Cemetery Lake (6 page)

‘If you’d like.’

‘What am I going to tell him?’

‘Perhaps we should sit down for a few minutes first.’

‘Sure, okay, sure, I don’t know where my manners are. Can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?’ She starts to stand back up. ‘Anything, just name it.’ She’s halfway out of the lounge when she pulls up short; then, fidgeting her hands, she slowly turns back to look at me. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ she says, and starts to cry.

She’s not the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing,

and I suddenly wish I hadn’t come. I feel the urge to hold her while she cries and an equally strong urge to turn and run back down the hallway and get the hell out of this street. I end up standing still.

‘Please, just tell me why you’re here,’ she asks.

I can no more easily tell this woman her child is dead than

I could show her pictures of the corpse. I cannot tell her about Cemetery Lake, about a woman whose decayed remains look like

they belong to Rachel. I can’t mention the exhumation, can’t detail my swim with the corpses, can’t mention it’s the same cemetery I almost buried my wife in two years ago after the accident. I reach into my pocket and produce the small plastic bag with Rachel’s ring. She takes it without a word, then slowly sinks down into a chair opposite me. For a long time she says nothing.

‘It turned up today in an investigation,’ I say, and she finally manages to pull her eyes away from it and look back up at me.

“Do you recognise it? Does it belong to Rachel?’

‘Where did you find it?’ she asks. ‘Who had it?’

“Nobody had it on them,’ I lied.

‘But how, then?’

“Please, I need to ask you a few questions. The inscription, it says Rachel & David for ever.’

‘Was it David? Did he give you the ring?’

‘No. Nobody had it. I found it.’

‘Where?’

“Please, Mrs Tyler, can you tell me about David?’

‘How did you know to come here?’

‘The inscription,’ I say, but then suddenly realise my mistake.

The only reason I’d check Missing Persons would be if I believed the ring belonged to somebody who was dead. Mrs Tyler, thank

God, doesn’t make the connection.

“David gave it to her for her birthday.’

“Is David her boyfriend?’ I ask, careful not to say ‘was’.

“I’ve already told the police all I know’

‘But I’m not the police,’ I say, ‘and that means I can approach things differently.’

‘You think she’s dead, don’t you.’

I think of the flowers in the passenger seat of my car, and

I regret not driving out to see my wife first. I could have talked to her. Told her about my day. Told her how much I missed her.

Could have held her hand and told her everything.

“I don’t know,’ I say.

Then what makes you think you can help her?’

It’s interesting she has asked how I can help Rachel, and not her and her husband. Interesting isn’t the word. It’s devastating.

This woman isn’t just holding out for the possibility that her daughter is alive; she’s holding on to the reality of it. But the question is more than that. It makes me think of exactly what

I can do to help Rachel: nothing. Not now. I can’t even help the others who have followed.

“I would imagine Rachel wants as many people helping her as

she can get.’

She nods, then starts telling me about her daughter, and

I realise I could be anybody in the world and she’d still be happy to speak about Rachel. She’d probably be the same way if I was at the door selling encyclopaedias or God. She talks for nearly twenty minutes and I don’t interrupt her. I know what it’s like to have lost somebody. I know what it is like to hold out hope.

False hope is cruel, but perhaps not as cruel as no hope at all. It’s a judgement only those who have been there can make.

‘And David?’ I ask, after she has told me what she can about

Rachel’s life, including in detail the days before she disappeared.

‘What can you tell me about him?’

“I thought he knew what happened,’ she says. ‘For those few

weeks I was sure she was living with him. See, they were living together, but not really. All her things were here, are still here, but she wouldn’t come home for days on end. When we didn’t see

her for a week we tried contacting her, then him, but he said he hadn’t seen her. I thought he was lying, and that he was shielding her from us for something we must have done. But I knew,

I knew something wasn’t right. I don’t know how, but I just knew.

