Only We Know

by Victoria Purman

  He was right. She was close. And it had been easy up to this point, because in the back of her mind she’d always figured she might never actually find Jem. Now, it was about to get hard and Sam had called her on it. He’d seen through her and picked her reluctance for what it was. She was scared shitless.

  ‘Sam …’

  He took a deep breath and his eyes softened. ‘Look, Calla. I really think you should come with me.’

  ‘Go with you where?’

  ‘Think about it. My old man clearly knows your brother. I think we should start with him. Why don’t we ask Charlie what he knows about Jem?’

  Calla backed away from him, shaking her head with an insistent rhythm. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You know I’m heading there anyway.’ He took a step forward. ‘I should have been there yesterday, as you well know. But I’ve been a little distracted.’

  ‘Sam, I’m sorry you got caught up with me. I’ve appreciated all the help, I really have, but you obviously have, quote unquote, family shit to take care of and I don’t want to get in the middle of that. Or get you involved in mine, frankly.’ Calla turned away from him. She didn’t like the look he was giving her and the way it was making her feel. Like a chicken, to be precise. Like a coward.

  She looked ahead at hills the colour of ripe apples, lush in the distance. A car drove by them, heading towards the pub, and then turned left and disappeared. Calla wondered if anyone actually lived in this place. It felt so empty, so quiet. Spookily so. She felt relieved with her decision to leave it behind.

  She was also relieved at Sam’s silence. He hadn’t moved, but she knew he was still there, those dark eyes staring at the back of her head. He’d clearly realised he’d overstepped the boundaries, pushed too far, issued invitations to her that weren’t really sincere, just politeness to a stranded stranger all at sea across the sea. She summoned the courage to turn back to him, and he was looking at her curiously, as if she were a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of a flat-pack wardrobe and he couldn’t figure out where to put her. ‘Do you want to find your brother or not?’

  Calla’s fingers clenched into fists and she felt the pressure of her nails on her palms. ‘What do you care?’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ve come all this way from Adelaide and you get a clue about this long-lost brother of yours, and now you’re running?’

  ‘I don’t owe you any explanation.’

  Sam spun around, walked away from her. A half dozen strides away he turned back. ‘You’re right. But you know what? You’re lucky you have a brother. What if he needs you and you’re this close, but you’ve chickened out and you’re going to jump on the boat and go home, huh? Won’t it kill you to never know?’

  Sam’s words stung the big sister in her, pierced her heart. So much that she couldn’t breathe for a moment. What if he was right? Did Jem need her? What if he was in more trouble with the police than a speeding ticket? Was that why he was on the island? Was he running from more than his family?

  ‘W-well …’ she stammered, full of anger and humiliation but not wanting to let him know it. ‘What about this ridiculous plan of yours to ask your father about Jem? What if he doesn’t remember, Sam? What if we go and talk to him and he can’t help me anyway?’

  Sam took a deep breath. ‘Then we come back here tomorrow and we talk to Pam at the shop.’

  His unruffled expression only made her feel more anxious.

  ‘No, I … I can’t.’ Calla said. ‘I can’t talk about this any more. Do I have to beg you for a lift back to the cabin?’

  Sam put his sunglasses back on, crossed his arms. ‘I never would have picked it.’

  She scowled at him.

  ‘You’re a glass-half-empty kind of woman, aren’t you?’ He took a couple of steps towards her.

  ‘Stop it,’ Calla said, pushing her own glasses back up her nose. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  And then he was next to her, so close she could see the flare in his eyes and the amused tug at the corner of this mouth. ‘You’ve got a heart so big that you let a total stranger stay with you, in the next bedroom. You’re disorganised, except for coffee. You’re crap in the mornings. You’re so sentimental that you cry over a brooch your mother gave you but not so much that you want to stay and find your brother. You have the coordination of a newborn foal and the sense of direction of a puppy.’

