“I imagine it’s a little like getting into a high-security prison,” He said after the young woman asked him how his journey had been.
The question had been small talk and didn’t require an answer, and even in replying he knew he hadn’t answered the young woman. What he said had been what a therapist might call avoidance. She could have mentioned this to him, but she just smiled instead, and he found it instantly disarming. His daughter was right, Miss Lilly Mantel was pretty.
“I guess that’s modern times. Would you take a seat, Mister Roth?”
“Please, call me Bill.”
“Thank you, and I’m Lilly.”
“Yeah, I know, my daughter doesn’t stop raving about you.”
“That’s sweet,” She said, slipping into the chair on the other side of the desk. “We’re all very fond of her too. She’s always such a bright and happy child.” She paused and then glanced at him apologetically. “Well, to be more precise she was always that way, but recently…”
She let the sentence trail off.
Bill Roth shifted uncomfortably in his chair. It was too low for him, and he wondered if he could get up from it when the time to leave came.
He hoped that time would be soon.
“Which is what you wanted to talk to me about?” He said.
She nodded but didn’t otherwise answer. Bill stopped fidgeting and grew silent instead. Lilly didn’t break the silence, so they appraised each other instead of speaking. Bill Roth was thirty-five but looked young for his age. His hair was close-cropped and his face unworn by time, which made the dark circles under his eyes even more apparent.
Lilly Mantel was ten years his junior and looked younger still. Her blonde hair was not much longer than his own but it was so fair it appeared shorter. Her eyes were bright, and her skin was flawless. She looked like a doll, and he mused that she could almost pass for a student rather than a teacher.
“What has she said?” He asked.
“What do you think she has said.” She replied.
He rubbed his eyes and promised himself he wouldn’t cry.
“She misses her mother, and she probably misses me too. I’m at home, I’m there, but I know I’m not entirely there. My mind is with Kirsten most of the time. Kirsten is Terri’s mother. We met while still in school, and this is the first time I’ve been away from her.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, how did she die?”
The air seemed thin. He could feel his body taking in gulps of air. His hand reached to his throat and pulled at his collar.
“Suicide.” He said with the word barely a whisper. If he had to say the word, he would make sure no one heard it. “She had been ill for a long time, not that I knew. I didn’t see it. I should have, I know, but I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry Mr Roth, what was…?”
“Schizophrenia.” It was another word he didn’t like, but it was clinical and meant little to him apart from the nasty taste it left. “It was only at the end that I realised how strange she had become, it came on slowly, and it’s…” He paused. “It’s disturbing how we adapt to the strangest situations and think them normal.”
“And how long? If I may ask?”
“Four years. A year. A lifetime. A few moments. It all feels the same now.” He said. “I found her on the 29th of February, it was a leap year.”
He saw her glance at the calendar hung on the wall beside the closed door, her eyes widening slightly.
“Yes. ” He said. “Four years ago, almost to the day.”
“So, Terri would have been eight?”
The response took Bill back a mental step, it was not the response he was expecting, but then he remembered this was about his daughter, not him. His grief had made him self-centred, and the knowledge made him feel sick with himself.
“Yes, it was a little before her eighth birthday.”
Lilly Mantel went quiet, and Bill noticed that she held a folder of papers before her. Her eyes darted between the notes on them for a few moments.
“I’m sorry Mr Roth. I cannot even imagine how this has made you both feel. I’ve never had any experience even remotely similar…”
“I hope you don’t.”
“But Terri hasn’t spoken about any of this. She has not spoken about her mother. Her concerns are about you.”
Bill felt his back push back into the seat as his body reacted to her statement. A slew of questions cascaded through his mind, effectively bottlenecking, and striking him speechless.
“We spoke, and she asked me to speak to you.”
Her eyes caught his own and held them.
“Why didn’t she speak to me herself?”
“She told me she has tried, but…” A fleeting smile crept across her face; it was humourless. “She said that you’re not entirely there anymore.”
His own words rang back to him and stung him with sudden guilt. He knew he had been distant, but why had he thought his daughter would somehow be oblivious to the fact? He may have even been distant even to himself. He fidgeted again for a few moments, glaring at his seat as if it were actively working against his comfort before settling again.
“What has she said?” He asked.
“What do you think she has said.” She replied.
They had been here before and said those exact words to each other. He rubbed his eyes and promised himself he wouldn’t cry, but this time the tears began to sting his eyes almost immediately.
“I’ve been seeing her.”
