,’ Jane said.
‘He’s sure to fall asleep soon,’ Scott assured me but I knew that he didn’t like leaving our baby alone either, shrieking in anguish.
When they had gone downstairs I shut the door and incarcerated myself with Stevie’s noise. I sang and opened the window and closed it again and shook rattly toys in his face. But still he cried. Finally I sat where Jane had sat and waited as Jane had waited and eventually, many thoughts later, there was silence. I looked at Stevie’s tiny face, battered with the effort of his protests. His warm body was inert but pliable. He was once more that creamy, peaceful baby he was supposed to be. He was lovable again. I laid him gently as china in his blue crib, and the voile, which was looped and swaggered in a fantastical canopy high over his head, danced a little. I pulled the blanket up and then gazed at his perfection for a few moments before joining the others downstairs.
When, after the meal, I went upstairs to check on him, I knew the moment I opened the door that something was wrong. The room had a special silence, the silence of death, and my skin recognized that silence and bristled before I recognized death itself. I switched on the light and ran to the crib. I pulled back the blanket.
Summertime Page 9