‘What about now?’
‘Officially, some things have changed. Culturally, not really. There is still an ignorant belief that people who commit suicide lose their soul and can never go to heaven. I called out to God to save my Assunta as I was running across that roof to catch her, and He didn’t help me.’ Samuel’s voice was tight with anger. ‘My time is coming to an end. Water took my Assunta from me. I wanted to make an offering back to the water god—a sacrifice that would be taken seriously. I want to be sure that when my time comes, wherever Assunta is, I’m swept straight into her arms.’
52
Sunny
Hudson had pulled out his magnifying glass and was finding ants to study, while Daisy lined up dominos to stand in a row only to have them fall again and again. Sunlight beamed through the open window next to them, lighting up their hair with shimmers of gold. Midnight squirmed in Sunny’s lap—she was now firmly an inside dog, under lock and key.
What Dave had done…
Sunny had never been someone who found life frightening. Quite the opposite. Yet in a very short amount of time, Dave had brought her to her knees. The stakes were simply too high. She was a nervous wreck. She had no faith in the law; it was up to her to protect them.
As she watched her children play, her mind reeled back to that day in Sydney when her life changed forever.
Lara, having had a seven-week scan, knew that there was not just one baby, but two. She’d been crying for days in the dingy one-bedroom flat they’d rented, engines revving almost constantly outside the windows, the men in the street frequently shirtless, the women pushing strollers and smoking. The deep scratches on her wrist looked red and inflamed. Sunny had been trying to convince Lara to at least put antiseptic cream on them, but Lara wasn’t interested in taking care of herself. She hadn’t showered for three days, and had barely touched the food Sunny cooked for her.
Lara was folded over on the couch with her head on her knees, her hands in her greasy hair, scratching at her scalp as though trying to dig through to the terrible thoughts in there and pull them out.
‘I thought I could do it,’ she whispered.
Sunny rubbed her back, feeling her own sanity tested to the limits. How long could this go on?
‘But I can’t.’
Sunny nodded silently, though she knew Lara couldn’t see her. She had no idea if Lara was referring to the abortion or to having the babies. On the issue of having the babies, she had to agree. Right now, given what Lara had been through with Dave, her sister wasn’t in a fit state to raise one baby, let alone two.
A termination made all practical sense.
And yet.
Watching the ultrasound, Sunny had felt something deep for those twins—little blobs, with blobby heads and blobby bellies, blobbing along together in their watery home. Just blobs.
But they were her blobs too.
Those babies shared her genes. They were as close to being her own babies as they could possibly be.
Lara bolted upright then, her pupils huge, her hands shaking. ‘Help me. Please help me,’ she begged, and grabbed Sunny’s shirt, tearing it at the collar. ‘I can’t kill them.’ She shook her head wildly, till Sunny restrained her so she didn’t hurt herself. Lara stilled under her hands. And then she broke down. A wild, primal, animal wail erupted. ‘But I can’t be their mother either.’ She collapsed into Sunny’s lap, rigid.
Sunny took a deep breath and looked at the 1970s-brown curtains covering the barred window. They’d hit bottom. For a second, she was seduced by the darkness that was engulfing Lara, tempted to fall apart and drown in it too.
But the thing with the darkness, she learned that day, was that it only made the light shine brighter. Suddenly, it was all very clear.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. She nodded strongly to herself, to the darkness that was waiting to ruin them both, and to Lara. ‘I’ll be their mother.’
Lara sat up, her eyes bloodshot, red-rimmed, puffy. She wiped her arm across her nose. ‘What?’
‘I’d hardly be the first to do it. It’s been done all through history, aunts raising babies as their own. Half the royal family’s probably got dubious bloodlines. And none of it makes a bit of difference.’
Meaning. Her life suddenly had meaning. All the drifting she’d done, all the rubbish relationships, all the waiting for…something. That something was here. Sunny was thirty-two years old, and this was where life had led her.
‘You’ll do it?’ Lara squeaked.
