25
Hours passed before I was brave enough to crawl out from beneath the sofa, weak and exhausted, my anger suffocated, my thoughts spiraling.
I’d fucked up.
I’d fucked everything up.
I’d thought, by sending that recording to Krissy, I’d fix something.
Something inside me, something between us, something I couldn’t even name.
Instead, I’d brought everything crashing down.
I’d been stupid, I’d been selfish. And what was worse, I’d known it.
I’d known that by sending that message to Krissy, I was putting Nicola in danger.
I’d done it anyway. I’d done it because I wanted to be right.
I’d done it because I wanted Krissy to help us.
I’d done it because Nicola had dropped me in her backpack and zipped it closed.
I’d done it because I wanted to hurt her.
Nicola’s last words echoed inside my head, over and over again, a CD stuttering on a scratch. “You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it.”
She was right. I didn’t deserve my vengeance.
I didn’t deserve her. I was a monster, and a clichéd one at that.
The sort that pretended to be your friend, then stabbed you in the back.
She’d been the one hanging up the missing-person posters, spray-painting the messages, coming up with the plans and executing them.
I was nothing without her. A broken doll on a glass shelf, not even worth the discounted price tag.
I emerged from beneath the sofa and kept crawling, dust clumping around the edges of my duct tape, making it peel and fray.
I didn’t try to stand. I couldn’t muster the anger for it.
And even if I could, I was broken. Old cracks had reopened, and new ones had formed around the clumps of glue.
I felt my consciousness shrink as pieces fell away, a breadcrumb trail of broken porcelain stretched out behind me.
I made it to the hallway and paused, taking in the wreckage.
Nicola’s bedroom door was closed, but everything else hung open.
The drawers, the cupboards, the cabinets, even the curtains.
The light from the nearby streetlamp painted the contours of the wreckage in flickering, fluorescent blue.
Fallen bookshelves, scattered belongings, broken things.
The boot prints of the politely knocking police officers covered the carpet.
Time sloshed sticky slow around me, transforming the tick of the clock into a slow throb and the hum of the fridge into a death rattle. I found what I was looking for in the corner of the hallway, lying on its side, clumps of grass still stuck in its wheel treads. The toy car.
I didn’t know what the time was when I dragged myself through the cat flap.
The microwave said it was 03:12, the oven said it was 02:54, and the old clock in the hallway said it was 01:10.
All that mattered was that it was late enough to be early, Nicola wasn’t coming out of her room, and the street outside was deserted.
I heaved my car through the cat flap, plastic scraping on wood, and fell backward as it slid through. It took a couple of attempts to climb into the toy car’s chassis and several more to press the on button on the remote control duct-taped to the bonnet.
A small green light came on. I leaned against the knobs and the car moved, creeping toward the letter box, the engine grumbling low and slow as time stretched that short pathway out until it felt longer than an airport runway.
The streetlight flickered as I finally made it onto the sidewalk and accelerated toward the main street.
The roads were empty.
I zigzagged along the cavernous lanes, weaving around speed bumps and running red lights. I didn’t know where I was going until I reached the first sign. It pointed toward the highway with a giant green arrow.
“She buried him at the pet cemetery,” Nicola had said. “You know the place? It’s a couple of kilometers down the highway in a sheep paddock.”
Cookie.
I didn’t know if the toy car had enough battery to get there.
I didn’t care. I steered in the direction of the arrow and accelerated.
Dawn was just starting to pinken the horizon when I peeled off the entry ramp and started driving along the highway’s concrete shoulder, tires crunching and bouncing over broken glass and cracked tarmac.
In the early-morning fog, the cars appeared suddenly, headlights blazing, engines roaring, then disappeared just as quick, taillights staining the fog red in front of me.
I was too tired, my anger too decomposed, to do anything but lean against the knobs.
The toy car’s whirring grew lower and slower as the battery drained, the speed dropping away bit by bit until I was barely moving.
Or maybe time was barely moving. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.
I just kept rolling forward, adjusting my course only to navigate around discarded hubcaps, chunks of torn rubber, and roadkill—ruined, flattened corpses of rabbits, foxes, birds, a couple of bloated, beaten wombats, and one gargantuan kangaroo.
