by Anni Taylor
They tried to get me to stay and have a smoke with them. Sometimes I did. Today I didn’t. Every time I’d sit down with them, they’d recycle the same old stories, in deep, smoke-burned voices.
Heading back to my car, I drove back around the corner to my street, threading through the beaten-up vans and wheel-less cars and a mob of kids on scooters and skateboards.
I pulled up short as two girls no older than eight stepped out in front of me, each pushing a stroller that carried a baby sibling. Although the babies were rugged up with blankets, the girls weren’t wearing anything more than tank tops and shorts. I watched them cross the street, the small, pixie-faced blonde girl stopping in the middle of the road to pat her squalling brother.
Driving three doors farther along to my house, I parked the car and rehearsed my act. Be casual. Don’t spill the news to Evie until later tonight.
I walked into a strangely quiet house.
Our house was never quiet.
Normally, Lilly and Willow would be whooping through the house, pretending to be magic unicorns or killer ninjas.
No whooping this afternoon. No unicorns or ninjas.
No sound of music or the TV.
Nothing.
4. EVIE
SUDDEN FLICKERS OF MOVEMENT IN THE opposite wall stole my attention.
God, were those eyes peering in from a tiny hole in the stonework?
Yes, eyes, moonlight from a high window making the whites of them luminous.
Someone’s watching me.
I jerked to a sitting position, rushes of cold prickles embedding themselves into my arms and spine.
The eyes glistened in the peephole.
Who was peering at me and the others? What was on the other side of that wall?
I willed someone else to wake.
The girl in the bed closest to mine murmured in her sleep, long, pale hair strung across her face. I choked back an impulse to run across and shake her awake.
I twisted around the other way.
A red-haired girl from the bed on my left side was silently observing me through the dim light. “Having a panic attack? I have those. Just . . . breathe. And cheer up, you’re somewhere good for a change.”
“Don’t you see them?” A tremor ran through my voice. “The eyes, watching us.”
Her face creased into a frown. “Ah, you’re one of the druggies. Good, I’m not alone. The mentors said they’d put us all through rehab before we came here. But you still haven’t come down off your high horse. Sorry, little joke of mine. High horse.” She raised her eyebrows comically.
Not answering, I swivelled back to face the walls. There was nothing but a dark space where the eyes had been.
I let air fill my lungs.
“You really need to chill, or you’ll never get through this,” the girl said, softening her tone. Her accent was what I called jolly-hockey-sticks. Upbeat and very English.
“I’m sorry—” I flinched as the wailing, stereophonic calls of a flock of birds started up, my thoughts scattering. The bird calls were so loud and exotic they were almost alien, coming from somewhere out in the hills.
“Wow, you are a jumpy one,” she said. “Hey, I’m feeling a bit jumpy, too. This place is weirding me out. And those birds are noisy.”
I rubbed my arms. “I don’t know what’s making me so nervous.”
“Don’t sweat it. Why don’t you try to get some sleep? It’s a damned shame to waste time being awake when you could be snoozing.” Yawning, she pulled the covers up close to her chin.
“Thanks. I think I’ll do that.” Wriggling back down under the blanket, I rolled to face away from her, feeling embarrassed.
Why didn’t I just shut my big mouth? I must have sounded like a child.
The birds quietened, and I could hear the steady tick of the metronomes again.
I shivered as I scanned the walls, making doubly sure the eyes were gone.
No, not gone. They’d never existed in the first place.
I was jet lagged. Exhausted. Maybe even feeling the effects of Brother Vito’s sleeping tablets. Enough to make me go a bit loopy.
My elation of mere minutes ago had vanished.
What’s wrong with me? Things finally start going right and then I have to go and start inventing things to worry about.
The girl was right. I needed to chill, or I wouldn’t make it through the challenges.
It’d been a huge rush to get here. A frenzied, whirling dervish of plans and decisions.
Brother Vito had found me through the casino. I’d signed up for a problem gamblers’ group, and the casino had passed my details onto him. Once I’d made my mind up to join Brother Vito’s program, I’d had to find someone to take care of Willow and Lilly—at a moment’s notice. I’d pressed Gray to go to his cousin’s bucks party. Gray didn’t think a lot of Dayle, but I’d needed some time to organise things and make my flight.
The hardest thing was that I wouldn’t be able to talk with Gray or my daughters for a whole week. That was a strict requirement of coming here. No outside contact. I’d had to sign a confidentiality clause.
I hated doing it this way.
I hadn’t had time to think about the right or the wrong. I just knew that I had to do something, else drag my family into a bottomless pit.
But I couldn’t tell anyone about what I’d been doing. Not Gray. Not my friends. Especially not my mother.
No one would understand.
5. GRAY
I CHECKED UPSTAIRS. SOMETIMES, EVIE AND the kids would be tucked up in our bed on a cold afternoon, watching a kids’ movie on TV.
But they weren’t there, either.
Even the cat, in its usual spot on the armchair, barely bothered to open one eye to give me its customary glare.
The house was cold. Evie normally had the oil heaters running. Both of the girls caught lots of colds in the winter—especially Lilly—and heating the house was the one luxury Evie insisted on.
