by A J Grayson
I kick the blankets off my body and grab a robe to cover myself up. I can feel the puffiness at my eyes, and with the tears from my exchange with David last night I probably have brown mascara streaks running down my cheeks, but I don’t care. It doesn’t matter any more.
I step up the stairs quietly, but without trying to hide the fact that I’m up. I want David to know. I’ve had my fill of hiding.
A few seconds later, I round the open door into his study. The scene of the things that set this all off. He’s at his desk, where the photographs once had been, his briefcase open and his laptop lit up in front of him.
At the sound of my entrance, he turns. His face is cautious. Plain.
‘Good morning, Amber.’
The words, the sheer, absurd normalcy of the words, jolt me. Any equilibrium I had evaporates instantly at the sound of his greeting.
‘What did you make me do?’
No ‘good morning’ for him, no pleasantries. I’m not in a fit state for any of that. It’s only by a minor miracle that somehow I’m thinking clearly enough to ask the one question I need to know the answer to.
David has tried to control my life. He’s hid my past from me. He is the cause of my pain and my unrest. But I now know, I know, that I’m the cause of something worse.
‘What did you make me do?’ I ask again, keeping our eyes locked.
His face has grown dark. ‘Amber, I haven’t made you do anything.’
‘I’m not a killer,’ I protest. ‘I feel guilty swatting a fly. I don’t step on bugs. I …’
But I can’t finish. I try to avoid visions that feel uncomfortably close to memories. I know that I’ve become something else.
David swivels his chair to face me more fully. There’s a large glass of water next to him on the desk, and I remember last night and the glass he offered me. I doubt his is laced with the same quantity of ‘medications’.
‘Amber, you’re not a bad person,’ he says, incongruously.
‘God knows what you’ve been giving me,’ I say, nodding towards the water, ‘What its effects are. You ever think it might do real harm, despite calling it medicine?’
His head shakes slowly. ‘Amber, maybe you should sit down.’
‘I don’t want to sit, David! I want you to answer me!’
A sigh. A moment for thought. ‘As you wish.’ He taps his fingers at his knees. ‘The drugs don’t make you aggressive, Amber. They do the opposite. They calm you down.’
‘Calm! Do I look calm to you?’
‘They let you be yourself, that’s what I’m trying to say. To a degree. They numb out the past.’
Myself, to a degree! Fuck him and his obsession with my past. I haven’t thought about my past half as much as David apparently has.
‘The past is gone, David. Behind us. Before I met you, my life was …’ I search for the right words.
And I trip.
In this moment, right now, I’m aware that I have only a few memories of life before David. I’m sure there must be more, but it’s just him, our meeting, and …
There are no other memories to fill the words.
‘You can’t remember, can you?’ David finally asks, witnessing my state. I gape back at him. I can’t even muster the clarity to be indignant.
‘You don’t have those memories because they’re too painful, Amber.’ He’s speaking now in the voice of a counsellor, like he’s practised this. I find it condescending, and it makes me squirm. ‘Your consciousness tried to get rid of those memories years ago,’ he continues. ‘It just needed a little help.’
‘There’s nothing painful in my past,’ I spit out. ‘My “consciousness” can cope with things just fine,’ you condescending prick. ‘Before you I was just, just … I don’t know. It isn’t important.’
‘It’s all that’s important. It’s everything.’
‘Stop with the bullshit, David! My past means nothing! An ordinary childhood, with an overbearing father and mother who—’
But the sentence stops mid-syllable. As I desperately push my memory towards my childhood, a great white light explodes within my head. I feel as if I’ve been struck with a bat, my ankles starting to give.
‘Amber, don’t.’ I can just make out David starting to rise from his seat, but I don’t want that. I grab the door frame for balance.
‘Don’t get up!’ My own words thunder in my head. ‘I’m fine.’ I repeat the phrase again mentally. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I will it to be true.
Gradually, the room slows its spinning. My feet recover some of their strength.
I won’t give in to this.
‘I was a normal child with—’
‘Amber, please stop,’ David interrupts. There is raw concern on his face, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to take orders from him.
‘I was a normal child with a mother who always knew what was best and who—’
The whiteness erupts within me. The struggle for memory sets it off again, and this time the vertigo is overwhelming. Even with my hand locked onto the door I feel my balance going. Blinking does nothing to control my sight, and I sense the floor coming up to meet me.
‘Amber!’ David’s voice is suddenly at my ear, and I feel his muscular arms wrap around me as my legs give out entirely. The room is a blur. I can feel him guiding me towards his desk chair, sitting me down and stroking my shoulder with a warm hand as my body calms down.
‘Enough,’ he says. ‘Please, don’t do this to yourself.’
I begin to come out of the strange collapse, regaining the trappings of equilibrium, and I notice the water in my eyes.
‘I have to, David,’ I hear myself saying. ‘I have to remember. I can’t go on like this, being myself and not myself.’
He raises his hand from my shoulder to my cheek and runs it tenderly along my moist skin.
‘You’re right,’ he finally says. ‘You can’t go on like this any more.’
