CHAPTER 54
‘You can buy an identity,’ Damien says simply. He places his glass down on the decking at his bare feet, then darts a cautious glance at the bathroom window and at the horizon beyond them.
‘An identity,’ Simone says, staring at the ring of condensation that begins to form around the glass in the heat.
‘A false identity. And then settle somewhere. Somewhere people aren’t looking.’
The world around them seems to stop, for just a moment, for Simone and Damien only. The wind lets up, the ice cubes in his glass stop moving. The desert holds its breath.
‘Right,’ Simone says softly, to buy thinking time.
In all her rumination with Lucy, this solution – hiding forever, but intentionally – did not really come up.
And she supposes that was because Damien wasn’t with them, so it wasn’t available to them, but …
it seems so obvious now, but something else, too.
Something painful, something that feels like grief.
They have so much still to figure out. They have to find the man. But here is a solution that feels more viable. Perhaps the answer was not to find the kidnapper, nor to hand themselves in, nor exoneration, either – the answer was to disappear.
‘I see,’ she says.
‘You don’t think?’ Damien asks, the question open and curious. ‘There’s a guy – on the dark web. Near to Galveston Port. You go to see him, get an identity, then get a boat.’
‘How’d you know that?’
‘On my burner phone. Private browsing.’
‘We’ve spoken to a lawyer here, he owns this place too, to get his help to try and prove it, to find him. Let’s do that first,’ she says decisively.
‘Did you? You told him everything?’ Damien says, and Simone is surprised to see that he clearly thinks this is risky, riskier than buying falsified documents from a stranger.
Another row brews on the horizon. How come Simone and Damien never differed this much before, even though they are so different?
‘No! I didn’t tell Moody for a full day. I wanted to check him out, make sure no cops came for us here.’
‘Fine, whatever. But even if he finds him, you’ll still have to roll the dice in court.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Forget confessing, and hope the lawyer stays quiet. The guy in Galveston does false passports,’ Damien says, talking in the fast way somebody does when they have held information inside, alone, for too long. ‘With an actual passport, we could get to somewhere like the Bahamas.’
The Bahamas. Simone winces painfully; they spent their honeymoon there. He doesn’t acknowledge this, and maybe it’s too much for him to do so, concentrating instead on the aftermath of getting their daughter back from circumstance and fate’s clutches.
‘Somewhere like the Bahamas, or there?’ she asks, wondering how fully formed this plan is.
‘Just a suggestion. Nothing set in stone.’ Simone meets his eyes. ‘Get a rental. Get jobs,’ he throws out.
‘But.’
‘I know.’
‘That would be … you’re saying forever?’
Damien says nothing. A small shrug. A huge hand on her knee. A sip of his lemonade. And, despite everything, Simone thinks of Dishes, of the back corridor, of the Michelin star plaque she might never see.
‘How do you know Moody’s who he says he is?’ he asks.
‘I don’t, I guess.’
Their voices are hushed in the Texan sunset, and Damien keeps checking the horizon for people, for police, she guesses.
‘You seem, I don’t know,’ he says, ‘pessimistic?’
‘Of course I am,’ she answers. ‘It’s a solution. But it’s not perfect. And we have something to unlock with Moody first.’
The breeze fades as they sit together. Her heart wrenches painfully as she thinks of Luan and the restaurant and her friends.
But not as painfully as if she had to stay away from him.
She tries to change her mindset. A trade has been done.
She got Lucy back. She got Damien. This is the price. It isn’t so bad.
But it feels it. Because two weeks ago, none of these were choices at all. These are grim decisions, made of the same rocks and hard places as the Lone Star desert, and Simone doesn’t want to be making them.
Music begins playing somewhere. Simone startles, shocked, then cocks an ear, listening. She tells herself that when they are caught, it will be stealthy. A surprise. Not like this. This music is a distant neighbour somewhere, a guitar strumming out in the lazy evening.
If. If they are caught, she corrects herself, and Simone finds that curious relief again at the thought of it.
‘It’s Oasis,’ Damien says quietly.
And it is. It’s fucking ‘Wonderwall’. Could there be anything more quintessentially British?
