The Accident

by S D Monaghan

  Tara said, ‘I can live without the money. I can live without the house. The one thing I can’t live without is you. Do you understand that? If you keep talking about giving in, then I’ll... I’ll... I swear I’ll kill myself.’ Sometimes it seemed that the whole point of life was not to die the same death as her father.

  Silence expanded around them. Usually they were comfortable with the absence of words: that telepathic marital communication that is often misconstrued by outsiders as awkward silence. But this time it was different. This time it was awkward silence.

  Tara broke it: ‘I’m serious. And I’m not going to say it again. I want you and I want our child. Fuck the house. Fuck the money. I don’t care if we end up in a bedsit in some shithole down the country. As long as there’s you and me. Got it?’ She leaned forward, and with both hands clutched David’s fist like a prayer book. ‘I can’t deal with this unless you accept that we are in this together. I really need you to stop thinking about giving in and leaving me alone for the rest of my life. This is about us. Got it? Tell me you’ve got it.’

  ‘I told you last night. And I’m saying it again. I’ll meet Gordon this morning and I’ll do the transfer.’

  Tara only half-smiled; she doubted his honesty. She knew that David was wary of her now, as he was suddenly unable to read the future that he had so meticulously nurtured over the last few years. It was as if he saw Tara as a malfunctioning satellite, spinning away from its safe orbit and out into the blackness of the abyss.

  ‘You need to be crystal clear,’ she said. ‘In the zone. You’ve got to realise that Ryan is irrelevant now. We can only deal with what’s left.’ Tara looked through the glass to the corner of the patio. ‘It’s no longer anything to do with Ryan. And nothing will ever be about him again.’

  ‘Tara, remember when we began drinking at four on Fridays? All those mojitos… After we have the baby, we’ll do that again. They were good times.’

  Feeling that her words were finally landing here and there, sticking like snow on dry land, she said, ‘And there will be more good times. I need my man back. The man who, from a windowless office at the back of the Arts building, managed to get Leo Di-fucking-Caprio on the phone after hearing that Scott McCoy had gifted him one of my paintings. It’s because of you that we had features in the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Star, the Miami Herald, the Guardian, Le Monde. You dealt with it all and basically ran a fucking history department and worked on your PhD. Now you’re going to deal with this. We’ll figure out what to do. Together. We always do. This type of thing – pressure – we thrive on it.’

  David placed his hands on her shoulders. He spoke softly: ‘I think that I did something really, really wrong to you somewhere, at some time, and I don’t know what. Why were you so unhappy that you had to go and—’

  She kissed him, briefly, inexpertly, and said, ‘I told you why I did it. It was barely a reason. I know that. And if I could rewind, I’d rewind. But I can’t.’

  ‘I love you.’ The few times David had ever said that sentence – he had only ever said it to Tara – she had sensed his discomfort. Not because it was untrue, but because he was saying something that the world would hear a million times that day in cinemas and on TV. The world would read it in a million books and hear it on the radio in a million songs. David had simply not been able say it without being embarrassed. Until now.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I do. I love you as much as it’s humanly possible to love someone.’ Tara stared at him, feeling his desire to believe.

  ‘You look different,’ David said.

  ‘I took a shower.’

  ‘Some shower.’

  Tara knew what he was doing, but couldn’t dissipate the ‘Last Supper’ ambience; the feeling that destiny would soon take hold and that there was nothing they could do but fulfil their roles in it.

  They tried again, this time kissing long and deep, Tara feeling the press of his hand against her breast – possessive, confident. But then David broke away and asked, ‘Did you think of me during it?’

  ‘No. Of course I didn’t. I mean... Yes. Jesus, I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you compare him to me?’

  Jesus. She folded her arms. ‘I’m not doing this. Do you want to make things worse?’ And yet, simultaneously, she could feel his anger slacken further.

  ‘How much effort did you put into it?’ She could tell that David was thinking while speaking. ‘I saw the underwear you had on.’

  ‘They were black.’

  His eyes widened a little.

