Cara is Missing

by Tim Buckley

  I shook my head.

  “That’s not good, Nate,” I said, shaking my head. “His leg is fucked. It’s…”

  Words failed me. The workman’s screams of pain still rang round my head, they seemed to pierce the backs of my eyes.

  “Listen,” I said to Nathan, “you’d better get back to the site. The guys are going to be all over the place, they’ll need someone to take charge. Take the jeep and bring Robbie with you. I’ll wait here.”

  Nathan nodded.

  “OK. Call me when you get any news, yeah?”

  My first reaction, when Nathan left, was to call Emily, to tell her I’d be late and to tell her what had happened. I’d never underestimated the value of having her to talk to, of knowing that she cared about the things that I cared about and that she would always listen. Bobby said that I should go easy on Emily because she had nobody to talk to but, without her, I wasn’t sure I did either. Of course, my friends would listen and offer a shoulder to lean on, but maybe they were surreptitiously checking their watch while I rambled on; maybe behind the sympathetic eyes, their minds wandered to the shopping they had to do or the phone bill that was overdue or that noise coming from the back of the car… There was only one person on whose undivided attention I could rely, only one person who would drop everything to help me, and I had no idea where she was.

  It was a couple of hours and three murky vending-machine coffees later when an exhausted-looking doctor came into the waiting room, still in his scrubs. He looked at the clipboard he was carrying, and called out Stevie’s name.

  “Over here, Doctor,” I said, standing up and going over to where he was leaning against the reception counter.

  “Are you family?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “he’s doing some work for me, the accident was on my site. I brought him in.”

  He grunted, not sure what he could tell me, then decided to tell me anyway.

  “There’s no easy way to put this,” he said, “but he’s not in good shape. We’ve fixed him up as best we can for now, but he’s weak and he’s lost a lot of blood. He’s also taken a pretty bad knock to the head. The leg’s in a bad way. Once he gets some of his strength back, we’ll operate again, but I have to tell you there is a chance he might lose at least part of the leg.”

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  “Do you have a contact number for family?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No, he’s from the Northern Territory I think, he’s just here to work for a few months. But I’ll check with the site manager, he’ll have his details. Can I see him?”

  “No, he’s still out and he’ll need to rest. Best to come back in the morning.”

  I got a cab back to Nathan’s house to pick up the jeep and he brought me inside for a beer. I told him what the doctor had said and he said nothing for a few minutes, just sucked on the stubby.

  “We’ve got another problem,” he said, eventually. “The boys have got it into their heads that the site is cursed.”

  “What?!! You’ve got to be joking?!”

  He shook his head.

  “The lighthouse was built on an old burial ground. Apparently the local chief put some sort of a curse on it and some of the locals actually believe in that stuff. I’d heard some of them laughing about it before, but a couple of them are a bit spooked. It might just be the shock of seeing Stevie, the way his leg was and all,” – he shuddered at the thought – “and who knows, they might be right in the morning, but… I don’t know. They’re mostly blow-ins from out of state, it wouldn’t take much for a few of them to up sticks and move on. And I don’t need to tell you, we can’t afford for that to happen.”

  “So I’ve bought a cursed lighthouse, is that what you’re telling me?” I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course I had.

  Nathan tried to stop the smile, but it broke through and he started laughing too. Carly came in to find the two of us hooting like barn owls and I don’t think she knew if we were laughing or crying.

  “I might just get myself one of those,” she said, pointing at the beers, and went into the kitchen. She came back out with two more for us and sat down beside Nathan, putting his arm around her and nestling in close. “So what’s tickling you two? Or is it just hysterics?”

  “Apparently, Carly,” I announced, “I’m the proud owner of a cursed lighthouse.”

  Nathan told her the story and told her too about the doctor’s prognosis for Stevie.

  “Had you ever heard about a curse, love?” Carly asked Nathan.

  He shook his head.

  “Born and raised here and it’s the first I’ve heard of it. But apparently the last lighthouse keeper was swept off the rocks in a storm. He heard a girl crying on the beach below and when he went out to look for her, he was swept away. They never found the body.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I blurted mid swig, sending beer shooting out through my nostrils. “I met this old woman on the beach a while back, mad as a box of frogs she was. She reckoned her husband was the lighthouse keeper and she had to get back up to the lighthouse to cook his dinner. And she was ranting on about the ocean and how it could rise up in an instant and take everything away. I had to go up to the jeep to call the coastguard to come and get her but when I went back down, she was nowhere to be seen. I thought she might come from the old folks’ home in Dunsborough, maybe had Alzheimer’s or something. If she was from around here she might have known the story.”