He said the words without thinking of them. He knew if he thought about it, he would never have said it. Not to anyone, but especially to a woman who could take his daughter from him. Her face was passive, and he understood why his daughter cared so much for her teacher, and a part of him wanted to tell her how much he appreciated her presence in the girl’s life. She needed a woman to speak to, someone who wouldn’t judge her and would rather help guide her through those pitfalls of life he could never entirely understand.
God knew that he was no longer up to the task.
“Kirsten visits me. Is that what Terri told you?”
Lilly nodded slightly, just enough to acknowledge she had heard what he had said without hinting at her thoughts. Bill searched her gaze for some reaction, but there was nothing there.
“Has she told you that she’s seen her?” He asked.
Lilly shook her head. “Has she?”
Bill shook his own. “No, it’s just… I had hoped.”
Sudden laughter erupted outside the office door, and Bill remembered where he was. He glanced over to the square of frosted glass that took up half its surface, shadows rippled across it. Somewhere in this building, his daughter sat in class. She may have been engrossed in whatever subject she was learning, or she may have been doing her best to distract herself from it. Whatever she was doing Bill hoped he was the furthest thing from her mind, though he suspected he wasn’t. The laughter retreated and somewhere a door slammed, cutting it off, and the sudden silence that followed buzzed in his ears.
Slowly he spoke. Starting at the beginning. He had smelt the blood even before seeing it. He had smelt it over the smell of the soap perfume and bathroom products that lined the shelf over the bath. At first, the smell had confused him, he could not place it, but he knew it was a smell he should not be smelling. The bath water was the wrong colour, and the way she lay was unnatural for someone who was merely relaxing in a hot bath.
He remembered that her hair was dry and her skin stood out as stark white against its darkness. For a moment he had stood there in admiration of her beauty. She was as breath-taking as she was the moment, he had first seen her. That memory took him now, and he began to describe it. Lilly listened without commenting.
It had been a normal day in a library when his life had changed. Kirsten had been sitting across from him with a pile of books on the witch trials in front of her and a notebook filled with her tiny, neat handwriting. He had looked at his reading material, a book on Elizabethan literature, and he felt the profound difference between them in an instant.
In the same instant, he realised she was all that he had ever wanted. That she would fill those gaps within himself that had been a void for so long, and then instantly his memory snapped back to the resurgence of the void. Standing there looking at her half-submerged in the pink water. The pit of dread within him. The growing realisation that what he was looking at was not his wife, but her remnant.
Through it all Lilly Mantel quietly listened.
He described calling the ambulance. Then a disjointed slew of moments filled with concerned faces and turbulent emotions before the silence. He remembered the quiet most. Nights that were darker than they should have been, and silence that hurt his ears. He wondered now whether she was hidden in that darkness, trying to speak through the silence, and he just could not hear her.
“But you did…” Lilly interjected then. “You did hear her?”
With those words, the school surrounded him again. Even the air tasted different. It was four years later, and his daughter was concerned for him. The pretty blond-haired person was her teacher, and Terri had asked her to speak with him.
He looked around the room as if he had just awoken. There were filing cabinets and bookshelves filled fit to burst, and behind the woman was a window that offered a view of foliage through which he thought he could see children playing.
“Yes.” He answered her, the single word was spoken quietly, as if he was nearing the end of a marathon of exertion.
He had heard her first in the kitchen after his daughter had gone to bed. It was the quiet of this time that weighed on him the most. When Kirsten shared his home, this was when they would talk the longest. They would discuss Terri’s school day, then their own, and share their concerns. This is when they would laugh the most. Their laughter subdued to not wake their daughter, and all the funnier for it. It was his favourite part of the day, sometimes they would talk of things that could not be shared in their daughter’s presence. It gave their whispered moments of intimacy a forbidden edge.
But now all there was, was silence.
Until there wasn’t.
Terri was sleeping and the sound of the TV was edited out by his consciousness. No matter how loud he played it, it would drift into the noise of nothingness. Newscasters would speak a language no one could understand, and all music sounded discordant. In this stew of incomprehensibility, came a single word, and his consciousness latched onto it effortlessly.
“Husband.”
It pulled him in like a needle pointing to magnetic north. He drew closer until more words followed the first. He couldn’t understand many of them, they described things he could not understand. Things that Kirsten could have no concept of either, he was certain. Things that made him doubt the authenticity of the voice. He listened. At first thinking it was no more than a trick of the silence. The desperate need of a lonely man with impossible dreams. But the voice spoke of other things too. Things that no one else could know. But these were things he knew; so the voice could be no more than a manifestation of his desires.
It took time, and he wondered about his sanity but he found that he didn’t care. But then the voice mentioned something he could not know.
“And what was that?” Lilly asked, and Bill replied.
“Your name.”
