It was on an unseasonably cold April Sunday that Rosie Jones clutched her side and gasped. She insisted she was all right, but when she could no longer stand and could barely breathe, Lionel bundled her into the Hillman and started driving toward the coast. When she started shrieking in the car, Lionel feared the worst. Rosie’s eyes were wild, and she sucked and seethed air like she was leaking it through her lungs. Lionel hurtled down the hill, squinting into the harsh twilight sun. Rosie’s back was bolt straight, and she pitched and pulled in her seat as though she were in a rocking chair. She squeezed at his hand with such urgency that he hadn’t the heart to retract it.
If he’d done so, if he’d possessed that shard of cold common sense that would have seen both his hands gripping the steering wheel, he might have better dealt with the jolt caused by a deep pothole that the sun obscured. But as it was, Jack Lionel braked hard and overcorrected on the gravel roadside. They slid toward a wall of trees. And that’s all it took. Just a hole in the ground, aligned with a tire. An instant in time. A moment of shit luck in bright light and everything turned to black.
When Lionel came to, he was covered in blood and glass and he was trapped inside the car. The passenger seat was empty. There was a thick, sick quiet punctuated only by insects. The windscreen was gone. Before he blacked out again, he caught sight of Rosie’s dress a few meters ahead, and he understood what he’d done with such a heavy dread that he welcomed the creeping dark behind his eyes.
It was her appendix. It was a bubble ready to burst. And so Lionel’s instincts had been right in rushing her toward a doctor. But even so, Lionel never forgave himself. He wished it were him that had died, not Rosie Jones. And so too did David, who blamed him violently and entirely, who suspected something far more sinister than an urgent race to the hospital. The last words David ever spoke to his father were delivered that night over his bed in the emergency room. He told him that if he showed up at Rosie’s funeral, he’d kill him then and there, God as his witness. And Jack Lionel believed him.
The crash had shattered Jack’s leg, left it aching and useless and bent inward. But Rosie’s death cloaked his whole body. Weighed him down like chain mail. Because he’d come to love her in that short time, and hand in hand with that chill of responsibility was that he simply missed his friend. He missed her cooking and her laugh and her smell and the way she always sat so straight and dignified in her chair, the way she was always so interested in what he had to say. Jack Lionel packed away the china and hung up his suit and never wore it again. Neither his leg nor the rest of him ever healed properly.
He held his own service for Rosie Jones. When the council returned the crushed husk of the Hillman to his property, it was there that he said his piece, by the passenger side of the car. He cried and he prayed, and then, kneeling in the rain, he used the edge of a penny to etch the word he wanted to last longer than he’d be on this earth to keep saying it.
Of course, Corrigan was ruthless. Rumors spread regarding the circumstances that saw Jack Lionel speeding away from town with Rosie Jones. Some said that he’d abducted her. That he’d become infatuated with his son’s wife and had stolen her away, and when she’d fought him in the car, the scuffle had caused them to crash. Others asserted that they’d planned their escape together, and it was their lusty fumblings that had them coming unstuck on the road. There were those that maintained he’d lured her into the car, strapped himself in, and deliberately veered off the road, making her death seem an accident. There were so many competing plots and twists. So many unconfirmed sources and personal accounts and neighborhood testimonies. And they wound around each other so tightly, they seemed destined to strangle and obscure the real truth. Nobody ever mentioned Rosie’s ruptured side. It seemed consigned to some other history. And the lies and suppositions were just heaped upon the stack. The story became truth. It became stone. And Jack Lionel’s portrait was smudged with ink and smeared in shit, and he made no effort to wipe it clean. And so he became the monster and the killer that they all said he was. A low man, a madman. A pariah. The town turned its back. The church no longer held an interest in his soul. And Jack Lionel, who had always enjoyed the solitude of his property, simply pulled further away. He severed himself from Corrigan. He went to other towns for food and supplies. He lived very simply off his war pension; he grew vegetables and raised sheep and cattle until his leg wouldn’t allow it. In recent years, he’s lived off tinned food and eggs and tea from tin mugs. And the only people he sees from Corrigan are the few children who dare to steal his peaches, and his grandson, who skirted his property for years, taunting his heart.
