Grace Is Gone

by Emily Elgar

  Mum pauses for a moment, sniffs. Usually when she’s wrong, I have no problem letting her know, but suddenly I realize I don’t know what’s right anymore. Everything feels out of focus, blurred. I used to think the reporter, Jon, was suggesting that Danny’s death was an accident and that it was unfair for Simon’s life, and his relationship with his daughter, to be completely destroyed because of an accident. I remember at the time I kind of agreed with him, but then Jon got pissed and tore up Meg’s garden just before Christmas, smashed a couple of windows, and Mum acted like she’d been proven right: men like Jon and Simon were selfish, dangerous bastards. End of story.

  Mum keeps talking. “You should talk to Martin from number thirty-seven, he leads all the community watch stuff round here. It was Martin who called the police when Jon went mental, smashing Meg’s windows. I was out at work, in the salon. Thank God Grace was in the hospital at the time, so neither of them were home, but it shook us all up, didn’t it, love?” Mum nods at me.

  I know she wants me to agree with her, to show Upton and Brown what a terrible man Jon is, but I don’t know him so I just say, “Someone posted a photo of his little boy online when he had cancer. Apparently that’s what tipped him over the edge.” Mum stops nodding and just stares at me, so I add, “Obviously, though, he was stupid. Doing what he did next door, I mean.”

  Upton nods. “So you felt a bit sorry for him?”

  I feel Mum bristle next to me. “Of course not!” Upton narrows her eyes at Mum, before Mum adds, “Why are you asking about him when we all know who did this?”

  Upton keeps her face impassive. “Susan, we are focused on finding Simon, like I said. But I’m asking about Jon Katrin because he’d been aggressive towards Megan and Grace in the recent past. Was there anyone else Megan or Grace ever mentioned: boyfriends, other family?”

  “No, no one.”

  “How about Grace—any relationships? Friends?” Upton perseveres. Mum curls a strand of hair around her index finger.

  “Grace was always too sick to go to school, of course, so she was homeschooled when she was well enough. She made some friends online, though. She was always talking to other disabled kids, giving them advice, making them feel better.” Mum pauses, squeezes her eyes shut, thoughtful for a moment. “But Meg never really talked about her family. Her dad’s still alive but he’s got Alzheimer’s, lives in that big home just outside Plymouth, Resthaven I think it’s called. Meg didn’t get to visit as much as she wanted; it was hard being a full-time carer. Her mum died from breast cancer when Meg was really young, twenty-one I think, and then her brother moved to Australia a few months later. Meg always said her friends were her family.”

  With a loud mewl, Cookie leaps up onto the table. Brown leans back in his chair, cups a hand over his mouth, and mumbles “Allergic” as he stands up from the table. I raise my hand towards Cookie, let her rub her cheek against my knuckles, and Mum coos in a baby voice, “Of course we hadn’t forgotten you, Cookie, you’re family too,” before she starts crying again and the meeting is over.

  I let Mum tuck me into my single bed. She’s smiling faintly for the first time all day. I know she likes it when I feel like her little girl again. She places a sleeping pill next to a mug of warm milk. “Just so you know it’s there,” she says. She took her pill twenty minutes ago; her words are already slurring. She kisses me, reminds me I can come into her bed if I need to, before I am, at last, alone.

  I make my body go completely floppy to try to help my mind relax, but it doesn’t. Everything seems to be marching through me at once. I don’t know how I feel because I’m feeling everything, no single emotion rests for long. As soon as I feel thick with sadness, a blaze of white anger passes through me, and then the anger is immediately replaced with a deep, queasy guilt. I’m a hostage. I see Meg’s dead, bulging eyes again, I hear the drip, drip. In death she was staring so hard, like she was trying to get one last message to the living world. I know what she wanted—the only thing she’s ever wanted: for Grace to be safe. My eyes start to blur and I feel tears rise up in me in a sickening wave. I try to focus on my breathing but my head is too full of noise. My eyes dart around my small childhood room, searching for something to calm me, but there’s no respite to be found in the bowing bookcase of A-level textbooks, the chest of drawers laden with dusty, cheap jewelry and half-empty body sprays. The floor is littered with clothes from the last few days and one wall is lined with boxes, stuff I still haven’t unpacked since I left Chris’s. I feel entombed by it all, by all this stuff. Sweat clings to me in a fine, cold film. Desperate to get out, I decide I’ll run the half mile down to Angel’s Bay—let my confusion toss about with the waves. I’m sure Mum won’t hear me: she’ll be asleep by now.

