Page 17 of The Trap by Catherine
Chris got up to see Denise out, leaving Lucy alone in the kitchen with the horror of what they’d just been told.
She took Denise’s glass to the sink and turned it upside-down to let the remaining water drain out, just to have something to do other than imagining where Nicki might be now, alive, and what might be happening to her.
But her hands were shaking and the glass slipped, hitting the stainless steel with a loud crack, shattering.
In its aftermath, the house felt aggressively silent. The sound of voices retreating down the hall had disappeared outside. Lucy needed noise. She went into the living room and grabbed the TV remote.
When the screen came to life, it was with the sights and sounds of an episode ofAir Crash Investigation.
She immediately identified the episode: American Airlines flight 587. Queens, New York; two months and one day after 9/11; wake turbulence. When planes punch through the air, they leave a temporary disturbance behind them in the form of wingtip vortices and jetwash. Aircraft following too closely behind can fly straight into it. 587’s first officer, due to a quirk of his training, totally overreacted to it, putting so much pressure on the vertical stabilizer that it broke clean off. Two thousand feet above a stretch of suburbia, an Airbus A300 with 260 passengers on board dropped out of the sky like a stone.
Lucy knew this because she had already seen this installment, twice if not three times. She’d already seen all of them, more than once. In the deepest, loneliest hours of the night, she found this show inexplicably soothing.
Maybe it was because of all the technical lingo, theflapsand thepitot tubesand thetrimand so on, the terminology that turned the emotion of death and destruction into science, engineering, and cold, hard facts. Or maybe it was that you could watch it safe in the knowledge that whatever the conclusion of the air-accident investigation team (which was, presumably due to the show’s low budget, invariably reenacted as three men in shirtsleeves gesticulating at a whiteboard), the cause was never going to involve a rapist, serial killer, or abductor of women.
Or maybe Lucy just liked watching it because it offered some kind of cruel perspective. After all, here she was, paralyzed over one missing person, when there was a tragedy that had rendered hundreds lost in a single moment.
And she thought it was nice that they always referred to the dead as thesouls.
The living-room door swung open and Chris came back in, and when she turned to face him she noticed for the first time how he was dressed: bare feet, jeans, a T-shirt on inside out and back to front. He must have still been asleep in bed when Denise knocked on the door.
“Did she just show up here?” Lucy asked. “She didn’t call ahead?”
“She called you,” he said, “but you didn’t answer. She didn’t try me because she said she guessed I’d have been working until late, which I was. I suppose she assumed that this early in the morning, you’d have been at home.”
Perhaps she was imagining things, but to Lucy’s ear thehomesounded pointed.
“Are you OK?” Chris asked.
In this house, they both knew that that question should always be taken as if arelatively speakinghad been tacked on its end.
“I was going to give up,” she said. “I’d decided to. I was going to accept that she was gone and wouldn’t be coming back. I was going to sell the house, open the cafe, move on. And I actually meant it, this time.”
“You still can,” he said. “We don’t even know if that Lena girl is telling the truth. This might all just be some story she made up to avoid getting into trouble with her parents. It might have nothing to do with Nicki. It’s entirely possible that absolutely nothing’s changed.”
“Or maybe we just found out that Nicki is still alive and has been held prisoner by some sadistic fuck less than half an hour’s drive from here all this time.”
Chris shook his head. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“Tell me how to stop, then. Because all I can think about is her tied up somewhere, being... being...”
But she couldn’t say the words. She didn’t even want to think them.
And then Chris was in front of her, reaching for her, pulling her into his arms.
She let him, burying her face in his chest, drawing in a deep breath and holding it, hoping it would hold in all the parts of her too, all the feelings that were popping and bursting and threatening to turn themselves into tears.
“We can’t wait for ever,” he whispered into her hair.
“Exactly.” She pulled away, moved away. “Exactly that. I can’t wait for ever. I can’t wait any more. I need to know what happened to her.”
“Luce, we’ve been through this. There’s nothing you can do. There’s an entire team of Gardaí whose full-time job it is to try to find her, and we just have to wait and let them do their jobs. Our only choice here is what we do while we wait. And I know it feels impossible, but it’s been over a year; you need to start—”
“Don’t,” she said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it again. I can’t move on—because this is what happens. I reallywasgoing to stop living in this... this paralyzed hell. I was going to call that annoying prick from the agency and tell him we can have viewings all next week if he wants. I was going to set an opening date for the cafe. And then this morning I have Denise sipping her glass of water in my kitchen telling me, oh, by the way, maybe Nicki is alive actually, and being held somewhere, and stand by for more on that in due course.”
During that speech, Lucy’s voice had risen in volume to a shout.
It made Chris’s sound all the quieter when he said, “But what can you possibly do? Because if this is some justification for you continuing your little night-time excursions after you swore to me that you’d—”
