Swimming at Night: A Novel (5 page)

“Traveling?”

“Yes. She booked the trip so suddenly. Something must have happened to make her leave.”

“She was just impulsive. Young. Bored. That’s all.”

“I shouldn’t have let her go.”

“Katie,” he said gently, “you’ve had a long day. Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking at her journal tonight. Wait till morning, at least. I was just about to make us a snack. Why don’t you come into the kitchen? Keep me company?”

“Maybe in a minute.”

When the door closed, she flicked through the pages and picked an entry at random. As she began to read, her gaze jumped from phrase to phrase—
“cinder desert,” “Finn and me,” “deep violet sky,” “lunar landscape”
—as if each word was too hot for her mind to settle on. She squeezed her eyes shut and then reopened them,
trying to focus on a single sentence. But it was hopeless; her gaze roamed over the words, but her mind refused to digest them.

Frustrated, she flipped on. She passed an entry where a sketched bird took flight from the bottom of a page, and another where Mia’s writing spiraled around an invisible coil as if being sucked downwards. Her heartbeat quickened when she realized she was traveling towards the back of the journal, her fingertips skimming the edges of each page as they drew her to Mia’s final entry.

Reaching it, Katie paused. There would be things, she knew already, which she’d rather not learn, but like a passerby being drawn to the sight of a crash, she was unable to look away.

Staring at the final entry, she saw that just one side of the double spread was filled. The adjoining page was missing; it had been ripped out, leaving behind a jagged edge near the spine of the journal. Her eyes fixed on the remaining page, which was filled with an intricate pencil drawing of the profile of a female face. Within the face a series of detailed doodles had been drawn: a roaring dark wave, a screaming mouth, falling stars, a hangman with six blank dashes, an empty phone dangling from a wire.

Katie snapped the journal shut and stood.

She shouldn’t have looked; it was too soon. Already new questions were swimming to the surface of her thoughts.
What did the illustrations mean? Why had a page been torn out? What had been on it?
She pushed the journal back towards the bag as if returning it to the backpack would stop the stream of doubts rushing forwards, but in her hurry the journal fell free of her hands, and as it spilled to the floor, something glided from its pages.

Bending to retrieve it, she saw it was the stub of Mia’s first boarding pass: London Heathrow to San Francisco. Her fingers moved across the smooth white card as she thought about Mia arriving in San Francisco full of the anticipation of traveling. She
tried picturing the places Mia visited, wondering about the people she had met, imagining what she might have experienced—but Mia’s travels were a mystery, six lost months Katie was desperate to understand. Six months that the journal held the key to.

As she held Mia’s plane ticket between her fingers, an idea began to form.

*   *   *

Katie barely slept that night as the idea shaped itself into a purpose. The next morning she rose early and strode into Putney High Street searching for a travel agency. She placed Mia’s itinerary on the desk of a woman who wore coral-pink lipstick on cracked lips. “I would like to book the same route.”

She could have done it online, but felt the decision was too important to be made on the click of a button. Perhaps she had anticipated hesitation from the saleswoman, as if someone would tell her this was a foolish, impulsive idea, but instead the lady had taken a sip from her steaming mug of coffee, then simply asked, “When would you like to go?”

Now, five days later, she sat on the wooden floorboards in her bedroom trying to pack. The contents of Mia’s backpack fanned around her feet, and her own clothes waited tentatively in half-built piles within a purple suitcase. She was usually a decisive and methodical packer, but she had no clue what to pack for this trip. In a few hours she was due to board a flight to San Francisco, exactly as Mia had done six months earlier.

Her bedroom door opened and Ed entered, carrying two mugs of tea. He passed her one and then lowered himself onto the floor beside her, his suit pants pulling tight across his knees and revealing half an inch of skin above his socks.

She took a sip of tea. He made it exactly how she liked it: not too strong, a generous splash of milk and half a spoonful of sugar.

He eyed the piles of belongings skeptically. “There’s still time to change your mind. Work would have you back, you know.”