‘Huh,’ she says softly. ‘Listen to that.’ A foreign breeze that makes the breath hitch in Simone’s throat.
She couldn’t miss England more. Back home now, first week of September, it will already be coat weather, unpredictable rain/sun/hail mix.
Cold and flu season already. Quality Street in the shops.
New-school-year photographs on Facebook.
And, finally, she can turn and look directly at the sadness. Damien thinks they are never going home again. In fact, he intends it.
England comes to her in flashes. Hanging washing on the line and dashing out to get it in during summer mizzle, soft rain like pine needles on skin.
Cobbled streets and fish and chip shops and the way nobody speaks to anybody on the Tube.
Can it really be true that she may never again see Heathrow Airport or the white cliffs of Dover or hand over a five-pound note in a tiny corner shop selling Tunnock’s Teacakes?
But what’s the alternative? Isn’t this – all this – about making the best of a bad situation?
‘We can vanish with new identities. And foreign police won’t be looking for us as much. If we can be together … we can start over,’ he says. ‘We can get a boat. We just need to get the passports first.’
‘Starting over,’ she echoes, her tone maudlin.
‘A rescue boat.’ He spreads his arms wide, then lets them fall, the gesture meaning, I’m here. I came.
She thinks of those English rains, her restaurant, that corridor with the pink door out back where she used to sit and think. Well, she tells herself, there will be rain in the Bahamas. There will be other restaurants. She’d have to be a pot washer, blend into the background. Couldn’t be a chef.
But, first, they have to try one thing.
‘Let’s see if Moody finds the man. If not,’ she says, then leaves the rest unsaid.
Damien nods, saying nothing too, and Simone thinks only of Lucy, that most high profile of careers planned. Dashed, for now, at the start of her life, the very end of her childhood. What should be a beginning is turning into something else, some kind of grief.
Later, Lucy emerges from the bathroom. Her hair steams as she steps outside in pyjamas.
‘What’s going on?’ she asks. She gestures to a DVD she’s holding.
‘Moody owns Taxi Driver. Never seen it. What are you guys talking about?’ She smells of synthetic coconuts, hair in a dark blonde wet knot on the top of her head.
Simone meets Damien’s eyes, and Lucy’s voice gets louder: ‘No, no – no exchanging glances. What are you discussing?’
‘The future,’ Damien says, slightly lamely.
‘What of it?’
Another glance, and Lucy explodes. ‘There are actually three adults here, not two adults and a child.’
Simone goes to guffaw at this, but thinks better of it, not wanting to anger her daughter but also experiencing the curious cognitive dissonance of your child being correct in an argument.
Damien looks at Lucy, takes a breath, and Simone knows that he is going to explain. It’s the best course of action – Lucy is usually nothing if not straightforward – but Simone still winces. Damien is too open, and sometimes at the cost of diplomacy. They’ve agreed to try Moody first.
‘I thought …’ he begins, and Simone is glad of the singular pronoun, ‘we would try and buy identities,’ he tells Lucy. ‘Try and settle somewhere.’
Lucy stops, second cup of tea half drunk, saying nothing. Her entire body has gone slow and watchful, and Simone knows precisely what this means. ‘Huh?’ she says to Damien.
‘If Moody can’t come up with the British man,’ Simone says, the notion of involving Moody a vital step.
It’s impossible for her to communicate to her husband that their daughter has not yet understood the magnitude of their situation, not in the full, complete way that adults do.
They haven’t had enough time together for Damien to realize the nuance of this.
To him, it’s obvious: they can’t hand themselves in, finding the man and proving the kidnap is a long shot, they can’t fly home, therefore they must stay here, but it is very much not obvious to Lucy.
She’s been half in denial, half on a wing and a prayer that something might change.
Simone studies her pyjama-clad daughter, wondering if she knows that they can never fly again, that their passports will be marked forever. That, even once their faces fade from the news, their names will be on watch lists for good.
‘We think it’s the best solution of a bad bunch, if Moody doesn’t find anything.’
‘What is?’ Lucy says, and her tone is careful, but Simone knows that, actually, it’s careful in the same way you handle a grenade that you intend on throwing.
