The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  ‘And?’ I finally prodded.

  ‘And the kid didn’t last a goddamned day.’ The words gushed out, wet and sticky. ‘I brought her to them on a Friday afternoon, late, just like always. I think it was about four o’clock. There were three of them in there.’ There were tears streaming down Emma’s white cheeks as she spoke now, but all the convulsions of her skin had stopped. Her face was stone. The light in her eyes had long ago left the room.

  ‘They brought her out forty minutes later, maybe. I’d stayed in the foyer, like I was told. To keep watch. But this was the first time, the first time …’

  I leaned forward as far as I could go. ‘The first time … what?’

  Her breath scraped across her larynx, rasps echoing in the little room.

  ‘The first time they brought a girl out dead.’

  I gaped at Emma in silence. This woman had confessed her part in crimes heinous enough in their own right; things no human could fathom, and most certainly couldn’t stomach. She’d been brought here on more innocuous grounds, but I now knew the reality behind them. Emma Fairfax, the tool girl for a group of men who had abused … the Lord himself only knew how many victims.

  Like other groups, and other men.

  And other girls.

  And one of them had been mine. Christ, the things I now knew they’d done. Things Emma had revealed. Things that went so far beyond what Evelyn had told me …

  The fire was back in my spine. I heard the blood coursing through my ears. Just like the day my parents told me she was dead.

  Dead.

  I straightened. Evelyn had been raped, abused. But she hadn’t come home dead. She’d killed herself.

  The pills, after we fought and I called her a bitch in a childish taunt I could never take back …

  I focused anew on Emma, who had hardened into a mountain in her chair. I didn’t know how long I had until the orderlies arrived, and I suddenly felt a panic at the thought of losing the moment. Emma was still breathing, there was the stilted rhythm of it in my ears, but she now seemed a solid fixture. Her confession had de-animated her, sucked out whatever spark of life may have been keeping her going. The woman in front of me was a shell.

  ‘The girl,’ I forced out of my lips, my own voice creaky with the attempt not to let it turn to flame, ‘she was … dead?’

  A little electric charge shot through Emma Fairfax’s skin. Her head snapped to mine.

  ‘Not literally.’ She shook her head. It was the wrong word, and she was visibly unhappy with it. ‘Not physically.’ A nod. That was better. ‘I mean, she was still breathing and all. They’d never have gone so far as to actually kill anyone. That would have brought down all kinds of shit on ’em. Fuck sakes, they weren’t idiots.’

  Tears suddenly welled in Emma’s eyes and rolled over her lower lids. The demon she’d become was replaced by the child, tortured and horrified, wallowing in the trauma of having become a beast herself.

  I had no compassion to share, not with this person, and so I simply stared on in silence.

  ‘She wasn’t dead,’ Emma finally continued, her voice little more than a whisper, ‘but she sure wasn’t alive any more, either. And she never was again. Poor thing never came back to life. They’d groomed her through me, made a connection, and then made sure she knew there’d be repercussions if she didn’t come back when I told her to, or mentioned anything to anyone. That’s what they always did. And believe me, they could be … convincing.’ Emma peered at me, as if this should be obvious. ‘And they had her come back many times. That was usual, too, when it was someone they liked. Someone pliable. Quiet, after they’d invested all that work in it. And she never said a word. Never confided in a schoolmate – they always had me on the lookout for that. God knows she never talked to her parents. Must have threatened her real good. Maybe beat her around some. Or maybe she was just done for. You know, inside. She just … switched off.’

  My pulse was escaping me. Like the woman Emma was describing, Evelyn never spoke to our parents. She barely spoke to me. She had, to use Emma’s godforsaken words, just switched off.

  ‘That girl’s life was over, and we did that to her.’ Her eyes were veined and red. ‘I helped do that to her.’

  You goddamned bitch. I couldn’t control myself any longer. I could feel my muscles tightening, ready to throw me over the table to wring the life out of the monster’s hideous frame.

