by Nicole Trope
‘Someone… you mean?’
‘No… I don’t know. A woman at work kept asking me questions, question after question about how long we’ve lived here and where my husband was and…’
When she was little, Rachel wouldn’t even wait for her mother to finish telling her why she was concerned. She just started packing.
‘You haven’t told anyone, Rachel? Tell me you haven’t said anything.’
‘I haven’t, I promise,’ she would reassure her mother but then she would always worry. What if the truth had somehow slipped out without her knowing when she was talking to the girls she skipped rope with at lunch or the boy she sat next to in class?
She was scared all the time of being found because she knew she and her mother were being looked for. She knew it and only keeping the secret of their past would keep them safe.
When she was sixteen, she finally put her foot down. ‘I’m not leaving, Mum.’ She was nearly an adult by then and she imagined that she would – she had to – deal with whatever came. She was resentful to be running from the past, from him, after so many years. In her mind he was still a monster, still terrifying, but his outlines were not as clear, and the threat seemed more imagined now. It had been years and years and the memories were fading a little. He had never found them.
She can remember the look her mother gave her and then she said, ‘Rachel you need to know something––’
‘I don’t want to know, Mum. I don’t want to talk about it.’
She and her mother could talk about anything with each other. Rachel had never felt the need to become a secretive teenager, instead sharing all that she was thinking and feeling with her mother, knowing that Veronica would listen attentively and counsel her wisely. But they had managed to never talk about that night, to never talk about him. Even now, twenty-eight years later, they still do not discuss it.
And she knows that this is, mostly, her fault. There have been times over the years when she has caught her mother looking at old photographs, staring down at the smiling faces pictured there, tears in her eyes.
‘Why do you do that to yourself?’ she asked when she got old enough to pose the question.
‘I just… I miss him, you know, and I wonder if maybe, maybe things would be better now.’
‘They wouldn’t,’ she always says. ‘They wouldn’t and you know that’s the truth. We can’t tell because then he’ll find us. We can’t talk to him because he’ll come and find us.’ Her voice shakes and the fears that governed her childhood come rushing back. ‘Please promise me, promise me you won’t try to talk to him.’
‘I won’t, Rachel, I won’t, I promise. Please calm down, I promise I won’t.’
But at sixteen she was done with running. ‘I want to finish school here. I’m not leaving.’
‘And if he finds us, Rachel? What then?’
‘He won’t find us, Mum. He hasn’t found us because we haven’t told anyone and we haven’t contacted him. He won’t find us. He’s probably forgotten us anyway.’
‘You never forget those you loved, Rachel,’ her mother said quietly.
‘I don’t want to leave,’ she repeated, her tone strident, her fists clenched.
‘Okay, we’ll stay,’ Veronica eventually said, and Rachel saw her mother’s shoulders slump.
Rachel wasn’t sure if it was relief or defeat. She smiled at her mother, thrilled that she would be able to stay in one place for as long as she wanted to.
After last night she understands how arrogant this was. She had no one to protect but herself then. Now she is a mother with a child of her own. Now she understands why her mother needed to keep running. He has never stopped looking for them.
Suddenly his image is right here and now her memories are flooding back, sharp and clear. Why has he returned to her life now? Why now after twenty-eight years, and what does he want?
She picks up her phone to call her mother because Veronica needs to know what has happened. And then she remembers, as she has done frequently over the last few weeks, that her mother will not be able to answer the phone and talk this through, helping her decide what to do. Her mother is at the top of her contacts list, and just seeing the word ‘Mum’ physically hurts her chest, as though she has been hit right in the centre of her body.
She turns to Beth to get her to finish her breakfast. ‘Hurry up, sweetheart. I want to go and visit Nana this morning. I need to drop you off a little earlier but there will be a teacher on duty.’
‘Nana’s in the hospital,’ says Beth. She nods as she speaks. She has her mother’s tawny-brown hair and green eyes and her father’s ready smile. Rachel feels like she brings sunshine into a room whenever she sees her. She is the happiest child she knows, and she should be. She is adored and protected, and both her father and mother can’t believe the miracle of her existence.
She remembers being afraid of what would happen when she was pregnant, afraid of how having a child might change Ben, might change her. She had not been prepared for the difficulty of those first months, but then she wasn’t just a mother struggling with a newborn. She was a daughter struggling with a mother’s illness as well.
‘She is sick,’ Rachel agrees.
‘She has some bad stuff in her stomach.’
‘She does.’
‘But the doctors are going to make her better.’
‘They are going to try.’ They have tried already. Tried and tried and tried.
Her mother is not going to get better but she keeps hoping. Veronica is like a climber dangling on the side of a mountain with only one finger left clinging onto a rock. She will fall any minute now, any minute.
Rachel puts another glass into the dishwasher and then stops and bites down hard on her lip. Please, Mum, don’t die today. Please be okay when I get there. She doesn’t know how she is able to have a thought like this and not simply collapse onto the floor. But then it is inconceivable that she is standing here in the kitchen, getting through breakfast like she did yesterday after what happened last night. She is an expert at compartmentalising, at not thinking about things she cannot bear to deal with.
