The Winter Project

45. Cleo

When she received a phone call to say that the van had been found, Cleo's first thought was that it had been found on the side of the road, the occupant missing and most likely presumed dead. She was devastated to hear it had been found on the road that surrounded Lake Garda, assuming that Isabel's body was lying at the bottom of the lake, the van dusty and unused from months of abandonment.

Three days after receiving the phone call that the van had been seized, Cleo decided that she needed to take a trip to Lake Garda to find Isabel. She had begged Nic to drive her, having no understanding of the Italian public transport system and also because she was certain that Isabel was dead and so she needed Nic to be there and support her when the death was confirmed. She needed him to be there for her and to hold her hand and tell her everything would be fine. He had expressed what could have been genuine concern, but it was overtaken by the fact that he said he needed to work and couldn't just, in his words, take a few days off work to go to the lake. Cleo was not asking for a day trip to the beach, she was looking for the body of her best friend, and clearly Nic did not care about Isabel. Maybe it was understandable, for Cleo had said some truly negative things about Isabel since arriving in Milan, but those were her words based on her experiences, and Nic's disinterest was extremely hurtful.

Cleo did not handle feeling unsupported very well and she was also not able to handle her extreme emotions in situations such as this. She wanted Nic to understand her and be there for her, and his refusal was insulting. The entire night before she left for Lake Garda was spent arguing with him as she screamed and cried and pleaded him to come with her, for him to only reply with tomorrow is a Wednesday, can we go at the weekend?

Reluctantly, she took the train from Milan Central Rail station to a town called Desenzano where the van was waiting for her outside of the Polizia station. The officers gave her a description of a couple driving the van; a man believed to be partly East Asian and a woman with long hair and tan skin. This confirmed her theory that Isabel had been murdered, and this reckless couple had tried to run away with her van.

Desperate to look for clues herself as the Polizia were not very interested in chasing down the suspects and Cleo did not speak good enough Italian to know how to say I need to report a possible murder victim, she hastily opened the back of the van and for a moment was ready to go back inside the station and tell them that this in fact was not her van at all. The brightly coloured walls, the table that was part of the van itself rather than the fold out iron one that she and Isabel had dined at together countless times - this surely couldn't have been their van. The license plate, however, did not lie, and neither did one Polaroid photo printed out and left on the neatly made bed. She picked it up and stared at someone she didn't recognise.

It was of course, Isabel. Smiling bright white teeth, with a tanned and freckly face and hair that appeared brown only because the blonde parts were scraped up in a bun on top of her head. Next to her was a man smiling so hard that his eyes looked as if they were shut tight.

She looked at the van and all of sudden became aware that the van was not a sign that Isabel was in danger or a piece of evidence in her murder case; it was evidence of a woman who was doing just fine on her own. Cleo had often thought that Isabel would have suffered far too greatly if she were to be left alone, that her anxiety would crush her and she would have the ability only to curl up into a ball and wait for Cleo to return. The van showed a story of a woman who had continued her journey, allowing it to improve and to improve her. The photo was not a photo of Isabel next to a stranger; it was a photo of two strangers.

Cleo had asked the police officers where the van was found, and her first thought was to immediately drive there in the hopes that maybe she was wrong; maybe Isabel was just sat on the side of the road waiting for Cleo to pick her up. Cleo was wrong. She kept driving north, just in case Isabel was walking along the side of the road, homeless and helpless, but she was wrong again.

She began to feel those feelings again, the truly merciless ones that haunted her and plagued her mind and turned her into a person she did not recognise. She had been feeling them the night before and even that morning, but her hunt for Isabel had kept her mind occupied just enough to push them away. Now there was nothing between them and her, and they were trying to win. She pulled over at a gas station and climbed out of the van for some fresh air. She tried to call Nic, but he wasn't answering the phone. She kept calling and every time he did not answer and she heard the sound of his voicemail, she became more and more infuriated. She felt a sense of intense indescribable rage and urge for self-destruction and impulsiveness at feeling so completely abandoned and betrayed, both by Nic for not coming with her and supporting her and by Isabel for not needing her any more. The pain was so unbearable and came on so fast, and even though it had happened to Cleo so many times before, the intensity was something that nobody could ever get used to, and each time it happened it felt stronger and more difficult to repel. She had lost Isabel and on reflection it felt that it was her own fault. Now she was losing Nic, who was clearly too busy with his pathetic job to support the woman he supposedly loved, either in person or just by picking up the phone. The thought of being stood there alone, having lost the only two people she ever really cared about, was making her panic and she did not know how to stop it. She had helped Isabel out of panic attacks a thousand times, but this was different. This wasn't just hyperventilating, this was her mind going into overload and the pain was so much that she wanted it to end and she wanted it to end quickly.

She walked for maybe a mile down the road before she stopped to take in the view of the lake. She peered over the tiny railing that separated the road from the sharp cliff drop towards the water and thought about how it would feel to simply let go. She had been fighting her entire life, ever since her childhood, to feel like a normal human being. To be someone who could feel just the right amount of every emotion, someone who could love and be loved and not be overwhelmed with pain or jealousy or betrayal. She imagined the sensation of falling and the feeling of elation as the pain was swept out of her body and spread out into the atmosphere, soon to be gone along with her existence. She imagined how nobody would care.