happened?â he insisted. âWhat happened then?â
âNothing,â I shrugged. Everyone was looking at me. I licked my lips. Shrugged again. âNothing. She was murdered. Sheâs gone. Thereâs nothing ⦠afterwards, if thatâs what you mean.â
Aamir watched me. We could have been the only people in the room.
âNothing happens afterwards,â I said. âThereâs no ⦠resolution. You go to work. You come home. You come to these groups and you ââ I gestured to the coffee machine. âYou drink coffee. You say the mantra. Thereâs no afterwards.â
Everyone looked at Megan to deny or confirm my assessment. She opened her folder, shuffled the papers, collected her thoughts. One of the urns started reboiling itself in the taut seconds of silence and I heard the spitting of its droplets on the plastic table top.
âLetâs look at some handouts,â Megan said.
Â
Anthony was waiting for me by the vending machine after the meeting. We walked up the stairs and onto the street.
âThat was a bit harsh,â he said.
âWhat?â
âThe whole âthereâs no afterwardsâ thing.â
âReality is often harsh,â I said. We paused to watch Aamir and Reema walking to their car. The big angry man glanced back at me as he opened the passenger door for his wife. His expression was unreadable. It was the first time that his expression had been unreadable since I had laid eyes on him an hour earlier. The rage was gone, replaced by something else. His shoulders were inches lower. I didnât know what had taken overfrom the boiling hot fury that I saw in the meeting room, but whatever it was, it was cold.
âDo you really believe that?â Anthony asked me. âThat it means nothing?â
âMurder?â
âYes.â
âYes,â I said, âI do. You donât get over it. You donât realise the mystical fucking meaning in it. You donât accept that it, like everything, happens for a reason. Come on, Tone,â I scoffed at him. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette.
âEvery night at eight oâclock that guy tries to say goodnight to his dead kid.â I nodded at Aamirâs car as it pulled into the street. âAnd heâll be doing it until the day he dies.â
Â
She always felt better when night was falling. The darkness folded over her like a blanket, protective. Light had never been a friend to Tara. It seemed to fall on all of her at once, seemed to wriggle into her creases and folds and dance around her curves, to expose her every surface. Tara always had plenty of surface. Sheâd never been able to keep track of all there was of her, and Joanie was there to point out the parts she forgot, those bulges and bubbles and handles of flesh that slipped and slid from under hems and over belts.
Pull your shirt down, Tara. Pull your pants up, Tara. Pull your sleeves down, Tara. Jesus. Everyone can see you.
Everyone can see you.
At the dinner table Joanie would grab and pinch and twist a slab of flesh Tara didnât know was exposed, a roll above her jeans or the tender white flesh on the backs of her arms. You couldnât cover Tara with a tent, Joanie said. She could feed an African village. Getting downstairs to dinner became a journey she couldnât take, so she began to take her meals up in her attic bedroom, staring at the park, the runners going round and round between the trees. Sometimes getting from the bed to the computer was too much. Tara simply lay between the sheets and dreamed about African people cutting her upand sharing her, carving down her thighs in neat slices like a Christmas ham until there was only bone â gorgeous, strong, light bone. Bone that shone, redemptive and clean. Tara lost herself dreaming.
The girls at school giggled at her bulges, the blue bruises that peppered them. Though decades had passed, their voices