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The tune, though, won’t leave my head. Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees …
I stomp my foot beside the accelerator to shake the melody from my mind. Enough!
The cause of death I’d found was listed only as that ambiguous ‘suspected foul play’. Any further detail is apparently under embargo. Hardly surprising, as the case is so new, but it doesn’t close the door to informed speculation. As a woman who reads the news religiously, I know that ‘suspected foul play’ usually means there’s some physical evidence of additional trauma – maybe a gunshot wound, maybe stabbing. Something more than simple drowning, which would be the more obvious cause of death in a river. Drowning could indeed be murder, of course, but it could also be just a fall. Or suicide. ‘Suspected foul play’ hints there’s something more.
My temples are starting to throb. Stinking, ineffectual pills. And the air con is doing shit, blue snowflake or not. I can feel my blouse clinging to the sweat on my back.
I recite the details over and over, making them almost a chant.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman’s body.
Found at the river’s edge.
White.
Cause of death – unannounced.
Foul play.
Sinister.
I’m sure there were other things I looked at in the news today, other happenings that will have attracted me at the bookshop. But my mind is stuck on just this. On this, and …
Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees …
The song won’t leave my head. My breathing has become heavier, and for some reason my right leg is starting to ache. I can’t think of any reason for that. I try to reposition myself on the seat.
The lane to my left suddenly shifts to life. I click on the indicator and push myself into the moving traffic at the first opening. Distraction from the odd sensations. Triumph. We clock a stellar seven miles per hour before the motion slows again, and within a few seconds we’re back at a standstill. The lane I left is moving. I clench my fists tight on the wheel. The urge to unleash a satisfying barrage of profanities is almost overwhelming, but I try not to recite the curse words David describes, with mock old-world flare, as ‘so awfully unwomanly’. Though, to be honest, he always says it with a very un-old-worldly grin, which makes me think he half-likes those moments when I lose verbal control.
I blink heavily two or three times. There are trails there, again, following my eyelids as they move.
The traffic starts to flow once more, and I attempt to distract myself, shifting my attention to the hillsides and vineyards alongside the road. All the locals along this particular stretch of Highway 101 refer to it as the Redwood Road, though I’ve yet to spot a Redwood tree anywhere near it. An enormous growers estate, entirely modern but designed to look ancient and historical, sits off in the sweeping green hills to the left of the highway. It’s a winery, of course, as most things are around here, but I can never remember the name of it. It’s built like a castle, complete with turrets and triangular flags. An odd way to sell wine. But the visual effect is dramatic, and the delivery trucks pulling in with supplies could as easily be wagons with mounted drivers, their diesel horsepower replaced with the actual thing. It wouldn’t look the slightest bit out of place.
But then there’s a Beyoncé cutaway on the radio and a new update on the refugee crisis in Eastern Europe, and the world again seems so very, recognizably, modern. Even the vineyard castle suddenly looks pallid and uninspired. Just another hoaxy specialty shop along the roadside, different only in size from the shed a few miles back and the Safeway warehouse at the next intersection.
That’s how quickly the world changes. A soundtrack, a flash of circumstance, and it’s a different land. A familiar one, where David is waiting at home and the universe is as it should be. God, how I want that, in this moment. My normal world. My comfy home. My wonderful man.
But suddenly I’m sweating fiercely. My breathing has become tight and rapid. The northern California landscape around me is as it was a moment before, nothing at all has changed – and yet it has, all the same and all at once. The woman’s situation has thrust itself back into my mind, powerfully, her circumstances flashing like lights in my vision.
I think I might hyperventilate – maybe I already am. My pulse, I’m sure of it, is out of control. This isn’t a headache any more. I don’t understand what is happening to me. The edges of the highway are glowing white, a phosphorous light that is too bright for me to look at directly, bleeding into every inch of my vision.
And I can see a girl, like a picture from a perfectly told story. She’s right there, in the glow of white that has overtaken the world. I am an observer at the solemn portrait of something ethereal and other-worldly.
And … wrong.
I can no longer see the traffic around me. I’m not sure if I’m still in my lane, or even in my car. Life itself has gone out of focus.
I only see the girl. Her. The girl from the headline – of whom no photos have yet been released. The girl whose face I have no reason to know from Eve’s. There’s something peculiar to her eyes. Something wrong with her neck. Yet it’s her, I’m sure of it, and she’s there, her face bathed in white, staring at mine. Her life ebbing away.
And for some reason I want to call her Emma.
