‘Ashleigh. Ashleigh,’ he repeated her name to himself. Little Ashleigh, princess, wild thing, pestie pest: all his pet names for his first-born granddaughter, his son’s daughter. Calling her up in his mind, as if he might be able to call her back to life. Ashleigh. The last time he saw her was only a few days ago — arriving with a copy of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and teasing Paolina that with her short hair, she looked like Jamie Lee Curtis. He remembered the way Ashleigh and Jane slid into bed on either side of their grandmother so they could watch the movie together on a laptop.
Ashleigh. Ashleigh. Loved so much.
Paolina was sobbing.
‘We have to get dressed and go over to Alex’s,’ he said.
Paolina nodded, but didn’t move.
‘They need us. We need to help them through this.’
‘I don’t know if I can get through this, if there is a way through this,’ Paolina whispered. ‘Mia bellissima nipotina.’
Antonello hooked his arm around her waist and guided her slowly to the bedroom, and there they both began to dress. He kept an eye on Paolina, as he’d fallen into the habit of doing, standing back, but not too far, waiting in case she stumbled, in case she was dizzy. Usually it annoyed her to see him hovering, but now neither of them spoke.
When they arrived at the house, Alex was alone in the kitchen. Paolina drew her son into her embrace and Antonello watched him spiral back in time to become her little boy again. He saw the unspoken hope between them that Paolina could make everything whole again. He wished he could hold his son. The desire was there: to pull Alex close, to give him a safe place to weep. But they so rarely touched. They shook hands at Christmas and on birthdays. While each kissed other men in the traditional one-kiss-on-each-cheek greeting that was almost impossible to avoid, especially at extended family gatherings, they didn’t kiss each other. Antonello moved closer to mother and son and placed his hand on Alex’s back, holding it there until Alex moved away from his mother’s embrace.
Antonello and Paolina sat at the kitchen table as their son told them the details of the accident, pieced together from the police and the ambos. Over and over, he repeated the details of the night, of the last time he saw Ashleigh. He was frantic, a wild man in the grip of a fever, stomping up and down the length of the room.
‘She came home from the library late afternoon with a stack of books. “For my Legal Studies essay,” she said. I said, “You look as if you’ve brought home the whole library.” And she said, “The old fart says no online references, can you imagine, as if we live in the Stone Ages.” We both laughed even though I agreed with the old fart, even though I thought I shouldn’t have laughed…’ Alex swallowed and repeated, ‘We both laughed,’ as if the possibility of having laughed were the most shocking element of the story he was telling.
‘And she gave me a kiss on the cheek.’ This last statement was made in a squeaky small voice, a child’s voice, and Antonello was transported back to an afternoon when Alex was seven or eight. The little boy racing into the house exhausted and sweaty, his nose bleeding, his school shirt torn and dirty. Alex’s indignation coming out in the ceaseless prattle.
‘Five minutes later,’ Alex continued, ‘she was out the door in her jeans, half her wardrobe thrown over her arm. Going over to Jo’s, she said. That’s the last time I saw her. That girl’s name was the last thing I heard her say.’ He paused, sat down, and immediately stood up again. ‘Later we had dinner. Rae took Jane to the movies, and I read my book, and I thought how great it was to have the house to myself — how could I have thought that? I don’t want this fucking house to myself.’ Alex gripped the back of a chair with both hands, his knuckles turning white.
Alex told them about the knock at the door in the middle of the night, and waking up in a panic and running down the stairs, and stopping and hesitating, and looking around and seeing that Jane and Rae were there, but no Ashleigh.
‘Ashleigh?’ Alex had called out her name.
‘She’s not home,’ Rae said. ‘I looked in her room.’
‘I knew,’ he told them, ‘I’d known all the time as I was running down the stairs, but I kept thinking it’s okay, she’s slept over at Jo’s, she’s fine, she’s asleep, she’s fine, she’s fine. Rae knew too. We both knew. I could see the cops through the glass panel, but I couldn’t move. My body was numb, but my head was racing and I was running through all the reasons that might bring the cops to the door.
‘I hoped that someone had broken into Jim’s place — he’s away and we have the key. And I hoped it was about you, Mum, you’d been rushed to hospital or you’d had a fall or something, or something at Rae’s school, or something to do with work — maybe the Premier had been attacked and they needed me to go in to the office… I thought — no, I wished, as hard as I could, that it was someone else, that it was you or the Premier or… anyone. Anyone else, but not Ashleigh. I wished everyone else dead, everyone else, anyone else. Anyone. But I knew.
‘When I saw the cops, a man and a woman, I knew it was bad news. They asked to come inside and we all sat down in the lounge room and there was a long pause where none of us said anything. The policewoman was almost crying even before she started talking. And I wanted to stop her. I wanted to gag her. I wanted to stuff something in her mouth to stop her from saying anything… When she said it, when she said “an accident”, Rae asked, “How bad?” But I knew, I knew, because otherwise they would’ve rushed us out to the hospital. And then…’
Alex couldn’t stop talking; a torrent of words spewed out of him. He described the policewoman and what she’d said, how she’d told them that his baby, his daughter, had been killed, moments from home, under the West Gate Bridge.
‘The bridge?’ Antonello whispered.
Alex didn’t hear him and kept talking. ‘They spun out of control…’
Paolina’s hand reached out for Antonello’s. He let her intertwine her fingers with his but he dared not look at her. The bridge, the fucking bridge. His granddaughter, his beautiful Ashleigh, had taken her last breath under the bridge, on the road where thirty-nine years earlier, they lined up the dead. Thirty-five stretchers cloaked with white sheets. A graveyard.
‘There was silence. No one screamed, no one said anything. All the way to the morgue, we sat in the back seat of the cop car in silence. I didn’t dare speak, I willed Rae not to speak. I was hoping and praying that it wasn’t her, that they had the wrong girl. I didn’t want to say Ashleigh’s name. I didn’t want Rae to say Ashleigh’s name, as if we could keep her alive by not speaking, as if saying her name might make her death real when we knew it wasn’t real, because it couldn’t be.’
Antonello remembered the cop tapping him on the shoulder and telling him they’d found Slav’s body. He stood by the stretcher hoping, praying, that it was not Slav, and then he saw Slav’s arm, the only part of his body not covered by the white sheet, and the old gold watch, its glass face cracked. It was Slav’s father’s watch. Slav never took it off.
Antonello listened to Alex. It was important to listen. It was important to let Alex speak. It was important not to be sucked back into past by the bridge.