by Nancy Adams
The screen shot to midnight footage of Sam’s helicopter leaving the hospital. Then it was live footage of a reporter standing with dozens of other reporters outside the hospital.
“Now, Jenny,” the reporter said into the camera as everyone thronged around in the background, “we know that last evening the daughter, Jess Burgess, was flown out of here and that was followed by Sam’s exit several hours later. We gather, although our sources inside the hospital aren’t entirely sure, that Marya Burgess is moments away from death, and we’ll get you confirmation of that the moment it happens. Back to you, Jenny, in the studio.”
The footage changed to Jenny Armstrong in the Channel 88 studio.
“Well, with Marya Burgess’s death only moments away,” the anchor woman was saying, “we’re going to take you to Josh Winters in the economic office for the latest forecasts on Techsoft. Over to you Josh.”
The screen went to a mid-twenties man standing in front of a series of financial graphs.
“Well, as you know,” Josh began, “Marya Burgess was always the warm face of the company, whereas Sam was always the cold genius dreamer with his head in the clouds, designing the future from the confines of his reserve. It’s always been Marya that went out and touched the people, so to speak, as well as being an absolute lioness in the boardroom. So with that in mind, Techsoft’s trading has opened today with its lowest share price for over a decade. And that was way back in 1990 when it first began trading. The world waits to see how Sam Burgess will—”
Claire switched the television off.
She was appalled that Marya had been reduced to a bunch of numbers and share prices, or simply a tragic story for people to consume today over their breakfast before being thrown in the garbage tomorrow. Did anyone care that a woman—a mother—was dying? she asked herself. Could anyone ignore the superficial aspects of it and see the real human tragedy in it all? She felt disgusted at society then, finding it cold and callous.
Looking at the remainder of her toast, Claire felt slightly nauseous, so she picked it up and tossed it in the bin. A terribly hollow feeling was opening up inside of her, so she took her coffee and went back up to her bedroom where she lay back down with nothing but her thoughts running in circles in her head. Lying there glaring at a space of wall, she closed her eyes tightly and clenched her teeth, the images of the last few days bursting inside her head like flashbulbs and threatening to crack open her skull.
She was ashamed of it all. Ashamed that she had allowed herself to fall in love so quickly, to lower her guard so readily, to do all of this with a dying woman’s man, a dying woman whom she had come to admire for her bravery, a bravery that Claire believed in that moment that she, herself, would never possess. Claire saw herself as a simple fly to Marya’s great angel—nothing but a mere fly. She was a usurper who had attempted to take the place of a great woman.
How could Sam claim to love me? she asked herself. I’m nothing compared to her. He can’t love me. He was merely trying to get one last fuck out of me with his bullshit talk on the cliff and in the hospital. It’s like they said on the television; he’s a cold dreamer. He dreamt of a fling with me behind his wife’s back. He’s a macabre dreamer. He did it for the shame of it all; he’s addicted to shame like so many men and women out there. And now I have been poisoned by his shame and will carry it with me for the rest of my life.
Just then, Claire’s phone rang. She got up out of bed and fetched it from the pocket of her pants that were laid on the floor. When she looked at its face, she cringed as she saw the word: John. John was the name that she had put Sam down as when he had first given her his number. He’d given it to her innocently enough while they had merely been friends, offering her an ear to cry into whenever she needed it. She trusted him so much then. But even as he’d given the number to her, she had felt a glimmer of shame in it all and realized now that this was probably the first real step in their affair.
That’s why she’d put it down as ‘John.’ She was too ashamed to admit his real name.
Trembling all over and caught in frozen indecision, Claire was about to answer it when she heard her mother’s car coming up the driveway. She instantly threw the phone onto the floor, a guilty feeling sweeping over her, making her feel an irrational fear that her mother would find out everything if she simply saw Claire’s frightened face at that moment.
Standing frozen in the center of her room, Claire listened as her mother entered the house and then, predictably, made her way to Claire’s room. Soon, the light rapping of her mother’s knuckles upon the bedroom door echoed through the silence of the room and Claire immediately looked down at the phone, which had thankfully stopped ringing.
“Sweetie, are you up?” Mrs. Prior called gently through the door.
Claire considered staying silent and waiting for her mother to disappear, but this thought resulted in yet another ignoble wave to move through her. So she went to the door and opened it, finding her mother’s beaming smile on the other side.
“I got us cakes from Darcy’s,” Mrs. Prior beamed the moment Claire’s head popped out. “So if you’re not too ill, maybe we could share some cake.”
Claire immediately smiled.
“You got me, ma,” she said. “I’ll be down in a moment.”
“Good,” Mrs. Prior let out before strolling off downstairs to the kitchen.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Within a minute, Claire was sitting around the island with her mother, enjoying a piece of carrot cake with a fork.
“God they make it so moist,” Mrs. Prior let out as she enjoyed a forkful of the desert.
“I haven’t found better,” Claire admitted.
“They don’t have good cake shops in Maine?”
“They have good cake shops, but not as good as Darcy’s.”
