*
All the way out of the park, Lila was convinced she’d be confronted. After all, when Johnson had given her leave to take one of the flasks, he hadn’t expected it to be occupied. If they searched her, could they tell it wasn’t empty? Although she hadn’t stolen one of theirs—not really. She had just removed one they had inherited with the property. One she had as much right to as they did, if anyone could be said to own a ghost.
She could have sworn she didn’t breathe until she was free and clear.
Purchasing a return ferry ticket was the next part of her plan, though she fretted at the delay that kept her from her mother’s bedside. But this was the part that would set her mother’s mind at rest. The part of which Lila had dreamed. The part where her father found his final resting place.
Lila stood on the deck, seagulls wheeling overhead, salt water on her lips. She held the flask in one hand while she called the hospice. Please let her mother still be alive. Please, please, please.
“Hello. This is Lila Muchamore. I’d like to enquire after Mrs Sophie Muchamore, in room 12.” Her palms sweated as she waited. “I see. Can you tell her I’ll be in tomorrow?” She nodded, forgetting the person on the other end couldn’t see her. “Of course. I understand. Yes, if she needs morphine then go ahead.”
Morphine. That means it’s close, doesn’t it? Really close.
Her chest ached when she terminated the call.
This was all for you, Mum. It was always for you.
Lila had never been much for religion. Her mother now, she was a different story.
“I don’t want to die, Lila,” she had said, her liver-spotted hand mopping spittle from her mouth with her lace-edged hankerchief. “He might be there. I swore to spend eternity with him, and I couldn’t bear that.”
Lila wasn’t well up on the wording of the marriage ceremony, but she was pretty sure spending eternity with a drunken wife-beater wasn’t part of the terms and conditions.
“If he’s there when I pass, I don’t know what I’ll do. Can’t exactly turn around at the Pearly Gates and come back, now, can I?” A bitter laugh turned to a cough that threatened to rip her chest apart.
“He’s hardly going to be in heaven, Mum,” she had said. “Bastard like him wouldn’t get there. The tiger only did what the rest of us wanted to do.”
Ripped his bloody head off. Score one for the tiger.
“But what if I get sent to—you know—the other place?” Her voice was scarcely a whisper. “What if he’s there?”
“You’ve not done anything to get sent below. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’ve hated. I’ve wished him dead. I’ve wished him rotting in hell. Father Timothy says you get sent to hell for even thinking bad things.”
Lila shook the memories away, and held the capsule out into the wind and the sea spray. For a moment she saw the hanged man again, doomed to pace the gallows platform, looking for his family forever. Could she do this? She had pitied the hanged man, but maybe he had raped, or murdered. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe it had been his victims who had damned him to an eternity of torment.
“You ready to spend the rest of time at the bottom of the sea, Dad? Everyone thought you were a hero, but you were just a sad woman-hating bastard, weren’t you?”
Trapped within the container forever. No escape. No release. No priest to send him peacefully into the beyond. Just forever, and the walls of the container, and the dark depths of the ocean, where light could not penetrate.
Her mother deserved peace for the days remaining to her. Her mother deserved to enter eternity knowing he wouldn’t be there; that he’d never be there.
She let go, and the capsule disappeared beneath the waves. Lila watched the wake for a moment then turned away, the plaintive shrieking of gulls lingering in her ears.
*
Her mother had faded while Lila had been away, but she still lived. Lila had almost not gone on her journey, terrified that her mother might die while she was away, might never know the peace of mind Lila hoped to bring her. But her gamble had paid off.
Her mother was drifting now, barely conscious. The nurses assured her she was in no pain; that the morphine had settled her; that it was just a waiting game now.
“She can still hear you, you know. You can talk to her.” The nurse in her blue overalls looked too young to be in a hospice ward, her youth a stark contrast in this place of death, however much they tried to sweeten it with flowers and perfumes.
Lila leaned closer and took her mother’s frail hand in her own.
“It’s safe now, Mum. He can’t get you. No matter what, he won’t be there. I promise. I saw to it. You can pass on in peace.”
And a smile brushed her mother’s lips.
THE END
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