When Dora gets home from another morning at the beach, there is a rare silence, and all she wants is some sleep. To sleep and sleep and stop swimming after her dead daughter. She hasn’t slept well in months, but today she remembers Hugo’s discreet bottles with their different-coloured pills, and then she’s in the bathroom, tipping two white ones into her hand before she can think better of it. Luminal. These are the ones that Susan Harris whispered about one night at the casino. She said they would set her right up—no one could survive all that Dora has without a little help. She takes them when she feels anxious—doesn’t Dora have a few good reasons to be anxious? A small glass of sherry to wash down the pills and she’ll sleep and sleep and sleep.
But even as Dora tries to lie still, she can’t stop getting up to go to the window, looking for her girls. She can’t quite remember where they’ve gone. Do they still exist when they’re not together? She sees a bird with grass in its beak hop mechanically along the picnic table and fly off. Magpie! And her little pots of flowers—impatiens, violets—they’re wilting from thirst. Laundry hangs on the line, shirts inflated by the breeze, bloodless bodies about to fly away. Luiza’s white dresses have all begun to yellow. She climbs back into bed, feeling herself slowing inside, and picks up the bottle of pills. Two more. Sleep more. Hugo is beginning to make more sense. A dream hooks her cheek and pulls her through the mattress, a tidal pool dragging dust motes, cities, planets behind her. Her spine softens, a stew of dandelion stalks, the fragmented wings of honeybees. Jars containing preserved organs suspended in an amber fluid. Luiza.
But then there’s shouting and when Dora opens her eyes, Maricota’s face is a pale brown moon above her own.
‘Acorda, Dona Dora!’
‘I’m awake, I’m awake.’
‘As meninas chegaram em casa. They shouldn’t see you like this.’
Of course—the yelling is from the television, which the girls always turn up too loud.
Maricota takes the bottle of pills from Dora’s hand. ‘Nã não, isso de novo não, elas precisam da Senhora. Not like Luiza. You can’t leave them too.’
It takes her a moment before she realizes what her maid is thinking—she’s always been overly dramatic. But Dora’s too tired and groggy to explain that this was not a suicide attempt, just a brief flirtation with escape.
‘Não se preocupe, querida. I’m fine. Just please go make me some coffee.’
‘A man is here to see you.’
‘I don’t want to see anyone, Maricota. Please tell him to go away.’
‘He says it’s important. It’s Mr. Carmichael.’
Maricota has made strong coffee, which Dora drinks silently as Carmichael sits across from her, gripping his hat. He appears bewildered in some way she can’t identify, stooped in the shoulders, hair a bit too long. His boundaries seem blurred. He was never good at small talk. This was one reason his adolescent crush on her had remained unrequited even though he was charming. When they were young, his quiet adoration had unnerved her. Later, when she was older and alone and it seemed like Hugo might be lost to her, for a time his devotion had seemed vital. She’s felt ashamed ever since, but he saved her once.
Now she needs to move him along—the girls, the maids, they’re all nearby. She used to fear he might do something like this, reach out in some awkward, dangerous way, but it’s been almost fourteen years since their affair. He wasn’t happy when she ended things, despite the blatant impracticality of it all. His wife, Alice, they could fool forever, but once Hugo came home from the hospital, there could be no more secrets. No complications. She told him she hadn’t meant to hurt him, but it was all a mistake, a terrible mistake—all the worst clichés she could think of. He always saw through insincerity, and she hoped it might diminish her in his eyes, repel him. It was the rainy season when she ended things (of course it had to rain!), and she made him stand outside on the veranda with her behind the house as a torrent of water poured out the gutters that ran the length of the roof. This was where she always waited for him, watching as he came through the backyard after dark, once Luiza was asleep upstairs and the maids were in their bedrooms, in their separate annex of the house. She would leave the back gate unlocked, then wait for him outside so that he wouldn’t have to knock, torqued with anxiety until he emerged from under the bougainvillea, occasionally cursing as he swept their hanging branches aside. Whatever feeling existed between them was deepened, she was sure, by the dim evening light that made him more lovely, and the hot, briny wind coming off the sea, the air charged with coming thunderstorms.
Those particular details, the manner in which they met—she sometimes wondered if the affair would have gone on so long if she didn’t always encounter him in the dark, in a tangle of heady flowers and shrubs. She should have found them a seedy hotel room—it would have been over in a week. Instead it went on for nearly two months, during Hugo’s second hospitalization. Sometimes they stayed downstairs all evening, just talking, laughing, dancing. On other nights, she led him to one of the guest rooms in the back of the house, far from the other bedrooms. In the early mornings, her beige underpants were a spoiled heap on the floor.
That last night, they had stood outside as just beyond them the rain fell off the veranda roof. He listened quietly, and as she spoke, she watched over his shoulder as the distant lightning jumped from peak to peak around the harbour.
