فصل 39

39

JULES

You were making up stories. Rewriting history, retelling it with your own slant, your own version of the truth.

(The hubris, Nel. The fucking hubris.)

You don’t know what happened to Libby Seeton, and you certainly don’t know what was going through Katie’s head when she died. Your notes make that clear:

On the night of Midsummer’s Day, Katie Whittaker went into the Drowning Pool. Her footsteps were found on the beach at its southern edge. She wore a green cotton dress and a simple chain around her neck, a blue bird charm engraved “with love.” On her back, she carried a pack filled with bricks and stones. Tests carried out after her death revealed she was sober and clean.

Katie had no history of mental illness or self-harm. She was a good student, pretty and popular. The police found no evidence of bullying, either IRL or on social media.

Katie came from a good home, a good family. Katie was loved.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in your study, leafing through your papers in the late-afternoon gloom, looking for answers. Looking for something. In amongst the notes—which were disorganized and in disarray, barely legible scribbles in the margins, words underlined in red or crossed out in black—there were pictures, too. In a cheap manila folder I found printouts on low-grade photography paper: Katie with Lena, two little girls grinning at the camera, not pouting, not posing, throwbacks to some distant innocent pre-Snapchat era. Flowers and tributes left at the edge of the pool, teddy bears, trinkets. Footprints in the sand at the edge of the pool. Not hers, I presume. Not Katie’s actual prints, surely? No, they must have been your version, a reconstruction. You followed in her footsteps, didn’t you? You walked where she walked, you couldn’t resist feeling what it felt like.

That was always a thing with you. When you were younger, you were fascinated by the physical act, the bones of it, the viscera. You asked questions: Would it hurt? For how long? What did it feel like, to hit water from a height? Would you feel yourself break? You thought less, I think, about the rest of it: about what it took to get someone to the top of the cliff or to the edge of the beach, and to propel them to keep moving.

At the back of the folder was an envelope with your name scrawled on the front. Inside was a note on lined paper, written in a shaky hand:

I meant what I said when I saw you yesterday. I do not want my daughter’s tragedy to become part of your macabre “project.” It’s not just that I find it repulsive that you would gain financially from it. I have told you time and time again that I believe what you are doing to be DEEPLY IRRESPONSIBLE and Katie’s death is PROOF OF THAT. If you had an ounce of compassion you would stop what you are doing now, accept that what you write and print and say and do has consequences. I don’t expect you to listen to me—you’ve shown no sign of doing so in the past. But if you continue down this path, I’ve no doubt that someday someone will make you listen.

It wasn’t signed, but it was obvious it came from Katie’s mother. She warned you—and not just this once either. In the police station, I’d listened to the detective ask Lena about an incident just after Katie died, about how she threatened you and told you she would make you pay. Is that what you wanted to tell me? Were you afraid of her? Did you think she was coming for you?

The idea of her, a wild-eyed woman, mad with grief, hunting you down—it was horrifying, it frightened me. I no longer wanted to be here, amongst your things. I raised myself to my feet, and as I did, the house seemed to shift, to tilt like a boat. I could feel the river pushing against the wheel, urging it to turn, water seeping into cracks widened by accomplice weeds.

I rested one hand on the filing cabinet and walked up the stairs into the living room, silence buzzing in my ears. I stood for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the brighter light, and for a second I felt sure that I saw someone, there on the window seat, in the spot where I used to sit. Just for a moment, and then she was gone, but my heart bludgeoned my ribs and my scalp prickled. Someone was here, or someone had been here. Or someone was coming.

My breath quick and shallow, I half ran to the front door, which was bolted, just as I’d left it. But in the kitchen there was a strange smell—something different, sweet, like perfume—and the kitchen window was wide open. I didn’t remember opening it.

I went over to the freezer and did something I almost never do—I poured myself a drink: cold, viscous vodka. I filled a glass and drank it quickly; it burned all the way down my throat and into my belly. Then I poured myself another.

My head swam and I leaned against the kitchen table for support. I was keeping an eye out, I suppose, for Lena. She’d disappeared again, refusing to be given a lift home. Part of me was grateful—I hadn’t wanted to share a space with her. I told myself it was because I was angry with her—supplying diet pills to another girl, body-shaming her—but really I was afraid about what the woman detective said. That Lena isn’t curious because Lena already knows. I couldn’t stop seeing her face, that photo upstairs with her sharp teeth and her predatory smile. What does Lena know?

I went back to the study and sat down on the floor again, gathered up the notes I’d pulled out and began to rearrange them, trying to establish some sort of order. Trying to get a sense of your narrative. When I came to the picture of Katie and Lena, I stopped. There was a smudge of ink on its surface, just beneath Lena’s chin. I turned the picture over in my hands. On the reverse you had written a single line. I read it aloud: Sometimes troublesome women take care of themselves.

The room darkened. I looked up and a cry caught in my throat. I hadn’t heard her, hadn’t heard the front door go or her footsteps crossing the living room, she was just there all of a sudden, standing in the doorway, blocking the light, and from where I was sitting, the shadow profile was Nel’s. Then the shadow stepped farther into the room and I saw Lena, a smear of dirt on her face, her hands filthy, her hair tangled and wild.

“Who are you talking to?” she asked. She was hopping from one foot to the other, she looked hyper, manic.

“I wasn’t talking, I was—”

“Yes, you were,” she giggled. “I heard you. Who were you—” She broke off then, and the curl of her lip disappeared as she noticed the picture. “What are you doing with that?”

“I was just reading . . . I wanted—” I didn’t have time to get the words out of my mouth before she was upon me, towering over me, and I cowered. She lunged at me and grabbed the picture from my hands.

“What are you doing with this?” She was trembling, her teeth gritted together, red-faced with rage. I scrabbled to my feet. “This has nothing to do with you!” She turned away from me, placed Katie’s picture on the desk and smoothed it over with her palm. “What right do you have to do this?” she asked, turning back to face me, her voice quavering. “To go through her stuff, to touch her things? Who gave you permission to do this?”

She took a step towards me, kicking over the glass of vodka as she did so. It flew up and smashed against the wall. She dropped to her knees and began gathering up the notes I’d been sorting through. “You shouldn’t be touching this!” She was almost spitting with rage. “This has nothing to do with you!”

“Lena,” I said, “don’t.”

She drew back sharply with a little gasp of pain. She’d put her hand on a piece of glass, it was bleeding. She grabbed a sheaf of the papers and clutched them to her chest.

“Come here,” I said, trying to take the papers from her. “You’re bleeding.”

“Get away from me!” She piled the papers on to the desk. My eye was drawn to the smear of blood across the top sheet and the words printed below it: Prologue, in heavy type, and below that: When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning.

I felt hysterical laughter rise in me; it burst out of me so loudly that Lena jumped. She stared at me in amazement. I laughed harder, at the furious look on her beautiful face, at the blood dripping from her fingers to the floor. I laughed until the tears came to my eyes, until everything blurred, as though I were submerged.