CHAPTER 53
Tomorrow, at four o’clock in the morning, when she inevitably wakes, Simone and Damien will be in bed together.
She wonders if she won’t wake, or have nightmares, if she will sleep through the night for the first time since.
At the pink house, two has become three, and Simone’s shoulders have dropped, her body feeling relaxed and limber.
She is aware in some part of her that this might be a false victory, but as she cooks a whole chicken in Moody’s kitchen, she finds she doesn’t care.
Lucy tells Damien about the kidnap while Simone makes stuffing.
She tells him everything, painful, small details she hasn’t told Simone.
That she lay down on the little camp bed, awake, for eight hours straight overnight.
That she tried to design a routine to stay sane in case she was held there for weeks.
Lucy goes for a bath – she takes two cups of tea in there with her, saying she will be two hours – and Simone and Damien risk sitting out back, looking at Moody’s trees while the chicken roasts, slumping in the two padded chairs that overlook the desert but are well hidden within the huge porch.
It’s the first time they have been alone. Parents are used to waiting to have significant conversations once their offspring are out of the way and, in some ways, this is no different.
The desert beyond their porch is spindly, decrepit, but attractive, too, the way weeds can be if you didn’t know what they were.
In the distance, a couple of horses and their riders amble up one of the hills.
Otherwise, there’s nobody around at all.
It’s the only time they’ve been away together since Dishes opened.
Damien is chewing gum, and the air is intermittently scented with sugar and mint as he speaks.
‘So,’ he says. He left most of his things at the hotel he stayed at when the police interviewed him, then travelled light. He has only himself.
But Simone finds she doesn’t want to talk; she just wants to be, right here, in the moment. They have so many problems. It’s impossible to solve them all.
She looks out to the horizon, the sky swallowing up the gobstopper of the sun for another day, and thinks that it’s a sort of strange and beautiful way to live. A mindfulness not accessible at home.
‘So,’ she replies reluctantly.
Damien looks down at his glass. It’s lemonade, ice cubes that bob and clink the only noise. ‘We have some things to say.’
Simone wants desperately to avoid it, but can’t.
‘Yeah,’ she says instead. He will have to extract it out of her.
The truth is, she isn’t sorry. She got their daughter back alive.
She did mean what she said, even though she both wishes she didn’t and wishes she hadn’t felt the need to say it.
It’s windy again today in the desert, and it ruffles Damien’s hair back from his forehead.
The bathroom is at the back of the house, too, and through the open window, Simone hears the sloshing of water.
She reaches up to close it. ‘I’m amazed it worked,’ Simone says. ‘Beyond amazed. You’re here.’
‘Can we talk about our row?’
‘I am sorry I said such an ugly thing to you.’
‘Did you mean it?’ he asks, his tone mild.
‘I shouldn’t have said it.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘Maybe we love her differently,’ Simone answers.
A soft laugh. ‘So you did mean it.’
Simone turns her mouth down. ‘A taboo exploded out of me at the wrong time, but …’
‘Yes.’
‘Kind of. Yes.’
‘Look, I can have my feelings hurt by you but still be here, still want to be here, with you,’ he says, and he scoots his chair closer to hers.
Their knees touch, and Simone is strangely nervous, the happy nerves of first dates, but feeling grateful, too, for that quality of his that is hard to find: emotional maturity.
‘I didn’t want to say this online,’ he says, waving a hand.
And then he looks at her, and Simone thinks, Please, please, please don’t say that I did the wrong thing.
Please don’t ask me about buying a gun. Trafficking drugs.
She can’t deal with anybody’s judgement right now, but much less from him, a man who has always unconditionally accepted her.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Just this. Thank God it was you who got the ransom and not me. I might’ve told the police, and then we might not’ve got her back.’
And Simone closes her eyes. Those beautiful words that must be so hard for him to say but that mean so much to her. She did the right thing, even though they ended up here, in a one-horse town in Texas, the three of them on the run.
‘Thank you,’ she says, her voice thick. ‘Thank you.’ She clears her throat, and he passes her his lemonade wordlessly. Something about this gesture touches her as she sips it. ‘Thank you,’ she says again.
Simone’s body begins to unwind slowly as they sit there, together. Adrenaline she has become accustomed to feeling begins to stop burning.
And then she starts to talk. Every moment, from the beginning to the end.
And the thing she actually wants to linger on is the shooting.
That man, survived by a wife and child, taken by her.
It’s been waiting there, the images boxed up in her mind to tell somebody safe, someone who is not her child.
She tells him about the blood and the feel of the handgun, the body, losing the pulse, their panicked phone call.
All the while, Damien holds her hands and doesn’t ask any questions, just lets her talk. Just listens.
