A Perfect Likeness

by Renee Kira

‘Are you okay now? You found help?’

  ‘I did. It was a lot of hard work. I re-evaluated a lot of things. Two years later, I had her money.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She still wouldn’t let me see him. I’d moved back here then and got the job at the pub. When I got a lawyer, she threatened to tell the town about what I’d done, even said she would press charges against me.’

  ‘Wow. That’s awful. So, you moved back to try to see him?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it was my best chance. But also, because it’s really hard to gamble here. The closest poker machines are forty minutes away. I work at the top pub because there’s no betting there.’

  ‘I had no idea about any of this. I wish I could have helped you.’

  ‘It’s okay, Iz. I learned a lot through it all. I’m better because of it. I like my life now. I didn’t like it before.’

  ‘But you lost your son.’ He flinches a little at my words.

  ‘Maybe not. He’s only six. He’s still a kid. The last few weeks have been awful, but they’ve also been my best chance to get him back.’

  34

  Isobel

  Liam slept on my couch last night, drifting off while we watched a comedy. There are plenty of spare bedrooms, but I didn’t want to wake him. Instead, I covered him with a blanket and left him to rest.

  This morning, I woke up early. I haven’t been able to sit still. Energy is pulsing through me, and I feel like I could run ten kilometres without breaking into a sweat. Whether it’s anger or anxiety, I’m not sure. I think I’m tired of being in the middle of this mess and not understanding what is happening. I’m going on a run.

  As quietly as I can, I shower and get dressed. My running clothes are at the top of my drawer. My feet slip easily into my shoes. Before I let myself out of the house, I glance into the lounge room where Liam still sleeps.

  A strange nostalgia twists in my stomach. This is what it was like with Ben, just a few months ago. I would look in on him one last time before I went out for a run. I don’t know if that’s what I want from Liam. Everything he told me last night is still fluid in my mind. The image of him I have held for many years is shifting.

  I open the front door to the soft light of early morning. I expect to see Liam’s car in the driveway, but not the familiar white van that’s parked behind it. I see my father standing beside it.

  ‘Dad?’

  He’s waiting for me, his hands in his pockets, the blank expression on his face giving nothing away.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor?’ he calls, motioning to Liam’s car.

  I nod as I walk towards him. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Half an hour or so,’ he shrugs. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up.’

  ‘You could have. I’m always up early.’ I wait for him to do something, to explain why he is here. He doesn’t. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We need to talk, Isobel. Let’s go for a drive.’

  He motions for me to follow, opening the passenger door for me. He gets in the other side, looks over and waits for me to put my seat belt on.

  ‘Who’s here with you?’ he asks.

  ‘A friend.’ I look away from him.

  ‘You won’t tell me who?’

  ‘No.’ The words come out of my mouth, short and sharp. ‘Dad, I think it’s time you started telling me the truth. This can’t be one sided anymore. I thought that was why you were here.’

  He sighs and starts the engine.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ he says, watching me closely.

  ‘Worried? Don’t you think I’ve been worried? I don’t know what’s happening. Ever since that morning on the beach, I cannot understand what is going on. All I know is that I’m in the middle of all of it. You’ve shut me out. You and Mum both. You know something.’

  The van turns on to the winding cliff road. We don’t head to town, instead we take the road towards the wilder part of the coast.

  ‘I think there is a lot going on. You need to distance yourself. I can take you to Melbourne. Have a break for a few weeks.’

  For the shortest of seconds, I think he could be right. And then I see what he is doing. He’s deflecting, making it my fault, moving the focus to me and away from himself.

  ‘This is not about me needing a break.’

  ‘Then what?’ His voice is calm, drawing my attention to how irate I am.

  ‘Pull over,’ I demand. He glances over and reads the serious expression of my face. ‘Pull the van over.’ I repeat myself.

  He touches the brakes gently and slows down. One side of the road is sand dunes and scrub. On the other side is the granite of the cliffs and the sheer drop to the ocean. There’s nowhere for him to stop.

  ‘There’s a car park ahead,’ he says.

  I know there is. It’s the same car park that leads to the beach where I found Veronica.

  ‘Okay.’

