48. Cuckoo
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CUCKOO
I don’t see Goldie anymore.
I have decided to take this as a good thing, that Goldie has finally moved on from us and that maybe I have finally been able to live without her.
I like to imagine that she is exploring London or Paris or Milan, or any of the places she dreamed of so hard.
That she spiritually glides down catwalks alongside supermodels, does a pose at the end for a camera that won’t be able to take her picture.
She is always, in my head, the Goldie on that final day first: angry, passionate, laughing, dancing; and then she becomes the Goldie before: peacemaker, considerate, whip-smart.
She is young and beautiful forever, and free at last. She would be proud of how we have all ended up, would say she never doubted us for a second.
I take not seeing her as a good thing because the alternative is too dreadful to think about.
That because Goldie’s body has never been found, she is lost to this world, that she only existed for as long as we were certain of her place.
That she resents us, thinks we have given up on her, when that is anything but the truth.
She will always be a question mark, an unsolved equation, an unfinished story.
Perhaps that’s why I write to Patricia. Some kind of connection to Goldie, and some way of feeling okay about what we led Patricia to believe.
I still visit the same places; it seems I can’t help it.
Hugo and Cassandra’s old house, which now has new owners, a family of four.
When I watch them from the garden, the mother and father argue a lot, and their toddlers sit on their iPads and don’t even react to the shouting.
They’ve kept the kitchen mostly the same, though never as clean as Cassandra did.
The spot by the river where we dumped Hugo’s body.
I dip my hands in the water sometimes, feel the ice-cold temperature, and even though I know how rivers work, that the water is always flowing and this isn’t the same water as before, I have the same satisfaction I did the first time.
Better, knowing how it all turned out for him.
The legacy he has left behind. He has one small victory, though it’s not as if he can enjoy it.
Bishop’s House has finally been demolished.
The police took a long time searching for Goldie’s body in the grounds but had to concede in the end that she wasn’t there.
They have guessed she was dumped in the river like the other missing girl, and that probably is what Cassandra did, though it churns my gut we will never know for sure.
There will indeed be the flats Hugo always wanted.
They’re building them quickly, in a hurry, eager to make people forget what once happened here.
But I will never forget.
I will remember Bishop’s House as it was: a dilapidated, disregarded, proud building that we brought back to life.
The golden toilet, the basement we had my eighteenth birthday party in, the various rooms with their individual trinkets, the boxes and boxes of things left behind.
The drawing of five birds I put on the wall when I thought the place would last forever. It was everything.
Those times when it was the five of us in Bishop’s House I will treasure forever.
We are moving on, starting new, exciting lives, and yet I will always want to return to that wonderful, awful summer, when everything was still ahead of us.