Chapter forty-three

‘Juice!’ demanded Jacob.

‘What do you want, sweetie?’ whispered Lauren.

Juice, thought Rachel. He wants a juice. Are you deaf?

It was only just light, and Rachel, Rob and Lauren were standing in a shivery little circle at Wattle Valley Park, rubbing their hands together and stamping their feet, while Jacob slithered in and out between their legs. He was rugged up in a parka that Rachel suspected was too small for him, his arms sticking straight out like a snowman.

As expected, Lauren was wearing her trench coat, although her ponytail didn’t look quite as perfect as normal – there were a few strands escaping from her hairband – and she looked tired. She was carrying a single red rose, which Rachel thought was a silly choice. It was like those roses in long plastic cylinders that young men gave to their girlfriends on Valentine’s Day.

Rachel herself was carrying a small posy of sweet peas she’d picked from her own backyard, tied up with a piece of green velvet ribbon like Janie used to wear when she was very little.

‘Do you leave the flowers where she was found? At the bottom of the slide?’ Marla had once asked.

‘Yes, Marla, I leave them there to be trampled by hundreds of little feet,’ Rachel had said.

‘Oh, yes, good point,’ Marla had said, not at all offended.

It wasn’t even the same slide. All the clunky old metal equipment had been replaced by fancy space-age-looking stuff, just like the park near Rachel’s house where she took Jacob, and the ground had a rubbery surface that gave an astronaut-like bounce to your step.

‘Juice!’ said Jacob again.

‘I don’t understand, sweetie.’ Lauren flipped her ponytail back over one shoulder. ‘You want me to loosen your jacket?’

For heaven’s sake. Rachel sighed. It wasn’t like she ever really felt Janie’s presence when she came here. She couldn’t imagine her here, couldn’t conceive how she had come to be here. None of Janie’s friends had ever known her to come to this particular park. It was a boy, obviously, who had brought her here. A boy called Connor Whitby. He probably wanted sex and Janie said no. She should have had sex with him. That was Rachel’s fault, for going on about it so much, as if losing her virginity was this momentous event. Dying was far more momentous. She should have said to her, ‘Have sex with whoever you want, Janie. Just stay safe.’

Ed had never wanted to come to the park where she was found. ‘What’s the bloody point of that?’ he said. ‘Too bloody late to go there now, isn’t it? She’s not bloody there, is she?’

You’re bloody right, Ed.

But Rachel felt like she owed it to Janie to turn up each year with her posy of flowers, to apologise for not being there, to be there now, to imagine her last few moments, to honour the last place she’d been alive, the last place where she’d breathed. If only Rachel could have been there to see her for those last precious minutes, to drink in the sight of those ridiculously long skinny legs and arms, the awkward, angular beauty of her face. It was a silly thought, because if Rachel had been there, then she would have been busy saving her life, but still, she longed to have been there, even if she wasn’t able to change the outcome.

Maybe Ed had been right. It was pointless to come here each year like this. It felt particularly pointless this year with Rob and Lauren and Jacob standing around like people waiting for something to happen, the entertainment to start.

‘Juice!’ said Jacob.

‘I’m sorry, sweetie, I just don’t understand,’ said Lauren.

‘He wants a juice,’ said Rob so gruffly that Rachel almost felt sorry for Lauren. Rob sounded just like Ed when he got grumpy. The Crowley men were such grumps. ‘We don’t have any, mate. Here. We’ve got your water bottle. Have some water.’

‘We don’t drink juice, Jakey,’ said Lauren. ‘It’s bad for your teeth.’

Jacob held his water bottle with fat little hands, tipped back his head and drank thirstily, giving Rachel a look that said, We won’t tell her about all the juice I drink at your place.

Lauren tightened the belt of her trench coat and turned to Rachel. ‘Do you normally say anything? Or, um –’

‘No, I just think of her,’ said Rachel in a flat, shut-the-hell-up voice. She certainly wasn’t going to let her feelings loose in front of Lauren. ‘We can go in a moment. It’s very nippy. We don’t want Jacob getting a chill.’

It was ridiculous bringing Jacob here. On this day. To this park. Perhaps in future she’d do something else to mark the anniversary of Janie’s death. Go to her grave like they did on her birthday.

She just had to get through this endless day and then it would be done, for another year. Let’s just move it along. Come on minutes. March on by until it’s midnight.

‘Do you want to say something, honey?’ Lauren asked Rob.

Rachel nearly said, ‘Of course he doesn’t’, but she stopped herself in time. She looked at Rob and saw he was looking up at the sky, stretching his neck out like a turkey, gritting those strong white teeth, his hands awkwardly clenched across his stomach as if he was having a fit.

He hasn’t been here, realised Rachel. He hasn’t been to the park since she was found. She took a step towards him, but Lauren got there first, and took his hand.

‘It’s okay,’ she murmured. ‘You’re okay. Just breathe, honey. Breathe.’

Rachel watched, helpless, as this young woman she didn’t really know that well comforted her son, who she probably didn’t know that well either. She watched how Rob leaned towards his wife, and she thought of how little she knew, had ever really wanted to know, about her son’s grief. Did he wake Lauren with nightmares that twisted the sheets? Did he speak quietly in the darkness to her, telling stories about his sister?

Rachel felt a hand on her knee and looked down.

‘Grandma,’ said Jacob. He beckoned to her.

‘What is it?’ She bent down and he cupped a hand over her ear.

‘Juice,’ he whispered. ‘Please?’

