by Emily Elgar
“I saw her.”
“Cara, you’re shaking. Here, take this.”
She watches as I take off my sweater and hand it to her, pauses before taking it.
“Look, let’s go and sit in my car, it’s warm, we can talk there.” But she shakes her head. No. She hugs my sweater to her.
“I saw her, Jon.”
I feel myself frown.
“I saw Grace. Or Zoe, or whoever the hell she is.”
Of all the crazy things I’ve seen and heard today, this is the craziest.
“It was Grace, but it was like she’d become someone else. She was, well . . . I saw her run. I saw her run, Jon.”
I let Cara tell me everything, in one great flow, about Danny’s grave, how she went to the graveyard and how Grace ran into the trees, how she thinks Grace followed a path, but that she was too quick for Cara.
“Grace must have known where she was going; she just disappeared. But it was her, Jon, I know it.” She pauses, finally taking a breath. “You don’t have to tell me I sound mental, I know I do. Please tell me you believe me. I know no one else will.”
I look at her. Even in the gloom her eyes are bright. Everything today, especially the body being found, all of it is too much for Cara. I should never have got her involved in the first place.
“Cara, please, let’s just get in the warmth and talk this through.”
She starts shaking again, this time not only with cold but also with gulping sobs that ripple in waves through her body. “Just say you believe me about Grace.” Her words are broken through her chattering teeth.
I pause for too long. She knows I don’t, knows I can’t.
She turns before I can think what to say, walks quickly back towards her car.
“Cara, wait, I didn’t say I don’t believe you, I just want us both to calm down. When was the last time you ate something, had a proper sleep?”
She stops abruptly and looks me directly in the eye, her gaze like a challenge. She doesn’t blink.
“Grace isn’t dead, Jon, and she isn’t locked up somewhere.”
“But Cara, Grace hasn’t walked for years and she hasn’t had any medication for four days now. It’s medically impossible she’d be on her feet, let alone running.”
“Fine. Don’t believe me. But I’m taking the diary back,” Cara says, her eyes filling.
I glance towards my car, where the diary is stashed in the footwell. Cara follows my gaze and immediately starts walking, shielding her tears from me. I call after her but she doesn’t pause or turn back. I watch as she peers through the window of my car, then curse myself for not locking up as she opens the passenger door and grabs the brown envelope with the copy of Grace’s diary inside. I decide to let her go. She needs to calm down, to rest, and I need some time to think and figure out where we go from here.
It’s 5 a.m. and I’m slumped on my sofa, where I woke an hour ago after a few hours of fitful sleep. I’m still numb with exhaustion but too full of adrenaline to sleep anymore. The window is wide open to the dawn but all I can hear is the morning chorus, no one is out calling for Grace anymore. I close my eyes and rub my hands over my face. Flicking the telly on, I look for something banal enough to send me to sleep again. I can’t find anything so I flick across to YouTube. There’s a scroll bar with “recommended for you” videos to watch on the side. The first is one I’ve watched before, it’s a short video the Wishmakers made when they completed the renovations on Meg and Grace’s bungalow. I let the video play and my eyes blur as Grace’s high-pitched voice chatters away, the camera following her as she wheels herself down the hall.
“And this is our amazing, amazing new bathroom. Look, the bath has these jets, which are great for my muscles, because they get really tight from always sitting down . . .”
I sit up on the sofa. Right, it’s time for bed. This is ridiculous.
“And this is our specially built medicine cabinet.” Grace taps in a code and the doors for the largest medicine cabinet I’ve ever seen open with a small click. I pick up the remote, hit the red button to turn it off, but it doesn’t respond; the batteries are running out.
“The cabinet was Mum’s idea, she’s much better than me at keeping track of all my meds . . .”
I stand closer to the television, aim, and press the red button again and again. Fucking thing.
