‘He might,’ Aurora pointed out. ‘You never know.’
‘Yes, I do. She wouldn’t tell him anything. Especially since he married Susie. That girl always picked on her at school. She was awful to Sephora.’
My head was starting to spin again. Too much information, and I didn’t want to tune it out completely because I wasn’t sure whether any of it might be useful. I shook my head to clear it.
‘People change. You never know. They were teenagers back then, I’m sure they’ve grown up. It would be nice to know if Sephora got in touch with David.’
‘I’m telling you, woman. She didn’t. End of story.’
‘But you don’t know for sure,’ Aurora persisted.
Benjamin was starting to get red-faced and agitated again. I wondered if another f-bomb was on the way. I was also thinking about the fastest way to get out of there. It didn’t seem like we were going to get any more useful information.
Then we did.
‘I do know for sure, because she told me she didn’t,’ he snapped. ‘She still thinks he’s a smug bastard and I don’t really blame her!’
We were well and truly just an audience at that point. It was awkward but scarily fascinating at the same time.
‘When did she tell you all that?’ Aurora demanded.
‘I spoke to her on the phone! There, are you happy now? She calls me a couple of times a year on Sunday mornings when you go off to do your church business.’
Church business. That’s how Dad refers to it when Mum’s off lighting candles and saying prayers and whatever else she does. He thinks it’s a waste of her time, though he never says so out loud. You can just tell.
At that point Aurora seemed to remember we were there. She turned to us, as if it needed to be explained: ‘Benji’s an atheist.’ Then she turned back to him. ‘You should have told me. I’ve been worrying about her all this time. Twenty years! Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘She didn’t want to upset you. She knows every time the two of you talk you just end up arguing and she didn’t want that. Besides, it’s only been a few years. Before that I had no more idea than you did.’
Something seemed to click for Aurora. ‘She wanted money, didn’t she? You sent her money. That’s why she always liked you better, because you gave her money any time she asked.’
I could feel a headache forming. Their voices were getting louder and the noise seemed to bounce around the kitchen, coming back at me from all sides. I’m used to noise—the kids are endlessly noisy—but the tension of the scene ratcheted it up to a whole other level.
I pushed my chair back from the table and reached for Elias’ arm. ‘We need to get going.’
‘Wait.’ He pulled away from my grip and turned to his grandparents. ‘Do you have a photo of her, at least?’
It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask that question. Not such a genius. Either way, the tension in the room seemed to drop with his words. Aurora nodded. ‘Of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t even think of that. Let me go find them.’ She paused, then turned to her husband. ‘Actually, I think we put the albums up the top of the linen cupboard. Can you come help me reach, darling? You’re taller.’
They left. She came back alone a minute later with a pile of albums. She put them down on the kitchen table and started flipping through the first one. ‘These are all the baby photos. I don’t suppose they’re what you need, though, are they? You want to see when she was older.’
Elias dropped back into his seat at the table, reaching for the album and pulling it closer. ‘No. This is good too.’ He ran his hand over the photos, studying each one.
There were four albums in the stack. Each one had easily a hundred pages. We were going to be here forever.
That was when I realised it was well past four o’clock. We were maybe half an hour from my house and I was already late. Crap. What was I going to tell Mum?
It took me another five minutes to get Elias out of the house. He seemed completely mesmerised by the photos, wanting to look at every single one. Finally we left, with the most recent photo of Sephora, a snap lock bag of homemade brownies and promises that he would visit them again tomorrow.
I climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door, then let out a big breath. ‘They’re completely mental.’
‘I liked them.’
‘Of course you did.’
He was still holding the photo in his hands. ‘It’s so weird to see a photo. Do you think I look like her at all?’
Sephora had the same colouring as her mother. She wasn’t fat exactly; I guess she had what they refer to as curves. Elias was stick thin. It was hard to see her eyes clearly in the photo. They could have been the same hazel colour as his. ‘Maybe.’
