David and I both ran across to her and reached her at the same time.
‘It’s Donna,’ she said. She seemed like she was close to hyperventilating.
We followed her inside. Tamara was muttering to herself, something about medicine. ‘I thought it would be okay. I didn’t know.’ She was babbling. I exchanged a look with David, both of us fearful of what we were going to find in the bedroom.
We went in.
Donna was lying on the floor on her back. She wasn’t moving. One of her hands was clasped around the gold cross she always wore, her grip so tight I could imagine the metal cutting into her palm. Her expression was neutral, though, as if she were asleep.
I threw myself down on my knees beside her. She wasn’t breathing. I grabbed the wrist beneath the hand that wasn’t clutching the cross and felt for a pulse, not finding one. All the while Tamara paced the room behind me, making distressed noises and saying, ‘Oh no oh no’， over and over.
‘Do you know first aid?’ I asked David.
He shook his head. ‘Do you?’
‘No.’ I was pretty sure that even if we were both trained paramedics, we wouldn’t be able to do anything. She was gone.
Tamara was giving me the desperate look of someone who craves good news they know isn’t going to come.
‘I’ll go and find someone,’ David said, getting up and running out.
I got up too. ‘Maybe we should go outside,’ I said, gently guiding Tamara from the room and out on to the deck. I didn’t want to be in that room with Donna’s body, and I didn’t think Tamara should be either. There was no sign of David.
I thought back to the scene earlier, when Tamara and Donna had returned from their trip to the drugstore. How grey and shaken Donna had looked.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Was it her heart? Is that why you’d been to the drugstore?’
It took a while for her to get the words out, and when they came they were wet, drenched in tears. ‘She forgot her beta blockers. She had a heart attack last year that almost killed her and she’s been on meds ever since, and she swore she brought them, accused me of throwing them out, but I swear I didn’t.’
‘So you didn’t manage to get any at the drugstore?’
She shook her head. ‘They said we needed to wait twenty-four hours for them to arrive. We should never have left the city. But I thought she’d be okay as long as she didn’t exert herself. As long as her heart rate didn’t get too high. And I wasn’t there with her, at the . . . at the end. She’d been griping and blaming me for losing her pills and I got angry with her and went to take a shower. I didn’t want to get out because I didn’t want to fight with her again and then . . . when I came out, she was like that.’
I went inside and found some Kleenex, handing one to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
I thought about the cross around Donna’s neck and the way she’d been clutching it as she died. Clearly a woman of faith. I wasn’t sure if Tamara was religious too, but I said, ‘She’ll be in a better place now.’
Tamara stared at me. To my surprise she said, ‘She thought she was going to Hell.’
‘Sorry?’
‘When she had her first heart attack, she thought it was a punishment from God. For the two of us. Being together.’
So they were a couple.
‘It’s how she was raised. Her father was the kind of man who chucks around words like “sin” and “fornicate” and “damnation” over breakfast. The kind of man who throws his sixteen-year-old daughter on to the street and tells her she’s got a demon inside her, that she’s going straight to Hell.’
I shook my head, unsure of what to say, letting Tamara talk.
‘It never really left her. She’d be fine during the day, but at night it’d come out. These awful dreams, real as day. The Devil, coming for us. It was okay for a while – especially after she joined another church, one that was more liberal, more modern – but after her heart attack it was like she was that terrified, confused sixteen-year-old again. She thought everything her daddy warned her about was coming true.’ Her lip curled. ‘That bastard. If he wasn’t already long dead . . .’
‘That’s awful.’
‘She almost left me over it. Not just because she was scared for herself. She got so sleep-deprived that she honestly believed she was saving me from him.’
Eventually David returned. He had Vivian with him. I followed her into the bedroom.