Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with her at all. She just has her way and that’s that. Some of the things she does, I kind of like. She’s sort of impervious to the horrors of the world. Like an alien.”

  “She’s an alien?” Kelly laughed incredulously.

  “If I found out she was an actual space alien I would not be surprised at all,” I said.

  Our mains arrived. She groaned and gasped over it, made a big deal, the way she used to when we were together. She doled out my serving. Put the chili paste on the side, the way I liked it. Our smiles faded, and I wandered back into dangerous territory.

  “I’m curious to know why it would be hard for you,” I said carefully. “Even if I was in a romantic relationship with Amanda.”

  Kelly toyed with her food. Wouldn’t meet my eyes. When she spoke, eventually, her voice was small.

  “I know it probably seems like I just stopped loving you when I shut off contact with you, Ted,” Kelly said. “But I didn’t. I really didn’t. I just put my feelings for you on hold. And they’ve been on hold this whole time. Until now.”

  I swallowed a piece of calamari that was too hot. I felt it sear its way down my throat, chased it quickly with wine.

  “What?”

  “I’ve listened to the podcast,” Kelly said. “I’ve gone back through the trial documents. I’ve talked to people. Sean. Your lawyer. He was very good to listen to me, to answer my questions. Very patient.”

  The dread was returning. A sharp pain in my gut, high up, near my heart.

  “I may have made a mistake,” Kelly said. She put her fork down. We stared at each other.

  “I made a mistake,” she corrected.

  “This is…” I began. My thoughts were racing. I shoved more pieces of calamari into my mouth, stalling for time. Washed them down with more wine. “This is very kind. I appreciate it.”

  “Oh, Ted.”

  “No, no, I’m serious,” I said. “I’m not being sarcastic. It’s kind of you to put it into words. You didn’t make a mistake—you followed your instincts, and at the time that meant backing away from me. There was no right or wrong way to handle it. It hurt. It still hurts. But Kel, you didn’t walk away from me for fun, or because you enjoyed it, or because you wanted to punish me. I’ve always known that.”

  She dabbed delicately at her eyes with a napkin from the holder beside me, trying to save her makeup. My throat was tight. I watched the people walking by outside the windows, young people texting on screens encased in big rubber phone cases shaped like teddies or bunnies. When Kelly took my hand she drew me out of a downward spiral into nervousness over my television appearance. Only an hour to go until it all began again.

  “Maybe we can fix it,” Kelly said.

  “We can fix it, sure.” I squeezed her fingers. “There’s not much to fix. Kelly, I’m not angry at you.”

  “No, Ted, I don’t mean our friendship. I mean our marriage.”

  I drew my hand away. Felt flashes of anger. Confusion. Longing. I scratched at my throat, where the muscles were still tightening. Tried to press the ache out of my eyes, the desire for tears.

  “Come home,” she said. “Come home and be with Lillian and me. She needs you. I need you.”

  Dear Diary,

  I witnessed my own death. Twice.

  The first played out in my plans. In the days after the attack, I made a mental list. I’d get the car detailed. I would sabotage it, maybe cut the timing belt, empty the radiator fluid, and run it to smoking, report it to Chloe, suggest that perhaps we’d bought ourselves a lemon. Then, a week later, I’d sabotage it again, throw a tantrum and demand we sell it. If the car had been seen, I figured police would be looking for cars bought and sold in the days after the attack. They’d be looking for a panicked offender. I wouldn’t panic. I refused to panic.

  I’d go out and spend some time with the boys at the pub. They’d be looking for someone acting weirdly, wanting to talk about the case. Evasive. I’d go to an internet café and keep an eye on the leads both on the police media sites and in the forums. It would be stupid to keep googling it from home. If there was so much as a whiff of me, a good composite sketch or a partial license plate, I’d end it. Prepare the apartment, write my note, wait for Chloe to come home. No sense leaving Chloe around to put words to it all. She’d never explain properly. She was too simple. She’d make me look like a monster. I’d do her quickly, then do myself.

