‘Alex,’ Antonello said. ‘When?’
‘That day, that awful day, and then on the day of the funeral.’
It was not in Alex’s nature to be cruel. As children, when Alex and Nicki fought, Nicki was the one who threw punches, who broke toys. Alex caved early, apologised, made amends.
‘It’s a shameful thing for an adult man to do,’ Alex continued. ‘I know that. I was so angry. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to feel like shit. I wanted her to feel so bad that she’d want to die. I remember thinking, I hope this makes her want to kill herself. I wanted to drive her to kill herself so her mother could feel the pain I was feeling.’
‘Grief can drive us crazy, Alex. Makes us do crazy things.’
‘I wanted to drive a young woman to suicide; people get locked up for doing stuff like that. If Ashleigh was alive, she’d be ashamed of me. If Mum knew, she’d be ashamed of me. Aren’t you ashamed of me?’
‘No, Alex. No, I’m not. And Ashleigh would understand. She’d forgive you. And so would your mother.’
‘Please don’t tell Mum.’
‘I won’t.’ Antonello tossed his shovel onto the ground and put his arms around his son. ‘You are a good man, Alex. A terrible thing happened to you, and it’s hard.’
‘I loved Ashleigh so much,’ Alex said, letting himself lean into his father’s embrace. ‘When she died, I wanted to destroy everything — not just Jo but everything, myself included.’
As they moved apart again, Antonello said, ‘I understand, Alex, better than you think. When the bridge collapsed, I thought about blowing it up. I wanted to obliterate it. And when I realised I couldn’t do that, I thought about suicide.’
‘Why didn’t you ever tell us about the bridge?’
‘The guilt, the grief, the anger… I’m not going to promise you it gets better, but I can tell you that some things make it worse, so please don’t do what I did. Don’t shut down. Don’t hold on to the anger. If you do, you won’t be able to give Jane and Rae the love they deserve. If you shut down, everything will get worse.’
‘I’m starting to see that,’ Alex said. ‘But when people say move on, it seems so cruel. Move on and leave Ashleigh behind — how can we do that?’
‘No one wants you to leave Ashleigh behind, but there are ways to move on. When I look at my friend Sam, I see that he moved on, but he took the bridge collapse with him and he used it to make things better for workers in the future. I am not suggesting you need to get involved with the road accident campaigns or anything like that. But you need to go back to work, go back to being a father and a husband and a part of the community.’
‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘I’ve been thinking about going back to work. It’s time.’
Jo sat at the back of the courtroom and waited. Sarah, in her fancy black cloak and wig, was barely recognisable. It covered her large frame like a superhero cape, but Jo didn’t expect any superhuman feats; she didn’t expect to be rescued from the inevitable. Jo’s new suit, bought under Sarah’s direction, hung on her loosely. A skirt and a jacket like you might wear to an interview for an office job. But she wasn’t going for a job, she was waiting to be sentenced. Waiting to hear what the judge was going to say. Waiting, and trying not to look at Ash’s family. Not to look at Mani and Laura. Or Kevin. Or at Mary and Mandy. Looking down at her feet, at her mother’s plain blue shoes, tight around the toes.
Her father had rung the night before. ‘It’s too hard for me to get away.’
‘Bastard,’ Mandy said, but Jo didn’t care. ‘I never see him anyway. I don’t need him to come.’
She prayed the judge would arrive quickly, that she would be sent away for a long time, that they’d take her straight from the courtroom out some back door to the prison and lock her away.
Everyone stood when the judge arrived. She came in through a side door, took her seat, and nodded, and everyone sat back down again. Antonello had a strong desire to ask them all to stop. Wait! he wanted to scream, Stop. She’s been punished enough. Let her live her life. But instead he sat still, his hand over Paolina’s, from which the rosary hung like teardrops. All of them acting out their parts.
The victim impact statements, read by the prosecutor, were relentless. ‘The house is so dark,’ he began, reading Jane’s statement out in his deep, old-man voice while Jane sat in her seat crying. ‘It feels like there is never going to be any light again. I’m sad all the time. I don’t think the sadness is ever going to go away. No one laughs anymore. Ashleigh used to laugh all the time. The day Ashleigh died, I was angry with her. She promised to take me shopping but she was home late and then went back out. I told her I hated her. I don’t hate her, and now she’s dead. But I’m angry at her because she got into that car with Jo when they were drunk. And I’m angry with Jo because she drove while she was drunk. She was my friend too and now I have to hate her. The counsellor keeps asking me to write letters, paint pictures, do all this crap so I can stop being angry, but I don’t want to.’
At the end of Jane’s statement, the courtroom was filled with the sound of weeping. The prosecutor read Rae and Alex’s statement, and a statement from Mani and Laura; there were still statements from Antonello and Paolina, Rae’s parents, and Kevin, but the judge said, ‘I think I’ll read the rest in my chamber. I don’t think we should read them all out aloud.’
Antonello thought Rae and Alex might object, but later, during the lunch break, when they all sat in a café around the corner from the courthouse, Rae said she was relieved too. She was so exhausted, emotionally exhausted.
Rae hadn’t spoken all day. In the courtroom, she sat gripping the sides of the seat. She fidgeted in the chair, and whenever they were sent out of the room, she paced the hallway. At lunch, she took a couple of bites of the sandwich on her plate and then shoved it aside. As she walked back, she said to Antonello, ‘It will be over soon. This is the last thing. We’ve been waiting for this as if it meant something, and now I see her… I thought I wouldn’t want to look at her but I can’t help it. She’s a scared kid. I see her and I see Ashleigh, I see them together, and I see she’s lost too. And now I can’t feel what I should feel, I can’t… Now I think I should do something to stop her going to prison, even though I know she should go, she should go… But I can see Ashleigh… It could’ve been the other way around, thick as thieves they were, and how many nights I cooked them dinner, helped them with their homework, and I was happy to see them together, glad my daughter had a friend and they were so close…’ She stopped to catch her breath. ‘I can’t say this to Alex.’
‘I think you can,’ Antonello said.
‘No. No, anyway the law will do what it has to do. It’s how it has to be.’
Chapter 28
Sarah listened carefully to the prosecutor’s closing remarks. She and Robert had been in court together before, and they knew each other’s styles. There was nothing surprising — the victim impact statements had been difficult to sit through, and there wasn’t much more he needed to add. Jo was a probationary driver; she should not have been drinking at all. But, not only had she been drinking, she was drunk, too drunk to drive in any circumstances. The other girls asked her if she was okay to drive and she said yes. She drove them, even though she knew that according to her licence conditions she was only allowed one passenger under 22 years of age. She was angry and arguing with Ashleigh as she drove. He accepted that she was remorseful. Noted it was her first offence, that she was pleading guilty, but that this shouldn’t and didn’t change the facts of the case.