Jack Lionel always thought Jasper ignored him on purpose as a means of shunning him. Some angry, willful act of ignorance. Not for a moment did he consider that Jasper Jones may not have known the truth.
Lionel expected Jasper Jones to have been poisoned with the lie. Planted by his father and fertilized by the town. And so he desperately wanted to invite him inside, to give him the truth, to scratch that word into the air. But Jasper never stopped, he never once paused to listen. And Lionel, too immobile to rush down to meet him and plead his case, was consigned to yelling from his veranda every time Jasper happened by.
All the while, Jasper Jones had no idea why Lionel kept calling his name. But he’d been singled out his whole life, so he paid no attention. Jack Lionel was just some mad old bastard with nothing to say. But I do wonder how it was that Jasper never found out. It made some sense to me that his father never mentioned the old man, but was Jasper so far removed that nobody, not even the most insensitive of children, ever blurted out what they knew?
Perhaps they didn’t have a clue either. I certainly didn’t. Maybe they were all like me. They just feared the myth of Mad Jack Lionel without properly knowing the nature of the lie that fed into it. But in his living room, watching him smoke and recount his horrible story, it seemed strange that I was ever afraid of him. He looked so small and tired and wretched sitting there, slowly rolling his cigarettes. He just seemed a decent man who’d been beaten.
I couldn’t place Jasper’s face. I watched him warily while he stood and listened. He rubbed at his hair and kicked his feet and sniffed. He looked at the ground, fists opening and closing, but I didn’t get the sense he was moving to strike. I noticed him stealing glances at the photographs on top of the piano. I shrunk back and listened intently.
And I’m not sure why, but when Jasper Jones quietly accepted a cigarette offered by Jack Lionel, at the moment he pressed his lips and sucked at it gratefully, I thought then that he’d abandoned hope of ever discovering who killed Laura Wishart. I thought the game was over. He’d given up.
But then Jack Lionel told us what he’d seen that night.
He recalled the evening easily because it was the night before he’d fallen ill with a virus that kept him weak and bedridden for a fortnight. He’d taken notice of the figure outside because it was unusual to see. He knew who passed his property regularly, he knew the familiar patterns. And so when he recognized that young girl, the one he’d so often seen accompanying Jasper, the one he now knew was Laura Wishart, he took notice, because she was walking past alone. And so he’d waited, assuming that Jasper wouldn’t be far behind her. Perhaps they’d had a row and she was walking defiantly ahead. Or she was meeting him somewhere. But Jasper didn’t show.
Jasper asked if he was sure she was on her own.
Lionel was. But then his brow had creased. And his head tilted. And he told us that although he hadn’t seen Jasper with her, he saw that somebody was following behind.
***
I’m sitting on my bed with elbows on my knees when there’s a soft rapping at my window. I close my eyes and sigh. I don’t even turn. It must have been a quick confrontation. Or maybe his father was out drinking. But I’m not even sure if I want to see Jasper again tonight, I’m so sad and tired.
“Charlie!”
I wheel around, hearing the voice. I flip the slats.
&n
bsp; Eliza Wishart has come to my window.
She’s here. At night. It’s really her. I don’t say anything. I just open my mouth and then close it.
“What were you doing with Jasper Jones?” she demands. I pause. I don’t have an answer. She must have followed me to the station. I should have turned around. I wonder how far she trailed us.
“Oh. Nothing, really. He’s just my friend, I guess. I don’t know.”
Eliza tilts her head in a way that suggests that she knows I’m lying.
“Charlie, why didn’t you come back? You said you would. You promised. And I waited for you. You said you would come back!”
I have nothing to say. I can’t tell her the truth, and I don’t want to lie anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I offer. “I really am.”
“Charlie, I really need to talk to you.”
“I know.”
“I mean now. Can you come out? It’s important.”