But she will have to deal with her mother. She closes her eyes and wishes as hard as she has ever wished for anything for some miracle to have occurred overnight and for Veronica to be sitting up in her bed eating breakfast when she visits her. When Rachel opens her eyes, she realises the futility of this fantasy and her heart aches once more.
‘Okay, I’m off,’ says Ben, standing up and draining the last of his coffee. She takes a deep breath and blinks but Ben sees the tears. Placing a hand on her shoulder, he squeezes gently, and then when she turns to face him, he rests his forehead against hers. He doesn’t need to ask why she’s crying because he knows. What he doesn’t know is that today her tears are laced with fear. Today she has another reason to cry.
‘Call me if you need me for anything.’
‘I will,’ she says, watching him plant a kiss on his daughter’s cheek.
‘When is Jerome coming to live here?’ Beth asks.
‘Who’s Jerome?’
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ she says. ‘We met him – not Jerome but his father.’
Ben looks confused. ‘You told me-you said he was a big guy with dark hair, remember. His builders dumped that load of material on the site and left. He came to apologise for the mess, isn’t his name Raymond or something?’
‘Oh him, no, different guy,’ says Rachel. She hadn’t liked Raymond. Even though he’d told her he had an eight-year-old daughter, there was something creepy about him, about the way he smiled, but she imagined there was no reason for her feeling. Some people had a certain look that disturbed her.
‘This is someone else, from the other side,’ she says. ‘Two days ago, when I was pulling out into the street to take Beth to school, I noticed a man standing in front of the house next door with one of those… um… tripods – you know, like surveyors use?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I
stopped and he introduced himself. He’s bought the land next door and he’s going to build. He’s a property surveyor by trade but isn’t able to work here at the moment because he’s Canadian. His name is Bradley Williams. His wife and son are finishing the packing in Canada and then they’ll be here.’
‘Cool,’ says Ben. ‘Does he seem nice?’
‘He has a hairy face,’ says Beth.
Ben laughs.
‘Yes, he seems nice. He said their build will take about eight months.’
‘Ages and ages and ages,’ says Beth.
‘It will go quickly. Love you both,’ Ben says as he leaves his two girls.
‘Get your shoes, Beth. Mrs Weiner is on morning duty today. Maybe she’ll read you a story.’
‘Okay, okay.’
As Beth goes to leave the kitchen, she stops and turns around. ‘Did the monster go away, Mummy?’
Her heart pounds. ‘Monster? When was there a monster?’ She feels like Beth has seen straight into her soul.
‘Last night. You came into my room and the monster tried to get in. You told it the police were coming. Did they come, Mum? Did the police make the monster go away?’
Beth sounds panicky. Rachel cannot believe what she’s hearing.
‘There was no monster, Beth. It was a dream,’ she says, trying to stop her voice from shaking. ‘It must have been a dream.’
‘It turned the handle on my door, Mum. I saw it. It wanted to eat me all up,’ she whispers. Her eyes fill with tears.
‘Listen to me, sweetheart,’ Rachel replies, swallowing her own fear and holding her daughter gently by the shoulders. ‘It was just a dream. No one and nothing was here last night. You went to bed and Daddy came home late and nothing else happened.’
‘Nothing else happened.’ Beth sniffs and she nods and Rachel nods along with her, wishing she could believe her own words.
‘Nothing, I promise.’
‘Okay.’ Beth smiles, her trust in her mother absolute.
‘Get your shoes,’ Rachel says faintly, and her daughter bounces up the stairs to her bedroom.
‘So, nothing has been taken?’ the police constable with the icy blue eyes asked Rachel last night as Ben held her hand.
‘No, nothing,’ they replied in unison. It had only taken them a few minutes to look through the house and determine that nothing was missing. Most of their stuff was still in boxes anyway. Rachel was wearing the most expensive piece of jewellery she owned, her engagement ring. The television and computer were still there, as was Rachel’s car and Ben’s digital camera.
‘But you’re sure there was someone here?’
Rachel started nodding her head but then she realised what she was doing, changing it to a shake. ‘I don’t know… I thought I heard…’ She looked down at her feet, unsure of how much the constable would be able to discern by looking at her face. Weren’t police trained to spot a liar?
She opened her mouth to tell, to explain, but an ingrained promise to keep the secret, to never ever tell, kept the truth deep inside her. ‘It could have been a possum,’ she said, because it could have been. Lou was tormented by the possums who ran across the roof of her small house at night. ‘They sound like grown men stomping up there,’ Lou said.
‘It was probably a possum,’ she said and she looked up, meeting the constable’s blue-eyed gaze.
‘Well, we’ve looked around and there really is no evidence of anyone breaking in, so let’s just put it down to a noisy possum, but call us if you have any concerns at all.’
Now Rachel drops down onto a chair. She thought Beth was asleep. She thought her baby was asleep the whole time. And now she has lied to her daughter, the same way she has lied to her husband, the same way she has lied to everyone she has ever met since she was a child.
