The Lost Summers of Driftwood

by Vanessa McCausland

  Her voice was false, upbeat. ‘It was plane food everyone. He’ll be fine. Please, eat, drink, be merry.’

  Phoebe spotted the elegant turban of her mother’s silk-wrapped hair. Please no, I can’t deal with this right now, she thought.

  Her mother moved deliberately through the crowd towards her, the bodies parting in her wake. She placed a kiss on both of Phoebe’s cheeks. Her face was pale with the expensive powder she kept in a gold compact and touched up regularly, as though she were a 1930s film star.

  ‘Oh darling, we’ve been waiting for this proposal for a while, haven’t we? I’m truly happy for you.’ Her glance flicked to Camilla. There was pity in both their eyes and the sight of it made Phoebe’s heart sink. Her mother’s pity was that it had taken her so long to get her life on track. Little did she know that she was now adrift and lying to everyone she loved. This was why she hadn’t called Camilla or her mother as soon as Nathaniel had told her the proposal wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t stand their judgement.

  Her mother made a tut-tutting sound. ‘And what’s this about Nathaniel being ill?’ She shook her head. ‘Silly boy.’ Her mother had no time or sympathy for illness, as though it was some moral failing.

  A thick dread moved through Phoebe’s limbs. How was she ever going to tell her mother the truth when even the lie had sparked disapproval?

  ‘Your sister has put so much thought into this celebration for you,’ she said, tucking a strand of hair behind Phoebe’s ear. ‘It’s such a shame Nathaniel can’t be here.’

  Phoebe felt her jaw clench and pasted a weak smile onto her lips. She wrestled herself out of her mother’s grasp, wishing she was anywhere but in the middle of this room.

  Her mother’s breath was in her ear. ‘Please thank everyone for coming out for you.’

  Phoebe looked around hopelessly.

  ‘I think now would be a good time,’ her mother urged, manoeuvring her so she was once again facing the room.

  Phoebe forced down the hot ball of hurt in her gut, squared her shoulders and raised her chin. ‘Thank you so much for coming tonight, everyone. It means so much to . . .’ His name felt thick in her mouth. She swallowed. ‘Nathaniel and me.’

  There was a burst of clapping and hooting and someone turned up the music. Phoebe’s throat ached with the emotion she couldn’t let out. She had to get out of here. She couldn’t go home; it was suffocating there, too. She’d come back to all the tiny reminders of their life together, like skeletons scattered through the house. Innocent, awful reminders of how her life had been perfectly on track only ten days ago.

  There was really only one place left for her to go. A shiver ran through her. She hadn’t been there since Karin’s death. Camilla and their father had cleaned out Karin’s things. Phoebe had wanted to help but she just couldn’t do it. Maybe part of her didn’t want to spoil the memories. She thought of that slow-moving river, the kookaburras at dawn and the smell of eucalyptus and river salt. It was the magical place of childhood holidays and the source of their family’s greatest pain. A place they’d all abandoned for the shame of it.

  It was close to a year now. How could a whole year go by without her sister in it? All that was left was memories, overshadowed now by what Karin had done. Perhaps that was what had made Phoebe so keen to marry Nathaniel, to lock down life, forge some meaning, some permanence. She was nearing the age her elder sister had been when she took her own life. Karin must have felt like a failure at thirty-eight. No husband, no child, alone in the middle of nowhere. Nothing compared to their younger sister. The suicide sat unspoken and heavy over all the family gatherings. But just how dark and hard things could get, Phoebe had never understood. Not really. Until now.

  She slid out a side door off the lounge room and escaped out the back door. She knew she was a coward for leaving but it wasn’t hard to go without anyone noticing. It was Camilla’s party, after all. And Phoebe had a five-hour drive south through the night towards memories of the very person she was afraid she had become.

  CHAPTER 3

  The road snaked before her, long and black and empty. Phoebe had never felt more alone, and now she was heading towards the loneliest of places. Her stomach twisted at the thought of reaching the cottage in the early hours of the morning. She hadn’t thought that far ahead, only that she needed to escape, to be alone to grieve the end of her domestic dream. The end of Nathaniel.

