Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “Where is he?”

  “Jason?” Grace says. “He’s at home. Trying to move on.”

  “Trying to move on,” Clare repeats, enunciating as though the words were in another language. “You said he was here.”

  “I said he figured you were here. He tells a very different story from the one you told.”

  Clare can no longer focus on Grace’s face.

  “I was horrible to Jason at the beginning,” Grace continues. “I was sure you were telling the truth. Of course you were. I’d seen him at parties. He was an asshole. We all knew that. I told the cops not to bother looking at anyone else, that Jason had to be responsible for your disappearance. They needed to circle right in on him. I’d like to think they did. But after Brian left me, I didn’t have the energy to keep on them. Do you know what Brian said to me when he left? That he needed to live his truth. I’m holding his baby in my arms as he says it. And then a month ago Jason shows up on my front lawn with this picture of you in this goddamn town in the middle of nowhere.” Grace’s voice cracks. “I’m pushing my kid on a swing and he shows up. And there you are, partying it up with these hillbillies. Smiling in some dive bar with your arm around some random coal miner. Jason was devastated. He wept when he handed it to me. I was confused, and I was devastated too. I told him I didn’t believe it was you. But of course it was. There you were. Smiling at the camera as though everything was fine, as though you didn’t have a care in the world, as though you hadn’t left anyone behind. After that, everything changed.”

  “What do you mean, everything changed?”

  “Jason. Me. We talked more. Our lives were both in shambles. I listened to him, Clare. Because Christopher wouldn’t talk to me. He couldn’t handle it, and Jason was the only person who’d talk about it. I needed to understand what would have possessed you to leave without telling me. And you know what? I got his side. He told me his side. His truth. And I understood.”

  Clare’s head spins. She crosses her arms on the table and rests her head atop them. Truth. That word. The word connecting everything. Jason’s word against Clare’s. Which is true? Everyone in High River speaks of truth too, Ginny’s stories, Jordan’s, Helen’s. Markus and Rebecca’s. Malcolm insisting he’s never lied to her, omitting instead, refusing to fill in the blanks.

  “Clare,” Grace says. “Look at me.”

  When Clare stands, a paper falls from her back pocket. She and Grace both bend to collect it. It is the ripped page from the phone book.

  “Sit down,” Grace says.

  “No,” Clare says.

  “We need to talk about this. And you need help. I’m just sick of half-truths. I want to talk. I do.”

  But Clare is already backing up, knocking against a rack of mugs so that everyone in the coffee shop looks up to her.

  “Clare!”

  Grace’s voice sounds like an echo. Before Grace can stand too Clare is out the doors, the street swirling beneath her. She flags a cab and is grateful when it stops. She jumps in and signals the driver to take her back to the hotel, catching only a small glimpse of the frown on Grace’s face as the cab pulls away.

  There is a memory of a motel room twenty miles from home. The first wedding they’d attended after getting married themselves. A coworker from Jason’s factory and his bride. Clare remembers the dinginess of the motel room, the small window that wouldn’t open, the smell of the beer cans tossed to the garbage unfinished. She remembers the needle on the bed, Jason splayed beside it, eyes closed, that half-smile of euphoria.

  The curtains in this room are floor-to-ceiling sheer. Out the window Clare studies the people lined up to catch the bus. Their lives, their joys and sorrows, Clare imagines, all tolerable enough. After she left home, there were times when she allowed herself to feel safe, to feel free. As though no one were following, as though her past could be truly left behind. Times when she’d eat chips on the motel bed and watch TV, the gun she’d had then out of reach on the bedside table, falling into the laugh-track trance of whatever sitcom she was watching. Brief stretches of forgetting. Of normalcy. But the feeling was always fleeting. By the next morning, the anxiety was back. The fear.

  He tells a very different story from the one you told, Grace said. I got his side. It feels too easy to imagine them, commiserating over their losses. Jason worming his way in.

  It is a relief, Clare thinks. Grace. Malcolm. Jason. Sally. Rourke. This case. To be numb. To let go. The numbness a balm against the fear. It always amazed Clare that the farther along her mother’s cancer got, the less fearful she became. When she’d jumped in the cab an hour ago and ridden back to this hotel, Grace in her wake, it had dawned on Clare. There was no need to continue. She owed her work to no one. A numbness set in.

