The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  But I’m on my feet, and the knife is in front of me, its small blade sparkling in the white light. It’s aimed at what would be David’s heart, if I still believed he had one.

  ‘Just try to fucking stop me.’

  55

  Amber

  David’s eyes are perfect orbs of surprise. Everything about him over the past minutes has been a threat: his words, his stance. There’s been a dragon uncoiling within him. Bastard thought he was going to control this moment like he’s controlled everything else – but he wasn’t expecting this. Wasn’t counting on his darling, pliable toy of a woman standing before him with a weapon. Even through the fear that eats away at my bones, I feel a sense of pride in that. With all the wool David’s pulled over my eyes through the years, in this moment it’s me who’s managed to surprise him.

  I wave the knife as menacingly as I can, and on instinct he spreads his hands. I wish for a moment I’d gone for a larger blade after all, but even this smaller one is having the right effect. It feels comfortable, solid.

  For the first time since all this began, I feel in control.

  ‘Amber, you don’t know what you’re doing.’ David’s hands are in front of him now, open-palmed. His voice has dropped in pitch but is still disturbingly solid. ‘You need to put that down. This isn’t the way to deal with your emotions.’

  ‘An ironic statement, coming from you!’ I answer back, real muscle in my voice. ‘I’m leaving, David. There’s nothing you can do to change that.’

  ‘You’re upset, Amber. You have every right to be.’ He takes a slow, unnervingly calm, breath. For an instant he looks angry, as if he resents this whole conversation. Bastard.

  ‘But you cannot leave, not yet,’ he continues. ‘You need to know the truth before you walk out of this room.’

  ‘The truth? From you?’ I manage a laugh that edges back towards maniacal. ‘You’ve been weaving a fake world around me for as long as I’ve known you. I don’t even know who you really are, David. And you, of all people, want to tell me the truth?’

  He is stoic. ‘Amber, I don’t want to hurt you.’

  I focus my eyes into his like lasers. ‘Is that a threat, David? I have a knife pointed at you, you heartless bastard, and you threaten me?’ I tighten my clutch around the wooden handle. ‘I never took you for an idiot.’

  I won’t hesitate. Not now. I won’t let him stop me.

  ‘It’s not a threat, Amber. You still don’t understand.’

  ‘You keep saying that!’ I stomp a foot, my rage demanding a physical outlet. ‘I don’t “understand” why you lied, I don’t “understand” why you killed. You’re right, David, I don’t understand at all. I don’t understand how I’ve been so gullible, how you’ve made me believe the things I’ve believed over these years.’ I stress believed, as it’s the word that encapsulates my sense of utter betrayal.

  ‘I really loved you.’ The words are out of my mouth without my controlling them. ‘I loved you from when we first met. From that day on … that day when you … when we …’

  But the words don’t come. It happens again, right here, and now, of all moments. That black space charges into my head and eats my words. The thoughts that should power them, the memories – they simply aren’t there.

  Oh, God. I can feel my skin going cold again. The pit gapes at my toes, an indefinable space in my mind black and incomprehensibly blank. My fear instantly transforms. In this moment, it’s not the murderer in front of me that scares me the most, it’s the void invading me from inside.

  I met David in the springtime. I demand that my thoughts comply, that they behave reasonably. We were … oh help me, I don’t remember where we were. It was outside …

  ‘It’s okay, Amber.’ David’s voice is suddenly consoling. Less fierce, less ice. ‘Your memory isn’t able to cope with all this. There are going to be holes.’

  ‘What the fuck do you know about what’s going on in my head!’ I shout at him. God, I’m enraged, but I’m also completely terrified. Because this instant is horrible, and yet it shouldn’t be horrible like this. There shouldn’t be holes.

  I met David in the springtime …

  I can still feel all the emotion of our first encounter, all the tingling of anticipation. There was salt in the air. The skies were vividly blue. I see them, I taste them. But I can’t remember where it was. Or when. I can only hear the gulls, and I think there were walking sticks. The retractable kind, that look like ski poles but …

  I can’t remember any more. The pit in my consciousness has swallowed one of my most precious memories, right as I stand here, with a knife in my hand.

