‘Maybe sooner than you think,’ he teased.
‘I don’t like surprises.’
‘Well, you might have to get used to them,’ he joked.
She drank in the deep gravel of his voice. It was wood and moss, dark chocolate. When she’d hung up, Jade made her way to the car to wait for her family.
‘My darling girl,’ her grandmother said when she reached her, ‘are you okay?’
‘Yes, YiaYia. I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘I just had to make a call.’
‘You know that you don’t have to be strong all the time. You can tell me if something worries you.’
Jade looked down and forced herself to laugh. ‘YiaYia, I’m absolutely fine.’
‘Can you drop me back at the house?’ her father asked. ‘I want to keep cutting down the trees.’
Jade nodded. Once again, Paul was mute for most of the drive, staring out the window, lost in a world out of reach to Jade. Her grandmother tried to lighten the mood but he seemed even more distant than usual. Jade felt guilty for the way she had spoken to him; it was clear that something she said had cut right to his core.
When he got out of the car and walked off, Jade couldn’t understand how a man who looked so physically strong could be so weak.
‘You mustn’t resent him,’ Helena said as if she could read Jade’s thoughts. ‘He blames himself for far more than you’ll ever understand.’
‘So, why don’t you make me understand? Why do I always feel like there’s an explanation no one is willing to share with me?’
Helena looked out the window and sighed. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. ‘I often wish he had never met your mother,’ she said finally.
It was the first time Jade had heard her speak ill of Asha. She had always sensed that her grandmother detested the woman but Helena had never verbalised her feelings. ‘But then, they would never have had you,’ Helena added with warmth in her voice, ‘and I wouldn’t have the most wonderful granddaughter. Even though your father might not show it, for you, he would go through the heartbreak she has put him through again and again.’
‘I doubt that,’ Jade muttered under her breath.
‘You are an easy child to love, agapi mou,’ Helena said.
Jade stared at the road ahead. ‘So, why was it so hard for my mother?’
38
UNTIL two nights ago, David had never slept in either of their two guest bedrooms. His parents now occupied one of them and, after his disagreement with Courtney, he had retreated to the other. But he couldn’t sleep. The windows rattled and moonlight streamed through the shutters all through the night. The mattress was too hard so he struggled to get comfortable. Just as he managed to fall asleep, he woke to find a cockroach crawling over his arm. And he spent the next fifteen minutes trying to find it under the bed.
He thought of his comfortable bed – the soft white cotton sheets with linen stripes at the end, his contoured pillow, the plush mattress that was like a hug on his body, and Courtney asleep in her silk nightgown, her hair spread across the pillow. But David fought the temptation to go back to their bed. He needed space to clear his mind. If he was in bed with his wife, he knew he would lie with his back to her. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she was abandoning them, all for a futile exercise.
Courtney hadn’t said a word to David about staying in the spare bedroom for his second night in a row. They were both under such extreme stress that they didn’t question each other when they acted out of the ordinary. If it bothered her, she didn’t show it. She continued to make morning coffee for him and his parents, sit with him over breakfast and help Mandy prepare dinner. Courtney tried to talk to him about the everyday things but David felt himself withdrawing from her. The more she pushed to make things seem normal, the more he pulled away. He considered telling her exactly what he thought of her decision to abandon Matthew right when he needed her. But he held back because, if he was honest, it wasn’t really about Matthew. It was David who needed Courtney the most. He was afraid to be a parent alone.
On the third night of sleeping in the guest bedroom, David was woken by Courtney’s soft lips on his forehead and then the touch of her fingers smoothing his hair back. He pretended to be asleep even though a temptation rose within him to forgive her, to embrace her and go back to bed together in the haze of early morning. But when David finally opened his eyes, he saw only her back as she rolled a suitcase down the corridor and out the door.
Courtney had intended to spend the longest leg of her flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne carefully mapping out a plan for her search in Australia, but instead, as the plane levelled in the sky, she drifted into a deep, heavy sleep.
