With me, he meant—but she couldn’t face the question, not yet, and took him literally, because it was somehow easier. ‘I don’t know. Jarndirri’s its own entity, a life force. Every part of my adult life is here—all my life, apart from school and uni, is here. Everything and everyone I’ve lost is here. It’s like this huge blanket smothering me, and every breath I take hurts me.’
‘Do you feel that way about me, too?’
She should have known he’d keep pushing for the answer he sought, even if it hurt them both. And it was hurting him; the tight coil of anguish inside was locked down deep, but she could see it there, ripping at him. She swallowed, breathed in and out by force. ‘I don’t know,’ she cried again, feeling wretched. ‘You and Jarndirri have been one entity in my mind for so long. You both dominate my life, overshadowing everything I do or I want, just as Dad and Jarndirri did. It’s been that way all my life. I don’t know if I can even separate you.’
His jaw moved, but nothing else. ‘That’s why Lea ran off to Grandad Jenkins at Yurraji,’ he muttered eventually. ‘The fight over marrying me was her excuse to get away from Bryce’s domination—and from the obsession with Jarndirri. I always knew that.’
Anna nodded. ‘She left. I had to stay…but, oh, how I wanted to do what she’s done.’ And how I admired her, and resented her, for forging her own life, her way.
‘Did you feel that way about marrying me?’
Her gaze lowered. She pressed her lips tight, chewed at her mouth. ‘I was so crazy about you. You know that—I never tried to hide it. I knew you’d never be happy off the land, or with an independent wife. So I gave up what I wanted to make you happy.’
He still didn’t move; she felt his stillness like a living thing. ‘So you did resent me, just like you resented Lea—like you still resent her. You resent her because she got away from here—because she rebelled and didn’t get punished for it. Because she has Molly, can have other kids.’
Hearing the words so bluntly stated should have shocked her, but then she realised she’d been waiting to hear them for a long time, either from him or Lea. After a few moments, she shrugged. ‘And for having Molly so casually, a one-night stand, when we couldn’t have one with all we’d tried.’
‘And me?’ he pressed. Pushing as usual for her emotions, so he could fix it; but this wasn’t fixable, and it was time he realised that.
So she said, lightly, ‘Wouldn’t you have resented me, if I’d expected you to come off Jarndirri for a few years so I could teach before we settled back here to have kids?’
The frisson of surprise ran from him to her. ‘I wouldn’t have done it.’ Low, he added, ‘I never thought of giving anything up to have you.’
She nodded. ‘I know.’ You just added me to your list of possessions.
‘I—cared, Anna. I still care.’ He was plainly struggling to say so much.
A vast sadness rose inside her, but still she smiled. ‘I know, Jared. In your way, you do care. We’ve known each other too long not to. But I’ve been lost for years, and you never even noticed when you left me behind. I don’t think you wanted to see it.’
‘I didn’t. Then.’ He strode to the window, watching the sheets of water from the heavens, like a waterfall’s edge. ‘There has to be a way. I’d do anything to fix this.’
‘Anything but leave Jarndirri,’ she said quietly.
He wheeled back round, his eyes shadowed, as if bruised. He didn’t have to say it. She knew there wasn’t a choice. ‘I want to grow old with you, Anna. No woman but you.’
Beautiful, moving words—but he meant on Jarndirri. And he hadn’t had any other woman since he’d been eighteen. He couldn’t possibly mean what he’d said, even if he thought he did. ‘There are women who want your dream, Jared. Women who love the land, who won’t demand compromise and—and what you can’t give. Women who can have children. I’m barely a woman any more.’ She almost choked on the words, they hurt so much.
‘That’s not true,’ he murmured, eyes closed, fists clenched. ‘You’re my woman, the only one I want.’
Struggling against tears, she whispered, ‘I can’t stay here, Jared. I have to go.’
He was so still, she felt a ridiculous urge to take his pulse. Then his hand twitched; a muscle in his cheek moved, and slowly, he turned from her. ‘The rain’s getting worse. We’ll call Rosie tomorrow at the facility, ask her if she’s changed her mind. If she hasn’t, we can tell the authorities about Melanie. Soon the rivers will flood, and nobody will be able to drive in. We need to get the plan into action.’