So Michael, my husband, called the police. We filed a Missing

Persons report. We hadn’t heard from her in nearly a week. It

wasn’t like her.’

‘What happened when the police spoke to David?’

‘Nothing. They said they had no reason to believe he was lying.

Still, I wasn’t convinced. I would go to his house at different times, but there was never any sign of her. I would knock on his door in the middle of the night. After a while I began to see that David was just as distraught as we were, and I started leaving him alone. I don’t know if he really believes Rachel is still alive.’

I throw a couple of names at her. Bruce Alderman and Henry

Martins. She shakes her head and tells me she’s never heard them, and asks me why. I tell her the names have come up but I’m

not sure where they fit into it, and that it may be unlikely they even do. She gives me a list of Rachel’s friends, places she liked to go, photographs of her, people she worked with, David’s

address. She’s giving it all some real serious thought, hoping for a connection, hoping she is going to mention a name that’s the key to getting her daughter back.

She walks me to the door. She seems reluctant to let me go. I

feel guilty I’ve deceived her, that I’ve given her more hope today than she had yesterday, and the guilt becomes a sickening feeling that makes the world sway a little as I make my way to the car. The police will identify Rachel Tyler. They will come here tomorrow or the next day, and they will tell Patricia that her daughter is dead. I can’t stop it from happening. I can’t prepare her for it.

It’s getting close to eight o’clock and within the next twenty minutes it will be dark, the thick clouds bringing the night earlier than usual for this time of year. The flowers in the front seat still look fresh enough to keep on growing. I start my car and pull

away, the small voice inside my head questioning what in the hell I am doing, and the bigger voice, the one I use every day to justify my actions, telling me I have no idea.

Perception is a funny thing. Especially when you’re dealing with luck. Somebody who survives a plane crash is considered lucky. Is he considered lucky to have even been on that flight? Or unlucky?

Does the bad luck of being seated on a doomed flight cancel out the good luck of surviving? I don’t get it that people are lucky to have lost only an arm.

My wife was lucky. That’s what people say. An inch here or

a second or two there, and things would have been different.

I would have ended up burying her, and the flowers I keep buying would be going to a grave. Inches. Seconds. Luck. Good luck for her. Good luck for all. It doesn’t add up. She wasn’t lucky. Not at all. Wasn’t lucky when the car ploughed into her; wasn’t lucky that her head hit the footpath at forty kilometres an hour and not fifty. Wasn’t lucky when her legs were shattered, her ribs broken.

Lucky to have lived, yes, but not lucky.

The care home is out of the city where suburbia kicks in and

city noise dies away. It covers five hectares of land, widi grounds scenic enough to be used for a wedding. The buildings are forty years old, grey brick with the occasional flare of polished oak windowsill — a combination of bad ideas or perhaps good ideas that didn’t work. The driveway is long and shaded by giant trees that flourish in the summer and look like skeletons in the winter.

I pull up outside the main office and for a few seconds try to imagine that this world hasn’t gone mad.

The main doors are heavy and made from oak, as if to stop the

weak from leaving or tempt the grieving to turn away. The nurse behind the reception desk smiles at me. Her dark red hair matches the sunset in the painting behind her.

‘Hi, Theo. What have you done with the weather?’

I fake a smile of my own, the type anybody with social skills

would apply when the weather suddenly becomes the topic of

conversation. ‘Tomorrow I’m organising sun. God owes me a

favour.’

She nods, maybe agreeing that yes He does. ‘Flowers for me

this time?’ she asks, like she always does.

The nurses and doctors are always nice, always friendly, always professional, their questions and pleasantries always cliched. The alternative is unthinkable. You’d ask how their day was going and they would tell you the truth and you’d never come back.

‘Next time,’ I say, which is what I say every time. ‘How is

she?’

‘She’s doing fine, Theo. But what about you? Is that you I saw on the news?’

“Yeah, it’s been one of those crazy days.’ A fairly accurate

summation, I feel.

She nods. ‘Every day this city shows us a little more how things don’t make sense.’

