‘Hello, lovely thing,’ she said. ‘You gave me a fright!’
The possum turned its head and scampered up the tree trunk into the blackness. She took a deep breath and let the background swishing sound of the ocean calm her.
A chill had landed in the air, and around her the bushland vibrated with the constant high-pitched hum of crickets. She heard a mopoke call out from further into the bush, a throaty double trill that pulsed and echoed like a warning call. She shivered. How silly! It’s just a silly owl!
She set off tentatively back up the hill on the unlit road, wondering if they would ever put street lights on this part. It was dangerous for pedestrians at any time of day, as there was barely any verge at all before the hill fell away. At night-time, it felt treacherous. When she reached Sylvia’s driveway, she made a mental note to tell Dan to come over at the weekend with a trailer full of dirt to help Sylvia fill in the holes. They were dreadful.
Ahead, at the end of the driveway, she could see a dim light in the front room. When she reached the house, she tapped on the door. Nothing. She peered through the glass side panel, but there was no movement. To her left, at the front of the house, the windows were open. She must tell Sylvia to close them to keep out the cold ocean damp, or she’d catch a chill. She turned the handle of the door and put her head inside, calling out gently, so as not to startle her sister, ‘Hello? Syl?’
Nobody answered. She closed the door behind her and walked into the kitchen. It was open to the living room, which was filled with an ugly patchwork chair and an old couch littered with various ethnic throws and scattered with woven cushions in muted colours that had seen better days. On the walls were abstract artworks and a very nice landscape painted by Lillian decades ago. A free-standing lamp beside the fire was turned on, throwing a faint warm glow across the room.
‘Sylvia?’
Still there was no answer. Annabelle moved across the kitchen in the dim light. Instinctively, she walked towards the sink to take in the view through the window of the ocean and the stars, and of course, there was Sylvia, sitting outside on the deck enjoying the view too. It was such a lovely night. She was facing out to the ocean, and her back was to Annabelle. As Annabelle’s eyes adjusted, she realised that Sylvia was sitting with someone else. Perhaps it was Indigo. Although they were sitting very close. Right next to each other, in fact, with no space between them at all. She squinted. It seemed to be a man, taller than Sylvia anyway, but facing away so she couldn’t get a good look. Their heads were together, relaxed, in tune. She has a lover, thought Annabelle. Good. Good girl. They were hard to find in a small town like this. She felt a swell of happiness for her sister.
She turned and tiptoed back through the kitchen, closing the front door behind her. As she stood on the porch and got her phone out to light her way, she pondered this discovery. She wondered when Dan would be home, and if she should tell him about it, or if Sylvia would want her to keep it quiet. She always found this bit hard – navigating the divide between Dan and Sylvia. The awkward history.
As she was swiping to turn on the torch, her phone buzzed silently in her hand. It was Dan.
‘Hi,’ she whispered.
‘Hi,’ said Dan. ’Just ringing to say I might be a bit later than usual. A few of us on the committee are going to have a game of pool and a beer at the pub.’
‘Oh, right,’ whispered Annabelle, staring up the driveway into the pure blackness.
‘Why are you whispering?’ asked Dan.
Annabelle squinted, then half turned and noticed movement through the opaque glass side panel of the door. Damn. She’d disturbed them.
‘No reason,’ she whispered. She took a step further out into the blackness and away from the faintly lit porch. Dan was silent for a moment.
‘Belle?’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’ll probably just see you in the morning. Don’t wait up. Okay?’
Something felt strange. The sound. The words. She could hear them in two places. She could hear Dan in two places. She stepped back into the porch and peered through the pattern of etched flowers on the glass. It looked like Dan. It was Dan. He was in Sylvia’s kitchen, with his phone to his ear.
He was telling her not to wait up. From inside Sylvia’s house.
‘Annabelle?’
She felt something inside her plummet. A swift, violent realisation. She felt the dizziness coming. Her hand dropped to her side still clutching the phone, and she stumbled forward out into the blackness. Then, without any light at all to guide her, Annabelle began to run.