  We reach the car park; he pulls in, the tyres crunching on gravel. I wait for the groan of the handbrake before I speak.

  ‘Why is someone following me when I go running, Dad? Why am I getting notes in my bedroom? Heather Hayes turned up on my doorstep last night and blamed me for her daughter’s death.’

  ‘Did she?’ He looks surprised at my last comment.

  ‘What has Veronica got to do with you and Mum? What has she got to do with me?’

  ‘I don’t want you to worry about it, Isobel. I think we should get you out of this town. I’m taking you to Melbourne, today.’

  ‘No. You’re not. We’re not resolving things like that anymore. You’ve been keeping things from me since I was a kid. It feels like you don’t trust me. Or that I’m not important enough for the truth. And now I treat everyone in my life the way you both treat me. I can’t build a life of my own because I don’t know how to trust another person, I don’t know how to have a real relationship.’

  He sighs. ‘I’m the parent. My job is to protect you. Not to burden you.’

  ‘But you are burdening me, don’t you see? I’m in a perpetual state of not knowing. I’m left alone, imagining the worst case scenario.’

  He looks away from me. I can’t read his expression. Is he self-conscious? Guilty?

  ‘You don’t want to know those parts, Isobel. All I ever wanted was to keep you safe. I never wanted you to bare the things I have.’

  ‘What things?’

  There’s no response from him. He turns away from me. ‘I know that terrible things happened to you. I can’t imagine how they make you feel.’

  His answer comes fast this time. ‘Have you considered that people in pain deserve their feelings?’

  ’Of course you don’t.’ My gut drops fast. What has he done?

  ‘How can you know that?’ His tone is dismissive and hurtful. But I push.

  ‘I don’t know that, Dad. You don’t tell me. And I can’t be an outsider in my own family anymore.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Stop saying you’re an outsider. You’re loved more than you realise.’

  ‘Not knowing is hurting me. Everything is hurting me right now.’

  I see pain ignite in his eyes at my words. He leans back with all his weight against the car seat and takes a long inhale of air.

  ‘Isobel, if I tell you, don’t be angry after the fact.’ He watches me, waiting for my answer.

  ‘I won’t,’ I promise.

  He hesitates, staring firmly ahead. ‘You ask what you need to know, and I will answer.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yes, anything.’

  ‘Okay.’ Where do I start? I worry that I will only get so many questions in before he snaps shut again.

  ‘Where did your scars come from?’

  It’s a small movement, but I notice that he grimaces. His shoulders jolt backwards and he blinks. It was not the question he was expecting. He starts to answer.

  ‘I have to start at the beginning. Back when I was twenty years old, I was a student at a university in Santiago. My father was a p
ilot, in the Air Force.’

  I nod, but this is news to me. My paternal grandparents have always been a mystery.

  ‘There was a military coup in 1973.’ This I know. Since I was a teenager, I’d studied Chile’s history, albeit through YouTube and Wikipedia. ‘My father didn’t come home one day. I can’t tell you why, I’ve spent most of my life trying to find out. Most likely, he supported the sitting government, not the military.’

  ‘He disappeared,’ I say.

  He gives a solemn nod. ‘A lot did in those years. We were afraid to contact the military or the police. We asked around quietly. People were getting taken off the streets. Others were leaving the country.’

  ‘Was your mother political? Were you?’

  ‘No. It was enough to be associated with someone who defected. Through loyalty to the government, my father decided our fate.’

  ‘What happened to your mother?’ I ask, dreading the worst.

  ‘She died in 1976. Liver disease. But it changed my sister.’

  The word sister cuts straight through my heart. ‘You have siblings.’ I’d assumed I was the only child of only children. A lonely point at the bottom of a narrow family tree.

  He gives a grim nod. ‘One older sister. She was a schoolteacher, five years older than me. When our mother was gone, she looked hard for our father. There was a lot of anger inside her. She brought attention to us.’ For a moment he stops talking, his head tilted to one side. Then he speaks again. ‘I made a plan to join the army. Find out from the inside. But she wouldn’t have it, plus she said it was near to impossible. She was right, too. There was something inside of me, a fire.’ He brings a curled fist to his chest. ‘I needed to do something. There were other groups I could join. Socialist groups. I started hanging around with activists.’