He had a folder, the same as the one he’d given me with the copy of his birth certificate inside. He slipped the photo in there carefully, then flipped back to the first sleeve. ‘She was twenty when she had me. It’s not like she was a teenager or anything. Why would she give me up?’
I looked at the clock. I was late. Late, late, late, late, late. I could already picture Mum doing the rounds of the house, checking if I’d snuck in without her noticing. Grilling the kids if they’d seen me. She’d start calling me soon. Maybe she’d wait a bit. So—in her mind, at least—it wasn’t so obvious she was checking up on me.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered, impatient. ‘Maybe she just didn’t want a kid.’
‘She could have had an abortion.’
‘Maybe she didn’t realise till it was too late. Maybe it was one of those things where they think they’re just having bad back pain and then, you know, a baby drops out.’
‘That’s gross.’
Well, yeah. Pretty much everything to do with babies is gross. The girls in my grade who are all gushy about babies, you know they haven’t had to live with them. Babies keep you awake all night, dribble and vomit all over the place and shit everywhere. Then they turn into toddlers and it gets even worse.
Elias kept staring down at the birth certificate, like it would give him answers. ‘This sucks. I really thought we were about to find her.’
It started to rain just as we got home. Elias had an umbrella and insisted on walking me all the way down the driveway. He’d wanted to drive down, but I talked him out of that—the block’s a battleaxe, tucked in away from the street, and there’s no room to turn at the bottom if Mum and Dad are both home. I didn’t want to watch him trying to reverse his van back up the hill.
The kids were inside but by the time we got to the door there were five faces pressed against the glass. Sigh.
I came through the front door just in time to hear Grace yelling, ‘Lindsay was with a boy!’
Mum came out of the kitchen. ‘You’re nearly an hour late.’
My brain had been focused on Elias’ situation and I’d forgotten to think up a good excuse. So I told the truth, just kept it vague.
‘I was helping someone at school with something.’
‘A boy,’ Grace added. Then, of course, she and Elijah started running around the house chanting that I had a boyfriend. I swear I am never, ever having kids.
‘He’s just a guy from school,’ I told Mum. ‘He lost his cat. I said I’d help him look. Apparently I now have a bit of a reputation as a finder.’
Hoping I’d wrapped the lie up in enough truth that it sounded plausible, I managed to get away from her without any further questions and went to hide in my bunk upstairs. My head still hurt. I lay down and closed my eyes and fell asleep.
10
Grace woke me up for dinner. I got grilled on Elias over spaghetti bolognese—Mum’s special budget recipe that’s ninety per cent zucchini and lentils—and stuck to my story about the lost cat. Eventually the kids lost interest and started talking about Transformers.
I left the table as soon as I could and headed upstairs. I pulled out the folder Elias had given me. He’d promised to make me a colour copy of the borrowed photo, but for now it just had the
birth certificate and the notes I’d scribbled during my computer searches. I found a blank piece of paper in the pile I’d taken from the printer and started to write down the things I remembered from the meeting. In among all the sink-fixing and arguing we hadn’t really discovered many actual facts. I hadn’t even filled a page when the ceiling fell in on me.
There were warning signs, I guess you’d call them. But they happened quickly. A sudden sprinkle of white dust landed on my hand from above and I looked up just in time to see a crack zigzag its way across the ceiling. I bolted for the doorway at the same instant a large chunk of plasterboard crashed with a thud and snapped off on the corner of my desk. Cracks in the ceiling branched off in several directions and other sections began to fall, one at a time, in a flurry of dislodged dust like dirty snow.
Apart from the initial surprise of it, I wasn’t shocked. Loud noises are hardly uncommon in this house, the boys and Grace are constantly whacking balls into windows and that sort of thing. It takes more than a few crashes and thuds to make someone actually get up and check it out.
Mum was in the bathroom, folding washing. Evie was brushing her teeth in her favourite Dora the Explorer pyjamas. Josey was sitting in the tub, playing with his bath toys.