Twelve
Sylvia
The long wail of the siren was interspersed with a maniacal whirring trill, and it was getting louder. The emergency vehicle sounded like it was coming down the beach road. Sylvia got up from the couch where she and Dan had just sat down. At the window, the rolling flash of red and blue lights was showing though the trees. An ambulance. It stopped just as it passed her driveway. She went into the kitchen and from the top drawer she took out her torch.
‘I’m going to have a look.’
‘Okay. I’d better stay here,’ said Dan.
Sylvia picked her way up the rutted driveway, following the torch beam. As she neared the road, Rita Perotta, her neighbour opposite, almost collided with her. She was dragging her mad Border collie on a leash.
‘Sylvia! I was just coming to see you. Annabelle told me not to, but I don’t think she’s making sense.’ Rita was breathless, speaking in a fierce whisper.
‘What is it?’ Sylvia felt a prickling sense of dread moving down her arms.
‘Annabelle – she’s sick. I found her collapsed on the road. She couldn’t breathe properly. I thought she was having a stroke or something. I called the ambulance and waited with her.’
The paramedics were talking to Annabelle in low tones about fifteen metres further along the road. She was sitting on a stretcher that had been lowered to ground level and was facing the other direction.
‘Is she all right?’ Sylvia tried to ignore the sinking feeling of guilt that had gripped her. She took a step towards the ambulance, but Rita held her arm.
‘She’s really agitated. When she stopped hyperventilating, she started sobbing. Told me not to bother you. Insisted I didn’t.’
They both stared at Annabelle’s back, listening to snatched words from the paramedics, until Rita’s dog began scratching at something in the dirt and then bucking and bouncing like a rodeo bull. She jerked him sideways onto the road. ‘Stop it, Biscuit!’
‘I should check,’ said Sylvia, as the dog settled momentarily.
‘Just let her have a few minutes with them,’ said Rita decisively. ‘She seemed a bit out of her mind, actually.’
‘What did the paramedics say?’
‘Nothing much. I just told them how I found her and they suggested I step back for a bit. They’re taking her blood pressure, I think.’
Sylvia felt her own pulse racing. Annabelle would need Dan, but she could hardly go back into the house and get him now. It would be bad enough with a normal neighbour, but Rita was an intolerable gossip. Cold fear whispered at her consciousness. What if Annabelle had seen them? She pushed the idea aside.
‘I heard she collapsed at the garden meeting last week too,’ said Rita.
‘Did she?’ asked Sylvia.
A scurrying sound emerged from the bushes on the hill, and Biscuit began pulling violently at the leash, whimpering with excitement.
Rita heaved him back with both hands. ‘Yes,’ she panted. ‘Had a turn or something. Didn’t she tell you?’
‘No,’ said Sylvia. She had banned Dan from mentioning Annabelle when they were together. She knew she could hardly take a moral stance on anything, but the whole thing felt worse, even more traitorous, if her sister’s name was mentioned between them.
‘Carted off in an ambulance. Hellie Beacher told me. Biscuit! No, boy!’
‘I’ll go in and ring Dan,’ said Sylvia, sighing. She turned the
torch back towards the house and shone it at the driveway, wondering what on earth she was doing. She should have insisted on speaking with Annabelle, checked she was all right, but something strange was going on. What was Annabelle hiding from her? What had caused this? Why was she sobbing? Surely she couldn’t have seen Dan inside the house. His car was parked down at the surf club behind the toilet block, so she couldn’t have spotted that either. Sylvia needed to think. She needed to speak to Dan.
When she walked back into the house, Dan was sitting on the patchwork chair, fiddling with his phone.
‘What’s the emergency?’
‘It’s Annabelle. She’s had some sort of turn. Collapsed and hyperventilating. Down on the road.’
Dan was quiet for a moment, then he let out a huge, heavy sigh.
‘Rita Perotta found her,’ continued Sylvia. ‘Said Annabelle didn’t want to disturb me. Said she was sick last week, too.’
Dan brought both his hands to his head and slid them through his hair. He stared at the floor in silence.
‘Rita said she went to hospital during a garden meeting. What was that about?’
Dan stood up and put his phone in his pocket. ‘Doctors said it was a panic attack.’
