Minna shrugs. ‘You know David.’
‘Well. I, I’m on council business, Minna, speaking for the council, as it were.’
Minna’s silent.
‘What we— Well, what the council wants is to express to you and Dave just how much we regret. Such a dreadful. Dreadful business.’
Minna’s face is unresponsive. She picks up her teacup, drinks, then places it back onto the saucer.
‘What we’d like. The council wants to do something for your family. We were wondering. What we thought of was asking what you and Dave would think about the idea of us holding a memorial service for Gemma.’
‘A memorial service?’
‘It could be— We’d do it the way you wanted, anything you and Dave want. We thought it could be a way for the community to, to display grief. A kind of closure, Minna.’
‘Closure? ’
‘The council thought this could be a way of moving forward. For your family. And for the community as a whole.’
‘Closure?’
‘Yes.’ His hands are scrabbling at his collar, tearing it away from his skin.
‘I don’t want closure. I want my daughter back.’
‘But. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, here, Minna but isn’t it too—? Isn’t it time to, to well, let Gemma go?’
‘Closure? Fucking closure? You don’t know anything, Bob Peters. You don’t know anything and you never have. Get out. Just get out and leave us alone.’
Stephanie goes back to school. She hasn’t seen anyone throughout the holidays. Mary-Anne’s phoned and phoned and Jenny and Sonya called around but she couldn’t talk to them. She wonders what they think of her now, maybe they don’t like her any more why won’t she see us, why won’t she even try? Still, her friends fall in around her, cutting her off from the kids who stare, making a barrier nobody can get through. The teachers give her special smiles when she answers questions in class. Nobody talks about Gemma.
For the first time since it happened she goes out with Mary-Anne. Macbeth is on at the community theatre. It’s a group touring the provinces. Ms Evans says she’s heard the actors are very good and isn’t this marvellous since they’re doing Macbeth later on in the year? She organises seats for the Sunday afternoon matinee.
Stephanie sits with Mary-Anne and Sonya and Georgia. People look at her. They look and turn away their heads then shift their eyes uneasily back towards her when they think she won’t notice. What do they think they’ll see? What do they expect? That she’ll look different? Act weird? Start crying?
It’s better when the actors come on and everyone’s watching the stage, but she feels disconnected from what’s happening, like she can’t concentrate properly, like the words are floating about in the air, popping like bubbles before she can grab them, make any sense of them. But when Lady Macbeth says the bit about dashing her baby’s brain out the words seem to bellow at her and she breathes sharply inwards, feels her body jolt. She senses Mary-Anne looking. Sonya turns her head and stares at Mary-Anne. Stephanie holds herself in tightly after that, keeps her eyes fixed on the stage, waits it out.
During the interval she goes directly to the bathroom and locks herself into a toilet cubicle. She sits on top of the toilet lid, rests her head back against the cistern, feels the coolness, closes her eyes. She hears the door opening and closing. Hears toilets flush, taps turn on and off, hand-driers blowing out air. The warning bell rings. Time to go back. She hears heels clacking across the tiles.
‘What d’you think of the show?’
‘Not really me. Thought I better come, though. Community Arts put a lot of effort into getting them.’
‘Good to see Stephanie Anderson here.’
‘Poor kid. Terrible thing.’
‘It’s awful to say this but I’ve never liked Minna Anderson.’
‘You wouldn’t be on your own there. I was at school with Minna. You always got the idea she thought she was a bit better than anyone else.’
‘Never would have wished anything like this on her, though.’
‘Better if the wee kiddie’s body turned up. At least they’d know.’
Stephanie sits silent, scarcely breathing, for a long time after the door closes and the voices stop. She’s huddled up, trembling.
She opens the door and peers out, then she’s over the tiles, through the next door, edging up along the passage. She can hear Macbeth’s voice booming out upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown and put a barren sceptre in my grip.
She’s out into yet another sunny day and running. To the lake, across the paddocks, across the rocks, running, running, running until she’s sweating and breathing in ragged gasps and her legs are so sore she can’t think or feel.