  ‘Lace.’ In the past, she’d told him all about her previous lovers. He’d liked to hear about their lusts, their secret fantasies, what she’d done with them and what she hadn’t. It had been like foreplay. David pressed himself tighter to her now, his hands under her blouse, his knuckles grazing across her stomach, gliding over her smooth skin. She felt the pulse in his fingers.

  Tara, her attention hooked like a fish, whispered, ‘Tell me what you want.’

  ‘You’ve the psychology degree. Whatever you give me, I’ll like.’

  She watched as a lovely, preoccupied kind of look fell over his dark eyes. They kissed again, as if it was the first time, like they had both been waiting months for someone to make the first move. With Tara’s blouse pulled down past her elbows and one leg removed from her lowered jeans, she sat astride him on the kitchen floorboards and they finally made love in their new house.

  Afterwards, as she lay still on the floor, her cheeks were flushed and reddened. So was that it? Was everything OK now? She looked down at her nakedness, taking in the vague rosy imprint of her husband’s fingerprints on her skin. She kissed the fading bruise on David’s forehead and then sank back into her nicely fucked mood.

  David stood, and as he pulled up his jeans, Tara checked her blouse for stains. She put it back on, adjusting her breasts beneath it. David lit a post-coital cigarette and she watched him smoke it. ‘Don’t look so pleased.’

  ‘Why? I take pride in my work.’

  Tara couldn’t help smiling. Did sex have the power to make everything between them better again? She felt a shudder of excitement. A mistress is a private thing, a meal to be eaten alone. But her husband had ripped it from Ryan’s jaws.

  The arrival of a text sounded. Immediately Tara stood and they both stared at David’s phone. ‘Gordon’ flashed on the display. David opened it.

  The corner of Vern and Sobal Hill. In front of your bank. I’ll be parked there. Be here in 30 minutes. Let’s finish this and get on with our lives.

  ‘Thirty minutes,’ David muttered, and looked at the clock as if he didn’t know what to do with himself until then. ‘Right, I’m having a quick shower. You OK?’

  ‘No, I’m not OK. You’re having a shower? You had a shower already.’

  ‘I was digging down the garden.’ Tara detected a flash of melancholy in his gaze as it turned towards the window. But then he added more cheerfully, ‘The landscapers missed something. And just now, after that, I need a shower.’ Unable to offer anything else, David left the kitchen. She listened to him climb the stairs. A dresser drawer slid shut above. He was undressing. The shoe rack creaked; wooden hangers clattered against one another. The water pump in the control room began its low drone.

  She muttered, ‘A fucking shower…’ She didn’t know how she’d wanted him to respond to their conditional surrender – but this was not it. Obviously, there was nothing normal about their situation, but David was acting abnormally abnormal. She picked up his phone to reread the message.

  He doesn’t care about the text because he’s still going to the police – not to Gordon. She suddenly had no doubt – Tara trusted her intuition. He’d lied to her. She’d believed that together they were indomitable, and that the world would always be theirs to explore, experience and use.

  She moved towards the hall, intending to race upstairs and scream, cry and rage at him. But that wouldn’t be enough. He’d made
his mind up. The next time David left the house, it would be to go to the police. Or maybe he would just phone them? Tara knew what she had to do, and it had to be done quickly. She would meet Gordon and do the transfer. Then she, too, would be guilty – of covering up Ryan’s murder. She would be an accomplice. If David went to the police after that, he would be condemning them both.

  As if the idea was a diamond, she turned it round and round in her head, looking for a flaw or crack, examining it from every perspective, looking for regret. She found none. Quickly, she tapped out a text.

  Fuck 30 mins. I’m coming NOW. Be there.

  She waited, counting silently in her head. I shouldn’t have cursed. David doesn’t curse. But when she reached fifteen, Gordon replied:

  K

  Tara left the house. As she drove to Sobal Hill, she sipped on her lukewarm breakfast smoothie. It was a dismal disappointment. She yearned for something sweeter than sugar and honey: her life from forty-eight hours ago.