‘What? She doesn’t suffer from anxiety, does she? Well, apart from the usual…’
‘I don’t know. Sounded like crap to me, but the doc said she had to see a psychologist.’
Sylvia flinched at his offhand tone. ‘How did that go?’ she asked.
Dan didn’t say anything.
‘Dan?’
‘I don’t know. Look, I’m going to head down along the beach and get the car. I’d better go home. Maybe it is panic attacks.’
‘Poor Anna. Maybe she…’ Sylvia shook her head, barely able to finish the thought.
Dan said, ‘Hopefully she didn’t work out that I was here, but if she did, I’m not going to lie about us.’ He came across the room and placed a finger under her chin. ‘Syl—’
‘You’ll have to drive past her on the road to get out. I really don’t want her to find out you were here.’ Sylvia’s whole body was rigid with fear.
‘Syl, I’m yours. I’m only keeping this secret because you want to.’
She flicked his finger from her chin with an irritable swipe.
A loud knock startled them both, and Sylvia spun around to face the door. Dan took a step backwards, just as she whispered, ‘I’ll ignore it.’
‘Your car’s there, and it’s probably Rita,’ said Dan quietly. ‘I’ll wait in the bedroom.’
The knocking sounded again, more forceful this time. Dan walked into the bedroom and closed the door. Sylvia took a deep breath, then went to open the front door. A paramedic was standing there, the bright white of his shirt stark against the night. He was holding a powerful torch.
‘Sylvia?’
‘Yes.’
He took a step sideways and turned back to face the driveway. Behind him, in the dark, the second paramedic was supporting Annabelle.
‘Your sister felt unwell. We didn’t think it was wise for her to drive just yet. She’s going to be all right, though.’
The second paramedic walked forward holding Annabelle. In the light of the porch, she looked pale and shaken. She was staring down at the ground, and when she looked up at Sylvia, there was such a raw, desperate pain in her eyes that Sylvia wished a crack would open up in the earth and swallow her. Annabelle knew.
‘Come in,’ she said.
The paramedic brought Annabelle inside and took her to the couch. Annabelle sank into it and looked up at the men. ‘Thank you. I’m so sorry to have wasted your time.’
‘No trouble, love. It wasn’t a waste at all. You make sure you get to the doctor tomorrow, okay?’
Annabelle nodded, and a tear rolled down her cheek. She swiped it away and stared at the floor again.
As Sylvia showed the paramedics to the door, she thought: please don’t leave. This is the end of something. The beginning of something else. I’m not ready.
The scene felt strangely familiar, and yet it had been more than forty years ago that the whole thing had played out in reverse. She still remembered the jumpsuit she’d worn to Alice Tarraby’s hen’s night. Its plunging neckline and flared pants with a huge belt – a bright yellow outfit to celebrate the beginning of how things were going to be. The weddings amongst her friends were starting, and she knew Dan was keen for them to be next. He was older, twenty-four, and ready to settle down. They’d been together now for nearly three years and she’d been waiting for her father and Annabelle to be ready to manage without her before she let Dan propose to her properly.
Annabelle would leave school soon, get a job probably. Maybe at a dress shop. She wasn’t as academic as Sylvia, but she adored people. She cared about making them happy.
Everyone knew Dan was a catch, but what they didn’t know was how much he and Sylvia needed each other. It hurt them to be apart. He was so smart and so devoted to her. Which was why, when it happened, it felt like the whole world had collapsed on top of her in great piercing shards of rubble.
She’d been out with Lillian at the party. They’d taken Lillian’s car – a slightly battered Kingswood that Lillian treated like a pet. She renamed it every week or so, depending on her mood. They had been drinking at the party, glasses of Porphyry Pearl, but not so much that she couldn’t remember what happened afterwards, in all its hideous, crushing detail.
Lillian had dropped her home and she had dashed across the front of the garage trying to avoid the rain that was pelting down. Mud splattered up her boots and clung to the hem of the jumpsuit. She let herself in the front door. In the hallway, at the rear of the house, she stopped. From the light of the bathroom, she could see that Annabelle’s door was wide open.
