Remember Me This Way (38 page)

Only one name remains.

What meant most to him?

Not crossed out.

Who did he truly love?

One name.

Lizzie Carter.

My hand is at my mouth.

I turn the laptop towards me. Across the keyboard, my fingers pick out the letters.

LIZZIECARTER
.

The screen vibrates.
INCORRECT PASSWORD
.

I try again, remembering the space.

LIZZIE CARTER
.

The screen goes blank and immediately springs back to life. Zach’s screensaver still reaches the corners of the space, but in the middle of it is an open file.

My hands fall away. Zach used my name as his password.

‘Have you thought of something?’

Victoria is staring at me. I hadn’t realised she was still here.

‘No. Yes.’

It’s a Word file. Small print, single-spaced. Page 119 of 120. ‘
Lizzie. My Lizzie
,’ I read. I move the cursor up, so the page flips. My eyes skit. ‘
I haven’t got a choice . . . Dartmoor . . . You fucker . . . People always . . . What was it Lizzie said?
’

I sit back. ‘It’s Zach’s laptop. We were trying to work out his password and I think Onnie cracked it. I’m not sure what this is. A diary, or a letter maybe. But if she managed to open it, then perhaps she read it.’

‘And that’s what upset her?’

I turn back to the screen. I move the cursor quickly up and then as quickly down. The document is divided into sections, with separate headings – months, I think, or more precise dates. It’s not a letter. It’s a diary. I picture Zach tapping away – ideas for paintings, he told me. I hear his voice in my head. ‘
As long as I have Lizzie,
’ I read, ‘
everything will be all right.
’

I spin down again to the last page. I have pains in my arms. I want to wrap them around myself to relieve the welling that I can feel building inside. I have to read the last page. I know I do. I force my eyes to focus, and my brain to concentrate on what they absorb. ‘
A fast road and a wall, or a tree: that’s all I need.
’

I feel drawn so far into his heart, reading this, I think I will never climb out.

‘What’s the matter?’ Victoria has put her hand on mine. ‘You’re shaking.’

‘The last section of diary,’ I manage to say. ‘This . . . bit at the end – it’s a suicide note. And I made him do it. It was my fault. He died because of me.’

Victoria waits with me for a while. I don’t know how long. And then she is standing up and talking. I’m aware of her moving around the kitchen. A glass of water is put before me. She’s still speaking, but not to me now. I hear her, still on her phone, leave the room. The sound of her footsteps on the stairs; the bathroom door opens and closes.

Zach is dead. He isn’t out there, trying to destroy me. He’s dead. And I killed him.

Victoria is back in the room, kneeling next to me. She has moved the laptop to the other side of the table. ‘Is there someone you can call?’

I stare at her with incomprehension. ‘Why? Where are you going?’

‘Onnie. I’ve got to find Onnie.’

‘Onnie? Yes. Of course, Onnie.’ I rest my head on the tips of my fingers and close my eyes. ‘Where would she go? She’s got my car. What is she planning to do?’

‘I don’t know. I’m trying to think. She obviously did read whatever’s on there.’

‘She’s blaming me for his death. She’s taken my dog.’

‘Where would she have gone?’

The screen of Zach’s laptop, across the table, has filled again with Stepper Point.

‘Cornwall,’ I say suddenly. ‘She’s driven to Cornwall.’

In the car, I sit with the laptop, a cold metal sliver, on my lap. Victoria tried to take it off me, to leave it behind, or at least to put it in the boot, but I won’t let go of it. I don’t want to read any more. Not now. But I know I’ll have to. Zach’s thoughts. Zach’s secrets. The truth behind all his lies. I’ll know it all. If that’s what I want.

I stare at Victoria’s feet much of the time. She has taken off her shoes and is driving in her socks. Thin navy blue socks. Why does anyone drive without shoes? To protect their footwear, I suppose, though you’d have to be the sort of person who had footwear you cared enough about. Victoria was wearing boots. High-heeled and shiny black leather ankle boots. I wonder where they are.

I’m trying to keep the desolation at bay – not a nice clean sadness, but a filthy, murky one. If Onnie thinks I caused Zach’s death, she’s right. I am responsible. That letter was painstakingly written. I judged the tone carefully, each vapid term. I knew how betrayed it would make him feel. It wasn’t just the request for a separation, but the blandness of the phrasing, the way the words avoided any real emotion. It was my form of aggression. I might just as well have attacked him with claws.