  I saw us aligned neatly on a plastic sheet on the living room floor, holding hands maybe, something gentle. The door unlocked and slightly ajar, waiting for that inevitable someone to find us. One of my mates coming round to grab a jacket left here over the weekend. Chloe’s mum. The unsuspecting postman. I’d make no apologies in the note. This was not my fault. Not a decision. Not something I could have helped. I’d tell my mother I loved her and sign off. Neat.

  And then I was sitting with Chloe, watching but not watching one of her stupid shows, when a news update told me someone had been arrested for the attack.

  It took everything I had not to move, not to speak. I wanted to scream. And then, over the coming days, I watched my death again. Only this time it wasn’t a slow, sorrowful imagining of my demise at my own hands. It was a thrilling, maddening, frenzied death played out by another man.

  I learned his name was Ted Conkaffey. The big, black-haired man from the roadside, the one who’d stopped beside her.

  I watched him tumble and twist as he fell, mystified, feeling the wind passing over him shred at my skin at the same time it did his. There were proud portraits of him in his cadet uniform, chest puffed and chin high, the peaked cap almost comical on his square head. Bright-eyed youth playing dress-up games with a bunch of other grinning boys. I dug and dug, each time bringing up new tragedies from within the bowels of the internet. Ted on his wedding day, his elderly father bent and smiling, a good foot shorter than the big broad cop. The enormous specter of him in black riot gear standing at the cordon of some drug raid or another. Heading to court in a suit to give evidence against Khalid Farah, drug lord and suspected murderer. Here Ted was the street-grimy Clark Kent, his superhuman strength and goodness obvious through the awkwardly buttoned shirt. From drug trials to his own trial, one side of the courtroom to the other, his tie looking too tight, choking him, a public hanging already happening long before the verdict.

  I watched him wither and pale as the world screamed at him. Dying, dying. This would have been me, jail-starved and beaten. Disgraced and running, trying to hide in the tangled wilds of some arse-fuck suburb on the edge of nowhere.

  I became fascinated by Ted. How the treacherous north had darkened and toughened his skin; seeing him appear, bearded and black-eyed, in reports of mobs gathering at his broken-down home. Months passed without word. I flicked through reports about him and his new partner, Amanda Pharrell, the killer. The other me, born again, ruggedly handsome and wounded on flashy, sensational ads for Stories and Lives.

  I became obsessed. Not only had I witnessed in grotesque detail round-the-clock coverage of my own demise, but I’d seen my own redemption, too. A part of me knew it was all a fantasy. That this Conkaffey guy obviously possessed incredible qualities in order to survive it all. But then, it was so easy to see my face on his, the downcast eyes, the pained grimace. He pressed on. On and on through life, defiant of the shame the world heaped on him. Refusing to be buried alive.

  I listened to a podcast about him, sitting rigid on the couch, eyes wide, ears pricked. There was mention, all of a sudden, of an appearance. Ted himself. In the flesh.

  I grabbed my phone and opened the episode, clicked the link at the bottom of the page. My hands were shaking.

  Amanda and Sweeney sat at the bar, two dejected souls, whiskey at their fingertips, chins low. Amanda was simply mirroring Sweeney’s body with her own. She’d read somewhere that a lot of empathy was exhibited physically. If s
he wanted to feel what Sweeney felt, she should act as Sweeney acted. The new police detective rapped the side of her glass with her fingernails, now and then wincing slightly as embarrassing or undignified thoughts crossed her mind. Amanda looked along the bar to the kitchen area, where the chefs wandered back and forth, flashes of raggedy black aprons dusty with glove powder and flour.

  All evidence of the murders had been cleaned and bleached away. Amanda was puzzled by that. Of course she didn’t believe that Claudia Flannery and her employees should have left the reddish brown smears left by Andrew’s struggling feet on the tiles. The print of Keema’s jaw and chin, red and round, perfect beneath the uneven droplets and puddles all around it. But surely there should have been something, otherwise how might the thing be remembered?

