But would she tell her the other things, like the fact that he’d lied to her about going to Sydney? What did that say about what he thought of Krystal? She had no idea.
She was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bench while the water rumbled to boiling, when her phone rang in her bedroom. Her heart kicked. No one ever rang at this time of the morning except when dreadful things happened. She froze a moment, wondering who it could be. Was it about her mother? Or her sister? She pushed herself off the bench and went back down the carpeted hall to find her phone. It was on the rustic wooden bedside table, the screen glowing in the darkness.
She should have known. There was one person who rang at this time of day. Cordelia-Aurora.
She let it go to voicemail, carrying the phone back to the kitchen, where she finished making her coffee with a supermarket-brand coffee bag and milk that smelled suspiciously close to curdling. Finally, the phone tinged to let her know the long message was finished. She took a few gulps of her coffee first, fortifying herself for whatever Evan’s sister had to say.
Cordelia-Aurora’s voice, snippy and officious, explained that she was calling at this time of the morning because she was just soooo shockingly busy all the time and it was the only scrap of the day when she could ever make personal calls. She said the word ‘personal’ as if it was a dirty word.
‘Apologies for the late notice, but I’m having an anniversary party for Evan at my house on Saturday afternoon. Tomorrow. How time flies! It’s just the family and a few close friends, canapés and drinks on the deck – I was sure I’d invited you but it must have slipped through the cracks. I really should have got my secretary to do it. I’ve just been so snowed under with the Willisteen case, you’ve read about that I’m sure, it’s been all over the papers lately – or maybe you haven’t, I’m not sure what you read these days, we hardly ever see you or the boys any more – oh, and of course the boys are invited too. Anyway, I must rush, my personal trainer has just arrived and I need him to set me up for a great day in court. First drinks at two pm sharp, see you there, and don’t bring a thing.’
Krystal’s anger was swift.
… the boys are invited too …
Like a cocktail party would be fun for two children under the age of six. Could Ms Cordelia-Aurora Arthur pause for just a moment to reconsider the word party? Holy shit, the woman was from another planet. How on earth was Krystal supposed to explain to the boys the idea of a party for the anniversary of their father’s death?
Then, with shock so great she had to put her mug down onto the bench, she wondered – would the boys even really care?
Jasper would, on some level, probably. But could a five-year-old actually remember anything from his life at age three? A set of three black-framed photos of Evan with Krystal and the boys hung along the hallway, placed deliberately low to encourage the boys to look at them, but high enough that they couldn’t pull them from the hooks. Jasper knew who his father was, visually at least. And she told him stories about Evan, like the time when he spent fifteen hours putting together the flat-pack chest of drawers that was now in Jasper’s room, all because he wanted to say he had built his son something. Or the way he would hold Jasper up over his head and fly him through the air, making him laugh and laugh, and one day he did it for so long that Jasper vomited all over Evan’s head. Or the time when Jasper had a terrible fever and Evan had lain on the couch – that one right over there with the red wine stain – with his son on his chest, and Jasper had fallen asleep there, and Evan didn’t move a muscle for two hours so Jasper could finally get some rest.
But did Jasper really remember his dad, or just the stories Krystal told?
And as for Olly … he’d been only one when Evan died. There definitely wouldn’t be any memories there. Sense memories, maybe. Totally unconscious things, like the smell of his dad’s skin. Or the way his little hand fitted inside Evan’s. Maybe the sound of Evan’s voice was stored somewhere deep inside Olly’s brain. Perhaps one day in the future Olly would hear or smell something that evoked these traces of his dad, and he would feel a rush of warmth in his chest, and it would make him smile, but he would be completely oblivious as to why. It would be almost as though Evan’s ghost had paid him a visit. Maybe that was what people experienced when they thought they felt the presence of a ghost. Maybe it was just their cells remembering something they didn’t consciously recall, so they said it must be a spirit when all the while it was an electrical impulse deep in their subconscious.
