‘No.’ She swallows. ‘If I get sick at some point, then fine, I get sick. Loki’s done nothing wrong. He didn’t ask to be here, and I’m not going to put a death sentence on his head just because things might . . . get hard.’
‘Things will get hard.’
‘You carried two perfections for over twenty years. And you know what, Mum? You have cancer, not some magical, mystical illness that no one can explain. Yes, it’s awful, but people get cancer all the time.’
‘It’s not the same,’ her mother says. ‘The charliedoll is barely alive, barely even sentient. He demands so little compared with your sister – that’s why I could host them both for so long. Believe me, I know what two full-blown perfections can do to a woman. I had the twins for four years. Growing weaker as they grew older, more complicated, more demanding. They almost killed me, Antoinette.’ She lowers her gaze, lowers her voice. ‘It was unsustainable. They were unsustainable.’
‘Mum . . . I don’t–’
‘Choice can be the cruellest of illusions. Sometimes, there’s no decision you can make that won’t be wrong.’ Clearing her throat, she lifts red-raw eyes to meet Antoinette’s once again. ‘But still, you have to make it ’
‘No. Charlie, he . . . it was an accident.’
‘It wasn’t planned. That’s a whole world of difference.’
An ordinary Thursday afternoon. Bath time for the twins. A ringing phone. And Sally Paige, numb and nauseous as she’s been for the past month or more, staring down at her two soapy, squealing children. If any thought stumbled across her foggy mind – and she doesn’t think one did, not consciously at least – it must have been that her youngest daughter, her real daughter, might prefer an older sister.
And so it was Jacqueline she scooped out of the bath.
Jacqueline she wrapped in the fluffy yellow towel.
Jacqueline she carried, heavy and damp, through the empty house.
‘You left Charlie alone on purpose?’
‘No, I simply chose your sister. It’s not the same.’
Sally Paige was on the phone for maybe a minute. As long as it took for the man from the library to remind her about the three overdue books she still had out on loan. For her to apologise and promise to bring them back the next day. She heard the crash as she hung up. The pain-laced wail cut surprisingly short. And Sally Paige put Jacqueline down on the kitchen floor. Left her swaddled in the towel and told her to wait. Mummy would be right back.
‘He’d wanted the bottle of bubbles,’ her mother says. ‘I’d left them on the windowsill and he must have climbed up on the side of the tub to reach them. Slipped and hit his head when he fell.’
Antoinette holds up a hand. ‘I know the rest of the story.’
‘That’s right, you know the story.’
Yes, Charles was unconscious when Sally Paige returned to the bathroom, but his face was not beneath the water. Instead, he’d fallen sideways and lay angled across the tub, his head propped up on the edge. Blood dripped from his scalp, threading scarlet down white enamel. He was still breathing as she slid his limp and unresisting body along the length of the tub, still breathing as she turned him over onto his stomach and placed her hand gently upon his head. But he never struggled. He never woke up.
The last thing Sally Paige did before calling the ambulance, was rinse away the blood from the side of the bath.
‘You murdered him,’ Antoinette whispers, horrified.
‘I made a choice. I couldn’t keep them both.’
Antoinette lurches to her feet. She can’t be this close to her mother, not right now, maybe not ever again. ‘And Charlie?’ she says. ‘My Charlie? Why didn’t you just do away with him as well? Instead of taking him from me, instead of keeping him locked up like some sideshow-alley freak?’
For a second, Sally Paige’s face crumples – but only for a second. She wipes at her eyes with a corner of the sheet. ‘You think I’m a monster.’ Her voice is wavering and hoarse. ‘And you’re right. But whatever I am, whatever else I’ve done, I could not kill my son twice.’
Antoinette backs slowly away, bumps her hip on the edge of the open door. ‘I can’t listen to any more of this.’
‘You have to give me Loki,’ her mother insists. ‘It’s the easiest way.’
‘Never.’
‘Then you’re a fool.’
‘Maybe. But at least I’m not you.’