‘Yes!’ Sunny said, suddenly smiling. She put her hand on Lara’s abdomen. ‘If you want me to, of course. It is your choice, Sprout,’ she affirmed, though she was hoping beyond hope that Lara wouldn’t choose to abort them. ‘Only you can decide your future,’ she said gently.
Lara looked down at Sunny’s hand, then covered it with her own. ‘Oh, Sunny.’ And then she crumpled over and slept for sixteen hours, a deep peaceful slumber, as though knowing that everything would be okay.
While Lara had slept, Sunny sat nearby, guarding her, and talking to those little blobs. Those two little blobs that had grown up into these laughing, cheeky, inquisitive children in front of her now.
Dave could destroy them all.
Martha’s opinion was that Lara’s medical records would stand for little in court as a way to keep Dave from the kids. And she had a mental illness. Dave was a respected physician and any day now he would know that Lara and Sunny had committed fraud by naming Sunny as the mother on the birth certificates.
It had been stupidly easy. No one asked Lara to prove her identity when she went to the doctor or to the hospital. They only asked for a Medicare card. That was it. Sunny handed over hers and Lara became Sunny for a while. The babies were born to Sunny Foxleigh and they stayed that way. When the sisters registered the birth, the paperwork simply asked for copies of identification documents—mother’s passport, birth certificate and so on—and the signature from the midwife that the babies were born to Sunny Foxleigh, which, as far as the nurse knew, was true. Sunny presented all her documents and that was that.
The intention had been to hide the children from Dave. Formal adoptions left paper trails and laws seemed to change all the time about freedom of information around sperm donations, open adoptions, surrogacy and the like. Hiding down in Sydney, keeping the pregnancy away from Dave’s eyes, it seemed the simplest, cleanest thing they could do to stop him from finding them. But now Dave could take them to court to prove paternity and then ask for amended birth certificates naming him as the father. And then their fraud would come to light and Sunny and Lara would be in even more trouble.
Dave must not get his hands on her children. Sunny had failed in protecting Lara from him. He had tortured her. The revelations had taken years to all come out, and whenever they did, they gave Eliza and Sunny nightmares for weeks. And they knew the man would never change.
There was no way in hell he was ever going to touch her children. She would do whatever it took to protect them, or die trying.
Given the options available to her, the answer was simple. She had to take them and hide. She could take them on a road trip, and Dave wouldn’t be able to find her, delaying court proceedings again. She’d be gone long enough that he’d hopefully get bored and, regrettably, find another victim to torment. Because that was what men like Dave did. They destroyed one life and moved on to another.
But even if he kept trying to get the kids, the one thing she could hope for was that the older the kids got, the less likely it was that a court would take them away from their mother. From her. She had to buy as much time as possible. Years, if necessary.
She’d long ago bought an ageing but reliable Ford Falcon, a model with not many comforts but a lot of grunt, and it had a tow bar for towing the furniture pieces she picked up for her work. It was capable of towing a caravan.
Sunny spent a total of thirty minutes considering the difficulties—money, homeschooling, sharing the caravan with an energetic puppy, not h
aving Eliza with them—wondering if she should be trying to talk herself out of the plan. But she was a good problem-solver, a capable child carer and talented handywoman and she poured a mean beer: that should be enough to get her started with some odd jobs. She was a gypsy at heart. She got out her laptop, typed in long-term caravan hire and watched as the screen filled with websites.
53
Lara
They caught sight of Isabella among her herd of cows, just one of dozens of young shepherdesses walking alongside their four-legged charges. She was dressed in hiking boots, jeans and a billowing long-sleeved white blouse under a black vest, and she carried a hiking stick. Her beautiful bovine ladies were adorned in towering, ornate floral headdresses that bobbed backwards and forwards with the movement of their huge square heads. More flowers encircled their necks, attached to the thick collars, with clanging bells the size of kettles.