  He hadn’t been cruel. Every night he’d tried to find the courage to tell her that he couldn’t marry her and every night he’d failed. He’d been afraid of hurting her, he’d said. And then on that last night he had looked so sad on that balcony and when she looked into his eyes, even before he spoke, she knew.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She shook her head, not wanting to hear what was coming next.

  ‘I can’t.’

  Her voice was tiny. ‘Why?’

  ‘It feels like we’ve been planning this instead of actually living, you know? It feels like some kind of military operation instead of something . . . I don’t know, something natural.’

  She took a step away from him and he reached out for her but she pushed his arm away.

  ‘I’m so sorry Phoebe. I know how much this means to you.’

  ‘How much this means to me? This is my life. This is our life.’ She could hardly get the words out.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry. I just . . . I need something . . . more. Different. It sounds horrible, I know, but I have to be honest. I’ve been wrestling with this for days. Weeks.’ He sighed deeply and shook his head.

  ‘Oh my God. Why did you make me go through all this? Buying the ring together? Planning the trip. Telling people?’ Her face was wet with tears.

  He put his head in his hands and was quiet. For a few hopeful seconds she thought he was reconsidering.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe I just went along. I knew how much you needed it. After Karin and everything that happened. I wanted you to be happy.’

  ‘But you don’t love me.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not that simple.’

  She laughed now, at how naïve she’d been. Of course it was simple. Nathaniel’s unhappiness had probably been there all along and she’d just refused to see it. She’d been running too hard from the pain of Karin’s death. And now look at her. She was driving through the darkness, running from everything and everyone. The headlights of her car fell on the trunks of tree after tree, white and still, like ghosts.

  Phoebe thought about Karin making this trip, alone in her little vintage VW. It had felt like an abandonment when her sister left Sydney to move to the Bay but Karin was excited. There had been a florist business for sale in town, and the rent and lifestyle was so much more affordable than Sydney’s lower north shore, where they’d all grown up. Karin had moved into the cottage, always intending to get her own place when the business was more established, but she was a lover of old things. The house had belonged to their grandparents, and where Camilla and Phoebe saw old people’s stuff and dust, Karin saw treasures. She loved the lace curtains, and the faded orange lamps. They all knew the lure of the move had been the house just as much as the business. Karin had seemed so happy.

  Phoebe wound down the window. The night air was still warm on her face. She could hear the earth breathing, the insects humming with the leftover heat of the day. She remembered this part of the trip, her sisters on either side in the back. The sunlight flickering through the trees was like looking through a kaleidoscope. She could still taste the hard-boiled butterscotch they were given as a treat on the drive. A wave of sadness rose through her body. How could that be so long ago? How could so much have gone wrong?

  When someone you loved took their own life, all you were left with were questions. Questions about Karin’s mental health, even though she had their father’s emotional stoicism. Questions about how she had died. Phoebe had been so sodden with grief at the time that the details had seemed almost irrelevant
. It was Camilla who had viewed the body and talked with police and the coroner. Her practical, together sister had pulled them all through it. The coroner had concluded that Karin had taken her own life in the river. But something deep inside Phoebe had said ‘no’, very clearly, very loudly, right at that moment of being told. Karin was afraid of the water, no one knew that better than Phoebe. But it was the coroner’s verdict, the narrative that had wound itself about her family, whispered in hushed tones, a filmy, sticky web, almost invisible to the eye but felt on the skin.

  The gravel crunched as Phoebe pulled into a petrol station, fluoro-bright on the side of the road. She filled her tank and smiled at the lanky teenage boy behind the counter as he looked up from his phone. She realised she hadn’t eaten properly in days. She remembered all the elaborate meals her and Nathaniel had shared overlooking sun-bleached beaches. She’d been so expectant, waiting so naïvely for her perfect life to begin. When she closed her eyes she could still see the glow of Nathaniel’s burned, bare shoulders at dusk. She bought a loaf of bread, a litre of milk, a jar of Vegemite, some cornflakes and a four pack of toilet paper. She grabbed a chocolate bar and watched the coffee machine dispense black liquid into a paper cup.