I can. I’m reasonably certain my dad didn’t hear me return. But I hesitate because I’m worried about what I might say. What she might ask.
And then Eliza says something that shakes me down more than anything I’ve heard since that first night. She feeds her fingers through the louvres and touches my hand. And she says:
“Charlie, I know where Laura is.”
***
I slip out of the house in a daze and I trudge beside her, racing through a maze of thoughts. I’m heading into the abyss. I haven’t mentioned a word of what I know, in case she leads me to someplace different. Is she taking me to Jasper’s glade? She must be. But how big a piece of this puzzle does she hold?
If she knows anything about the clearing, about the tree and the rope, then she must have been there on that night. She must know something of what happened, or at least how it ended. And has she been there since? What will she do when she finds Laura’s no longer there? Should I tell her everything now?
Was Eliza Wishart the figure that Jack Lionel couldn’t make out? Was she the one who followed Laura that night?
The town is emptying out. The Sovereign’s sprawl has been reined back inside. The band is still playing. The bonfire behind the Miners’ Hall is a mound of red embers. Stray dogs circle the carcasses of the roasting sheep, waiting for the coals to cool so they can pick at the bones. Most families have retired, but a few have stayed on to see in the new year. We walk quickly up the center of the main street. I hope I don’t see my mother anywhere. The hall is still open, but activity there has slowed. Sure enough, on the front steps someone is getting their burned hand seen to by a nurse.
A few couples are necking down the alley by the hardware store. They must be drunk enough to assume nobody can see them. A large man is throwing up on the edge of the general store’s veranda, leaning on a vertical beam and hacking his guts into a drain. It’s the sarge.
Eliza takes me past the station. We don’t speak, but I know she’s upset. I hope she doesn’t cry again. The longer we walk, the surer I am of our destination.
We’re into the outskirts of town, where it’s still and quiet. We move quickly, stepping in rhythm. I don’t know how, but our hands have linked up again. We reach the broad banks of the Corrigan River, onto the open lawns past the traffic bridge. I’m still trying to think of things to say, but Eliza seems so resolute I feel I shouldn’t interrupt her.
We slip beneath the paperbark trees, which leer and lean, their scabby skins hanging from their limbs. The grass by the river is soft, and little saplings have emerged with the aid of the recent rain. Eliza bends to uproot a cluster of tiny wildflowers. She fiddles with them in her hands.
And then I see our car.
It’s parked by the water’s edge, under a tree. It’s concealed by shadows, but I still recognize it easily. I stop and squint. Eliza tugs at my hand, willing me on, but then she follows my gaze. I frown. And I say it, absently.
“That’s our car.”
“Really?” Eliza whispers.
I nod and I hold my breath. I’m not sure what to do. After a time, we slowly make our way toward it.
It’s a horrible sense of foreboding. It takes me a moment to join the pieces, and then everything makes sense. I swallow hard. The brick drops further than it’s ever been. I feel like that man from France I read about who had a syndrome that compelled him to swallow coins. When he died, they discovered that his stomach was packed like a purse, and it was so heavy it had slid to his pelvis.
I know precisely what I’m about to see, but I edge closer anyway. Twigs crackle crisply under my feet. And I’m close enough to see two of them in there. On the backseat. The sheen of pale skin, slipping and dipping between the shadows. Close enough now to touch the back window. Close enough to see my mother grappling and gripping a man I don’t recognize. To see them flinch, then freeze at my interruption. To see my mother glaring out the window, her face spreading from pinched anger to wide horror. The scrabble and untangle. I’m numb. I’m watching this unfold right in front of me, but I feel removed from it.
I step back. My mother has awkwardly pulled her dress back on. The man slinks back in the seat. The door yawns open, and I squeeze Eliza’s hand.
“Charlie! What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here! What are you playing at? Did you follow me? You shouldn’t be out here! Why aren’t you at home?”
