conversation. ‘Tomorrow I’m organising sun. God owes me a

favour.’

She nods, maybe agreeing that yes He does. ‘Flowers for me

this time?’ she asks, like she always does.

The nurses and doctors are always nice, always friendly, always professional, their questions and pleasantries always cliched. The alternative is unthinkable. You’d ask how their day was going and they would tell you the truth and you’d never come back.

‘Next time,’ I say, which is what I say every time. ‘How is

she?’

‘She’s doing fine, Theo. But what about you? Is that you I saw on the news?’

“Yeah, it’s been one of those crazy days.’ A fairly accurate

summation, I feel.

She nods. ‘Every day this city shows us a little more how things don’t make sense.’

‘Sometimes I think Christchurch is broken,’ I say, ‘and nobody is ever going to fix it.’

I walk down the corridor, passing empty seats and closed

doors and a nurses’ station that looks empty but most likely isn’t.

The entire floor is speckled green linoleum, the sort that is easy to clean blood and vomit and shit off and will last two hundred years. The day is cold but the air in here is comfortable. It’s always comfortable, and so it ought to be. Some of the people in care here don’t know how to complain, and some who do know simply don’t have the ability any more. There are more paintings with water and sunsets, peaceful scenes that are perhaps supposed to help calm the residents here before they move on from this

world and into the next. There are pots full of artificial plants.

And there are decorations for the people who come here who are on the verge of losing it.

I climb a flight of stairs, and halfway down another corridor

I stop at Bridget’s room. The door is open. She is sitting by the window, looking out at the misty rain and the trees and the lack of good weather that the nurses mention every time I arrive. She seems interested in all of it. I don’t know whether she hears me come in. I close the door behind me. She keeps staring outside.

‘Hey babe, I’ve missed you,’ I say, but she doesn’t answer. I take yesterday’s flowers out of the vase and put today’s flowers in. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice as I shuffle them around in an attempt to make them look nicer. I sit in the chair next to her and take her hand in mine. It’s warm. It’s always warm, no matter how cold the room gets. I’m glad for it, because it helps remind me my wife is still alive.

She occasionally blinks as I tell her about my day. There is

no expression on her face as I run a brush through her hair,

stroking it over and over, searching for the recognition that isn’t there. She does not laugh when I tell her how I slipped into the water. She doesn’t chide me for not telling Patricia Tyler that her daughter has been dead the entire time she has been missing.

Other noises, the shuffling of patients, the squeaking of caster wheels, come from the care home which, for the last few years, I have quietly nicknamed ‘Death Haven’. I’m not sure why I’ve

come up with the name. I’m not sure whether thinking of it as

Death Haven has made it more personal to me or less. Every day I have this romantic notion that I will come in here and Bridget will look up at me and smile. Every day. But she doesn’t. I hold onto the hope, I have become attached to it sentimentally, in the same way Mrs Tyler has become attached to the idea her daughter has run away and is living the perfect life in a perfect town and is so perfectly happy she just hasn’t had the chance to call.

I keep talking until my throat is sore and I’m out of words.

Bridget has remained in her catatonic state the entire time, happy in the world she is in, or perhaps sad; I wish I had a way of

knowing. The window and the trees beyond hold for her the

same fascination as they have done every day for the last two

years. I feel exhausted, as I always do when I purge myself of the day’s events. The silence in the room is peaceful, and in these quiet times I often think that I would be better off if I could be catatonic too, unknowing and unfeeling, and keeping Bridget company. I sit holding her hand for a few more minutes, then

I stand, pulling her hand up slightly. She comes with me and

steps towards the bed. Her actions are involuntary, her body just following the motions. She can move from the bed to the chair, and back again. Sometimes the staff will find her standing in

the corridor, motionless, and twice she has made it down into the foyer. Guide a glass up to her lips and she can drink. Raise a fork to her mouth and she can eat. But she cannot fend for herself, cannot speak, cannot look at you with an expression that suggests she knows you are there. Everything is a thousand miles away, and her eyes are fixed on that point in the distance, continually searching, searching, but never finding.

She lies down. I kiss her on the side of her cool face — her

hands are always warm, her cheeks always cool — then slowly

make my way from her room. I don’t turn back. I never do, not

these days. I will see her tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after.

Patricia Tyler isn’t the only person in this city playing the

waiting game.

Outside, the cold air feels like silk against my face. I stand next to my car for nearly five full minutes. I stand doing nothing as the rain dampens my jacket. I’m not even really sure whether I’m thinking about my wife or dead girls or bad luck and bad omens, Until finally I find the strength to drive away.

chapter nine

I turn my cellphone on and wait for it to ring, but it doesn’t.

Could mean people are getting killed elsewhere in the city and the reporters flocking there have forgotten about me. Could be the police know who put the bodies in the water and don’t feel they need to let me know. Could be Tracey hasn’t noticed the missing ring on the dead girl’s finger and I’m sailing through trouble-free waters. Could be none of that. Might simply be a poor signal.

Or that taking it for a swim has finally caught up with the inner components.

I go through the motions of changing gears and avoiding

other cars before realising I’m not heading home, or even to my office, but back to the cemetery where my day suddenly became

interesting. Where there is death there is life — at least at the moment. Police cars are scattered across the landscape but mostly localised by the lake. They are no longer guarding the entrance.

I ignore them and head to the opposite side of the cemetery where the dead are still at peace.

I make the walk through the dark without need of a torch. It’s a walk I could make with my eyes closed. The grass is wet and

soon the bottoms of my pants and shoes are wet.

It’s been two months since I last stood over my daughter’s

grave. After her funeral, I never wanted to come back. Seeing the smooth headstone with the brass plate carved with her name and the dates hurt too much. But it hurt even more staying away. The doctors tell me they don’t think Bridget knows that Emily is dead or even that Emily ever existed. I hope they’re right — though I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me. Emily didn’t have

the good luck to become catatonic but the bad luck to be killed: she had twice as many bones in her body broken as my wife; she hit the pavement just as hard, just as awkwardly, and just like that she was gone. No luck there at all, unless you count bad luck.

The tears don’t come as much these days. The pain is part of

who I am now. Getting rid of it would be like losing a limb.

The flowers in the grave have wilted and died. The coffin

beneath the earth is child sized, and the mere fact there is a market for child-sized coffins in this world proves it’s a fucked up one — and for the briefest moment I think about the condition the coffin is in, whether it’s as dented and damaged as the one pulled out of the ground earlier today, or whether its smallness helped it withstand the weight of the earth above it. Then I wonder if she is even in there.