  Then, in a heartbeat, Emma’s emotion vanished. The spark that had momentarily returned to her soul departed, and her whole frame sank itself in the chair.

  ‘Emma,’ I leaned forward, ‘this girl, I want you to tell me exactly what happened to her.’ Thought I heard footsteps outside, in the corridor. I needed an answer.

  There was a twitch in her shoulders. ‘Just did. Don’t tell me you weren’t listening. This is, like, heavy stuff.’

  ‘Heavy stuff’, like she’d been discussing a tough break-up and not the cruel destruction of multiple lives. I bit at my lips.

  ‘In the end,’ I offered in clarification. ‘If you didn’t kill her’ – and for a terrible instant, I almost thought it would have been merciful if they had – ‘then what happened? Where did she wind up?’

  I have to know. I have to know. I have to …

  Emma’s twitch expanded, spreading to her neck, up into her cheeks. Her eyes moved, shifting uneasily from side to side.

  ‘Emma, don’t think you can say what you have, and then not tell me what eventually happened to—’

  I didn’t even pretend to be objectively professional now. I couldn’t control myself.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Emma was suddenly animated again, her face pointed back at mine. ‘Is this some kind of sick psychotherapy joke?’

  ‘Don’t try to change the subject.’

  ‘Seriously, I’m not here to play about.’

  ‘This isn’t a game!’ My temper spent, I slammed my fist down on the table. The thunder echoed through the little room. ‘What you did was unspeakable! Don’t think you can hide the fate of the victim you’ve already told me plagues you the most. Tell me what happened to my sister!’

  I conflated them again. This woman hadn’t known my sister, but I couldn’t separate my thoughts.

  Emma’s expression changed from scorn to incredulity as I exploded.

  ‘Your sister?’ Shock, then she drew back in her chair. ‘What the hell does this have to do with your sister?’ And then a moment of dawning recognition. ‘No, wait, don’t tell me your sister was abused by—’

  ‘My sister was killed by people like you!’ I shouted back. I simply couldn’t help myself.

  All her torment. All her pain.

  ‘Me? I’ve never killed anybody!’ Emma shouted out. She didn’t understand. Didn’t realize that suicide can still be murder, and once you help one abuser, you’re part and parcel with all of them. It didn’t matter whether Evelyn was abused by the same men Emma had worked with. She’d been abused, and I wasn’t prepared to hold Emma innocent of her fate.

  Her face was white.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened to her!’ I demanded again, pounding down my fist a second time as spittle flew from my lips. ‘To the girl you’ve been talking about.’

  Not my sister, not my sister. But it didn’t matter.

  ‘Fuck, don’t tell me you don’t get it,’ Emma finally answered, shaking her head. ‘I mean, you can’t not understand.’

  My chest was heaving. ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Come on!’

  I slammed my hands into the edge of the table in frustration. I was standing, then, towering over her, letting my nostrils flare and sensing that the skin of my face was a bright red.

  ‘What the fuck sort of game are you trying to play here?’

  ‘The girl!’ she almost shouted back, almost laughed, though she cowered beneath my presence. ‘She’s right fucking here!’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ My question flew at her as an accusa
tion.

  ‘In the building!’ Emma shouted with all her strength. ‘Christ sakes! You assholes lock me up in here, and you’re keeping her four doors down the goddamned corridor! You’ve made the girl I’ve spent my life trying to forget into my goddamned psych ward neighbour!’

  40

  David

  My conversation with Emma Fairfax continued another ten, perhaps fifteen minutes. I don’t remember how it ended. I don’t remember her being taken away by the orderlies. I just remember that she was there, and then she wasn’t.

  And I remember what she said. Every breath of it.

  I remember everything else, too – all the pain, all the guilt, all the sorrow of my life – it all came flooding back in full force. Like an ocean unleashed into my head. Far, far too much to take. I could feel the current sweeping away every facade I’d built there over the years: each retaining wall, each barrier. All the emotion that I’d thought was gone, was back. It had never really left at all.