I try and remember our last conversation, when everything was still normal. Except it wasn’t. He told me he was on Dartmoor. But he wasn’t; he was already at Gulls.

‘Just catching the light,’ he said. ‘It’s dying on me. There is this run of ancient stone tors stretching into the distance that look like unmarked graves. Not a person in sight.’

‘How wonderful,’ I said, relieved that at least his work was going well. ‘Don’t stay too late.’

‘I won’t get there until after dark.’

‘Drive carefully,’ I said, suddenly close to tears. I knew the letter was waiting for him. I wanted to wind back time to the beginning. I was beginning to regret it.

What was he staring at when he spoke to me? Was he with Onnie? When I can bear it, the laptop will tell me.

I lift it off my knee and pull it up to my chest.

Victoria casts a quick look in my direction. ‘You shouldn’t read any more,’ she says. ‘It never does any good to read someone’s diary. It always ends up being hurtful.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘Did you get to read much already?’

‘A little. I didn’t really take it in – apart from the last bit.’

‘You know what you should do?’

‘What?’

‘You should throw it out of the window. Now. Just open the window and chuck it.’

She indicates to pull into the inside lane, and slows down. She presses a button on the console between us and my window retracts electronically, filling the car with noise and wind. She gestures to the laptop with her hand.

‘I don’t think so,’ I shout, clutching it more tightly. ‘I’m not ready for that.’

She winds the window back up and the car is sucked into silence again. ‘Suit yourself.’

I study her for a moment, in case she was joking, but she is grim-jawed. Several strands of hair have come detached from the tie at her neck. She’s chewing her lip as she drives.

We’ve hardly spoken since we left the house, both of us too desperate.

‘I hope my dog is all right,’ I say suddenly. ‘You don’t think she would hurt him, do you?’

Victoria doesn’t answer directly but after a few minutes of silence, she says, ‘Leave her to me when we find her, won’t you? Just take the dog and go. You don’t have to be involved with the rest of it.’

She begins to talk after this – scraps of information. Onnie was named after Alan’s mother, she tells me. It’s Aine, really.

She was difficult, even as a baby, fussy and hard to feed, never slept, always reaching for things that she would then hurl to the floor in frustration. She was nothing like her older brother. And then her schooling – it’s been ‘a catalogue of disasters’. She never seemed to make any friends. Victoria worried about her, ‘of course I did’, but Onnie didn’t make it easy for herself. ‘She was arrogant. She was angry all the time, subject to mood swings. She always blamed other people if she failed. It was never her fault. She was always very literal, too. And you could never say the right thing. You were always putting her back up.’

‘Sounds like a typical teenager.’

‘Well, the various schools didn’t think so. She was bullied a couple of years ago and we should have taken her out then. If we had we would have saved the situation. As it was it went from bad to worse. Onnie eventually got her own back on the girl in question. She Photoshopped some pictures and posted them on Facebook. The pictures were actually not at all nice. Cruel. And she got kicked out for it.’

She stares straight ahead now. We are just beyond Bristol at the point where two motorways converge. She concentrates on the signs and getting into the right lane. Finally, she says, ‘I hope she hasn’t hurt your dog.’

I turn my head so she can’t see my face.

A few more miles pass.

‘How did you know about Zach and Onnie?’ I ask. ‘When did you find out?’

‘The day before his accident,’ she replies shortly. ‘I caught them at it.’

‘In Cornwall?’

‘Yes.’ She frowns, concentrating on overtaking a tourist coach. ‘It wasn’t a pleasant scene, though we tried to forget it in view of what happened to Zach. She was in a fearful state after we heard. I tried to keep it from her. But it was impossible.’ She sighs.

‘Did your husband know?’

‘No,’ she says shortly. Then when I think she isn’t going to say anything else, she adds: ‘That’s one thing I did succeed at. One of the reasons I was so keen to pack Onnie off to Switzerland was so she wouldn’t let slip anything to Alan. It never fails to amaze me how many secrets couples hold from each other. This liberal idea – tell each other everything. Nine times out of ten someone is hiding something. Even if it’s just thoughts, desires, hopes. You can live in the same house, share the same bed, but how much do you ever really know anyone?’

I watch the borders of the road streak by. After a minute, she says grimly, ‘Clever of you never to have children. They ruin your life.’

