by A J Grayson
My honest man is lying. I can’t stop the tears rolling down my cheeks.
Then David’s odd command rolls into my consciousness.
‘I want you to drive straight home, Amber.’ A tightening in my chest. ‘Don’t make any stops along the way.’
The chemical smell wafts through my nostrils like an accusation. I’m starting to feel cold, the chill emanating from inside.
‘Lie down and wait for me.’ Then what has suddenly become the most ominous instruction of all. ‘And don’t call anyone else.’
David had clipped off the end of the phrase. It had struck me as odd even in my state, but now I can hear him swearing at himself as he realized he’d said something he didn’t mean to. Something that had slipped out anyway.
Never in all of the years I’ve known him have I ever feared my husband. From our first collision, to his seeking me out at the inn that night, to the romantic wonder of every moment that followed once we were back in civilization – nothing he’s ever done has put the slightest hint of dread into me. But in this instant, crouched on this floor, I’m terrified. Terrified, and possessed of only a single thought.
I have to get out of here before he gets back.
37
Amber
‘I’ll be home within an hour or two, tops.’
There is nothing comforting about the timeline David set out on the phone. His willingness to alter the statement he’d made only moments earlier in the same call – one minute saying he couldn’t get off work early, the next announcing he was heading this way – compounds my anxiety.
He’s worried. What I told him, spooked him. He’s upset, and he’s racing here to find me.
For the first time in my life, I don’t know what David will do when he sees me. And for the first time since I’ve known him, I’m afraid to find out. Rational or otherwise, my chest fills with panic.
I glance at my watch. It’s 1.19 p.m. I don’t know exactly what time it was when I’d called him from the road, but it was likely near on an hour ago. Given that he’d have had to come home sometime today to take care of the floor, I can’t even be sure where he was when we spoke. Was he all the way back down in the city? Somewhere closer? God, he could be here any minute.
I’m on my feet again, leaving David’s office and rushing down the few steps to the bedroom. Get out of here. Get out of here! I don’t know where I’ll go, or entirely why I’m going there, or how long I’ll be away, but I have to obey that inner voice. It’s time to get the hell out of this place.
I glance around our room. It’s so familiar, yet in this moment feels foreign and unoccupied. I didn’t make the bed before leaving this morning. The place is unkempt. The closet door is ajar.
I’m in no mood to scold myself for my domestic failings. Obviously, I had other things on my mind this morning, whether I fully understood them or not.
I stride over to the closet, trembling with an anxiety that has more or less extended through all my limbs. I have a yellow duffel bag inside, I think, tucked away somewhere in the back, and a plan quickly forms to stuff it with a few pairs of underwear and socks and at least one full change of clothes. Wherever I go, that’ll get me through until I can figure out what’s really going on.
I swing the wooden door fully open and shove aside my hanging clothes. Behind them, a general jumble of odds and bobs is stacked in a mess at the back, one on top of another without any semblance of order. I have to shuffle through the mess for a few seconds, but eventually I see a familiar, lemony shade of yellow, just visible beneath a triplet of loosely folded sweaters.
With a few more manoeuvres I’ve exposed the duffel bag I’d remembered was there, and I grab it and fling its crumpled shape onto to the bed. It takes only a few additional seconds to sift through my drawers and gather up my underthings. I’m back at the side of the bed a moment later, and I drop them into a small well of space between the bag and the balled up wad of our comforter. My breathing is getting away from me and I try with all my will to control it, but I’m on autopilot now. I’m anxious, but I’m moving. I’m off to somewhere safe.
I set the yellow bag upright and slide open the zip that runs crookedly along its top. With both hands I pull it open.
I get no further than that.
As my face goes numb and the whiteness at my eyes overtakes any hope of sight, the interior of the duffel bag just has time to burn itself into my vision. It contains only two items. A white t-shirt, caked in blood, and a knife, its blade coated in crimson.