But she couldn’t explain this ‘party’ to the boys. A party to them meant cake, funny hats and Pass the Parcel. Candles to blow out. A celebration! This was not somehing to celebrate.
It’s not a PARTY!
Her sister-in-law had no friends with children as far as Krystal knew. This would be an excruciating, stand-up, snobbish affair and the kids wouldn’t be allowed to touch anything and would be bored stiff and complaining, and somehow Krystal would end up feeling like the one who was in the wrong and having to apologise, when it was her husband who’d died and left her all alone with two tiny children.
The last thing she wanted to do was go to that … event. But the problem was that her own mother and sister weren’t in her life. For better or worse, Evan’s family were the only family the boys had other than Krystal, and the only connection to Evan they had left. Except for Gabriella.
Roxy had advised Krystal to go to the cafe, ask to speak to Gabriella, and tell her calmly and honestly that she believed Gabriella had Evan’s heart. ‘Just keep it simple and remember to breathe,’ her friend had said.
Krystal took a deep breath now. Just keep breathing.
She checked the time – still not even five o’clock. The boys would be up in an hour. She went to their room to make sure they were under the covers. As usual, Olly was sprawled horizontally across the bed, his zoo-animal-themed doona long since kicked off. She crept in and gently pulled up the cover to lay over him. He stirred a little and she froze, not wanting him to wake up. When he stopped squirming, she turned to Jasper, who was on his back, arms up by his head, also lacking his doona, which was adorned with Spider-Man, naturally. She pulled up his bedcovers too, then tiptoed out of the room. It was true what they said, that you always loved your kids a little bit more when they were asleep.
She decided to do some work while she waited for them to get up. Well, it wasn’t really work so much as a hobby, but it gave her somewhere to focus her excess energy. She set up her laptop at the dining table and opened her music list, put her earbuds in and started playing Kelly Clarkson’s song ‘Stronger’. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the saying went. Kelly sang about it. Social media was full of it. People had repeated it to her often – strangers, workmates, anyone with an opinion on her heart’s devastation.
Two years today.
She missed Evan’s laugh, wanted to go back in time and record it on her phone so she could hear it now. They’d often recorded the children’s voices when they were little, just learning to talk, giggling wildly or singing tunelessly in the back seat of the car. But never each other’s. It had always been about capturing the moments of their children’s lives, those precious, spectacular moments that they knew would only come once. The moments were fleeting, and their hearts ached with the beauty of this unique, irreplaceable instance and the sadness of its passing.
Motherhood, Krystal had quickly learned, was all about grief, over and over in tiny nicks and stabs. Death by paper cuts, Evan had said once. From the moment the babies left her body, it had been a parallel journey of joy and loss as they grew out of the triple-zero Bonds suits, as they began to lose their downy baby hair and grew toddler hair, as they got too heavy to hold in one arm, started eating solids, began to talk. They learned to crawl, and they crawled away. They began to talk, and the gurgles were gone. All these tiny pinpricks of sadness every day. The only consolation was that each loss meant the development of something new to enjoy.
She’d n
ever foreseen the loss of her husband, or how she might find her own way forward in the aftermath. No bleeding paper cuts; just one gaping, gushing wound that would never heal.
These days she wrote to try to redirect the flow. She wasn’t a proper writer, and this wasn’t a proper job. At Jasper’s school, where she worked three days a week, in that air-conditioned office with the fluorescent lights above her and the endless stream of children and parents and delivery drivers that came to the counter – as well as the odd police officer, which always added a good deal of interest and whispered conversation in the tearoom – and the ringing phones and the repetitive blips from the computer that announced the arrival of another email, that was where she did her real work. Honest, boring, grunt work. The kind of work people like her did. Not the kind of fancy-schmancy careers that Evan’s family and friends had.
Janice was the full-time office administrator, and she gripped her authority tightly with her fake nails. There was another part-time assistant, Margie, and their days crossed over on Wednesdays. Krystal had started to enjoy midweek. Margie was a bubble of light and Krystal found herself drawn to her like a moth.