‘I wake at four every morning. The time she was taken. I dream of her disappearing.’
‘Understandable,’ he says, later. ‘I wouldn’t even have woken … so you’re a better parent than me.’ It’s an olive branch, Simone thinks, offered there in the desert.
Then he tells her, ‘The police, they … I don’t know. From the sheriff’s call, they seemed to take against you.’
‘You know about that call?’
‘Uh-huh,’ he says calmly. ‘They told me everything. They interviewed the cop who you lied to. He said he felt sure Lucy was there.’
‘But why?’
‘Said you seemed too calm,’ he replies, and Simone cringes. Her ability to mask in situations where she’s under pressure, taught to her by a shitty childhood. Now the unravelling of a great adulthood. ‘Said Lucy’s things were all around. Said he didn’t notice a broken door.’
‘Did they go back there?’
‘Don’t know. He’s a key witness for them.
They checked the ANPR footage of your car, but it’s blurry.
Just saw it driving to the border. You can’t tell if Lucy is inside or not.
Then someone – whoever, the British man, maybe – said you weren’t alone on the coach.
Then the call to the sheriff – they think it was some sort of bluff.
Drugs drop gone wrong – you needed to invent a story. ’
‘We didn’t call the sheriff. The operator put us through to him. We called a fucking ambulance.’
‘Oh,’ Damien says. ‘I guess, the thing is …’ A hesitation.
‘I guess to the police maybe it felt like there was such public interest in this story that they didn’t want to listen to you, I suppose,’ he says, his tone low.
‘They were looking for a perpetrator, like they always are. It’s easier to assume that’s you.
Everyone believed the headline, so they forged on with it. ’
‘So they don’t care to investigate it,’ Simone says, her tone deadpan. ‘They just want a conviction.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How stupid.’
‘No. I know,’ Damien soothes. ‘I know.’
‘Is it me they want, mostly?’ Simone asks him.
Damien waves a hand, but it’s exaggerated, the sort of thing you do when keen to move the conversation on, away from this topic. She looks at him closely. He stands and double-checks the window is closed even though he saw her do it. He’s buying time, thinking.
She isn’t usually opposed to this. Damien fills the gaps in their marriage with thought and careful planning. Simone drives the rest forward with action. It is how they have always worked. Her messy cooking, his quiet tidying up. She always reinventing the menu, he wanting to stay the same.
‘They want you for murder and drugs crimes, but Lucy is a full accessory, plus wanted in her own right for shooting at the Buick, which they have interpreted as an attempted homicide on a cop,’ he says in the end softly, turning to her.
‘Do you know what we would get?’ Simone asks, without thought, and if Damien knows, he says that he doesn’t; he’s always sparing her.
He looks at her. ‘They asked me over and over about our phone calls. I told them everything I knew about the kidnap, about your description of it. They said it’s a very common defence to any crime around here: say you were forced to do it by organized criminals.’
‘But that’s! That’s –’
‘I know,’ he interrupts. ‘Mad. And unfair.’
‘Sometimes, the rare thing does happen.’
‘Yep.’
‘Lucy’s account of it is so visceral …’
‘She’s a trained actor. The police are well aware.’
‘So. Fucking. What.’
‘I have missed your swearing.’
‘Believe me, it’s been ongoing.’
His voice turns delicate. ‘This doesn’t mean a court would convict.’
‘Hmm.’
‘The business opportunity text from me really wasn’t helpful. And they grabbed on to how you recently also sent some other texts about the restaurant’s overdraft to Luan.’
‘August was a bad month. Wet. They think you flew out to make money to put in our account? Because of the text I sent to you about you having access to our bank?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do they think you’re an accessory?’
‘I’m not sure. They didn’t caution me.’
‘It’s mental. As if the solution to a restaurant ailing is a drugs drop!’
‘I know. I think they thought you were offered an opportunity, somehow, so flew out.’
‘Did you see the news about the star?’ she asks, and is surprised that, at this above all else, she loses it, her face crumpling up like a child’s while Damien holds her and tells her that he did.
They lapse into silence. ‘Do you think we should hand ourselves in?’ she asks quietly.
Damien pauses for so long that Simone leans back in his arms to look at him.
‘No,’ he says, but it doesn’t sound exactly like a refusal to Simone. Then he adds, ‘Don’t ask me that.’
The breeze begins to cool rapidly the way that it does here. Simone leans into it, but Damien is looking at her strangely.
‘What?’ she asks him.
‘I’ve been thinking about the best thing to do,’ Damien says, and it is precisely at this moment that Simone realizes he isn’t only here because he wanted to join them. He is here because he has made a plan for them. Sure enough, he finishes this with: ‘I’ve got an idea.’