  My feet drop, leaden, out of bed, and as I bend for the jeans I left crumpled on the floor I kick something soft. The bag of carefully laundered clothes meant for Grace tilts and then collapses to the floor. As it does, something thuds. I stare unblinking at the thing on the floor: Grace’s diary. My memory comes back to me in slow, persistent pulses. I picked up the diary, splayed right in front of me. I picked up the diary and, with my hands full and nowhere safe to put it, I dropped it into the bag. I forgot about it, didn’t tell the police. Will I get into trouble? My eyes are fixed on the diary, right there on the floor in front of me, and then I pick it up for the second time today. It shakes in my hand. On the pink cover, Grace has written her name and address. Underneath she’s put PRIVATE in capitals. I go to open it then pause, uneasy, like I’m snooping. But I remember Meg’s eyes again, unseeing but desperate. I picture Grace lying cold and terrified in a disused mine somewhere. No. I run my fingertips over the cover. Grace would understand me reading her diary, she’d know I was trying to help. It’s what Meg would have wanted.

  I stumble back to sit on the edge of the bed. I slowly open the cover and it’s like opening a music box, Grace’s childlike voice taking over in my head, telling me about her small life.

  10 November 2018

  Mum keeps asking when I’m going to start writing in this diary. She says Lola—one of her favorite nurses—asks her about it every time they speak. That’s because Lola gave me the diary. She gave it to me when we were in the hospital two weeks ago to see another consultant about my heart. Lola has this theory that it’ll be good for me to write about how I’m feeling “physically and emotionally.” She’s a counselor as well as a nurse and is always talking about something she calls “mind-body connection.” She knows other sick kids who kept a diary and said it really helped them. I asked her who they were, but she just smiled and touched my cheek and said she couldn’t tell me. I was only asking because there was this boy who was on the ward with me a few months ago, he had cerebral palsy and he was always writing stuff down with his one good hand. Mum doesn’t seem convinced that it will work for me either, but anything Lola recommends Mum reckons is worth a shot, so I’ll do it for her.

  I asked Zara about diaries yesterday when we were in the salon. Susie was painting Mum’s nails a bright purple color I picked out, the two of them chatting as usual. I was in the hairdressing part of the salon, watching Zara sweep the hair off the floor. Some of it was brown, some gray, and some blond. It was all swirled together like melting ice-cream flavors mixing in a bowl. It doesn’t seem right that some people have so much hair they leave great big clumps of it cut and abandoned on the floor like that. Looking at it made me touch my bald head through my beanie and try to remember what it was like to have hair, proper hair, not just fuzz.

  It’s just hair, Grace. You’re just as beautiful without it.

  That’s what Mum says. Sometimes Mum takes me to try on wigs and we make faces and take selfies with bright pink hair. We put the photos on Facebook and get hundreds of likes. She always knows how to cheer me up.

  “What do you think people write in diaries, Zara?” I asked in the salon.

  Zara stopped brushing for a moment and smiled at me like I’d just said the most ador
able thing ever and said, “I don’t know, Gracey, what do you think people write in their diaries?”

  I knew I should have asked Sylvia instead. Sylvia volunteers at the library and she’s like a book herself, full of useful words and experiences.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Secrets, I suppose?”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “But what if someone doesn’t have secrets?” I asked.

  “Oh, everyone has secrets,” Zara said with a wink. She always winks at me. I don’t know why. It’s not like we share any secrets and I’ve never seen her wink at anyone else.

  And then Zara had to go and answer the salon phone and I was left sitting there, surrounded by dead hair, wondering if she’s right, does everyone have secrets? I looked at Mum and Susie, who were still talking about Cara breaking up with that boy Chris, even though she dumped him months ago. The two of them are like radio presenters when they’re together, always, always talking even if no one is listening. It must be hard having secrets and talking so much, one of them could pop out so easily.

