What I Threw Away

I’ve had good moments in my life. I’ve had more horrible ones. I know you want me to start from the beginning, but there are two beginnings. You already know the first. The second happened last Friday when I was cleaning the cupboards. I started on one, it hadn’t been opened in years, the one beneath the stairs, where everything goes when neither of us can bring ourselves to throw it away. There was an old birthday present we never got a chance to give, nor had the heart to get rid of...

You know our story. At least what was reported twenty-three years ago.

Anyway, I pulled out a box marked CABLES that day. There were cables in it, obviously. Long and short tangled black snakes with plugs for things we no longer own. Behind that box was a camera bag. I remembered what it was before I picked it up. The strap had gone stiff and dust settled into the fabric, turning the black canvas into a weird fluffy grey.

I carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the table where the zip caught halfway around as I tried to open it, but I managed. Inside was the old video camera; my memory was a bit fuzzy, but it looked more or less the same. An old digital Sony. I held it in both hands, it was heavier than I remembered.

I spent half an hour searching through drawers for a cable that would connect it to the television. I did check the cables box, but none of them fit. Claire would have known where to find one, I didn’t ask her though. She was at work, and I had the day off.

I told myself I was only curious. That I was cleaning and only going to take a five-minute break. That this is what people do when they find old family videos, it’s normal to get nostalgic about family, after all.

I did eventually find the right cable to connect it to the TV. The first video was of Christmas, it was timestamped for 25/12/2000.

Emily was four, sitting cross-legged beside the tree in her pyjamas. They were the Blinky Bill ones my parents got her. She loved Blinky Bill. She was tearing into the paper, giggling the entire time.

I could hear Claire laugh behind the camera. It moved over to me. I was younger. Thinner. Still had a full head of hair.

“Show Dad,” Claire said.

Emily held up a pink saucepan.

“What are you cooking?” I asked.

“Pas’ghetti.”

“You hate spaghetti.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You didn’t like it last time.”

“I was little then.”

The picture shook because Claire was laughing.

I stopped the video, then for a while I sat there, with the camera in my lap listening to the magpies warble outside.

Then I rewound and watched it again.

The next video was mostly a montage of birthday moments. Emily blowing out candles before everyone finishes singing. Emily asleep against my chest at the zoo. Emily in the backyard, shrieking while I spray her with the hose.

Moments I had forgotten. It’s another kind of loss. I kept watching until my eyes hurt. I couldn’t help it.

When I watched the next video, Emily stood at the edge of the ocean in a yellow rash shirt, white water breaking around her ankles. I remembered that day, I was the one filming. She was six, and refused to swim because she thought sharks could crawl onto the beach.

“You said they couldn’t come this shallow,” she told me.

“They can’t.”

“Then why is Mum staying back there?”

The camera turned back towards Claire, sitting beneath the umbrella.

“Because Mum’s scared of seaweed,” I said.

“I am not,” Claire called out.

“You screamed when it touched your foot.”

“It wrapped around my ankle.”

“It was grass.”

“It was alive.”

Emily laughed so hard she dropped her bucket.

I paused the video, and just looked at her. At her frozen face on the screen. Her mouth opened and her eyes squeezed shut. Six years old. She will be six years old, forever. I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand when I was staring at her. I think I cried, that bit I don’t remember.

The last video looked as if it were blank or an error. It started off as just a black, muted screen until a kind of grey static jumped across the television. I let it run while I gathered the cables from the floor.

Then the picture appeared. It was crooked and shaking, pointed at the inside of a car. For a second, I thought it was another holiday. Emily was holding it, I saw her fingers slipping across the lens. Between them I saw the passenger seat, part of the dashboard and flashes of trees through a window.

“Give me that.” I heard. It was Claire’s voice.

The camera swung around and I saw Emily’s face. It filled the screen. One eye, half a cheek, blonde hair caught against her mouth.

“Mum, look.”

“Put it down.”

“I’m filming.”

“I said put it down.”

Claire reached towards her and the image jolted sideways. For two seconds, the camera pointed through the windscreen. In the background I heard a traffic report play over the radio. Heavy traffic on the Kwinana Freeway. Then the announcer gave the time, six thirty-two, before throwing back to a Justin Timberlake song. I saw the road ahead darkening beneath a fiery orange sky, too. Branches hung over the road. Then Claire’s hand covered the lens and the video cut to black.

I stared at the television. It was twelve seconds. Maybe fifteen. Maybe fifteen seconds of Emily I’d never seen before.

I rewound it obviously. Watched it again. I remember every movement Emily’s fingers made. Every stain on the passenger seat. Claire’s voice and the trees.

I watched it again.