But on other days she wrote, if she could call it that. It wasn’t like she wrote novels, or even short stories. Her word count was small. Sometimes just fifty words. Sometimes fewer. By utter chance, she’d landed herself a job writing for Millie May Cards, an electronic greeting card company, the kind that created small animated movies that people sent via email these days.
It had started simply because she had so much grief and so few people to talk to. She began writing letters to Evan. Long letters full of things that hadn’t been said and should have been, or telling him what the kids had been up to, the funny things they did. Sometimes it was hardest to bear the good times, knowing she couldn’t share them with Evan. Who else would have appreciated the combined humour and frustration of Olly’s ‘flour angel’ phase, when he took flour or cocoa powder or sugar from the cupboard when Krystal wasn’t looking and poured it on the floor, lay down on his back and scissored his legs and moved his arms up and down to make the most precious piece of art right there in the kitchen?
Many mums would be horrified, or angry. Sometimes she thought of those mothers who would have yelled at their small child, hit them, called them names or sent them to their rooms, and she just cried and cried. Couldn’t they see it was a magical moment, one they would ache to have back if something happened to take their child away? They’d beg and plead and bargain with the world to have their child back tipping flour on the floor. Only Evan would have enjoyed Olly’s art as much as Krystal did. So, she wrote to him, everything pouring out.
Sometimes she was angry with Evan too, more often early on, when the questions surrounding his death seemed the key to reversing time. If she could just figure out why he was in Sydney that night, alone, without having shared a word of his plans with anyone, if she could just solve that puzzle then she would know how she could have stopped him going, how she could have prevented this whole awful thing.
She wrote to him, asking him. He never responded, though she had dreams that he came to their home in the middle of the night and wrote answers across her notebook in his spiky handwriting, telling her what had made him do what he did, unravelling the mystery. But she could never read the pages in her dream. They blurred before her eyes as she tried to make out the words. Worse yet, sometimes the blue ink changed to purple and then red. Blood red. It ran off the page like his blood dripping onto the carpet, staining it forever, forcing her to walk over his blood every day on her way to the kitchen for a cup of tea or to make the kids’ meals, forcing them to eat their fish fingers surrounded by the evidence of his demise.
Then, on the first anniversary of Evan’s death, a distant cousin had sent her an electronic greeting card to say she was thinking of her. There was fine print right at the end of the little movie – something involving a pond and lilies and the setting sun. Want to write for Millie May Cards? it asked. Some sort of advertisement in exchange for a free card, she assumed.
She clicked on the link. She read the submission guidelines. It was simple to do. Name, address, email, PayPal account details and her written content. If her piece was accepted, she would receive twenty-five US dollars in her account. Almost out of defiance, she copied and pasted a chunk of her emotional outpouring to Evan.
Two weeks later she received an email from Millie May head office and the money appeared in her account. She laughed, thinking it was absurd. Then she submitted more, and the same thing happened. Naturally, she specialised in grief, loss and remembrance.
Today, though, she was lost for words. She must have sat there for nearly an hour, with nothing to show for it. Jasper got up first, and Olly was not far behind. Right, it was time to get ready to go. She made them scrambled eggs for breakfast, wanting something substantial in their bellies before they made their way over to The Tin Man to see Gabriella.
But then Jasper said he felt sick. Then Olly said he felt sick. Then Jasper vomited. Then Olly vomited. They must have picked up some sort of bug.
All her hopes and plans for the day were ruined.
7
‘Harvey, you can’t leave marinated chicken unattended or it will burn,’ Pippa snapped.
‘It’s called chargrilled,’ Harvey replied wearily, sipping from his glass of red wine and ignoring the flames that licked at the sweet-and-sour sauce. ‘It’s an actual thing, you know.’
Pippa all but growled in exasperation and turned to head back inside Monty’s house.
