by Tiffany Sala
Brad sighed. “We’ll turn around.”
Watching Jess run off towards a public toilet block at the edge of a park, I tried to work out if this was an opportunity, or if I was just about to make a terrible mistake.
“How’s everything at home?” Brad asked, staring out at the doorway Jess had disappeared through.
“Not good,” I admitted. “I thought Mum might not even let me get out to school today. She got wind of my maybe having plans to meet you. If she knew I was skipping now…” I shook my head.
“She heard?” Brad’s hands tightened on his steering wheel. He’d hardly taken them off since stopping. He was clearly pretty keen to get well out of town, but of course I didn’t blame him for that.
“I didn’t want her to but she did some snooping, found out I’d been looking up about you. She completely went off.” I shot him a cautious look. “She did completely blow the truth that you never did anything though, so there’s that.”
Brad was gripping his steering wheel for dear life now. “Didn’t expect that.”
“Yeah, she couldn’t bring herself to lie about it when I directly challenged her, apparently. She just kept going on about how she had a good reason to do what she’d done, but she wouldn’t spit it out.”
“Well there you go,” said Brad. “Anyway, she can’t keep you from going to school! You’re an adult now.”
Being outraged was a totally rational reaction on his part, but something about the way he said it rubbed me up. “Well, she didn’t. I made sure of it. Why isn’t Jess in school today?”
Brad shifted in his seat a little. “Jess has been homeschooled for a few years now.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.” Callie had mentioned that Lucas’s twin sister was being homeschooled ever since she’d been sick, and that had intrigued me because I didn’t think I knew anyone else who’d had that experience. Well, you wouldn’t know them, would you. They’d have even less social connections than someone like me, and that was hard to imagine. Who would notice that I wasn’t in school today? Aileen maybe, since we had a class together in the afternoon. I’d been so distracted lately and Callie had been so distracted that Aileen was fending for herself most of the time though. Maybe she wouldn’t care any more. And if Callie didn’t have time for Aileen she definitely didn’t have time for…
Steven would notice. But Steven was every bit of the abuser I’d always thought my biological father would turn out to be. When he noticed, it would be because I’d managed to escape whatever attack he had in store for me.
The thought of how he’d played me made me burn so much I kept talking when I might have otherwise retreated into myself. “I don’t think I can stay at home any more. I guess she really did have her reasons for what she did… but I just want to get out of there. Get away from everything.”
Brad began to drum lightly on his steering wheel. “You know, obviously, I can’t invite you to stay at my home. My wife… she’s aware of your existence, of course, but she would be very awkward having to play host to you. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“I wouldn’t want to do anything to her,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it, actually, but it was true. She’d done something very wrong and I didn’t think I’d want to get close to her, but I did want to get close to Jess, and that meant I’d have to get along with her. “But I understand.”
He abruptly reached over to his phone in the storage alcove below the dash, checked the time on the screen, then put it back. “There are other options. I can help you get a place of your own to rent.”
I stiffened at the suggestion, shocked beyond words that he would go there before I did—and so I didn’t have any more flinching to do when Brad’s hand landed on my leg, his thick fingers sliding under the edge of my bag so he could get a grip.
So there was no way for him to guess my feelings—and the thing was, if I’d been the same person I was a few weeks ago, before Steven pushed his way into… well, a lot of places, then maybe I wouldn’t have seen it that way. Maybe I would have even been excited to finally be able to resume the father-daughter relationship that was snatched from me all those years ago.
But because I’d been with Steven, I knew there was very little that was fatherly about the way he was touching me.
Suddenly, the taste of that coffee he’d bought me on our first meeting was crawling right up my throat.
“I have a lot of money,” Brad said. “I saved a lot when I was still playing sport, invested a bit, did well on those investments. I still don’t even understand my finances, honestly, but I’m rich. That’s what matters. I wouldn’t miss the cost of a small rental around here.”
All I could think about was his fingers pushing their way under my bag, pushing my skirt sideways a little as they went, but something told me not to let him know how I was reacting to this.
Fortunately I was good at hiding my feelings. I’d had practice all my life. “That’s an incredibly generous suggestion, I don’t know that I could let you do that for me.”
Brad shrugged, the movement somehow driving his fingers a little further in. “You could pay me back if you wanted, once you got a job. I know a few places I could put in a good word for you if you’re having trouble finding something.”
I’d been such an idiot, so convinced I could work out the truth of this for myself just based on this one piece of new information. So certain that trying to cling to your secrets was a sign of guilt.
But I wasn’t completely able to just believe what I was hearing. Thanks to my mother, I was inherently pretty suspicious of anything bullshitty coming from men… at least after I got over the initial rush of stupidity.
“Well, if I had a place of my own I guess it would be easy for us to meet up whenever,” I said. His hand tightened on my leg. I felt like my skin was going to start bubbling and crawl right off.