“It’s a relief one of us is organized. I’m such a dreamer that I . . .” The camera zooms in on the cabinet and the rows of carefully organized pill boxes. I’m inches from the screen. The boxes have their labels turned out, facing the camera. They’re all for Grace, but something to the side and just behind them catches my eye. It’s a piece of light green paper, a slip for a repeat prescription for Meg, not Grace, folded in half and tucked into the side of the cabinet. My eyes pounce, immediately recognizing another familiar name, one I’ve heard and spoken myself many times recently.
“Now I want to show you my special bed, which is really cool.” The camera moves on, following Grace’s chair as she maneuvers out of the bathroom and starts to glide down the hall. I stand still as my mind races. I know what I saw, I recognized the name of the doctor on the paper: Dr. Nina Rossi. She told us she wasn’t ever their doctor, so why was she prescribing Meg drugs? I turn the television off, pulling the plug from the socket, load the video on my laptop, and freeze the frame. The prescription slip is small on the screen, but now I can see two names clearly. Dr. Rossi was prescribing Meg OxyContin, a powerful opioid. Maybe it was for her back pain, but in that case why didn’t she get it from her own GP? I glance at my watch. I had thought about springing a visit on Dr. Rossi this morning to find out if she knew about Grace’s real name and age, but now questioning her is urgent, imperative. If I leave in two hours I’ll miss the traffic. I could wait for Dr. Rossi at work. It’s a bit of a mad plan, but I’m beyond caring now. I feel alive with energy again, and I need to know why Dr. Rossi lied.
13
Cara
By the time I get home, Mum’s on her own, bleary-eyed and disheveled, her FIND GRACE T-shirt thrown over a chair. She’s sitting on the sofa in her bathrobe, holding a large glass of red wine, the bottle empty on the coffee table in front of her. She turns slowly towards me, chin raised, defiant in her drunkenness. Her hair is flat at the back where she’s been resting her head. None of this feels real. I feel like we’re bad actors in one of those melodramatic soap operas Mum loves.
“I was wondering whether you’d bother coming home,” she says. The wine has made her teeth look rotten.
“Do you want a cup of tea, Mum?” I ask, wishing I could tell her Grace is alive; better than that, she’s alive and well. I won’t, though. I know she won’t believe me, and I can’t take any more humiliation. Besides, it’d only make her worry about me more and she doesn’t need that, not now. She looks almost swollen with grief and I can see that she can’t fight it anymore. I try to think of what she wants to hear, something comforting, but nothing comes.
“What the hell have you been doing, Cara?” she asks, clumsily pulling herself to sit upright on the sofa. I’d forgotten my feet are caked with mud, and the skin on my arms is red and lumpy with goose pimples.
“I went for a walk. I just needed to clear my head.”
Mum narrows her bloodshot eyes. “You went back to the Point?”
“Yes,” I lie.
Mum likes to be right, especially when she’s drunk. She nibbles her bottom lip. “You’re braver than me. I don’t want to go anywhere near that place.” She looks distant as she talks, and her voice shakes. “That poor, poor girl. You know they’re saying it was a suicide?”
I nod. She’s talking about the dead girl—the girl whose name we don’t even know, whose navy dress was ripped from her body by the rocks and the waves. The dress didn’t have stars on it. Maybe tomorrow, once the shock has settled, Mum will feel some relief that it wasn’t Grace’s body they found, but a young woman is still dead. None of us can be pleased.
She b
links and, taking a gulp of wine, comes to a clumsy stand, holding on to the back of the sofa for balance. She’s drunker than I thought. Mum gets combative when she’s been drinking. Trying to reason with her when she’s like this is like wrestling with smoke.
“I’m sorry about earlier, Mum. I shouldn’t have said anything with all those people—” but she cuts me off.
“You want to know something awful I realized after you left the salon?” I know she’s going to tell me, even if I don’t want to hear. Her breath is sour as she speaks.
“I was jealous of Meg. Can you believe it? Even with all the shit she went through, losing Danny, Simon being an evil bastard, and Grace’s illnesses, I was jealous. You know why? You know why I was jealous?”
I shake my head, frightened of what she’s going to say.
