Page 23 of High Season

SIXTEEN

Nina knew that Ryan would be concerned when she suggested staying.

They were in Nina’s childhood bedroom with its fresh white sheets and its cool stone walls, Nina’s running gear discarded on the floor.

She saw Ryan’s eyes twitch toward the crumpled pile of leggings, wary, when she called him in.

He would know, of course, that something must be wrong.

Nina would never leave anything untidy. Disorder was not in Nina’s nature.

“I just don’t think there’s any point flying back today,” she said. “You already said that work doesn’t need you in this week. And we’re here now. Why not stay the weekend?”

“But the flights are already booked.”

“We can change them. And look—” She took a deep breath in, ready to play her trump card. “Mum’s birthday party is Saturday night. You know how much it means to her. We can stay for that, and go back early on Sunday.”

“Nina,” Ryan said slowly. “You said that you never wanted to go to one of your mum’s birthday parties again.”

“Well, I changed my mind.”

She bent to pick up the pile of workout clothes, business-like.

“It might be fun,” she said, her voice lighter than she felt. “And it’d be brownie points with Mum. Get her off my back for a bit.”

“Nina—”

“You can go back, if work needs you. I don’t mind flying on my own, and—”

“ Nina .”

She looked up at him then, sitting on her bed, his hands laced together, his jaw tight.

“Please tell me,” he said, “that you don’t want to stay because of this documentary.”

Nina folded her leggings in two even though they needed to go in the wash and there was little point making them neat.

“Of course not,” she said. “I already told you. I’m not doing the documentary.”

“Because your mum and Blake are right,” Ryan said. “There’s no good that can come of you putting yourself out there. It’s done. It’s best we leave it that way.”

“That’s not what you said back in London.”

She turned her back on him, started to roll the leggings up into a tight, compact ball.

“What I said in London is that it would be a good idea to talk to your mum and Blake about it. Because I knew that Blake would talk sense. This documentary, Nina—there’s only one way it can go, and it’s badly.

Putting your family under the microscope like that.

Putting what you said—what you told the world—under the microscope.

Nina. You’d be setting yourself up to be torn apart. ”

“Why?” Nina asked, still not looking at him. “Do you think that if I let them put what I said under a microscope, they’d find out it wasn’t true?”

There was a moment of silence. A moment where the only sound was the soft fabric shifting through Nina’s hands as she rolled and unrolled the leggings.

“You know I don’t think that,” Ryan said at last.

“But what if I was wrong?” Nina said. “Would I have the responsibility to find that out? Would I have the responsibility to tell the truth now?”

Another silence. This time, Nina turned to face her boyfriend. He was looking straight at her. He looked, she thought, unbearably sad.

“Anyway,” she said brightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not about the documentary. It’s a beautiful day, and I don’t want to spend it in an airport.”

“Nina—”

“Just a few more days, OK? Just a few more days, and we’ll go back home.”

He hesitated. She could see him thinking. Could see his eyes twitch as he watched her. Trying to figure her out.

“Promise me,” he said. “That you’re not going to go looking for something.”

“Looking for what?”

“I don’t know. Something. I don’t want you getting obsessed with this. I don’t want you to go looking for Josie Jackson.”

Nina scoffed.

“Why would I go looking for Josie Jackson?” she asked. “Josie Jackson is the last person I want to see.”

And now, Nina stands across from Josie Jackson, and the first thing she thinks is that she has lied to Ryan. Another break in her family, because of this woman. Another reason why she has to make this count.

The second thing she thinks is that she knows this woman, an enormous sense of déjà vu that disappears as soon as she arrives.

But then, in a way, Nina does know this woman. She has said her name over and over, every time she has explained the death of her sister. She has stood across from her in a courtroom, as she told a story that would change both their lives. She doesn’t remember a time before she knew Josie Jackson.

And now, when Nina looks at Josie Jackson, she is five years old again.

She is out by the pool, the sun against her skin, Josie strapping her into her armbands.

She is six years old, standing in that courtroom, the drawing of her sister’s death in front of her.

