Dina shoved the wine bottle closer to me with the toe of her boot. “Have more.”
My glass was still full. “I have to drive you to Geri’s. I’ll stick with what I’ve got. Thanks.”
Dina flicked a fingernail off the edge of her glass, a sharp monotonous pinging, and watched me under her fringe. She said, “Geri gets the papers every morning. Of bloody course. So I read them.”
“Right,” I said. I pushed down the bubble of anger: Geri should have been paying more attention, but she’s a busy woman and Dina is a slippery one.
“What’s Broken Harbor like now? In the photo it looked like shit.”
“It is, pretty much. Someone started building what could have been a nice estate, but it never got finished. At this stage, it probably never will. The people living there aren’t happy.”
Dina stuck a finger in her wine and swirled it. “Fuck’s sake. What a totally shitty thing to do.”
“The developers didn’t know things were going to turn out like this.”
“I bet they did, too, or anyway they didn’t care, but that’s not what I meant. I meant what a shitty thing to do, getting people to move out to Broken Harbor. I’d rather live in a landfill.”
I said, “I’ve got a lot of good memories of Broken Harbor.”
She sucked her finger clean with a pop. “You just think that because you always have to think everything’s lovely. Ladies and gentlemen, my brother Pollyanna.”
I said, “I’ve never seen what’s so bad about focusing on the positive. Maybe it’s not cool enough for you—”
“What positive? It was OK for you and Geri, you got to go hang out with your friends; I was stuck sitting there with Mum and Dad, getting sand up my crack, pretending I was having fun paddling in water that practically gave me frostbite.”
“Well,” I said, very carefully. “You were only five, the last time we went there. How well do you remember it?”
A flash of blue stare, under the fringe. “Enough that I know it sucked. That place was creepy. Those hills, I always felt like they were staring at me, like something crawling on my neck, I kept wanting to—” She smacked the back of her neck, a vicious reflexive slap that made me flinch. “And the noise, Jesus Christ. The sea, the wind, the gulls, all these weird noises that you could never figure out what they were . . . I had nightmares practically every night that some sea monster thing stuck its tentacles in the caravan window and started strangling me. I bet you anything someone died building that shitty estate, like the Titanic.”
“I thought you liked Broken Harbor. You always seemed like you were having a good time.”
“No I didn’t. You just want to think that.” For a second, the twist to Dina’s mouth made her look almost ugly. “The only good thing was that Mum was so happy there. And look how that turned out.”
There was a moment of silence that could have sliced skin. I almost dropped the whole thing, went back to drinking my wine and telling her how delicious it was—maybe I should have, I don’t know—but I couldn’t. I said, “You make it sound like you were already having problems.”
“Like I was already crazy. That’s what you mean.”
“If that’s how you want to put it. Back when we were going to Broken Harbor, you were a happy, stable kid. Maybe you weren’t having the holiday of a lifetime, but overall, you were fine.”
I needed to hear her say it. She said, “I was never fine. This one time I was digging a hole in the sand, little bucket and spade and everything all adorable, and at the bottom of the hole there was a face. Like a man’s face, all squashed up and making faces, like he was trying to get the sand out of his eyes and his mouth. I screamed and Mum came, but by then he was gone. And it wasn’t just at Broken Harbor, either. Once I was in my room and—”
I couldn’t listen to any more of this. “You had a great imagination. That’s not the same thing. All little kids imagine things. It wasn’t till after Mum died—”
“It was, Mikey. You didn’t know because when I was little you could just put it down to ‘Oh, kids imagine stuff,’ but it was always. Mum dying had nothing to do with it.”
“Well,” I said. My mind felt very strange, juddering like a city in an earthquake. “So maybe it wasn’t Mum dying, exactly. She’d been depressed all your life, off and on. We did our best to keep it away from you, but kids sense things. Maybe it would actually have been better if we hadn’t tried to—”
“Yeah, you guys did your best, and you know what? You did a great job. I hardly remember being worried about Mum ever, at all. I knew she got sick sometimes, or sad, but I didn’t have a clue that it was a big deal. It’s not because of that, the way I am. You keep trying to organize me, file me away all neat and make sense, like I’m one of your cases—I’m not one of your fucking cases.”