  Back in the car, Phoebe switched on the engine to get the aircon going and bit into the sweet chocolate, hard and cool. She’d treated her body like a temple for weeks leading up to the holiday and with the prospect of a wedding on the horizon — she’d hardly touched sugar or caffeine. Now it didn’t matter. There was a kind of relief in the simplicity of the sweetness, the buzz that ran through her as she tipped the coffee cup back to get the dregs.

  It occurred to Phoebe that she hadn’t brought spare clothes or make-up, or her pill—not that she needed to take it anymore. There were no lists of things to remember. No plan. This was so unlike her. She hadn’t even brought her phone charger. Her phone sat on the seat beside her, uncharacteristically silent; she had switched it off after Camilla’s first text. There was no mobile reception at the cottage anyway.

  She knew these roads in the way she knew the bumps and grooves of her own skin. She didn’t have to think, she just drove. She tried not to let Nathaniel into her mind. She tried not to think about Camilla. How would she be feeling after her wasted party? She knew her sister. She’d be mortified that Phoebe had snuck out but she would have made up some socially acceptable excuse. Anyway, she was beyond caring now. All she could think about was Karin.

  You never knew the last time you saw someone was going to be the last time ever. Why hadn’t she listened more carefully when Karin had told her about her business idea of mixing her florist with a tea salon and a vintage book and furniture store? They were all her passions and it was a great idea, but Phoebe had despaired that while it might have worked beautifully in Sydney’s hip eastern suburbs, the residents of the Bay might not be so sophisticated. Karin had defended them. There was a lot of wealth coming in on weekends and holidays out of Canberra, she had said. There were a lot of holiday rentals to furnish. And the people here were simpler, it was true, but a cup of tea, a paperback and a bunch of flowers were simple too, in their way. Phoebe had thought back on her last conversations with Karin so many times, looking for clues, but she couldn’t see any. Not even a glimmer of what might have made her sister walk into the river only a few days later.

  The smooth traction of the road changed as the tyres moved onto the unsealed road. Fatigue was heavy on her shoulders and it made her eyes feel gritty and dry. There were no streetlights and Phoebe reduced her speed to a crawl. She rounded the corner and the river glinted like a dark mirror through the trees. She felt a rub of excitement run through her, the leftovers of childhood, like remnants of a pleasant dream. But as the metal gate came into view, the feeling changed. It was chained shut and panic tightened over her chest. Would she even be able to get in? The front door key had always been hidden under a stone frog in the yard but she hadn’t thought about whether it would still be there. Was the electricity even connected? She had no mobile reception and she was in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. Phoebe didn’t believe in ghosts but her skin suddenly felt clammy with cold at the thought of the dark, empty, abandoned house. Why hadn’t she just called Hellie and bunkered down with her for a few days? No. Hellie had a new baby, and the spare room was now the nursery. She hadn’t even had the courage to tell her closest friend that the proposal hadn’t happened.

  She opened the car door and the smell of eucalyptus surrounded her, tart and familiar. Her breath hitched in her throat. Karin was in the smell, the sound of the river moving behind the house. It was Karin as a child, playing on the jetty, and Karin gone but still here, moored in the bark of the trees, the lonely shut-up house.

  Phoebe wiped her eyes and got out of the car. The gravel was loose under her feet and she made her way carefully in the path of the headlights. Relief made her gasp as the chain fell away easily and the gate swung open. The house came into view, windows darkened, paint peeling like flaky skin. She remembered it bigger, newer. Memory always played that trick.

  The air had cooled in the early hours and it nipped at her bare arms and legs. In the headlights she found the stone frog next to the tank where it had always been. Underneath was a rusty key, caked with dirt and time. Her heart was beating loudly in her ears as she wiped the key off and eased the metal into the lock. Part of her felt like an intruder, part of her felt like a refugee. She was scared about what she would find inside, but she pushed the door open and went in.