And Sally Paige laughs, actually laughs, a braying hyena cackle that chills Antoinette to the bone. ‘We’ll see. Like mother, like daughter – that’s half my blood you have, running through those veins.’
Antoinette swallows. ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to take Loki and my sister home. And then I’m coming back here, and I’m going to sit by your side every day. I’m going to watch as you get sicker, as the pain gets worse and the drugs get stronger, and when you’re weak enough, confused enough, I’m going to reach in there and take back my brother.’
‘You can’t do that.’ But that voice is uncertain now, tinged with doubt.
‘I think you know I can,’ Antoinette says. ‘I think you know I will.’
Then she smiles, a sour-sharp twist of her lips that – god help her – must be the spitting image of a patented Sally Paige grimace, and steps backwards from the room, pulling the door shut behind her.
And, oh–
Gasping, hand flying to her heart as she almost runs, smack-bang right into the both of them: Loki-Lina huddled Siamese in the darkling hallway, two pairs of eavesdropping ears, two pairs of startled eyes opening wide, and Antoinette doesn’t even need to ask how much they might have overheard.
Lina holds her sister’s hand. ‘No more secrets. Promise?’
‘I wanted to tell you,’ Ant says. ‘I just didn’t know how.’
‘Whatever happens, we deal with it together. All three of us.’
‘I’m sorry, I just . . . Loki? I’m so, so sorry.’
‘You didn’t do anything.’
‘But I was going to–’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘It’s all right,’ Lina tells her. ‘We understand, we do.’ But even so, she feels it. The splinter now wedged between them. Preparing to fester.
‘Do you believe her?’ Loki asks her sister. ‘What she said, about not being able to have more than one of us?’
‘I don’t know. I feel okay right now, so maybe . . .’ Ant shrugs. ‘I know she’s resentful, and I know she hates you, Loki, the idea of you. I think she would do anything, say anything, to get me to give you up.’
‘Then don’t try to take Charlie,’ he says.
‘What?’ Ant stares at him. ‘Why not?’
‘Loki,’ Lina says. ‘She can’t just leave him with–’
‘Yes, she can.’ He turns back to Ant. ‘You can, you should. If you give your mother another chance, what’s to say she won’t just snatch Lina back again? Or me, while she’s at it? It’s too dangerous.’
‘I won’t let that happen.’
‘Maybe you won’t have a choice.’
‘Enough,’ Lina tells them. ‘Please, just stop. It’s been a really long, really awful day and we’re all on edge. If we keep talking about this now, we’ll end up saying things that we’ll wish we hadn’t.’
Loki leans back in his chair, arms crossed. ‘It’s a bad idea, that’s all I’m saying. Sally Paige can’t be trusted.’
‘I heard you the first time,’ Ant snaps. ‘Point noted.’
‘Point noted? We should get as much say in this as you. Lina, tell her.’
‘Loki, I don’t think this is the time–’
‘What about Charlie?’ Ant ignores Lina. Her anger is directed at Loki alone. ‘You’re so keen on all this tribal council bullshit, tell me, does Charlie get to have a say before you vote to kick him off the fuc
king island?’
‘He’s not on the island, remember? You didn’t seem so concerned about Rights for Retards when you cut him adrift the first time.’
‘Stop it!’ Lina glares at the both of them. ‘I trust that old woman about as far as I could spit, and of course I want to do whatever we can for Charlie. But nothing has to be decided tonight. Not a damn thing.’
Ant gets to her feet. ‘Peachy kittens.’
‘Where are you going?’ Lina asks.
‘To get a drink,’ her sister snaps as she stalks from the room.
Loki mutters darkly, unintelligibly beneath his breath.
Lina decides she’d rather not know. ‘Let her sleep on it,’ she tells him. ‘She needs time to digest everything that’s happened. I think we all do.’
‘This thing with Charlie–’
‘It’s her decision, Loki. We can’t force her to do anything, or even not to do anything.’
‘But you can’t agree with her.’
‘I honestly don’t know. It’s a risk, yes, but it doesn’t seem right to just . . . if it was you, or me–’
‘But it’s not us.’
