Promise

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘Yeah. Well, I am. Guilty, that is.’

  ‘It’s a good plan. And I have a couple of ideas for defence lawyers.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘You know, Anna, the FACS people will take good care of Charlie. That’s what they do, take care of kids.’

  She smiled. ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

  There was silence from his end.

  ‘How are your kids?’ Her voice sounded even flatter than she felt.

  ‘They’re good. First term of high school, which is all a bit exciting.’

  In the motel room, her dad turned the TV on. It blared until he turned it down.

  Dave said, ‘Look, I really want to see you but I can’t get out to your dad’s for at least a fortnight. I’m up to my eyeballs in work. Can you come to Sydney for a quick visit?’

  ‘I’m meant to sleep at Dad’s every night. I don’t have a place in Sydney anymore. Dad packed up my place.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I helped him.’

  ‘Oh, did you? Thank you.’ She pictured him stacking her possessions into boxes. He knew her better now than he had before, that was certain.

  ‘I took all your pot plants to my place,’ he said. ‘They’re down the back near the clothesline.’

  ‘Oh thanks, Dave.’ She started crying. ‘Thank you.’

  •

  Anna and her dad sat up on the twin double beds, facing the television. He paged through the room-service menu.

  ‘Hamburger and chips. Steak and chips. They have spaghetti bolognese. Or we could order Chinese in.’

  ‘Hamburger and chips is perfect, thanks, Dad.’

  He picked up the phone and ordered.

  ‘Thank you kindly, young lady,’ he said, then hung up. He’d always had an ultra-polite phone manner.

  He plumped the pillow behind his back and picked up the remote. ‘What do you want to watch?’ The news was on mute, showing footage of a capsized boat somewhere.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Dad. I’m sorry to drag you into this.’ She attempted a smile. ‘Sorry to besmirch your reputation.’

  ‘You didn’t drag me into it. I’m your dad. You were part of my deal the moment you were born.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’ She watched the silent pictures of two men in life jackets being helped up a jetty. ‘Life dealt Charlie such a crappy hand but she was still so game, you know, so unapologetically herself.’

  ‘You were like that.’

  She shook her head. ‘My hand wasn’t half as crappy as hers. And I didn’t feel that game or plucky either.’ She was too tired and raw to stop herself from saying more. ‘After Mum died, I was always testing the waters, always holding back. Charlie doesn’t hold back.’

  She felt breathless, mentioning her mother, and couldn’t look at him.

  ‘Maybe she knew she didn’t have to hold back with you,’ he said.

  Like I had to hold back with you, she wanted to say.

  ‘She still wanted her mother.’ She glanced at him.

  He smiled. ‘Of course. We all want our mother. Especially when she’s gone.’

  His mother was a farmer’s wife, a no-nonsense, devout Christian. She died of a stroke the year before Anna’s mum died.

  ‘You still miss your mum?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yeah. I still miss my mum.’ The TV pictures went blurry.

  ‘I emailed Luke and let him know what was happening.’

  ‘You just can’t talk about her, can you?’

  ‘About your mum?’

  She nodded.

  He shook his head. ‘But what is there to say, Annie?’ He patted his chest. ‘It’s all in here, really.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t need to talk about her, but I did.’

  ‘Well, you could have.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t! You told me to stop asking about her.’ She ran her hands down her face. She’d start shouting if she didn’t calm down.

  ‘I asked you to stop?’ He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  ‘In the garage.’ She turned to face him. ‘You threw the shelf onto the floor and stormed off for hours.’

  ‘Stormed off? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You don’t remember that?’ She swallowed. ‘Dad, you acted as if she’d never existed. I felt like I was going mad.’ She started to weep. ‘There was no one to talk to about her, and remember how it was, and so the few memories I had . . . when they faded, that was it. I had nothing. I was just left with this big black hole where my mum used to be.’