“Maybe it’s just because we’re used to Darcy’s. Maybe if we’d been eating from some other town’s cake shop all our lives we’d prefer that one and always compare every other cake to those cakes.”
“That makes sense,” Claire admitted. “But I take it that you didn’t call me down here to talk about cake.”
“No I didn’t,” Mrs. Prior said, shaking her head. Then looking Claire square in the eyes, a benevolent expression on her face, she added, “You know I’m worried about you. I gotta admit it. I know how you don’t like me prying, but I gotta say that I’m worried for ya, sweetie. I know that you’re at college now and that everything is supposed to be going well for ya, but when I look at you, I don’t see a happy girl—in fact, I ain’t seen you happy since you was a little girl, Claire, and as your mother, that makes me worry all the time.”
“Ma,” Claire let out in annoyance, “just because I’m not the smiley type doesn’t mean that I’m not happy. I told you that I’m ill at the moment.”
“Is that why you just wolfed down half a carrot cake?”
Claire gave her mother a bemused smile and took another forkful.
“Look, ma,” she began when she’d swallowed her mouthful, “the whole thing with watching people die for the last six weeks has kinda got to me and I’m feeling rundown because of that. You said it yourself that the job is really harrowing and you gotta switch yourself off a bit. I guess I just haven’t switched myself off enough.”
“And it’s just that?” Mrs. Prior asked. “Nothing else?”
“No, ma. Now, can we just eat cake and have a nice chat.”
“Sure thing.”
After that, the two spent a few pleasant hours together chatting and Claire was able to allow her mind to flitter away from its more pressing concerns. They ate cake, did a little housework and spent the time talking about old times. This was then followed by June Prior’s usual topic of conversation when she was relaxed with her daughter, and that was the subject of when Claire was married and had children. This was a dream that Claire had learned to allow her mother to indulge herself in. When she was a young teenager, Claire had been horrified by her mother's so-calle
d plans, but later on realized that it made her mother happy to talk of such things; and her mother deserved to be happy.
However, while June talked of bespoke tailoring and five-tier cakes, Claire began to find herself fanaticizing about a life with Sam and, like her mother, she allowed herself the indulgence, no matter how wicked it seemed to her at the same time as feeling truly wondrous. She imagined them marrying on some far-away beach away from everyone except each other. She imagined the waves crashing against the shoreline in the background and the sunbeams playing in the surf, glittering off of them. She cringed slightly at how romantically cloying the image appeared. But still, it invigorated her to think of them together forever.
In a shot, though, Claire suddenly saw the despairing figure of Marya on the hospital bed, the image breaking into Claire’s beach scene, the poor woman reaching out to them with her hands, slowly dying, alone and frightened, the whole time her husband sleeping with a young girl that she had grown to trust—a double betrayal. And, like that, the spell was broken and, with a shudder, Claire was dumped back in the room helping her mother with the ironing, while the latter droned on about the list of hotels that would put on a beautiful wedding for Claire.
At two o’clock, Claire’s mother had to leave for work and Claire was once again alone in the house with nothing but her febrile thoughts of guilt, shame and forlornness to keep her company. It was then, a couple of hours after her mother had left, that Claire heard the sound of a car pulling up the drive and realized with a tremor that her father had arrived back from work early. Looking about herself like a frightened child, Claire quickly headed upstairs to her room and locked herself in.
What is he doing back so early? Claire asked herself in fear.
It wasn’t long before she heard him come through the door and his loud footsteps began making their way up the stairs and toward her room. Claire sat in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, pulling them into herself, trying to make herself smaller, her terrified eyes fixed upon the closed door, a shudder passing through her with each of her father’s footsteps that continued to get closer and closer to the door.
“Please, Jesus, let him go to his room,” Claire whispered to herself.
But Christ wasn’t listening, or at least unwilling to intervene for some reason that only the divine ever seem to know, and Joe Prior’s footsteps stopped sharp outside Claire’s door.
He didn’t knock and instead just let his bassy voice do the work.
“Claire, you in there?” he boomed.
Claire pulled her legs in even tighter.
“Of course you’re in there,” he continued the other side of the door. “You’ve locked the door. You know I got a master key to all the doors in my house and, if I wanted, I could just open up that door and come right inside.”
Claire’s body was beginning to tremble violently with the sound of his voice, each syllable of it poking her like an electrified finger.
“Claire, I’m your father,” he continued to bellow through the door, “we gotta talk. I been trying to catch you away from your mother this whole time you been back from college, so we can sort this thing out, but you been avoiding me. That’s why when your ma told me you were at home, sick, I knew I had to come back. There’s a lot of shit that’s been going through my mind—”
“Through YOUR mind?!” Claire burst out in anger at the door.
“Yeah—through my mind. Do you think it’s easy for me, having my daughter accuse me of that?”
“You bastard,” Claire uttered to herself as she began to rock backward and forward on the bed, clinging to her legs.
“We gotta talk this thing through, for Christ’s sake,” Joe whined.
“What have we gotta talk through, Joe?” Claire spat at him.
“What happened before—or at least what you think happened.”