  I feel a bit jealous, I suppose, of all those people with secrets, things they hold close, just for themselves. I don’t have secrets, not really. But I’m going to work on getting some. Not just things that we aren’t supposed to talk about, like farting or Dennis the butcher’s bad breath or Dad. Or things like Danny and what Mum was like before I was born because other people know those things so they’re not really secrets, they’re just sad memories, and no one likes to talk about sad memories. I mean proper cross-your-heart secrets. Now it makes sense. Lola gave me this diary so I have somewhere to keep my secrets, something to confide in. It’ll be like having a new friend, one who’s always happy to let me whisper in their ear. I’d like that, especially now Cara isn’t around so much. And the next time someone says “Everyone has secrets,” I’ll be able to nod in a knowing way because I’ll have this diary and it will be full of them.

  We left as soon as Mum’s polish has dried, and no one noticed when I picked up a curl of golden hair on the ledge below a mirror. Zara missed it when she was cleaning up. I rubbed it between my finger and thumb and put it in my pocket. No one else knows I have it but me. Secret number one.

  Love, Grace xxx

  4

  Jon

  The Best Year Yet: Plans for Ashford’s Award-Winning Summer Fair Gathering Pace.

  The cursor blinks at me on the empty screen, the computer equivalent of tapping a watch, as if impatient for the first word of the article. My hands hover over the keyboard. I always work in the kitchen with the radio on, but today the words “kidnap” and “Grace Nichols” carry through the flat, so I kick my chair back to turn it off before I sit back down at my desk. The bloke reading the news won’t have met Grace, of course, won’t know how tiny she sat in her chair but how huge her smile was. I pull my glasses off to rub my eyes before I position my hands back over the keyboard, try to recall what it was the mayor said about the fair. My fingers start to type but I can’t focus. My thoughts keep drifting to Meg and Grace and Simon, their faces filling my mind.

  Grace and Meg were very similar, but there were a few things about Grace that reminded me of Simon. Did they both have blue eyes? Or was it the way Grace spoke, the soft inflection of her voice that made me think of her dad? Now I come to think of it, I can’t remember what Simon’s voice was like. I stop typing. I could listen to the tape from my interview with him. No. Come on. I force my eyes back to the screen to read, with dismay, the words I just typed. All I’ve done is write out the headline for the article again. Bloody idiot. I drop my head to my desk with a groan. This is so fucking painful. Why do I have no energy for what I should be doing but boundless energy for exactly what I shouldn’t?

  Ten minutes later the article is abandoned and I’m rifling through the box under my bed, already feeling less tense. Ruth used to joke, though now I think she means it seriously, that the only thing I’m fastidious about are my work tapes. Every important interview I’ve done is recorded on tape and stored in a carefully sealed plastic box, labeled in black felt-tip, and ordered alphabetically. Most reporters don’t use tapes now, everything is digitized, but I straddle both generations and can’t resist the security of hard copy. I trace past interviews with boxers, ex-politicians, disgraced bankers, and musicians until I get to the “stories in progress” section. Davis: Simon Nov. 2018.

  I had wanted to write about the effect of tragedy on families. How some manage to drag themselves up from grief together, and others buckle and fold. Jakey was in the middle of another grueling round of chemo, our family was suffering. I couldn’t write about illness, there was enough of that at home, so I decided to write about “act of God” tragedies, car crashes and freak accidents. Right from the moment I had the idea, I saw the article take shape in my mind. I wanted to talk about how most adults know the cold horror of near misses—that moment you don’t see the cyclist in your rearview mirror, the second you take your eyes off your toddler to inspect the price of bananas in the supermarket. Most of us have felt how terror turns blood to cement in your veins, the shriek that rises in the throat like bile, but then the cyclist skids to a stop or you see your toddler hiding behind a shopping cart and relief, like bleach, strips you clean. Never again, you tell yourself, never again will I forget to check the mirror, or let her out of my sight. But some parents, like Simon Davis, don’t get a second chance.

  I was introduced to Simon through a contact at Dads Without Borders, a national charity that supports fathers’ rights. Seeing as he was just over an hour away in Plymouth, they suggested an interview. The charity warned me Simon had “episodes” of poor mental health and that he’d struggled with depression since his son’s death, but he was, at the time, quite balanced and agreed to the interview. Sitting on my bed, I slide the tape into the Dictaphone and press PLAY.