I swapped back to thinking that Evie must be mad at me again. She rarely took the girls out on a cold night, and we hadn’t gone this long without talking since we’d met. There had to be a reason she wasn’t answering the phone.
She’d been strange lately. So up and down—for months. Some days dancing and singing with the kids. Other days almost refusing to talk. When I’d asked her why, she’d said it wasn’t me, it was just everything. Well, damned if I could fix everything. Throw a couple of things my way and I might be able to patch them up. But I didn’t even know where to start with everything.
I’d started thinking that maybe she was disappointed with her life. That she wanted more than I could give her. Once or twice, I’d caught that same look of disappointment in my eldest daughter’s eyes when I’d explained we couldn’t buy the crazy-expensive toy she wanted. And it’d killed me. Willow was only four, but she was just like a mini-Evie in many ways.
My thoughts burned to ash as I stepped through to the kitchen and saw the handwritten note on the fridge. It wasn’t a grocery list or a dashed-off message or something Willow had scrawled. This was a short letter, signed by Evie.
Before I snatched it from the fridge, I already knew that things were worse than Evie being a bit mad at me.
Gray,
I’m sorry, I can’t be here right now. I have to go away for a while, maybe a week or so. Sort myself out. We’re fighting too much. That’s not good for the kids or us. Please just give me the time that I need. Don’t try to find us.
I’ll come back soon.
xx Evie
Her words hit me square in the centre of my chest.
I’m sorry, I can’t be here right now.
She left me?
I have to go away for a while, maybe a week or so . . .
How the hell did she think it was okay to take our kids and just go? No way was I going to be okay with not seeing Lilly and Willow for a week. Or even a day. She could decide to leave, but she didn’t get to decide that she could take the girl
s away from me.
Why didn’t I know things were getting this bad?
We fought sometimes—sure—but we rarely got to the point of yelling. We always made up. We were always a team.
I didn’t know her, after all.
I squeezed the letter into a small ball.
This wasn’t happening.
I’d find her and talk to her, and this would get fixed.
Taking out my phone, I tried calling her number for the twentieth time, but this time the recorded voice said the number was disconnected.
As I went to toss the letter into the trash, a noise at the front door had me doing a one-eighty.
Had Evie come back already? Had she changed her mind?
Of course. She wouldn’t leave like this. This was just a bad day all around. We’d get past it.
Blowing out a stream of chilled air, I jogged along the hallway.
6. CONSTANCE
KNOCKING ON DOORS ALWAYS REMINDED ME of knocking on someone’s skull and then hollering in their ear, Let me in.
People didn’t want you at their front doorstep unless they’d invited you. Homes were a sanctum, a refuge away from the world. It was a wonder everyone didn’t put Never Disturb signs on their doors.
But whoever lived here, I needed to disturb their peace.
I knocked again.
A slow panic squeezed through my veins at the thought of why I was standing on this doorstep. I’d found a note in my missing daughter’s jacket that had this address on it.
I hadn’t heard from Kara in three weeks. I hadn’t even been able to wish her a happy birthday. She was just seventeen. I shouldn’t have allowed her to go on this trip. What had I been thinking? It was my fault. Of course it was my fault. My bright and beautiful daughter, who’d finished high school early and was already in her second year of college, had been too young to leave our home in Mississippi and complete her second year of college here in Australia. But Kara was always so headstrong. Once her mind was made up, that was it.
I was about to knock again when a young man opened the door—his hair shaggy but his face clean shaven. His eyes held a measure of anxious anticipation—which vanished almost instantly as he stared at me. Had he been expecting someone else?
“I’m looking for my daughter.” I fished in my handbag and produced a laminated photo of her. “Kara Lundquist.”
His confusion seemed genuine as he glanced at her picture. “What makes you think she’s here?”
“I just—” I stopped and started again. “I found an address on a piece of paper in a jacket of hers. Your address. And a name—Evie.”
“Evie’s not here,” he told me flatly. “And I don’t know your daughter.”
“Then can I talk to Evie? Please?”
His fist tightened on a piece of paper he had crumpled in his fist. “Good luck with that. She just left me. Wrote a goodbye letter.”
“I’m so sorry. Do you know where she—?”
“No. I have no damned idea where she went.”
He just wanted me gone. He wasn’t able to summon up any sympathy for a stranger and her missing daughter.
But I’d come a long way to find this house. It’d cost me well over a hundred dollars in cab fare from Sydney to this suburb in the middle of nowheresville. Not that the money had mattered, but it was the wasted time. I had no idea where I was—I’d simply shown the address to the driver and asked him to take me there.
The suburb reminded me of the town in Mississippi where I’d grown up. I lived in Lafayette County now, in a huge home on acreage. But I didn’t always. I stifled a shudder as I glanced down the street. Old, leaning houses and rusting cars on front lawns with the grass growing right through them. I could almost taste the poverty in the air. And this man standing before me right now was a reminder of that life, too. Cheap shoes, cheap polyester shirt. He was young now and handsome, still with pads of baby fat covering his cheekbones and his eyes still clear. In a few years, the desperation of his life would wear him down. In bitter anger, he might start drinking too much, too often. And he’d turn into the man I’d lived with in my early twenties.