7 (#ulink_b0b59814-f915-5126-87ab-fcc1815700dc)
David (#ulink_b0b59814-f915-5126-87ab-fcc1815700dc)
The way things went, after I first gazed into her eyes, first heard her voice – it’s not the way I necessarily would have wanted it to go. I would have liked there to have been less trauma. I would have liked to have avoided the pain. The pain I bore, and the pain I had to inflict.
But this is what happens. This is where you end up.
I hadn’t expected that any woman would change my life. My experience with women had never been good. When one you love dies, so early in your life, you’re not exactly left with the most optimistic hopes for the future. And if another, who ought to love you, doesn’t, that doesn’t help mend the wound. I’d been through both scenarios, with a sister in the grave before her time, and a mother who, together with my father, hadn’t left for the next life soon enough. Childhood was a mass of misery in my head, and in my youth I’d hoped one day I’d flee from it. Get far enough away to at last be free. But time was a vicious teacher, and eventually I had to learn to be satisfied with an unhappiness as deeply set as my bones and my blood. And eventually I did: I simply got used to it. Give a man enough pain, and for long enough, and he’ll stop hoping for anything else.
But that encounter, that first moment with her – it changed things. I’d long since given up on escaping my pain; hell, I’d made a career of wallowing in it. Surrounding myself with more of the same. I had become a man condemned to live in the never-ending cycle of sorrow I’d carried as long as I could remember.
And then, in a single instant, something new. A doorway into a new life.
Not that the pain would leave, even then. Not for me. That was, in the end, simply too much to hope for. In the days that would come I would smile, and hope, and sing, and even find the means to rejoice. But never to sing the pain entirely away.
Some pain, we learn too late, exceeds the songs that are sung of it.
8 (#ulink_8a461f91-e7a5-5e33-af2f-b9b5f3a17067)
Amber (#ulink_8a461f91-e7a5-5e33-af2f-b9b5f3a17067)
I don’t burst through doors, it’s just not my way. Never has been. But today, just now, as I tentatively push ours open enough to catch the sight beyond, I wish I was the kind of person who bursts through doors. The day’s been too strange, and I want the surety, the comfort that I know waits on the other side – and I want it now, instantaneously, all at once.
But I don’t burst through. I push gently. Wood parts from wood and scrapes across our much-abused carpeting. And though the opening is tentative, the reveal is what I long for. The open door gives way to the reality of genuine happiness. This is home. Within …
My heart always rejoices when I see David, and today I need that rush more than most. I rush forward, grab him by his fleshy, muscular shoulders, and pull his lips towards mine. They’re parted even as we meet and I lock us into a long, warm embrace. It extends into a span of time I really couldn’t measure, and wouldn’t want to try. I am a woman who knows true love; and when you know that love, you don’t try to understand it.
Finally, our lip-lock breaks. ‘Well, hell, good to see you too.’ David’s face is a wide grin. Stubble, firm cheekbones, that slightly olive skin with its twinkle of shine – ‘It isn’t oily, babe, that’s Mediterranean sexy!’ Everything is familiar and welcoming. A touch of my pink lipstick has clung to his chin. ‘I take it life in the shop wasn’t all that bad today?’
I’m shaking my head, kicking off my favourite retro flats with an overly girlish motion, like Dorothy flipping her slippers to an unheard musical beat. It’s a playful gesture that made him laugh once, and which I’ve repeated a hundred times since. My shoes wind up somewhere in the corner, lopsided, near Sadie’s plastic water dish.
A flash of white light at the edges of my vision – to be ignored. It’s nothing. The remnants of a migraine. I do so often get those.
‘Work was fine, David. I’m just happy to be home.’
The flipping of shoes has roused Sadie to life. She’s already at David’s feet, looking pleased to have the household back in proper assembly. Her orange fur droops against the tiles beneath her as she saunters over and shoves her snout against my ankles. I tap at her head and give the usual ‘That’s a lovely puppy’ utterance in baby-talk tones, which sends her tail wagging.
Wagging. A breeze. Wind …
I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s always been amazed how quickly our thoughts can take us to another place. The present moment is a spectacular case in point. The day, the house, the dog – they all coalesce, and suddenly they’re all gone. All I see in this instant is a seaside walkway in the Marin Headlands, a vividly blue sky, and the sound of seagulls squawking over steep hillsides that abruptly end in cliffs sheering down to the Pacific.
A good memory, this one. I permit it to sweep through me without resistance.
