Only Daughter

by Anna Snoekstra

  “Okay, honey,” he said, and they turned back to the news.

  Later, as the silent car drifted into the next lane again, Bec wished she’d asked her mother. She wanted to bend down and strap on her heels, but she was beginning to feel the faint nausea of carsickness. It was like her dad was half-asleep. His eyes were glazed over and he was hunched strangely over the wheel. He indicated to get off the main road, the click filling the car like a heartbeat.

  The moment he was off Adelaide Avenue, Lizzie yelled out, “We’ll walk from here!”

  “I get it—no parents allowed?” he said, pulling over.

  “Thanks for the lift!” said Bec, sliding over so Lizzie could get out her side.

  “Yep, thanks, Mr. Winter!” Lizzie slammed the door shut and he pulled back out on the road unsteadily, like a toddler just learning to walk.

  “Wow, your dad sucks at driving!” Lizzie said. “I think even I could do better.”

  “I know. I feel sick.” Bec held her forehead, feeling the queasiness begin to subside.

  “The vanilla vodka probably didn’t help,” said Lizzie. “Come on, let’s go. It’s only ten minutes away anyway.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Bec, looking down. “I left my shoes in the car!”

  “Oh, no. Should we call him?”

  “Nah. Fuck it. I can’t walk in those things anyway.”

  They laughed and walked toward the party. The streets were deserted, even though it was only nine thirty. After a while, they could hear the beat of the music permeating the calm. As they got closer they could see a mill of people outside one of the houses.

  Ducking through the crowd, they went down the side gate toward the pumping bass. The backyard was crammed full of figures. Some dancing, some sitting on the stoop talking; couples making out against the shadowy back fence. They had fairy lights all through the trees, like tiny ice-blue stars. Bec spotted Luke through the crowd; he looked up at them at the same moment. He walked toward them, his eyes reflecting all the tiny blue lights. Pleasure fizzed through her veins.

  11

  2014

  My phone rings with an unknown number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, how are you?” It’s a guy’s voice.

  “Who is this?” I ask, smiling with relief. I had been sitting in the quiet house for hours and it was starting to get creepy.

  “Oh, sorry. It’s me. Fuck, I mean, it’s Jack.”

  “I know it’s you, dumbass,” I say and he laughs. I hear the sound of a car outside and look out the window. Luckily it’s the mom’s, not Andopolis’s.

  “So, um, how are you going?” he says.

  “I’m all right. Do you want to do something? I’m feeling a little cooped up here.”

  “Oh, sure. When?”

  “Why not now?” I ask, as the mother comes into the room, puts a bag at the end of my bed and then scampers back out.

  “Now? Okay, sure.”

  “Can you pick me up?” I ask.

  “No worries. I’m on my way.”

  “Awesome,” I say, then hang up.

  I smile; this day is looking up. The bag of clothes sits on the end of my bed like gifts from Santa. I can’t help but look inside. The smell of brand-new fabric, everything wrapped neatly in tissue paper, is intoxicating. Something about it always felt so good to me; too good. I remembered when my stepmom had found the bags under my bed back home. Packages and shoe boxes from the most expensive boutiques in Perth. She thought I must have had a secret rich boyfriend and I could see she was happy. She smiled at me, one hand on her pregnant stomach, glad to know I might be gone by the time her baby came.

  Really, I had no boyfriend, just a drawer full of her friends’ credit cards. She’d looked so surprised when I started offering to take people’s bags and coats at every pathetic little dinner party. I hadn’t known you could go to jail for something like that.

  “Are you going out?” the mother says, turning off the vacuum cleaner.

  “Just for a couple of hours, with Jack,” I say. “Is that okay?”

  “Yes, of course, honey. Lizzie’s brother, Jack?” she asks.

  “Yep,” I say. Before she can turn the vacuum cleaner back on I give her a quick tight hug, breathing in her vanilla smell. If Andopolis has dropped the case it means she really is mine, for good.