  He took a long drink from his can of beer. ‘It was a big black hole. That’s the truth of it.’ He wiped his mouth. ‘Couldn’t you talk to Lorraine?’

  ‘I wanted us three to talk about her. We were the three left behind.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Annie. I did my best.’ He stood up. ‘Do you want another beer?’

  ‘No.’ She wiped her cheeks with the sheet and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

  Sorry wasn’t enough. It was the same as it ever was.

  She heard him open the bar fridge. ‘I’ll call Luke and let him know you’re okay.’

  ‘Ah, it’s alright. I’ll send him an email.’

  He flicked open the tab on the can of beer. ‘Our top priority now is to find you a gun lawyer, my girl.’

  ‘I know. Dave will help.’ She took a breath. ‘You’re not the one, are you, who told the cops where we were hiding?’

  He stared at her and sighed. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘To be honest, I did contemplate it a couple of times. But, no. It wasn’t me. I was very bloody glad to get your phone call from the police station, though.’

  Someone knocked on the door. ‘Room service!’

  Anna ducked into the bathroom while her dad opened the door. She couldn’t face strangers right now. She stood before the mirror and peered at her face, listening to him chatting to the room-service guy about the cricket. She believed he didn’t dob her in. It must have been the doctor.

  ‘Anna! Come and get your hamburger!’

  She tucked her hair behind her ears. Her dad hadn’t mentioned her short hair. She wanted to ask him whether it made her look as much like her mother as she imagined.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  They reached her dad’s place in the late afternoon. As soon as Anna finished high school and left home, he’d moved out of the weatherboard house in town and bought a brown double-brick box in a new development on the outskirts of Orange.

  He pulled her suitcase from the boot of the hire car. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s settle you in.’

  She stood on his front porch as he unlocked the front door. His lawn was neatly mown and featured a rose bush in a circular brick bed. The houses in his suburb still seemed bland and featureless to Anna, even twenty years on, even after the trees had grown.

  He wheeled her suitcase into the spare room. Together they made up the double bed with the green chenille bedspread that her dad used to have on his bed. He folded the corner of the sheet down as if it were a hotel.

  ‘There you go, love. I’ll go make us a cuppa. Then I’ll drop the car at the airport and pick up the pup from Lorraine.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad. What’s the puppy’s name?’

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘Pup.’

  She laughed. ‘I won’t forget that. Can I use your phone, please?’

  He turned back from the doorway and cupped her cheeks gently in his papery hands. ‘You use anything you want, sweetie. This is your home. There’s no need to ask.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She took the phone out to the back garden and stood in the shadow cast by the house. The air on this side of the Dividing Range was so dry, and carried a desiccating heat, even at the start of March. Her dad’s long rectangle of lawn was hemmed in by a high metal fence. A small clothesline was bolted to the side of the house and in the middle of the yard was a lemon tree weighed down with unripe fruit.

  Dave answered his phone straightaway. ‘Anna?’
/>   ‘Hi. I’m at Dad’s. I’m wondering . . . can you find out where Charlie is?’

  He cleared his throat and she heard him walking. ‘No. I can’t. And I can’t talk about the case. I’ll very likely be called as a witness at your sentencing.’

  ‘The solicitor in Byron says that even though I got bail, there’s still a chance I may go to jail. Is that your assessment? I know you know this stuff. Will I go to jail?’

  She waited for his reassurance, for things to fall back into place.

  ‘Well,’ he paused, ‘I haven’t prosecuted any child abductions . . . But, in theory, yes, you might go to jail.’

  ‘But that’s crazy. I was protecting her.’ She looked over at the low hills in the distance. They were a muted green, as if the colour had been leached away.

  ‘The law views it differently, Anna.’

  ‘But Charlie was in trouble. Serious trouble. And they turned a blind eye like we all do when someone’s in trouble. We do. We don’t want to get involved.’ She knew she was jabbering. ‘We leave it to the . . . the friggin’ authorities. But we should all be responsible for the kids around us. All of us.’

