She was banging one heel off the side of the sofa in a relentless, infuriating rhythm that jarred against the fluid sweep of the Debussy. I said, “Then I’ll lend you a good book. Take your pick.”
“I don’t need a good book I don’t need a DVD box set I don’t need a nice fucking cup of tea and a sudoku magazine. I need you.”
I thought of Richie at his desk, chewing a thumbnail and spell-checking his request form, of that desperate call for help in his voice; of Jenny in her hospital bed, wrapped in a nightmare that wasn’t going to end; of Pat, gutted out like a trophy animal, waiting in one of Cooper’s drawers for me to make sure he wouldn’t be stamped Killer in a few million minds; of his children, too young even to know what dying was. That surge of anger heaved up again, shoving at me. I said, “I know that. Right now, other people need me more.”
“You mean this Broken Harbor thing is more important than your family. That’s what you mean. You don’t even see how fucked-up that is, do you, you don’t even see that no normal guy in the world would say that, no one would say that unless he was obsessed with some hellhole place that was pumping shit into his brain. You know perfectly bloody well if you send me back to Geri’s then she’ll bore me till I lose my mind, and I’ll walk out and she’ll be going crazy worrying, but you don’t even care, do you? You’re still going to make me go back there.”
“Dina, I don’t have time for this shit. I’ve got, what, fifty-odd hours to charge this guy. In fifty-odd hours’ time I’ll do whatever you need, come get you from Geri’s at the crack of dawn, go to any museum you want, but until then, you’re right: you’re not the center of my universe. You can’t be.”
Dina stared, propped up on her elbows. She had never heard that whip-crack in my voice before. The gobsmacked look on her face swelled that balloon inside my chest. For a terrifying instant I thought I was going to laugh.
“Tell me something,” she said. Her eyes had narrowed: the gloves were coming off. “Do you sometimes wish I would die? Like when my timing is shit, like now. Do you wish I would just die? Do you hope someone’ll ring you in the morning and go, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, a train just splattered your sister’?”
“Of course I don’t want you to die. I’m hoping you’ll ring me in the morning and go, ‘Guess what, Mick, you were right, Geri isn’t actually a form of torture banned by the Geneva Convention, somehow I’ve survived—’”
“Then why are you acting like you wish I would die? Actually I bet you don’t want a train, you want it to be all neat, don’t you, all nicey-neat—how do you hope it? Hang myself, is that what you’d like, or an overdose—”
I didn’t feel like laughing any more. My hand was clenched around the wineglass, so tight I thought it would smash. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous. I’m acting like I want you to have a little self-control. Just enough to put up with Geri for two fucking days. You really think that’s too much to ask?”
“Why should I? Is this some kind of stupid closure thing, you fix this case it makes up for what happened to Mum? Because if it is then puke, I can’t even stand you, I’m going to puke all over your sofa right this—”
“This has fucking nothing to do with her. That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. If you can’t come up with anything that makes more sense than that, maybe you should keep your big yap shut.”
I hadn’t lost my temper since I was a teenager, not like this and definitely not at Dina, and it felt like doing a hundred down a motorway on six straight vodkas, immense and lethal and delicious. Dina was sitting up, leaning forward across the coffee table, fingers stabbing at me. “See? This is what I’m talking about. This is what this thing is doing to you. You never get mad at me, and now look at you, just look, the state of you, you want to hit me, don’t you? Say it, come on, how badly do you want to—”
She was right: I did, I wanted to slap her right across the face. Some fraction of me understood that if I hit her then I would stay with her, and that she knew it too. I put my glass down on the coffee table, very gently. “I’m not going to hit you.”