  “Maybe it was his wife?” Carly said. “Maybe she lives around here still?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “That happened forty or fifty years ago, she’d have to be in her eighties or nineties, even, by now…”

  But even as I said it, I wondered. I shook myself to shake out the eerie feeling that was gurgling in my stomach, a product of the day’s drama and a few beers. The only thing that mattered now was getting the crew back onside and stopping all of this talk in its tracks. We were already one man down and we couldn’t afford to lose more. On top of that, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging worry that I might be somehow liable for the accident. I felt guilty even thinking about it while Stevie was lying in a hospital bed, but I didn’t really know what insurance cover I had or even if it would cover the accident. I had to do right by the poor bastard, but that might just end up costing us another fortune.

  30

  It was thanks to Karl that I eventually tracked Emily down. He’d been a little bit subdued and when Bobby eventually teased out of him what was on his mind, he told her he was worried about the vines. Bobby said that he hadn’t wanted to talk about it because he didn’t want to be disloyal to Emily but any time she’d gone away before, she’d left him with meticulously detailed instructions for what he had to do every day. The idiot’s guide, he called it with a guilty grin. This time, however, she’d gone without even telling him she was going. He had assumed she wouldn’t be gone long so he hadn’t worried about it at first, but now she’d been away for nearly two weeks and the list of questions that he’d been writing down every day ran to more than a page. He hadn’t wanted to ask me about it because he thought I was “a bit stressed out”.

  Bobby reckoned it wasn’t her place to tell Karl what was going on so she asked me if I’d talk to him, to at least put him in the picture and try to put his mind at rest. I might not be able help him with what needed to be done around the vineyard, but at least I could let him know that nobody was going to blame him and that we all knew he was doing his best. In the end, I decided to just tell him the truth. Weaving intricate lies would just confuse everything and I knew that Karl wasn’t going to go round telling the world about our domestic problems. So I went over to Bobby’s house and gave it to him straight. I didn’t know where Emily was, I told him, I didn’t know when she’d be back and I didn’t expect to speak to her any time soon.

  “So what should I
do now?” he asked me, after taking a moment to digest what I’d told him.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “You probably know better than me, Karl. I mean, just keep the weeds down, keep the sheep fed and watch for fly, I guess. Let’s try and have a few vines still standing when she gets back, eh!”

  He smiled a weak smile, then was quiet again for a moment.

  “I could find her, you know?” he said then, staring at the floor.

  I looked at him and waited for some explanation but there was none.

  “What do you mean, Karl? Do you know where she is?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, no, I don’t know where she is. But I could probably find out?”

  I waited again but it was blood from a stone.

  “How? How could you possibly find her?”

  I realise now that he was reluctant to betray Emily. After all, she was his friend, not me. But after another moment’s deliberation he arrived at the conclusion that helping me find her was probably the right thing to do. Or at least the lesser of two evils.

  Emily was obsessive about the vineyards, to the extent that she kept a record of every little thing that could affect the vines or the wine. She had a weather log, for example, in which she kept a note every day of the temperature, rainfall, humidity, even the wind speed. She kept a note of any fly she saw around the place, or of any she’d heard about from our neighbours. She kept meticulous notes on the production process, recording every action that might affect the wine and which might help her to do better the next time. She took photographs every week of the wines and kept copies of the reports she’d had from the wine board experts who’d come to check out the operation. One of her greatest fears was that she might lose all of that painstakingly collated data if she were to lose her laptop or if it contracted a virus or if the house burned down.

  “So I’ve been backing it all up for her,” Karl said. “I set up an online backup account for her and every week I’ve been backing up her laptop to the cloud.”

  Karl, it turned out, is a bit of a techie. He’d become interested when they started studying computers at school and soon he’d left the class behind, spending time online learning the tricks of the trade and much, probably, that he’d never have learned in a classroom.

  “But how does that help us find Emily?” I asked, still not sure where this was all going.

  “When you back up a device to the cloud,” he said, trying to explain it in language that even I could understand, “it kind of… registers that device. If the device is connected to the internet, the backup utility can see it. It can show you on a map where the device is.”

  “You’re kidding me?!” I was incredulous. I’d spent hours on the phone, wasted hours of Bobby’s time, on a wild goose chase of Sydney hotels, and all I had to do was log on to some application and I could see where her computer was? And where her computer was, Emily would be no more than a metre away.

  Karl looked at me as though I was a child and he was explaining how the toaster works.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not. Look, I’ll show you.”

  He sat down to his laptop and opened up the backup tool. Then he logged in – as Emily – and there, on the screen, was a map with a location pin, “Emily’s laptop”.

  He’d found Emily.

  ***

  By that afternoon, I was on a plane to Sydney. Karl had showed me how to access the backup tool and I’d installed it on my phone. Wherever and whenever Emily logged on to her computer, I could see her. It almost felt creepy but I didn’t care. Her laptop, it turned out, was in Avalon, a small town on the coast about an hour north of the city. She wasn’t even staying in a hotel – the address was a small holiday cottage on a coast road just outside the village. I could have phoned every hotel in New South Wales and I’d never have found her. I rented a car at the airport and drove up the coast.