‘All right,’ she replied, awkward, inane. Lame, lame…‘Thank—’
‘Stop.’ The word was so harsh she winced. ‘I’ve neglected your dreams, your needs for twelve years. If Melanie and your freedom is all you want from me, you’ll get it.’
The words moved her to her soul. Soft, hesitant, she stammered, ‘I-if I can d-do anything…’
He shook his head once. Curt, on the edge of losing control. ‘You’ve done enough, Anna. All these years, you’ve done enough. Let me give to you for once.’
‘Stop it. You’ve been the rock of this district, always giving—’
‘Yes, I’m always giving, aren’t I? To everyone but the one person I should have given everything to. That person I pushed into things she didn’t want, and pushed her away at the same time.’
What could she say to that?
‘Just know one thing.’ His hands were in his pockets; his face remained resolutely watching the rain, the brilliant forks of lightning attacking the sky. ‘I’ll be here waiting. For the rest of my life, I’ll be waiting for you to come back.’
She couldn’t take any more of this. With a stifled sound, she turned and ran from the room; but the ghosts of what had been and what might have been crowded her every step—and she knew that, no matter what she did with her life, they’d always be there.
And for the rest of her life, Jared would always be there. He’d haunt every step, fill every silent moment: her personal ghost and the yardstick by which every other man would fail.
CHAPTER TEN
MELANIE awoke grumpy from her nap. Anna brought her out to the kitchen to feed her—but she threw away the bottle, dribbled over the teething rusk with a grizzling wail, turned her face from a biscuit. She even slammed her little fist in disgust over the dust bunnies Anna retrieved from the garbage.
Jared, who’d been watching, waiting for Anna to ask for help, finally gave up and said, ‘I think we should distract her.’
Anna looked up at him in open pleading. ‘With what?’
He grinned. ‘Well, those stables are getting smellier by the hour.’
‘You don’t think she’s too little?’ She twisted her hands around each other, her gaze anxious. ‘What if she eats dirt or dung—?’
‘Babies in Third World countries survive worse than a bit of dirt—and as the doctor assured my mother when I apparently ate my first fistful of horse doo, it’s never killed anyone yet,’ he assured her in mock solemnity.
A slow smile spread across Anna’s face. ‘Yeah, but if you’re recommending yourself as a living example of what eating poop can do to you…’ She went cross-eyed and made a crazy stuttering noise, like Porky Pig’s stutter, by pulling her lip down with her finger over and over.
He burst out laughing and tugged at her hair, glad she’d got past her tragic mood earlier. If he needed to inject more happy medicine into their relationship, every five minutes, he’d do it.
If only he’d thought to help her this way months ago, she might never have left.
‘Come on, let’s go. I’ve set up some blankets for her in a clean patch right near the lambs. I think she’ll like them.’ Though this was a cattle station, her dad had bought her a couple of sheep when she was little. Despite selling spring lambs every year, Jarndirri still had about ten dozen sheep—Anna’s sheep, they were called. Her dad had even had shearers flown in every time the sheep grew too woolly, and it was accepted
Jarndirri tradition now.
‘No more excuses. Let’s go.’ He handed Anna an umbrella with which to protect Melanie both from the rain and the curious eyes of John and Ellie Button.
Melanie’s bad mood broke the moment Anna laid her on the series of blankets he’d laid out in the stable. The baby took one look at the lambs in the pen next to her, and a delicious, gurgling laugh gushed from her lips as she began crawling toward the animals.
Jared pushed a shovel into Anna’s hand as she was about to run after Melanie. ‘Hey, you’re not getting out of the work that easily.’
‘But what if she…?’
He put a finger over her lips. ‘Don’t you remember the fun you had in here when you were a kid? Let her go, Anna. She’s happy.’
‘The pen posts are rough—’
‘I sanded them earlier. There’s no way she’ll get a splinter.’ Quickly, before she could protest again, he pushed the foot-high concrete blocks he’d brought for the purpose—and nearly strained every back muscle doing it—that morning. ‘There. Best playpen any kid ever had, complete with living toys to watch.’