It was dusk by the time the taxi pulled up at her city hotel, a whole calendar day lost flying across the International Date Line. When she went to pay the cab fare, she felt a wave of sadness as she glanced at a photo of Matthew and David in her wallet, taken on her son’s first trip to visit Mandy and Barry in New York. It was the middle of winter. Matthew was four and Courtney had bought him thermal clothing, knitted gloves, a matching beanie and a thick fleece jacket. His hands were so small that she had to fold up the jacket sleeves three times.
On their second night in the city, it snowed as they slept. In the morning, they woke early so he could see snow for the first time in his life. ‘Look, Mom, I’m a turtle,’ he’d said as he dropped his head below the polo neck and tucked his arms in. He waddled forward, poking his head out and then pulling it back in again. ‘Did you see?’ he said, coming up eventually for air.
‘You are the cutest turtle I’ve ever seen.’ Courtney smiled, flattening his now-static hair. ‘But I bet turtles don’t like the snow.’
‘I do,’ Matthew said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
David carried Matthew on his back and pulled his beanie over his eyes so he wouldn’t see until they neared Central Park. ‘We’re fifteen steps away,’ David said, ‘so start counting.’ When Matthew began the countdown, Courtney ran ahead and got the camera ready. She stopped on the cleared footpath, kneeling down. The park was a sea of white ice, the frost dustings of snow on the branches shining like pearls. She watched David, tall and strong, his face red from the wind chill, plop Matthew down. A horse pulling an ornate cart passed between them.
‘One, two, three, snow!’ David said, whipping the beanie off Matthew’s eyes.
Courtney snapped a photo capturing Matthew’s eyes wide with awe, his face glowing with a broad smile.
David peeled a glove off and flung a snowball in Courtney’s direction, narrowly missing the camera. Matthew joined in, and soon the three of them were covered in snow, their fingers numb from the ice. The snow started to fall, silver flakes raining from the sky.
Back then it was just one of many travel experiences they would have together; the prospect of seeing her son grow older and having more family getaways was a given. Now Courtney wished she could have frozen that moment: Matthew looking up at the white clouds, his arms wide, his tongue out catching the snow as if it were sugar frosting. The sense that the world was magical and anything was possible.
Courtney woke the next morning in her quaint Melbourne hotel to the tantalising smells of coffee beans, hollandaise sauce and chocolate croissants drifting through her window. Her stomach grumbled. She hadn’t eaten since they had served dinner on the plane.
She was surprised to have slept through the night given that she was asleep throughout most of the ten-hour flight from LA. She ventured into the laneway below her hotel and enjoyed a cappuccino and lime buttermilk pancakes with strawberries, lemon curd and a dash of cream. She checked her phone, relieved to find that David had replied to her text letting him know she had landed safely. His words were economical. Matthew okay. Your dad came by to see you.
She had told her father over the phone that she was going to Australia but it seemed, like many things lately, he had forgotten. She hadn’t been able to face him in person before she left for the trip. S
he didn’t want him to feel like he had somehow failed her by being unable to recall the details of her adoption.
Courtney did feel guilty for leaving her family at their most vulnerable, but she knew she was doing the right thing. She had to find her birth parents; she had to come home with a close-enough match.
She had to because, if she failed, Courtney was afraid she would lose everything.
When David arrived at the hospital, he found his son’s bed empty. For a moment, he felt his cheeks and ears flush hot with panic, but then he heard a muffled noise coming from behind the closed bathroom door. David knocked. ‘Hey, buddy, are you in there?’
‘Hi, Dad,’ Matthew said, his voice low.
‘Everything okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ He sounded tearful.
‘I’m coming in, okay?’ David said, his voice tender but forceful. He opened the door to find Matthew standing on a stool, looking at his balding head in the mirror, tears streaming down his face.
‘Hey, buddy, what’s the matter?’ David walked over and picked his son up off the footstool. Matthew looked at the ground, too embarrassed to let his father see his watery eyes, which he wiped with the edges of his pyjamas. ‘My hair’s almost all gone,’ he said, softly. ‘I don’t look like me.’