  The noises from the steamy café where I interviewed Simon puff and clatter from the small speaker, pulling me back to the day we met. I remember his watery eyes scanning the café before he saw me waving at him from my small round table. He walked as though some unknown force was pushing him down from above, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed to the ground, as if in constant apology. He had prematurely gray hair and his clothes bunched around his frame, like he used to be bigger. He was an ordinary man who wore an extraordinary sadness.

  “So, just for the record, can you please confirm you’re Simon Davis and you’re happy for me to record this interview.” My voice is clear, confident. I remember the relief I felt when I was at work during that time, the professionalism a protection against the other me, the me I tried to hide, the vulnerable father of a sick son.

  “Yes.” Simon’s voice was just a whisper. He clears his throat, makes an effort to speak up. “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me, please, in your own words, what happened on June the sixth ninety-eight, the day your son died.”

  Simon’s voice is plain, almost matter-of-fact, as he talks, but I remember how his eyes darted around the café.

  “It was Meg’s birthday, so I’d taken the Friday off work. I was an accountant back then. I know, hard to believe really, but I was. I’d booked us a weekend away at Port Raynor Beach. We were staying in the static caravan site there, I don’t know if it’s still going. You know it?”

  I probably shrugged, less interested in this setting-the-scene stuff than what came after. Simon keeps talking.

  “I’d heard about the beaches down there, how they’d be deserted even on a hot weekend in June. Meg used to tease me about being a boring accountant, so it was a good surprise. As soon as we got there, Danny wanted to go down to the beach, it was all he could talk about. He kept saying he was going to catch a whale in his little net.” Simon stops, clears his throat. “He loved whales, I don’t know why.”

  “So you went to the beach?”

  I wish I could smack myself for sounding impatient.

  “We had a picnic on the beach.” Simon either doesn’t hear my
irritation or it doesn’t bother him. “I’d bought a bottle of wine.”

  Later, Meg claimed he’d been drunk.

  “While I cleared away the picnic things, Meg went back up to the caravan to get Danny’s armbands. He was so excited.”

  “Where was Danny at this point?”

  “Splashing in the shallows. He kept shouting he’d seen a whale in the distance, on the horizon. I promised him we’d go out together, once his mum was back. He was a good boy, he didn’t mind waiting, just kept chattering away to himself and digging with his spade in the wet sand.”

  “And then?” I ask. Simon clears his throat; a waitress calls out an order. “Then I saw those boys. They were only about eight, identical. I thought it was a bit odd they were on their own, running like hares down the path to the cove. Danny stopped digging. He loved older boys. I remember he stared at them, the sun shining behind him. I called the boys over, I wanted to make sure they were OK, they were shy, you know, didn’t want to talk to a stranger. They went crashing into the sea with Danny instead. They were all splashing about, having fun. Danny was laughing. I kept sorting out our stuff. It makes me sick now, knowing that was the last time I’d hear him laugh, that I was busy packing away our picnic rubbish at the moment he needed me the most.” Simon clears his throat again. “It was only a couple of minutes. I thought it was good for him to be playing with older boys, but when I looked up the brothers were splashing each other and I couldn’t see Danny—”

  I turn the tape off. That’s when Simon started sobbing and I knew it wouldn’t be right to press him for details. Besides, my mind’s always been limber for disaster; it colors in most of it. I picture how Simon would have scrambled to his feet and run to the water, his eyes desperately searching for a flash of Danny’s hair, his swimming trunks, anything. I can see him pulling his T-shirt off as he splashes into the surf, all the while screaming Danny’s name. But no matter how much he screams, the sea gives him no clue, the waves roll black and uncaring around him, carrying Danny’s limp body further and further away. I imagine how small Simon must have felt in the face of such great terror; it’s how I felt when I thought we might lose Jakey. But whereas Jakey was spared—thank God—Simon wasn’t so lucky. Perhaps I was wrong to empathize with Simon, maybe I had let my fear of losing Jakey color my judgment and took his side too quickly.