The crowd was half a dozen deep the whole way along the narrow cobblestoned streets that were shut down to traffic in all directions, locals and tourists alike staying put—as though time itself stood still for the spectacle of hoof after cloven hoof treading the medieval paths home.
Lara jumped up to wave at Isabella above the heads of onlookers. Isabella walked steadily, following the flicking cow tails, hurrying one along every now and then if it was distracted by the paparazzi. But she looked up just as Lara’s head shot up into the cold air, her gloved hand waving wildly.
The young woman returned Lara’s enthusiastic greeting. She tried to call something, her hand to her mouth as a mini megaphone, but Lara couldn’t possibly hear it. In fact, she was fairly certain she’d never hear again. The cacophony of discordant sounds ringing out from the cows’ bells was enough to send her home doing a splendid Quasimodo impersonation. The bells, the bells!
Cameras flashed in the dim light, the day heavily overcast. Summer was well and truly over, the weather having turned so quickly since she’d arrived in Italy just a month ago. The oppressive, low-hanging clouds held the stench of cattle manure thickly in the air. Lara hurried to take some photos of Isabella and her brown and white cows, but they were soon swept along in the great current of bovine and human flesh, replaced by the mocha-coloured, leaner cows of the next group, with huge kohl-lined eyes and seductively thick lashes.
Lara leaned back into Matteo and he wrapped his arms around her from behind so they could watch the parade together. This was truly a moment she would never forget.
After the last of the cows had passed, Lara and Matteo inched their way back to the van through a village that was probably usually sleepy. In the van, Lara turned up the heat to defrost her fingertips, which were chilled despite her gloves. Silly, cheap polyester. If she was going to be here for winter proper, she’d have to invest in some super wool-lined leather gloves.
They were on their way back to Tuscany now, not stopping to see Matteo’s brothers as they’d originally considered doing, instead forging on so Matteo could visit another farm he wanted to see—one that ran buffalo and made soft white and blue-veined cheeses.
‘I am very interested in seeing what they do,’ Matteo had said. ‘I am looking forward to sharing ideas about less wastage.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have been reading journals that say buffalo produce less milk per day but with higher solids, so it takes less milk to get the same kilo of cheese. And buffalo are more efficient with their feed.’
‘So you have to spend less on feed to get the cheese?’
‘Correct.’
While Lara was thrilled to see yet more animals, she was a touch disappointed not to meet Matteo’s three big brothers.
‘Tell me their names again,’ she said, yawning. She’d stayed up late last night talking to Samuel and then lay awake thinking, and missing Matteo’s body next to hers.
‘Enzo is the oldest; he is forty now, and is an electrician. Sergio is thirty-six, so just a year older than me, and owns a chain of gymnasiums. And Salvatore is thirty-eight and is a textile trader.’
‘And they all have families of their own,’ she clarified.
‘Yes. I have seven nephews and nieces, all between the ages of twelve and fifteen.’
‘Wow. I bet that gets expensive at Christmas,’ she said, grinning.
Matteo murmured agreement. ‘It does. And, you know, I am a simple shepherd man,’ he said. ‘What can I bring them? Cheese?’
‘So you’re the only one without kids.’ Lara studied him sideways while he steered the van through the countryside, wriggling her toes, willing them to defrost as well. He had such a lovely profile.
He glanced at her quickly, then darted his eyes back to the road and lifted the black leather-clad shoulder nearest to her before dropping it again. ‘I was a late starter,’ he said.
‘Why? You’re a hot man!’ she said, running her hand up the denim over his thigh.
‘This is true.’
‘And so modest.’
‘That too,’ he joked. ‘But not so good with the words, huh,’ he said, suddenly more serious.
Oh, yes. The stutter. That thing she hadn’t noticed once the whole time they’d been away. Was it possible he stuttered less around her? It was an incredibly flattering thought, but a rather far-fetched thing to believe, she admitted. Or was she simply completely blinded by love? Or deafened, as it were.
‘I imagine that was difficult for you growing up.’