PART FOUR
TWO-AND-A-HALF YEARS AGO
38
David
By the time Emma Fairfax was finished telling Dr Marcello and me what she’d done, there in that interview room in the ward, I despised her. I can’t say I’d seen everything yet in the short decade following graduating from UCLA and then med school in San Diego, but I’d seen a lot. Sat beside this very doctor as he’d dealt with a lot. But I’d never seen anything like this.
This was the first time I’d come face to face with a monster.
It wasn’t just the things she said, the things she’d done, that made her such a shocking revelation. It was that after all these years and a life surrounded by the kind of tortured souls that reminded me of childhood and my sister, I’d at last found one that had been in that same world – in the same kind of tortured hell as Evelyn had been. Though their stories would always be different, and this woman’s so much more grotesque and vile, I nevertheless felt that I had encountered someone, for the first time, whose life was linked to the kind of terror that had consumed my life as it had taken my sister’s.
My pen had stopped moving across my page as she spoke. Dr Marcello was an older hand, conditioned to these things. My mind, on the other hand, was trained to think of prescription options and dosage ratios, not to hear words like this woman was speaking.
Though I’d heard them before. From another perspective. That was the whole point.
Christ, it was all so repulsive.
She spoke for almost an hour, opening up about her past in sickening detail. Marcello grilled her, dispassionately toned but with the force of law behind him, and probed every corner of her story. It wasn’t really his place to judge – she’d already been in a courtroom, already beneath the gavel – and yet knowing the full details of her story was part of the process of mental treatment and care.
Because that’s what we were meant to do. Care. God help us.
In the end, I did what I’d never done before, and never done since. I lingered a moment after Dr Marcello left the room, just to take a long, uninterrupted stare at this creature. Emma didn’t respond to my sustained, probing gaze. Then, without a word and trying my best to conceal my inner world of utter disgust, I turned and stormed out of the room, slamming the door in my wake.
My heart was bursting.
I had never been so disgusted, and yet I couldn’t believe what a gift I had received.
I was back in the room two days later, as Marcello met her for his first follow-up and I was on call to see if the prescription we’d assigned forty-eight hours earlier was having any effect – the state’s desire to embrace ‘holistic, team-based approaches’ to patient care meant we often visited together. But in reality, I was there to learn much more than just the efficacy of the drugs. Secretly, of course. I couldn’t let Marcello or anyone else know about the thoughts that had overtaken my attention. This Emma Fairfax was suddenly everything to me, and yet I couldn’t permit myself to show even that slightest hint of it.
She was led to her spot opposite the doctor, as before, and while the orderlies saw her into her seat and signed off on their instructions, my mind swam. It was disgusting to me that someone so vile as this could be responsible for bringing my sister’s memory back to life, and so powerfully; and yet it was hardly a surprise that she had. Their lives were sickly linked, in the way that every victim is in some way linked to every abuser, whether it was her own abuser or someone else’s. The
spirit of such agony is universal. That was the whole tragedy.
My sister had been beautiful. All these years later, I can still see her face so clearly. Evelyn was the kind of teenage girl every other teenage girl craved to be, and the shape of girl that every teenage boy wanted to have, and she knew it. Didn’t care about it, but knew it. She had the odd ability to know she was a looker, and still find herself ugly. Crazy, but totally true. Took me years to figure it out, too; though I’m not sure if, even now, I really have.
When news came that Evelyn had killed herself, my first reaction was silence. I mean, what does a boy say when he’s told his sister’s swallowed a fistful of pills and that the only place he’ll see her face again is in a casket and in his memories? I went numb, and dumb. For a few moments, I wanted pills myself, just so I could follow her and be with her. But that passed. Maybe because I was strong enough to resist such escape. Maybe because I was simply too weak to follow her example.
What I remember most about the last months of Evelyn’s life, before the suicide, was the look of emptiness she wore around her like a shawl. It was there whatever expression her face took on – when she was pensive, or smiled, or even when she laughed.