Its fur was matted flat with dried blood and dew, its body torn open, exposing the broken cage of its ribs and the purplish brown of rotting viscera.
Its claws were long and hooked, its legs and tail flung back for its last jump.
Scavengers had already eaten the flesh off its face, leaving the skull exposed and yawning wider than it ever could’ve in life.
It looked like a dinosaur. The Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park smashing through the electric fence and posing as she delivered her first iconic roar.
Except there was nothing powerful or triumphant about the kangaroo.
It wasn’t breaking free. It wasn’t going to kill anyone.
It wasn’t going to save anyone in the final act of the film either.
It was dead. Not just dead, destroyed. Crushed, broken, and left to rot.
The awfulness of that choked me, strangled me, mauled me.
The brutality and relentlessness of my grief somehow shocking all over again.
I felt small. I felt destroyed. I felt the same way I’d felt when I stuck myself into this doll body, back before I knew I could move, before I’d adapted to the sickening stops and starts of the clock.
Somehow I also felt the numb hopelessness I’d felt in the glass cabinet in Trash N’ Treasure.
I’d lost. There was nothing I could do to save myself.
There was nothing I could do to save the kangaroo either.
It was done. It’d been done for a long time.
It was stupid to think anything that devastating could ever be undone.
Split in two, lost in both grief and nothingness, I did the only thing I could do. I kept going.
The fog lifted. The traffic thickened. I passed by a roadworker with a slow/stop lollipop sign, the job I used to do before starting my business administration course.
He filmed me with his phone but didn’t try to scoop me up.
I watched him disappear in the reflective bit of plastic in my driver’s side mirror.
The car finally ran out of battery, only a few meters from the Pet Cemetery sign made from a wooden pallet and the canvas of an old wool bale. I climbed out of the car and half walked, half crawled down the short dirt path.
The pet cemetery itself was a tiny triangular slice taken out of a larger paddock, spotted with a motley collection of gravestones, some polished stone statues of sleeping cats and dogs, others just sticks with laminated photos stuck onto them.
The grass was yellow and interwoven with thistles, blooming purple and white.
The fence between the cemetery and the paddock next to it had fallen, and a flock of sheep were in among the gravestones, tearing at the overgrown grass.
A few raised their heads and watched with elongated pupils as I stumbled from one grave to the other, reading the inscriptions.
After a while, clearly deciding I wasn’t a threat, they bowed their heads and went back to eating.
Eventually, I found him, at the very back row.
The esteemed Colonel Cookie-Dough “Cookie” McQuinn.
Lover of liver treats and belly rubs, sworn foe of vacuum cleaners everywhere, gentlest soul ever put in a spiky collar.
He never learned to play dead, so when we saw him, we knew.
The stone was a simple, uneven rock that looked like it was set by hand over the grave. The words had been carved deep and clear with an amateurish hand. Below them a single, giant paw print was already turning green with lichen.
I sat down next to the stone, startling a huntsman spider that had been hiding in the grass nearby. It scurried away, looking like a strange, loping, eight-legged dog as it raced off through the grass.
Cookie had tried to warn me about Kyle. He would’ve saved me, if he could. He didn’t deserve to die and be left behind.
Time swirled forward. The sky bruised, the traffic on the highway thickened, and a sheep shoved me aside with its nose to get the grass I was sitting on.
I let myself be shoved, slumping further against the ground and watching as the sheep devoured the grass with brutal efficiency, head jerking as it tore the blades from the earth.
It was gangly and white with yellow eyes and ears heavy with tags. It had also been recently shorn, the lines of the clippers still visible in its wool. I hoped that meant it had been bred for its wool and not for its meat.
Eventually, as the sun set, the flock finished stripping the cemetery of grass and filed one by one back through the hole in the fence, heading in a long train toward the distant shimmer of dam water.
I imagined myself rotting into the earth, fabric shot through with worms, head crumbling away, finally dying and becoming dust and dirt and resting forever alongside Cookie. There were worse fates, I supposed.
At least this way, I would be with family.