  Now Calla really couldn’t breathe. Her heart was pounding way too loud and she felt shaky. But she found it in herself to meet the challenge in his words, to refute his pop-psychology assessment of who she was. She lifted a finger and poked him in the chest. It was harder than she’d imagined. ‘I’m stunned. You must be some kind of genius. You got all that about me in, what, thirty-six hours?’

  ‘What can I say? It’s a gift.’

  Calla tried to contain her anger. ‘Well, I have a gift too. I’ve been analysing you, Sam Hunter. You’re a firefighter with some kind of professional-hero complex who goes around butting in to everyone’s business and trying to rescue people. It must be absolutely exhausting.’

  He lowered his head. Calla’s eyes darted to his lips and words fell from them in a deep and sexy admission. ‘You got me.’

  His smile didn’t make her feel any better. She felt pierced. He’d called her a glass-half-empty kind of woman. She’d heard that before. Had told herself that a million times. She tried to give the appearance of being free-wheeling and fun-loving, a restless soul, an artistic spirit, but deep down she was the exact opposite. She wasn’t a risk-taker. She was always careful. She was the kind of person who took her own pillow with her when she travelled, for fuck’s sake. She was the clichéd responsible big sister, and Rose and Jem had been the adventurous ones. Calla had become an art teacher rather than the artist she’d always longed to be. Had never rocked the boat with her family, had always tried to be the peacemaker. It had taken all her courage to hop on that damn boat by herself and start this bizarre adventure on her own. Was she really going to come this far and give up?

  Wasn’t she trying to change her life?

  Maybe she had to start by changing herself.

  Sam had turned away from her and begun the walk back to his car, the carefully wrapped portrait of his father still tucked under his arm. Calla opened her mouth to speak but the words tripped on her tongue. She could feel her only chance slipping through her fingers.

  His car keys jangled in his hand. He didn’t go to the driver-side door but stopped on the other side, opened the passenger door. He looked back to Calla. ‘You coming?’

  The glass-half-empty girl told her to step away from the handsome guy.

  To step away from the white knight.

  She walked to the car and got in.

  CHAPTER

  17

  They headed off in silence. It was a forty-five-minute drive to his father’s place. Roo’s Rest was off the main road to Cape Willoughby, the easternmost part of the island. It was the place Sam had run wild as a kid. He’d had a home with no fences, literal or metaphorical. There were horses and motorbikes and the sheep he hated and learning to drive when he was thirteen. That was the summer he’d grown, as if he’d hit puberty overnight. The way he remembered it, he’d pushed the covers back one morning and stood up, suddenly all long arms and gangly legs with a voice that wasn’t sure if he was child or man.

  That was all a lifetime ago. The girls he’d kissed behind the football clubrooms were women now. Some had left the island; some had stayed. He ran into people sometimes, both in unexpected places in the city and back on the island, but those close friendships of childhood had scattered in his absence. And while the roads were still familiar to him, many of the faces weren’t. He didn’t know the kids of the people he’d been kids with. Twenty years meant people left and came back, and new people blew onto the island all the time.

  People like Calla Maloney.

  Out the window, the scenery changed more and more th
e further away from Penneshaw they drove. There were no open green fields and, once they hit the dirt road, low scrubby gums lurked on either side. He glanced over to the passenger seat for the hundredth time since he’d started the car. Calla had one leg crossed over the other, and was leaning away from him, looking out towards the view, her arms snaked around herself. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left Penneshaw.

  He knew what a pissed-off woman looked like and he knew enough to shut up until she wanted to talk. Maybe he’d taken his tough-love approach too far. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that stuff about knowing her. Maybe she thought he was some kind of stalker who’d been watching her every move since they met. The strange thing was, a part of him did feel a connection to her. He hadn’t wanted it to be there, with her or with any woman, but it was. In the couple of days they’d spent together, he’d learnt a lot about Calla.

  She took her coffee weak and white with low-fat milk and waited for it to get half-cold before drinking it. She liked her toast with an almost invisible scraping of Vegemite. She packed her own pillow when she travelled. She was the kind of woman who wanted a piece of home with her wherever she went.

