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It feels, in that moment, as if every molecule of oxygen has been sucked away, as if he isn’t in his mother’s garage at all but an outpost on the moon where the airlock has just failed. He hears the beat of his heart as a pressure inside his head. When he stands, the gravity seems all wrong.
Max tries to struggle up too, but his bloodied hands slip on the concrete and he crashes back down. ‘Wait, please. Don’t go in there, Dad. I don’t want you to see.’
Ignoring his son’s plea, stumbling past him to the bungalow’s connecting door, Joseph has to correct course several times.
Inside his mother’s kitchen, it really does feel like he’s swimming inside a vacuum. His boots make no sound on the linoleum. The rasp of his breath echoes as if an astronaut’s helmet encloses his head.
The kitchen looks identical to the last time he was here. In the living room, where he goes next, a table lamp throws out a homely glow entirely at odds with what it illuminates.
His mother’s armchair has been pushed to the nearest wall, along with her glass coffee table. Spread across the carpet is a heavy-duty plastic sheet. Upon it, eyes fixed on the ceiling, lies Drew.
EIGHTEEN
Joseph swims closer, hampered by the lack of gravity. When he calls Drew’s name, he barely hears his own voice.
She’s dressed differently than she was at the house, her floaty summer dress switched for a tartan miniskirt and a high-necked white halter cut to the midriff.
In his head, he hears his son’s words from earlier this afternoon:Drew won’t say anything, I guarantee it.
Joseph moans, sinks to his knees.
Drew looks like she died from a single stab wound to the neck. Blood has sheeted down her throat, soaking her halter top. It covers her hands, too, all the way up to her elbows, as if she tried in vain to stem the bleeding before she died.
A few days ago, save for their occasional banter, Drew Cullen had rarely featured in Joseph’s thoughts. Now, in death, he appreciates just how unutterably precious she was, and what the world has lost.
Even worse is the knowledge that he could have prevented this – that the responsibility for her death rests with him. He cups his hands over his mouth, forces himself to look at what his choices have brought about. So intense is his grief that it’s a while before he realizes Max has sunk to his knees beside him.
When the boy draws breath, the air sounds like it’s rushing through dusty catacombs. When he speaks, his voice is so bereft that Joseph hardly recognizes it. ‘However I try to explain this, I lose you.’
‘Try,’ Joseph croaks.
Max claws bloodied fingers through his hair. ‘I was wrong,’ he says. ‘Drew would have talked. She got scared, Dad. She was saying she had to tell someone. If she’d gone to the police, she’d have ended up implicating you. We’d have both gone to prison. And you’d have lost Erin – Tilly, too. Our whole family broken apart.’
Joseph hears the words but he can’t really comprehend them. The full impact of his actions, and his role in this tragedy, breaks over him. ‘What have I done?’ he whispers. ‘I could have stopped this Friday night and I didn’t, but I never for one moment thought you’d … Oh my God, you’ve taken Drew’slife, Max. Herlife.’
He wants to scream those words. Wants to grip his son’s head, pull it close and yell them so forcedly that they detonate like landmines inside the boy’s brain. He feels Max’s hand on his shoulder, wants to shrug it off, wants to beat him with his fists, wants to crush him in a hug.
He gags, gasps for air. Right now, his entire reality feels under threat, as if a single false move could rent it with holes through which nameless horrors could pour.
The warmth from Max’s fingers spreads across his back. ‘It’s not your fault,’ his son says, beginning to sob. ‘Please, Dad. Don’t blame yourself. This isn’t on you. I don’t know how else I can—’
‘I should have gone to the police. Taken responsibility. I should have told them I hit that guy driving home.’
‘No. I never would have let you. And without me, you’d never have got them to believe you. Please don’t say this is your fault, because it isn’t.’
Joseph begins to weep, too. Once he’s started, he can’t stop. He cries for the dead man. He cries for Tilly, for Erin, for Max. He cries for Claire, dead these last five years, who would have prevented this tragedy had she lived, because she’d have given Max the love and guidance the boy so desperately needs.
But mostly he cries for Drew.
He feels Max’s hand slide up and down his spine, and it seems to him that they’ve swapped roles, son trying to comfort father.
‘Her parents …’ Joseph begins. ‘Enoch and Paula. My God, what have wedoneto them? We’ve killed them, too. This isn’t just one death, it’s three.’
‘Enoch’s an alcoholic, doesn’t care about anyone except himself. Paula cares more about cocaine than she does about her daughter.’
‘Oh, Max,’ he mutters. ‘What are you saying? What difference does that make?’
‘It doesn’t make any difference. That’s not what I mean.’