He shook his head lightly and she wondered if he was going to go on. ‘It was. Especially with three older brothers who were all great football players and very popular with the girls. Who all had the right clothes and the smooth skin. I had to go to speech therapy instead of football practice, and nothing fixed my words. I was an embarrassment to them.’
She was about to say, Surely that’s not true, but stopped herself. Children could be unimaginably cruel. She’d certainly felt the alienation at school, her oddness apparent from a young age.
‘I had to choose to be different from them because I already was,’ he said. ‘I focused on science. At first it was because of my speech. I wanted to know why this had happened to me. But I found my peace with animals. They don’t care what I can or can’t say.’ He smiled, sadly at first, but then with real warmth. ‘They have lots of time to listen. No rush. Rushing is no good for me.’
‘Do you get on with your brothers now?’
Matteo waggled his head, considering. ‘Some days. It depends on their mood and that depends a lot on who is doing well in the World Cup.’
‘Would you…’ Lara stopped, not wanting to ask her question out loud, but knowing she would have to do it sooner or later and that it might as well be sooner. She needed to know what he thought so she could get her head and heart straight. ‘Do you think you will want children one day too?’
Matteo was silent a moment, tapping the steering wheel. Then, ‘Perhaps, if the time is right and it happens, then yes.’
Okay, that wasn’t too bad. Lara released the breath she’d been holding. Silence stretched between them then, with Matteo concentrating on the winding roads and Lara gazing at the deepening blue, purple and grey sky, the approaching inclement weather like a big bruise seeping through the air.
‘What about you?’ he asked quietly.
‘Until recently I hadn’t given it too much thought because I have this great relationship with Daisy and Hudson, and while I know that Sunny is their mother, they’re still part of me and they’re still mine too, in a tribal sense, I guess. We all belong to each other.’
‘That is very special.’
‘But coming over here, having this time away from them, I see for the first time that maybe I won’t always be living with them. Maybe they have a life to lead without me in their face every day, and maybe I have a life to lead too, with all sorts of new adventures. At some point I’ll need to learn to fly on my own.’ She pressed her lips together to hold back emotion, but when she spoke her voice was shaky. ‘I’m at peace with my choice and I know
it is possible for me to have another child, but I also know it would be a difficult process in terms of medications and managing my condition, and it would put a lot of strain on both me and my partner.’
She fixed her eyes out the window, determined not to look at Matteo. She needed to get it all out, and if she looked at him she’d want to stop. ‘I’m not saying it would never happen, but right now I think there’s too much risk for me to do it again.’
Sunny and Lara had agreed that one day when the kids were older they would tell them the truth, the story of their birth. Lara knew she had a family for life. That was a lot more than many people got. Sometimes you had to count your blessings and not tempt fate.
The warmth of Matteo’s hand cupped around hers. ‘That’s okay with me,’ he said. ‘I have a big family already. Sometimes too big. Right now, I just want to keep seeing you.’
Lara blinked rapidly. ‘I want that too.’
The first plops of rain splattered on the windscreen and Lara leaned over and rested her head on Matteo’s shoulder, her arm across his chest, feeling warm and snug and deeply in love.
54
Sunny
It was after eight o’clock and the kids and the pup had finally fallen asleep. Sunny could hear their noisy sleeping breaths over the bump of the wheels along country roads, though it did little to quiet her mind’s chatter about the car that had been following her for the past half hour.
The interminable blackness threatened to swallow the weak beams of her car’s headlights. She couldn’t shake the two white orbs that had been following her for the past half an hour.
She’d tried slowing down, encouraging the driver to overtake her. When that didn’t work, she tried speeding up. But he simply followed whatever she did. Now she was doing the speed limit, yet the other car still sat up against the back of the caravan as though she were crawling.
Every now and then a wallaby sprang out from the dark roadsides and she swerved sharply, almost squeezing her eyes, expecting the too-close car behind her to come through the back end. So far, they’d been lucky.
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