‘Loki, please, I really don’t want to talk about this now.’
He shakes his head. ‘Your mother was right about one thing.’
‘Loki . . .’
‘Sometimes, all you have is the wrong choice.’
— 24 —
Sunday dawns grey and drizzly; a soft, misty rain that hangs indecisively in the early morning air rather than fall. Lina wishes she had packed sneakers, instead of only her sandals. Long, wet blades of grass catch between her toes. Slap at her bare legs. She still doesn’t like coming down here. Still has to fight the anxiety that churns with each fresh step. But she wants to spend some time alone with Charlie before Ant drives her and Loki back home.
Back home, back to work. For one more week at least. Meet with Ryan, supervise the set-up for his show, finesse the earlybird clientele. Make sure opening night runs smoothly, make sure everyone is happy. Especially Susan Keyes. Before she puts in for compassionate leave. Ant will need her help to wrangle Sally Paige. To tease out each last scrap of information from that woman’s stubborn, spiteful brain. Fact, hypothesis or baseless rumour – they want everything.
If her sister is going to gamble, all cards must be on the table.
Loki, meanwhile, will remain in the apartment with his books and his broadband. Continue the search for data in sources other than Sally Paige. They can’t be the only perfections in the world. Someone out there knows something. Will have left some sort of breadcrumb trail, however cryptic or oblique. All that’s required is a keen eye for needles.
That’s the plan, anyway. Tossed together in the thin, restless hour before the sun began to rise. Before she abandoned any hopes of getting back to sleep.
It’s a good plan.
A bird squawks, rockets out of the scrub, and Lina jumps. Chokes back a startled cry. ‘Stupid,’ she chides herself. How much worse it will be for Ant, having to force herself along this path each day to care for Charlie. To give him his bottle of juice or water or the baby formula they found hidden away in the laundry cupboard. Change his nappies. Make sure his radio has working batteries.
Knowing why I’m terrified of the place doesn’t seem to help, Jacqueline. It just makes me feels stupider.
Until now, Sally Paige has been making daily pilgrimages. Tasking Ant with some spurious, sickbed errand away from the house this past week, or so her sister surmises, before hobbling down to the shed and back. But Lina doesn’t want the old woman to go near Charlie ever again. Merely the thought of those wrinkled fingers scraping against his smooth, pink-mottled skin is more than she can stand.
No, Ant will have to do it. She will make her promise.
Lina knocks softly on the shed door before opening it. ‘Hey there,’ she calls to the figure curled beneath the sheet. ‘It’s only me.’ He doesn’t stir, doesn’t rock his head or hoot his usual greeting. She steps closer. Crouches beside the crib and looks into those huge, open eyes. Eyes that neither blink nor focus, but simply stare past her. Through her. Dull and lifeless as a discarded doll’s.
Antoinette is buried under rubble. A heavy, persistent weight of dirt and rock and debris, pinning her down in this noiseless dark. It isn’t so bad if she keeps her eyes squeezed shut, isn’t so scary, and maybe if she just lies here and doesn’t move, maybe everything will be okay. This is what she wants to tell the hands that scavenge unrelenting through the wreckage above, pulling at her clothes and her skin like the beaks of carrion birds. Stop, she wants to tell them, leave it, leave me, but her mouth is foul with grit, with the sand that pours in over her tongue and fills her throat, fills the empty sack of her body, spills from her seams–
Ant please, I need you
–and she groans and heaves and rolls, giving herself over to the grasp of all those greedy hands. Hands that now clutch her by the shoulders, that now drag her, bruised and leaden-limbed, up to the surface and the stale air.
‘Come on, Ant. Wake up.’
Antoinette blinks groggily and clears her throat, half-expecting to cough up a lungful of sour, clotted dirt. Her sister’s face is grim, her eyes red and glossed with the residue of tears. ‘Jacqueline, what’s wrong?’
‘Charlie’s dead.’
‘What?’ She sits up. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I went down to see him and he was just . . . lying there. Curled up in his crib with that stupid frog tucked under his chin.’