  ‘Amber, I know more about you than you think,’ David says. He hasn’t moved from his position in front of the door. ‘I know enough to be certain that you can’t be let out of here. Not in the condition you’re in, now that you’ve discovered what you have.’ His hands, again, are constrained fists at his sides. ‘You will stay here with me, and I’ll help you understand. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’

  I don’t believe a word coming out of his mouth.

  ‘It’s only ever been lies between you and me, David.’ I jab the knife towards him. The blackness in my head hasn’t made me forget all he’s done. ‘That’s all it will ever be, and I’ve had enough of it.’

  ‘No, Amber.’ He loosens the fists at his sides, but looks no less intimidating. His body seems to have swollen in size again. ‘The lies are done. You haven’t left me with any other choice.’

  ‘Me!’ I can’t believe he would try to pass his guilt on to me. It’s too much.

  ‘Get out of my way, David.’

  He doesn’t budge.

  ‘I’m sorry, Amber. I didn’t want it to be like this. I can’t protect you any more. It’s time we bring this to an end.’

  And he’s in motion. He plants one foot in front of the other – and it might just be my perception, but the earth seems to shake as his foot hits the ground. My panic explodes inside me.

  ‘Stop!’ I shout at full voice. I hold the knife sturdily, leaning forward. I’m fully prepared to do what I have to. I won’t be a victim. ‘Don’t move another muscle, David.’

  ‘It’s enough, Amber. I can’t let this go on any longer.’

  He takes another step. Adrenalin courses through my system. I have the strength of a dozen women.

  ‘I said don’t move!’ And the adrenalin does more than simply charge me up. It floods into my eyes, and my vision starts to go blurry, white biting away at its edges. The world wobbles beneath me, but I cling to the knife with all my strength. I still have the wherewithal to be able to aim it at him, plunge it into his chest, if that’s what it takes – and it seems that that’s what it will take. Once, twice, into that heartless flesh, again and again and …

  And there is a voice, blasting its way into the back of my head, singing out of the earth in a voice I don’t quite recognize, but in tones so familiar I think I could sing along.

  He’s lyyyyyyyying …

  The words eat at me, and then the voice disappears. In the silence it leaves behind, David is a step closer. He’s almost in front of me.

  I’m out of options. There’s only one thing left for me to do.

  ‘I warned you!’ I wail. ‘I told you not to move!’ I raise my arm, and the knife shines in his eyes. It shouldn’t have to end like this, but I’m not going to give in.

  ‘I’m not letting you stop me, David.’ I wipe away my tears with my free hand. ‘Or don’t you think I’m strong enough? Strong enough to kill?’

  I expect to see only fear in his face: terror at a woman transformed, the murderer suddenly facing someone prepared to kill him instead. It’s right! It’s what has to be! It’s the only way!

  But David’s eyes are filled with as many tears as mine, his features contorted in the purest sorrow I’ve ever seen.

  ‘No, Amber,’ he answers softly, ‘I know you can kill.’ He takes a slow breath.

  ‘It’s just
that when you do, you don’t do it with that knife.’

  56

  Amber

  I heard once that the future is a deep valley into which we all gaze. That we peer in, and we look at the mass of what’s to come – only to find that it’s mingled, there in that valley, with what is now and what’s already been. So our vision blurs, because it cannot take in so deep a sight, and we simply stand mystified before it.

  I wonder, in this moment, as my world falls apart around me in the electric light of my kitchen, whether the same is true of the past. Or the present. Whether the haze that covers life is ever really lifted, or if we ever genuinely grasp the reality through which we’re drawn.

  ‘I know you can kill. It’s just that when you do, you don’t do it with that knife.’

  David’s words are just fog, dulling reality. They’re not even really words, not any more. They’re only sounds.

  A moment ago I was filled with more rage and fire than I’d ever known in my life. I was ploughing forward with accusations and suspicions, all of which had become certainties. And then …

  The amorphous sounds coming from David continue. I’m stuck in place, no longer pushing towards the door. I can’t feel my feet. With a single sentence, David has broken me. All the fire inside my chest has turned to shock.