David took a step back. ‘Then, how do I know you’re my son?’ He feigned a look of alarm. ‘I’m going to have to check.’ He looked closely at his son’s face and pretended to measure his nose with his fingers. ‘You have the same eyes as my son. You have the same chin as my son.’ He squeezed his calf muscles. ‘You have the same legs as my son, and I’d know because he’s strong like his father.’
Despite his tears, Matthew was unable to suppress a smile. ‘And you have the same dimples as my son. In fact,’ David said, ‘I’m almost certain you’re my son. I just need to do one more test to be sure.’ David tickled Matthew and he burst into laughter. ‘Yup, that’s my son’s laugh! You’re definitely him and you look the same to me. Listen,’ David said, trying to distract his son further, ‘if you are going to play for the Miami Cubs next year, you need to start looking like a real player. If you had to pick any soccer player in the world, who would you want to play like?’
Matthew looked down at the floor. ‘David Beckham,’ he said.
‘Thought so. Well, you know that poster of Beckham from the England versus Greece game that I gave you? I know just the thing that will make you look like he did when he scored that free kick that sent England into the World Cup finals.’ David pulled electric clippers out of his briefcase. With all the time he was spending at the hospital, David had started to carry them with him because he rarely had enough time at home for a proper shave.
He knew it was only a matter of time before his son’s hair fell out completely. ‘We’re going to shave your head so you can look like Beckham did then. And you know what? I want to look like him too, so I’m going to shave my hair as well.’ David plugged in the charger. ‘What do you think, buddy? Should we shave our heads? I’ll let you shave mine?’
‘You’ll let me shave your head? You promise?’ The edges of smile formed on his son’s lips.
‘Scout’s honour.’ David was doing everything in his power to turn it into something fun and exciting, instead of terrifying. A child should never have to look in the mirror and see a face they didn’t recognise: gaunt and grey from the chemo, balding from the treatment. He didn’t want Matthew to wake up one day and suddenly think he wasn’t the same person because he saw a different reflection. David would do whatever the hell it took to desensitise him, to make all the unnatural parts of his treatment seem even vaguely normal.
‘You’ve never shaved your head,’ Matthew said.
‘Never say never,’ David said with a grin. ‘I’ll go first. I’ll do the front and you can do the back.’ David looked at himself in the mirror and at his son standing next to him. Matthew, who had been crying moments earlier, now had a smile across his face.
‘I’ve always wanted to shave,’ Matthew said.
‘Well, you better do a good job. Watch how I do the front.’
David set the clippers to one. He turned them on and leaned towards the sink, starting by his ears and working his way around the sides and then the front. He left a mohawk, and joked that he would keep it like that.
‘Mom would kill you,’ Matthew laughed.
‘Take a photo and we’ll send it to Granny and Grandpa.’
Matthew took a photo on David’s phone. David then shaved the mohawk off and knelt down, handing the clippers over to his son. With a steady hand, Matthew went from the nape of David’s neck. He started off slow and cautious, and then whizzed it around the sides of his head. ‘This is fun,’ he said. ‘It looks way harder when the man does it at the barber shop.’
‘Well, try not to have too much fun and slice into my scalp,’ David joked.
‘There, done,’ Matthew said dusting off David’s T-shirt. David dipped his head forward and ran his hand over his newly shaved scalp. He stood up and took in his new reflection. He wasn’t used to seeing his face without his thick dark-brown mop of hair. It made his eyebrows seem messier, his frown lines more noticeable, the bronze and ochre shades of his eyes sharper. To hide his surprise at his changed appearance, he smiled to his son, noticing now what Courtney called his crooked smile, more pronounced on one side.
‘You look cool, Dad,’ Matthew said, grinning.
‘Your turn.’ David propped Matthew up on the stool and slowly and very carefully shaved around his son’s head. There were only clumps of hair remaining in uneven patches. The last remnants of his beautiful blond hair fell to the bathroom floor. Matthew stared at himself, unblinking, as his hair disappeared, clump by clump.