I took out a marker and scrawled down my phone number on the back of Kara’s photo. I had twenty copies in my bag. “Please, would you call me if you do speak to your wife? I don’t mean to be pushy. I’m just desperate to find Kara. I’ve come all the way from our hometown in the US.”
Shrugging, he took the photograph. “Yeah, sure.”
Behind him on the wall, a framed photograph of a smiling, fresh-faced family took pride of place—the man looking slightly awkward in a white shirt and tie beside a pretty, dark-haired woman and two little girls in red dresses. I guessed it was a Christmas photo.
“Can I ask your name?” I said in a last-ditch attempt to gather clues.
“Yeah, it’s Gray. Gray Harlow.”
Thanking him, I returned to the waiting cab. I’d hoped for more than this. If only I’d found the address in Kara’s jacket pocket yesterday and had travelled out here then. It might have been his wife who opened the door, and she might have had the answers I was looking for.
My fingers were jittery as I closed the cab door and leaned back on the seat.
I needed to get myself to a doctor and grab a prescription for some Promaxa. The drug was for my anxiety and depression. My psych had refused to prescribe me any more of it. I’d been on it too long, she’d said, I was mentally stronger than I gave myself credit for.
What did she know? My three-hundred-an-hour psych didn’t have a teenage daughter living in a foreign country. She didn’t live with a husband whose love she’d never been able to feel. She didn’t bear the weight of the crushing feeling of a wasted life.
Blinking back the sting of tears, I instructed the driver to head back to the city.
7. EVIE
I WOKE NOW, FEELING THE DRAGGING WEIGHT between sleep and consciousness, my eyes too heavy to open. I hadn’t felt this whacked since Lilly was a baby. I always woke just before Gray did, near six in the morning.
I hadn’t slept in for years, not even on weekends. Willow and Lilly were always up so early.
But this morning, the world inside and out was dead silent. And the air smelled all wrong. The rental house I shared with Gray and the girls reeked of old carpet and mildew, and Gray himself carried the familiar scents of aftershave, musk and coffee. But this air had none of that, smelling dry and coppery, with notes of incense.
I snapped fully awake.
All the pieces snapped into place.
There was no Gray or home here. I was at the monastery.
I’d been dreaming of Ben and me when we were kids. At the beach house. It was a place apart, like it existed outside of everything. A place I could always go and find Ben. I hadn’t wanted to leave the dream.
Blowing out a sharp breath, I checked the clock on the stone monastery wall. It was near ten in the morning.
My thoughts switched back to Gray. He’d have found my note by now.
What was he thinking? Was he ever going to be able to forgive me for this?
The other women were gone, and the hexagonal room was still, except for the metronomes. I watched them ticking back and forth for a minute, wondering what the purpose of them was—each one on an otherwise empty shelf above each bed.
Remembering the eyes in the wall suddenly, I anxiously glanced around the room.
Nothing.
Still, I couldn’t help but watch the walls as I rose and padded across the floor. I wore a hooded outfit of loose, cream pants and shirt that I’d been given by Brother Vito last night. All of the program participants were to wear this gear for the whole week.
Poking my head around the open doorway, I realised I had no idea where to go.
Had the challenges started yet? I’d be left behind. I dashed into the bathroom first—at least I knew where that was. I peered into the dim mirror as I washed my hands and face. I looked strange in my monastery gear, my eyes so large and uncertain
.
Running my fingers through my hair, I headed back into the silent air of the corridor. The monastery seemed as if it were in twilight, though it was morning outside.
I made a wrong turn into a small, dead-end recess. On the floor beneath a forbidding, winged statue, some child had once painted a small court for a hopscotch game. Immediately, I pictured Willow and Lilly and made a mental note to teach them the game.
I jerked my head up sharply at the sound of scuffling on the other side of the wall. Maybe I’d found the others already? I just had to find the door for the room on the other side.
Running out of the recess, I almost bumped straight into someone—Brother Vito.
“There you are.” He smiled, one eyebrow quirked. “What were you doing?”
“Getting lost.”
“Ah, let me help with that,” he said with a short laugh. “Come.”
He led me along the hall to a library stuffed with ancient-looking books. He indicated a framed piece of torn, yellowish parchment illustrated with thin, hexagonal lines. “These are the original plans of the monastery, from the twelfth century. Shame it’s not all there, but you’ll get the idea.”
“Wow, so old.” Constructing the missing half in my mind, I surmised that twenty-four rooms encircled six rooms—all hexagonal and all exactly the same size—with a large gap in between the outer and inner rings. Yet another twenty-four rooms ringed the outside. “Why the odd-shaped rooms?”
He nodded, frowning as though the answer was complicated. “The monastery was built with the purpose of taking in the mentally ill and giving them work and lodgings. It was thought that the hexagonal shape of the rooms would give rest to the afflicted. Squares were thought to be too sharp and threatening. Circles roll too fast. Hexagons were the best compromise, apparently. When you step inside the monastery, you’re meant to be stepping inside an ordered mind.”