“I was jealous of how close she was to Grace. I was jealous of how she knew everything about her girl, jealous of how Grace worshipped her mum. I was jealous of how they never left each other’s side, their in-jokes, how they always said they were each other’s best friend.” As she talks, Mum starts crying, her tears falling where so many have gone before. She pulls out a ragged tissue from her sleeve, wipes her eyes, and takes another gulp of wine.
“I know how bloody awful it sounds, Car; you don’t have to look at me like that. I know how lucky I am to have you, a healthy daughter. But there have been times, Car, times I wished you weren’t quite so independent, times I wished you needed me.”
My throat constricts with guilt and regret. It spreads through me like soup, hot and thick, and I don’t know how to turn it into words.
“I do need you, Mum.” I sound meek as I reach for her hand. She squeezes it once, but then quickly lets me go.
“No you don’t, Car, not really, not the way I need you. You’re like your dad that way, he was always off doing his own thing, he never needed me either.”
Her voice hardens whenever she mentions Dad, especially when she’s drunk. I don’t want to argue about him, not now, not after today.
“Maybe you should go to bed, Mum, you must be exhausted.”
She shrugs in a resigned kind of way that shows I’ve just proved her point, that I’m casting her aside again, just like always. She moves unsteadily back to the sofa.
“You go on then, Car.” Her voice slurs. “I’m going to stay here and finish my wine and think about how I’ve screwed my life up.”
I know she wants me to rush to her, throw my arms around her, and tell her she’s wrong, that she’s the best mum in the world. That’s what Grace would do. The old Grace. But I feel empty. I don’t have anything good to give her and besides, I know she won’t remember any of this in the morning, so I turn away.
“Good night then, Mum.” As I say it, I hear her gently start to sob again.
I sit on my bed and stare at the Wishmakers forum on my phone. In the sitting room Mum turns on the telly to a noisy chat show, waves of laughter filling the silence. It still stings that Jon doesn’t believe I saw Grace, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I’m on my own now and there’s only one thing I can do that makes sense to me. I open up a new message on the forum and in the “to” field type in GoodSam. I spent the drive home composing this message in my head so I know exactly what I want to type. But now that I’m here, I pause. What if GoodSam doesn’t know anything about Grace after all and he shows my message to the police? They’d either bring me in for questioning or lock me in a mental hospital. Either way, it wouldn’t be good. But what if he does know something, anything, that could help? Him exposing me is a risk I have to take. I start to type.
Hi. I messaged you because I know you knew Grace Nichols, the missing girl? This is going to sound crazy but I think I saw her today. No one else will listen to me but . . .
I stop. What was I going to say next? I remember Grace’s face that day, when she told me about GoodSam, how her skin flushed, how a light seemed to glow behind her eyes. It was the first and last time I ever saw her like that. Maybe it was just a short-lived crush, but maybe not. I keep typing.
I think you were special to Grace, and I hope she was special to you too. If you know anything, please, please get in touch. I promise I won’t say anything to anyone. I just want to find Grace.
C.
I press Send before I can change my mind and, holding my phone to my chest, lie back on my bed, on top of the duvet. I think about how pissed off Jon would be if he knew I’d messaged GoodSam without telling him, but I try not to care. After all, he’s in the wrong. I’m the one who should be annoyed. But there’s still a part of me that wishes I could ask his opinion, talk all this through. I stamp it out, remind myself that he let me down. Mum’s always saying I’m like Dad, that I don’t need others the way other people do. What if I am? It might not be such a bad thing after all. It means I can do this, I can help Grace alone. Mum’s slurred words come back to me, how she was jealous of Meg, how she wishes I were more like Grace. I harden my heart. I need to focus on Grace now, not Jon or Mum.