  Turns out that shrink back in my teens may have been right, after all. You really can’t bottle things up forever. And you never really escape the things from which you’re trying to run.

  There was another woman, there, in that facility, who knew what my sister went through. Who went through it, too. And who, unlike Evelyn, survived.

  For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt something other than anger, or guilt, or dread, or deadness. I felt hope.

  My feet were moving before I really had a chance to think matters through. I left the treatment room, having extracted from my unexpected conversation with Emma Fairfax only one detail that mattered in that moment: the name of the woman whose suffering had so affected her. I headed straight towards Admissions to seek out a file and a room number. The motion in my legs was energizing. If Emma was telling the truth, I’d be able to set my eyes on her opposite in a matter of minutes. On a woman who is the only echo of my sister’s innocent suffering that still existed in this world.

  Her file, however, wasn’t at Admissions. I learned this from Mrs Albertson, the elderly attendant who’d been perched behind the intake and filing desk as long as I’d worked there, with a nest of nearly fluorescent hair that she dyed afresh on a weekly basis. That day it was a ridiculous shade of yellow. On any other day, I’d have been distracted by the sheer weirdness of that, in a woman who could easily have been my grandmother.

  ‘Sorry, that file’s out on rounds,’ she said after I’d given her the name. ‘Dr Marcello took it with a handful of others this morning. You doing a pharmaceutical consult on her case as well?’

  I shook my head and almost released the simple truth, ‘No’, but recognized that asking for the file of a patient for whom I haven’t been requested for medication analysis would be highly irregular. Beneath that bright yellow coif was a woman who knows how things work around here. ‘I was just asked to cross-reference her meds, for inventory,’ I answered, concocting a response that felt reasonable-sounding. The next question was harder to ask, since it wouldn’t normally be relevant to inventorying a patient’s medications. ‘You don’t happen to know what room she’s in?’

  There were a few taps on a surprisingly noisy keyboard before Mrs Albertson grabbed a sticky note and a bent ballpoint and jotted down a number.

  ‘She’s resident here.’ A number was circled on the pad in dark ink, designating a room in A-Bloc. ‘But Dr Marcello is having his sessions today over here.’ Another number was added below the circle. ‘You might try both.’

  I nodded my appreciation and took the little slip of paper. The A-Bloc was only a few minutes’ walk from central administration, and I saw no reason not to go there immediately.

  Curiosity can be an overwhelming force.

  A series of interconnecting corridors led me to a door that was the same as those found on all the other residential blocs: heavy metal construction with a Plexiglas window reinforced by internal wire mesh. A video camera mounted high above registered my presence as I approached, and a flash of the credentials hanging around my neck provoked the loud buzz that came with the lock being remotely released. I grabbed the heavy door before the buzzing stopped, opened it, and passed through.

  The corridor on the other side looked more or less identical to the one I’d just left. A-Bloc was just like the rest of our establishment: apart from the locks on the doors that were only operated from the outside – a feature for patient safety rather than anything else – it looked much like any hospital ward would. Only D-Bloc housed patients with violent tendencies and had the extra security features to match. Here, things were more septic and institutional.

  I counted off the doors. It was only forty or so yards to room fourteen, the first number on my little slip of paper, and I halted momentarily before I turned to gaze through the window. I realized, in this instant, that there was something truly bizarre about what I was doing. The woman inside wasn’t a patient I had any business approaching. I wasn’t assisting her doctor. I wasn’t supplying her meds. I had no connection to her at all, save for the statement of a woman who was admittedly psychologically disturbed. But in that moment I wasn’t acting on behalf of the healthcare system, or the justice system. I was acting as a brother whose heart ached for his sister, who’d been told a patient here knew more about her pain, and the pain it had inflicted on me my whole life, than anyone else I’d ever known.

  I spun on my heels and stared through the hazy window moulded into the door. The room contained what almost all there did: a metal-framed bed; a wall-mounted washbasin and plastic mirror; a little desk with a round stool fixed before it, bolted to the floor, for those who might try to use a movable chair to inflict violence on themselves; and recessed lights set into the ceiling with protective Plexiglas between them – no graspable light fixtures, to remove the suicide-ready temptation of hanging. A small metal toilet unit stood in the corner. For a moment, it looked far too much like a prison cell.