“Go on, go ahead, you might as well. What’s the difference? If you throw me away into Geri’s House of Hell and I run away and then I can’t come to you and I can’t hold it together and I end up jumping in the river, how is that better?” She was half on the coffee table, face shoved at me, right within arm’s reach. “You won’t give me one little slap because God no you’re too good for that, fuck forbid you might feel like the bad guy just once, but it’s OK to make me jump off a bridge, right, that’s fine, that’s just—”
A sound halfway between a laugh and a yell came out of me. “Sweet Jesus! I can’t begin to tell you how sick I am of hearing that. You think you’re going to puke? How about me, getting this shit shoved down my throat every time I bloody turn around? You won’t take me to the Wax Museum, I think I’ll kill myself. You won’t help me move all my stuff out of my flat at four in the morning, I think I’ll kill myself. You won’t spend the evening listening to my problems instead of taking one last shot at saving your marriage, I think I’ll kill myself. I know it’s my own fault, I know I’ve always caved the second you whipped out this crap, but this time: no. You want to kill yourself? Do it. You don’t want to, then don’t. It’s up to you. Nothing I do will make any difference anyway. So don’t fucking dump it on my lap.”
Dina stared at me, openmouthed. My heart was ricocheting off my ribs; I could barely breathe. After a moment she threw her wineglass on the floor—it bounced on the rug, rolled away in an arc of red like flung blood—got up and headed for the door, scooping up her bag on the way. She deliberately passed so close to me that her hip barged into my shoulder; she was expecting me to grab her, fight her to make her stay. I didn’t move.
In the doorway, she said, “You’d better find a way to tell your work to fuck off. If you don’t come find me by tomorrow evening, you’re going to be sorry.”
I didn’t turn around. After a minute the door slammed behind her, and I heard her give it a kick before she ran off down the corridor. I sat very still for a long time, gripping the arms of my chair to stop my hands shaking. I listened to my heart banging in my ears and to the hiss of the speakers after the Debussy ran out, listened for Dina’s footsteps coming back.
My mother almost took Dina with her. It was sometime after one in the morning, on our last night at Broken Harbor, when she woke Dina, slipped out of the caravan and headed for the beach. I know because I came in at midnight, dazzled and breathless from lying in the dunes with Amelia under a sky like a great black bowl full of stars, and when I eased the caravan door open the bar of moonlight lit up all four of them, rolled up tight and warm in their bunks, Geri snoring delicately. Dina turned and murmured something as I slid into my bed with my clothes still on. I had bribed one of the older guys to buy us a flagon of cider, so I was half drunk, but it must have been an hour before that stunned delight stopped humming in my skin and I could fall asleep.
A few hours later I woke up again, to make sure it was all still true. The door was swinging open, moonlight and sea-sounds rushing in to fill up the caravan, and two bunks were empty. The note was on the table. I don’t remember what it said. Probably the police took it away; probably I could go looking for it in Records, but I won’t. All I remember is the P.S. It said, Dina is too little to do without her mum.
We knew where to look: my mother always loved the sea. In the few hours since I had been there, the beach had turned inside out, transformed itself into something dark and howling. A rising wind blustering, clouds scudding over the moon, sharp shells cutting my bare feet as I ran and no pain. Geri gasping for breath beside me; my father lunging towards the sea in the moonlight, flapping pajamas and flailing arms, a grotesque pale scarecrow. He was shouting, “Annie Annie Annie,” but the wind and the waves bowled it away into nothing. We hung on to his sleeves like kids. I shouted in his ear, “Dad! Dad, I’ll get someone!”
He grabbed my arm and twisted. My dad had never hurt any of us. He roared, “No! No one, don’t you bloody dare!” His eyes looked white. It was years before I realized: he still thought we were going to find them alive. He was saving her, from all the people who would take her away if they knew.
So we looked for them by ourselves. No one heard us shouting, Mummy Annie Dina Mummy Mummy Mummy, not through the wind and the sea. Geraldine stayed on land, up and down the beach, scrabbling through the sand dunes and clawing at clumps of grass. I went in the water with my father, thigh-deep. When my legs got numb it was easier to keep going.
For the rest of that night—I never figured out how long it lasted, longer than we should have been able to survive—I fought the current to stay standing and groped blind at it as it surged past. Once my fingers tangled in something and I howled because I thought I had one of them by the hair, but it came up out of the water a great lump like a chopped-off head and it was just seaweed, wrapping round my wrists, clinging when I tried to throw it away from me. Later I found a cold ribbon of it still bound around my neck.
When dawn started turning the world a bleak bleached gray, Geraldine found Dina, burrowed headfirst like a rabbit into a clump of marram grass, arms dug into the sand up to her elbows. Geri bent back long blades of grass one by one and scooped away handfuls of sand like she was freeing something that could shatter. Finally Dina was sitting up on the sand, shivering. Her eyes focused on Geraldine. “Geri,” she said. “I had bad dreams.” Then she saw where she was and started to scream.
