Into the Water

by Paula Hawkins

I was very young when I was cracked open. Some things you should let go of Others you shouldn’t Views differ as to which —Emily Berry, “The Numbers Game” We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

What struck me is how well I remembered. Too well. Why is it that I can recall so perfectly the things that happened to me when I was eight years old, and yet trying to remember whether or not I spoke to my colleagues about rescheduling a client assessment for next week is impossible? The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming. The nearer I got to Beckford, the more undeniable it became, the past shooting out at me like sparrows from the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.

I’ve been trying not to let the words come, but they go round and round in my head: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, it was my fault. I kept staring at my bedroom door and going over and over that moment on Sunday night when Mum came in to say good night. She said, “No matter what, you know how much I love you, Lena, don’t you?” I rolled over and put my headphones in, but I knew she was standing there, I could feel her standing and watching me, it’s like I could feel her sadness and I was glad because I felt she deserved it. I would do anything, anything, to be able to get up and hug her and tell her I love her, too, and it wasn’t her fault at all, I should never have said it was all her fault. If she was guilty of something, then so was I.

The grief counsellors tell you that you will have good days and bad, and you just have to deal with it.”

Mark nodded, but his eyes slid from hers and she saw colour rise to his cheeks. He was embarrassed. Everyone was embarrassed. She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life. Everyone wanted to put it behind them, to get on with things, and there you were, in the way, blocking the path, dragging the body of your dead child behind you.

The truth is—the truth must be—that while they were watching their son, waiting for him to fall, their daughter tripped instead, and they didn’t notice, they weren’t there to catch her. The guilt felt like a stone in Louise’s throat; she kept expecting it to choke her, but it didn’t, it wouldn’t, and so she had to go on breathing—breathing and remembering.

Except now Louise couldn’t be sure whether she remembered those things at all. Did Katie lower her eyes, look down at her plate? Did she really grip her glass more tightly, or let her touch linger? It was impossible to tell now; all her recollections seemed open to doubt, to misinterpretation. She wasn’t sure if this was down to the shock of realizing that all she had known was certain was not so sure at all, or whether her mind had been permanently fogged by the drugs she’d swallowed in the days and weeks after Katie died. Louise had gobbled pills upon pills, each handful offering hours of blank relief, only to be plunged freshly back into her nightmare on waking. After a while she came to grasp that the horror of rediscovering her daughter’s absence, over and over again, was not worth the hours of oblivion.

Only sometimes the door was left unlocked, and if he was perfectly honest, Patrick could no longer be certain he had locked it. He’d begun to feel, more and more over the past year, moments of confusion that filled him with a dread so cold he refused to face it. Sometimes he lost words or names and it took him a long time to find them again. Old memories resurfaced to breach the peace of his thoughts, and these were fiercely colourful, disturbingly loud. Around the edges of his vision, shadows moved.

She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did. Alec felt the grief, of course, but she wasn’t sure he felt the despair. Or the hatred.

The grief counsellor she had seen for just two sessions told her that she shouldn’t seek to know why. That she wouldn’t ever be able to answer that question, that no one could; that in many cases where someone takes her own life, there isn’t one reason why, life just isn’t that simple. Louise, despairing, had pointed out that Katie had no history of depression, she wasn’t being bullied (they talked to the school, they went through her email, her Facebook, they found nothing but love). She was pretty, she was doing well in school, she had ambition, drive. She wasn’t unhappy. Wild-eyed sometimes, excitable often. Moody. Fifteen. Most of all, she wasn’t secretive. If she had been in trouble, she would have told her mother. She told her mother everything, she always had. “She didn’t keep things from me,” Louise said to the counsellor, and she watched his eyes slide from her face. “That’s what all parents think,” he said quietly, “and I’m afraid all parents are wrong.”

Louise didn’t see the counsellor again after that, but the damage had been done. A fissure had opened and guilt seeped through, a trickle at first and then a flood. She didn’t know her daughter. That was why the necklace bothered her so much, not just because it came from Lena, but because it became a symbol for everything she didn’t know about her daughter’s life. The more she thought about that, the more she blamed herself: for being too busy, for focusing too much on Josh, for failing so completely to protect her child.

Grief, shock, it affects people in strange ways. I’ve seen people react to bad news with laughter, with seeming indifference, with anger, with fear. Jules’s kiss in the car after the funeral—that wasn’t about lust, it was about grief, about wanting to feel something, anything, other than sadness. My mutism when I was a child was probably the result of the shock, the trauma. Losing a sister may not be the same as losing a parent, but I know that Josh Whittaker was close to his sister, so I am loath to judge him, to read too much into what he says and does and the way he behaves.

I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one. I remember you at seventeen and me at thirteen, and I’m certain that our parents had no idea who we were.

seemed to take a very long time; everything took so long these days. No one warned you about that when you were younger, no one told you

how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness. She should have foreseen it, she supposed, and she laughed to herself in the dark.

So, finally, she came to me. It was the middle of summer. I’d had a meeting at the station in Beckford, and when I came out I found her leaning against my car. She was wearing a dress so long it swept the floor, leather sandals on suntanned feet, bright-blue polish on her toes. I’d seen her around before then, I’d noticed her—she was beautiful, hard not to notice. But I’d never until then seen her up close. I’d never realized how green her eyes were, how they gave her this look of otherness. Like she was not quite of this world, certainly not of this place. She was too exotic by half.

She seduced him. Even the strongest and most moral of men can find themselves in thrall to a woman who offers herself in that way.”

Like dinosaurs not being in the Bible, it was something that made no sense and yet I knew it had to be. It had to be, because I had been told these things were true, both Adam and Eve and brontosaurus.