He ducked his head, half smiled. “Louise. How are you?”
She tried to smile back. “You know.” He didn’t know. No one knew. “They tell you—they, listen to me! The grief counsellors tell you that you will have good days and bad, and you just have to deal with it.”
Mark nodded, but his eyes slid from hers and she saw colour rise to his cheeks. He was embarrassed.
Everyone was embarrassed. She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life. Everyone wanted to put it behind them, to get on with things, and there you were, in the way, blocking the path, dragging the body of your dead child behind you.
“How’s the water?” she asked, and his colour deepened. The water, the water, the water—no way to get away from it in this town. “Cold,” she said
, “I imagine.”
He shook his head like a wet dog. “Brrr!” he said and laughed self-consciously.
In between them stood an elephant, and she felt she ought to point it out.
“You heard about Lena’s mother?” As if he wouldn’t have. As if anyone could live in this town and not know.
“Yes. Terrible. God, it’s terrible. Such a shock.” He fell silent, and when Louise did not respond, he kept talking. “Um . . . I mean, I know you and she . . .” He tailed off, looking over his shoulder at his car. He was desperate to get away, poor thing.
“Didn’t exactly see eye to eye?” Louise offered. She toyed with the chain around her neck, pulling the charm, a blue bird, back and forth. “No, we didn’t. Even so . . .”
Even so was the best she could do. Didn’t see eye to eye was a ludicrous understatement, but there was no need to spell it out. Mr. Henderson knew about the bad blood, and she was damned if she was going to stand by the river and pretend she was unhappy that Nel Abbott had met her end in it. She couldn’t, she didn’t want to.
She knew when she listened to the grief counsellors that they were talking nonsense and she would never, ever have another good day for the rest of her life, and yet there had been times over the past twenty-four hours or so when she had found it hard to keep the triumph from her face.
“I suppose, in a horrible way,” Mr. Henderson was saying, “it’s oddly fitting, isn’t it? The way she went . . .”
Louise nodded grimly. “Perhaps it’s what she would have wanted. Perhaps it’s what she did want.”
Mark frowned. “You think she . . . You think it was deliberate?”
Louise shook her head. “I’ve really no idea.”
“No. No. Of course not.” He paused. “At least . . . at least now, what she was writing won’t be published, will it? The book she was working on about the pool—it wasn’t finished, was it? So it can’t be published . . .”
Louise skewered him with a look. “You think so? I would have thought the manner of her death would make it all the more publishable. A woman writing a book about the people who died in the Drowning Pool becomes one of the drowned herself? I’d say someone would want to publish it.”
Mark looked horrified. “But Lena . . . surely Lena . . . she wouldn’t want that.”
Louise shrugged. “Who knows?” she said. “I assume she’ll be the one receiving the royalties.” She sighed. “I need to be getting back, Mr. Henderson.” She patted him on the arm and he covered her hand with his own.
“I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Whittaker,” he said, and she was touched to see that there were tears in the poor man’s eyes.
“Louise,” she said. “Call me Louise. And I know. I know you are.”
• • •
LOUISE STARTED on her way home. It took her hours, this walk up and down the river path—even longer in this heat—but she could find no other way to fill her days. Not that there weren’t things to do. There were estate agents to contact, schools to research. A bed that needed stripping and a wardrobe full of clothes that needed to be packed away. A child that needed parenting. Tomorrow, perhaps. Tomorrow she would do those things, but today she walked by the river and thought of her daughter.
Today she did as she did every day: she searched her useless memory for signs she must have missed, red flags she must have breezed blithely past. She searched for scraps, for hints of misery in her child’s happy life. Because the truth is, they never worried about Katie. Katie was bright, capable, poised, with a will of steel. She swanned into adolescence as if it were a trifle, she took it in her stride. If anything, Louise felt sad sometimes that Katie hardly seemed to need her parents at all. Nothing fazed her—not her schoolwork, not the cloying attention of her needy best friend, not even her swift, almost shocking blossoming into adult beauty. Louise could remember acutely the sharp, affronted shame she had felt when she noticed men looking at her body when she was a teenager, but Katie showed none of that. Different times, Louise told herself, girls are different now.
Louise and her husband, Alec, didn’t worry about Katie, they worried about Josh, who had always been sensitive, an anxious child. Something had changed for him this year, something was bothering him; he’d become more withdrawn, more introverted, seemingly by the day. They worried about bullying, about his slipping grades, about the dark shadows under his eyes in the morning.
The truth is—the truth must be—that while they were watching their son, waiting for him to fall, their daughter tripped instead, and they didn’t notice, they weren’t there to catch her. The guilt felt like a stone in Louise’s throat; she kept expecting it to choke her, but it didn’t, it wouldn’t, and so she had to go on breathing—breathing and remembering.
The night before, Katie was quiet. It was just the three of them for dinner because Josh was staying over at his friend Hugo’s house. It wasn’t usually allowed on school nights, but they’d made an exception because they were worried about him. They took the opportunity to talk to Katie about it. Had she noticed, they asked, how anxious Josh seemed of late?
“He’s probably worrying about going to the big school next year,” she said, but she didn’t look at her parents when she spoke, she kept her eyes on her plate, and her voice wavered ever so slightly.