Sacrifices (9 page)

She’ll catch him in the morning before he leaves for the bookstore and work on that guilt. This is Michael, after all, and even though her once overwhelming love for him has been tempered by teenage cynicism, she still believes that he is essentially a good man. Weak and too easily bullied by his nasty little wife, but good.

In need of comfort, Louise opens
the closet and finds her copy of
Through the Looking-Glass
hidden beneath a pile of T-shirts, resting on top of her photo album. The book, for years her most treasured possession, is in perfect condition. She pages through it, Tenniel’s illustrations as magical as the day she first saw them. 

She flips to the frontispiece and reads the inscription: Birthday wishes to Louise, a girl who knows there are no impossible things. Michael.

Taking the book back with her to the bed, laying it beside her pillow like a talisman, Louise clicks off the lamp and slides under the covers. 

Closing her eyes she works at consciously calming herself, drawing deep breaths through her nose, and exhaling slowly. Banishing the horror-movie images of the nightmare and visualizing the panic that threatens her as a toxic yellow-brown smoke, smoke that she can disperse with each exhalation.

Visualizing a waterfall through the smoke: a waterfall on Table Mountain that came with the winter rain. She only saw it once, when she was eleven, she and Lynnie hiking with Michael Lane, Lyndall moaning about the small pack he had to carry, Louise entranced by this wilderness just minutes from the house in Newlands.

Standing amongst the rocks and the
fynbos
on the flat plateau at the top of the mountain, the invisible city far below, smiling up at Michael who looked like a monk with the rain dripping off the hood of his parka.

Michael crossed to the small pond at the waterfall, knelt and drank, calling her over. Folding down beside him, she cupped her hands and brought them to her mouth, and tasting the purity of that cold, clear water, Louise sleeps.

When he wakes from a restless slumber, Lane is astonished to see that it’s nearly
8:00 a.m. He raises the blind and looks over the garden at Table Mountain looming like a cutout against the empty blue sky, the rock washed golden by the sun. There is no wind and the famous cloth of cloud hovers undisturbed above the mountain’s flat top, ready for the hordes of tourists and their camera phones.

Lane, lifting his own phone from the dresser beside the bed, tries to find remnants of last nights’ alcohol-fueled resolve but the
Scotch has left him dry mouthed and liverish and he feels a paralyzing depression enfold him like a cloak.

But, as he conjures up Louise Solomons’s eyes staring at him across the kitchen table last evening, the bitter bile of guilt rises in his throat and he pockets his Nokia and slips out into the corridor.

The clock radio in Chris’s old room is tuned to a newscast and he hears his son’s heavy tread over the latest crime reports. Lane, feeling a twinge of pain in his swollen testicles, shames himself by hurrying toward the stairs, eager to be gone before his son emerges.

He scuttles past the main bedroom—door closed, shower in the en-suite bathroom whispering—descends the stairs and crosses the living room, his socks skating on the tiles.

Lane opens the door onto the deck, inhaling the crisp air (too early to be tainted by carbon emissions) and walks around the side of the house, his socks soaked by the dewy grass. Invisible now to the bedrooms upstairs, he takes Gwen Perils’s card from his pocket and punches her cell number into his Nokia.

Before he can hit dial a movement draws his eye and Christopher appears beside the pool, dressed in shorts, vest and running shoes, jogging on the spot. Retreating behind an assegai tree Lane pockets his phone, watching his son through the glossy leaves as he stretches, touching his toes with ease.

Chris shakes his arms to loosen the muscles before taking off down the driveway. The ornate metal gates fling themselves open like swan’s wings, furling when he disappears from view. He’ll be gone for at least an hour, powering his way along one of the trails that lead up the mountain from Newlands forest.

Lane retrieves his Nokia, his hands slick with sweat. He composes himself, then jabs at the little green phone. When he hears the cop speak he feels a momentary lurch of terror, and he’s speechless for second before he realizes that he’s listening to the woman’s voice mail, telling him to leave a message.

“Detective, this is Michael Lane. Please call me back as a matter of urgency.” Sounding like his pompous father again.

As Lane slips the phone back into his
pocket a scream—a prolonged, howling descant—rises from Denise Solomons’s room, visible through a thicket of shrubs.

Lane knows he should retreat into the house and pretend he is deaf to the woman’s distress, but he finds himself hurrying over to the cottage, where he hear
s a series of hiccupping sobs. He bangs on the door and after a few seconds it flies open, revealing Louise dressed in a T-shirt and floral pajama bottoms, blinking at him, her short, spiky hair standing in quills.

“What’s happened, Lou?” he asks.

“It’s Lynnie. They’ve just called from Pollsmoor. He was murdered last night, in the cells.”

Lane lays a tentative hand on the girl’s bony shoulder. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Louise.”

“Fuck you, Michael! Fuck you,” she says, throwing off his hand and slamming the door in his face.

Lane staggers under the weight of his guilt. But, as he walks toward his wife who stands in the kitchen doorway—looking cool and composed in a white cotton top and ivory-colored slacks, her plucked eyebrows arched in enquiry—he feels the guilt washed away by a surge of pure, unalloyed relief.

Louise leans her sharp shoulder blades against the door, the wood still trembling from the violence with which she slammed it, and closes her eyes to the cottage and its hand-me-down furniture, colonized—like her life—by
Michael Lane’s charity.

Her mother, reduced to a wailing, drooling
mess has been unable to provide any detail about the way Lyndall died, so the dream that woke Louise in the early hours becomes the visual accompaniment to Denise’s garbled account of the call from the prison.

Louise sees the hands tearing at Lyndall’s flesh, hears him screaming in terror, and knows that she has failed him. She should have fought harder, called a press
conference yesterday: yelled at the top her lungs about the Lane’s machinations and Lyndall’s innocence.