  Tara stopped at the lights. Across the intersection was the row of shops with their bank in the centre. In front of it was Gordon’s Saab. A feeling of amazement fell on her. It was as if she couldn’t quite believe that she still had no plan to get out of this. The lights changed, and she pulled up onto the span of pavement beside her architect. Climbing out, she opened the Saab passenger door and slipped in beside him.

  Immediately, Gordon said, ‘What do you want? Actually, let me rephrase that – what the fuck do you want?’ With his shades on, he looked past Tara to her car. ‘Where’s Dave? Is his mother on the way too?’

  ‘David’s not coming. You’re stuck with me. Deal with it.’ Tara took a deep breath, trying to sharpen herself. The heat in the airless car felt like a physical weight.

  Gordon nodded to himself, making a decision. ‘Fine. Whatever. Let’s leave Dave at home, pondering all the ways in which his wife has failed him. So you’re doing the transfer?’

  She nodded, but then said, ‘Please don’t take it all. Leave us enough to cover the loan. You’re not just doing this to David and me. You’re doing this... to three of us.’

  Gordon’s face took on a veneer of sincerity. ‘I’m sorry.’ He lowered his shades a few centimetres, lending her a granule of eye contact in the process.

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  ‘Oh, I just automatically say that when I hear “whine whine whine”.’ He painted inverted comas in the air. ‘I just assume that there’s something to be sorry about.’

  Tara opened her mouth to respond, but the space where the words should have been just filled with the bleakness of loss. Her eyes watered and she swallowed back wretchedness. Placing her hands on her stomach, she said, ‘We have a child coming. We just want to get on with our lives. Why can’t you just take two hundred k? Three hundred k?’

  ‘Can we establish right away that I’m much smarter than you are?’ Gordon removed his shades, placed them on the dashboard and continued, ‘We’re not bargaining. We’re not scratching each other’s backs. This ended two days ago, in David’s office.’

  ‘But Gordon, it’s our house. For our family. We’ll lose everything.’

  ‘Tara, save me the Flower of the Earth bullshit. Jesus, I know what you are. I know how you work. Look at you. Even you’re fucking embarrassed.’ Gordon looked tired and pale. His skin had loosened from his face, as if too exhausted to cling to his jawline any longer. ‘But I tell you this – you do know how to cause a scene. I mean, I’m old school. I’m of the vintage when marriages crashed and burned from lipstick on the collar. These days it’s a carelessly undeleted text or email. But where’s the fucking drama? I’ll tell you where it is – it’s when a husband catches his wife with his builder’s balls in her mouth in his attic office. Now that’s drama, Tara. That’s class. Respect.’

  Tara had heard Gordon being crude before, but only in terms of cracking the whip in the direction of builders, suppliers and subcontractors. With her, he’d always played the role of gentleman knight, ready to defend her cause with his pitiless perfection. When they’d toured the site together, Gordon would often ask her to pop outside for some air, and from there, she’d hear him dressing down Ryan and his men with venomous sarcasm in a naturally booming voice that would have reached the last row of a concert hall. She’d even come to consider Gordon as a friend – but your friend is your friend until suddenly he’s not. Life had shown Tara again and again that good people aren’t particularly interesting, but that people could be bad in so many remarkable ways.

  ‘You’re not a psychopath, Gordon,’ she said. ‘You’re many things, but you’re not that. You knew Ryan, and you can’t just dismiss his death like you’re pretending to.’ She’d surprised herself. It felt like she was talking about herself. ‘I’d looked Ryan up just because he was the only builder I’d ever known, and the first thing he told me was to talk to you. “You need Gordon.” That’s what he said.’

  Gordon raised his head, as if Tara had slightly interested him. Then he sighed. ‘Fine, we worked well together, and since I’m a perfectionist, that’s a rare thing. “Perfectionist” is the scariest word a builder can hear when meeting an architect. It means missed deadlines and stupid demands. And I won’t deny it – Ryan was a decent man. He didn’t deserve what happened. Of course not. But what happened, happened. And in the end, like with most of us, it turns out that Ryan is totally replaceable in every aspect of his life. In other words, he was the average man. And the death of the average man is nothing more than a shift of a number from one column to another; from the list of the living to the list of the dead. That might sound cold. But reality is fucking cold.’