  For Amanda’s own crime, it seemed very important to friends and family of the girl that her murder be remembered. Amanda had read in the newspaper in prison about the five-year anniversary. We must never forget what happened to Lauren, her mother had said. And yet, as far as Amanda knew, there was nothing to mark the spot where she had stabbed Lauren to death in the rainforest. No cross, or briskly informative plaque: Here is where Lauren Freeman was stabbed to death. Her killer didn’t mean it. She was trying to get someone else. May she rest in peace or whatever. Amanda had noted this strange contradictory insistence on both remembering and forgetting in other cases she’d heard about in prison. For a brief time one of her cellmates was a woman who had drowned her three children. The woman had commissioned memorial tattoos from another inmate. Yet the house where the babies had died had been sold immediately, bulldozed, replaced with a small park. The houses on either side of the park had changed their numbers to confuse the casual murder voyeur as to the house’s original location.

  “Why didn’t I have someone pick them up from the airport?” Sweeney groaned suddenly, distracting Amanda from her thoughts.

  “Would that have helped?” Amanda asked. You were supposed to ask questions when you were being a good listener. “I’m not sure cassowaries curb their behavior for police cruisers.”

  “It’s not about the cassowary,” Sweeney sighed. “It’s about consideration. I left them to get a bloody taxi. How rude. I’m fucking this up. I’m fucking it all up. I feel like shit.”

  “You’re a cop,” Amanda said. “I think that’s part of the job description.”

  Sweeney smiled. “Out of my depth and feeling like shit. Both in the job description.”

  Amanda shrugged.

  Sweeney said, “Doesn’t this kind of work ever bring you down?”

  “Nah,” Amanda sniffed.

  “Not even when…” Sweeney seemed to be treading carefully. “Even when you know very intimately the effect that a sudden, unexpected death can have on a family?”

  Sweeney watched Amanda carefully. The noise of the bar swirled around them.

  “Sweens, are you trying to tell me something?” Amanda asked.

  Sweeney couldn’t find the words. Yes, she guessed. She was trying to tell her something. She was trying to share, for the first time in more than a decade, what she had done. Because something was telling Sweeney that Amanda would be the only person who could possibly understand what Sweeney felt about her father’s death. About her refusal to help him. The guilt. The shame.

  And yet, at the same time, she knew there was every chance Amanda was incapable of understanding at all.

  “Why don’t you just choose your penance,” Amanda suggested.

  “Huh?”

  “Whatever it is you did,” Amanda said. “Whatever it is you’ve been tiptoeing around me for days with—why don’t you just decide on a penance and serve it, and get on with your life.”

  Sweeney swallowed hard.

  “I was lucky, see,” Amanda continued, sipping her whiskey and smacking her lips. “Someone gave me mine. I went to jail. It was a pretty good penance, as far as they go. I had a great time there. A really great time.” She laughed to herself, smiled at her drink as though watching some long-ago prank being played out on reflections in the tea-colored liquid. “But when it was done, and I walked out, that was it.” She dusted off her hands. “Doneski!”

  “Okay.” Sweeney nodded.

  “Whatever your crime was…” Amanda appreciated her partner for a second, shook her head. “No. I’m not going to try to guess. Whatever it was, go ahead and pick a punishment for yourself that you think is befitting. Do it. And then, move the fuck on.”

  “Move the fuck on?”

  “Yep. You don’t have to forget it completely,” Amanda said. “Cut one of your fingers off, maybe. Then it’ll always be there, every time you look.”

  “I’m not going to cut one of my fingers off!”

  “Well, I don’t know! Say a thousand Hail Marys. Chop down a tree with a pair of scissors,” Amanda said. “I told you—I didn’t have to come up with mine, I don’t have any great ideas!”

  Sweeney watched the investigator. The television above the bar flashed colors over her face, the yellow of a rose tattoo on her neck. The red of an anatomical heart poking out above the neckline of her shirt. Sweeney heard a promotion for Ted’s appearance on Stories and Lives, but she didn’t look at the screen. All over Amanda, the scars of the croc attack sliced through the tattoos like lightning, carving the once beautiful face of the portrait of a geisha on her bicep into a grotesque, cracked-mirror image.

