Into the Water(34)

Yesterday, she had gone to the church to watch them put Nel in the ground. In reality – and she ought to have known this – they didn’t. Still, she got to watch her slide away to burn, so that was what passed for a good day. Even the outpouring of emotion – she had sobbed throughout the ceremony, despite herself – was cathartic.

But today was going to be a bitch. She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence. The elation she’d felt at first, her vengeful satisfaction, was already waning. And now, with Nel burned to ashes, Louise was left with nothing. Nothing. At no one’s door could she lay her pain and suffering, because Nel was gone. And she worried that in the end the only place she had to bring her torment was home.

Home to her husband and son. So. Today was going to be a bitch, but that bitch had to be faced, stared down. She had made up her mind; it was time to move on. They needed to go before it was too late.

Louise and her husband, Alec, had been arguing about this – the sort of low-level, quiet arguments they had these days – for weeks. Alec felt it would be better to move before the new school term started. They should let Josh start the new school year in a completely new place, he argued, where no one knew who he was. Where he wouldn’t be confronted with his sister’s absence every day.

‘So he’ll never have to talk about her?’ Louise asked.

‘He’ll talk about her with us,’ Alec replied.

They’d been standing in the kitchen, their voices strained and hushed. ‘We need to sell this house and start over,’ Alec said. ‘I know,’ he said, raising his hands as Louise began to protest. ‘I know this is her home.’ He faltered then, placing his big hands, mottled with sun damage, on the counter. He hung on as if for dear life. ‘We have to make some kind of new start, Lou, for Josh. If it were just you and me …’

If it were just them, she thought, they’d follow Katie into the water and be done with it. Wouldn’t they? She wasn’t sure Alec would. She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did. Alec felt the grief, of course, but she wasn’t sure he felt the despair. Or the hatred.

So the fault lines were already beginning to show in a marriage she’d thought unshakable. But of course she’d known nothing before. Now, it was obvious: no marriage could survive this loss. It would always sit between them – that neither of them had been able to stop her. Worse, that neither of them had suspected a thing. That the two of them had gone to bed and fallen asleep and discovered her empty bed in the morning and had not for a single second imagined she’d be in the river.

There was no hope for Louise, and little, she thought, for Alec, but Josh was different. Josh would miss his sister every day for the rest of his life, but he could be happy: he would. He would carry her with him, but he would also work, travel, fall in love, live. And the best chance he had was to be away from here, away from Beckford, away from the river. Louise knew that her husband was right about that.

Somewhere inside, she’d known this already, she’d just been reluctant to face it. But yesterday, watching her son after the funeral, she had been gripped by terror. His pinched, anxious face. How easily he startled, flinching at loud noises, cowering like a frightened dog in a crowd. The way he constantly turned his gaze to her, as though he was retreating back into early childhood, no longer an independent twelve-year-old, but a frightened, needy little boy. They had to get him away from here.

And yet. This was where Katie had taken her first steps, spoken her first words, played hide and seek, cartwheeled around the garden, fought with her little brother, soothed him afterwards, laughed and sung and cried and cursed and bled and hugged her mum every day when she got home from school.

But Louise had made up her mind. Like her daughter, she was determined, although the effort was immense. Just to get up from the kitchen table, walk to the bottom of the stairs and then climb them, to place her hand on the door handle, to push down, to enter her room for the last time. Because that’s what it felt like. This was the last time it would be her room. After today, it would be something else.

Louise’s heart was a block of wood; it didn’t beat, it only pained her, scraping against soft tissue, tearing through vein and muscle, flooding her chest with blood.

Good days and bad.

She couldn’t leave the room like this. Hard as it was to think about packing up Katie’s things, putting away her clothes, taking her pictures down from the walls, tidying her away, hiding her from view, it was worse to think of strangers in here. It was worse to imagine what they would touch, how they would look for clues, how they would marvel at how normal everything looked, how normal Katie had looked. Her? Surely not? Surely she can’t be the one who drowned?

So Louise would do it: she would clear the school things from the desk and pick up the pen that once rested in her daughter’s fist. She would fold up the soft grey T-shirt that Katie slept in, she would make her bed. She would take the blue earrings that Katie’s favourite aunt had given her for her fourteenth birthday and tidy them away into her jewellery box. She would take the big, black suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the hallway, she would fill it with Katie’s clothes.

She would.

She was standing in the middle of the room, thinking all this, when she heard a noise behind her, and she turned to see Josh standing in the doorway, watching her.