‘The ceiling in my bedroom just fell in,’ I said calmly.
Mum looked at me, then at Josey in the tub. I knew she was thinking the bedtime schedule would be completely messed up now and nobody would be tucked in at their appointed time. Those are the things she lives by.
She pulled Josey’s towel off the rack and handed it to me. ‘I’ll go have a look.’
Dad wasn’t home yet so she went and got a ladder. About half of the ceiling was on the floor, leaving yawning gaps into the roof space—although, strangely, the ceiling fan was still anchored firmly to its rafter. I would have thought that thing would be the first to fall.
The room was a mess of broken Gyprock, insulation and decades of dust. My desk, chair, Grace’s piles of stuff everywhere, the bookshelves…everything was covered. It looked a bit like the footage you see of bombsites in war zones.
By now everybody had worked out something was going on and they were all crowded around the bedroom door where Mum stood holding the ladder. She surveyed us sternly. ‘Nobody else comes in until I say so. Understood?’ I wonder sometimes if Mum dreams of heading up some sort of critical response unit or something so that people would finally appreciate her ability to boss them around and make them clean up their messes.
We watched as she set up the ladder under the open ceiling and climbed to the top with a torch in hand. She spent a couple of minutes waving it around up there, particularly around the ceiling fan. Checking the wiring, I guessed. Making sure the house wasn’t going to burn down. Elijah and Grace got bored and wandered off, then Evie and Josey did too. I’d put a nappy on Josey but nothing else; he didn’t seem to mind. Finally, Mum climbed back down the ladder, dusting her hands off.
‘Looks like a leak in the roof. It’s soaked through the Gyprock and weakened it where it was anchored to the timber in the ceiling.’ She pointed to the beams. Thick nails stuck out downward, some with white blobs of plaster still stuck on them. The weight of the wet plaster had literally ripped it off them.
I glanced at Micah, who had been watching everything silently. He’s fascinated by how things work, always building stuff with his Meccano and Mobilo. I reckon he’s going to end up an engineer or something.
Mum looked at me. ‘You and Grace can’t sleep in here tonight. We’ll move your mattresses downstairs. I’ll go through the roof and check there’s no other leaks, then it’s bedtime.’
The rest of the kids were summoned to help drag our mattresses downstairs. It was past Josey’s bedtime and the excitement had worn off. He’d been given spare pillows to carry downstairs and when we finally made it into the living room with the first mattress I found him curled up on top of the pillows, sound asleep.
The kids were starting to get themselves worked up again when Mum reappeared. Covered in plasterboard dust and cobwebs, she looked like someone out of one of those Armageddon movies. Even I got a bit of a chill down my spine.
‘Evie and Josey—bed. Boys, go brush your teeth. You have exactly three minutes to be tucked into bed.’
Grace and I got ourselves sorted with spare sheets. Mum came in to say goodnight. It was nearly ten, and there was still no sign of Dad. Sometimes he gets home so late we don’t see him at all. We don’t really notice anymore. Mum used to complain about the long hours he worked, and he’d point out that she was the one who wanted to keep having kids and somebody’s got to feed the hungry mouths.
My dad used to give the best bear hugs. He’d wrap you up in them and lift your feet off the ground and not once did you ever feel scared or claustrophobic. That was Before Frankie. Now, I wouldn’t want to get that close to him—he’s so tightly wound you never know when he’s going to snap. And when he snaps, it’s loud.
We’d put my mattress by the front window. I stretched out on my back, looking through a gap in the curtains. It was a cloudy night, but no more rain for now. I saw that Mum had put a drop sheet on the floor in our room just in case. You could never accuse her of being unprepared. Well, not anymore.
I thought about Elias and the meeting with his grandparents. There was no obvious place to start looking for Sephora, but I knew he’d want to try. The way he’d inhaled those photo albums…he wasn’t going to give up now.
I blew out a sigh. He was going to want to find her, and he was going to expect me to know how. Bugger.