Someone was here.
Nothing was taken.
But something was left.
6
Ben
The long drive into work is exacerbated by a truck and car collision. He doesn’t see it but he hears about it on the radio, listening to the announcer telling him he should try for an alternate route, as though he’s not already stuck right in the middle of everything.
He lets his mind wander, still feeling panicked at the idea of someone being in the house. There was no one there, he reminds himself. The police found nothing. Rachel made a mistake. Yet he’s not sure that he buys the possum idea. There are no big trees on the new estate, nowhere for a possum to be, really. There are only tarred roads and dirt and rock-filled empty spaces everywhere. The trees that once crowded the space have been razed to make way for the ever-growing city. But anything is possible. It may be that this was just a lost possum, searching for the tree that was once his home. He’s been over at Lou’s when they run across the roof. They do sound like grown men, heavy and big and loud.
He touches his screen to call his sister, knowing that she will be having a quiet coffee before her day begins.
‘What’s up?’ she says as she answers the phone. She’s not one for pleasantries.
He fills her in on his night.
‘Scary,’ says Lou. ‘At least there was no one there. It must feel weird for her to be there on that huge empty estate.’
‘Yeah, I’ll get hold of the alarm people and ask them to move up our installation so that might be of some comfort but…’
‘But what, Benjamin?’
‘I don’t know, she seems… I don’t know.’
‘Her mother is dying, Ben,’ says Lou gently.
‘I know but I feel like it’s more than that – last night was weird.’
‘You have to be patient with her. It’s a really tough time and we just have to be with her until the end.’
‘I know, I’m trying to do that, I am.’
‘Are you okay? Is everything okay at work?’
Ben doesn’t say anything for a moment. His sister can still read him so well but he doesn’t want to get into this now. ‘Fine,’ he says.
‘Good. Oh hell, I’m being beeped on the other line. Listen, hang in there, baby brother – it will all work out and thank heavens it was only a scare. I’ll give her a call later, maybe arrange a time to help with some of the unpacking. Sorry, I really have to go.’
‘No problem,’ he says quickly. He smiles as he thinks about Lou calling him her baby brother. He is only the baby by about three minutes.
He lets his car roll forward in the traffic that is now barely moving at all. What worries him is that there could have been someone in the house. There could have been. The suburb is close enough to the highway and empty enough for someone looking for some easy money to consider it a good risk. Even he finds the estate a little creepy at night. Putting out the bins last week he had stood in the street and looked down at the only other house that had its light on. As he examined it, the lights in every room went out one by one. It was obviously the owner going to bed but he had found it unsettling to watch, as though those in the house knew he was looking.
He had longed for the peace and quiet of the suburbs after the noise and bustle of their block of apartments, but there is too much silence here. No owls hoot at night, no bats fly over, no passing pedestrians or loud neighbours. There is only the hum of traffic from the nearby highway.
It will be different soon, he comforts himself.
The alarm will be installed next week if he can’t get them to do it earlier. It can’t come soon enough. It’s expensive but it’s not something he would take a chance on. He wishes he could have found a way to stay in their apartment but the mortgage was huge and rent was not exactly cheap. ‘Move in with us for a bit,’ his mother had suggested but he didn’t like that idea. He loves his parents but Audrey and Bernard have very definite ways of doing things. His mother serves dinner at six o’clock every night. His father likes to watch the news while he eats. They both allow themselves breakfast in bed on a Saturday after a long week at work. They take a walk at exactly the same time every morning and they hate e
ven the smallest amount of mess in the house. His father is particularly fond of neatness and order.
His mother had been more relaxed when he and Lou were kids but once they both moved out to get on with their own lives, he could almost see her decide that it was finally time to have her home looking the way she wanted it to look. Renovations had been carried out and furniture replaced, and when Beth was little, he had found it stressful to take her over there, worrying about the white couches and the pale embossed wallpaper. But his parents had earned their peace and quiet after raising twins. He smiles now as he remembers himself and Lou at around four years old deciding to shampoo the couch, and at five years old smothering a wall with their artwork. Lou was always the instigator but he was always a willing accomplice. ‘My adorable terrors,’ Audrey used to call them.
When he and Rachel returned from their honeymoon and were waiting for their flat to be painted, they stayed with his parents for a couple of weeks. They had honeymooned in Venice, right in the middle of the European summer, enjoying all the cheesy things tourists did, like hiring a gondola for a ride down the canal and taking photographs in front of St Mark’s Basilica. They had eaten pasta and pizza and ended every meal with a different flavour of gelato, eventually agreeing that the delicious pistachio flavour was the winner. Ben had seen a different side of Rachel, a carefree, less wary side. She laughed longer and talked more, even starting conversations with strangers. She embraced everything about travelling, loving being on an aeroplane with the joy of a kid. She was almost a different person because she was in a different country. Every morning she woke him with a kiss and a long list of things she wanted to do that day. She never ran out of energy and wonder at everything.