‘Anna?’ she whispered into the gloom of the bedroom. It was late, and usually she would have crept past, but Annabelle had always slept with the door firmly shut since their mother had died. At first it was probably so she could cry herself to sleep in private. But after the first few months, Sylvia decided it must have made her feel safer.
From the glow of the bathroom light, she could see that Annabelle’s bed was empty. The bedspread looked as pristine and neatly made as Annabelle left it every morning when she got up.
‘Annabelle?’ She said it more loudly, but there was no answer. She flicked on the bedroom light. There was nobody there. She walked further down the hall to their father’s room. Through the crack in the door she could hear his irregular grunting snores. She walked into the lounge room, flicking on the light as she did.
‘Anna?’ The house remained silent. Sylvia sat down in her father’s armchair. It was past midnight. She took a cigarette out of the packet on the mantelpiece and lit it. Where could Annabelle be? She wasn’t allowed out to parties. Soon it would be different, she kept telling Sylvia. Soon she’d be sixteen! She would twirl around the kitchen hugging herself and imagining the glorious life that lay ahead of her – boys, parties, beautiful dresses. Sylvia wished her little sister wasn’t so extremely pretty, and so trusting. It hurt to watch her dream like that. Annabelle’s nature meant that people would take advantage of her – she just wanted to please everyone, and that was a dangerous thing.
Sylvia took a drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke towards the fireplace, drumming the fingers of her other hand against her knee. Where was her sister? Worry began to gnaw at her. Should she wake her father and ask? Or had Annabelle slipped out with friends after he’d fallen asleep? There were no neighbours for miles, so she wouldn’t have been able to walk anywhere. But one of the Palfrey boys might have come to pick her up. Or Eadie Bentley. She’d got her licence last month and was getting around in one of their family’s farm utes. Annabelle had wanted to go roller skating in Burnie with Eadie tonight. Maybe she’d managed to persuade their father to let her, but it was doubtful. He worried about her going in cars with other kids. And anyway, it was way past any curfew he would have set.
<
br /> Sylvia finished the cigarette and flicked the butt into the fireplace. She turned off the light and went into the kitchen. When she opened the fridge, the smell of something sour hit her. Ignoring it, she pulled a huge jug of milk from the top shelf and poured some into a glass, then turned off the kitchen light and sat on the window seat sipping the milk and wondering what to do. What would Mum have done? She wanted to phone Dan, but it was late. He had been stressed all week. Work stuff seemed to be getting on top of him; he had an urgent matter in court on Monday and needed to spend the weekend preparing for it. This had been good news for Lillian, who had pressed Dan into sitting with her dad for the night so she could go to the party with Sylvia. Len needed help getting out of the wheelchair, and occasionally he had seizures.
Sylvia wondered how Dan had managed tonight with Len’s nightly routine. She’d done it a few times herself, when Lillian had things to go to. Len was quiet, but he was kind and had a wicked sense of humour. He’d joke about the pills he had to take with dinner that made his arms feel like liquorice and his head go fuzzy. Then he’d joke about the whisky he wasn’t meant to be drinking on top of it, which all added to the difficulty of getting him out of the wheelchair and onto the bed when the time came. Sylvia didn’t mind sitting with him. He was a good listener and he didn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself.
Sylvia settled into the soft surface of the old window seat. She put a cushion behind her head and lay back, resting her eyes. Annabelle would be all right. She was just wanting to grow up too fast. That was all. She saw what Sylvia had with Dan and she wanted that too. When Dan slung his arm around Sylvia and drew her close – if they were washing up in the kitchen, or mucking around in the dairy helping to milk the cows at the weekend – Annabelle looked so wistful. She was like a puppy dog wanting to join in with its master. She adored Dan. It was sweet that she was so devoted to him.
Sylvia let herself relax. She wished Dan was here, holding her. He had been a bit grumpy this afternoon, she had noticed. He was busy and really didn’t have the time to go and sit with Len, but he could squeeze in some work over there, and he wouldn’t refuse Lillian. They were old friends as much as work colleagues.
The Daughter's Promise (ARC) Page 12