  Do you want me to be afraid? Clare’s mother had asked, looking up from her deathbed. Because I’m not anymore. I’m relieved.

  Clare takes the baggie of Ginny’s pills from her duffel bag and selects the two she knows will wash her in dull light. Blue and white. She sets them on the glass desk. These motions are so rote, the tip of the hotel-logo pen to mash the pill, a straw to stir it around. She thinks of the look on Grace’s face as she bolted from the coffee shop, on Rourke’s face as he listed the dirt he’d dug up on her. Clare leans forward and presses a finger into one nostril, the straw in the other.

  Don’t. She hears a voice. His voice. If she stares at the wall long enough, she can almost see him. Don’t.

  Shut up. Clare can’t be sure if she says these words aloud. I owe you nothing.

  Clare leans back and hugs her legs to her chest. The scars on her arm still feel fresh. She remembers watching the young nurse fumble with her mother’s morphine line, inserting and removing the needle, her comatose mother barely flinching at the indignity. How she’d wanted to offer to do it herself, well practiced as she was at finding a vein. Clare lifts the straw and leans in again.

  Don’t.

  The scene comes back to Clare in perfect order. The motel room by the ocean. Not her room. Malcolm’s. She’d knocked and he’d answered without a word. He retreated to sit on the corner of the bed, his shirt unbuttoned, his hair wet from an ocean swim. Clare stayed in the doorway. She’d only just started spending longer stretches on her feet, the pain of the bullet wound receding a little.

  Still, she said. I need more.

  You’ve had enough, Malcolm answered.

  You’re not my keeper.

  It’s making you foggy.

  You’re not my keeper. She was yelling.

  Clare, he said, ever calm, you’ve had enough.

  Something else had emerged in Clare then, a rage burning hot. Malcolm stood. She lunged for the desk drawer, expecting Malcolm to do the same, but instead he just watched her as she yanked it open. The pills weren’t there, but his handgun was askew on the motel Bible. Clare lifted the gun and aimed it square at Malcolm’s chest. He backed up reflexively, a look of shock on his face. Clare advanced until Malcolm was pinned to the wall, pressing his gun into the exposed skin at the V of his shirt.

  Don’t, he said.

  I’ll kill you.

  She remembers everything. She’s remembered all along.

  Is that really what you want to do, Clare?

  His voice was so gruff. The memory of it seems almost ridiculous to Clare now, how easily he might have overtaken her, swiping the gun to his right so that even if she’d managed to flick the safety and pull the trigger fast enough to pierce him, it would not hit his heart. Instead he kept his arms loose at his sides. Clare remembers the staccato of her own breathing.

  I don’t belong to you, she said.

  No, Malcolm replied. You don’t.

  Next would have come the falling back onto the bed, thoughts erased. She can only guess, because the last thing she remembers for certain is setting Malcolm’s gun back in the drawer, this time next to the Bible. She remembers standing up straight to meet his gaze, the anger she’d expected to see in him. But instead his face
was cast in something closer to sadness, to disappointment, a look she’d failed to decode in the desperation of the moment. A look of longing.

  Now, outside this hotel room, Clare hears voices, the fumble of luggage and keys. The squealing of children and a mother’s gentle commands. I’ll deal with the cart, Clare hears a man say. Then the family is in the room next door, their TV instantly on, a rhythmic thumping that must be children jumping on the beds. Clare drops the straw, her cheeks running with tears. Then she takes a deep breath and blows the powder from atop the table in a dusty poof. She props open the door to her room, crossing the hallway to toss the baggie into the garbage chute by the elevator. When she turns around, a boy of seven or eight stands in the doorway beside hers, his baby brother perched unsteadily on his hip.

  “Hi,” the boy says as Clare approaches.

  “Hi,” Clare says.

  The baby flaps his chubby arm and utters a sound to mimic theirs, a rudimentary hello. Clare thinks of the way Christopher used to cradle his newborn son, cupping his soft head in his palm as though it were made of glass. It was never in Clare to be so gentle.

  “Our house burned down,” the boy says.

  “Oh no,” Clare says. “That’s terrible.”

  “My mom says it’s not so bad. We all got out.”

