A J Grayson - The Girl in the Water

I stomp my foot beside the accelerator to shake the melody from my mind. Enough!

The cause of death I’d found was listed only as that ambiguous ‘suspected foul play’. Any further detail is apparently under embargo. Hardly surprising, as the case is so new, but it doesn’t close the door to informed speculation. As a woman who reads the news religiously, I know that ‘suspected foul play’ usually means there’s some physical evidence of additional trauma – maybe a gunshot wound, maybe stabbing. Something more than simple drowning, which would be the more obvious cause of death in a river. Drowning could indeed be murder, of course, but it could also be just a fall. Or suicide. ‘Suspected foul play’ hints there’s something more.

My temples are starting to throb. Stinking, ineffectual pills. And the air con is doing shit, blue snowflake or not. I can feel my blouse clinging to the sweat on my back.

I recite the details over and over, making them almost a chant.

A thirty-nine-year-old woman’s body.

Found at the river’s edge.

White.

Cause of death – unannounced.

Foul play.

Sinister.

I’m sure there were other things I looked at in the news today, other happenings that will have attracted me at the bookshop. But my mind is stuck on just this. On this, and …

Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees …

The song won’t leave my head. My breathing has become heavier, and for some reason my right leg is starting to ache. I can’t think of any reason for that. I try to reposition myself on the seat.

The lane to my left suddenly shifts to life. I click on the indicator and push myself into the moving traffic at the first opening. Distraction from the odd sensations. Triumph. We clock a stellar seven miles per hour before the motion slows again, and within a few seconds we’re back at a standstill. The lane I left is moving. I clench my fists tight on the wheel. The urge to unleash a satisfying barrage of profanities is almost overwhelming, but I try not to recite the curse words David describes, with mock old-world flare, as ‘so awfully unwomanly’. Though, to be honest, he always says it with a very un-old-worldly grin, which makes me think he half-likes those moments when I lose verbal control.

I blink heavily two or three times. There are trails there, again, following my eyelids as they move.

The traffic starts to flow once more, and I attempt to distract myself, shifting my attention to the hillsides and vineyards alongside the road. All the locals along this particular stretch of Highway 101 refer to it as the Redwood Road, though I’ve yet to spot a Redwood tree anywhere near it. An enormous growers estate, entirely modern but designed to look ancient and historical, sits off in the sweeping green hills to the left of the highway. It’s a winery, of course, as most things are around here, but I can never remember the name of it. It’s built like a castle, complete with turrets and triangular flags. An odd way to sell wine. But the visual effect is dramatic, and the delivery trucks pulling in with supplies could as easily be wagons with mounted drivers, their diesel horsepower replaced with the actual thing. It wouldn’t look the slightest bit out of place.

But then there’s a Beyoncé cutaway on the radio and a new update on the refugee crisis in Eastern Europe, and the world again seems so very, recognizably, modern. Even the vineyard castle suddenly looks pallid and uninspired. Just another hoaxy specialty shop along the roadside, different only in size from the shed a few miles back and the Safeway warehouse at the next intersection.

That’s how quickly the world changes. A soundtrack, a flash of circumstance, and it’s a different land. A familiar one, where David is waiting at home and the universe is as it should be. God, how I want that, in this moment. My normal world. My comfy home. My wonderful man.

But suddenly I’m sweating fiercely. My breathing has become tight and rapid. The northern California landscape around me is as it was a moment before, nothing at all has changed – and yet it has, all the same and all at once. The woman’s situation has thrust itself back into my mind, powerfully, her circumstances flashing like lights in my vision.

I think I might hyperventilate – maybe I already am. My pulse, I’m sure of it, is out of control. This isn’t a headache any more. I don’t understand what is happening to me. The edges of the highway are glowing white, a phosphorous light that is too bright for me to look at directly, bleeding into every inch of my vision.

And I can see a girl, like a picture from a perfectly told story. She’s right there, in the glow of white that has overtaken the world. I am an observer at the solemn portrait of something ethereal and other-worldly.

And … wrong.

I can no longer see the traffic around me. I’m not sure if I’m still in my lane, or even in my car. Life itself has gone out of focus.

I only see the girl. Her. The girl from the headline – of whom no photos have yet been released. The girl whose face I have no reason to know from Eve’s. There’s something peculiar to her eyes. Something wrong with her neck. Yet it’s her, I’m sure of it, and she’s there, her face bathed in white, staring at mine. Her life ebbing away.

And for some reason I want to call her Emma.

The way things went, after I first gazed into her eyes, first heard her voice – it’s not the way I necessarily would have wanted it to go. I would have liked there to have been less trauma. I would have liked to have avoided the pain. The pain I bore, and the pain I had to inflict.

But this is what happens. This is where you end up.

I hadn’t expected that any woman would change my life. My experience with women had never been good. When one you love dies, so early in your life, you’re not exactly left with the most optimistic hopes for the future. And if another, who ought to love you, doesn’t, that doesn’t help mend the wound. I’d been through both scenarios, with a sister in the grave before her time, and a mother who, together with my father, hadn’t left for the next life soon enough. Childhood was a mass of misery in my head, and in my youth I’d hoped one day I’d flee from it. Get far enough away to at last be free. But time was a vicious teacher, and eventually I had to learn to be satisfied with an unhappiness as deeply set as my bones and my blood. And eventually I did: I simply got used to it. Give a man enough pain, and for long enough, and he’ll stop hoping for anything else.

But that encounter, that first moment with her – it changed things. I’d long since given up on escaping my pain; hell, I’d made a career of wallowing in it. Surrounding myself with more of the same. I had become a man condemned to live in the never-ending cycle of sorrow I’d carried as long as I could remember.

And then, in a single instant, something new. A doorway into a new life.

Not that the pain would leave, even then. Not for me. That was, in the end, simply too much to hope for. In the days that would come I would smile, and hope, and sing, and even find the means to rejoice. But never to sing the pain entirely away.

Some pain, we learn too late, exceeds the songs that are sung of it.

I don’t burst through doors, it’s just not my way. Never has been. But today, just now, as I tentatively push ours open enough to catch the sight beyond, I wish I was the kind of person who bursts through doors. The day’s been too strange, and I want the surety, the comfort that I know waits on the other side – and I want it now, instantaneously, all at once.