She is seven, and eight, and sixteen, and twenty-one.

She is all the ages of her life when she did not have a sister.

When she knew that the story she had told had changed this woman’s life.

When both of their existences were irrevocably rerouted from what they could have been, all because of what did, or did not happen, on that hot August day twenty years ago.

“Josie,” Nina says.

But Josie is already stepping back from her. Her eyes are wide. Her mouth, a set line. She looks, Nina thinks, like something preparing to pounce. To fight for its life.

“Josie,” says Nina again. “I think we need to talk.”

Nina expects to be invited inside, but instead Josie leads her to a threadbare patch of ground at the side of the house. There’s a rusted metal table and chairs, an ashtray, a light that trembles with a too-white brightness when they walk beneath it. An olive tree, its trunk ancient and knotted.

A man, who must be Josie’s brother, hovers for a moment until Josie tells him he can go.

“We’ll be right inside,” he says, his arms folded across his chest. “If you need us.”

Nina thanks him, even though she knows he isn’t talking to her. It is clear that the offer only extends to Josie.

They sit opposite each other. It strikes Nina, as she lowers into the uncomfortable seat, how ordinary this woman looks.

Josie Jackson has always been the ghost in everything that Nina’s family says and does, but now it occurs to Nina that she could probably pass this woman in a supermarket without a second glance.

She is so much smaller than Nina had thought of her as.

Freckles along the lengths of her arms. A bad blond dye job.

A thick, straight line of dark roots against the white of her scalp.

A small, heart-shaped necklace resting in the center of her chest.

Nina waits until Josie’s brother has disappeared behind the house before she speaks. Josie’s eyes are staunch. Wary. She doesn’t break Nina’s gaze.

“I almost couldn’t find this place,” Nina says, trying to keep her voice light. Trying to put Josie at ease. “I was convinced I was waiting at the wrong house.”

It isn’t just small talk. The walk really had taken her longer than she expected, her calves aching with the tilt of the hill.

She had imagined Patricia Jackson as she climbed, a woman whose face she knew more from newspaper articles than memory, walking this road every single day.

Before the sun came up, and long after it set.

She had imagined Josie, just sixteen, trudging up the path to babysit Nina when she should have been doing all the things that sixteen-year-olds do—going to parties and falling in love with the wrong people; sneaking alcohol and staying out too late.

All the things that Nina had missed out on, too; her once permissive mother overprotective, after what had happened with Tamara; the notoriety of her name preceding her in every new friendship, interrupting every teenage crush.

Her anxiety and the creeping, terrible fears that so often slipped between her and many of the teenage experiences she should have had.

Her mother keeping her home from school when her worries felt particularly sharp, entire terms learned from textbooks.

The psychiatrist appointments and chemists and one terrible stay at a private hospital for teenage girls who were, as Evelyn said, “unbalanced.” Nina had looked at the other girls with horror, their wasted bodies from starving themselves, their skin scratched with the same compulsions that Nina suffered from, their dazed expressions from the cocktails of medications that were handed out with breakfast. She hated that she saw herself in them. That she, like Josie, was locked away.

But the similarities between Nina and Josie ended there.

For Nina, there had been recovery. The relative freedom of her late teens and early twenties.

University. A relationship. The promise of a career.

Things that Josie likely never got to have.

The guilt of it filled Nina up in the same way that it did when she was a small child, immediately after the trial.

Josie Jackson had served ten years in prison, a stretch of time that had been unimaginable to six-year-old Nina.

Now, she understands all the things that can be lost in ten years.

All the things that her words took away from Josie Jackson.

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” Nina says.

One of Josie’s eyebrows lifts, disbelieving.

“I’m not,” says Nina. “I just want to talk. You’ve probably seen everything that’s been happening online. People talking about Tamara again. About the case.”

Josie shrugs.

“I don’t really bother with all that stuff,” she says. “Social media.”

“Right,” Nina says. “Well, there’s been this online video series. And it’s attracted a lot of attention. And—”

Josie is holding up one hand to stop her.