Gabby braced against the strain of tension between them. Roughly twenty years of marriage had withered down to this. Their kids had taken to looking at the ground, anywhere other than at their parents chipping away at each other.
Monty came to the aid of the chicken then, snatching the tongs from the side of the grill and turning the kebabs over. Gabby shared a knowing look with him. Her father’s cheeks were flushed; he always hated public displays of disharmony. Her parents had seemed to be unfailingly kind to each other. She wondered if they’d really, truly been happy all the time or if they’d just been better at not letting the cracks show, and for Pippa’s sake she wished Lottie were here to help her through this.
Pippa returned from inside the house holding a pavlova square the size of a small country, topped with strawberries and cream.
‘That looks amazing,’ Gabby said, glad to be able to change the focus.
‘The antioxidants in the berries negate all the badness of the sugar,’ Pippa said, laying it down on the outdoor dining table.
‘I like your theory.’
‘It works for me,’ Pippa said, licking cream from her finger.
The sisters stood for a moment, surveying the backyard.
‘Back to school on Monday,’ Pippa said, sounding relieved.
‘Yes, though the end of the holidays always makes me a bit sad,’ Gabby said. ‘There’s so much less pressure in the house when we’re not all slaves to timetables.’
‘Is Summer coming back today?’
Gabby raised her eyebrows at Pippa in annoyance. ‘She was due back this morning but Cam still hasn’t shown. I texted him and he ignored me. I phoned and it went to voicemail.’
Pippa shook her head. ‘Not good enough.’
‘Not by half.’
Celia had set up the white linen teepee on the lawn and several of the younger children were crowded in there. Sally had her head poked in the door, with her tail wagging like a metronome outside.
Pippa’s kids ranged from nine to fourteen years of age. If they had lived in the same neighbourhood they would have gone to the same schools as Gabby’s kids. Gabby and Pippa had gone to Camberwell South Primary, which Celia attended now, and then to Camberwell High, where Summer and Charlie were. Camberwell was spoiled for choice for amazing private schools, but Monty and Lottie had always argued that state schools were just as good, that you already paid for them in your taxes, and you saved boatloads o
f money over thirteen years. Pippa’s kids were also enrolled in state schools, over in Ringwood.
Tori, Pippa’s second youngest, affectionately wrapped her arms around Gabby’s waist. ‘Happy translation day,’ she said.
‘Transplant day,’ Pippa corrected.
‘Transplant day,’ Tori tried again, then pointed to the huge red, glittery heart on the front of her T-shirt. ‘I wore this for you.’
‘I love it,’ Gabby said and kissed the top of her niece’s head before she skipped away. Then she turned back to her sister. ‘You look amazing, by the way.’ Pippa smiled secretively, her eyes bright and eager. ‘In fact, you’re positively glowing. You look like … you’re in love.’
Pippa giggled and touched her hair, checking the position of her hairclip. She was wearing another apron dress today, this one forest green, over a long-sleeved white tee and black tights. ‘I am in love,’ she whispered, leaning in towards Gabby. ‘I have a new man, remember?’
‘Harvey still doesn’t know?’
Pippa shook her head, frowned and mouthed, No!
Their hungry children were getting noisier by the minute and a flurry of activity followed. Children running on the lawn. The two eldest boys taking over the barbecuing when Monty’s thick spectacles got too clouded with steam. The three youngest girls crawling in and out of the teepee. Felix – twelve, and the quietest of them all – sitting down on the grass to play with Sally, who rolled onto her back to beg for belly rubs. Monty discussing a new app Harvey was co-creating for the health fund he worked for. Pippa sorting out the salads.
Gabby soaked it up. This life, it wasn’t perfect. Cam should have brought Summer over by now. Her mother was gone. Gabby was two years post transplant and the reality was that time was against her – the dog would probably outlive her. And Pippa and Harvey’s marriage was falling apart. But today of all days, she was grateful to have hers at all. Where there was life, there was still hope.
The Gift of Life Page 6
