The Way Back

by Kylie Ladd

  The moment the front door swung open, flashes erupted. Terry instinctively went to put his arm around Charlie to shield her from them but she swerved out of his grasp, cowering next to her mother. Rain blurred his glasses. An umbrella, he thought, mentally kicking himself. What an idiot. An umbrella would have protected Charlie, would have thwarted any attempts to take her picture. And in this weather too. He splashed along the driveway, shielding his face with one arm, fumbling for his keys. One click, and the squad car unlocked—he wrenched the back door open and Rachael bundled Charlie inside, sliding in beside her and slamming it shut. They’d made it, sort of, but as he tried to reverse into the street, paparazzi loomed up beside him like zombies and lingered dangerously close to his bumper bar, their faces obscured by lenses. He had a good mind just to run them over and hang the consequences, but wound down the window instead.

  ‘Hey! Get out of the way!’

  ‘Charlie!’ one called. ‘Give us a smile! How are you feeling?’

  Terry put the window back up and revved the accelerator. The car slewed to the left on the wet road, corrected itself, then shot forward. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. In his rear-vision mirror a few damp figures gave half-hearted chase, then slunk back to the house to await their return. ‘I thought most of them would have given up by now. It’s been a week, and in these conditions.’

  Rachael ran a hand through her hair, combing out the rain. ‘Jackals,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Terry. ‘What we really need is someone famous to die, or get caught in a sex scandal. Take the heat off.’

  ‘You’d read a story about me, though, wouldn’t you, Mum?’

  Surprised, Terry glanced over his shoulder. Christ, he still couldn’t get used to her looking like that. Charlie had pushed her hood back, and her freshly shorn scalp glowed white beneath its scant covering of hair. Matt had rung him to tell him about it the night it had happened, two days ago now, but it had still caught Terry by surprise when he’d arrived at their house to take her to identify Col. It looked awful, frankly. And if the press caught wind of it they’d have a field day.

  ‘Mum?’ Charlie prompted.

  ‘Oh, I guess,’ Rachael sighed, shifting in her seat.

  ‘You were all over it when that little girl got lost near us, down by the creek. You were looking it up online.’

  ‘I was worried!’ Rachael protested. ‘She only lived a few suburbs over.’

  ‘Sure,’ Charlie said, ‘but you wanted to know what had happened too.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s human nature.’

  Terry hid his surprise, choosing his next words carefully. ‘So do you think the public have a right to know what happened to you, Charlie? Do you want to talk to those journalists, do an interview with them?’ Maybe this was the way in, the key to unlocking what she’d really gone through. Lord knows he wasn’t getting anywhere with the formal procedures. Terry had tried again the previous day, asking Jason to join him, setting up his tape recorder and a video camera in Rachael’s study to spare Charlie a trip to the station. It wasn’t strictly protocol, but he’d hoped that keeping her at ease in her home environment might yield some more answers. It hadn’t.

  ‘No!’ Her response was vehement. ‘It’s none of their business. It’s none of anyone’s business.’ She stared out the window, mirroring a pose he had so often seen Rachael adopt. ‘I’m just saying that everyone does it. You get so het up about those people in the front yard, Mum, but they’re just doing their job. They wouldn’t even have a job if people like you didn’t want to read what they wrote, all the gory details. You’re just as bad as they are. You’re worse.’

  ‘Charlie!’ Rachael cried, her voice cracking.

  Terry rushed in to change the subject. ‘So what we’re doing today shouldn’t take very long, Charlie. Once we get to the hospital we’ll go straight in. There are security there, they know we’re coming, there shouldn’t be any problems. The man they are holding is in a private room, with a guard. I’ll take you in, and your mum can come too. You just have to tell me if you recognise him, if he’s the one who held you.’

  ‘Fine,’ Charlie replied, stonily gazing out at the rain.

  ‘There’s just one more thing.’ Terry cleared his throat. ‘The fire that you lit. The suspect was trapped in it, did you know that?’ No answer. He ploughed on. ‘It didn’t kill him, obviously, but he sustained third-degree burns to his arms and torso, and part of his face. I mean, you should still be able to recognise him, but I just wanted to warn you. I don’t think it’s pretty.’