I refresh the forum and stare at the screen. Twenty minutes tick by. I picture the new Grace—Zoe—the person I saw today, the too-big coat, the snarl on her lips where there was once always a smile. She stared at me with cold eyes, a stranger, as though I was the one doing something wrong, before she started to run. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even say her name. My legs seemed to sink into the soggy ground, my body cut off from the rest of me. She knew those woods, she knew where she was running. What would have happened if I’d been braver and kicked off my flip-flops and chased her across the sodden grass and into the trees? The scene plays out in my mind, me running after her, calling her name. Perhaps she would have stopped then, perhaps she would have told me who she really is. Perhaps she would have told me what happened that night, who killed Meg. I take out the photocopy of Grace’s diary and skip through to the last entry, the one marked 19 December. The abrupt ending doesn’t feel like Grace, not the Grace I thought I knew. Perhaps she stopped because she wanted to write about GoodSam but felt she couldn’t for some reason, not here anyway. My thoughts run messy, crashing into each other, when suddenly my phone buzzes on my chest.
Hi Cara. Meet me 5:30 am tomorrow at the place where you and Grace used to fly kites.
My heart is hammering as I read GoodSam’s reply, then reread it to make sure I’m not imagining things. I know the place he means, it’s a grassy patch overlooking Angel’s Bay. The last time Grace and I went was a couple of years ago, Grace driving her chair so close to the edge it scared me shitless. “Have you ever thought what it’d be like to drown?” she had asked, uncharacteristically dark, staring at the waves below.
“I thought you were afraid of the sea.”
“I’m not frightened of the sea, I’m frightened of drowning,” she said, glancing at the gray foam below one more time before turning her chair around.
I told Mum about it that evening while we ate fish and chips on the sofa. Mum must have told Meg because suddenly Meg didn’t want me taking Grace to Angel’s Bay anymore.
If GoodSam knows that place, that we used to fly kites there, then he must know Grace well. Maybe he’s even with her right now. The thought both warms and chills me. I want nothing more than for Grace to be alive, but I feel thrust into a world I don’t know, a world where everything I thought was real is fake, a world where miracles happen, the disabled walk, and the dead come back to life. But I don’t trust it; I can’t until I know the rules. I watch but don’t feel my thumbs as I type my reply:
I’ll be there.
19th December 2018
The glass in the sitting-room window has been replaced. It looks exactly the same as it did before he smashed it in, but since those temporary plyboards cut out all natural light it feels like a new beginning, like the house has had an operation and can see again. I sat in the window this morning while Mum got herself dressed. It was a blustery day, I watched an empty beer can clatter under Martin and Sylvia’s hedge opposite. I saw a fe
w of our neighbors, on their way to their lives. Sylvia was first, in a beige wool coat and scarf, holding a plastic bag full of books going to the library. She gave a double thumbs-up when she saw the new window and I did one back. Susie was next, holding a hand to her hair and putting her head down against the wind as she trawled for her car keys in her red leather bag, tucking her phone under her chin to make a call as she reversed out of the drive. Then came Dennis, an umbrella tucked sensibly under one arm, like he was off to work in a bank, not to stand behind a display of dead animals all day. He told Mum at our welcome-home party that he walks to his butcher’s shop every morning. He absentmindedly patted his stomach as he said it. It had started to rain by the time Cara slammed the front door behind her. It was the first time I’d seen her in a couple of weeks. My breath became ragged and my PEG tube bit into my stomach as I leaned forward in my chair to knock on the cold window. I wanted to shout her name, but I knew that’d worry Mum, make her come running.
Cara was in a hurry. She didn’t hear me so I sat back in my chair and just watched her. She was wearing denim jeans, a black knitted scarf, a sloppy old army jacket, and the Dr. Martens she wears every day now she’s a student and not a receptionist anymore. Her hair was scrunched up in a loose bun on top of her head. It wobbled from side to side as she started running down the pavement to catch the 09:16 bus to Plymouth. Her backpack strained and as she ran I watched the zipper slide lower and lower, until the weight tipped, making the zipper slide all the way down and books fly out onto the pavement. Heat bloomed around my palms where I pressed them against the cold glass as I watched Cara shout swear words into the sky with white, icy breath. She kicked one of the books, which made me giggle, before she bent down to pick them up. She was muttering to herself and I wanted to wheel out there and help her. Maybe she could pull a sickie and we could go to the beach again, like we used to.