I feel so completely helpless.
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘If you’ll let me,’ he answers, ‘I’ll tell you a story.’
67
Amber
David has been speaking for at least forty minutes, and his story is worse than any I could have dreamed up. He’s talked of children and basement dens, of abusers and rape and plots. He’s spoken about a psychiatric ward and a woman so broken by her past that she was little more than a shell. He’s told me of her salvation – attempted, if nothing else – of her new life with her new man.
I’ve listened to this all in silence, numb from the words. How else is one supposed to listen to the impossible?
But eventually, words have to come.
‘David, why did you do this? Why couldn’t you have just let me be me?’
‘Don’t you understand, Amber, you needed help. I had to save you.’
‘I was thirty-six when we met,’ I say. ‘Thirty-six. If any of what you say is true, that was more than twenty years after whatever had happened to … me.’ It feels strange to speak about a past I cannot remember. ‘Can I really have been so bad, if I’d made it that long on my own?’
‘You were getting worse, Amber.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because the doctors told me that you were—’
‘You said the doctors had been giving dire diagnoses for years,’ I interrupt. ‘And yet still I lived my life.’
‘It was falling apart. You weren’t able to—’
‘You said I worked in a library, before you … did this. Read papers. Was content.’
He sighs. ‘Yes.’
‘So I was able to have a reasonable life. Even to enjoy myself.’
‘Amber, it wasn’t so simple as that,’ David protests. He has a pleading look in his eyes. ‘You were slipping away. More and more distant. More and more lost. If I hadn’t stepped in, it would have been the end of you.’
I pause, trying to absorb all he’s revealed to me.
Then, a single w
ord. ‘Maybe.’
David peers up. ‘What?’
‘Maybe, David.’ I straighten myself. ‘Maybe I would have faded away. Maybe I was going the route you thought. But I had a life. I had a job. Maybe I’d even thought of a family. Can you really say you know? How could you? And now, how can I? You took all that from me.’
His eyes glass over. When he speaks, his voice trembles with emotion.
‘I’ve given you everything I could,’ he says. ‘Love, a home, a full life without all that pain.’
And I don’t know what to say, because despite everything else, he actually has. He has given me a life, together with him, that in almost every way was perfect. Our beautiful home. Our dog. Our trips. Our romance.
But he made me into someone new in order to do it. And I can feel the contours of another woman’s neck in my grasp, and the flesh of those men, and I know that David created more than he had bargained for. He had created a monster. A killer.
He had created me.
In the end, David’s stories are too much for me. What he’s revealed is beyond my comprehension. They are the ravings of a story too horrible to be true, yet too personal to be anything else.
I want to believe it’s all a lie, simply tagged on to the litany of others David has told me. I’m actually praying I’m being deceived – something that even in the moment feels horribly wrong. I want to believe I’m being taken for a fool. And I would, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve gradually gone numb as David’s spoken – a numbness that isn’t nerves, or shock, or even horror. It’s the numbness of something inside me, fading away. Something new emerging. Parts of me that I’ve never realized were there, making themselves present. A whole life, a woman, I’ve never known.
And the reality of what she’s done.
The feel of the woman’s neck. The rope. The flesh of those men. The feel of the woman’s neck. The rope. The flesh of …
I look at David, unsure what I am meant to think of him. I want to hate him, but I still love him. I really do. I’d convinced myself he was a killer, but the killer was me. And yes, he made me into that, and I don’t know if that’s better or worse.
But I know it’s something I can’t live with.
My strength surprises me when I put it into action. In a single motion I’m up from the chair, and I push David back onto his ass on the floor as if he were a toy. He stares up, shocked, as I loom over him. For a moment our eyes lock, like they’ve done so many times.
‘I’m sorry David. This is over,’ I say flatly. ‘But it’s not finished yet.’
And without another breath, I storm out of the room. I sweep through our bedroom a floor below, grab what I need, and then race down the remaining stairs.
I’m out the door before David has regained his footing.
68
Amber
I’m ankle deep in the gentle waters of Russian River. I’ve heard the incomprehensible story of my life, learned that it has come to its final chapter, and I’ve come here.
I never thought the last chapter of my life would look like this. I can’t truly remember the first chapters, but I’d never have thought the story concluded with me bringing death, and to so many. But maybe my story was always going to end like this. Like most, the final page was presumably written long before the first, the conclusion the one sturdy fixture towards which everything before it was always going to lead. God knows there have been enough authors involved with mine. I’m not sure if it’s really even mine at all, any more. But however they begin, and whoever writes them, there’s no story that doesn’t finish with the end.
I don’t go back to the place I’d left Emma’s body. There might still be detectives or police there. It’s probably roped off. Nothing I wish to face at this particular moment. Not because I want to avoid responsibility, for this or my other actions. It’s just that I don’t want anything to throw me off track.
I know what justice needs to look like, now, more than anyone else.
I approach the water along another path, in a different direction, and walk until I come upon a suitable bend. It’s framed in by tall trees that form cathedral walls beneath the bright sky high above.