  Silence, then finally a question from the back seat.

  ‘What do you mean, his face? What part?’

  ‘One ear, one cheek, the side of his nose, an eyelid. I haven’t seen myself, but apparently they’ve all sort of … melted.’

  ‘Melted.’ Charlie turned the word over in her mouth experimentally. The wipers squeaked. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I hope someone tries to take his picture.’

  It really hurt, everything hurt all the time like all there was was hurt and he couldn’t remember what it was like just to feel OK. The nights were the worst. He couldn’t get to sleep because he kept thinking about things and they all swelled up in his brain and made pictures like the movies he used to watch with his mum and kept him awake. And then when he did fall asleep the hurt started again and woke him up and he called out for the nurses, but they were no good, they weren’t friendly, not like the nurses after his accident who came whenever he pushed his buzzer or yelled out and sat on his bed and talked to him. He wanted those nurses back. He wanted to go to the other hospital, the one after his accident, but he couldn’t remember what it was called and when he tried to ask they just turned their mouths down and went out of the room.

  He blinked. He couldn’t see properly. There was something stuck over one of his eyes and it was too hot and it itched. He tried to get it off when he first woke up but when he lifted his arm it went clang against the bed and when he looked down there were handcuffs around his wrist just like in the movies. That was pretty cool for a moment until it wasn’t. So he tried with his other arm but painpainpain, the pain was red and had fingers that squeezed him until he cried and then a nurse came in and told him to stop crying because he’d ruin his dressing. He said how much it hurt but she just pushed her lips together and went away but she must have told a doctor or someone because later someone came in and gave him an injection and that hurt too but then it made him feel all warm, like his insides were made of honey, and he went back to sleep and when he woke up the handcuffs were gone. It was good not to have handcuffs but nothing else was good. His face hurt and his arm hurt and he couldn’t sleep and none of the nurses smiled at him and he wanted to be at home but no one had told him when he could go home again and he sort of thought that maybe they wouldn’t let him go home ever because of his arm and because of Charlie and that made him so sad he wished he’d stayed in the stable. It all made him sad, everything. The pain with the fingers and thinking about Blue and thinking about Charlie. He didn’t know where Blue was. He’d heard him barking when he was in the fire but it was all dark and there was so much smoke that he couldn’t tell where anyone was, Blue or Charlie, and when a wall fell down and he got out he was still on fire and all he could think to do was to go and stand under the tap on the water tank. That was a good thought, his mum would have said so, but then he sat down and he must have fallen asleep and when he woke up it was dark and the stable was all gone and so was everyone else. He didn’t worry about them then. He was so wet and cold that he just wanted to go inside to bed, so he did, until he heard the helicopter the next morning and something told him to go back to the tank, which sat on a platform, and crawl into the space underneath it.

  His mum. It was probably his mum. She would have been looking at him and clucking her tongue and saying Oh, Col, what sort of scrape have you got yourself into this time? But not in a mean way, in a way that showed she was going to help him out. But she couldn’t, could she? She was
dead. Tears came to his eyes and he tried to stop them so the nurse didn’t get cross again about his dressing. He’d thought Charlie was dead too. She was screaming so hard when he got to the stable and then she just wasn’t, as if someone had pushed an off button. It had made him cry, huddled under the water tank while the helicopter went back and forth in the sky above thock thock thock, thinking about her dead and that lovely hair all burned up and it made him feel bad that he had brought her there, because she wouldn’t have died if he’d just watched her ride her pony and left her alone. But then, on the first day in hospital, someone had turned on the television for him and she was on it! Not dead and not burned up, but in a car with lights going off in her face. He’d tried to sit up so he could see her better but by mistake he ripped out the thing that was stuck in his arm and all the nurses came wobbling in like ducks going down to the water, eyes bright and bottoms wiggling, and one of them turned off the TV even though he asked her please not to. So Charlie was alive after all. At first that made him happy but then he was sad because why hadn’t she stayed with him? Couldn’t she see that he was hurt? And then he got a bit nervous because she might tell someone about that thing he did that time, he didn’t mean to but he did, he told her he didn’t mean to and he wasn’t going to do it again, but she might tell someone. It had made his heart go all fluttery and a machine started beeping and the ducks came back and scolded him for scaring them, but he was the one who was scared.