She had quit her job as a senior recruitment consultant as she’d walked back from the travel agency. After dedicating herself to the same company since graduation, she had only needed a five-minute phone call to leave. “I can’t go back.” The idea of returning to the office, taking a seat at her corner desk beneath the air-conditioning vent that aggravated her eyes, and pretending that placing candidates was still important to her seemed utterly ludicrous.

“Why not wait a few weeks? I am almost certain I’ll be able to juggle a vacation. We could go together . . . not everywhere, but Bali. You can see where—”

“I need to start this from the beginning.” Katie’s coping mechanism was structure. After her mother’s death, she had ruthlessly filled her diary with social engagements, taking command of every free hour that might otherwise have been idled away in the folds of self-pity. She attacked her job with equal vigor, working around the clock with such steely focus that, three months later, she got a promotion.

Losing Mia felt different. Work and social distractions were no match for her grief, which was thick and black. Finding Mia’s travel journal seemed like a small glimmer of light in the gloom, so she had made a decision to follow it, entry by entry, country by country, in the hope that retracing Mia’s steps would help her to understand her death. For the first time since the police arrived on her doorstep, Katie felt as if she had a sense of purpose.

“I know we’ve talked about this,” Ed said, “but I am still struggling to understand your logic.”

“You know how difficult things were between me and Mia before she left,” she said, setting aside her tea. “And I let her go . . . I was
relieved
to see her go.”

“Mia’s death is not your fault.”

Wasn’t it?
She had seen Mia was unhappy when they were living together, but she had let her loose anyway. Mia was her little sister, her responsibility. And Katie had failed her. “The journal is all I have left. It’s a link to six months of her life that I missed.”

“So read it. I’ve already told you I’m happy to do it with you.”

She’d discovered Ed thumbing through the journal the morning after she’d found it, checking that there was nothing that would upset her. She knew he was being kind, but she didn’t want his protection; she wanted his support. Now she’d taken to keeping the journal with her at all times.

“But once I’ve finished reading it,” she explained, “there’ll be no more new memories of Mia. That’ll be it—she’s gone.” She imagined flipping through the pages time and time again until the words had become dull and meaningless, like a set of old photographs that have faded with the years. But Katie knew that by reading each entry in the countries where Mia wrote them, and experiencing some of the things she had experienced, then it would feel as if she was with her—that those six months hadn’t been lost. “I need to do this, Ed.”

He stood and crossed her bedroom to the window and opened it. Katie caught the heavy bass booming from a car stereo below. He spread his hands on the low windowsill and, for several moments, just stared at the street below.

“Ed?”

“I love you,” he began slowly, turning to face her, “but I believe you are making a mistake. What about everything you’re leaving behind? What about our wedding?”

They were due to get married in August. They had booked an intimate country house in Surrey, which they’d planned to take over for the weekend with their closest friends and family. Katie’s evenings had been occupied with searching for a band that would play beyond midnight, deliberating over the choice of cheesecake or profiteroles for dessert, and collecting vintage photo frames to create a display on the cake table. The excitement and anticipation that had only recently consumed her now seemed as if it had been part of a life that was no longer hers.

“I won’t be away for long. A few months at most.”

“I know you’re going through hell right now,” he said, pushing aside a cream lantern to make space to sit. “I wish, I really wish, there was something I could do to make this easier for you. But all I can say to you, darling, is that I truly believe it will help if you can begin looking towards the future, rather than the past.”

She nodded. There was some sense in that.

He indicated the spot beside him and she moved across the room and sat. She could smell the residue of his shaving foam, mixed with the fresh tones of aftershave. He looked handsome in his suit; the slate-gray tie had been a present from Katie and she liked to imagine his hand brushing the raw silk in a meeting, his thoughts trailing from the boardroom to her.

“This isn’t the answer,” he said, looking at Mia’s journal, which she still held. She heard the smile in his voice as he said, “Come on, you hate flying! You’ve never been outside of Europe. It is just not safe for you to go backpacking on your own.” He placed his hand on her thigh, rubbing gently. “Let’s work through this together. Here.”

Ed always had a practical way of assessing situations; it was one of the many things she admired about him. Perhaps this was a mistake. Flying to the other side of the world and giving no
indication of when she would be back was unfair to Ed, she knew that much. “I don’t know what the right decision is anymore.”