11
Thursday after school we got the rundown. Our bedroom was out of action until the roof was patched and someone came in to repair the ceiling. In the meantime, bedrooms were going to be shuffled around.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Over the years, as each new kid was born, Mum experimented with different combinations, trying to create more space where there wasn’t any. It was like a marketplace, with everybody gathered around the kitchen table, ready to stake their claim. A spot in the biggest bedroom, a top bunk or a window or their own desk. I didn’t really care that much anymore, as long as I could have the lower bunk. Anywhere you go in this house, there’s people. That’s just the way it is.
With six kids and two rooms it was going to be three–three. That was a no-brainer. Evie and Josey had been sharing a room, and the twins were in another. I’d rather share a room with Josey than anyone else, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Mum was too obsessed with things being tidy.
‘One girls’ room, one boys’ room. Lindsay and Grace can move in with Evie, Josiah can move into Micah and Elijah’s room.’
Evie and Josey’s bedroom was for a long time the study and sewing room. For years Mum kept the sewing machine set up, as if living in hope of someday having the time to use it again. Maybe she thought one day she’d wake up and find she still had two little girls she could sew matching dresses for. I wonder sometimes—if she was offered a choice between the family she used to have and the one she has now—whether she’d even hesitate. I reckon she’d give up all of them to get Frankie back. Wake up from this nightmare and get her perfect life back? She’d do it in a heartbeat.
‘Evie, Lindsay and Grace; Josiah, Micah and Elijah,’ Mum repeated. ‘Any objections?’
It was a rhetorical question. She’d already made up her mind. When Mum decides to do something, it doesn’t happen in a couple of weeks or gradually over the next month. It happens straight away. Now.
‘Okay.’ She stood up. ‘Let’s get moving.’
I could tell Micah was relieved that he got to stay where he was. He grabbed his bucket of toy dinosaurs and escaped outside to play while the rest of us got started. Out of all of us, he finds Mum’s organising hardest to bear. It’s only luck that he escaped this time. For me, the luck had run out: it was the first time I’d ever moved bedrooms. I’d always been left where I was before, and it was usually Grace I’d shared wit
h, the first Frankie-replacement.
We spent the afternoon cleaning all the crap off the bunk beds from my room and moving them into the new one, along with as much of our stuff as we could fit. Soon as we’d cleared everything out of the old bedroom Mum ran strips of bright orange tape across the door. CAUTION, it read, over and over. The room was officially out of bounds until further notice.
The kids disappeared outside to play before dinner, and I stood in my new bedroom, staring into the full-length mirror. I used to come in here, back when it was still Mum’s sewing room, after Frankie disappeared. I’d sit and talk to the mirror. It was almost, superficially, like talking to Frankie. It reassured me, somehow. I’d spent my whole life looking at my reflection every time I turned around, and to suddenly lose that…the world felt empty. I knew the mirror girl was just my reflection. Of course I did. But still.
This time when I looked in the mirror, though, it didn’t work. I stared at the girl with lank blonde hair and wondered who she was.
‘Lindsay,’ I said to myself in the mirror. I don’t really know why. I felt unsettled by the room change, discouraged about the Greenfields thing. Just bummed in general.
My phone rang. Elias.
‘Ohmigod.’ It was all one word. ‘You wouldn’t believe it. I just had the best talk with Aurora. Did you know she’s from this little Greek island that only has, like, two hundred people on it?’
No. But I didn’t really care, either.
‘Oh, and I had the most awesome idea. I’m starting a blog documenting my journey. Like, from finding out that I’m adopted and starting to search. I already wrote the first post but I need to come up with a catchy name for it. The blog, I mean. I was thinking—’
‘Okay! Enough.’ I wasn’t sure if I could handle much more of Elias. I tried to process what he’d said. ‘You better not mention me.’
‘But you’re helping. I’m totally a believer in credit where credit’s due, y’know?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what about if I just put your photo, without a name?’
The Finder Page 6