‘We haven’t been talking much about the future,’ Simone tells Damien, a warning tone in her own voice.
‘What?’
‘We’ve been just getting through the days actually,’ Lucy throws at him, not unfairly.
‘You know, running from violent men, surviving in forty-degree heat.’ She pauses.
She looks out of breath, her cheeks red.
‘Trying not to remember the various horrendous moments of being taken from my bed, shoved in car boots. Do you know that, on the first night, I actually prayed to fucking God? On my knees and everything.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Simone says to her daughter, who she knows has always been an ardent atheist.
‘Do you know that I worry I conjured something with my monologues that led to the killing? Out, damned spot. Out!’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Simone replies. Lucy’s a perfect Lady Macbeth, even in that singular line. An accessory to murder.
‘What do you mean, buy identities? And then what?’ Lucy continues. It’s a tirade of angry questions.
‘The best solution if everything else fails seems to me to try and settle somewhere. Now that we’re all together,’ Damien replies calmly.
‘What?’ Lucy splutters, and Simone is panicking. This is what happens when an outsider joins a group, one who doesn’t know the current state of affairs.
‘The best solution is to find the kidnapper and prove what he did to us,’ Lucy says, her tone so icy it practically frosts the hot air between them.
Simone gets to her feet, bitter with the irony that family arguments and parenting dilemmas have followed them to Texas. ‘The price is too high not to try.’
‘Moody is not going to help. Even if he finds him, how do you think you’re going to prove the kidnap?
’ he asks, and Simone thinks he’s genuinely asking in the way that he does, but he’s chosen the wrong words if so.
For this is the true dispute. Clearly, Damien thinks using Moody is pointless.
Are they really prepared to go to trial on this, even if they find this British man?
‘I don’t know, but isn’t that the most obvious way out of this?’
‘What would you do if you could?’
Lucy finally answers this question. ‘Tell the police about him? Get them to search his house? Find the – the things?’ Lucy says, her voice rising in pitch. ‘The shitty old bed, the cutlery he gave me with dinner that had other people’s old food on it, the bucket I had to piss in and pass to him?’
Simone gasps. ‘I didn’t know about that.’
‘What did you think I did?’ Lucy asks.
‘I didn’t …’
Lucy just slow blinks at her parents. Simone can see her heart flickering in the hollow between her collarbones; a butterfly held cupped in a palm.
And she thinks of her googling torture and she can’t believe she doubted her daughter’s account of it.
Her kidnap, here it is, in all its ghoulish detail.
‘Look,’ she says, reaching out to her daughter, and, to Simone’s surprise, all Lucy’s bluster leaves her, and she reaches, grasping, for Simone.
‘It’s … He’s ruined … I can still smell him on me!’ she says, right into Simone’s neck. And then: ‘I’m pretending. I’m pretending. I’m always pretending to be fine.’
Simone holds her daughter as she sobs, looking at Damien and trying not to be angry. To think she was suspicious of Lucy, wondering how well she was acting, if she was withholding information. And all the time the acting was this: pretending to be fine.
Simone, Damien and Lucy stand there on the porch together. Simone rubs Lucy’s back. Damien does nothing.
‘Are you saying we stay in the US forever?’ Lucy asks Damien quietly, after several moments. ‘Are you saying you think using Moody is hopeless?’
And, to Simone’s shame, he does what Damien almost never does: he fudges it. Maybe he’s out of practice, maybe these topics are too big for him. Maybe he really, simply means it, but he chooses to answer with: ‘Forever is a big word.’
There are little stone houses on the horizon, clouds that are three-dimensional with fluff, a sky that never ends.
Lucy speaks. ‘The truth is always possible to prove. Moody thinks so.’
‘We’ll see what he comes up with, but I wanted you to know the plan.’
‘No you didn’t. You wanted to change my plans to yours. What a bum fucking deal, and you won’t even be honest about it.’
Lucy paces away from them. She leans her hands on the wooden porch, then reaches out to touch the spines of a huge cactus. A single prick on her fingertip, the skin yielding, a drop of blood, and Lucy looks, for just one moment, dangerous.