Two hours of hard labour followed—but Anna had never minded hard work, and felt good at the end, though she was drenched in sweat and stank of dirt and dung by the time they were done. She kept running back to check on Melanie, of course, but for the most part the baby was having fun watching the lambs and hearing them bleat. She laughed every time—and she was fascinated by the horses. Whenever one whinnied she stopped whatever she was doing to fix her gaze on the beautiful creatures, with a drooling smile and incoherent baby noises of pleasure.
Anna shovelled the last load of muck into one of the massive bins kept for mulch, put the lid down tight and came back from the other end of the stable to check on Melanie. She found the baby in Jared’s arms, her gold-and-silver chortles of happiness floating in the air as Jared danced her around the pen, singing loudly and off-key to her. He laughed as she tugged his hair, or put grubby fingers in his mouth, in his ear or up his nose, as babies did.
Her gaze swivelled to where the music came from. ‘You brought out the portable CD player for Melanie?’
He jumped as if shot. Jared, who noticed everything, hadn’t seen her there, he’d been so absorbed in the baby. ‘I noticed she likes music,’ he explained, gruff and cool, but Anna smiled. There was just a tinge of blush on his upper cheeks at being caught singing ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ to a baby.
And he’d known every word of the song. And he’d always acted as if he hated her CDs…
Grinning, she said as the music ended, ‘I think it’s time for a shower. I feel all sweaty—’
Realising what she’d said, and how she’d always said that before, she glanced at him in half-aroused horror, and saw in his eyes a mirror of her memory, and her desire. She burst into speech, almost babbling. ‘Do you think Melanie will be okay in a shower with me? It’ll be faster if we shower together—’ She skidded to a horrified halt, shut her mouth and then babbled again, ‘Melanie and me, I mean, not…’ Now she closed her eyes. Could she have made it any worse? Could she be any more humiliated, any needier? Why didn’t she just say, Take me to bed?
‘I think she’s getting tired. If you shower her quickly and hand her to me, I can give her a bottle and dress her while you dress, and we can put her to bed.’ He spoke as calmly as if he’d noticed nothing, but his chest was heaving with each breath.
Guilt flashed through her, seeing what she’d done to him. ‘I—I didn’t mean to…’ she groaned, feeling like a complete dork. ‘I mean…’
‘I know you didn’t mean that,’ he said gently enough, but he’d turned from her, hiding the inevitable male reaction to even accidental sensual talk. ‘Let’s get her inside. She looks like she’s ready for a nap.’
Anna saw that the baby was indeed yawning, but her sparkling eyes still followed every animal movement that caught her attention. ‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said, relieved he hadn’t—
‘But…’ His eyes twinkled as he added, ‘But if you decide you did mean it, now or any time at all, I’ll be the happiest bloke in the Kimberleys.’
Blushing furiously, heart pumping with anticipation, Anna swung the baby up into her arms, put up the umbrella and ran into the rain before she could say anything stupid, like Yes please, or do something really dumb, like kiss him…
Shielding Melanie with the umbrella, she let herself get drenched as she ran: the outback equivalent of a cold shower and, boy, did she need it.
That night, after Melanie had been played and danced with to her little heart’s content, fed, burped, changed and put to bed, Anna sat on her grandmother’s old rocker on the front porch. She was stitching one of the patterns he’d bought her: a wild rose bush growing inside a forest.
She looked content. She looked beautiful.
Inside the living room, Jared sat on the sofa, sorting out the colours of thread she didn’t yet need, and waited for her to say the words, that she’d changed her mind and she wanted him to take her to bed…
But she hadn’t. She’d asked him to sit beside her as he’d sorted threads for her, but she’d mucked out the stables all afternoon with him, cooked dinner, and made conversation when he’d made some fumbling attempts to speak. She’d done nothing but give—and she’d made the offer to sit with her with such gentle distance he’d known she wanted to be alone.
So he watched her through the curtained window, filled with aching hunger. She was close enough to touch, to fill his inner darkness with her starlight, to give him sweetness and warmth in a world gone bleak and cold. But, fool that he’d been, he’d forged ahead with dreams when she had still been in love with him. He’d focussed on perfection, refusing to see truth, and he’d lost her. He’d lost her inside his dreams, left her behind, as she’d said. Though he could force her to stay by her promise, he no longer had the right to touch her, take her. He’d lost it all by himself, by sheer neglect.
