Anna clamped her hand over her mouth. She wanted to drop the phone and run away but she made herself sit there. Brody needed her. He needed her to listen to this.Oh, Anna, be careful what you wish for…
Brody’s voice became even tighter. ‘The pond was covered in duckweed, exactly the same shade of green as the lawn, and to a two-year-old, it might have looked just like grass. I started running, and when I reached the edge of the pond, I could see a hole in the duckweed, ripples in the water…’
Anna began to cry. She made sure to do it silently so Brody wouldn’t hear her.
‘I started grabbing at the water blindly, but the pond was probably three- or four- feet deep at the edge and got even deeper towards the middle. I couldn’t find her, Anna. I couldn’t find her, not quickly enough, anyway…’
Anna swallowed. She waited until she was sure that Brody had finished his story, or at least as much of it as he could say, before she asked a question. She knew she was probably asking the obvious, but she had to do it. After so many months of mystery, she needed to know for sure. ‘Did you get her out?’
He cleared his throat and waited a few seconds before carrying on. ‘Yes. Before the paramedics arrived – my mother had come out with the tea tray just as I pulled Lena out of the pond and laid her on the grass.She dropped the tray, teapot and all, and ran back inside the house to phone them. But it was at least a twenty-minute drive from the nearest town, and I could tell from the looks on their faces when they finally arrived that there was no hope. Even though I’d been doing my best with CPR.’
He broke off and all Anna could do was stare at the empty sky beyond the concrete posts of the car park. Her vocal cords were frozen shut. Brody had always had the right thing to say when she’d poured her soul out to him, and now she couldn’t even say a single word of comfort back to him. Some friend she was.
‘Did you know that a child can drown in under a minute?’ he asked, but Anna wouldn’t have replied if her voice had been working, because it almost seemed as if he was lost in his own words at this point, and he didn’t really need her answer. ‘And that after a certain point, even if they’re still alive, their body shuts down, making CPR much less likely to be effective?’
‘Oh, Brody,’ Anna said, her voice finally emerging scratchily from her throat. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
‘We were all numb with grief to start off with. You know what it’s like…’
Anna nodded, unable to talk without sobbing, so she held it in. Even though she knew Brody couldn’t hear her, she felt it important that she agreed, and she hoped he could feel it rather than hear it.
‘But after a few months the numbness wore off and I got angry. I blamed my parents – for having the pond, for not having fenced it in to make it safe, even though I knew this was their first grandchild and it probably just hadn’t occurred to them.I said horrible things, Anna. I cut them off, refused to speak to them. And that was a despicable thing to do, to blame them, but I was being selfish and pig-headed. What else could I do? I had to blame someone. And I certainly hadn’t been able to face laying the blame where it should.’
‘Brody…’ Anna said, with a warning tone in her voice. She had a feeling she knew where this was going.
‘It wasmyfault.’
There. He’d said it. Anna wished she could reach out and touch him.
‘I shouldn’t have drifted off in my own imaginary world. I should have kept hold of her when she tried to wriggle away. I should have been faster… looked harder…’
‘Oh, Brody,’ Anna said again. ‘You know that’s not true, don’t you?’
‘No,’ he said baldly. ‘And I’m not the only one who thought so.’
‘Did your wife blame you too? Is that why she left?’
‘At first,’ Brody said. ‘While I was still blaming my parents. But later she softened, said it was an accident. She wanted us to go through it together, share our grief, but I couldn’t do it. It was as if I had a wall around me. I couldn’t let her in. I couldn’t let anybody in. It was the only thing holding me together, you see, the only thing keeping me sane.’
‘I know,’ Anna said gently. She hadn’t had a wall, exactly, but she’d had her own coping mechanism: her numbness, her refusal to engage with the world. She sniffed, and then she sobbed. It had all built up, and now it was coming out noisily. So much for not letting on to Brody.
‘Don’t cry for me, Anna,’ he said with so much softness that it only made her cry harder. ‘I don’t deserve it.’
Anna grabbed a tissue from a packet in the centre console of the car, blew her nose, and composed herself. Alongside the aching sadness, his words prompted something hot and fiery inside her. Now she was angry with him too. ‘After Spencer died, I kept questioning myself, moving all the variables around, as if his death was a game of chess I could win if I could only get the pieces in the right place.
‘What if that driver hadn’t been drunk that evening? Or hadn’t drunk as much? What if I hadn’t wanted something from the corner shop, or if I hadn’t called Spencer back to ask him to get some milk too? He’d have left thirty seconds earlier. What if he’d crossed the road at a different point? In the end, I had come to one conclusion – this was a game I couldn’t win. It was always going to be checkmate because it was an accident – and so was what happened to Lena.’
He made a disbelieving noise, but Anna wasn’t letting him off with that.
‘Like most accidents, there was a multitude of moving parts, just as there was with what happened to me. A handful of circumstances came together, stupid little things that if they’d happened on their own, would have meant nothing. But they did happen together, and it created a perfect storm, for want of a better word. Would you tell me that just because one of those variables was down to me that Spencer’s death was my fault?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Then why won’t you accept the same for yourself? If there hadn’t been traffic on the motorway, you wouldn’t have been as tired.If your wife hadn’t had a migraine, then both of you would have been outside with her. You see what I mean?’
‘It’s not the same!’
Anna closed her eyes and screamed silently inside her head. Stubborn didn’t even begin to describe it. She wasn’t going to win this argument, not now, not today. ‘Okay… Even if it was your fault, even if maybe you could have stopped it happening, what does that mean? You have to punish yourself forever? What does that accomplish? How does that make anyone, even the people we’ve lost, any happier?’ Her voice grew hoarse again. ‘How does it make them any more alive?’