My father wouldn’t leave the beach. In the end I wrapped my T-shirt around Dina—it was heavy with seawater, her shivering got worse—hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her back to the caravan. Geraldine stumbled along beside me, holding Dina up when my grip slid.
We pulled off Dina’s nightie—she was cold as a fish and gritted all over with sand—and wrapped her in everything warm we could find. Mum’s cardigans smelled of her; maybe that was what made Dina yelp like a kicked puppy, or maybe our clumsiness hurt her. Geraldine stripped like I wasn’t there and climbed into Dina’s bunk with her, pulled the duvet over both their heads. I left them there and went to find someone.
The light was turning yellow and the other caravans were starting to wake up. A woman in a summer dress was filling her kettle at the tap, with a couple of toddlers dancing around her, splashing each other and screaming with giggles. My dad had dropped to the sand by the waterline, hands hanging uselessly at his sides, staring at the sun rising over the sea.
Geri and I were covered head to toe in cuts and scrapes. The paramedics cleaned up the worst ones—one of them let out a low whistle when he saw my feet; I didn’t understand why until much later. Dina got taken to hospital, where they said she was physically fine apart from mild hypothermia. They let Geri and me take her home and look after her, until they decided my father wasn’t planning to “do anything silly” and they could let him out. We made up aunts and told the doctors they would help.
After two weeks, our mother’s dress came up in a Cornish fishing boat’s nets. I identified it—my father couldn’t get out of bed, I wasn’t about to let Geri, that left me. It was her best summer dress, cream silk—she had saved up—with green flowers. She used to wear it to Mass, when we were in Broken Harbor, then for Sunday lunch at Lynch’s and our walk along the strand. It made her look like a ballerina, like a laughing tiptoe girl off an old postcard. When I saw it laid out on a table in the police station, it was streaked brown and green from all the nameless things that had woven around it in the water, fingered it, caressed it, helped it on its long journey. I might not even have recognized it, only I knew what to look for: Geri and I had spotted it missing, when we packed away her things to leave the caravan.
That was what Dina had heard on the radio, with my voice swirling around it, the day I caught this case. Dead, Broken Harbor, discovered the body, State pathologist is at the scene. The near impossibility of it would never have occurred to her; all the rules of probability and logic, the neat patterns of center lines and cat’s-eyes that keep the rest of us on the road when the weather is wild, those mean nothing to Dina. Her mind had spun out into a smoking wreck of bonfire noises and gibberish, and she had come to me.
She had never told us what happened that night. Geri and I tried a couple of thousand times to catch her off guard—asked when she was half asleep in front of the telly, or daydreaming out the car window. All we got was that flat “I had bad dreams,” and her blue eyes skittering away to nothing.
When she was thirteen or fourteen we started to realize—gradually, and without any real surprise—that there was something wrong. Nights when she sat on my bed or Geri’s talking full speed until dawn, revved up into a frenzy about something we could barely translate, raging at us for not caring enough to understand; days when the school rang to say she was staring and glazed, terrified, like her classmates and her teachers had turned into meaningless shapes gesturing and jabbering; fingernail tracks scabbing on her arms. I had taken it for granted, always, that that night was the embedded thing corroding at the bottom of Dina’s mind. What else could have done it?
There isn’t any why. That dizziness took hold of me again. I thought of balloons unmoored and soaring, exploding in the thinning air under the pressure of their own weightlessness.
Footsteps came and went in the corridor, but none of them paused outside my door. Geri rang twice; I didn’t answer. When I could stand up, I blotted the rug with kitchen roll until I had soaked up as much of the wine as I could. I spread salt on the stain and left it to work. I poured the rest of the wine down the sink, threw the bottle in the recycling bin and washed the glasses. Then I found Sellotape and a pair of nail scissors and sat on my living-room floor, taping pages back into books and trimming the tape to within perfect hairsbreadths of the paper, until the heap of wrecked books was a neat stack of mended ones and I could start putting them back on my shelves, in alphabetical order.