‘Motels.’
‘Uh-huh. OK.’ She sounded distracted again.
He reached into his pocket for the ring, something concrete. He turned it in his hand, and he felt less alone.
By lunchtime the following day it was fixed. Alex pushed on to Flagstaff, arriving after night fell. He stopped, checked into a motel. The Grand Canyon was near. He imagined its vast absence as he lay on his bed, trying to get to sleep.
On his heels, had he but known it – had they but known it – were Bree and Jones, still heading west, still trusting – as instructed – to luck.
There was little said in the car as they drove. Bree, slightly giddy from not sleeping, was still thinking about what Jones had done, still seeing the surprise on the face of the dead man, still wondering what it would mean to have done the worst thing in the world and not understand what had happened – if, indeed, that was the situation Jones was in. His sunglasses might as well have been armour-plating. There was nothing in there; nothing Bree could understand.
When he was hungry, he would suggest they stopped, and they would eat in silence, standing by the car, Jones looking in whichever direction he happened to be facing; Bree looking in whichever direction Jones wasn’t. After that, again, he just drove, eyes blandly scanning the world.
Bree realised, as the miles rolled past under the blank blue sky, that some part of her hated him not for killing the stranger, but for getting away with it. He had done the worst thing in the world, and nothing had happened to him. He didn’t fear the consequence. He couldn’t feel the loss of another’s life any more than he’d feel the loss of his own.
And was it the worst thing in the world, even? No. The worst thing in the world was what Bree had done. Bree had done that years ago. Bree had lost her baby.
She couldn’t remember much of the sequence of events. By that stage the memory thief had become brazen. Just flashes, disconnected points of pain, smeared routines. Cass getting her own breakfast and going to school – her spoon clanking softly on her bowl, audible through the partition wall in Bree’s dark box of morning pain. Cass, more than once, helping Bree off the couch and into bed. Cass finding bottles and pouring them out, and later, Cass standing barefaced and shaking, chin up, fronting Bree’s rage.
She never hit her. She shook her. Never hit her.
And then Cass’s own anger – ever since Al had gone. There was bed-wetting first, nothing said. And then, after she started her bleed, the focusless rage of a teenager. Bree had done everything she could to direct Cass’s anger at Al. It gave them something to share. It was Al’s fault. Al had gone altogether. How could he do that? How could he abandon his own daughter to… to Bree.
Trouble at school. Bree hadn’t bothered going in to see the head. Bree remembered screaming at the social worker. Marion – pig-faced Marion, with the flakes of dandruff in the dark greasy bit where her hair was parted. Bree hated her whether or not she was doing her job. But the whole machinery went on. Then there were her appearances and non-appearances in court, her desperation, her fantasies, her sloppy embarrassments of love.
Bree even tried to run with her – skip out and run to another state. She pulled Cass out of bed in the middle of the night. It would be like Thelma and Louise, just us girls, she said. She crashed the car into a hydrant, dead drunk, before they reached the end of the street. The seat belt left a purple bruise on the girl’s right collarbone and across her sternum. Bree saw it through the bathroom door, set off by the white of Cass’s training bra.
When they asked about her rock bottom in meetings, Bree always said it was waking up in the nuthouse: dawn growing blue in the awful window, and shaking with the need for something to make it go dark again. That was nearly a year later, the year she completely lost. She didn’t talk about losing Cass. She couldn’t share that.
She said to herself that that had been her real rock bottom – that had been the turning point. But what Bree could not turn to face was that losing her daughter had not been her rock bottom. She had loved her daughter, but she had loved drinking more. She had, in the early days of Cass’s absence, almost been relieved. Someone else was looking after her; someone good. She could drink safely now. Nobody was watching her.
She hadn’t loved her daughter enough to stop drinking, was what the bottom line was. That was a sentence she uttered to herself only when she was so drunk she knew she would forget it.
Every year, at the approach of Cass’s birthday, June 29th, Bree thought: this is the year when I go and find her. She could track her through the care system. She could make the correct applications. This is the year, she would think, when I go and knock on the door of her foster-parents’ home – she imagined some white suburb, somewhere warm, with a smell of oranges in the air and a clean SUV parked up in the driveway and all that baloney – and say: ‘I’d like to see Cassie.’ That would be the year when she would show the young woman who had once been her daughter a fistful of recovery medallions, and beg for her forgiveness. And then what?
She could see Cass – all the different versions, from the first sight of her. Purple face, whitened with vernix, screaming in the hospital. The double whorl in her hair. The surge of love and exhaustion as she first held her weight – her future coiled into that tiny body. The last words she had heard Cass say had been: ‘Please. I don’t want to leave my mom.’ She couldn’t see Cass now. She was a young woman and her face was nobody’s, something indecipherable, unavailable to Bree’s imagination.
Most years she went to two meetings that day, and didn’t talk about Cass. One year, early on, she came within the crack of a screw cap of a bottle of brandy from relapsing. The thought that she couldn’t do it made her desperate to take a drink; the thought that she might one day do it kept her from it.
But she had still never looked for Cass. She could not come face to face, not in that way, with the centre of her shame. She thought Cass would forgive her – and she thought that there was no way, no way on earth, that she would be able to bear that.
Are you ashamed, Jones? Can you be forgiven? Bree slept that night in a motel in Flagstaff, forty feet from where Alex Smart slept. She, too, felt the giant absence of the Grand Canyon out in the night, but exhaustion took her this time and she was almost grateful when she had the death-dream instead of any other one.
Chapter 19
A day and a half later, Alex arrived where he was going. Las Vegas rose out of the desert like a mirage. Even from this distance, it looked like a place that someone had invented, or dreamed about after falling asleep with the central heating on too high and a belly full of Stilton.
Alex arrived in town early in the afternoon, and opened the windows to the dirty heat. He was wondering what the inside of the car smelled like. After the desert, where there was no direction but forwards, and no other cars on the road, he found himself again on multi-lane highways, being bullied by SUVs shouldering from lane to lane.
The movement of traffic pulled him down into the centre. He found himself travelling slowly, from stop light to stop light, down the broad, gaudy Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip: it was a place at once new to him and familiar – a place that had lived, in jumbled form, in his imagination. He’d seen it overflown endlessly, by helicopter, in the title credits of CSI – the Eiffel Tower and the Montgolfier balloon traced in blue neon, the pyramid shooting a beam of light into the sky; the burlesque monumental lions outside the MGM Grand; the anonymous coppery curve of the Wynn. He’d zoomed in on it, too, in Google Earth: monumental schematics from the air; frozen images at street level; granular, gaudy and smeared with light.
Was it as he had imagined it? He didn’t know. It seemed to come pre-imagined. But it occurred to him as he drove that he hadn’t seen it in daylight before: it wasn’t intended to be seen in daylight. The concrete and stone answered the sun with a wan brightness. It looked as worn and bleached out as Christmas tree lights discovered in the attic in summer.