“All right!” Josh said, cutting his hand through the air. He walked away from Michael. The ground within the clearing’s fence was bare and tired, patches of short grass between the earth. But beyond it, beyond Josh, Michael could see swathes of bluebells carpeting the woodland floor. Beyond the fence there was life. Michael wanted to be out there, among those bluebells. He wanted for all of this to be over.
Josh turned back to him. He looked exhausted. There was so much Michael wanted to ask him. Why had he left the house? Was it really for Maddy? And why then, leaving Lucy alone? But he saw Josh was not to be pressed. He was like a charged mine, sensitive to the slightest of pressures. But he had to keep him talking. Michael knew that, too. So he asked him, instead, how he knew. How had he found out he’d been in the house?
Josh’s answer was short, staccato, his mind engaged elsewhere, battling competing impulsions of revenge and survival. Michael stayed on the bench while he talked, nodding as Josh told him about the soil, the tape, his betraying limp. When he’d finished, Michael knew there was only one question left for them to answer.
“What do you want to do?” Michael said. “Now you know.”
Josh was frowning at him, staring. He nodded, slowly. “You have to leave,” he said. “Samantha and Rachel. You have to leave them. The street, London. You have to go. Now.”
“Go?” Michael said. But he knew Josh was right. They couldn’t continue like this. “And what do I tell them?” he said. “I can’t just disappear. They’ll be suspicious. They’ll call the police.”
Josh laughed. “The police? Yeah, as if they’d be of any fucking use!”
“It’s lucky for you they weren’t,” Michael snapped. Josh stepped towards him. “And me,” Michael said, raising a conciliatory hand. “And for me.”
“Tell them whatever you want,” Josh said, turning away again. He was pacing back and forth, back and forth, as if trying to recall some lost instinctive movement. “You’re the fucking writer, aren’t you?”
Michael got off the bench and went to pick up his fencing bag. “If I go,” he said, “will you tell Samantha?”
Josh looked at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign language. “And tell her I wasn’t there?” He shook his head. “No. But,” he said, pointing at Michael, “if you come back. If you write to them, or call them. I will. I swear. I’d rather bring us both down than have you fucking anywhere near them.”
Michael looked at Josh. He was a new man. A man transfigured by loss, by anger. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes both alive and dead. A man with nothing and everything left to lose.
“Tonight,” Josh said, dropping his hand. “You have to leave tonight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IT IS EARLY evening in Manhattan, at the beginning of the Easter weekend. The sun is just an hour from setting over the New Jersey skyline. In a few minutes the red Colgate sign will light up over the Hudson and Statue of Liberty tourist boats will unfurl their sails to steer by the wind towards the mouth of the estuary.
Michael is sitting on a bench beside the river, on a pier across the highway from West Twenty-Sixth. He is at the pier’s end, beside a large steel waterwheel that is turning, water and light falling from its paddles. On one side of him a young woman in shorts, vest, and trainers is stretching her hamstrings, a low fizz leaking from her headphones. On the other, a Mexican couple is sitting on a bench, rocking their baby in its buggy. From farther down the river, at the next pier, Michael can hear music playing from The Frying Pan, a floating bar on a decommissioned fireboat. Together with the pulse of the traffic behind him and the sound of the water falling from the wheel, its faint beat completes a soundscape he’s come to think of as calming. Manhattan is never quiet, but this, whenever he has needed to find space, to think, to remember, to capture a sense of quiet if not quiet itself, is where he comes.
It’s been almost a year since Michael left London. The note he wrote to Samantha on returning from the Heath that day was short and to the point. He told her that leaving was simply something he had to do. That he knew he should say good-bye to her, to Rachel, but he couldn’t bring himself to say those words with them standing before him. The note had made him seem weak and selfish. He knew Samantha would think it a reaction to her offer for him to move into the house. It would anger her. She would think herself a bad judge of character. One day, when Rachel was old enough, she’d tell her to forget him or, at best, forgive him for being so damaged and for passing on that damage in hurting them.
His own hurt is gradually healing. The last letter he received from Daniel, like all of them sent via his publishers, had made it clear it would be just that. The last letter. He had given Michael everything he could. They both needed to move on, he’d said, so he would not be writing to him again. In the same letter he’d told Michael he’d recently moved back east, that Cathy had returned with the girls to upstate New York and he’d decided to follow them. He hoped, he’d written, that one day he might move back in with them. Until then he’d found a cabin to rent outside Hudson and a job at a local organic distributor. Twice a week he drove into Manhattan, delivering local farmers’ produce to downtown delis and restaurants.
Michael often thought how strange this was, that twice a week the two of them were in the same city, on the same streets. That over these past months, unknown to either of them, maybe they’d already shared a sidewalk, or a bench like this. Although Michael had searched for Daniel more than once online, he’d never found an image, so he’d never know if they had. Even now, Daniel might be driving down the highway behind him in his truck, leaning his elbow out the window. If, while stopped at a red light perhaps, he were to glance to his right, then he’d see Michael sitting at the end of the pier. A tall man silhouetted beside the turning wheel, looking over the glimmering waters as he presses play on a Dictaphone to listen to the voice of his dead wife, killed by a “fire and forget” missile on a mountain in Pakistan.
Guess who’s upstairs? Caroline whispers to Michael from across the years. Want to come and join me?
But then Daniel wouldn’t know either. So as the lights changed to green he’d look away from the pier and drive on into the city, unaware he’d just seen the man to whose life he’d brought death, and who in turn had brought death to the lives of others.
―
Michael listened to Caroline twice more, then removed his headphones and put the Dictaphone back in his pocket. He rationed himself such listening now. Just as he rationed his looking: at photographs, her news reports on YouTube, a video they’d taken on their first night together beside the fire in Coed y Bryn.
Rising from the bench he turns from the river and begins his walk home. It is a short walk, down along the Hudson then turning left into the streets of the Village. His apartment is on the top floor of a five-storey walk-up. It has a fire escape that looks onto trees, a desk beside a window, a bedroom in which he has hung one of Samantha’s prints of the pond. So he might remember, he supposes, or never forget.
It is beside that pond that Michael always imagines Josh when he thinks of him. Sitting at dusk on a bench facing the backs of all those houses, their rear walls and rooms more window than brick, the ponds, the trees, the willows, the Heath. He imagines Josh sitting there after a day’s work, his arms tired and cut, perhaps sipping on a coffee, watching as those windows light up in the evening. Watching, as in a few of them, his wife and then maybe his daughter appear and disappear, going about their lives, inhabiting the place he’d once called home and which he hopes, one day, he might again.