And again.

On the fourth or fifth time, I noticed the numbers in the bottom corner: 14 JUN 2003. I know you already know that date. But you don't know what it did to us, to me.

I stopped breathing when I saw that. Not figuratively. For a moment I forgot how to breathe.

June fourteenth. That’s the day everything changed. I have spent twenty-three years knowing that date.

It is written on police reports and newspaper clippings. It is carved into the stone beneath Emily’s name, even though there is nothing buried there.

June fourteenth, 2003.

That's the day I lost my daughter.

I rewound the video, and stared at it.

The date remained. The radio told me the time. It was June fourteenth. 6:32 p.m. The thing was, Emily disappeared shortly after midday that day. It was a Saturday. I had taken her to the park down the road. Hawthorn Park. She wore denim overalls and a pink jumper because the wind had a chill. She climbed the wrong way up the slide, then slid down before she ran towards the swings.

I sat on the bench not far from her and opened my book. I can’t remember what book it was. It’s stupid isn’t it? I can remember every other exact detail. But not the book that lost me my daughter.

I have replayed those moments in my brain so often they no longer feel real. They feel like footage from someone else’s life. Or a chapter in a horrible, horrible book. Probably the book I was reading…

I remember I got through about a dozen pages before I noticed the silence. Children are never quiet in a playground.

I looked up and saw a swing moving without her. I told myself it was only the wind; there was a breeze that day, after all. But as the years went on I started telling myself Emily had been sitting on it moments earlier. That whoever took her had only just left.

By one o’clock, police were searching the park.

By two, they had closed the surrounding streets.

By three, Claire was standing beside me in front of cameras, crying so hard a policewoman had to hold her upright.

It had all happened so fast.

At 6:32, Claire was supposedly searching the streets. The same as me. But that video showed dusk through a windscreen. It had Emily alive with her mother.

I carried the camera upstairs to Emily’s room at the end of the hall. Claire wanted to change it after the first year, then again after five. She said keeping it untouched wasn’t healthy.

I refused every time.

The pink walls have faded, but glow-in-the-dark stars still cling to the ceiling. Her bookshelf sags beneath picture books and school readers.

I closed the door and turned the lock. Then I sat on the floor beside her bed and waited.

Claire is home at five twenty normally. That day was no different, I heard her keys drop into the bowl downstairs.

“Daniel?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

Cupboard doors opened and the kettle clicked on.

Then I didn’t hear anything for a bit, until… footsteps moved towards the cupboard beneath the stairs.

A minute later, they climbed.

She stopped outside Emily’s room.

“Daniel?”

“I’m in here.” I said.

I rested the camera on my knee as the handle turned.

“Why is this locked?”

“I found the camera.”

Nothing moved on the other side of the door when I said that.

“I was cleaning the cupboard.”

Still nothing moved.

“There was a video.”

Her hand left the handle. I heard it. When she spoke again, her voice was soft.

“What’s wrong, Daniel?” she said.

“I found old videos of Emily”

“I saw Christmas. And her birthday. The kitchen set when she was four.”

“The pink kitchen set?” she said.

“Yes.”

“She loved that thing.”

“She did.”

There was another pause.

“I saw the beach.”

Claire pressed something against the door. Her palm, maybe. Or her forehead.

“Open up, baby.”

“There was another video.”

The floorboard creaked beneath her.

“It was only short.”

“What video?”

“Emily had the camera.”

“When did she use the camera?”

“You told her to put it down.”

Claire said nothing.

I looked at Emily’s frozen face on the camera’s small screen. Emily’s eye. Claire’s fingers reaching towards her.

“It says June fourteenth. Two thousand and three.”

She went quiet, then said “The day you lost her.”

She knew how to hurt me. She always did.

“It says 6:32.” I said.

“The dates reset whenever the battery came out, Daniel.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Because that must have been what happened.”

“Then why did the radio say it’s the fourteenth of June O’three, at six thirty two?”

It didn’t actually, it just said the time. I don’t know why I lied and said that. But the thing is, that there was a silence again. A weird silence.

I told her I recognised the road too. It took me a while, but I remembered it. The white posts and how the gum trees leaned over the street. They went up Wattle Ridge Road, that’s forty kilometres from our house.

After that she kept asking me to open the door. “Daniel,” she said. “Open the door.”

“Why was she with you?” I asked.

“She wasn’t.”

“I watched it.” I told her.

“You watched twelve seconds of an old tape with the wrong date.”

“She was wearing the pink jumper.”

“She wore it all winter.” She tried telling me.

“You stood beside me while they searched.”

“Open the door and we’ll talk.”

“You watched me walk through that park every night.”

