“I would imagine Rachel wants as many people helping her as she can get.’
She nods, then starts telling me about her daughter, and I realise I could be anybody in the world and she’d still be happy to speak about Rachel. She’d probably be the same way if I was at the door selling encyclopaedias or God. She talks for nearly twenty minutes and I don’t interrupt her. I know what it’s like to have lost somebody. I know what it is like to hold out hope.
False hope is cruel, but perhaps not as cruel as no hope at all. It’s a judgement only those who have been there can make.
‘And David?’ I ask, after she has told me what she can about Rachel’s life, including in detail the days before she disappeared.
‘What can you tell me about him?’
“I thought he knew what happened,’ she says. ‘For those few weeks I was sure she was living with him. See, they were living together, but not really. All her things were here, are still here, but she wouldn’t come home for days on end. When we didn’t see her for a week we tried contacting her, then him, but he said he hadn’t seen her. I thought he was lying, and that he was shielding her from us for something we must have done. But I knew, I knew something wasn’t right. I don’t know how, but I just knew.
So Michael, my husband, called the police. We filed a Missing Persons report. We hadn’t heard from her in nearly a week. It wasn’t like her.’
‘What happened when the police spoke to David?’
‘Nothing. They said they had no reason to believe he was lying.
Still, I wasn’t convinced. I would go to his house at different times, but there was never any sign of her. I would knock on his door in the middle of the night. After a while I began to see that David was just as distraught as we were, and I started leaving him alone. I don’t know if he really believes Rachel is still alive.’
I throw a couple of names at her. Bruce Alderman and Henry Martins. She shakes her head and tells me she’s never heard them, and asks me why. I tell her the names have come up but I’m not sure where they fit into it, and that it may be unlikely they even do. She gives me a list of Rachel’s friends, places she liked to go, photographs of her, people she worked with, David’s address. She’s giving it all some real serious thought, hoping for a connection, hoping she is going to mention a name that’s the key to getting her daughter back.
She walks me to the door. She seems reluctant to let me go. I feel guilty I’ve deceived her, that I’ve given her more hope today than she had yesterday, and the guilt becomes a sickening feeling that makes the world sway a little as I make my way to the car. The police will identify Rachel Tyler. They will come here tomorrow or the next day, and they will tell Patricia that her daughter is dead. I can’t stop it from happening. I can’t prepare her for it.
It’s getting close to eight o’clock and within the next twenty minutes it will be dark, the thick clouds bringing the night earlier than usual for this time of year. The flowers in the front seat still look fresh enough to keep on growing. I start my car and pull away, the small voice inside my head questioning what in the hell I am doing, and the bigger voice, the one I use every day to justify my actions, telling me I have no idea.
chapter eight
Perception is a funny thing. Especially when you’re dealing with luck. Somebody who survives a plane crash is considered lucky. Is he considered lucky to have even been on that flight? Or unlucky?
Does the bad luck of being seated on a doomed flight cancel out the good luck of surviving? I don’t get it that people are lucky to have lost only an arm.
My wife was lucky. That’s what people say. An inch here or
a second or two there, and things would have been different.
I would have ended up burying her, and the flowers I keep buying would be going to a grave. Inches. Seconds. Luck. Good luck for her. Good luck for all. It doesn’t add up. She wasn’t lucky. Not at all. Wasn’t lucky when the car ploughed into her; wasn’t lucky that her head hit the footpath at forty kilometres an hour and not fifty. Wasn’t lucky when her legs were shattered, her ribs broken.
Lucky to have lived, yes, but not lucky.
The care home is out of the city where suburbia kicks in and city noise dies away. It covers five hectares of land, widi grounds scenic enough to be used for a wedding. The buildings are forty years old, grey brick with the occasional flare of polished oak windowsill — a combination of bad ideas or perhaps good ideas that didn’t work. The driveway is long and shaded by giant trees that flourish in the summer and look like skeletons in the winter.
I pull up outside the main office and for a few seconds try to imagine that this world hasn’t gone mad.