The last body in the water, I think I’ve always known, has to be mine. There has been a pattern, hidden away in the recesses of my life, acting itself out in measured rhythm. Like my feet, one step automatically following another, whether I ponder their motion or not. Like they’ve lives of their own. Now their last steps are here. The river needs to receive one more offering. The final step. Then the journey can end.
I’ve got so much wrong in my life, and in these past days in particular. This, though, I will get right. Whatever the story of my childhood was, whatever David has done to me in these latter years, it doesn’t warrant what I’ve done. Others have brought me abuse, lies; but I’ve brought death. And death always cries out for death, and blood for blood.
I’d grabbed my trousers and a loose blouse off the back of the door as I’d stormed out of the apartment, and my handbag as I’d marched through the kitchen to the door. The river’s not far from our western edge of Windsor, only a ten-minute walk from our door at the pace I was keeping. And nature became my changing room once I arrived here – the first time I can remember ever being so exposed beneath the cover only of trees.
My bathrobe is now on the soil of the shore just behind me. It doesn’t seem right to have things end in a state of undress.
I took my little compact out of my purse once I’d dressed myself. A touch of foundation on my cheeks, a bit of mascara on the lashes. Nothing too fancy. A face just polished up enough to shine. I kicked off my shoes.
Nothing to do about the hair, still frizzled and waspish from sleep. But the water beneath me has an undulating flow, the way the current always does near the shore, ebbing and flowing like life itself. I imagine my hair will sway nicely in that motion, catching the sunlight.
There’s a natural, earthen music around me. A sweet song. I think the thrushes are singing. I take a few deep breaths, calming my soul. A few final moments to ponder.
I can’t decide, in the end, whether David is a beast or a blessing. How much of what’s happened over the past few days might not have happened if he hadn’t fabricated a world of lies from which I had, eventually, to break free? Maybe the story wouldn’t have had to end this way. Maybe there could have been a few chapters of comfort, or peace, or a conclusion more like those of storybooks and fairytales.
But then, maybe there wouldn’t have been a story at all. Maybe I would have simply faded out of existence years ago, like he said, slipping into nothingness. David may have destroyed me in the end, but he gave me life along the way.
And really, my destruction was my own doing, not his. Whatever else he might have done, David’s never wrung the life out of a woman, or stabbed a man – or three – out of vengeance. He’s too loving for that. Until now, I’d have thought I was too.
A story gone wrong, but David has provided me with the right way to bring it to a close. Knowledge of reality, and of my acts within it, gives me a script for the ending. A string of bodies, starting with the woman found in the water … I can simply be the next. The next, and the last.
I have the knife in my hand already. It feels familiar there. I remember holding it in the kitchen, aiming it at David. The same way I must have aimed it at those men, only going so much further …
This time, it will be pointed in a different direction.
It’s an odd thing, to play the observer at one’s own death. I can see the whole thing in my vision, unfolded in front of me as a fait accompli. My body, eyes towards the heavens, back resting in the soft mud of this shore, a crimson stream flowing from my side and mingling with the water. The clouds dancing high above.
Part of me is ashamed, certain that I should feel more emotion. There’s a universal wisdom that suggests dispassion isn’t the right response to death, especially one’s own. There should be anger. Grief. The stars shoul
d droop down from heaven and mourn. And it’s not that I don’t feel anything at all – of course I do, given everything that’s brought me here. It’s unfair. It’s unjust. It’s the stain of evil, the kind that marks the universe itself, that can’t be rubbed away. And I should be furious, and embarrassed, and ashamed and guilty at the thought of David realizing what I’ve become.
But all that emotion is a step removed. It’s not going to overtake me now, the way it has so many times before. I’m observing my feelings, as much as I’m observing what’s to come of my body, floating in this stream.
For just a moment, though, sorrow bursts through. I’m not sure, but I have the feeling that life is meant to culminate in something more than this. Something meaningful. Life, in all its complexity, shouldn’t come to its conclusion in a river, with sand in my hair and reflected sunlight the only thing left in my eyes.
But then the sadness departs. No, this is right. This is how it’s supposed to be. Of course the shore is the end; of course the water and the silence. My story … my conclusion. David may have tried to rewrite it, but stories go where they go.
The knife is drawn. I’ve lifted the edge of my blouse, pointed the blade towards my exposed flesh. It won’t be difficult. And for a moment, I believe it won’t hurt. Just a quick motion, and then release.
However they begin, there’s no story that doesn’t finish with the end.
69
Amber
‘Amber, stop.’
The voice cuts into the moment. It’s not right. It’s David’s voice, but David isn’t supposed to be here. I’ve left him behind. The end comes alone, no more ties to anyone – their truths, or their lies.
But his voice sounds again. He’s not yelling, but pleading with more emotion than I’ve ever heard in his words.
‘You don’t have to do this. It doesn’t have to end this way.’
I turn to face him. I can’t help myself. Resolve or no resolve, it’s David. The man by the seaside in that ridiculous red jacket. The man of a thousand bad breakfast drinks. The only man I’ve ever called my own, and who’s always called me his.