“Katie,” he said quietly, “eventually you are going to have to let her go.”

She ran her fingers over the sea-blue cover of the journal, imagining all the times Mia had written in it. She pictured her swinging lazily in a hammock, her tanned legs stretched in front of her, a pen moving lightly over the cream leaves. The journal contained the most intimate details of Mia’s thoughts, and Katie held it in her hands.

“I can’t,” she said. “Not until I know what happened.”

Ed sighed.

She wondered whether he had already decided what had happened. In the time he’d known Mia, he had seen her at her worst—impetuous, wayward, and volatile—but he didn’t know the real Mia; the one who swam like a fish in the sea, who kicked off her shoes to dance, who loved catching hailstones in her palms. “It wasn’t suicide,” she said firmly.

“Perhaps it wasn’t.”

And there it was. The
“perhaps.”

She stood, picked up Mia’s empty backpack, and began carefully replacing items she had taken from it. From her own suitcase she grabbed a pile of clothes, her toiletries bag, and her passport, and squeezed them into the backpack, then buckled it shut. She shoved her suitcase in the wardrobe, closing the door with a satisfying smack: what good was a suitcase where she was going?

Ed was on his feet. “You’re actually doing this?”

“I am.”

She could see he was hurt and that he wanted to say something more. There were a thousand reasons why she shouldn’t go: she had never traveled alone before; her career would suffer; she was
grieving and would do better with company. They had been through all of these reservations, Ed giving pragmatic advice, just as she would have offered someone else. Only now she felt differently. Now it wasn’t about practicalities, risk assessment, or smart decision making. It was about her sister.

(California, October Last Year)

M
ia’s legs rested on the dash of the battered Chevy they’d rented. She pressed her bare toes against the windscreen and then withdrew them, watching the toe prints of condensation slowly disappear. Beside her, Finn was drumming his thumbs against the steering wheel in time to a blues number playing on the radio.

They were driving south along the famous Highway One, leaving San Francisco in their wake. They’d spent far more time there than intended, having been captivated by the city’s offbeat charm. On their first night they took a room in a cheap motel, dumped their backpacks, and went for dinner at a busy Thai restaurant that served incredible sweet chili prawns. The owner tipped them off about a basement club a couple of blocks away and, in spite of their jet lag, they found themselves drinking and dancing until their feet throbbed. They surfaced, hours later, to find dawn breaking over the city, and stumbled across an early-morning coffeehouse where they bought cinnamon bagels with fresh coffee and sat on the edge of the bay watching a pale-pink sun climb over Alcatraz.

Low-lying fog stalked them down the coast and clung to the sea like a damp cloak obscuring any view of the horizon. Mia rolled down the window and stuck her head out, squinting towards the sky. “Sun’s coming out.”

“I’ll stop at the next pull-off.”

A few miles on was a gravel viewpoint on the cliff top. Sure enough, the sun was burning through the fog to unveil a rugged, grassy coastline. Wildflower-strewn cliffs, which she imagined would be spectacular in spring, staggered down to an untamed bay frothing with white water.

She stepped from the car barefoot, interlocked her fingers above her head, and stretched, her stomach pulling taut. The air fizzed with salt and she inhaled, closing her eyes.

Finn leaned against the car with his arms folded loosely over his chest. “Look at this place.”

“You want to go down?”

“Sure.”

They found a narrow footpath that wound down the impressive cliff face, cutting back and forth to steal the incline from the steepest parts. Reaching the bottom, Mia was the first to jog towards the shore and plunge her feet in the sea. “Hello, Pacific!” she bellowed. Then she turned to Finn. “Swim?”

“Here? It looks pretty rough.”

“You can look after my clothes, then,” she said, pulling off her top and wriggling free from her shorts, leaving her in mismatched underwear. Her body was lean and muscular; she thought herself too angular to be considered beautiful, although she’d grown used to the jut of her hip bones and her small breasts, and wasn’t abashed in front of Finn. They’d seen each other’s bodies hundreds of times—she knew the broadness of his shoulders, the way his belly
button protruded slightly, seen the coarse hairs spread from around his nipples across his chest.