“You weren’t well.”

“I dug through bins.”

“I know.”

“I knocked on every door between our house and the river.”

“I was there.”

“No, you weren’t.”

The words came out quickly. I think that’s what frightened her, because after that the handle turned again, harder.

“Give me the camera.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not thinking clearly.”

“I sent the video already.”

I lied. It came easy. And it made Claire stop pulling at the handle.

“Who did you send it to?”

That was the moment of confirmation. There was no confusion or disbelief; it was fear. She was scared about me sending that video out.

I closed my eyes. For twenty-three years, I have imagined Emily in the hands of strangers. I have seen her dragged into cars, hidden in sheds, carried across the bush. Every terrible possibility.

“Who did you send it to?” Claire asked me again.

“Where were you taking her?”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it.”

“You weren’t watching her.”

Imagine hearing that for the seventy-fifth-thousandth time. Being told it’s your fault your six-year-old daughter is gone. For twenty-three years.

“You took her.” I said.

“You were reading.”

“You took her.” I said again.

“She could have wandered onto the road. She could have gone with anyone.”

“But she went with you.”

“You didn’t even notice.”

“I trusted the park.”

“You trusted a book.”

“I trusted you.”

Claire’s voice changed after that comment.

“You think you were a good father?”

“I think she was alive at six thirty-two that day.”

“You were never there. Even when you were standing right beside her, you weren’t there.”

“Why did you take her?”

“I was leaving you.”

I stared at the stars on the ceiling. Some had fallen over the years, leaving pale shapes in the dust. But more or less it was still Emily’s ceiling. They were her stars.

“You were leaving me?”

“I had money. Clothes. Everything we needed.”

“Why the park?”

“Because she would come with me.”

“She would have come if you asked.”

“You would have stopped us.”

“You made me think someone kidnapped her.”

“I was going to call.” She said.

“When?”

“Once we were safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“You.”

I remember laughing. Not the ‘haha’ funny kind. More the hurts-so-much all you can do is laugh kind.

“You let the police search for her”

“I panicked.”

“You went on television and cried.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“You told them what she was wearing.”

“You had already told everyone anyway.”

“Why did you stay with me?”

She hit the door then. Or maybe it was after what I said next. I know you need the order exactly. But I’m telling you it blurs together around here.

“Open it.” She yelled.

“Why did you stay? If you wanted to leave, why stay with me!”

I heard her laughing after I asked her this. But she never answered me. I still don’t know why she stayed.

“What happened after the video?”

“Nothing.”

Claire was breathing heavily through her nose by now.

“Did she come home?”

“She wouldn’t stop crying.”

“What did you do?”

Then she hit the door again.

“What did you do?”

“She kept saying you’d find her. She said you always found her when she hid.”

We played hide and seek a lot. I’d always find Emily beneath the kitchen table or behind curtains. Curled inside the laundry basket with both hands clamped over her mouth to stop herself laughing.

“What did you do, Claire?”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Thats when I stood. I remember that clearly. “Where is she?”

Claire said nothing and I crossed the room and placed my hand on the door.

She was inches away. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her there. Over twenty years of sleeping beside someone, you know when they’re close.

Claire would hold me when I woke up screaming. She told me it would be ok, and when she felt nice she’d say it wasn’t my fault. Then, when she wanted to hurt me, she told me it was.

“You said I lost her,” I said.

“You did.”

“No.”

“If you had been watching—”

“You took her.”

“If you hadn’t been reading—”

“Did you kill her?”

The silence that followed was horrific. She didn’t deny it. She didn’t sound shocked or offended. A normal person would have, wouldn’t they? There was only her heavy breathing on the other side of the door.

And now, when I think of the days after Emily vanished. How the police went through the house. How volunteers would sleep in cars… it starts to make sense. Claire tore open every cupboard because she could not stand to look at anything Emily had touched.

Rubbish built beside the shed. Black bags and old rolled up carpets. She piled up broken timber from the playhouse I had promised to repair before she disappeared, too.

Claire screamed that she wanted it all gone. So, I loaded the trailer about two days after she went missing, because I couldn’t handle another fight. She made me drive out beyond Wattle Ridge one evening. The landfill was basically empty of people at that hour. I reversed towards the pit and got rid of it all. I pushed it all in. I didn’t even look at what I was throwing out. And where were you? How did you let me tow a trailer out there alone during all of this? What the fuck is wrong with you?

“Where is she?” I asked.

Claire started to laugh. It started softly, wet broken sobs. But it grew into something worse.

“What’s funny?” I demanded.

“You still don’t know...”

“Tell me where she is.”

Her laughter stopped.

“You’re the one who buried her.”