The Fitzpatrick family slept late. Cecilia woke first. She reached for her iPhone sitting on the bedside table and saw that it was half-past nine. Dishwater-grey morning light flooded through their bedroom windows.

Good Friday and Boxing Day were the two precious days of the year when they never scheduled anything. Tomorrow she’d be frantic, preparing for the Easter Sunday lunch, but today there would be no guests, no homework, no rushing, not even grocery shopping. The air was chilly, the bed warm.

John-Paul murdered Rachel Crowley’s daughter. The thought settled on her chest, compressing her heart. She would never again lie in bed on a Good Friday morning and relax in the blissful knowledge that there was nothing to do and nowhere to be, because for the rest of her life there would always, always be something left undone.

She was lying on her side, with her back up against John-Paul. She could feel the warm weight of his arm across her waist. Her husband. Her husband, the murderer. Should she have known? Should she have guessed? The nightmares, the migraines, the times when he was so stubborn and strange. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but it made her feel somehow negligent. ‘That’s just him,’ she’d tell herself. She kept replaying memories of their marriage in light of what she now knew. She remembered, for example, how he’d refused to try for a fourth child. ‘Let’s try for a boy,’ Cecilia had said to him when Polly was a toddler, knowing that both of them would have been perfectly happy if they’d ended up with four girls. John-Paul had mystified her with his stubborn refusal to consider it. It was probably yet another example of his self-flagellation. He’d probably been desperate for a boy.

Think of something else. Maybe she should get up and make a start on the baking for Sunday. How would she cope with all those guests, all that conversation, all that happiness? John-Paul’s mother would sit in her favourite armchair, full of righteousness, holding court, sharing the secret. ‘It was all such a long time ago,’ she’d said. But it must feel like yesterday to Rachel.

Cecilia remembered with a lurch that Rachel had said today was the anniversary of Janie’s death. Did John-Paul know that? Probably not. He was terrible with dates. He didn’t remember his own wedding anniversary unless she reminded him; why would he remember the day he killed a girl?

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said softly to herself as the physical symptoms of her new disease came rushing back: the nausea, the headache. She had to get up. She had to somehow escape from it. She went to throw back the covers and felt John-Paul’s arm tighten around her.

‘I’m getting up,’ she said without turning to face him.

‘How do you think we’d cope financially?’ he said into her neck. He sounded hoarse, as if he had a terrible cold. ‘If I do go to . . . without my salary? We’d have to sell the house, right?’

‘We’d survive,’ answered Cecilia shortly. She took care of the finances. Always had. John-Paul was happy to be oblivious to bills and mortgage payments.

‘Really? We would?’ He sounded doubtful. The Fitzpatricks were relatively wealthy and John-Paul had grown up expecting to be better off than most people he knew. If there was money around, he quite naturally assumed it must emanate from him. Cecilia hadn’t deliberately misled him about how much money she’d been earning the last few years; she just hadn’t got around to mentioning it.

He said, ‘I was thinking that if I’m not here, we could get one of Pete’s boys to come around and do odd jobs for you. Like clearing the gutters. That’s really important. You can’t let that go, Cecilia. Especially around bushfire season. I’ll have to do a list. I keep thinking of things.’

She lay still. Her heart thudded. How could this be? It was absurd. Impossible. Were they actually lying in bed talking about John-Paul going to jail?

‘I really wanted to be the one to teach the girls how to drive,’ he said. His voice broke. ‘They’ve got to know how to handle wet roads. You don’t know how to brake properly when the roads are wet.’

‘I do so,’ protested Cecilia.

She turned around to face him and saw that he was sobbing, his cheeks crumpled into ugly grizzled folds. He twisted his head to bury his face in the pillow, as if to hide his tears. ‘I know I have no right. No right to cry. I just can’t imagine not seeing them each morning.’

Rachel Crowley never gets to see her daughter again.

But she couldn’t harden her heart enough. The part of him she loved best was the part that loved his daughters. Their children had bound them together in a way she knew didn’t always happen to other couples. Sharing stories about the girls – laughing about them, wondering about their futures – was one of the greatest pleasures of her marriage. She’d married John-Paul because of the father she knew he would be.

‘What will they think of me?’ He pressed his hands to his face. ‘They’ll hate me.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Cecilia. This was unbearable. ‘It will be all right. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to change.’

‘But I don’t know, now I’ve actually said it out loud, now that you know, after all these years, it feels so real, more real than ever before. It’s today, you know.’ He ran the back of his hand across his nose and looked at her. ‘Today is the day. I remember every year. I hate autumn. But this year it seems even more shocking than ever. I can’t believe it was me. I can’t believe I did that to someone’s daughter. And now my girls, my girls . . . my girls have to pay.’

The remorse racked his whole body, like the worst sort of pain. Her every instinct was to ease it, to rescue him, to somehow make the pain stop. She gathered him to her like a child and whispered soothing words. ‘Shhhh. It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right. There couldn’t possibly be new evidence after all these years. Rachel must be mistaken. Come on now. Deep breaths.’

He buried his face in her shoulder and she felt his tears soaking through her nightie.

‘Everything is going to be fine,’ she told him. She knew this couldn’t possibly be true, but as she stroked the military straight line of John-Paul’s greying hair on his neck, she finally understood something about herself.

She would never ask him to confess.

It seemed that all her vomiting in gutters and crying in pantries had been for show, because as long as nobody else was accused, she would keep his secret. Cecilia Fitzpatrick, who always volunteered first, who never sat quietly when something needed to be done, who always brought casseroles and gave up her time, who knew the difference between right and wrong, was prepared to look the other way. She could and she would allow another mother to suffer.

Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 640