I was hiking north, that’s how I remember it, and at a good clip. Years ago. The shoreline on my left lay at the bottom of cliff faces that lifted up in brilliant severity from sea level, with the hills on my right dressed in spring wildflowers that almost concealed the cement remains of the naval turrets and bunkers that had been active in these hills until the end of the Second World War. In the distance, only grey-blue seas and low clouds over the minuscule Farallon Islands. Beyond them, nothing at all until Hawaii.
I was alone, as I always was, and lost in grey thoughts that clashed with the bright skies. I was walking with sticks, those retractable kinds that look like ski poles but cost twice as much. He was at the front of a group of two or three, walking in the opposite direction. I don’t think I noticed him first. It was the other way around.
‘Excuse us,’ he said, politely. The wind was blowing (a given; it was the Pacific coast in early spring – the wind is always blowing). He was covered in a puffy red coat that looked as if it had been injected with a little more stuffing than required, giving his torso the appearance of a badly packaged tomato.
It could have ended right there, our first encounter. It could have been our only. But in a moment out of a children’s cartoon I sidestepped left when it should have been right, my eyes downcast, on my feet rather than on the strange tomato person in front of me. He did the same, and a second later our bodies collided – heads first, with the requisite crack, and then chests and arms and hands to keep each other from falling.
The way things begin.
‘Oh, Hell, I’m so sorry,’ he said, reaching out to stabilize me. ‘That was entirely my fault.’
‘No, it was mine,’ I freed a hand to rub my forehead. And I looked up, wincing in the slanted light that suddenly felt too bright.
That’s when our eyes connected for the first time. That magical, painful, wonderful moment.
David’s eyes were, and are, a stranger hazel than most I’ve seen before. Blue and green in equal mixture, but they have brown centres, just around the iris. Something unique. I must have stared into them longer than social norms would allow because the next words were his, awkward and accompanied by a glance that broke mine and tried to find some other landmark on the barren horizon at which he could stare.
‘At least we’re both still upright.’ His words were cheesy and superfluous, but I didn’t care.
‘I should pay more attention to where I’m going,’ I offered. Sheepish grin. Foolish girl. I wished I had stronger words to say, but I had’t been feeling myself, and those words didn’t come.
‘It happens,’ he answered. The profundity of our conversation was truly epic. ‘These surroundings, they can … they can take you in.’
And there was his smile. The first time I’d seen it. The one I’ve grown to know so well over the years. One too many teeth in an otherwise nicely balanced mouth. That cute, very cute, face, bordered with slightly disorderly locks of black hair and a refreshingly masculine touch of stubble on his chin. I’ve never understood women who don’t go for stubbled chins and hairy chests. They’re an incomprehensible demographic, too influenced by the wax mannequins that pass for men in magazines. I’ve always gone for the Chia Pets of the race.
The skin around his eyes bunched as he smiled, full of warmth and sincerity. ‘I’m David,’ he’d finally offered, reaching out a hand with its glove considerately removed. ‘And these guys over here’ – he gestured towards the men a short distance behind him, who didn’t seem to notice – ‘are my work colleagues.’ One of the men might have nodded, but seemed too chilled to consider approaching and reaching out a hand himself. He was huddled with a third member of their party, stood a few steps away, engrossed in a gathering of sea birds diving for fish over the edges of the cliffs. I might have been on Mars for all they appeared to notice me.
I raised my hand to David’s and felt a powerful grip.
‘I’m Amber,’ I answered. ‘It’s … it’s lovely to meet you.’ The words were almost flirtatious, like nothing I’d ever uttered before.
It made him smile again.
Then, the strangest thing of all. I spoke not only flirtatiously, but with an openness completely uncharacteristic of everything inside me.
‘I’m staying just up the way, by Muir Beach. At the Pelican Inn. If you … you know, ever wanted to bump into each other again.’
In the midst of my confusion, wit. Spectacular.
Or maybe not quite spectacular, but definitely more than was normal for me.
I cringe at the memory, but it’s that wonderful cringe of something so horrible, something that could have gone so terrifically, spectacularly wrong, that ended up going just the opposite. It wasn’t two nights later, or three, that David crouched his big frame through the short, barrel-wood door of the Pelican Inn, ‘just stopping by’ with the hope to say hello. It was the same evening. The very same.
There was something magical on the coast that day. That’s the only explanation. Something magical that brought me out of my shell. That brought us together.
And now we’re here, in our kitchen in the little town of Windsor, California, standing in front of the refrigerator on which an orange paper cutout of the word ‘Bump!’ remains the perpetual reminder of our first meeting. We’re still locked together, bodies close, though the kiss has ended. There’s beer on David’s breath – the scent of more than one. Usually means a long day in the shop, and the need to get out from behind the pharmacy counter for one or two before heading home. I have a fleeting desire to ask him about the mundane details of his day, but it passes quickly. Work is work. For today, his is behind him, mine’s behind me.