  ‘I know, but you can’t have one person, off the bat, deciding to take a child away, Anna. Think about it. Some random person who doesn’t even know the child decides the kid should be taken away from its parents. You think just because that random person thinks the child is at risk, that makes it okay? The courts won’t condone that, Anna. Anyway, is that what you want? Other people just taking kids because they think the child’s in trouble or in some kind of danger?’

  ‘Is that what you really think? I mean you – Dave? Or is this the crown prosecutor talking?’

  ‘You asked me if I thought you might get a custodial sentence. And I’m explaining why there is a reasonable chance that you will. I said this to you right from the beginning when you were in the car driving away with her. You’ve known it all along.’

  She could hear how angry he was, angry that she’d caught him up in this. And that was fair enough. She thought of all the people she’d dragged into it: Pat, Sabine, Beatie and Will, her dad, Dave.

  He went on, ‘I hope you don’t get a custodial sentence. But I’ll understand if it happens. And the prosecutor – whoever it is, and I’m being kept at arm’s length, as you can imagine – there’s a good chance he or she will be sympathetic, too, in this particular case. But there’s a bigger picture, Anna. Think of all the children who’ve been taken from their parents for their supposed good.’

  ‘You mean the Stolen Generation?’

  ‘Yeah. And the rest.’

  ‘This is really different! Her home wasn’t safe. Don’t lump her in with them.’

  ‘But she could have gone to Grandma in the first place, without all this upset, and without you facing jail. FACS would have got her to her grandma in the end.’

  ‘Is that where she is now?’

  Her dad opened the screen door and handed her a mug of strong tea. He mimed that he was going to pick up the dog. She nodded.

  ‘Jesus, Anna. I cannot talk about this anymore. I’m a friggin’ witness. You’re not allowed to talk to your friends up north, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, the only reason you can talk to me is because we’re in a relationship. But we’re not meant to talk about the case. You should know – and I’m speaking generally here – that judges are not fans of vigilantism. And a judge is tied by the law and what’s happened in previous cases. He or she can’t let you off just because they’re sympathetic. Anyway. That’s enough. We can’t talk about it now.’ He paused. ‘What are you going to do now you’re at your dad’s? Get some work?’

  ‘I’ll call Monica and see if she has any bits for me. I’ll call around.’

  ‘Good idea. I saw her down the beach one day.’ He sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry for hitting you with both barrels but you should be realistic about what you’ve done and what lies ahead. I’ll text you the number of a barrister who I think’s best for you. She’s not cheap, though. Do you have some funds?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. I’ll be right. I’m sorry for bringing this into your life and your workplace. I’m sure it’s . . . not easy.’

  ‘No.’ He said nothing for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was soft. ‘Have you thought about coming to Sydney for a visit? How about this weekend? But we can’t talk about your case, okay?’

  ‘I think I need to stay put this weekend. Thanks. Just to . . . rest.’

  Inside, she lay on the spare bed and looked out the window. Dave was wrong to say that she advocated vigilantism, but she did think that people turned away when a fellow human needed help. She’d done it herself.

  We just didn’t want to be reminded of others’ suffering, Anna thought, because others’ pain and vulnerability brought our own too close to the surface.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The policeman at the front counter of the Orange station looked about nineteen.

  ‘I have to report here three times a week,’ she said. ‘This is my first day.’

  It was her dad’s old station; she’d been in there hundreds of times as a kid, but didn’t recognise even one of the officers now.

  ‘Wait there for a moment, please.’ He pointed to a chair and consulted a ring binder on the shelf behind him.

  She sat on the hard plastic seat and wondered again who had dobbed her in. She’d asked the detective in Byron but she’d shaken her head. ‘I can’t really say.’

  ‘But it was a private citizen?’ Anna had asked.

  ‘Yes. For what that’s worth.’

  ‘Did you send a guy with binoculars into the hills near my place? The day before?’

