Escaping Life by Michelle Muckley Read Free Book Online Page B

famous.”
    “David!” Helen
interrupted, embarrassed at her husband’s crass and insensitive take on the
situation.
    “What?” he pleaded
with his wife, the same outstretched openness that he had greeted Elizabeth
with earlier on that day.  “Lizzy look, I love you.  I do.  But I won’t dress
it up like he will,” he said pointing at Graham.  “Don’t tell me you believe
this, Graham?”  He looked to Graham, trying to find sense in a conversation
that he felt was in urgent need of a hefty dose of it. 
    “Elizabeth has
a point, David,” he offered reluctantly, but with enough certainty to support
his wife.  David sat back in his chair, his head outstretched behind him in
exasperated acceptance of where his best friend’s point was going.  “We never
buried Rebecca.”  David had been the lawyer who handled the insurance case.  He
had worked for hours, building a case to fight for the life insurance.  He knew
every detail of the crash.  He never asked for a penny.
    “Lizzy, I know
you would love to believe she’s still out there, but I don’t see any way she
could have survived that crash.”  He paused, unsure if he should share his
final thought.  He sat forward in his chair, placing his wine down firmly on
the table.  He said, in the softest words yet, “there was nothing left of that
car.”
    Elizabeth lay
in bed that night, listening to the usually gentle crash of the waves against
the shore, a little louder this evening, still delivering debris from the earlier
storm.  She couldn’t sleep.  Her head was full of thoughts of Rebecca, but
these thoughts were not good thoughts.  Not the easy memories of past
Christmases and birthdays and of Sunday mornings out in the stream.  Not of
quiet nights, long past the time they should have been asleep when they would
sit up talking, their room gently lit by nightlights, underneath the bed sheets
when Rebecca would tell her stories of her own life, far more exciting and
dangerous than that of her four year old self.  Tonight she was consumed by
thoughts of her driving the old Ford Fiesta, not well maintained or at all sturdy. 
She thought about the rain that had fallen in the hours before the crash which,
out in the country it seemed, had been heavy.  She thought of the road, winding
and dark, the barriers broken and flimsy from a previous accident where the car
had only just managed to stay on the road.  She thought of police tape and
orange patrol jackets.  She thought of the car, visible as the blue lights
flashed all around her and so burnt out that nothing remained.  There were no
tyre marks on the road.  Rebecca hadn’t tried to stop.
    “Can’t sleep?” 
She hadn’t even realised that Graham too was still awake.  She turned her head
to face him, her body following so that she could get closer, no matter how
sticky the heat of the night air was.  There was no breeze.
    “No.  I just
keep thinking about what David said.  He knew the case so well.”  He nodded in
agreement.  David had brought a sense of rationality to the table that had been
absent, kept out by their own emotions.  “She never tried to stop, did she?” 
It was barely a question.  David had argued the case solidly, and won.  The
insurance agency had paid out the money.  He was a damn good lawyer and he
built a good case, and he had made it seem possible that it was just an
accident; that she had never intended to kill herself.
    “Maybe we have
to accept that she just couldn’t cope with your mum’s death,” he said, as
Elizabeth nodded in agreement, “and the way she died.”
    They both knew
what he meant.  When her mother had been found lying on the kitchen floor, her
body limp, her neck bruised and eyes red and swollen from the grip of her
murderer, it was obvious that she had been strangled.  It was Rebecca who had
found her body.  She had sat there for hours in that same room, watching her
mother’s lifeless body until the neighbours had