‘He has left you again and again,’ he said at last, after she fell silent. ‘One of these days, he won’t come back.’
‘He’s sick. I promised—’
‘You never promised to be alone.’
‘I still love him.’
‘You love me too. And I’ve loved you since we were children.’
‘I don’t. I’m so sorry. This has all been like a lovely little dream, but I need—’
He’d kissed her then the way he always did, with both hands placed on the sides of her face, which that night made her chest strangle. Finally, she pleaded with him, begged him not to be one more thing that shocked her awake in the night, that caused her knees to give as she descended the stairs. That had been the right approach after all. He’d always said he couldn’t bear to see a woman cry. She can still picture him, slouching away under the scraping boughs, tearing off a handful of leaves as he went. Ever since, he has remained in their orbit just as he’d always been—work parties, cocktail parties, the casinos, even the occasional dinner at their house when it would have been awkward not to invite him. Still, he’d kept his promise never to speak of their affair, never to seek her out. Until today.
She places her coffee cup on the table carefully, as though trying not to startle a wounded animal, and says slowly, ‘I think it would be best if—’
It all comes rushing out of him—the Dawseys’ man, the one who looks after their gardens, the one who is simple?
‘Yes,’ Dora says cautiously. ‘I know who you mean.’
‘The Dawseys’ man has been telling people that he saw a girl. He says he was at the beach that day, his day off, and he saw a girl.’
‘Which day?’
‘You know which day. The day she—’
‘Yes.’ Dora means to state it as a question—Yes? Please go on—but some part of her wants him to stop, wants to push him out of the house.
‘He was at the far end of your beach, on the other side. He saw a beautiful girl, clothing drenched, hair drenched. He said she came out of the water like an angel with nothing but the dress she wore and a face like a secret, or something odd like that.’
‘No.’ Dora stands. She wants him out, needs him out before she runs into a corner and screams.
Carmichael stands too, moving closer to her. ‘And she walked up the beach and away and never stopped once, never hesitated. He says she was like Sophia Loren in that film about the dolphin, soaking wet but even more beautiful.’
Dora tries to push him away, but Carmichael grabs her by the wrists, pulls her toward him, and speaks in a low, deliberate voice. ‘I believe him. I wouldn’t do this to you if I didn’t believe him.’
‘He said all that? Those were his words?’ Her hands are still foolishly splayed, snared and useless in his.
‘Yes.’
‘Those are ridiculous things for a gardener to say.’ She wrenches her hands away harder than she needs to and hits him in the jaw.
Rubbing his face and smiling gently, Carmichael answers, ‘Even local halfwits go to the cinema sometimes.’
He was always able to make her laugh, and in spite of herself she aches for that now, for the simplicity of his company, the ease of it. For lightness where the swelling lump in her gut sits now.
‘You don’t believe me,’ he says.
‘She was at the beach, for Christ’s sake. She wasn’t wearing a dress. People like stories about beautiful dead girls. How dare you come into my house, use this of all things as an excuse to—’
‘This fellow, the Dawseys’ man,’ he says, speaking over her, ‘he’s been telling the story to other maids, cooks, and anyone who will listen. Alice heard it from our weekend girl,’ he says, finally drawing a breath.
‘Why are you only telling me now?’
‘I only just heard it myself. I couldn’t stand it if you left without … ’
Dora holds his gaze, but he breaks away and adjusts his shirt, which became untucked in their struggle.
‘It just doesn’t seem right somehow,’ he says quietly. ‘Her walking out into the water like that, vanishing without a trace. It seems impossible. And now all these rumours. What if she didn’t drown?’
Hope claws inside her, because someone else has finally said it. Could it be true? Could Luiza still be alive? Would he lie so viciously just to be close to her again? He used to look at her sometimes, when they were alone, as though he were startled to find her in his presence, as though he couldn’t quite trust in his own happiness. His forehead would crease with worry, then relax as a broad, warm smile spread across his face, altogether different from the brooding, slightly dissatisfied expression he wore at parties. It would sound old-fashioned if spoken out loud, but she believes he still desires her good opinion. No, he wouldn’t lie. And the more he tells her, the less she hears, blood buzzing through her ears. Don’t hope. These inchoate thoughts pulse through her mind, while another, louder word beats out the new rhythm of her heart. Go. Go. Go.
Her knees give way beneath her, just like those women in the movies. But when he tries to grab hold of her, she wraps her arms tightly around herself and falls to the floor in an awkward, half-seated heap. This man kneeling beside her, she thinks—so much like Hugo, but not Hugo. He’s just articulated the thought she’s struggled to push away for months. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
She waits until her breath has regulated, until the wave of nausea has passed, before she pushes herself back up to standing. Then, still ignoring Carmichael’s outstretched hands, she grips her elbows and says, ‘Take me to him.’