But who would have believed her, a brown kid who looks younger than her years?
Beverley Lane, cool and groomed and composed, with the innate superiority of her race and class, would have milked the media and left her looking like a silly, hysterical girl.

Silence has Louise opening her eyes.

“Ma?” Nothing. “Ma?”

Louise hurries through to the bedroom and finds her mother lying on the carpet beside the bed, her face gray and her breathing shallow.

Kneeling beside her, Louise lifts her head. “Ma? Talk to me.”

The older woman groans, but her eyes remain closed, and a brownish froth of spittle appears at the side of her mouth.

Louise stands, stupidly patting herself for her cell phone, then hurries into her bedroom and finds it next to her bed. Reception is always poor in this room, so she sprints through the kitchenette, rips open the door and runs out into the courtyard, the signal building on the scratched face of her old Samsung.

Louise dials 911 and gets a recorded message. She hits redial. The message again, and a wave of panic and desperation rises in her.

“Please,” she shouts at the digital voice, “please answer!” And she feels tears and snot on her face.

Hands on her shoulders spin her and she’s looking up at
Michael Lane.

“Louise, calm down.”

She has to fight the urge to sink into his arms.

“My mother’s unconscious, Michael. I need an ambulance.”

When he releases her she almost falls, then recovers and follows him into the cottage. He scans the kitchen and living room then heads for the bedroom, kneeling beside her mother, putting a finger to her neck.

Digging into his pocket he frees his Nokia and thumbs the speed-dial, handing Louise the phone which is purring in his hand, its superior antennae locking onto a signal bounced back at them from the mountain.

“That’s Sniper’s emergency response number. Just give them the address and they’ll send a private ambulance.”

“And where will they take her?”

“To Constantia Clinic.”

“And how will we pay for that?”

“Don’t worry about that now, Louise. Just do it.”

A human voice answers and Louise hears herself giving the address as
Michael Lane opens her mother’s mouth and starts CPR.

Beverley hovers in the cottage doorway, looking like she got lost on the way to book club. “Michael? What’s going on?”

Michael lifts his face from Denise’s long enough to say, “She’s collapsed. Go and open the gates for the medics.”

Within minutes a shiny new ambulance manned by a pair of male-modelly EMTs in tight jumpsuits is in the driveway. Louise shows them through to the bedroom, where they relieve Michael Lane, covering her mother’s face with a transparent oxygen mask that looks like a beached jelly-fish. They set up a drip before loading
Denise onto a gurney and wheeling her out.

Louise follows, watching as her mother is
slid into the ambulance.

“Do you want me to come with you?”
Michael Lane asks, appearing at her elbow.

She wants to say yes, but she shakes head. “No, Michael, you’ve done enough.”

Louise climbs in after her mother and the doors are slammed and the ambulance takes off, siren weeping.

Lane sits alone in the kitchen, staring at the layer of wrinkled scum on the surface of a cup of cold coffee. The giddy flash of relief is long gone; all he feels now is the dark taint of guilt.

The lowing of his Nokia brings him out of his funk. Answering it, expecting to hear a bureaucrat from the clinic demanding his credit card details, Lane’s caught off-guard by the remodeled vowels of Detective Gwen Perils.

“You left a message,
Mr. Lane?”

“I did,” he says, scrambling for a lie.

She helps him out. “I suppose you have heard already about Lyndall Solomons?”

“Yes, via his mother who was pretty hysterical as you can imagine. I just wanted to confirm it with you, Detective.”

“The Solomons boy died during the night in the awaiting trial cells at Pollsmoor. There are no further details and the investigation won’t be handled by this office.”

“I see.”

“Was there anything else, Mr. Lane?”

“No, Detective. Thank you.”

Lane ends the call, any opportunity for atonement lost as the phone fades to black.

Beverley walks in from the living room. “Your cop friend again?” When Lane doesn’t reply she takes a bottle of Evian from the fridge and pours it into a glass. “What did she say?”

“She confirmed what we heard. About Lyndall.”

“So,” Beverley says
, “it’s all over.”

“No,” Lane says, “it’s not all over. And I think you know that.”

The thundering approach of their son bounding down the staircase has them turning to the kitchen doorway as Christopher appears in a shorts and a T-shirt, his hair still damp from the shower.

Ignoring Lane he plants a kiss on Beverley’s cheek. “I’m off, Mom. Catch you later.”

He rushes out, slamming the front door and Lane hears the roar of his car engine and the spit of gravel as he takes off down the driveway.

Carrying her glass Beverley crosses to the kitchen table and Lane marvels at how poised and composed she looks. Her absurd mother sent her to deportment classes as a teenager and Lane has no doubt, as his wife seats herself with her back straight and her pampered hands folded in her lap, that a book would remain perfectly balanced on her head. Her short blonde hair, encroaching gray hidden by her artful and extortionate stylist, is neatly combed and her understated make-up hides any of the stress so visible on Lane’s own face.

“Let’s just move on now, Michael,” she says. “Put this all behind us.” As if she’s talking about some minor unpleasantness at the tennis club.

“Beverley, we killed Lyndall. Whatever he was, he didn’t deserve that.”

“You’re overstating things just a little don’t you think?”

“Am I? Well here’s an understatement for you: our son is a sociopath. Face it.”

He expects Beverley to argue but she doesn’t. Instead she crumples, as if invisible guy ropes anchoring her have been cut, and holds her head in her hands.

For a moment a reflex almost has Lane reaching out a hand to comfort his wife, but the image of Beverley and Christopher on the
couch together the night before, while he nursed his bruised balls, drives him from the kitchen and up the stairs into the marital bedroom.