  The truth was he’d been watching over her since they’d met on the ferry. And while it had begun as something akin to a sense of duty, Sam realised it was becoming something else. So, okay, he’d played bad cop with her back in the main street of Penneshaw. He hadn’t been trying to be the hero, or to rescue her, as she’d accused him of doing. He’d judged that she simply needed a subtle shove in the right direction. He’d felt her hesitation and wavering ambivalence about her family. There was something more to her story, he could sense it, and he’d learnt over the years that you couldn’t tell by looking at someone what was going on behind the masks and the smiles. In the same way, you couldn’t tell from someone’s grief what another person had meant to the one left behind. He’d seen it at accident scenes and house fires and suicides. You couldn’t judge people by how they reacted in those surreal moments.

  One song finished and another started, a hard bass-line pounding from his car stereo. He liked to listen to this kind of music when he drove. It took him out of his head when he needed to be out of it, especially on the drive home from work after a busy shift. If Calla didn’t like it, she hadn’t said anything. She was still staring out the window. She probably needed time to think.

  ‘Tell me about Jem.’ Sam didn’t look at her, instead concentrating on the road ahead as he gently veered to the right to avoid a pothole filled with water from the recent rains.

  It was a moment before she answered in a quiet voice. ‘He’s my little brother.’

  Sam checked the rear-view mirror. There wasn’t another car in sight. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Calla shift, turn her head so she was looking right ahead now, sharing his view. Her eyes following the road, straight and true into the distance.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He has black hair, not red like Rose and me. And blue eyes, not green.’

  ‘Your sister is a ranga too? Ginger sisters.’ Sam laughed. ‘Watch out.’

  Calla sighed. ‘You know, I hate that. It’s such a cliché that redheads are quick to fly off the handle.’ When she turned to him, with her mouth a tight line and narrowed eyes, he smiled and raised an eyebrow.

  Her smile back hit him in a place he thought he’d shut down years before.

  She turned back to the front window. ‘We’re redheads, not hotheads.’

  ‘So how old is he?’

  ‘He’s twenty-nine, five years younger than me. He’s the youngest. Rose is in the middle.’

  ‘What happened that you haven’t spoken to him in two years?’

  There was silence from the passenger seat, then Calla leant over and turned down the music. ‘So, tell me about your father?’ she asked in a quiet voice. ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Charles Samuel Hunter. He’s eighty-four years old and a miserable bastard.’

  If she was shocked by the way he’d described his father, she didn’t show it.

  ‘You were named after him, I take it.’

  ‘Yes. I’m Samuel Charles. But barely anyone calls me that.’

  ‘No? What do they call you then? Fireman Sam?’ There was a delicious tease in Calla’s voice and he liked it. He liked that she was sitting beside him in his car. He liked that she was talking to him. And he liked her smile.

  ‘They call me Crash.’

  ‘Crash?’ Calla snorted. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘My best mate in the fire service. Rowdy.’

  Calla snorted. ‘I take it that’s not his real name.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That’s such a boy thing. Hilarious.’ Calla laughed and slapped her hand on her thigh. Which drew Sam’s attention to her thigh. And her laugh. It was the sort of laugh that you heard at a party across a crowded room, one that made you turn to it and look over the heads of everyone there and wonder who owned it. Warm, happy, feminine, teasing.

  ‘You can talk,’ he replied. ‘I think “Crash” suits you better than me, judging by the way you drive a supermarket trolley and a motor vehicle. And anyway, what sort of a name is Calla?’

  ‘Zantedeschia aethiopica. I was named after a flower. The Calla lily. Mum loved her garden and loved painting it. It was full of flowers all year round. Rose was named after … well, that’s obvious.’

  ‘Calla. Kinda weird name for a kid.’

  ‘That’s rich coming from someone whose nickname is Crash.’

  ‘Your mum’s an artist, too? Like you and Jem?’

  ‘She was.’ Calla’s eyes darted to the side window. ‘She died five years ago.’

  For the next half hour, they listened to the music and didn’t say another word.