“I’m not trying to organize you,” I said. My voice sounded eerily calm, artificially generated somewhere far away. Tiny memories fell through my mind, blooming like flakes of flaming ash: Dina four years old and shrieking blue murder in her bath, clinging to Mum, because the shampoo bottle was hissing at her; I had thought she was trying to dodge having her hair washed. Dina between me and Geri in the back of the car, fighting her seat belt and gnawing her fingers with a hideous worrying sound till they were lumpy and purple and bleeding, I couldn’t even remember why. “I’m just saying of course it was because of Mum. What else would it be? You were never abused, I’d swear to that on my life, you were never beaten or starved or—I don’t think you ever even got a smack on the backside. We all loved you. If it wasn’t Mum, then why?”
“There isn’t any why. That’s what I mean, trying to organize me. I’m not crazy because anything. I just am.”
Her voice was clear, steady, matter-of-fact, and she was looking at me straight on, with something that could almost have been compassion. I told myself that Dina’s hold on reality is one-fingered at best, that if she understood the reasons why she was crazy then she wouldn’t be crazy to begin with. She said, “I know that’s not what you want to think.”
My chest felt like a balloon filling with helium, rocking me dangerously. My hand was clamped on the arm of my chair as if it could anchor me. I said, “If you believe that. That this just happens to you for no reason. How do you live with that?”
Dina shrugged. “Just do. How do you live with it when you have a bad day?”
She was slouching into the corner of the sofa again, drinking her wine; she had lost interest. I took a breath. “I try to understand why I’m having a bad day, so I can fix it. I focus on the positive.”
“Right. So if Broken Harbor was so great and you have all these great memories and everything’s so positive, then why is it wrecking your head going back there?”
“I never said it was.”
“You don’t need to say it. You shouldn’t be doing this case.”
It felt like salvation, to be having the same old fight, back on familiar ground, with that slantwise glitter waking in Dina’s eyes again. “Dina. It’s a murder case, just like all the dozens of others I’ve worked. There’s nothing special about it, except the location.”
“Location location location, what are you, an estate agent? This location is bad for you. I could tell the second I saw you the other night, you were all wrong; you smelled funny, like something burning. Look at you now, go look in mirrors, you look like something shat on your head and set you on fire. This case is fucking you up. Phone your work tomorrow and tell them you’re not doing it.”
In that instant I almost told her to fuck off. It astonished me, how suddenly and how hard the words slammed up against my lips. I have never, in all my adult life, said anything like that to Dina.
I said, when I could be sure that my voice was wiped empty of any hint of anger, “I’m not going to give up this case. I’m sure I do look like shit, but that’s because I’m exhausted. If you want to do something about that, stay put at Geri’s.”
“I can’t. I’m worried about you. Every second you’re out there thinking about that location, I can feel it making your head go bad. That’s why I came back here.”
The irony was enough to make anyone howl with laughter, but Dina was dead serious: bolt upright on the sofa, legs folded under her, ready to fight me all the way. I said, “I’m fine. I appreciate you looking out for me, but there’s no need. Seriously.”
“Yes there is. You’re just as much of a mess as I am. You just hide it better.”
“Maybe. I’d like to think I’ve put in enough work that I’m not actually a mess at this point, but who knows, maybe you’re right. Either way, the upshot is that I’m well able to deal with this case.”
“No. No way. You like thinking you’re the strong one, that’s why you love when I go off the rails, because it makes you feel all Mr. Perfect, but it’s bullshit. I bet sometimes when you’re having a bad day you hope I’ll show up on your doorstep talking crap, just so you’ll feel better about yourself.”
Part of the hell of Dina is that even when you know it’s rubbish, even when you know it’s the dark corroded spots on her mind talking, it still stings. I said, “I hope you know that’s not true. If I could help you get better by having an arm amputated, I’d do it like a shot.”
She sat back on her heels and thought about that. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“Awww,” Dina said, with more appreciation than sarcasm. She sprawled on her back on the sofa and swung her legs over the arm, watching me. She said, “I don’t feel good. Ever since I read those newspapers, things are sounding funny again. I flushed your jacks and it made a noise like popcorn.”
I said, “I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to get you back to Geri’s. If you feel like crap, then you’re going to want someone around.”
“I do want someone around. I want you. Geri makes me want to get a brick and hit myself in the head. One more day of her and I’ll do it.”
With Dina, you don’t have the luxury of taking anything as hyperbole. I said, “So find a way to ignore her. Take deep breaths. Read a book. I’ll lend you my iPod and you can block Geri out altogether. We can load it up with whatever music you want, if my taste isn’t trendy enough for you.”
“I can’t use earphones. I start hearing stuff and then I can’t tell if it’s in the music or inside my ears.”