  CHAPTER 4

  Phoebe opened her eyes to see dust particles dancing in the morning light. It took her a second to locate herself. To remember why she was here. The feeling settled like a stone in her gut and she shivered in the morning cool. The mohair blanket smelled slightly of mildew but she pulled it up to her chin anyway. She had flicked on the lights, collapsed onto the sofa and slept a long, dreamless sleep. In the daylight she could see how little the place had changed.

  Her grandfather had built the house in the 1960s but evidence of Karin was everywhere. Under the fine layer of dust was a carefully curated melange of vintage artefacts. Karin had ripped up the decaying carpet to reveal polished wooden floors. She had stripped the wallpaper and painted the walls white. The furniture was mostly different from how Phoebe remembered it. The sofa she’d slept on was a newer type that had been covered in a beautiful stitched and beaded throw. The coffee table was made of raw wood and topped with her grandmother’s cut-glass vases. There was a basket of shells, collected over a lifetime, held up to the ears of children to hear the sea.

  Phoebe picked up one and ran her fingers over its rivulets. She went over to the cracked leather armchair and smelled it. Tobacco. She could still see her grandfather smoking his pipe here after dinner. She smoothed the spines of the National Geographic magazines dating back from the 1980s and the old leather-bound books, which still sat in the bookcase like dignified old men.

  There was a picture of the whole family at the Mogo Zoo, the three of them standing in front of their parents. Phoebe was shocked at how young her parents looked. Her mother had yet to enter her turban-wearing phase, but even then she’d been partial to hats. She looked elegant in a wide-brimmed black hat, angled just so, and what looked like a silk jumpsuit. Camilla had inherited this ability to effortlessly shine, even somewhere like a zoo, but Karin had been the truly beautiful one. Phoebe had been called beautiful in her life, but sometimes looks were relative to who was standing next to you. In the photo, she was sandwiched between her two sisters—Camilla, honey skin and hair, with eyes the colour of the sky in high summer; Karin, her photographic negative: winter’s version, with black hair, grey eyes and pale skin. Phoebe was in the middle in every sense. Her skin and hair were neither dark nor light, and her eyes were hazel as though they couldn’t decide between green and brown.

  Camilla wore a pink dress with sparkly ballet flats, and Phoebe and Karin were in shorts, T-shirts and thongs. Karin was laughing at Phoeb
e poking her tongue out. Karin had been the happiest, the simplest. She was the peacemaker and the funmaker. She was like their dad. She was not the kind of person who walked out into the river and decided to die.

  A breeze brushed her back and Phoebe turned, feeling fright jump in her chest like a startled bird. And then she saw that it had come from the window she’d opened when she’d arrived. She looked at the picture of her smiling sister. She didn’t want to feel afraid. She wanted to remember Karin fondly, but the gap in understanding what she had done was a dark gulf that Phoebe couldn’t seem to cross.

  She wandered into the kitchen. Where some would have seen narrow benches and an impractical old electric stove, Karin had seen history. She’d kept it all except the florid carpet. Carpet in the kitchen was too retro, even for Karin, and she’d replaced the overhead fluoro light, too. Phoebe sat down at the dining table overlooking the river. It was covered in the same lace tablecloth that had always been there. It had been on this tablecloth that Karin had left her suicide note.

  Phoebe stood up, abruptly, the image of dead and rotten flowers crowding her mind. She needed air. She had to pull hard to open the glass sliding door. It gave with a crack, and she stepped out onto the deck her father had built over one summer.

  Through the white gums that lined the bank she could see the green of the river, still in shadow. A motor boat scooted past, a loud wound in the morning air. She smelled motor oil and eucalyptus. She realised she was hungry. Back in the kitchen the kettle looked new. Camilla probably bought it when they were down here to clean up Karin’s affairs. Phoebe remembered that the water was from the tank and needed to be boiled before drinking. She filled the kettle and flicked the switch. She found the toaster, also new, and went about the comforting ritual of making Vegemite toast. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d had toast. She carried her breakfast outside to the wooden table. The timber was brittle and cobweb-covered and she used a stick to scuttle away the wisps.