  It’s an odd thing, to stand numb and silent, and watch the world turn to mist.

  David’s voice at last cuts through the clouds.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Amber. It was you, you who started this. You, at the beginning. It was you.’

  A voice that sounds like mine answers from somewhere down by my lips. ‘Me?’ It’s wobbly, just like everything else has suddenly become, but it’s familiar.

  ‘The woman in the water, Amber. Emma Fairfax.’

  ‘No, that woman … it was you.’ An echo of my former certainty returns. I know the truth. I’ve learned who the man before me really is.

  David shakes his head slowly. In my sight, ripples curl away from the movement, as if space itself is warping at his gesture.

  ‘No, my love,’ he says, even softer than before. ‘It was you, but it’s okay. It’s all okay.’

  I see him reach forward. There’s a knife in my hands but I can’t make my muscles move. Odd, a moment ago, I think I was ready to swing it at him.

  David gently opens my fingers and draws the knife away. I think he sets it on the counter. God, the Formica countertops in this place are a sin. It must have been a colour-blind designer who thought a sensible balance for egg-yolk yellow is lime green.

  David softly takes my shoulders and sits me down in one of the chairs at the table. I think I was sitting there before. I remember there was a blade beneath my thigh and my hands were flat on the tabletop. David goes to the counter and draws a large glass of water from the tap. Back at the table, he slides another chair up to face me and sits, close, almost knee to knee.

  ‘David,’ I manage to say, my voice frailer than I would like. ‘Don’t lie to me anymore. I’m tired.’ I think I mean to say ‘I’m tired of it,’ but my sentence ends where it ends.

  For the time being he doesn’t speak. He draws a little bottle out of his pocket, and with an eyedropper counts off a few drops of a clear liquid into the water glass, then stirs it with his finger.

  ‘This will make you feel better,’ he says, passing me the glass. ‘Try to drink it all. Your system needs as much as it can get.’

  He seems wise, right now. There’s a knowing, sensible tone to his voice. Didn’t I want to kill him a moment ago? Wasn’t he trying to kill me? But my reactions have gone as numb as my limbs.

  I drink the water – big, full gulps, down to the last swallow – and David sighs. It looks like relief.

  A wind blows through the fog of the valley. For an instant it parts and a glorious vision takes its place. The sky is bright. There is a strong, salty breeze blowing up from the cliffs, the sea crashing against a rocky shoreline far below. Birds squeak from the hillsides and a few soar in the air. ‘We met in the Headlands,’ I find I’m muttering, the comment out of place but all that I want to say, ‘up above Muir Beach …’ The memory I couldn’t find before – there it is. Beautiful. Comforting. There is sea salt in my nostrils.

  ‘I tried to do everything I could for you,’ David says as the breeze passes. ‘But you’re wrong.’

  The fog comes rolling back in.

  ‘Wrong?’

  The tears are back in David’s eyes.

  ‘We didn’t meet by the sea.’

  PART SIX

  NEW LIVES

  57

  David

  My original plan had been so much simpler. Of course, it hadn’t actually been a plan. It was just an impulse. From Emma Fairfax, I’d learned about the abuse that Amber Jackson had suffered, and the grizzly details of how it was accomplished. The rough location. The environment. The men involved. Enough that I could have sorted out who they were – and that had been my first impulse. Find them. Punish them. Bring them to justice. Purge the evil from the world.

  It had only been reflection on just what that purging would leave behind that had swayed me to a different path. Sure, they men might be locked away, ripped from society; but Amber would still be in it, still hollow, still scarred. Maybe even more than she was there in the treatment room. If she was forced to go through a trial, the forgetting her mind had so struggled to effect would be ripped from her entirely. She’d have to face it all. Vivid accounts. Testimony. The past, taking on new life.

  She would go on suffering. It would never end.

  But there was another way.

  Amber’s past was already fading away. Maybe that could be helped. Manipulated. Made into the emergence of a new life, free of the terror that had marked out the old one.