  But it had no prisoner. Or patient.

  I glanced down at Mrs Alberton’s paper. Since this room was empty, chances were the woman was in the other location indicated in her penmanship. Consultation Room 22A. I swung my legs into motion again.

  I hesitated even more significantly as I approached the consultation. If there was a session taking place, interrupting it would be an abnormality of protocol of the highest order. I couldn’t possibly disturb them. I couldn’t make myself known at all.

  But I also couldn’t stop. I couldn’t do what I knew I should: simply turn around, walk away, and wait until her session was over and she was back in her room. Then I could have passed by and got the glance I for whatever reason felt so compelled to steal.

  No. I had to see her now, immediately. The drive was a possession. My sister’s memory was calling me.

  I stepped forward cautiously, rolling my feet from heel to toe to keep them from echoing on the tile. I halted before my body came to the inset window and angled my frame towards the wall, placing both hands on the slick paint to support myself. I leaned in, slowly moving my head to the window.

  Finally, I stopped. One eye – that was enough – was able to peer through the glass.

  And I saw her.

  Dr Marcello’s back was to me, seated in his customary position at the table. Opposite him, the woman sat facing in my direction. She wasn’t speaking. She was a statue, yet in that first glance I realized that she was absolutely the woman Emma Fairfax had spoken about. In that statue I saw a woman haunted. Dead. Empty.

  And as her features came into view, I thought I’d found my sister all over again.

  She didn’t look like my sister, nor did she captivate me physically. Her skin wasn’t remarkable, though she was far from unpleasant looking. She didn’t have Evelyn’s build, or her skin type, or her sense of style. Her hair wasn’t done up. She was of relatively plain appearance, though her eyes were a beautiful, deep blue.

  But their colour wasn’t what grabbed me. Through the window, what I saw first and fore
most was pain – and in that, she was like my sister through and through. More than pain, too: absence. With one eye I was glancing into a psych facility treatment room, but with the other, with the whole of the rest of me, I was seeing my childhood. I was seeing Evelyn in those final months.

  ‘Why do you look like that?’ The memories burst back into my head. Christ, how I’d tried to kill them. But there was my childhood voice, back in the air, wafting toward’s Evelyn’s sorrowful features. ‘Like you’re far away.’

  And my sister’s voice. ‘It’s because I’m hollow. I’m all emptied out.’

  Now, beyond the Plexiglas window in front of me, was another hollow woman. Not my sister’s features, but my sister’s soul. This woman was carrying her experiences.

  You stop my breath. I could feel my heart weeping. You look like a part of my soul that was ripped away.

  And I felt I knew her. Emma Fairfax told me what happened to this woman, and if the vileness of what she endured can upset even a monster, then I knew precisely why the woman in this room was empty.

  And I didn’t want my sister to die again.

  I sidestepped away from the door and walked quietly back down the corridor. With each step, I felt my life changing. It was going to be intertwined with this woman’s. I was certain of it.

  I would ensure it.

  This woman about whom I knew only two things: her torment, and her name. Her torment was the same as Evelyn’s, the torment of a woman whose life was no longer hers.

  And her name was Amber.

  41

  David

  Amber Elizabeth Jackson.

  The name on the chart, when I was eventually able to get my hands on it, was exactly as Emma Fairfax had said. She’d even remembered the woman’s middle name.

  Amber’s case file read like nothing I’d ever seen before. I’d been working in pharmaceuticals in our secure wing of this rehabilitative psych care facility for a while, but a pharmacist isn’t exactly a doctor. I didn’t always get exposed to the nitty-gritty, especially of the extreme cases. I was brought in now and then, when a doctor wanted someone in the room to assess drug options on the fly, but not usually for the long haul. Not to hear the full stories of what brought people to this place.