‘You don’t mean it.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ She smiles briefly.

‘I wanted a child,’ I say. ‘Zach didn’t.’

‘Oh.’

We are silent for a while. I continue to look out of the window. Eventually I say, ‘Xenia. Someone called Xenia left flowers for Zach.’

I don’t think Victoria has heard but she says, ‘Everybody has a Xenia.’

We leave the motorway behind at Exeter and join the A30. It is mid-afternoon by now and the sun is low. Clouds are gathering, grey streamers across the pale blue sky. Alongside us stretch the purple uplands of Dartmoor where Zach didn’t park up to paint, where he didn’t leave the car and hike to a point called Cosdon, where ancient stone tors might or might not look like unmarked graves, where he didn’t wait for a dying light.

She doesn’t take the short cut, the route Zach and I used to take, the one I thought he had forgotten. She sticks to the main road. I watch the turning flash past.

A mixture of anger and panic and unhappiness begins to rise inside me. I’ve been trying to keep it all down, but now we are getting close I become so agitated I don’t know what to do with myself. I start moving about in my seat.

‘What’s the matter?’ Victoria asks.

I don’t answer. I can see something ahead and I start shouting. ‘STOP. Pull over. Pull over!’

‘Fuck. What? What?’

She screeches into the blunt end of a lay-by, the car nosed in at an angle, half up on the kerb. A car horn blares loudly and passes. Behind us, parked squarely to the road, is my grey Nissan.

I’m out of the car before she can say anything, tearing across the gravel back to my own car. It’s empty. No Onnie. No dog. Victoria is out, too, struggling to pull on her boots. Her hair is flapping. The top buttons of her shirt have come undone, the wind filling the fabric. I shout above the drone, pointing to the other side of the road, to the site of Zach’s accident. I scan the hedgerows. There’s a figure over there, with a dog on a lead – just before the corner. I can see the shape of her – long hair, a flash of blue. The dog keeps stopping and she’s trying to drag him.

We need to cross but the traffic is constant in both directions. Cars just keep on coming. Pale winter sun glitters on their windscreens. In the first gap, I grab Victoria’s arm and run to the middle of the road. The arrowed wires between pylons vibrate above our heads. I search for a gap between the cars coming in this direction. A space larger than most. The glare of lights approaching. I gesture to Victoria and run.

She’s a hundred feet or so away from us. I’m not sure if she’s seen us. She hasn’t turned round. ‘ONNIE!’ Victoria shouts.

She glances over her shoulder, yells something and turns again.

There’s hardly any space between the hedgerow and the road. We start towards her. Onnie begins to run, the lead jerking in her hand, the dog, now he’s seen me, pulling against her. Victoria is running, too, still shouting. On the ground are curls of burned-out tyre. The bushes, branches trailing against my face, are greener than they were. As we begin to gain on her, she stops and turns to face us. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ she yells. ‘Don’t you dare.’ She has Howard by his collar now. He is twisting to get away from her.

Victoria and I have both stopped but Onnie is staring at me. Now we’re closer, I can see the tears in her eyes, the streaks of blackened mascara, the rawness of her mouth. ‘You killed him,’ she says to me. ‘It’s your fault he’s dead. You pretended to care, but you didn’t. He died because of  YOU.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It is. You were leaving him. You broke his heart. You lied to me, pretending you were all sad that he was dead. You made me feel sorry for you. Guilty. Well fuck you.’

She pushes Howard into the road with her knee. An approaching car swerves slightly to avoid him, sounds its horn. Victoria takes a step forward.

‘Don’t you come near me. You lied too, Mum. You’re all liars. You made me feel I was the bad one. I was the failure.
I didn’t know
. Why didn’t you tell me? How could you have let it happen?’

Victoria lets out a sob. ‘It wasn’t like that. We’ll talk about it. I’ll explain.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ Onnie shouts. ‘I hate you. I hate myself.’

She turns away and, still dragging Howard, stumbles on towards the bend. Over her shoulder, she yells again, ‘You killed him, Lizzie. The only person I’ve ever loved is dead.’ She sounds as if she’s choking. We’re almost at the point of Zach’s accident. The tree is near. It’s blocking the last of the sun, dappling the road. She stops again. A container lorry thunders past, its horn sounding. She takes a sideways step out towards the road. She bends to pick up Howard. He’s struggling, scrabbling in her arms.