  That was the first day, which was yesterday, or maybe it was the one before. It was hard to keep track. They hadn’t let him have the TV again but he wished they would because it stopped him thinking and there was so much not to think about: Blue and Charlie and his arm and home and wanting a cigarette, which he couldn’t have because it was a hospital and could make him sick. He was lying there trying not to think about any of it when the door to his room swung open and in came Charlie. It made his heart go all fluttery again, but in a good way, because she’d come to see him and he was so happy that she had.

  ‘Charlie!’ he croaked. His voice didn’t work right since the fire, it sounded like someone had stepped on it. He tried to sit up and she backed away and he suddenly saw that all her hair was gone, her beautiful long blonde-brown hair. She didn’t look as pretty without it. He’d never tell her that, it would be rude, but he couldn’t stop staring. There were little marks all over her head, scabs, as if her scalp was rusting and he wondered what had happened to her. Maybe it was from the fire. ‘Charlie,’ he said again, only softer because a man and a woman had come into the room behind her and he saw them look at each other. The man was wearing a uniform, he was a policeman, and it made him feel a bit sick in the tummy.

  ‘OK, Charlie?’ the man asked. Charlie nodded. ‘We can go then,’ he said but Charlie wasn’t listening. She stepped right up to the edge of his bed and for a moment he thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she bent down.

  ‘I hate you!’ she hissed in his face, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. ‘I hate you, I hate you, I wish that you’d died.’ He started crying then, tears sliding out of his good eye and probably his bad one too and for once he wished the nurses were there because even if they didn’t smile at him they didn’t yell at him either and they might make Charlie stop. But she went on and on, even after the woman and the policeman took her arm and tried to pull her away, telling him how he’d ruined her life and she hoped he’d burn in hell. Sticks and stones might break my bones but words will never hurt me, that’s what his mother always told him, but she was wrong, she was wrong because Charlie’s words were like knives going into his heart and bullets whizzing past his ears. He pulled the sheet up over his face and she screamed and called him a coward, but then it all went quiet and he could hear her being tugged out of the room, the door slamming shut behind her.

  He didn’t dare come out from the sheets. He didn’t want to be alive. She was right, he was evil and a coward and all those other things she said. He shouldn’t have taken her to his house even though it was just because he was lonely but lonely was no excuse and he knew his mother would agree with her, and that made him cry even more. He was crying so hard that he didn’t hear the door open, didn’t hear her walking back across the floor until her voice was in his ear, the one that was hurt, but he could still hear her. ‘I’ve got Blue,’ she said. ‘He lives with me now, and he’s fine. Just in case you were worried. I still hate you, though.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, eyes still screwed shut, still under the sheet, then louder as she left again though it hurt his throat. Thank you, thank you, Charlie, thank you.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want us to stay?’ Her mother went to put a hand on Charlie’s arm, but Charlie moved slightly at the last second so that it fell into empty air instead.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You can just wait in the car with Terry.’ She watched her parents retreat, her father’s fair hair darkening in the persistent drizzle, then turned back to the grave. It was very fresh, the earth around it scarred. She could still see the marks on the lawn where a digger had been brought in to break the ground. Maybe she should have let them stay. Her mum could hardly have visited yet, what with Charlie turning up on the day her grandmother was buried. She drew breath to call out to them, but then the urge passed as quickly as it had arisen.