“You can’t even say it,” Claire laughed at the door, “and you want to imply that I imagined all those nights you—”
“STOP IT!” Joe screamed out from behind the door. “You wanna pour that acid into my ear, you little bitch. You keep insinuating that I touched you when you were a kid, but I’m telling you that I didn’t. And if you ever hurt your mother by telling her then I’ll—”
“YOU’LL WHAT?” Claire shouted out, leaping toward the door and unlocking it, a tiger of fury erupting inside of her.
In a second, she was out on the landing and had pushed into her father’s chest with all her strength, sending him sprawling back several feet.
“You get the fuck away from me,” she snarled at him. “It’s men like you that poison this world. You talk about me pouring acid into your ear, but it’s you that’s poured acid over my life, you fucking…”
Just then the front door opened downstairs and in came Claire’s fifteen-year-old brother, Kyle.
“Hey!” the teenager called out. “Dad? Are you home? I see your truck outside.”
“Not a word,” Joe growled at Claire, pointing his finger in her face. “I’m up here with your sister,” he then called downstairs to Kyle.
The sound of Kyle bumbling up the stairs followed and Claire did her best to control her rapid breathing. The whole time, Joe glared at her angrily, all the way up until the point when Kyle emerged at the top of the stairs and Joe’s furrowed brow straightened out as he turned to Kyle with a beaming smile.
“I thought you were at football practice, sport,” Joe remarked to his son.
“No,” Kyle let out, “I told mum two days ago that practice had been canceled for the next two weeks while coach Johnson’s wife has a baby.”
“Oh,” Joe let out nervously, “your mum never mentioned it.”
“Well, I don’t see why she should’ve, you’re never usually home this early.”
“Yeah, I got off early today,” Joe said. “I was wondering if you wanted to go down the batting cages and hit some balls.”
“What, like I’m ten?!” the fifteen-year-old let out incredulously. “I’m a little old to be playing ball with my pa, don't you think?”
“It was only a thought,” Joe let out. “You’re never too old for playing ball with your old man.”
“Well, I am today,” Kyle remarked. “I got a whole load of assignments due in tomorrow, plus Mr. Henderson is making us sit another test tomorrow. So I’m gonna head to my room and study.” Then, looking at his sister, who he hadn’t acknowledged so far, Kyle said, “Hey, Claire. Mum said you were ill, you don’t look ill.”
“How would you know?” Claire asked with playful mirth, smiling at her brother as she did. “Unless you were an expert in faking sickness.”
“I may not be an expert, but I’m experienced enough to spot a faker,” Kyle laughed, making his way between them both toward his room. “Anyway, I’ve got study to do, so, Dad, can you bring my dinner to my room when it’s done.” Then, turning his back to them, Kyle waved and said, “Laters, losers.”
Both Claire and Joe watched him reach his room and go in, before turning once more to each other.
“Not a word, Claire,” Joe whispered coldly. “Not a fucking word.”
With that, Joe set off downstairs and Claire returned to her room, locking the door once again behind her. She then bounded across the floor and threw herself facedown into her bed, bursting into bitter tears and screaming into the mattress.
CHAPTER NINE
“Sam?” Dr. Jones said on the other end of the telephone. “Are you still there?”
After a moment’s silence, Sam replied that he was.
“She was in no pain when she went,” Jones continued. “Death occurred at seven o’clock this evening. We’re awaiting your confirmation before we release a statement from the hospital to the press.”
“No, don’t hold off the wolves any longer, let them have their flesh.”
“Okay, we’ll release our statement soon.”
“Is that all?” Sam asked in a curt manner.
“Well, it is if you have no more—”
But Sam didn’t let him finish and simply put the phone down.
He was standing at the edge of the cliff in the same spot that he had been at with Claire only the day before. In fact, it was the same spot that he and Marya had trekked to nine years ago, and where Sam had proposed to her. When she had gotten pregnant five years later, they had decided to buy the surrounding area and build a house just below the exact spot, built into the precipice of the cliff. It seemed so fitting to him now that they should have chosen to build their house hanging upon the face of a cliff, dangling precariously over a river. Their whole love had dangled precariously over sudden catastrophe. Ever since they met, they’d been living with a time bomb that neither of them could see. They had always imagined that they would live their lives forever side by side, grow old together and watch Jess grow old, watch their family multiply. But now, at the age of thirty, Marya was gone, blown along in an incendiary wind, vanished from everything but Sam’s photographic memory.
He now had the honor of informing his little girl that her mother was dead.
Sam let out a shiver and then made his way back to the house’s entrance. Inside, he found Maud in the recreation room painting finger paintings with Jess. Sam stood at the doorway for a moment watching them, the little cherub being guided by Maud as she ran her paint-drenched fingers across the page.
Jess abruptly looked up and saw her father standing at the doorway.
“Look, Daddy,” she beamed, “I’ve drawn the house.”
“Is that so,” Sam said approaching Jess’s painting.
He came around the front of it, Maud moving to the side as he did, and gazed at her drawing of the house. It was when he saw the three stick characters standing out front, all holding hands, that he almost let out a little cry, but stopped himself.