But I’m not wholly in control, and that conviction bends. The thoughts that come are an invasion, not an invitation. Into the swirl of memory floats a river with a bend I don’t recognize. The woman I’d read about on the computer and thought about so vividly on the drive home. The unexplained.
In this intimate moment I can feel goosebumps rise on my arms.
It almost happens. I almost touch that buzz of electricity that pulls my world out of order and into the mêlée of impulse and memory. I can tell I’m right at the edge of it. There are so many draws.
But I’m anchored in an emotion that’s more powerful than them all. I have my means of resistance. My solidity and my rock, firm and stable in my arms, with his big, beautiful smile.
I pull David’s face towards mine again. I can taste the beer on his lips, and I push him towards the door.
9 (#ulink_69168ca8-a279-5d97-b43e-45ebbdda2427)
Amber (#ulink_69168ca8-a279-5d97-b43e-45ebbdda2427)
It happened in the night, somewhere in the darkness of the drawn curtains and the muffled lampshades, beneath the cotton sheets and in the midst of the heady scent of all that goes on in the dark room of a husband and wife who’ve found their way there by stumbling up their staircase, falling into bed as clothes are thrown at walls and ceilings.
Somewhere in the midst of all that, the strangeness closed in.
Our bodies were as tightly wound together as two bodies can be. My chin was pressed into his neck, my lips somewhere near his ear, his whole body slippery with anticipation. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic. Mine was keeping pace.
Then came the flash of light. An image, bursting into my mind. A stranger’s face, loving and peaceful and kind and wicked and cruel, all at once. One of Cinderella’s sinister stepsisters, only far more beautiful.
I suddenly remembered the bookshop. The headline, my hours on the Internet, and something beyond all the details I’d read. Someone else’s games and mysteries and … wrongs. My whole body suddenly felt the immense, overwhelming wrongness of the world. And I remembered the highway, the flashes of my thoughts and fears on the drive instantly back before my eyes. The image. The face.
And I can hear whimpering, and crying; the utterances of a creature, crying out and asking me to know its pain. A judgement, cascading into my present.
And in my embrace with my solidity and my rock, my arms wrapped around David’s fiery chest, I said it. The single word that echoed out to me from that strange, white darkness.
A name. Her name.
‘Emma.’
I don’t know where it came from, why it made my lips move. But her name was suddenly there, and I couldn’t keep it to myself.
‘Emma.’
I could feel David’s body go rigid beneath me. There was ice. The cessation of everything. And then the world stopped, and started to fade away.
10 (#ulink_96dd39d6-5f66-52f2-864b-4fdaeb4c5c5d)
David (#ulink_96dd39d6-5f66-52f2-864b-4fdaeb4c5c5d)
It pains me to think that Amber might start to understand. There are so many things a husband and a wife share, but there are also things we can’t. She and I can never share the truth. Not this truth. It would destroy her. It’s only the lies that keep us alive, and keep us together.
I’ve struggled with this fact countless times. Since childhood it’s been engrained in all of us that truth is what liberates, and it alone. It will set you free – such a pithy saying, and probably as a general rule it holds true. But not always. No, not always. Sometimes truth is the greatest form of slavery.
At one point in my life I would have rejected that premise with all my energy – I’d have spat out that lies have absolutely no place in life, that they lead only to darkness and torment. That ought to be argued as a matter of principle. But I simply can’t. I won’t. Experience sometimes proves right what social norms insist are wrong.
Everything I’ve built with Amber is a lie. I admit that. It’s all facade. That’s what makes it work – for me, for her. A beautiful, artistic, warm facade of manufactured reality. It isn’t true, perhaps. That depends on your definition. But it’s real.
It’s been real since that day in the Marin Headlands when – for all Amber knows, or ever will – we met for the first time. That happy little headbutt above the sea, the little sidestepping dance that forced the moment not to pass but linger. Some might say the staging of it, the weeks of thoughtful planning, of following her movements and learning her itineraries, of making sure I’d be on just the same path at just the same time, were manipulative or false. But no one accuses a man who plots out a typical first date of being sinister for doing so – deliberating what flowers to buy, what restaurant to go to, what music to ‘accidentally’ have playing on the car stereo during the drive. It’s normal, all of it.
Is what I’ve done really so different? Only the circumstances are out of the norm, and for damned good reasons.
And I still have means of rescuing the situation. Tools. Resources. Not everything is lost.