What was he going to do? How could he live without her?
I love you…
He closed his eyes, bunched his fists. Oh, he had no doubt he could make her stay, even without reminding her of her promise. All he had to do was speak the three fatal words that would unleash the guilt and duty in her, as they had in his mother. Anna had never refused a duty in her life; he knew she wouldn’t now. I love you, Anna. Please stay and make my life right.
But that was the issue: it was always about him, his life, his dreams. Anna had fed his dreams constantly from the day he’d kissed her in the haystack—she’d almost died trying to fulfil them, and still he’d pushed her away.
What kind of love was it that ignored the person he loved, outside of his wants and needs? Like father, like son: he had no idea how to love. He was as destructive as his father.
He wouldn’t hurt her again. It was time to give back—and if peace from his pursuit, and adopting Melanie was all Anna wanted from him, she could have them.
The phone rang at that moment. He greeted the caller absently as he tried to sort out grass green from forest green—which shade was this? He had no idea—
‘Mr West? Hi, it’s Rosie Foster…I’m so sorry…’
And then what she was saying, babbling really, sank in. His head snapped up, his gaze riveted on nothing as the world caved in on him.
No—it wasn’t his world collapsing. Anna’s world was about to cave in on her. Again.
‘You want to talk to me?’ His mother sounded subdued, but the sense of mild shock came down the line.
Jared had to release the jaw he’d clenched since first hearing his mother’s voice, realising he’d been the one to call her. Conversation with her had been this hard since the day his mother had dumped him on Bryce like a bag of garbage. And to do this, asking for her help, was like drawing his own blood, cutting his throat; but he had no idea what else to do.
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t asked for anything from me in years.’
Since you threw away D
ad’s last letter with his words of love and apology for ruining our lives. You said his love was as bloody useless to you as the insurance he hadn’t paid in months. ‘Since I was fourteen,’ he snapped.
Silence met his four-word attack. He took the phone into the glassed-in garden room at the end of the house, and closed the door. ‘There are things you need to know. Anna’s going to divorce me,’ he said bluntly, ‘and I don’t know what to do to stop her.’
The silence this time was different. ‘Oh, Jared,’ his mother said at last, her voice soft with compassion. ‘I was wondering when she’d leave.’
A few days before, he’d have demanded to know why Anna would ever want to leave him, leave their beloved home—but now he just waited, because he had to give his mother the full story, and she’d need time to digest every part of it.
‘I don’t think anyone can understand what she’s been through,’ she said at last.
‘I tried to help. I lost Adam, too,’ he growled, hating it that his mother seemed to understand immediately what it had taken him years to see. ‘All the kids that died were mine, too!’
‘But you didn’t fail, son,’ Pauline said very quietly. ‘It wasn’t your body that wasn’t good enough, that killed those babies. Anna feels she failed you, and failed those children.’
Jared stilled, frozen over the phone. ‘What? I never once thought that!’
His mother sighed. ‘I wish your father were alive right now. I think he could help Anna as none of us can.’
Without warning he burst out, ‘Don’t. Don’t you dare speak about my father!’
‘It’s time, Jared. If I don’t, you’ll lose Anna for good.’
The blunt words shocked him. ‘Go on,’ he said, hard and taut.
‘Even though we inherited Mundabah in debt up to our ears, your dad felt like a failure. No matter what he tried, Mundabah sank deeper into debt. He borrowed from the bank to buy a thousand more sheep, and the Wet, the worst in fifty years, came and drowned out the enclosures; the poor things drowned in their own wool. It damaged the house and took the orchard, as well as the vegetables I’d planted.’ She sounded tired and sad. ‘Agistment of neighbouring horses, cattle and sheep was our sole method of keeping food on the table—that, and the fact that your dad was a good pilot. He got into crop dusting. That’s why he taught you to fly. He planned on giving you your own business when you turned sixteen.’
One Small Miracle Page 14