  ‘This is it.’ Sam changed gears and the four-wheel drive confidently tackled the steep and rocky incline up a lush green hill. A dirt track was carved into it, leading all the way up to the top where a modest house sat in the distance, obviously placed to take in the best of the view. A curl of smoke was unfurling from a chimney, white against the backdrop of green-grey scrub behind it. The house looked more modern than she’d pictured in her head. It was brick, with a corrugated-iron roof and a veranda running all the way along the front. The only decoration on it was a single wooden chair. As the car got closer, two dogs raced down the track to meet it, barking and jumping until they mysteriously both turned at once and bolted back to the house, mud flicking into the air behind them as they ran.

  Calla took it all in. She couldn’t find the right word to describe the green of the paddocks surrounding the house, this lush, full hue that was the colour of Adelaide Oval, but wild somehow. She wondered if she would be able to capture it on canvas, this wet country green. As she turned, she saw in the far distance the smooth form of hills and gums, a snaking river like a blue ribbon twisting, and then the ocean, sapphire and vast.

  She unclipped her seatbelt and hopped down from the car. Her boots hit the soft dirt and the smell of it was strange to her. She breathed deeply. A wind was coming up the hills and swirling around her, creating a tangle in her curls and flapping her coat. She spread her arms wide to take it all in. All the tension she’d carried with her on the journey seemed to have been blown away in a breath. She’d tried hard to cling to her anger with Sam for the way he’d spoken to her, but hadn’t been able to hold on to it. There was something inherently true about the man, something that he’d shown her every day since they met, which couldn’t be undone with a few terse words. He was right anyway, she’d decided on the quiet drive here. She’d come too far to give up.

  She turned back to the house. Sam was already on the veranda. ‘You coming?’

  ‘Coming.’ She shook her head at her situation. Nothing about this trip was turning out as she’d planned. She’d managed to hitch her little red wagon to a handsome firefighter and now she was meeting his father. Why couldn’t she shake the feeling that this felt like a first date?

  ‘
Dad? You home?’

  Calla hung back, waited and watched from the grass in front of the house. She didn’t feel quite right intruding on this father–son reunion and, considering what Sam had said, the presence of a stranger might unsettle him even further. The front door opened slowly.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Sam, Dad.’ Sam opened the door and held out a hand to his father. Calla thought it was a weirdly formal way to greet your own father.

  ‘Oh, Sam. How are you, son?’

  ‘Good, Dad, I’m good.’

  Charlie stepped outside, let the screen door creak shut behind him. He might have matched Sam’s height when he was younger, but he was a little stooped over now. He wore newish-looking jeans and a big, baggy home-knitted jumper. On his head, a knitted beanie in the red, blue and yellow colours of the Adelaide Crows hid the spiky, white-grey hair that Jem had painted in the picture. Despite the hunch in his posture, he appeared to be sturdy rather than frail and, while his shoulders weren’t as wide as his son’s any more, Calla guessed that once upon a time this old man had been a strapping young country boy with a strong jaw and a smile that could make girls go weak at the knees.

  ‘You want a cup of tea?’ Charlie asked, his voice old-man croaky.

  ‘Sure,’ Sam replied. ‘Sounds good.’ He turned back to Calla and motioned that she should join him. ‘Any chance you’ve got some coffee, Dad? Calla doesn’t drink tea.’ As she walked towards the house, and stepped up to the veranda, she let herself imagine why Sam had remembered she was a coffee girl.

  ‘Well, well, well. Who’s this you’ve brought with you?’

  Both men turned to her. Sam’s resigned smile couldn’t compete with Charlie’s beaming grin. The resemblance between the two men was striking.

  ‘Dad, this is Calla. She’s from Adelaide and has got herself into some car trouble. I’m giving her a tour of the island.’

  Calla hesitated but then did it anyway. She stepped towards Charlie, opened her arms wide and hugged him. ‘It’s so lovely to meet you, Mr Hunter. Your property is amazing. The views are incredible.’