  Tara pictured Ryan so clearly now: laughing, charming, funny, filling every room with his presence and humour. ‘After you get your money, what do we do about Fenton?’

  Gordon reddened. He checked the rear-view mirror, pretending to fix his fringe but really checking behind his car, almost as if he expected Fenton to be approaching. ‘Who?’

  ‘Stop dicking around. Fenton – the guy who pretended to be a fucking detective.’ Tara felt her heartbeat against her blouse. ‘The guy who you let us believe was a detective. The guy who pointed a fucking gun at my husband.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about or who you’re talking about. Got it?’

  He’s lying. He has to be lying. Gordon and Fenton have to be connected. Somehow. And not just through their association with Ryan. If only David and she had more time to work things out, to figure out what was really going on. She thought of one of David’s lines back in college: ‘To understand the meaning of history is to understand that where secrecy begins, power begins.’ She had no power, because men like Gordon and Fenton had all the secrets. Or maybe they had been buried with Ryan.

  Tara said, ‘Fenton was Ryan’s problem. Now he’s ours. David’s and mine.’

  Gordon didn’t seem surprised to hear this. ‘Then deal with it. I. Am not. Ryan. Now, we’re getting off point. You need to stop opinionating and calm down. So let’s go into the bank and finally put all this behind you. They’re expecting us.’ He licked his lip, not in a sordid manner, but in a man-lost-in-a-desert way.

  Wait. Something’s wrong. Tara noticed a yellow sauce stain next to Gordon’s tie knot. It was an uncharacteristic blemish; Gordon was always so perfectly turned out. Tara turned towards him, her knees banging into the automatic gear shift. ‘I’m not done yet.’

  ‘Jesus. You are. Trust me.’

  Tara suddenly saw him anew: as something stupid and repellent. She looked out the passenger window and, coughing into the hollow of her fist, said, ‘Know what I think, Gordon?’

  ‘Tell me – my pulse is pounding.’

  ‘You’re just a trust-funded, overprivileged, weak, measly prick.’

  ‘Fuck you, Tara Brown – you’re just a washed-up painter whose true success story is managing to get knocked up by her teacher. Now enough! This conversation is finished. We’re getting the fuck out of this car and doing the t
ransfer. Now!’

  Something’s not right. Something’s off. Tara shook her head and folded her arms tightly across her chest. She had never seen Gordon act like this before. She could see it in his eyes: a fearful desperation, a rising panic.

  ‘You don’t have the balls for this. None of your type do.’

  ‘Tara. Come with me into the bank and do the transfer.’

  She stared at the dashboard. A voice in her head pleaded with her, begged her, to just go with him, to give him what he wanted.

  ‘What is the matter with you, Tara? Are you totally fucking stupid? I will ruin your life. I will send your husband to jail. I will—’

  She pushed the passenger door open. As she stepped out, she looked back into the car and said, ‘Fuck you, Gordon.’ She slammed the door, and a moment later was sitting in her own car, staring through the windscreen. Trust your intuition. Trust your instinct. You’ve done the right thing.

  Next to her, Gordon’s Saab reversed quickly into the intersection.

  Oh my god. Where’s he going?

  The Saab disappeared through the lights before the waiting cars had a chance to move.

  Oh Christ, what have I done? Was he going to the police? He is going to the police. Should she go back to David? Spend their last few minutes of freedom together? I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up. No. She mustn’t think like that. She had to follow him. If he was going to the police, then she would catch him before he went into the station and give him what he wanted. I’ve ruined everything. Or maybe he’s not going to the police. I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!

  Her car was already out onto the street. The lights were orange. She stomped on the accelerator. The needle leapt up to sixty. Then seventy. Eighty. She was through the lights, ploughing through a puddle from a broken water main, sending a satisfying fan of water hissing up into the warm summer air. Breathe. She breathed. The windscreen wipers beat back and forth.