Then Brad looked up at a bang from the toilet block. Jess was slouching back over to the car. He didn’t move away from me right away, waiting until she had climbed back in and sat down before he put his hands back on the steering wheel. He was probably counting on Jess not seeing anything because of the angle and the covering of my backpack.
Maybe he didn’t care so much if she saw, though. She was fourteen and he was her father—it wasn’t like she was going to speak up.
Had he been doing… something to Jess, to make her so shy and sulky? Was her behaviour really about him and not me?
Had he been—
I couldn’t remember exactly how we’d discussed things on our first meeting. He must have said he never hit me… but I’d been stupid enough to avoid reading between the lines, or maybe I just hadn’t been able to face the fact that there were other ways to abuse a child that didn’t involve hitting.
I had to get away from him. I could ask to go to the bathroom myself and run away, call Ryan. I would be in so much trouble, but I was pretty sure I’d get the truth if I was honest about how far I’d been willing to go. For better or worse.
No, I couldn’t get away just yet. I had to talk to Jess, find out if she was in danger.
If she had no idea what I was on about, she might get pissed off with me and cause trouble. Even if she did, there was no guarantee she’d trust me enough to tell the truth.
I peeked at her reflection in the rear-view mirror again. Her head was down, her eyes almost lost in her fringe. Had he made her this way?
I couldn’t just run off and leave her now. No matter what, she was my sister. I might be the only person she had to look out for her.
I tried to keep glancing over at Jess and smiling as the three of us crossed a dirt carpark to a café that felt mostly in the middle of nowhere. Acting like the only thing making me nervous was wanting to get to know my sister.
Maybe it wasn’t concern for anyone I might know that made him want to take us all the way out here where there wasn’t much company. It had taken me a while to work out why there was something weird about the way Jess was sitting in the
car, and then it had hit me as I dared unzip my bag to check the time: she didn’t pull out a phone of her own once. Did she even have one? Most kids I knew had gotten their phones when they were old enough to be allowed to walk or bus to school on their own, or stay late for activities and get picked up. But maybe Jess had been homeschooled from that critical age—and I knew it had been hard enough for me to get Mum to agree to get a phone for me when she just made Ryan take me to and from anything.
What a fucking mess if both of us had been prisoners, in a way, because the parents who had control over us were messed-up in different ways.
I was worried Brad wouldn’t leave the two of us alone for a second, but after we were seated and he’d ordered our lunches from the girl with a clipboard who came to our table with water, he announced he was off to the bathroom before our food arrived.
Jess’s eyes widened at me a little as he sauntered off. I couldn’t help feeling this was strategic on Brad’s part too: he had to take a piss sometime, so he was going to do it while we were still awkward with one another.
My lips were quivering. I wanted to forget about the whole thing, ask Jess if she had any hobbies or what her favourite music was. Something that kept me safe from the horror I thought might be coming for me.
I couldn’t have done that to a girl who meant nothing to me, let alone my own sister.
Still, it was a struggle to even start to talk. “Jess.” She started and looked at me more directly. “We don’t have a lot of time to talk, just the two of us, so… I’m sorry if this is… well, totally off-base. But I— You can trust—”
There was no good way to ask quickly. I started again. “Jess, is your dad doing… something to you that he shouldn’t?”
She didn’t say anything, but I saw more emotions cross her face than I could even identify. And that was enough to give me the courage to go on. I really didn’t need to know the details right now, after all.
“Jess, you can trust me. If you need me to help you get away from him, to tell someone…”
“No!” It was the first she’d shown she could even speak with such force. She put her fingertips over her lips as if she’d surprised herself, too. She didn’t move them away as she kept talking. “I can’t trust you. You’re… Don’t get angry, but I can’t trust that you can really help me. You don’t even really have anywhere to live at the moment, do you?”
Brad had been happy enough to go on about the possibility of setting a home up for me. I winced.
“I know I’m not much. You don’t know me, and you’re scared. But I’m here. I want to help. That has to count for something, right?”
She shook her head hard enough to scatter her fringe to either side of her face. There was a strange fascination in seeing her uncovered forehead for the first time. I hadn’t realised before then just how young she was. There were a few years between Ryan and me and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, but between fourteen and eighteen was a big deal.
“Please. Now I know you exist, I can’t just—”
“You can’t do anything.” Jess kept glancing behind her, checking the doorway to the toilets. “He’s ahead of you. He’ll always win. He’s the guy who was almost a star footy player, and I’m just his badly-behaved daughter. A proven liar.” She rose partially out of her seat, on the edge of getting in my face. “And if you try to get in his way, you’ll be exactly where I am.”
Her fear was a little bit contagious—and it made me very angry. “No, it doesn’t have to be like that. Jess, we have to expose him. He—”
“Why?” Her initial excitement seemed to be fading, like she’d finally convinced herself she couldn’t take me up on my offer too. “Look, you don’t have to worry about me. He’s not— He leaves me alone now most of the time, like he knows it’s wrong, he even told me he was sorry once and he wouldn’t do it again. I don’t believe him for a second, but he’s trying… and anyway, in a few years maybe I’ll be able to go live somewhere else. It won’t matter if he makes everyone else think I’m fucked-up because I’ll be old enough to be responsible for myself.”