  I didn’t really know what I was going to say to her and I didn’t really know what to expect when I found her. I didn’t know if she was angry or hurt or if she felt that I had let her down or just that I didn’t love her anymore. I’d read her letter over and over again and I had probably come up with a dozen interpretations for every word.

  I stopped in Avalon and took out my phone. The pin in the ubiquitous mapping software had disappeared so she wasn’t online but that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. I drove out of the village and slowed down as the cottage came into view. Emily had chosen well; the white clapboard shone clean and bright against the deep blue of the sky and the little garden was ablaze with colour. I passed the house and pulled in a few hundred metres up the road. I had a knot in my stomach and I was sweating; she was my wife, my love, and yet I felt like I had on the night of our first date. Finally, I turned the car round and went back to the cottage, pulling into the gravelled driveway.

  There was no other car in the drive and so I wasn’t surprised when my ring on the doorbell went unanswered. One of the living room windows was open so I figured she probably wasn’t gone far. I wandered round the back of the house where a small lawn ran to a whitewashed picket fence, beyond which a cliff fell away to the ocean below. There was a table and chairs on the back stoop so I sat down and waited.

  Sometimes it’s nice just to sit. I’m not a great fan of technology and I don’t have a job whose emails demand my immediate attention. I don’t have so many friends that my phone is constantly pinging with messages and I’m not on social media and yet, whenever I’m doing nothing, I’ve developed an annoying habit of pulling out my phone and scrolling through… anything. I don’t need immediate access to the sports results or the latest news stories, but yet I log on and thumb my way through content that hasn’t really changed much since the last time I looked. Even that day, I had to stop myself reaching for my phone and force myself to just sit there, taking in the beauty of the view and the sound of the birds and the cicadas. I took off my sunglasses, closed my eyes and let the sun slowly toast my face. I did nothing and I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss out on anything.

  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there when I heard a car engine coming up the hill and crunching into the driveway. The engine died and there was silence again, just the birds and the crickets and the waves rolling into the bottom of the cliff. I stood up and waited, but there was no sound from the front of the house, no door opening and closing, no crunch of feet on gravel. I imagined her sitting in the car, looking at the strange car in the drive, and deciding what to do. I thought about running round in case she might drive away, but that felt unkind, unfair to spring myself on her like that.

  Finally a door opened and closed and footsteps grew closer until she appeared from the side of the house.

  “Wilde,” she said. Just that, nothing more.

  “Hi, Em,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  She took a deep breath but didn’t move, didn’t come any closer. She just stared hard into my eyes so that I couldn’t move.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, eventually.

  “I’ve come to take you home.”

  She rolled her eyes and suddenly there was anger in her voice.

  “Come to take me home? Do you think you’re in a fucking cowboy movie? You don’t take me home! You don’t take me anywhere!”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Emily, you know I didn’t. I’ve come because I need you, I can’t live without you and I want you back.”

  “I’m not coming back, Wilde. Not yet, not ever, maybe. I told you not to come looking for me, I asked you to do that for me. Couldn’t you do that for me?”

  Now I was the one getting angry. Even though I hadn’t thought much about what would happen when I found her, I’d probably harboured some unrealistic notion that she would fold into my arms and we’d drive off together into the sunset. Emily doesn’t like ceding control and she hates to be caught unaw
ares like that, but could she really have been surprised? Did she really think that I’d just let her go and move on with my life? And how happy would she have been, really, if that’s what I’d done?

  “Oh come on, you’re being ridiculous, Emily!” I tried not to shout and the words were out before I could think about what I was saying.

  “Ridiculous?! Fuck you, Wilde! You think we can just carry on like before after all that’s happened? You think we can play happy families while you blame me for losing Cara? You think it will be all OK but every time we have a fight you’ll throw it in my face! And I’m ridiculous?!”

  “I don’t blame you, Em! I’ve told you a hundred times, I don’t blame you!”

  “Of course you do! I die a little bit more every day to think of her, I would never do anything to harm her. I hate that I did what I did, but I made a mistake. A terrible mistake, but a mistake. And it’s hard enough to live with that without you silently reminding me every day that it’s all my fault!”

  I held up my hands to try to calm the storm, to stop this in its tracks before it got out of control and one of us said something that could never be unsaid.

  “OK, Emily, OK,” I said, taking my voice down a notch or two from the shouting that had gone before. “OK, let’s just take a breath, yeah? Let’s go inside, have a coffee and talk. Surely that’s the least we should do? Surely we owe each other that much?”

  “No.” She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest like a barrier that would hold me away. “No. It won’t help.”

  “But…” I started to argue but I realised she was right. I never said anything to her that said I blamed her, but she must have seen it in the angry looks that flashed across my face every time we argued. Maybe she was right, maybe we would be better off apart. Maybe she was right, but I couldn’t even imagine a life without her. This had been a mistake and there was nothing to be gained from staying. Nor was there anything to be gained from coming back the next day for more fighting and screaming and hurting or trying to hurt. I shouldn’t have come unannounced and staying just because I had come this far wouldn’t solve anything.