  I go outside to wait for Jack, my packet of cigarettes in my bag. But Paul is already there, leaning against a tree and smoking.

  “You caught me,” he says.

  “I won’t tell if I can have one.”

  “Becky! Never thought I’d see the day.” He flicks the bottom of the cigarette box so that one sticks out and offers it to me.

  “Smooth,” I say, though it really was.

  He raises an eyebrow and lights my cigarette for me. We both take a puff of our smokes. I feel like I’m a little closer to Paul than Andrew. It’s nice to have some time with just him. Sometimes the two of them seem too close, so that it’s almost impossible for me to get to know either of them as individuals. A station wagon pulls into the driveway next door and a tribe of screaming kids gets out, following a very harassed-looking mother into the house.

  “Max left a few years after you did,” Paul says, as though that was what I was thinking.

  “I was wondering,” I lie. He must have meant the neighbour who had lived in the house when Bec was still here.

  “He had another episode, screaming and yelling all night. Then he just wandered off one day and never came back. He must have gone off his meds.”

  “Oh, no,” I say, not sure how upset I should pretend to be.

  Paul just shrugs. I flick my ash into the grass.

  “How’d it go with Vince this morning?” he asks.

  “He didn’t show.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he’s going to back off a bit?” he asks.

  “I’m sure he won’t,” I say, after a moment. I don’t want to upset him. “I think something just came up.”

  I see Jack’s rickety old car climbing the hill. I put my cigarette out against the trunk of the tree. Paul looks at the car and then raises an eyebrow at me.

  “Shut up!” I say and walk down toward it.

  Jack takes me to Glebe Park. I know I’m not really meant to be seen in public yet, but I can’t say no. I’d almost forgotten how tall he is. I only come up to his shoulder. We buy some coffees and pastries at a café nearby and sit on the grass. Sitting cross-legged, he looks almost comical, as though his limbs are too long to know what to do with. I want to curl up against him, but I don’t. I need him to feel like he’s got to earn it.

  It’s a nice, sunny day for autumn. Kids are laughing and squealing on the play equipment, some throwing heaps of orange leaves. Mothers sit on the surrounding benches, some gossiping to one another, others just watching their children serenely. A few public servants are out for a late lunch, eating sandwiches out of cling film and looking over paperwork. I close my eyes and force myself to enjoy the moment; the creaminess of my latte and the sour sweetness of the raspberries and custard of my Danish. The warmth in the air and the smell of wood and cut grass. Opening them, I see Jack is staring at me intently. I hadn’t noticed that his eyes are a striking shade of green, with little golden flecks around the edges. They are really pretty. In fact, all of him is really nice-looking. His arms are thin but strong. His messy hair. That goofy smile. If I were being me, I probably would have kissed him already. But I’m Bec now, and I can’t forget my real reason for being here with him.

  “So have you forgiven Lizzie yet?” I ask.

  “I guess so. She’s a hard person to stay mad at, you know?”

  “Yep.”

  I give it a few moments.

  “Actually,” I say, as though I’ve been stewing on it, “I kind of want to ask you something about her, but I don’t want to put you in an awkward position.”

  “You can ask me. What is it?” He
looks at me carefully, cocking his head.

  “It’s just… When I saw her the other day I got a weird vibe from her. Like… I don’t know, like she was mad at me or something. It was just…” I trail off and look at the ground. It’s hard to lie to those beautiful eyes.

  “Just what?”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t really be talking to you about her. It’s not fair.”

  “Bec,” he says, pushing my shoulder lightly, “just tell me what’s on your mind. I might be able to help.”

  “It’s just that I was so incredibly happy to see her, but I felt like she didn’t feel the same way. I felt like she was quizzing me or something, almost like she didn’t believe it was really me. It upset me.”

  It never hurts to sound a bit pathetic. Jack looks at me sadly and squeezes my knee, his wide palm warm. He takes his hand away, but I wish he would leave it. A few moments pass before he speaks.