“I could be responsible for you,” I said. “I’m eighteen, I could apply to be your guardian. We could live together, you could go to—”
Jess was giving me a look that would have made me realise just how stupid I sounded, even if my own words weren’t doing it for me. I didn’t even have my own life under control: how could I convince anyone to make me responsible for a girl with an apparently troubled history on paper?
“Just forget me,” Jess said. “Like… if you really want to know me? Look me up in five years, see if I’m doing okay or still in the same damn place. Maybe then it’s time to come in and try to fix things. But right now, I just can’t take that risk. I can’t get myself any more messed-up than I already am. I just…”
Brad had just stepped out of the bathroom. Jess put her head down, but he’d been halted from returning to us for the moment by some people at another table. At first I thought they were friends… then I realised they were trying to get an autograph off him. He was grinning as he scribbled on a menu.
This creep had been doing things I didn’t want to think about to my sister, and apparently there was nothing I could do about it. He’d done—
I didn’t know what Mum had found out that made her leave. But I understood now at least why she’d lied about the exact reasons. Hitting a child, especially a young one who had done nothing to provoke it, was awful… but we’d all seen what that looked like. What I was trying to get my head wrapped around now was unthinkable. Utterly sick.
And someone who could do something like that to their own daughter wasn’t stupid. Brad had let Mum go because she must have been too much trouble to him to keep around, but she hadn’t been able to bring him down. I knew her: if she’d been able, she wouldn’t have held back.
This was probably why Mum was so vicious with other men. She’d failed to get Brad, so she wasn’t going to let anyone else get past her.
Brad had finished up with his admirers and was sauntering back over to us, a little smile on his face I would have thought was cute if I didn’t know his game now. What an absolute piece of scum. He’d fucked up his own career for himself—I guessed Mum might have had no choice but to let her accusations lie without good proof, but he must have known letting her see him on TV all the time playing games would send her into a rage that might be bigger than self-preservation or, indeed, common sense. But there he was, still perfectly happy to act as if he was a hero deserving of worship even now.
I got my face under control before he got back though, so he wouldn’t guess what I was thinking. If he realised I was on to him, he might go underground. Take Jess with him.
I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it. I knew their address. I could get her out if I needed to…
I just needed to figure out how I would convince her to go along with me. How to make her believe I could protect her.
Brad sat down as our food arrived. I stared at the chicken salad on my plate—very light on the chicken and dressing, heavy on red and green things I didn’t know the names of and wasn’t likely to want to eat. The same thing he’d ordered for Jess, while he was tucking into a pulled pork burger that was making me salivate. The arsehole probably didn’t want to risk his girls putting on weight.
Jess wasn’t even peeking at me any more as we settled in to eat, and Brad didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. He just wanted to talk about how incredible it was that those random people still knew his face, after all these years had passed. When he knew he was hardly a spring chicken these days, still worked out but hardly what he was in his youth… groan. How had I been taken in by this bullshit artist? Jess didn’t even have any expression on her face as he talked. It was like being stuck with Mum, except she was mostly just exhausting rather than damaging.
I owed Mum an apology. I just hoped she’d be willing to accept it.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Tamara
I let him touch my back as I got back into his car without flinching, though my eyes met Jess’s through the window and I saw her grimace.
“So I’ve been talking to Ryan,” I spoke up on impulse as we got back into town. “He seems to be thinking a lot of things over… I can’t promise anything, but maybe one day he’ll be willing to meet up too.”
“Oh, cool.” Brad tried, but he just couldn’t bring up the same sort of excitement at the prospect of reconnecting with his boy. I resisted shooting any more meaningful looks in Jess’s direction.
I sort of thought he might try to fuck with me by making me late back to the street he’d picked me up from, or driving right up to the school so someone saw me get out of his car, but he stopped just one space down from where he’d been parked that morning at thirty-two minutes past three.
He turned to me and spoke as if Jess wasn’t there at all. As if we were parting at the end of a date, I thought and then regretted. “Thanks for coming out today, Tamara. I know it’s going to be a long road at this point, we’ve lost so much time and you’ve been poisoned against me for so long… but I think we could really have a great relationship still. I hope you won’t let any misunderstandings that might come up along the way ruin things.”
“I won’t,” I promised. Misunderstandings… I could see now that he’d used Jess to lure me in, to convince me to do things I would have been too wary to do otherwise. What would come next? An invitation to his house with Jess present and his wife not? He could just send Jess off into her room and then what could she do?
Maybe he’d realised whatever he was doing to Jess was wrong because the world saw her as his daughter… but he and I were basically strangers. The same rules might not apply in his messed-up head.