  To restart a life. With a little bit of pondering, it became the most obvious thing in the world. The right path. The only path.

  Amber Jackson’s world was collapsing. She’d made it as far as she had through repression and forgetting, but those walls were breaking down. She was becoming an amnesiac, periodically catatonic, and increasingly emotionally fragile. Dr Marcello had identified it all, and had said it was only going to get worse.

  Hard to save that.

  Impossible, in fact. That was precisely the point. It was impossible to save that woman. Everyone that had tried – all the doctors, the counsellors, the medics – they’d all failed. Because they’d been after the wrong thing.

  To save this woman, she would have to become someone new. Someone without her past. Without any past. Because as I knew too well, all that pain that she carried – it can’t be repressed, and it can’t be dealt with. It needs to be wiped away.

  Forgetting. The thing I’d always aimed for in my memories of Evelyn. I hadn’t been able to accomplish it in myself, but with Amber perhaps I could.

  The doctors certainly wouldn’t go that route. I’d been working around them long enough to know that what I had in mind wouldn’t exactly fit within their paradigms of proper conduct. But I knew the meds. I was absolutely certain it could be done.

  The right drugs, the right dosage. Her past could be wiped clean. She could be set free.

  But, I knew, that could only be the beginning. Erasing the past wouldn’t be enough. She would have to be given a new life. A better life. Happiness. Joy.

  And I felt a calling, a true calling, for the first time in my life.

  Her life could start anew, and so could mine.

  58

  David

  Of course, I had to concoct a way to meet Amber Jackson in person, if the plan was going to work. I certainly couldn’t meet her there in the ward. There could be no memories of what she’d known before, including her time at the hospital, or meeting me in those surroundings. If a new reality was to be created, there could be no traces left of the past at all.

  What followed the meeting would be easier. Drugs, correctly administered, could wipe the slate of her mind blank and keep it that way. He
r episodic states of forgetting could become permanent, which is what she needed more than anything. It would take a cocktail of medications that her doctors would never prescribe; but as long as I could get my hands on them, I knew what she would need. Not just enough to muffle the voices in Amber’s head, but enough to reboot a life that had been ripped from her before she’d had the chance to grab hold of it.

  Thank God, I’d only encountered her the once, in the facility, and I’d stayed out of her line of sight – though she’d been in such a state that there was little chance she’d have any memory of seeing me, even if she had.

  That lack of direct contact gave me some freedom. I followed her, not worried about being recognized, after her release came. Hard to imagine she was ever released at all, given the profound likelihood that her condition would recur; but the state hospital system can’t keep people in treatment forever for conditions that come and go. She was retained in-house until she returned to functional, given a few maintenance medications, then sent back out until things inevitably got bad again. A system with a few flaws, to say the least.

  This time, though, it worked entirely in my favour. Amber Jackson was discharged, and I was free to take hold of her life thereafter. She was mine.

  I had all her details as she departed, gleaned from her files at the hospital. Home, workplace, phone numbers, email address, everything that was in her records. I’d snapped it all onto my camera one afternoon, and had her file back in situ within thirty minutes. Later I’d printed them out at home and read through those pages carefully, over and over again, committing them to memory. I combined the knowledge with the information Emma had revealed. The portrait of this woman began to expand and take life in my mind.

  Then, after getting to know Amber Jackson on paper, the time came to get to know her in the flesh.

  I’m sure some people will think me obsessive for the way I followed her in the weeks after she left, but saving a person requires work. It has to be an obsession, it just has to. So I followed her as regularly as I could, learning her habits and her behaviours. She didn’t have a regular job, living instead off funds transferred into a bank account each month for disability assistance. An outpatient observation service from the State Health Department was as close to family as she had, and apparently it had been they that had ensured she had an apartment, and a degree of monitoring – which could hardly be called sufficient —meant to ensure she was getting on day-to-day. Though I only saw them once, represented by a woman who was clearly at the end of her tether, carrying a clipboard with files on at least thirty outpatients she was meant to check in on that day alone. Her visit to Amber lasted fewer than ten minutes.