She’s hysterical and aggressive. Yelling a mile a minute and waving her hands. I wonder how she has the gall to be furious. I can smell sour sweat and liquor from the car, and it disgusts me. My mother’s chest is heaving. She’s panicking and she’s upset and she’s drunk. She keeps shrieking her spitfire questions, just filling up this space with her stupid outrage.
The walls might be falling, but I feel calm. I really do. Even when she slams the door and grabs my arms and shakes me free of Eliza Wishart. And I notice that her cotton dress is on backward, and how ugly and old she looks when her makeup is smudged.
She starts to pull me toward the car. Still yelling.
“You’re coming home! You shouldn’t be out here! Come on! Get in the car!”
I rip my hands from her grasp with an ease that surprises me. My shoulders are squared. I take a step back, and I feel the balance between us shift. I look away from her. I am so ashamed. Not only because she’s drunk and barefoot, and not just because I’ve caught her fooling around with some fat old bastard while my dad is sitting at home, but because all of this has unfolded in front of Eliza Wishart. She’s seen it all. I want to cover this scene in a blanket, draw a curtain. I want to push our car into the water.
“No,” I say firmly.
“What did you say?”
“I said no.”
“How dare you! Don’t you talk to me like that, Charles Bucktin. Get in the car! I’m taking you home. You shouldn’t be out here.”
“And neither should you. This”—I point at the backseat of the car—“this means I don’t have to do what you say anymore.”
I step forward. I’m not afraid of her.
“Excuse me? Yes you do, young man! Now get in the car. I won’t ask you again!”
“No! You dug this hole, you fill it in. I’m not going with you.”
She’s lost. She can’t win this. She can’t win anything anymore. She looks vile and unlovely. Ghostly white against the mottled gray of the paperbarks. I hate her. I hate her like poison right now, but I also feel sorry for her. She looks like a child. Scared and lost and unhappy. Even more so when her mouth turns down at the edges and her face folds and she begins to cry. As suddenly as she’d risen, she’s fallen.
“You don’t understand,” she sobs. “Your father doesn’t love me. He never has. You don’t know anything. You don’t know a thing at all.”
She’s right about that. I don’t understand a thing about this world: about people, and why they do the things they do. The more I find out, the more I uncover, the more I know, the less I understand. My mother shakes her head and sniffs. Her hands go limp at her sides. The man in the c
ar doesn’t move. He just sits there. All of this is so messy and awful.
I have to leave.
“Go home,” I tell her, and I feel powerful saying it. I sound like Jasper Jones. I get a shot of electricity down my spine. “Just go home.”
I turn and I take Eliza’s hand. I weave our fingers tight and I squeeze hard. I’ve been betrayed by both my parents in a single night. And I look her up and down, and then leave my mother standing there, her shoulders slumped and shaking. She calls me back, but there’s no venom. There’s nothing in it anymore. We leave her behind.
I stay quiet as we walk. Distantly, we hear the car cough to a start behind us, fleeing the scene. My mother and her lover. I wonder if she’s going back home to confess to my dad. Probably not.
I must be pressing Eliza’s hand especially hard, because she wriggles it a little.
“You okay, Charlie?”
I sigh and scratch my scalp with my free hand.
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I think so. Maybe. I think it’s all too crazy for me to feel anything either way.”
She nods.
“I think I know how you mean. That was really … strange. Your mother. It’s just … I never thought she’d be the … I’m sorry, Charlie,” Eliza says quietly.
And it soothes me. It’s as though she can make everything golden with an apology, even though she’s a world away from fault.
I kick at the gravel.
We reach Lionel’s property. It looks so different. It’s such a desolate plot of land to look at now, whereas it used to throb with threat and portent. I wonder if he is watching us go by.
Jasper and I had left his house as abruptly as we’d entered it. After Jasper milked Lionel of all he had seen that night, he pushed off the wall he’d been leaning on. He’d had enough. He slid his bottom jaw from side to side, took one last look at the top of the piano, then strode out of the house. I followed. Neither of us said goodbye, neither of us looked back. I even felt bad for Jack Lionel, leaving him alone like that in his sad little museum.
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