Lilly Mantel did not so much as flutter an eyelash at the revelation. Surprise didn’t enter her pretty features, and that should have caused Bill concern, but his story was the world to him now, and nothing existed outside of it.
“I cried out in pain for our daughter and the voice told me that Lilly was there for her,” Bill said. “The next day Terri returned from school and spoke your name for the first time.”
He listened after that. He had wanted to believe and sought evidence to prove his need right. The voice became clearer and the words more like the woman he knew.
Then came the glimpses. Reflections in glass as he washed the dishes, a handprint in the steam on a bathroom mirror. A woman’s shadow the moment a light was switched off; and he knew they were of her. She was forcing her way into the world a fingernail at a time. Re-imprinting her presence in a reality that had been denied to her, and now Bill helped, and the process grew more rapid.
He could feel her now. Her scent was in the air. The pressure of her body beside him in the bed. The creak of a stair as she climbed them. The evidence became undeniable to him. It became a cascade, though each was a remnant, and none ever resulted in something he could see and hear and feel all as one. They were disjointed moments; however strong they might be.
“She was always there, but never there,” He explained, “Unprovable to others, but undeniable to myself. Her existence was an act of will. A collective act of will.”
“Collective?” Lilly said, and something in her voice made Bill stop a moment, snapping him back to the here and now. Her eyes were narrowed slightly, her lips pursed as if she intended to say more. He waited a moment, then replied.
“Yes.” He said. “It wasn’t something I could have done alone. She was the one with faith in a world outside of our own, not me.”
Her presence grew day by day. A little at a time until he began to glimpse her as she spoke. The sounds of her voice married with momentary flashes of her image. It was something like a puzzle being built in front of him, the disparate pieces coalescing into the complete woman Bill Roth thought of as his wife.
By this time Bill had begun to forget himself. She would appear and he would speak about his day. When Terri took to bed, he and his phantom wife would share their day and it was lost on him that the days she shared were in no way truthful. She no longer took Terri to school. She no longer worked her part-time job, nor did anything else she used to while she was alive, but Bill was a wilful fool believing anything she told him.
He believed as he always had that these conversations were between him and his wife, but the knowing looks he pretended not to see from Terri was evidence that this wasn’t true. His grief had not only made him self-centred, but it had also made him oblivious to the world around him, including those pain-filled looks from his daughter.
Bill Roth sighed. It was a drawn-out noise of utter fatigue. Then he slipped back into his seat. Before him, the teacher hadn’t moved save for an occasional glance at the notes in front of her, and her comments had been sparing and non-judgemental.
The moment drew out, but Bill’s tale was done, at least for the moment.
“So,” he said, “is that what Terri told you?”
Terri Roth woke to pain. Her skin felt tight enough to burst, and movement made her body erupt with a burning sensation. It was difficult to move, as if her bones had begun to fuse, and any movement set off fireworks in her skull.
For some time, she lay still and looked out over the blue sky through the window she happened to be facing. It had horizontal blinds that had been opened and drawn up to give her an unobstructed view. She could feel the sunlight on her face like a warm breeze, so she closed her eyes again and drifted back to sleep.
She drifted for the better part of the following day. Sometimes an unknown face would greet her, and the girl would even offer a smile. This would receive a worried look, on one occasion there was even a look of fear in one young nurse who looked no older than Terri herself, but this caused Terri no concern.
It should have, she knew, but a part of her sensed that drifting here in this pocket of disassociation was preferable to what she would endure outside of it.
She would take what she could get for the moment.
She knew why she was here, but she pushed it away.
There will be enough time later.
The following morning, she had managed to get into a sitting position when the first nurse entered the room. It was the young nurse, the one who had reacted with fear to her smile. Terri considered grinning at her to see what response she would receive but decided against it.
The nurse came to a complete stop when she saw Terri sitting there. For a long moment, she froze, looking exactly like an animal caught in headlights.
Terri did almost smile, in fact, she nearly laughed.
The nurse did a rapid about-face and rushed from the room. Perhaps she had seen the desire to laugh in her patient’s face and reacted instinctively to it.
Terri waited, no more than two minutes passed before a doctor rushed into the room. He was a handsome-looking man of Eastern descent. His accent betrayed a mix of Indian and upper-middle-class British. It was a pleasant voice, and she answered any questions while his gentle hands tested her bones for breakages and flesh for pain. There was none of the former but quite a bit of the latter.
Slowly it came back to her. A moment here, a still frame there. The doctors’ examinations took little time, but when he left her eyes were fixed on the light above her, though her attention was elsewhere. At first, the mind movie was made of the offcuts of scenes, but slowly they began to flow.