How is it possible to laugh and be empty? I ask the question now with the same bewilderment I had as a boy. It seems senseless. Impossible. At least, until you know the reasons.
‘Why do you look like that?’ I remember asking her. Little brother to older sister; the questions were allowed to be direct.
‘Like what?’ Evelyn had seemed disinterested.
‘Like you’re far away.’
I was only twelve, and not exactly eloquent. Evelyn had turned right to me. There was kindness in her face – she was always loving to me, a bond we shared in response to the fact that neither of us had ever really felt loved by our parents – but she still looked far away.
‘It’s because I’m hollow,’ she answered. ‘I’m all emptied out.’
I’d read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and heard of hollowed out tin men, but I sensed that this wasn’t what my big sister was talking about. In honesty, I didn’t have a clue what she meant, and I think she knew it. She patted my head and fluffed my hair, an act she knew I ‘hated’ but secretly loved. She walked away.
That’d been six, maybe seven months before the pills. In those months, she broke down a little more day by day, and she did finally tell me why. Never told the parents, because she said bad things would happen if she did. She looked afraid as she said it, too, like someone might overhear her. So she just told me. As if I could bear that burden.
But it wasn’t her fault. Christ, it wasn’t her fault. The things they did to her, those sons of bitches, and to the rest of them. To gut her like that, so there wasn’t anything left of the sister I loved …
And then, here, a connection.
The little room was antiseptic and the glow of the lights harsh, and I tried not to recoil from the sight of this woman. Even Dr Marcello’s normally unreadable look was a shade harsher than before, and Emma Fairfax seemed marginally happy with that. Contented by it. At least someone knew what she’d done and hated her for it, even if it was only the two of us. Sometimes even monsters know they’re monsters, and there are times when we’re all comforted by another person understanding our reality, however terrible it is.
‘You realize,’ Dr Marcello finally said, ‘that I’m going to have to write up everything you told me in an official report. Even though we’re chiefly here for care, and as much as you may have been a victim yourself, we’ll do everything we can for you, the details are going to need to go into your record, all the same. There might be repercussions, beyond your current incarceration.’
‘Thought you might talk,’ she answered, defiance in her voice, but not anger. ‘It’s why I told you. I’m done keeping secrets. Can’t do it any more.’
The fact that you feel guilt doesn’t exonerate you of anything! I wanted so much to shout out the words, to throw aside my clipboard, leap up and throttle her. Evelyn’s face smashed into my vision, and I had to blink it away to see Emma again. I’d never been so repulsed by another human being.
She leaned towards Dr Marcello, boring her gaze straight into his. ‘I ain’t looking for exoneration, Doc. I’m telling you, I can’t live with what I’ve done any more.’
He stared back at her for what seemed a very long time, simply letting her heaving breath echo through the room. Then there was the scribble of a few words on his pad, his face inscrutable. Perhaps he was pondering her wrongs; perhaps seeking vulnerabilities behind her defensiveness that may have led her to be taken advantage of. They were both routes I would expect of him, and, normally, of me.
He was about to ask another question when a small beep sounded at his hip. He had been in this line of work too long to feign apology when he reached down to examine his beeper, and as his brow rose I knew there must be some issue elsewhere in the facility that required his immediate involvement. My suspicion was confirmed a second later as he rose.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this a little later, Miss Fairfax,’ he said, turning towards the door. ‘The orderlies will be here in a moment to return you to your room.’ Then, to me, ‘It’s a patient I’m looking after with Thompson, so I won’t need you. I’ll catch up with you at our next appointment.’
A second later, he was gone.
And we were alone.
39
David
I could have followed Dr Marcello out of the room, but I didn’t. I stayed in my seat, glaring at Emma. I controlled my breathing as best as I could, but with only marginal success. The orderlies would be here soon, and it wouldn’t strike them as odd if I stayed to await them. It provided an unexpected moment.