‘Sometimes I think Christchurch is broken,’ I say, ‘and nobody is ever going to fix it.’

I walk down the corridor, passing empty seats and closed

doors and a nurses’ station that looks empty but most likely isn’t.

The entire floor is speckled green linoleum, the sort that is easy to clean blood and vomit and shit off and will last two hundred years. The day is cold but the air in here is comfortable. It’s always comfortable, and so it ought to be. Some of the people in care here don’t know how to complain, and some who do know simply don’t have the ability any more. There are more paintings with water and sunsets, peaceful scenes that are perhaps supposed to help calm the residents here before they move on from this

world and into the next. There are pots full of artificial plants.

And there are decorations for the people who come here who are on the verge of losing it.

I climb a flight of stairs, and halfway down another corridor

I stop at Bridget’s room. The door is open. She is sitting by the window, looking out at the misty rain and the trees and the lack of good weather that the nurses mention every time I arrive. She seems interested in all of it. I don’t know whether she hears me come in. I close the door behind me. She keeps staring outside.

‘Hey babe, I’ve missed you,’ I say, but she doesn’t answer. I take yesterday’s flowers out of the vase and put today’s flowers in. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice as I shuffle them around in an attempt to make them look nicer. I sit in the chair next to her and take her hand in mine. It’s warm. It’s always warm, no matter how cold the room gets. I’m glad for it, because it helps remind me my wife is still alive.

She occasionally blinks as I tell her about my day. There is

no expression on her face as I run a brush through her hair,

stroking it over and over, searching for the recognition that isn’t there. She does not laugh when I tell her how I slipped into the water. She doesn’t chide me for not telling Patricia Tyler that her daughter has been dead the entire time she has been missing.

Other noises, the shuffling of patients, the squeaking of caster wheels, come from the care home which, for the last few years, I have quietly nicknamed ‘Death Haven’. I’m not sure why I’ve

come up with the name. I’m not sure whether thinking of it as

Death Haven has made it more personal to me or less. Every day I have this romantic notion that I will come in here and Bridget will look up at me and smile. Every day. But she doesn’t. I hold onto the hope, I have become attached to it sentimentally, in the same way Mrs Tyler has become attached to the idea her daughter has run away and is living the perfect life in a perfect town and is so perfectly happy she just hasn’t had the chance to call.

I keep talking until my throat is sore and I’m out of words.

Bridget has remained in her catatonic state the entire time, happy in the world she is in, or perhaps sad; I wish I had a way of

knowing. The window and the trees beyond hold for her the

same fascination as they have done every day for the last two

years. I feel exhausted, as I always do when I purge myself of the day’s events. The silence in the room is peaceful, and in these quiet times I often think that I would be better off if I could be catatonic too, unknowing and unfeeling, and keeping Bridget company. I sit holding her hand for a few more minutes, then

I stand, pulling her hand up slightly. She comes with me and

steps towards the bed. Her actions are involuntary, her body just following the motions. She can move from the bed to the chair, and back again. Sometimes the staff will find her standing in

the corridor, motionless, and twice she has made it down into the foyer. Guide a glass up to her lips and she can drink. Raise a fork to her mouth and she can eat. But she cannot fend for herself, cannot speak, cannot look at you with an expression that suggests she knows you are there. Everything is a thousand miles away, and her eyes are fixed on that point in the distance, continually searching, searching, but never finding.

She lies down. I kiss her on the side of her cool face — her

hands are always warm, her cheeks always cool — then slowly

make my way from her room. I don’t turn back. I never do, not

these days. I will see her tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after.

Patricia Tyler isn’t the only person in this city playing the

waiting game.

Outside, the cold air feels like silk against my face. I stand next to my car for nearly five full minutes. I stand doing nothing as the rain dampens my jacket. I’m not even really sure whether I’m thinking about my wife or dead girls or bad luck and bad omens, Until finally I find the strength to drive away.