The Family Game(57)

I have faith in you, Harriet. We are alike, you and I. In what we have done for our families. As you will see.

The second girl was harder than the first. And Gianna fought. She screamed and clawed and left marks. She wanted to live but she saw too much.

A fashion party, 2003, a warehouse loft on New Year’s Eve. There were red balloons, and a drive for the future as present and tangible as the glitter on young faces. Her eyes did not waver as she danced. That look of hers, intent, determined, a challenge. And she was beautiful, her lips stained dark, her thick curls tumbling around her. She had pushed and pushed for more but she could not have more. She was not suitable. Good fun, but not worth the investment she seemed to require, or demand. And so, to her place.

The boom and the pulse of the warehouse left behind. An argument, a scuffle, but, once words were spoken, she calmed enough to come willingly. Her rooms were dark and full of foreign objects. Low light, blue-black linen sheets and the smell of jasmine. Mirrors everywhere so that she could watch what happened. Her lipstick imprinted on a crystal tumbler, the kiss of her wet lips as she drained the fluid, as her slender throat swallowed. She looked like she knew what she was drinking, but she did not know.

Do not worry, Harriet Reed. I did not touch her as I lay her in the fresh sheets, only to softly arrange her for whoever would find her. Her breathing already too slow, already ebbing away.

In the drained glass: too much of what she had already had. A mixture of excess. That is what she was given, simply more of what she had already had, because that is what she wanted in a sense. It was what she wanted to give us. More of the same. More of her. So, you see, she had to go.

Sitting in the corner of the room, I watched her slow to a stop. You could say watching is cause enough to give up on a person, and perhaps you would be right, my dear. After all, who would do such a thing? Who would watch another person die?

But we both know the answer to that, don’t we? We know the kind of person who would watch another die and do nothing. We both know the kind of person that takes, don’t we, Harriet Reed?

The question is: is there a difference between you and I? Between what I have done and what you have done? And you must believe me when I say I do know what you have done. I imagine you reason that I cannot possibly know about that lonely morning on a country road, and my answer to you is simple: I do. I know enough.

Enough to fill in the gaps, enough to colour the picture and present you with my findings. I am not the writer here, Harriet, but indulge me if you will.



* * *



I see you. Little girl in the back seat of a car, in a world of your own, safe. The babble of parents up front. Perhaps you felt the air change as the moment came, an unexpected intake of breath from the driver, a tensing, a sudden movement of the wheel, a jerk. Your gaze flashing forward too late. Did she turn to you, your mother? Did she catch your eye before it hit, her last instinct to protect you?

I cannot presume to know what happened in those last moments. The life you came from, the ones who loved you, taken from you.

The car impacted, flipped, skidded and came to a stop in a gully beyond the road. In the silence that followed that deafening noise you slowly came to; your own cries inaudible beneath the buzz in your ears. Around you glass, and twisted metal, the taste of blood and the thick fug of gasoline. Your left arm broken, torn muscles in your neck and both shoulders. Broken ribs. You hung suspended by nothing but your seatbelt.

You all hung; a silent family suspended as if stopped in time. Your mother’s auburn hair swaying just out of reach, the car’s windshield decimated, plant life inching deep into the car. Whether you said her name or not, I do not know, whether you leant forward to try and wake her I do not know; but she would not have stirred. She was an object jostled, nothing more. Your father beside her, equally silent.

I don’t know how long you waited and hoped and tried to rouse those silent bodies. But after a time, an animal instinct moved you. Even at eleven years old you knew to cut your losses, to chew through a trap. Or perhaps you thought you could save them, get help, that someone else would come.

You disengaged your seatbelt and tumbled into the roof well, scrambling out on bleeding hands and knees. In my mind, Harriet, you did not look back as you passed them. You did not want to remember them that way.

The dead feel different, don’t they? Once the light has gone, the people we loved become strangers, don’t they? We cannot reach them and something different is left in their place.

You clambered out of that broken windshield, snagged by branches and barbs of twisted metal. You did not pull a phone from their pockets; you did not think to do so in your rush.

I have no doubt that over the years, you have stewed over why you did not think to do that in the moment. But, rest assured, there was nothing you could have done for them; I have seen the medical reports; they left you before you even knew.

Back on the road, shaking and bruised, you saw what hit you. He was there. His car tipped, immobile, its windshield shattered milky by the impact. You saw him, pinned by his own steering wheel, shivering, crying, his body trapped in the twisted metal.

Did you speak to him? Did he scream for help, shriek his regret? I imagine, even at your age, you could tell he was drunk, that this was why you had lost everything. Judging by what you did next, I think there can be no doubt about that.

Crashed cars rarely explode in real life, but small fires are common. A spark at the front of his vehicle. A fuel leak at the back. The two so rarely connect.