Where are you where are you where are you?
In the mornings, in those first few minutes of waking, it’s all right, everything’s all right but then she knows something has happened, something so terrible that she can’t ever make it better. The night is best because in the night Gemma’s there, her body warm and firm and little tucked against her, breathing in the dark, her arms tight around Stephanie’s waist. But in the daytime she can only think about her, how she made her cubby-houses, tugged at Stephanie’s hands come and see come and see. About how Gemma liked to eat weird things, olives and anchovies, and how she liked to ride high up on her shoulders. Stephanie’s arms ache and ache with wanting her. Gemma’s bedroom is the same, her toys, her dresses and shoes, everything the same. If you lie on her bed you can smell her.
You can’t be gone. You can’t be.
What Stephanie thinks happened is someone found Gemma lost. Someone kind and good who took Gemma maybe to Auckland, maybe to America. They took her because they didn’t have a little girl and they’d always wanted one and at first they meant to bring her back, to only borrow her for a short time, for a little holiday, but now they love her too much to let her go. But Gemma’s safe and gets spoiled all the time and she’s quite happy except sometimes she misses Stephanie and Minna and David and Jonny and Liam and wants to come home. One day she’ll find her way back.
Let it be true.
These are the stories Stephanie makes up every night before she tips into sleep. She makes up the bedroom Gemma sleeps in now, pink walls, a bed with a filmy white canopy over it, a princess’s room. She makes up the house she lives in, her new toys and her new dresses.
She can’t bear to think of Gemma out there in the dark.
Term one is over and then term two and something different is happening between Minna and Dave. He’s home every day at five forty-five, home in the weekends. He brings flowers for Minna and they go to dancing lessons at the Community Centre. Sometimes they laugh together. Gran comes to stay and they go off for three days alone. Then in November Minna comes and sits on Stephanie’s bed. Stephanie’s reading her notes for the English exam which is on tomorrow.
Minna picks at Stephanie’s quilt. ‘I’ve got news, Steph.’
Stephanie’s heart blazes up in her body. ‘Gemma?’
‘No. Not Gemma.’
‘What then?’
‘Dave and I. Well, we’re going to have another baby, Steph.’
‘Another baby?’
‘Yes. We thought. We thought a baby would be a new start. For all of us, Steph.’
‘Oh.’
‘So. What do you think?’
‘I need to study right now. I’ve got this exam tomorrow.’
‘But you’re okay about the new baby?’
‘Where will it go?’
‘Go? ’
‘Where will you put it?’
‘Put it? Oh. Well. She, or he, will have Gemma’s room. I suppose. Though Dave and I would have it in our room at first. Maybe we, just you and me, Steph, could paint the room. Not right away. Later on. You could choose the colours and the material for curtains and things.’
‘I have to study now.’
Next day Stephanie goes to school and lines up with the others outside the exa
m room, files in with them and finds the desk with her name on it. When the teacher says they can start reading she picks up the exam paper and looks at the questions and when he says it’s time to start writing she picks up her pen.
She selects the first question and writes the number in the margin. She writes the question on the paper. She writes it again. She looks at the exam sheet, reads the question again and she copies it, over and over she copies it down and the words loop together and shift and slide across the page that is filled somehow with white blurs and moving black lines.
It starts like a choking cough, grows grows growing until the roaring shrieking fills her head, fills the room. She’s on the floor. Stephanie is on the floor her legs pulled rigid and tight up into her body and her arms up around her head and that noise is going on and on and on.
Through the noise she hears the whispers. Hears chairs scraping back, footsteps on the wooden floor, someone starting to cry. She can’t move and she can’t stop the noise even though they come and try to make her stop it, try to take her away.
‘Stephanie? Can you hear me Stephanie? I’ve got you. Stephanie, sweetheart, I’m right here.’ It’s Ms Evans holding her, taking her head in her hands, stroking her forehead.
Then she says it.