Antoinette throws back the doona and swings her legs over the side of the bed. ‘Well something must have happened. He can’t have just died.’ She pulls on her sheepskin slippers, scoops up her dressing gown from where it lies puddled on the floor by the desk. ‘Can he?’
Her sister shrugs helplessly.
‘Hey.’ Behind them, Loki appears in the doorway, yawning and scratching his chin. ‘What’s going on?’
And Antoinette is struck by the sudden, incongruous realisation that she has never, not once, seen him shave. Never spied the faintest trace of stubble, either, his face perpetually clear and waxen-smooth, no matter the time of day or night, and she cringes from the thought that this is something else she has done to him, stolen from him. Because if he could grow a beard, then he almost certainly would have by now. Facial hair so simple a mask, such an easy point of difference to cultivate. Better than avoiding mirrors the way he does, mirrors and any polished surface that might throw back that perfect, carbon-copied face he seems to despise.
‘Are you sure?’ Loki is asking Jacqueline, and she nods. Yes, she’s sure. She saw him. Lying there so still and quiet, as though someone flicked off a switch, as though his batteries ran out mid-breath–
–and then Antoinette is moving, pushing past her sister, twisting away from Loki as he tries to catch her arm. Please please please please. Running now, or close to it, stumbling down the hall with dread building a home in her chest. Please please please please. Desperate, useless little word. No magic left in it at all, and she knows this, knows it even as she reaches the silent, still-closed door to her mother’s room, as the handle turns in her hand. Knows it, knows it, but still.
Please please please please.
There’s no pulse, no matter how deep Antoinette presses her fingers into the cool, slack wrinkles of her mother’s throat. No breath to fog the mirror she made Jacqueline fetch from the bathroom. The Dilaudid is all but gone. Some of it spilled onto the sheets where the bottle has fallen, but most no doubt sucked through the green bendy straw that still pokes, pathetic and somewhat surreal, from the brown-glass neck.
Antoinette picks up the bottle. It smells sweet. Palatable.
‘Should we be touching anything?’ Jacqueline asks. She’s looking at the large manila envelope lying on th
e end of the bed, the envelope with Antoinette’s name written on the front in small, square letters.
Antoinette puts the Dilaudid bottle back where it came from, an inch or so from the motionless, spider-curled fingers of her mother’s right hand. Her mother. The woman in the bed looks nothing like her mother. That face mottled and grey, but still more relaxed than Sally Paige ever seemed in life. Mouth hanging slightly open, upper teeth protruding just a little. Eyes all but closed, sunken in their sockets.
‘Here,’ Jacqueline says, holding out the envelope.
She shakes her head, sinks for what might be the last time into the chair beside the bed, its sagging padded seat sighing beneath her weight. On the night table, the syringe driver echoes the sound, wheezing as it obliviously pumps another shot of meds through the dead woman’s system.
‘Should that thing still be running?’ Loki asks, standing sentry in the hall. He refuses to step foot inside the room.
Antoinette looks at the little machine. There’s no power button, although the nurse did show her how to take out and replace the battery. So maybe, in a minute, that’s what she’ll do. In a minute.
Her sister waves the envelope again. ‘Do you mind if I . . .’
She doesn’t even bother with the headshake this time, just wraps her arms around her shoulders and slumps down even further. She’s so tired, she could go right back to bed, find herself a spindle and sleep for a thousand years, rose-slashing princes and all their valiant steeds be damned.
Part of her watches her sister slide a fingernail beneath the envelope’s flap and extract a sheaf of paper, and part of her is looking elsewhere. Hunting the chambers and hollow rooms of her heart until she finds it, the Big Box of Scary-Bad, finds it and pulls it out from where it has been hidden for so many forgotten years. Still lots of room inside, more than enough to stow Sally Paige away. The little glass bottle with its bendy straw as well.
It’s not a note or anything, Jacqueline’s voice is feeble and distant. Just legal stuff. Some kind of funeral plan, plus a copy of her will, and – oh, Ant, apparently she made you executor. Did you know about that?
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