  She squatted down to read the headstone. What was wrong with her? When she was in the stable all she wanted to do was be back with her family again, but now that she was, most of the time she just wanted them all to go away. Her mum, mainly. It was the way she looked at Charlie, her eyes perpetually bright with unshed tears, the way she tiptoed around her as if she might break. Only that morning Charlie had called Blue up on to the bed—her mother and father’s bed—just to see what her mum would do. Her old mother would have screamed at her and kicked them both out of the house; this new one just winced a bit and offered her something to eat for about the thousandth time. It made her so mad! She wished she’d just piss off, with her little sighs and solicitous pats, piss off and go back to work. But then, why was Charlie still in her bed if she wanted to get away from her? It didn’t make sense. Every night she was determined to stay in her own room, but every night she lasted precisely two minutes before the thought of closing her eyes and being all alone in the dark sent her back up the hallway to sanctuary.

  ‘Hello, Nan,’ she whispered, though there was no one around to hear her. ‘It’s Charlie. I’m sorry I haven’t seen you for so long. I got sort of tied up.’ She snorted bitterly at her own joke. ‘I’m sorry you died and that none of us were there. I hope you can play the piano again now.’ Did Col have any family? she wondered suddenly. Were they allowed to visit him? He’d smiled so widely at her as she’d walked into his room just an hour or two ago, as if she was carrying a bunch of flowers and a DVD box set for them to watch together. It had made her sad when she wanted to be angry. Fuck Col. She pushed the image out of her head, forcing herself to focus on the broken grass at her feet, the violated soil. She didn’t want to think about Col. She didn’t want to think about anything to do with those three long months. If she didn’t think about them, if she didn’t talk about them or answer Terry’s questions, then maybe they didn’t happen. For a moment she almost envied Nan her dementia.

  Charlie tried again. ‘I hope you’re in heaven now, Nan. I hope you’re with Grandpa.’ Her voice trailed off. This was stupid. She had insisted on being brought to the cemetery as soon as they left the hospital, a trade-off for having to face Col, but now she wondered why. Nan wasn’t here. She was gone. Maybe she was in heaven, if it even existed; maybe she was just in a box in the dirt. Charlie shivered. Where would she be now, if she hadn’t got out of that fire? She screwed her eyes shut and beat one fist against her forehead. Don’t think about it. It didn’t happen.

  ‘Charlie?’ It was her mum, walking towards her holding an umbrella. ‘Sorry, I know you want to be left alone, but I can’t bear you getting wet. You should have your hood on.’
She moved to pull it up, then caught Charlie’s eyes and stopped herself. ‘Your call,’ she shrugged. She handed over the umbrella and turned to go. Charlie let it fall to her side. There was no point. It was too late. Her cropped scalp was already soaked, little rivulets of water running down her neck and pooling in her collar. She hadn’t realised how dry hair kept you. Her jaw ached, her teeth began to chatter.

  ‘Mum,’ she called.

  Her mother stopped, turned around.

  ‘I think I’m done. Do you want some time with Nan?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, moving back towards the grave. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You might as well have this,’ Charlie said, holding out the umbrella. ‘I’m already wet.’

  Her mother took Charlie’s hand instead. ‘Stay with me, Charlie,’ she entreated. It took all Charlie’s strength not to pull away.

  ‘Don’t peek!’ Rachael said, keeping her hands firmly clamped over Charlie’s eyes. ‘Just a few more steps.’ She steered her daughter forward while Matt led her by her hands, across the patio and towards the back lawn. Charlie giggled and Rachael felt her heart swell. She hadn’t heard that sound in months.

  ‘Shoo, Tikka!’ Matt exclaimed theatrically, though the chickens were nowhere in sight. ‘Go away, Kiev! This is Charlie’s surprise, not yours.’ Rachael could hear Blue barking from where he was locked inside the house, desperate to join them, but there was no way she was letting him out. Not now; not with what she was about to show Charlie.

  ‘Are we there yet, Mum?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Nearly,’ Rachael said. ‘Five more steps. Count them: one, two, three, four—five!’

  She manoeuvred Charlie into position in front of the hutch Matt had spent most of the morning assembling, then took her hands from her eyes. ‘Ta-da!’

  Charlie blinked and glanced across at her.

  ‘Go on,’ Rachael prompted. ‘Have a look inside.’