  “It was really hard for Lizzie when you were gone, really hard,” he says finally. “Everyone saw her as the missing girl’s best friend after that. Either they felt too awkward to talk to her or they would just sort of pump her for information about you.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I know. I guess it just really changed her. I don’t know if she told you, but she’s doing amazingly well for herself now.”

  “No, she didn’t tell me,” I say, quietly.

  “She is. I’m really proud of her. She climbed the public-service ladder. She’s the boss to some of your school friends’ parents now, I think. It’s all part of it, though. She was very lonely back then. She withdrew for quite a few years and just completely focused on school.”

  I don’t know what to say. He’s staring out at nothing, misty-eyed, drifting into thought. My plan is backfiring; I need Jack on my side. I wait for him to continue. If I bring the conversation back to me now I’ll look selfish. The breeze pushes against some new plantings, bending their thin trunks.

  “My dad didn’t help either,” he says. “He made her feel so bad that she wasn’t there when you came over on the day you…well, you know. He kept saying he was sure you’d just run away. It made her feel like she could have stopped it all from happening.”

  “Nothing could have stopped what happened to me,” I say, seizing the opportunity.

  The mist clears from his eyes.

  “Shit. I’m sorry, Bec.”

  “No, I brought it up. I’m glad I know. Poor Lizzie. It must have been horrible.”

  “You’re so selfless,” he says, his smile warm. “Yes, she had a bad time. But it was hardly your fault.”

  “I still feel bad,” I say, playing it up.

  “No, don’t feel bad. Lizzie shouldn’t blame it on you. That’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe you could talk to her?”

  “No worries.”

  “Thanks,” I say, putting my hand on top of his on the grass. He looks at it and then looks at me, smiling. Usually when people are this easy to fool it makes me see them as weak. Stupid, even. But for some reason, it was only making me like him more.

  “So why is she mad at you, anyway?”

  He groans.

  “She thinks I’m getting too involved in something I shouldn’t.”

  I’m really curious now. “What is it?” I push, trying to get him to confide.

  “I’ll show you,” he says, standing up and brushing the dirt from the back of his jeans.

  At Jack’s house, I follow him inside and up the stairs, wishing I wasn’t wearing Bec’s kiddie underwear. His house is modern and large, much bigger than Bec’s and almost as big as mine back in Perth. His bedroom is a bit messy, but it’s warm and sun-filled. His bed is in the middle, with a desk and computer covered in Post-its. A large stack of cardboard leans against the wall. Looking out his window, I notice the gleaming oblong of blue water. A swimming pool.

  “Don’t judge me for still living at home!” he says. “I moved out for a while but then I had…”

  “I’m not judging you,” I say, cutting him off.

  “At least I’m out of my metal phase, though, right?”

  “Yep, that is a relief.” I remember my own metal phase.

  Jack sees me looking at the pictures on the cardboard. They’re children’s drawings, blown up to poster size.

  “They’re pictures made by kids who live in Australian detention centres. A Save the Children worker smuggled them out before they were banned from going there,” he says. “We put them on placards for a demonstration I was part of a few months ago.”

  I flick through the pictures. Simple drawings of children, big sad faces and tears down their cheeks. They have drawn cages around themselves. One of them has a giant sun with an evil face. Another has a drawing of a man under a tree. It takes me a moment to realize that he has hung himself. “Melika, 6” is written in the corner.

  I return the placards to their place. They are too hard to look at.

  “It’s awful,” I say.

  “I know.” He sits down on the computer chair. “Look, I’ll show you…”

  He opens a blog and scrolls through the content. It seems to be an activist page about asylum seekers. There’re blurry photographs of white politicians smoking cigars and having dinner in fancy restaurants, and next to them a photograph of an Arabic teenager with his lips sewn together, a little African girl pressed up against a fence.

  “This was before the blackout.”

  “Um,” I say, “I’m not so up to date with politics.” Being abducted is a great excuse for being ignorant about the world.

