I stood there, looking at the open door. I took a step forward, and stopped.
See, I had imagined her death so many times. I had played scenes in my head, little snippets of film, of video. I had run it through, over and over, different permutations, different scenarios.
A hammer a knife a rope a gun a bat a chain a—
But in my imagination, the house was always vague, always diaphanous, a construct of clouds and smoke. And the actors on that stage, Paris and her dad, were not much more solid, their mass leached by the blurred background, the whole thing barely coalescing in my mind, before dissolving into nothing.
It was never very real, even though I tortured myself with it.
And if I went in there?
If I went in there, I wouldn’t find any clues. I was starting to realize that now. I was not Sherlock Holmes, as Dad had said. I wasn’t going to uncover some link to the killer that the crime-scene technicians had somehow missed; I mean, real life just doesn’t work like that.
I’d known one thing, had worked out one thing, which was that a car turned in front of Julie and so must have come from a drive on the street, and it turned out that, yes, it had, it had come from the neighbors, where an uptight gym-bunny wife whose husband was in Dubai had been driving out to the store or the yoga class or whatever.
It was nothing.
And if I went into that house, I would find nothing.
I would just know where she died; I would have a stage for my worst imaginings, a stage with depth and width and heft and presence. A stage that would make the scenes on it more real.
I remember being asked if I wanted to see my mom when she was dead. In the funeral home, I mean. And I said yes, because I thought that was what I was supposed to say; I thought I was supposed to say good-bye; I thought my dad would be hurt if I didn’t.
But she was a waxwork doll; she was empty; she was nothing but skin and makeup that she wouldn’t have chosen herself; and I wish, wish, wish that I had never seen her like that. I wish I had said no.
Standing outside the house where Paris died, I took a deep breath.
Then I turned, and walked away.
I wasn’t going to go in there.
It was as I neared the next house on the street that I saw it.
A narrow gap ran down the side of the house. There was a rusting old bike propped there, between the wall of the house and a wooden fence; a couple of trash cans, one fallen over.
And beyond, in the gray pre-storm light, a sliver of a pier, just a narrow one it seemed like, visible through the thin opening. A rickety old thing, collapsing at the end into the ocean, green with seaweed.
I didn’t think; I just turned and headed down, past the side of the house, and then I was on a path that ran the length of the backyard. Similar paths came from the other houses and it seemed like at some point the pier must have served the row, a shared resource, for people to moor their boats.
Now, it teetered into the ocean drunkenly, on sea-slimed pillars, many of its boards broken like smashed teeth. I gazed at it. The water was high; coming up almost to the backyard. Above and around me and out over the ocean, merging with it, indistinguishable from it at the horizon, the sky was a boiling mass of darkness now, tinged with white. To the south, I could see rain slanting down on the water, turning it from smooth glassy expanses and waves to a lo-res pattern of gray dots—blurred; pixelated.
And there was the old pier, jutting out into the water like a gesture, like an invitation.
Paris died here.
It wasn’t the voice. It was a conviction, deep inside me. I could see her, being dragged down the backyard from the house, then along the pier, screaming maybe, or maybe unconscious. Feet trailing. Hands under her arms. Pulled like a slack puppet down the length of the wooden jetty, bump, bump, bump, her feet over the joints, to the end. Weighed down with rocks. With chains. I don’t know.
And pushed into the ocean.
My body was moving now with no control, no input from me, and I was out over the churning water before I really did any thinking at all, over the chop and swell of it, the inky darkness.
The planks were slippery. I walked carefully, gingerly, finding what purchase I could among the seaweed, slicked by the water, which was rising up in a spray all around me, a rain that came from below.
And then the rain came from above.
Just like that:
No warning, no boom of thunder, just one moment no rain and the next the skies opened like the jaws of those grabbers you see in movies at garbage heaps, dumping the contents of all those roiling clouds on the ocean, on the pier, on me.