  “She’s right,” Clare says. “That might even make you kind of lucky.”

  The baby holds his brother’s shirt with gripped fists and looks back and forth between them as they speak. This baby, fleshy and beautiful, the first wisps of hair curling around his pink ears, about the age Clare’s son would be now had he lived.

  “We have to stay here for a while,” the boy says. “Until insurance comes. My school starts in two weeks and it’s not too far.”

  “You must miss your home,” Clare says.

  “I don’t know,” the boy says, shrugging. “There’s a pool here.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  “And I’m not dead,” the boy adds matter-of-factly. “I didn’t die.”

  Clare nods. She wipes at her still-damp cheeks. When the father calls to him, Clare offers the boy a wave, then ducks back into her own room, sliding the deadbolt over and throwing herself on the bed. She imagines the scene, the smoke detectors bleeping and the parents waking, then scrambling in terrified autopilot to scoop their children from their beds, nothing else important. Through the hotel room wall Clare hears the father’s lilting voice, then the mother’s laugh. She digs for her phone.

  You owe me the truth, she writes.

  The phone makes a swoosh sound as the message sends.

  Malcolm, she writes. You owe me.

  Clare grips her phone and waits. No answer. The folder Malcolm gave her is on the bed beside her. When this case turned up, when Malcolm arrived in her room with the file, Clare had taken it because she believed she could solve it. She’d learned the details of the case as she figured a professional would do; this the closest to a calling Clare’d ever experienced. This work absorbed her. Helen. Raylene. Markus. Rebecca. The Twinings. The pieces of the puzzle. Clare fishes into her pocket and pulls out the torn phone book page from the café this morning. St. Jude’s. Another piece.

  Her phone buzzes. Clare snatches it to read the message from Malcolm. One word.

  Okay.

  Clare sends him the address to the hotel and her room number.

  Two hours, he responds.

  The hotel business center is empty. Clare logs in to the computer and opens the search engine. She types in Janice Twining’s name and finds photographs of her with Philip at various city events, articles on social issues, the dearth of women’s shelters in the city. Clare tries social media sites but finds nothing. She opens the local newspaper’s archive site and searches for the oldest entries. There is a short piece from forty-eight years ago. “Young Socialite Janice Godfrey Marries Up-and-Coming Lawyer Philip Twining in Lavish Ceremony.”

  In the photograph Philip feeds Janice cake, her dress modest but beautiful, their smiles young. Clare returns to one of the social media sites and tries again. This time, she types in Janice Godfrey. She finds one profile with its privacy locked down, but the profile photo is of a woman on a café patio. The woman could be Janice in a hat and sunglasses, the menu propped to cover the lower half of her face. Clare prints the photo and the article then clears the search and starts again, typing Zoe Malcolm Hayes. But as soon as the results land, Clare flicks off the monitor. It is too much. She will ask Malcolm herself. He will be here in an hour.

  In her room Clare takes a long shower, holding her head back under the hot water. How familiar it feels to be in an unfamiliar place, to squeeze shampoo from a bottle the size of her thumb. The cycle of rooms with their double beds, cheap patterned quilts versus the soft down bed of this city hotel. She steps out and wipes the fog from the mirror, studying her shoulder. The scar looks like a flower, the flaring red circle at its center surrounded by a wash of pink skin. She rubs body lotion into it, pressing into the dead tissue at the center, the pain duller. The case no longer needs to be Clare’s to solve. But something compels her.

  Maybe you’re learning how to do the job, Somers said this morning in the café.

  There is a knock. Clare goes to the spy hole with the towel wrapped around her. Why is he so early? But instead of Malcolm she sees Raylene standing there, arms crossed, nervous.

  “One second,” Clare says, toweling her hair. She dresses as quickly as she can and opens the door. “Raylene.”

  “I’m leaving,” Raylene says, a rolling carry-on bag at her feet. “Taking a red-eye bus. I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m going to book the longest bus ride I can.”

  Clare steps aside and allows Raylene into the room. Raylene leaves her bag at the door and walks to the window. Clare watches her as she peers down to the street below. Raylene wears clean clothes; a pink tailored T-shirt and dark capris. Her hair is combed into a neat ponytail.

  “Your ex-husband was reported missing,” Clare says finally. “They found his car. An APB went out. It names you. Somers is on to you.”