Terri Roth was weeping when Lilly Mantel slipped through the hospital door. Blinded by her tears she sensed movement and reached out. At first, the person who held her was just another body, a beating heart through which she could draw comfort. Then the smell of Lilly’s perfume filled the air around them and she knew who she was, and she clutched at her more firmly. Her body rocked with the racking sobs, the muscles across her ribcage aching with the exertion of it.
Lilly held her. Her gaze drifted over the billowing clouds set against the blue sky. The hospital was built on a hill and offered a view across the whole town. Below them, she could see a square of green that would have been the school’s playing field, and to its north, she could barely make out the huddle of buildings in which her own home hid.
She didn’t speak. Neither did Terri. With agonising slowness, the sobbing softened only to be replaced with ragged breathing as Terri caught her breath.
Lilly slipped her arms from around the girl and pulled away, at first the girl’s arms resisted, then they loosened, and she slid boneless down onto the bed.
Lilly slid her hand into the child’s and sat as she slept.
The young teacher was stunned by the events she knew of the previous night. Word of mouth had shaken the small community of educators that surrounded Marie-Catherine High. Lilly had received so many calls she had taken her phone off the hook. She was sitting in silence, considering who she could contact when the knock came at the door. When she opened it a police officer was standing there.
On the way, it had been explained. When Terri Roth had been found she had only said one thing, Lilly Mantel’s name, and a search had produced her connection to the child.
At first, no one had allowed her inside the room to see her, but Lilly had waited. Occasionally she drifted off in one of the roughly upholstered chairs in the mostly abandoned waiting room, then sleep finally took her. Just as quickly she awoke to shouts from down the hall and she followed them to walk past a handsome doctor as he left the girl’s room.
As she watched her sleep she thought of William Roth as she had last seen him and was mystified by the memory. She had seen nothing of this in the man. She could not guess it. She told herself. She said this in her mind again and again. She could not have known that something like this would happen. It had occurred to her that she might be the one to be thrown to the wolves over the incident, she had seen him last, and some would argue she should have contacted the authorities.
But she had not seen it. She had seen a man driven to distraction by the loss of his wife, and she had seen a daughter who was not concerned for her safety but the father who she loved.
There was no indication at all that he was violent.
Lilly Mantel could not believe that the police were right in their assumptions.
She could not believe that Bill had tried to kill his daughter.
“She’s awake?”
The voice was feminine but harsh. It was the tone of a person who was used to tragedies. Lilly looked up to see a uniformed officer, a woman with angular features standing at the door. The teacher experienced an instant repulsion. She had dealt with police often in her job, and usually, she found herself neutral towards them, but this one instantly put her on guard.
“She was, she isn’t now,” Lilly replied curtly. “The doctor said to let her rest.” She concluded with a barely considered lie.
The female officer made a sound that reminded Lilly of a cat coughing up a hairball, she thought it was supposed to signify understanding.
“Let me know the moment she does.” The officer said and Lilly lied to her a second time.
“Of course.”
The police officer stood there a moment, and Lilly thought she intended to stay, but somewhere a comfortable seat and a cup of coffee no doubt beckoned, so the woman turned and left. For a moment longer there was silence.
“Is my dad, okay?”
The voice was small, the words stumbling over each other like the remnants of a party that had gone on far too long. Lilly turned her head to the sound. Terri’s eyes were half-lidded, and tears were caught between them in dual glistening pools. Any moment the dam would break, and the teats would fall, and Lilly thought there was enough salt water there to drench the girl to the waist. The teacher held her tongue, not sure what she should say. She considered what the police might say whether she might be contaminating evidence of some kind by revealing the man’s fate to the girl.
But then she told her anyway.
The dam broke and the tears fell.
The girl shook her head. It was a vigorous motion, like a dog shedding itself of rainwater. Her hand raised to the sides of her head and a fist was pressed to each cheek. The flesh around the knuckles grew white.
“That’s not fair.”
Lilly Mantel had heard those words many times as a teacher. Each time she issued an “F” she would receive it as an accusation. Sometimes a pupil would utter it in a long-drawn-out cascade of youthful pain at the injustice they had suffered in the family home. Occasionally she would hear it muttered unconsciously, as if the child in question was on the edge of an epiphany. But she had never heard it backed with such raw pain before. Slipping from Terri Roth’s lips the words took on the weight of the world. It was the sound of someone on the edge of a precipice, a deep, dark pit which threatened to draw them to terrifying alien depths.
“No, it’s not.”
It was the same answer she always gave. It had always felt inadequate, but never more so than now. Before those words were a tired explanation of a fact that needed learning, but now it was heartfelt and uttered in the spirit of union in the cruelties of life.