The Taken

Prologue

What always broke his heart was the way they dressed themselves. Divorcées in wedding gowns slumped behind the wheel in their garages; stockbrokers in Armani hanging from basement joists; the jilted plunging from rooftops drenched in cologne or perfume, as if to say their wrecked bodies still had more to offer in death than anyone had ever known in life.

This one wore a pair of black jeans over Blundstone boots, a faded green T-shirt, and a black wool sweater. A thin leather cord served as a necklace from which a silver lamb hung, her only piece of jewellery apart from a gold hoop edged with a curlicue design, like a Sufi sun, dangling from one ear. He pictured someone giving her that lamb and wondered what had been meant by it. That she was innocent? That she needed protection? Obviously, it hadn’t been enough.

They’d pulled her up onto the grass, and the discoloured lakewater drained from inside her pantlegs, a thin, greyish trickle that ran down between the green stalks. He couldn’t help thinking that the roots of the grass would gratefully take in this water, insensate to its origin, because it had been a dry summer and grass was oblivious to what came from it or what returned to it.

The photographer was taking pictures. The girl would never know. Her story was only just beginning to be told. You lived your life, making choices that you thought would become the plot of your life as you wanted to live it, but the fact was, someone else always wrote the end. It was no mystery people hated movies where the protagonist died: who needs that kind of realism?

He didn’t want to imagine what she’d been through, but he was like a receptor that has no choice what signal enters it. He imagined the cold, pressing lake, the way water holds you, its molecules tight against your body. She’d probably heard it was a peaceful way to go: it wasn’t. Even if you want to die, your body resists. You know breathing is the only way to make it work, but you don’t want to, you can’t. And then you begin to change your mind, you want to live because you’ve never felt pain like this, but it’s too late, the screaming in the blood has started, the brain starving for oxygen, and you fight, using up all your reserves, the urgent craving for air gets worse. You’re just an animal now, one in the wrong element, you flail for the surface, the sun fractured into diamonds above you, but finally you breathe and for the thirty seconds, before the water adulterates your blood and makes your heart a double ruin, the agony is unnameable, your mind is a fiery mass, you really die, you feel every moment of it. He kneeled down beside her. All that terror was over now, but she still wore the surprised expression he’d seen too many times on floaters. She was no older than thirty.

For the rest of his life, she would be dead. She would miss all the changes that would have come to make her think twice about what she’d done. He, himself, would go through depression and contentment, joy and agony. He would fail, he would thrive, and still this girl, like all the others who couldn’t give life one more day, would be gone. What he tried to do for them in death always felt like an empty triumph, but at least he would try to do it. Tell me everything, he said to her in his mind. Tell me the truth and I’ll let it be known.