David dampened a towel and patted his son’s head clean. ‘There,’ David said, ‘now we’re twins.’
‘Do I look just like Beckham did?’ Matthew asked with a broad grin as he ran his hand over his scalp.
David tried not to show any change in his expression as he gazed at his son’s bald head. Matthew looked exactly how a young boy shouldn’t. His face seemed even bonier without the mask of his hair, his eye sockets were dark and purple, his skin void of colour. It was as if someone had taken a brush of grey paint over him but spared his eyes as they were, sea-blue, luminous, youthful. David’s heart felt raw. ‘Just like Beckham,’ he lied.
This was never how he imagined he would teach his son to shave.
39
UNEXPECTED things happened in the wake of the fires. More than forty plant species that had never been recorded in the Silver Creek region suddenly flourished. Plants like the round-leaf pomaderris, silky golden-tip and swamp bush-pea started to germinate prolifically. Their seeds had been buried deep in the soil, and with exposure to the heat of the fires, the chemicals in the smoke and the ultraviolet light, they began to thrive. The new plants attracted new bird species, and white-browed woodswallows and red-capped robins could be seen soaring through the sky.
To Jade, it seemed a strange paradox: the fire had caused so much death but here it was as a source of life.
She was lying on her back inside the shell of her house, exhausted from another day of hard labour. They had started to plaster the brickwork on the ground level. It was feeling more and more like a home now that the internal room divisions were complete and the doors and windows were ready to be installed. The builders had left for the day and she took in the sounds outside: the birds chirping, the whirr of helicopter blades as they dispersed eucalypt seeds, the wind moving through the open spaces of her house.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’ She heard a deep resonant voice coming from the door and she sat up quickly to see Adam leaning against the doorframe, the silver afternoon light falling over his suntanned skin, the faint freckles on his cheek, the shape of his disarming smile, his beckoning grey eyes. Her whole body felt electric.
She got up and walked towards him, fighting the urge to run and fling her arms around hi
m. ‘I told you I didn’t like surprises,’ she said playfully, as he cupped his hands behind her neck and kissed her. His skin was warm, the touch of his lips made her body tingle. ‘But I have to admit, I kind of like this one.’
‘Kind of! Is that all?’
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said, knitting her hand in his. She ran her other hand down his broad chest and breathed in the addictive scent of his skin. The air between them was charged with the rawness of a new relationship. They were courteous and flirtatious, unnecessarily reading into every word. It seemed strange, really, given that they knew each other’s bodies intimately but still felt like there was so much to discover about one another.
‘So, can I have the grand tour of the house?’
She led him through, describing what would become of every room, laughing about her grandmother’s insistence on a grandiose kitchen with a large marble centre island and a bay window overlooking the garden. He rubbed off a line of dried dirt on her cheek.
‘The house is a simple structure,’ she said. ‘It’s the natural scenery that will make it beautiful. All the rooms have these large windows so we can see the view of the orchard and rose gardens as they grow, the avenues of olive trees and the mountains in the distance.’ She smiled with pride.
‘You’ve done a great job,’ Adam remarked. ‘I can’t believe how quickly it’s come up.’
‘We work them hard.’ She grinned.
When she finished showing him through the construction site, he walked to his car, where a large suitcase sat in the boot.
‘So, I have another surprise,’ he said, looking up, his thick eyebrows arching inwards as he smiled. His penetrating eyes studied her face. ‘I quit my job.’
Jade froze. ‘Why?’
‘I did a lot of thinking after I left here,’ he admitted. ‘And I realised I felt out of place in Melbourne. My mum keeps urging me to move back to Sydney. I think she’s lonely. But for now, I know I want to be here, with you.’ He ran his fingers down the outline of her face. ‘I want to help you rebuild.’ He looked at her intently, waiting for a response, but Jade was stunned into silence. ‘I hope that doesn’t seem too invasive,’ he said quickly, taking in her shocked expression. ‘Say something,’ he prodded.
The Ties That Bind Page 22