  “Is that what the tattoos are about?” Sweeney asked. “Were they penance?”

  “No.”

  “Like a reminder?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tattoo over these?” Sweeney asked, drunk enough on the whiskey to reach out and touch the nearest scar. Amanda slapped her hand away.

  “No touching! Rule one!”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Sweeney had encountered Amanda’s rules already. Rule fourteen was the most amusing to date. No use of the word “bulbous,” ever. Under any circumstances.

  “I won’t tattoo over these.” Amanda pulled at her bicep, examined the scar there. “They’re too badass. Who else do you know who has teeth marks on their butt?”

  “No one.”

  “No one,” Amanda confirmed. “Me? I’ve got heaps. He really munched me.”

  “Must have been some tasty butt,” Sweeney said.

  Amanda choked on her drink, laughing. Sweeney felt uplifted for the first time that day. That was Amanda. Sweeney felt the constant pull of tension around the woman, the terror that she would break out and do something inappropriate or weird in front of a victim’s family, her colleagues, members of the public. Mingled with this in the perfect storm of emotions swirling within her was the awareness, all the time, that this woman had killed. That she was capable of killing. And what a weariness that brought in Sweeney, because she saw herself reflected there, the woman who carried on like nothing was wrong despite the death that forever stained her. And now, the storm broke with sudden irrepressible joy. Pip finished her whiskey. Yes, Amanda was exhausting. But every night this week Pip had gone to sleep and fallen into welcoming blackness, something she hadn’t done since she was a teenager. It was like Amanda absorbed her pain. A magnet constantly pulling invisible forces from her.

  A scuffle behind them near the door to the bar, glasses toppling. They turned, and there was Michael Bell by a table of seated men, staggering drunk. Sweeney found herself standing, her hand going to her belt, searching for the gun she had left at home.

  “You come and drink here,” Michael was wailing, his arm out, pleading, gesturing to the kitchen. “My son was murdered in there. This is where he died.”

  “Should we…?” Sweeney glanced around the faces in the bar, some watching the fray, others refusing to look, cringing, hands over eyes. When she looked at Amanda, the woman was picking her teeth with a bent straw.

  “Nah,” she said. “Better to let the boys get it.”

  As Sweeney watched, the men at the table ushered Michael outside, arms around his broad shoulders, pattin
g hard. A few hostile looks were thrown Sweeney’s way as she turned back toward the bar. The town wanted this solved. They wouldn’t wait much longer before they started looking for ways to issue their own brand of justice. People liked a cause in places like this. A reason to band together, to be angry. Injustice would bring them crawling out of their hidey-holes like spiders sensing a tugging on their webs.

  “I let Stephanie Neash go,” Sweeney said. The bartender glanced at her, a young spiky-haired redhead who might have been covering a shift originally meant for her friend Keema or Andrew. The girl had been eavesdropping while racking and polishing glasses. Sweeney kept her voice low, leaned in to Amanda. “She didn’t do it.”

  “You search the house?” Amanda asked.

  “Yeah,” Sweeney said. “No sign of a weapon. No gunshot residue. Not that that would have proven anything anyway, but we did check, and we checked the Bell place, too. All there was at Stephanie’s place was a bunch of unwashed dishes in the sink and a sad, neglected cat that didn’t appear to have been fed in a while.”

  “Huh.” Amanda examined whatever she had picked from between her teeth.

  “In the bedroom there were photos of her and Andrew,” Sweeney said. “Letters from when they were in high school. Passing notes, having conversations. He used to call her Little Love and she used to call him Big Love.”

  Sweeney cleared her throat, rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  “Are you crying?” Amanda asked.

  “No, I’m not crying.” Sweeney sniffed. “It’s just sad. That’s all.”

  “The high school stuff?” Amanda shook her head. “But it’s been years since they were in high school. I don’t understand. Why is that sad?”

  “Never mind,” Sweeney said.

  “Hey, what’d the shrink say about the false confession?” Amanda asked.