Diana
December 2011
It was Cassy’s twenty-third birthday. Diana had sent her some earrings, but with little hope that they’d reach her. Mike had signed the card and written a note. Tara refused to be involved.
‘She wants to talk to me,’ she said, ‘she can lift up the phone.’
Tara had gone out for the evening; said she wasn’t going to sit at home and be depressed.
‘Twenty-three years ago,’ said Diana, as she and Mike ate at the little kitchen table. ‘Do you remember? My waters broke, and you ran that red light.’
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’
‘We can’t pretend she never existed.’
‘She seems keen to pretend we never existed.’
They cleared away the meal in silence, watched the news in silence, made their way to bed. And still, there was silence.
Diana used to think they had a pretty good marriage. Good enough, anyway. They’d managed the separations and upheavals of army life, including ten moves in eighteen years. Their greatest test—or so they thought—had come after Mike’s second tour in Bosnia. He seemed to lose himself for a time: jittery, drinking, flying off the handle. He was never violent, but she was pregnant with Tara and it was a grim year. Diana and Cassy—a little girl, then—learned to tiptoe around him. Yet they’d weathered the storm. It was ancient history, never mentioned, almost forgotten. Tara knew nothing about it.
This, though. This thing with Cassy. It was in another league. It left them bruised in every part of their souls. It made everything seem pointless. Diana wondered whether their shared investment in their daughters had been a kind of glue. When it began to dissolve, there seemed to be nothing holding them together.
The private detective had been their last hope. They had researched carefully before choosing him and spent more than they could afford. Palmer was a New Zealander, an ex-policeman who’d been in the business for years. He had experience, a wide network and a knack for getting people to talk. But he admitted to being baffled. He’d never heard people speak about anyone the way they did about Justin Calvin.
‘It’s not just admiration,’ he said, when Mike and Diana phoned to discuss his report. ‘More like adoration. That prison chaplain’s attitude blew me away. Calvin talked a suicide down from a roof, stopped a riot, persuaded an elderly couple to hand over their land. He started his own church, and he was still only about twenty-one. People flock to him. Then again, Kerala Tillich was a helluva mess.’
‘So what are we dealing with?’ asked Mike.
‘I don’t know.’ Palmer sounded frustrated. ‘I’m sorry. You want answers. Heck, you paid me for answers! But I honestly can’t decide whether this guy is Jesus or Hitler.’
They thanked him, paid him and filed away his report. After that dead end, Mike lost hope. He had no interest in anything or anyone. Night after night, month after month, Cassy filled their silence. Diana couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘Speak to me,’ she said to his turned back on Cassy’s birthday.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Well, for a start we should talk about Tara. She’s drinking. She’s doing no schoolwork at all.’
‘At least we know where she is.’
Diana wanted to shake him. She understood his despair—of course she did—but what gave him the monopoly on grief? Easier to be alone, surely, than lonely in your marriage.
‘D’you think you might have depression?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Sure about that?’
Nothing.
‘Mike?’
Still nothing. It was infuriating.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Well, I think you’re depressed, and I wish you’d get help because you’re impossible to live with. For God’s sake, it’s not just you who’s suffering! I want to stop crying for her too. I want to have one single day when I’m not wondering whether she’s still alive.’
Still no response.
‘Enough,’ she snapped, reaching out to flick on her bedside lamp. ‘Enough, Mike. You’re bloody well going to tell me what’s going on in your head.’
He was hunched up, hiding under the covers like a small boy. She laid her hand on his hair just as a sound escaped him—a long, falsetto whine that appalled her.
‘Go away.’ He was sobbing—helplessly sobbing, his chest heaving, tears streaming down his nose and onto the sheet. ‘I don’t want you to see me. It’s my fault. It’s me who drove her away. It’s me she hates.’
There could be something in that, she thought.
‘Of course it’s not your fault,’ she said.
He grabbed a pillow and wrapped it around his face. The movement was distressingly childlike. She’d never, in all their years together, seen Mike break down like this. Anger, yes, but never tears.
‘Please go,’ he begged again. ‘Please.’
She grabbed her dressing-gown and fled. There was only one room in the house that brought her any comfort, and she headed there now.
Tara had come to hate Cassy’s room. She wouldn’t go into it. Like a frickin’ shrine, she said. But it wasn’t a shrine. It was just a beloved girl’s bedroom, waiting for its occupant to come home. Seventeen months had passed since they watched Cassy pack, but it could have been yesterday. The corkboard was festooned with photos and to-do-before-I-go lists; the Greenpeace calendar still showed the page for July 2010. A row of Russian nesting dolls—a tenth birthday present from Mike’s mother—kept sentinel on the windowsill: big, medium, small, very small, tiny, their painted faces locked in the permanent rictus of a smile, eyelashes like sunbeams. The dreamcatcher with its nets and feathers had hung forlornly all this time, with no dreams to catch.
Diana cleaned the room each week, dusting the law books and photos, the bottles of moisturiser and nail varnish, the tangled collection of jewellery in the mother-of-pearl box. Cassy’s room must be ready for the day she came home.
Pesky was curled up on the bed. When he saw Diana he stretched, purring sleepily.
‘You miss her too, huh?’ whispered Diana. ‘Budge up, fatso.’
She burrowed under a duvet that still—with a little imagination—smelled of Cassy’s cocoa butter. The sheets felt profoundly cold.
‘Cassy,’ she said aloud, ‘please come back. We’re falling apart.’
Her voice sounded lonely. Futile.
The curtains were open. She could see drizzle on the glass and the orange mist of a light-polluted sky. Cassy wasn’t even under that same sky. She was far away, in bright daylight, beside a beautiful, poisonous lake.
‘Happy birthday,’ said Diana. ‘Wherever you are.’