They think Gemma’s dead.
PART TWO
7.
Dunedin, 2005
She turns off the main road onto the shingle drive, winds up through the rhododendrons, the azaleas, the soaring trees and negotiates that slightly tricky turn into her very own car park. Reserved Staff.
The gardens are a place of peaceful reflection where the cycles of nature are a reminder of the regrowth fostered within this restorative environment.
A bit cheesy. Still, she believes in this place.
There’s been no other choice for her, never an alternative and that made her afraid because if she hadn’t made the grade she would have been out. Some of the students she started pre-Med with ended up in Dentistry or Pharmacy. But she had to do this. Psychiatry. It’s all she wanted during all those years; to make better sense of things, make easier the kind of anguish nobody can see.
If she couldn’t make herself feel better maybe she could help someone else.
That day in late February, she packed up her clothes and got onto the bus. It crawled through town, past the lake, past the bars and cafés and shops and houses out onto the main road. She closed her eyes, felt the late afternoon sun on her face through the window then got the book out of her bag and read with her head down. There were others around her starting at the uni as well and the bus picked up more of them along the way. Cromwell, Alex, Roxburgh. She felt the bus brake, felt it lurch to the side of the road, heard people calling out goodbye, running up the steps, stowing their stuff into the racks. They settled into their seats talking loudly, excitedly, about Orientation Week, about which hostels they were going to live in. She felt distant from all that; she kept her head bent over her book.
She didn’t want to think about what she’d left behind. About Dave and the boys standing at the bus station. Greg had his fingers in his mouth. He’d just started kindy and he didn’t like it. The other kids scared him. How would he be without her? How would Dave and Jonny and Liam manage? Minna had been gone over a year now. She was up in Wellington. She’d met some guy.
I can’t do this any more, Steph. You’ll just have to understand.
And now Stephanie was leaving them as well. Greg was crying. He’s so beautiful, Greg, dark hair and eyes, looks like. No, she’s not going to think about that, she’s not going to think about anything. She stared at the words on the page. The book was about Elizabeth the First. She got it at prize-giving for English, chose to bring it with her on the bus because it seemed so far away from anything to do with her. Except when she started the bit about how Elizabeth was sent away from court and couldn’t see her little brother Edward any more she could only stare at the words. She felt like that. Exiled. Except it was her choice she was leaving behind everyone she loved.
Maybe she was as bad as Minna but she couldn’t stand it any more. Stephanie Anderson. She’s the one whose sister. And now Minna’s gone off and left Dave with all those kids. Stephanie’s become everyone’s little mother.
Poor Stephanie. That poor kid. The school counsellor sent for her when Minna left, beckoned towards the grey vinyl armchair carefully positioned right alongside hers and peered into her face with that put-on, oh-so compassionate look she’d come to expect.
‘Stephanie, dear, we’re a little concerned about how you might be coping.’
She could have stayed on in Wanaka. Could have easily got a job, a reasonable job in one of the offices and carried on living with Dave and the boys. Not that Dave expected her to do that. But she could have kept on helping out. She felt so bad. So bad.
She got off the bus. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. She’d left Wanaka in sunshine, the sky intensely blue, but it became dimmer, greyer as they approached the city. When they pulled into the terminus the sky was the colour of slate. She climbed down from the bus and felt instantly the coolness of the air on her arms. She had a sweater in her bag but she didn’t pull it on. The cold felt unfamiliar and invigorating.
There were shuttle buses waiting to take them to the hostel. The others talked all the way, loudly swapping stories. She could tell they were nervous and making up for it by going on about toga parties and drinking, making jokes like they knew it all. Stephanie was silent, her face close against the window watching the city moving past; the soft greys and greens of buildings and trees. Wanaka always seemed so new and shiny with modern shops and offices and houses being built everywhere, all sharp angles and huge windows gleaming in the sunshine. Here everything seemed older and muted. Restrained, gracious.
