Выбрать главу

So anyway, I’d taken a rope — one of those stout ropes we’d used to haul the Christmas tree home from the woods. I went upstairs to her room. I pretended I wanted to make up with her so that she ran to me, put her arms around me. Then I slipped the rope around her neck and pulled it tight.

It took a long time. A long time. I don’t like to think about it. Finally, she slumped, unconscious. I carried her down to the basement and strung her up on the heating pipe. That was kind of awful too because she woke up for a while and struggled, hanging up there, before it was finally over for good.

It really was a brilliant idea to hide downstairs in the basement during the game. It gave me a chance to collect myself — and to act surprised and scream in horror when they found her. And no one would believe I would just sit down there like that in the dark for so long, knowing she was with me all the while.

Amanda had never forgiven me for any of it. She’d waited for me all this time.

All night long, she knocked and called outside the pantry door, trying to draw me out. But finally, I saw the first sunlight slip in under the door. I heard her voice grow softer and softer until it vanished.

I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I opened the door. Peeked out. She was gone.

I rushed out of the house. The snow had stopped. The sun was shining. I was delighted to see that the road and the driveway had been ploughed and sanded overnight. It was easy to get back to my car, easy in the daylight to push it free from the drift where it was stuck and get it back onto the road.

As I was driving away from the Wilson house, a Volvo came past me in the other direction. It was Jonathan. I don’t think he saw me. He didn’t stop.

When I reached the top of the hill, I looked back. I saw the Volvo go down the driveway to the house. A moment later, two more cars reached the drive from the opposite direction and joined the first. Jonathan got out and then David and Lucy and Rosemary. They all came together, hugging and kissing and shaking hands.

I left them to their reunion. Let them live in the past, not me. I wasn’t going to waste my one and only life wallowing in remorse about Amanda.

Although I must admit, as the years go on, as I move toward the end of middle age, I find myself wondering about that sometimes. Whether this is, in fact, my one and only life, I mean. Death wasn’t the end for Amanda, after all. Recently, more and more often, I hear her in the night, in the dark, in the distance, singing in that wistful voice:

“I wait for you. I wait for you.”

I believe she does.