CHAPTER 39 #2
‘No.’
‘So I’d come and find us.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Otherwise,’ Lucy says, talking around the topic, delving into it using a different perspective, ‘I would never see my wife and kid again.’ She looks away at this, into the distance.
The sun has now long set, the stars are beginning to pop out, the sky a bruised purple.
Simone wonders idly how often there are extreme weather events here.
Storms or hurricanes or even vast numbers of tumbleweeds blowing in.
She thinks about bears and snakes. She thinks about these things to avoid thinking about the real, true tragedy: a family torn in two.
By Simone? By a kidnapper? She’s no longer sure.
‘Yeah,’ Simone says, choked up. Lucy doesn’t need to know anything yet. She knows too much, has seen too much, already.
‘I mean, wouldn’t you?’ Lucy presses.
‘Yeah, I would,’ she tells her daughter, then adds: ‘At any cost.’
The water is boiling, crystals forming quickly, and Simone is pleased and relieved to see them: salt.
She didn’t expect much from a stream, thought she’d have to extract calcium first, but, no, here they are.
Salt crystals and all the flavour they bring with them.
She begins to pluck them out, carefully, burning her fingers, but she doesn’t mind.
She lays them on paper towels to dry out, then takes some tin foil and wraps the potatoes in them.
They will take half an hour to cook.
‘This is nice,’ Lucy says, later. ‘Reminds me of another time.’
‘Home?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not really. A time before. When cooking was cooking.’ At this sentiment, she meets Simone’s gaze in the gloaming. Simone can only see the whites of her eyes, the shape of her face. The rest Simone fills in from a hundred thousand memories.
‘When cooking was cooking,’ she says softly, thinking, privately, Well, what does this mean? But Lucy can’t be pressed. Simone simply waits.
‘I don’t mean the restaurant,’ she says. ‘I mean –’ she pauses – ‘what do I mean?’ And then she laughs. ‘When things were simpler,’ she says eventually, looking directly at Simone, and Simone is struck, suddenly, by the notion that perhaps her daughter is hiding something.
‘Things are about as complicated as it’s possible to be,’ Simone says.
‘Yeah. I know.’
‘Is there something else complicated going on?’ Simone asks.
‘No,’ Lucy says, but she projects her voice. It’s too confident, too dismissive; she’s acting.
Hot, tender salty potatoes, insides fluffy. They eat with their hands. There’s a simplicity to the food that Simone, too, finds she has missed. When cooking was cooking.
‘Had things become complicated before Texas?’ she presses.
‘Maybe …’ Lucy answers.
‘Why?’ Simone cocks her head.
‘I don’t know. Eighteen is … on the precipice, isn’t it?’
‘Right,’ Simone says, thinking she doesn’t know at all what eighteen is, actually. Eighteen, for her, was survival, but she would never tell Lucy the full extent of that.
‘Do you have complicated feelings about being eighteen?’ Simone probes.
Lucy nods emphatically while swallowing. ‘For sure. How did you get these so salty?’
‘I made salt,’ Simone says. ‘Didn’t you see – the pan? The salt crystals forming?’
‘I wasn’t sure what you were doing,’ Lucy says. A beat. ‘I was thinking about Dad, when I should have been helping.’
‘What’s complicated about being eighteen?’ Simone asks, wanting to return to this, then raises her palms. ‘Open question. Obviously, lots of things.’
It’s beginning to get cold, now, but it’s still the sweet spot between fierce heat and freezing weather. It’s windier tonight, and Lucy puts her hair up after several moments of being irritated with it sticking to her food and face. By them, the stream tinkles and flows.
‘I’m going to need another fork,’ she jokes.
Simone waits.
‘Are you accusing me of having got us into this situation?’ Lucy asks, and it’s such a leap, a fallacy of logic, that Simone automatically thinks, I wasn’t, but I might now.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Because I didn’t.’
‘I didn’t accuse you of anything.’ Simone keeps her voice level, her mind cycling. Why would Lucy jump to that conclusion?
‘We’re in this together, I thought,’ Simone continues. ‘What makes you think I was accusing you?’
‘I didn’t. Sorry. I’m just stressed. This life is not for me!’ she says. ‘Maybe I will just inherit Dishes after all and be a nepo baby.’
‘No chance. You don’t even recognize salt.’
And that’s the conversation gone, skirted once more.
Simone understands it, has spent much of her life hiding her true feelings from everybody except Damien.
But this is the distance Simone keeps encountering.
Lucy making veiled references to something.
Lucy not telling her why she doesn’t want to move out.
Lucy being defensive, thinking Simone was accusing her.
Simone shivers with something like nervousness.
When you’re running together, you have to trust each other – and does she?
‘It feels like there’s no hope of a way out at all, ever,’ Lucy says.
‘I know.’
Lucy pauses. ‘I’m depressed now.’
‘Me too.’
‘Let’s, I don’t know, rescue it.’
‘Rescue what?’
‘Save the day. The mood. Look,’ she says, holding out a hand to her mother in the gloom.