  “I figured. So I’m leaving. Onwards.”

  “Raylene, do you know where Sally is?”

  “No,” Raylene says. “Do you?”

  “I have a theory,” Clare says.

  “Everyone has a theory.”

  “Listen,” Clare says, “I know you need to go. And you don’t have to tell me what’s going on if you don’t want to. Will you be okay?”

  “I’ve got ID,” Raylene says. “Some money. I figure I don’t have to worry about Sally taking heat anymore.”

  “Sally taking heat? For what?”

  Raylene’s eyes fill with tears. For a long time she stares at Clare, as if deciding. Gauging.

  “He’s dead,” Raylene says.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Him. My husband.”

  “What happened?”

  Raylene walks to the bed and sits, her hands folded in her lap.

  “You know when you finally reach that point where it has to end?” she says. “One way or another?”

  “Yes,” Clare says. “I do.”

  “Three weeks ago he came to High River. I don’t even know how he found me. Honestly, it occurred to me that Markus called him. Markus knew I was on to his affair with Sally. What better way to get rid of me than to tip off my husband? Anyway, it was a Sunday morning, and Sally and I were the only ones home at the big house. And William. He was there too. My husband arrived at the front door. Sally was the one who answered but I was right there in the kitchen eating a bowl of Cheerios. Right in front of him. He was wearing this stupid old baseball cap he’s had forever. He took it off and held it to his chest. He had a picture of the kids. He sat at the table with us. Sally, William, me, him. He passed the picture to Sally, tousled William’s hair. I remember Sally looking at me, the rage in her eyes, and she’d be nodding at me so sli
ghtly, like she was trying to send me a message, but then she’d turn to him and nod full out and frown like she was listening and wanted to hear his side. She amazed me, how quickly she could flip that switch just looking from me to him and back. I knew she’d do whatever I needed her to do.”

  When Raylene pauses, Clare touches her arm to coax her.

  “He said he wanted me back,” Raylene continues. “He asked me to drive with him to the grave. To their grave. I’d buried them in the same cemetery where my parents were laid to rest. A few hours from High River. Three hours. But, honestly? I never visited them. Not once. I couldn’t bear it. And here he was, as if everything was normal. As if he were a normal husband just trying to make amends. I just couldn’t bear it.”

  “Of course you couldn’t.”

  “Sally took charge. She was being nice to my husband, but of course I knew. I knew her. She told him to get in the car and wait for us at the end of the driveway. We’d both go with him to the cemetery. Six hours round-trip. She took William upstairs for a nap even though it was morning. Then she came back down with this bag. She called Markus to come over and look after William. You know. She and Markus. Fucking Markus. He came over like this little puppy dog and she told him we need to take a run into the city and won’t be back until after dinner. She told him she’d called us a cab to take us to the commuter bus station five miles away. She was all business. The way she just aligned the lies. It was remarkable.”

  When Raylene pauses again, Clare stands and collects two glasses of water from the bathroom. She hands one to Raylene and sits back down without a word.

  “As we were walking to my husband’s car, I’m freaking out, thinking he’s going to kill us. No, Sally said to me, we’re going to deal with this. Fuck this shit, she said. I got in the front seat and my husband smiled at me and squeezed my arm and I wanted to vomit. To punch his teeth in. We drove to the cemetery and Sally made small talk with him from the backseat. She talked about politics, the weather. Isn’t the heat crazy? she was saying to him. I wanted to punch her too. I felt like I was going to faint. I wanted to die. To jump out of the car on the highway. Because I was listening to him talk to Sally and I could hear him talking to our kids at the dinner table or on the stand at his godforsaken trial. That same voice. Eventually we got to the cemetery and we were standing at the grave, the three of us. Sally excused herself. Said she wanted to give us some privacy. And I wanted to kill her but I was frozen there. Numb. Reading their names. Two years between birth and death. My husband was kneeling at the grave. He was crying. He was actually crying. Forgive me, he said. He said that. But then Sally came up. She was beside me and I could see that she was holding a tire iron. Where did she get a tire iron? She nodded at me. I nodded back. Then she took one swing, whoosh, just like that, and it cracked his skull. You could hear it. Crack. He crumpled.”