Free The Gloaming by Melanie Finn Page B

idea that anything out of my head or mouth might be logical. Tom believed my atheism was an affectation intended to annoy him, there was nothing logical about it. He suspected it was a reaction to my parents’ spiritualism. Their earthship in the Mojave is filled with Buddhas and various Hindu gods and santos from Mexico. They appreciate the method of worship as a mechanism for connection to an unknowable, eternal Energy. ‘
Chakras?’
Tom muttered when he met them, when my mother insisted on going about naked and my father smoked his bong and said Tom’s sacral and heart chakras were blocked. He couldn’t wait to get away from the incense. Neither could I.
    â€˜What do you want me to do?’ I ask Dorothea again.
    She squeezes my hand. Tears roll down her cheeks and her face shines with thanks. Her hair is a halo of light. ‘Take it from here. Take it far from here.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜The
uchawi
will direct you.’
    â€˜I don’t know what that means.’
    More forcefully, she squeezes my hands: ‘The
uchawi
will direct you.’
    Â 
Arnau, March 18
    â€˜It is Detective Inspector Paul Strebel,’ a voice said through the intercom. ‘I tried to phone—’
    â€˜Yes, I’m sorry, it’s disconnected. The bill. I forgot to pay it. Please come up.’ I buzzed him up.
    He appeared, almost too tall for the doorway, awkward, angular. In his early fifties, he was thin, with a narrow face, receding hair and quiet, dark eyes under eyebrows in need of trimming.
    â€˜Please come in,’ I said. Polite, calm. ‘Can I get you something?’
    â€˜Thank you, yes. But no caffeine. I’m not a good sleeper.’
    â€˜Tea? Mint? Chamomile?’ Was this right? Should I be offering him herbal tea? He was here to talk about dead children and all I had was manners. As if I was hosting a cocktail party for the associates in Dili. Smile, serve exquisite canapés while wearing an elegant black dress. Anything to distract from
the atrocities
in the files.
    â€˜That’s fine,’ Strebel said, without specifying. He took off his gloves but not his coat. The gloves were fine-grained black leather, but they didn’t suit him. He wasn’t urbane. I suspected someone had bought them for him as a gift, his wife or daughter.
    We sat, I poured. My hand trembled on the teapot’s handle and he saw this. ‘Don’t worry.’
    â€˜Worry?’
    â€˜I mean, don’t be afraid.’
    â€˜Of the tea?’
    â€˜No.’ He ventured a smile. ‘Of me.’
    I put the teapot down. ‘Is that it? Am I afraid of you?’
    He leaned forward to sip his tea. ‘I expect so. You don’t know what to tell me. You don’t know what I know.’
    When I said nothing, he went on. ‘Or perhaps it’s more a generalized fear. It can be frightening to lose control.’
    Would he know about that? I glanced at his kind, tired face and tried to imagine him losing control, shouting or crying. I tried to imagine him being afraid. Then I realized he wasn’t speaking of personal experience but professional observation: he had seen people lose control. His profession—like Tom’s—concerned people who lost control.
    â€˜Are you here to arrest me?’ I said.
    â€˜For what?’ He turned the cup in his hands. ‘You think the accident is your fault?’
    â€˜But it must be, somehow. I was the driver.’
    â€˜Fault would mean you drove into them on purpose. Do you think you are such a person—capable of such an act?’
    Tom believed everyone is capable of everything, fundamentally. To him, violence is circumstantial. The nicest man, given the right set of circumstances, may become the most brutal genocidaire. Everyone? I’d pushed Tom, even you, even me? How do you think these atrocities happen, he’d countered, if not for people like you, people like me?
    â€˜If I