‘I know that too. And I remember you would rather not try than try and fail, and maybe that’s the real reason you spent nearly a decade on the streets.’
It had been a while since someone had spoken to me that way. He saw this in my face.
‘Look,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘This isn’t coming out right. I’m sorry. What happened to the Andersons isn’t actually a huge deal to me. It’s just a little weird and might make my life simpler if I could get it unravelled. I read your book. It seemed to me you might be interested. That’s all.’
‘I appreciate the thought,’ I said. ‘But that feels like another life now. Plus I was on the job in LA, not Seattle. I don’t know the city and I don’t know the people. I couldn’t do much more than you, and I can do a lot less than the cops. If you genuinely think there’s a problem with the way they’re investigating this, it’s them you should be talking to.’
‘I tried,’ he said. ‘They think the same as you.’
‘So probably that’s the way it is. A sad story. The end.’
Fisher nodded slowly, his eyes on the view outside the window. The light was beginning to turn, the sky heading towards a more leaden grey. ‘Looks like heavy weather. I should probably be heading back. I don’t want to be driving over that mountain in the dark.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, standing. ‘After that drive I guess you were hoping for more.’
‘I wanted an opinion, and I got one. Too bad it wasn’t the one I was looking for.’
‘Could have got you this far on the phone,’ I smiled. ‘Like I said.’
‘Yeah, I know. But hey – been good to see you after all this time. To catch up. Let’s keep in touch.’
I said yes it had, and yes we should, and that was that. We small-talked a bit longer and then I walked him to the door and watched as he drove away.
I stayed outside for a few moments after he’d gone, though it was cold. I felt a little as if a bigger kid had come up to me in the playground and asked if I wanted to join his game, and I had said no out of pride. Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up.
I went back indoors and returned to my desk. There I wasted probably the last straightforward afternoon of my life gazing out of the window, waiting vaguely for time to pass.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d been working harder that morning, let the machine take Fisher’s call. Even if he’d left a message I’d have been unlikely to get around to calling him back. Most of the time I don’t think this would have made any difference. I believe this thing was heading towards me regardless, on the horizon, inevitable. I’d like to claim I had no warning, that it came from nowhere out of a clear blue sky. It wouldn’t be true. The signs and causes were there. At times in the last nine months, perhaps the last few years, I had noticed little differences. I’d tried to ignore them, to keep going, and so when it happened it was like falling off a log, a sturdy trunk that had been floating down the same river for many years, to discover there’d never been any water supporting me after all and I was suddenly flat on my back in a strange land I didn’t recognize: a dusty plain where there were no trees, no mountains, no landmarks of any kind, no way of telling how I might have got there from wherever I had been before.
The fall must have been coming for a while, gathering pace below the threshold of discernible change. At least since the afternoon on the deck of the new house, probably for months or even years before that. But digging up the roots of chaos is like saying it’s not the moment the car hits you that’s important, or the split second when you step off the kerb without looking. You can argue that as soon as you stopped checking when you crossed the street, that’s when the trouble really began. The moment of impact is what you remember, however. That breathless instant of screech and thud, the second when the car hits and all other futures are cancelled.
The beat in time when it suddenly becomes clear that something in your world is badly wrong.
A beach on the Pacific coast, a seemingly endless stretch of sand: almost white by day but now turning sallow-grey and matt in the fading light. The afternoon’s few footprints have been washed away, in one of nature’s many patient acts of erasure. In summer kids from inland spend the weekends here, gleaming in the sun of uncomplicated youth and pumping default-value music out of baby speakers. They are almost never picked off by sharpshooters, sadly, but go on to have happy and unfulfilled lives making too much noise all over the planet. On a Thursday a long way out of season the beach is left undisturbed except for the busy teams of sandpipers who skitter up and down at the waterline, legs scissoring like those of cheerful mechanical toys. They have concluded the day’s business and flown to bed, leaving the beach quiet and still.
Half a mile up the coast is the small and bespoke seaside town of Cannon Beach, with its short run of discreet hotels, but here most of the buildings are modest vacation homes, none more than two storeys high and each a decent distance from its neighbour. Some are squat white oblongs in need of re-plastering, others more adventurous arrangements of wooden octagonal structures. All have weathered walkways leading over the scrubby dune, down to the sand. It is November now and almost all these buildings are dark, the smell of suntan lotion and candle wax sealed in to await future vacations, to welcome parents who each time glumly spy a little more grey in these unfamiliar mirrors, and children who stand a little taller and a little farther from the adults who were once the centre of their lives.
There has been no precipitation for two days – very rare for Oregon at this time of year – but this evening a thick knot of cloud is coalescing out to sea, like a drop of ink spreading in water. It will take an hour or two to make landfall, where it will turn the shadows rich blue-black and strip the air with relentless rain.
In the meantime a girl is sitting on the sand, down at the tide line.
Her watch said it was twenty-five minutes before six, which was okay. When it was fifteen minutes before six she had to go home, well not home exactly, but the cottage. Dad always called it the beach house but Mom always said the cottage, and as Dad was not here it was obviously the cottage this time. Dad not being here made a number of other differences, one of which Madison was currently considering.
When they came to spend a week at the beach most days were exactly the same. They would drive up to Cannon Beach, have a look around the galleries (once), to get groceries from the market (twice), and see if there was maybe something cool in Geppetto’s Toy Shoppe (as often as Madison would make it happen, three times was the record). Otherwise they just lived on the sands. They got up early and walked along the beach, then back again. The day was spent sitting and swimming and playing – with a break mid-day in the cottage for sandwiches and to cool down – and then around five o’clock a long walk again, in the opposite direction from the one in the morning. The early walk was just for waking up, filling sleepy heads with light. At the end of the afternoon it was all about shells – and sand dollars in particular. Though it was Mom who liked them the most (she had saved all the ones they’d ever found, in a cigar box back at home) the three of them looked together, a family with one ambulatory goal. After the walk everyone showered and there were nachos and bean dip and frosted glasses of Tropical Punch Kool-Aid in the beach house and then they’d drive out for dinner to Pacific Cowgirls in Cannon Beach, which had fishermen’s nets on the walls and breaded shrimp with cocktail sauce and waiters who called you ma’am even if you were small.
But when Madison and her mom had arrived yesterday they had been sailing under different colours. It was the wrong time of year, and cold. They unpacked in silence and dutifully walked up the beach a little way, but though her mother’s eyes appeared to be on the tide line Madison didn’t see her bend down once, even for a quartz pebble that was flushed rose pink at one end and which she’d normally have had like a shot. When they got back Maddy managed to find some Kool-Aid from last time in the cupboard but her mom had not remembered to buy Doritos or anything