‘Let’s go in the stream.’ Less a stream, more a river, here on the flat ground.
It’s maybe four feet deep and flowing. ‘Save the day. It means, no matter how crappy your day’s been, you do one nice thing at the end of it. ’
‘Sure,’ Simone says agreeably; it’s not that cold yet. This is the sort of parent she is, always wanted to be, the kind of person who says yes almost always but means it when she says no. Fun times and boundaries. Simone only ever wanted to be perfect.
Lucy takes her top and shorts off, and Simone joins her.
And the water is chilly, and they don’t have any towels, and now maybe they will be too cold overnight, but – oh.
It feels delicious. The water is the temperature of a still winter morning, swirling, small variations detectable, almost warm and almost freezing entwining together.
The iciest parts touch and soothe Simone’s sunburn.
She floats and thinks nothing, for once.
Not about missing Damien, or their ancient cat in the bay window, or Dishes.
‘God, this is nice,’ Lucy says, her head tilted back, her face a grey moon in the water.
Her limbs swill, the occasional foot hitting foot, and Simone thinks of how her daughter once swam inside her, in the amniotic fluid, and her heart seems to turn over in nostalgia and sadness and something else, too.
‘I can’t remember any of our list, now,’ Lucy says. ‘But this feels like a pro.’
‘Maybe,’ Simone says.
‘It’ll blow over,’ Lucy says. Perhaps she can’t yet see the scale of their problems. Simone is not minded to tell her; there’s time for her to get there, to realize. There’s time for a solution.
A pause. ‘Do you think Dad is trying to find us?’ she asks, returning to Damien once more.
‘Yes, definitely,’ Simone lies.
‘Maybe he’s trying to find the kidnapper, too.’
Simone moves closer to her, and sees Lucy’s expression is open and true.
‘When you said bring him to justice, what did you mean?’ Simone asks.
‘He’s ruined our lives,’ Lucy snaps, and it’s clear that Lucy knows exactly what the score is, that their old existence is gone, that she just manages to compartmentalize it most of the time. ‘It’s like I imagined it. We have so little evidence.’
‘No, you didn’t imagine it. I was there,’ Simone says.
‘He was – his hand … that first journey in his car. Then in his arms again, he handled me so roughly as we went in the door to his house. I heard a key turn, a big one, maybe.’
Simone listens, hoping that if Lucy keeps recounting the events, details will begin to emerge that will help them.
That voice, Lucy’s voice, throaty and rich and full.
It drifts up into the heavens. And even though it has within it some pain, it is also ambitious and feisty and real.
Simone could listen to Lucy forever. She would see a one-woman play of her that lasted a lifetime.
‘I’m going to wash my hair,’ Lucy says, drifting to the edge of the stream.
‘No – it will make it so much more tangled,’ Simone says.
‘I can’t resist. It’s so dirty.’
She gets out, a darting white silhouette in the night. Simone cannot resist either. It feels so good to dunk her head, to slough off the grease, the sweat, the tang of adrenaline. She submerges fully under, opens her eyes, staring at the rocks and the silt in the darkness.
She pops up, and Lucy is returning with a shampoo and – ludicrously – an intensive conditioner.
‘This will help get the fork through it!’ she tells Simone.
‘A leave-in conditioner.’
‘Great hair is always a must,’ Lucy says lightly.
They stay with it on for ten minutes, fifteen, talking about small topics, how the restaurant might be doing, what Terlingua is like, if George the cat is wondering why Damien left, too, until Simone’s teeth begin to chatter.
‘It’s so cold I can’t feel my body,’ Simone says, washing off the conditioner with a satisfying oily slick.
‘Do a little wee – warm yourself up, I have!’
‘You haven’t!’ Simone exclaims.
‘I most definitely have.’
‘I’m out now,’ Simone says with a laugh. ‘But thank you. That was the best moment of my day.’
They get dressed and Simone thinks that actually, perversely, that might have been one of the best moments of her entire life, here, in the wilderness of right and wrong, fugitives, but together. And then she sees that Lucy has made the bed for her again.
‘Tell me something,’ Lucy says, sitting in the tent, the soft patter of their hair dripping. ‘Just one thing. One weird thing about your trip. From leaving the UK, to losing me, to rescuing me. Tell me something that could be a clue.’
Simone pauses, thinking. The baggage claim, the hire car, the drive to the lodge. The kidnap, the ransom. Border Patrol. The bag in the empty garage.
Nothing stands out, until one thing does. The relaxation, the swimming. It’s broken something open. All this time, Simone had been asking Lucy about the kidnapping, but they hadn’t focused on what Simone might know, too.
‘There was a man on the coach to and from Mexico,’ she says. ‘He checked if I was OK. There was just something slightly weird about it. I don’t know. Overly familiar.’
‘Describe him.’
‘Grey hair. Fifties.’
Lucy’s gaze lands on her mother’s in the almost black air. Simone can only see the whites of her eyes and her outline, but her stare is lucid and clear. And then she asks a question which changes everything. ‘He wasn’t British, was he?’