Chapter 15
I drove home haunted by a pungent sense of discomfort. It was certainly a coincidence, but I couldn’t help noticing that stories of drowned people seemed to follow me in the last days. This week-end it had been about Jack’s girlfriend, and tonight it was Mirth’s babysitter. I wondered why she had drowned. Had she felt suddenly sick? Had she committed suicide?
When I got home I sat in the car for a moment, not wanting to go inside. I was tempted to go see Jack and tell him about the kid, omitting the story of her drowned nanny. But then I thought I couldn’t talk to Jack about Mirth without mentioning what happened to her babysitter, so I renounced altogether the idea of going to see him.
The steps squeaked beneath me and when I opened the door the house welcomed me with a sheath of darkness. I reached for the switch and turned the lights on the emptiness of the rooms. There are nights when being alone is a burden, and this was one of them.
The freshness of the lake had evaporated off my body during the drive, leaving me hot and thirsty. I headed to the kitchen and drank large gulps of water directly from the tap. Then I removed my clothing, the shirt clung onto my head, I stripped it off anxiously and threw it on the floor. My heart was beating quickly, I could feel it pulsing in the veins of my neck.
The shower slowly washed away the tension. I let the water sooth me inhaling the lavender smell of the soap. I stood there until I emptied the hot water tank and the shower went cold.
When I went to sit on the porch with a lemonade my mind was devoid of thoughts. I was still there, sipping my drink and letting the night drench me with the sound of the cicadas, when the phone rang. When I picked it up I heard Jack’s voice on the other end.
“It’s strange, because I wanted to call you but I couldn’t. It feels good to hear your voice”, I said, and was surprised at my own words.
“Why couldn’t you phone me?”, Jack asked.
I told him about the swim in the lake, and Mirth and her drowned nanny.
“I had read about the drowned girl, it was on the local news. She had felt sick on the lake, it seems like it’s something she was taking. They thought it was drugs at first but then it seemed unlikely. I don’t know what they concluded though. It’s very strange how the case stopped being discussed abruptly. It was ‘the local police is still investigating’ one day and no news at all the next”.
“So you knew…”, I said.
“Yes, and that is what decided me to go see Greg and fix the boat”, Jack told me.
There was a silence on the line, and I waited for him to go on. “I thought it was time to face the past”, he added. There was another silence, then Jack asked me how I was doing with my polymers.
“We’ll see how they work on other types of food tomorrow. This compound could be a real breakthrough for the food industry”, I said.
“I thought someone like you wouldn’t care about the food industry”, Jack replied.
“I don’t”, I said, “but the fact that other people do keeps my business going”.
Jack laughed. “So how do you guys test that the new compounds are safe before releasing them?”, he asked, then added “Sorry for the biologist’s question…”.
I hadn’t thought about this before. After all I was only combining polymers that were considered non-toxic, so why would I end up with something that was harmful? Who tested what we produced in our labs? I thought I would ask Alice the next day. She was the one working with bacteria all the time. Her job was to verify if compounds that prolonged the shelf-life of the products worked, all she did was make sure bacteria weren’t there, but perhaps she could have some ideas on how to run some toxicity tests using my polymers.
“I didn’t want to bother your conscience, I was just saying…”, Jack told me when he felt the anxiousness in my voice.
“Why don’t you come over?”, I asked.
But he had to wake up at five the next morning to start the bakery. I hang up wishing him good night and went back on the porch. Jack’s question kept rolling in my mind, and I felt the tension gradually ramp up till my heartbeat became so fast it hurt. It wasn’t only what Jack had said, it was a combination of events and feelings I could hardly define.
I took my book and went to bed, trying to focus on my reading. The story drew me in, detaching me from myself a bit at a time. I calmed down, and fell asleep half an hour later.