  The detective gave a small smile. ‘Yes. There’s no reason I shouldn’t tell you that. We needed to make sure it was you.’ She seemed to be trying not to smile too much. ‘So you spotted him?’

  ‘I didn’t. One of the kids on the property did.’

  The young cop at the Orange station called her over and pointed to a small device the size of her brand new iPhone.

  ‘Press your thumb to that, please,’ he said. The screen was a bit greasy.

  ‘Just wait and I’ll give you a receipt.’ He passed her a slip of flimsy paper.

  Her dad was waiting at his café and had ordered her an oversized chocolate-chip muffin and a latte. As Anna sat down, a woman walked in with a girl about Charlie’s age. She had the very same high, curved forehead. Anna felt a surge of worry. Was Charlie okay?

  ‘How’d you go?’ her dad asked and passed her a serviette from the dispenser on the table.

  ‘It was straightforward. I just do a thumbprint and that’s that.’ She stirred her coffee. ‘Dad, can you tell me something that Mum and I used to do together? When I was little.’

  He looked back at her for a moment, blank-faced. The chatter of the café washed around them. Anna was determined not to break the silence, but as he looked down at his cappuccino, she felt a pang. Was she unfairly forcing him to go to painful places? No, he only had to tell her once.

  ‘Well, I remember you and your mum spending hours at the kitchen table drawing fairies, and cutting them out and sticky-taping them in hiding spots around the house. Under the dining table, under your bed. In the freezer.’

  Anna had the faintest shadowy memory of lying under her bed taping something to the wooden slats.

  ‘I found a couple in the linen cupboard when I was moving out of the house.’

  ‘Really? You found them ten years later?’

  ‘Yeah. They were really faded but that’s what they were.’

  Tears sprang to Anna’s eyes. ‘Why didn’t you keep them for me?’

  ‘Would you really have wanted those little scraps of paper?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  •

  The puppy whined loudly in the night. Her dad didn’t stir, his hearing aids sitting on his bedside table. After half an hour, Anna got up and sat on the floor of the dark laundry bes
ide Pup’s basket. She patted his silky head and soon he was asleep, snuffling quietly, his legs making tiny jerks. She opened the door to the backyard and looked out at the stars. It was quiet out there, with none of the reassuring cacophony of the rainforest.

  In recent days she’d felt herself returning to a familiar feeling, something that predated Charlie. It was a feeling of drifting along and not even contemplating swimming against the stream. She was determined not to return to that.

  At the kitchen counter, she opened her laptop and looked up Seybold in the White Pages. Of course, Gabby’s mother might not have the same name as Gabby. She could be a Smith or a Brown. There were four Seybolds listed for the whole of Australia. Anna guessed that the grandmother would live in a less affluent area, which ruled out the Sydney and Perth addresses. She looked up Google Maps for the South Australian address and street view showed a beautifully preserved Federation house. The Gold Coast address was a driveway into a block of small white-brick units.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  It took Anna a fortnight to muster the energy to drive to Sydney to see Dave. She left Orange at 5.30 on Saturday morning and drove over the mountains and through the stop–start traffic to Bondi. Her dad had contacted Pat and arranged for someone to drive her car down. He said that Pat was perfectly friendly on the phone but sounded tired and the baby was crying in the background.

  The only parking space Anna could find was five blocks from Dave’s house. The footpaths were thick with people heading out to cafés for breakfast or down to the beach for a morning swim. Everyone was hurrying, no one looking at each other, and she had to step into the gutter to avoid a kid gliding by on a skateboard. And then Dave was right in front of her. She’d forgotten how tall he was and how gently he kissed.

  He ruffled her hair. ‘I like the new haircut.’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, thanks. You should have seen it before I got it tidied up.’

  Inside his apartment, he handed her a glass of cold grapefruit juice and said, ‘I’m making croissants with ham and cheese. Wait until you taste these croissants.’