The shuttle sped up along the one-way street then turned right past the Botanic Gardens. She looked at the iron gates. That was where they came that day years and years ago. The boys wore checked shirts and the jeans Gran got them in Sydney, Stephanie had on her red and blue dress. They played on the swings, ran their fingers over the shiny metal squirrels and frogs crouched at the bottom of the Peter Pan statue. Dave got fish and chips and Minna spread them out on the grass. The chips were crisp and salty and the fish luscious and fresh. Gemma was just a baby asleep in the buggy and everyone who went past stopped and looked, made those funny clucking noises. Gemma.
Don’t think about Gemma.
Past the Gardens. Lurching up the steep curve of hill, hard left up a driveway and they stopped in the car park outside the main doors. She’d had the brochure to look at but the hostel seemed even more massive than in the photographs, looming up above her, all those levels of red brick and small square windows. She stood there, holding onto her pack and looking up. How would she find her way around? How could she actually live in this great, grand residence that looked the kind of place only really clever people would be allowed to stay in? It was like the English universities she’d seen on TV programmes where students wafted about wearing black gowns and weird hats, talking in plummy voices. Oh God, she was in the wrong place.
She hauled her pack up the two flights of stairs, found her room, pushed the key into the lock and turned the door handle. The room was small and square and silent. There was an armchair, a sofa and a desk. At the end of the room was a door that led into a bedroom. A wardrobe, a dresser and a narrow bed. She went to the window, opened it up wide and looked down at the garden, the lawn soft-looking, brilliant green, flower beds filled with roses and lavender. She breathed in, closed her eyes.
In the first week she landed a job at McDonald’s. Five hours a day, five days a week. It covered the cost of the hostel and if she walked everywhere and only bought what she had to she’d get by. She had to borrow for her fees and books and that was a lot. But she couldn’t rely on Dave for money. When Minna left the house had to be sold to give her the half-share and they’d moved into a little concrete-block place up near the in
dustrial area. Then Dave gave up work to look after Greg and went on a benefit. He didn’t trust anyone else to look after him. He never let Greg out of his sight, not even for a minute. At the park or by the lake he had his eyes right on him all the time.
Six years medical school. She stayed on at the hostel for all that time. She felt safe there, like she belonged. There was no one peering at her with that I am so concerned look, no one trying to work out how that poor kid is coping. People were friendly but they kept their distance. Running up the stairs to her room, feeling the gloss of the wooden banister beneath her hand, looking from her window far out over the city at the hills and the glint of harbour. The garden in summer with the fragrance of roses, magnolias gleaming white and bigger than your hand in spring. The place used to be for men who were training to be Presbyterian ministers to live in and that made her laugh because, despite being a girl, she fitted in with that perfectly. Because here she was living her own life of self-denial, celibacy and penury. Lectures and tutorials and study study study. The five-thirty till ten-thirty shift at McDonald’s, seven hours sleep, the alarm shrieking through the room at six, she could fit in a couple of hours study before lectures started. Then all over again the next day and the next.
She worked hard to get her A‘s. It wasn’t easy, all those hours of reading, learning, memorising, trying to make sense of concepts other students seemed to rattle off instinctively. Anatomy, the labs, dissection. She never got used to that, never found it easy, that smell of ether and cutting into flesh. She takes pleasure, now, in using her Mortech standard 20 mm wide dissection knife to chop vegetables. She keeps it sharp, takes it with her everywhere like a talisman.
Med School, then specialising in Psychiatry, the two years interning in the public system. The nightmare of that; it was the only time she wavered. But then she landed this fellowship at the clinic. She’s still in training, still got another year to go but what she’s counting on is they’ll ask her to stay on. She’s doing her best to prove herself; in her office before eight, never leaves till after six but the hours spin by: she loves what she does though the work is really tough. With some patients months can go by without any progress or even change but she can’t think of anything better than staying and making her career here. She’s a long way from Wanaka. A long, long way away from that poor kid.
Hunting BLind: It's Every Family's Deepest Fear Page 6