  “Sorry!” he says. “I didn’t forget. It’s just—”

  “No, it’s okay. I want to understand. Explain it to me.”

  “Well,” he says, stopping for a moment to think, “stop me if you know this, okay? I don’t want to patronize you.”

  “I don’t think you will. Go on.” I really didn’t know much about this sort of thing. Politics has never really interested me.

  “Well, unlike other countries, Australia sends asylum seekers to detention centres. When we were young there was Woomera and Villawood, remember? They were out in the middle of the desert.”

  I nod. His eyes were blazing. He was really passionate about this.

  “Well, now we changed the law to be even worse. Now we send them to Nauru and Manus Island, in the Pacific. The conditions there are horrifying—they’re literally living in tents and it’s incredibly hot.

  “The new government has ordered a media blackout on detention centres. It’s really dangerous to try to find out what’s going on in there. The government doesn’t want us to know. We’ve got this picture, though. It was taken from a helicopter.”

  He shows me a photograph of a camp of tents and dirt with a tall wire fence around it. People are holding up signs, but they’re too far away to be legible.

  “They are being held there for years, kids, too. It’s costing us billions to keep these places open, and yet we have no idea what’s going on in there. A few things have leaked, though. A guy died there from a treatable infection. He just had a cut on his foot. And the guards are sexually assaulting the asylum seekers on a mass scale. Even kids, Bec, but nothing is being done about it. There are kids there who’ve tried to kill themselves.”

  He swallows and looks at the picture. “Everyone is so scared of these people being monsters, they don’t realize that we’ve become the monsters.”

  I don’t know what to say to him. I feel terrible for not knowing about any of this, about turning off the news when it came on because I thought it was just politics rather than people’s lives. Feeling guilty isn’t going to help my present situation, though, so I try to change the subject.

  “But what’s it got to do with Lizzie being mad at you?”

  He looks at me carefully.

  “The guy who runs this blog, he calls himself Kingsley but no one knows his real name. I guess you’d call him a guerilla journalist. He’s the one who organized the protest, little good
it did.”

  “Why does he have to be anonymous?” I’d imagine someone would want the glory if they were putting so much work into something like this.

  “There was another guy he used to work with. Used his real name. He was proud, defiant. No one’s heard from him for about a year. One day—” he clicks his fingers “—vanished. Kingsley needs to be anonymous to do what he wants to do next. He wants to go further now and he needs my help.”

  “Your help? Is it dangerous?”

  His eyes suddenly soften.

  “Nah, of course not!” he says. “Anyway, I should get you home. I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Okay,” I say, disappointed. I’m not quite ready to go home yet. I try to think of some reason to make him stay, but he’s already picked up his keys and walked out the door. I follow him down the stairs.

  “See ya,” I hear him call. Swinging around, I realize there’s a man sitting in the lounge room. He looks up from the iPad on his lap with a slight sneer on his face. Although he looks close to fifty, his thin hair is slicked back and his clothes are new and fashionable. I can see Jack in his nose, Lizzie in his eyes. He must be their father.

  “Hi,” I say, waiting for the inevitable shocked look of recognition. I’m starting to get used to it.

  “Hi, Bec,” he says, but the sneer doesn’t drop. He looks back down to his iPad, as if the sight of me means nothing at all.

  Jack pulls out of the drive and heads toward my house. Something about his father rattled me, but I try to shake it off and focus on Jack. His air has shifted slightly and he was a bit cagey back up in his room. I don’t think it’s to do with me, though. He’s hiding something, but it’s too early to ask him.

  “Your dad didn’t seem surprised to see me,” I blurt out.

  “No. I have to admit you were all I’ve been talking about these past few days.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “Of course. And also—” he pauses for a moment “—I guess he hasn’t quite forgotten what you said to Lizzie about him.”

  “What did I say?”

  He looks at me closely. This must be something I should know.

  “It doesn’t matter.”