‘What you … did,’ I finally managed, wholly aware that protocol didn’t allow me to speak directly to patients at all and that this was a severe violation that could see me censured, or even sacked. I didn’t care. ‘Why is it … bothering you … now?’
It was hard to piece the words together.
‘I’ve bottled it all up for a lot of years,’ Emma answered, ‘like I said.’ If she had any suspicion I wasn’t meant to be talking with her, she didn’t let on. ‘But I’m haunted,’ she added. ‘Haunted by all of it. Every day. Can’t get away from what I did, however many years go by. I’ve had enough.’
You, haunted? I tried to feign compassion, some part of me might even have genuinely wanted to find it, but it was an impossible attempt.
And then, ‘She haunts me.’ Emma’s utterance was sudden, direct. ‘Out of all of them, she haunts me.’
There was a look of agony on her face, just then. Apparently, there was more to her internal torment than what she’d yet revealed. A personal dimension. She’d just said ‘she’, not ‘it’. A reference to a person, rather than an act.
‘Who haunts you?’ I asked. My heart rate was increasing. In all Emma had said before, the girls had been referred to as an undefined mass. ‘Victims’ in the anonymous collective plural. However many of them there’d been. This was the first time Emma was singling out an individual.
‘She wasn’t like the others.’ She was narrating to herself, now. With remarkable swiftness I’d become an invisible presence, no longer in her world. ‘She was so … kind. Just a child.’
For a moment I thought she might be talking about Evelyn. I straightened, anticipation filling my body. Evelyn had been a child when they did what they did to her. She had been kind. She …
I brought myself back to the moment, keeping my breath controlled. Evelyn hadn’t been in the same area as this woman. I couldn’t permit their stories to get that intermingled in my head.
‘You said they were all children,’ I responded. ‘You were barely more than one yourself.’ The disgust was thick in my voice, and I didn’t attempt to conceal it.
‘But she was different,’ Emma continued. ‘I can’t explain it. Like a flower. Saw everyone in such happy terms, even though she
came from a shitty background, near’s I could tell, just like all the rest of them. Absent father, overbearing mother, a fist or an open palm never too far off down the road of possibility. Nothing too happy, that’s for sure.’
My stomach curled in knots. I could see Evelyn out in the woods behind our house, filled with light. Back before it had started. Like sunshine, dancing on the leaves, bringing me into her song.
‘Fact that things were crap at home,’ Emma continued, ‘made her an ideal candidate.’
She said the last word so casually. It turned my skin to fire.
‘No, she wasn’t just ideal, she was perfect.’ Fierceness, now. ‘So bright and cheery, despite everything. Why couldn’t she just be broken, like everyone else!’ The accusation gathered rage, and Emma repeatedly beat a curled fist against the arm of her chair.
I wanted to throttle her, then. It felt entirely justified. All my years not knowing what had happened to Evelyn, not really, and then to come upon a woman who’d been part of exactly the kind of group that had destroyed her. Only this girl hadn’t been abused. She’d been a friend to the abusers. Not just a friend – a helper.
And the demon has the gall to raise her voice against someone who suffered and—
My anger swelled, almost overtook me. I hadn’t felt that sensation in decades. A lifetime of pushing away those memories, those emotions, and suddenly they were all back in my chest like an avalanche.
Emma took a few breaths, restoring her stillness, and I forced myself to follow suit. Despite my rage, I couldn’t lose this moment.
‘It’s what made it so awful,’ she eventually continued. ‘That girl went in happy, despite the troubles she’d faced at home in her little teenage life, all the unpleasantness it created. All the reasons to be dark and upset by life. She kept shining, never mind all the shit. And … and …’
Something choked in Emma’s throat. She couldn’t get the words around the guilt lodged in her neck. I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in that she would choke on that guilt, that I could watch her gag and turn blue in front of me.