  I put the rest together in my head. ‘And then they came for you.’

  ‘No. They came for my sister first. She went to work one morning and never came home. A few days later, they pulled me off the street, put a hood over my head and threw me in a van. I was glad, because I thought they’d take me to her. But they took me west of Santiago, to a camp. I heard they took her south, but I never saw her again. I wish I could have done more to protect her. The camp in the South… it was one of the worst.’

  ‘And then you were tortured. That’s why you have the scars.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Good torture leaves no marks. They used electricity, water. The things that left the marks I barley remember. They were just the beatings.’

  ‘I’m sorry that happened to you.’ He gives a small nod in acknowledgement. ‘What about your sister?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never found out. Buried with hundreds of others or left to float in the Pacific Ocean. I won’t ever forgive myself. My anger drove my actions. Those actions led to her end.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  He pauses. ’Isobel. I named you after her. I’ve always thought you looked a little like her. When I held you as a baby, I promised to protect you. I wanted your world to be a safe place. And I want you to know that every decision that I’ve made has been to do that as best I can.’

  The information flows through my brain as I pull the pieces of his history together. like frayed pieces of fabric.

  ‘When you held me as a baby?’ I question. ‘But I can’t look like her, can I?’

  He’s surprised, but there is recognition in his eyes. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.

  ‘I know, Dad. I know blood can’t relate us. Why? Did you adopt me? Steal me? Where did I come from?’

  With a sigh, he pulls the car back out on to the quiet road. ‘It’s time to have a discussion with your mother. I thought if I could get you out of town, I could keep you safe. But I have a bigger problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I can’t protect you both anymore.’

  35

  Maya

  The police let David walk free. I find him at the pub.

  It’s been hours since I left the station. I’ve picked up the boys, washed them, fed them and dropped them at my Dad’s place.

  ‘Are you sure you should spend time with David?’ he’d asked.

  Honesty is my new policy. This afternoon I filled Dad in on everything that has happened in the last few weeks. Most importantly, I’d asked him if I could take him up on his offer of moving in with him for a while.

  ‘Of course you can,’ he’d agreed without hesitation.

  Stacey Collins called my mobile and told me David was out. Her tone implied a warning.

  ‘Did he do it?’ I asked.

  Stacey hesitated. ‘It’s likely he’ll be cleared. I can’t say any more than that. Look after yourself, Maya.’

  The call ended as abruptly as it had started.

  He’s long left the police station and he’s not at home either. I find him, third attempt, hunched over the bar at the top pub, a full pint perched in front of him. I take the stool next to his, he barely looks up at me.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ he asks.

  ‘It wasn’t that hard.’

  ‘So, what is it? You came to ask for a divorce?’ He takes a sip of his beer, still avoiding my eyes.

  ‘I’m moving in with Dad,’ I say.

  ‘What about the boys?’ He looks over at me now.

  ‘We can work something out. But we need to talk about things first.’

  ‘Which things?’ he asks.

  ‘We need to talk about Veronica. I need to know if you left the house that night.’

  He leans back an inch in his chair and straightens his shoulders. ‘I’ve already told my story to the cops. And they’re the ones I have to answer to. Not you.’

  I expected anger, not hostility. I realise that his anger was only threat, a tool to make me behave the way he wanted. Now I was moving out. He had no use for it. He would find more effective methods to suit his agenda.

  ‘I have to trust you, David. If I leave those boys with you ever again, I need to know that they are safe. I can’t do that until I know what happened.’

  ‘Yes then. I left the house.’ He looks over his shoulder. A few people are looking over our way. None of them are close enough to hear. I don’t care anymore, anyway.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I left the house because you didn’t pick up the phone. You ignored my texts.’ That was true. I was too stressed from arguing with Veronica to answer them. ‘So I went around to Veronica’s.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, genuinely perplexed.

  ‘To catch you out. To know for sure what you were doing. I was tired of suspecting you. For a while, I didn’t want to know. I wanted things to work out. But every day, Maya. Every day, you slipped a little further away from me than the day before.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ I want to tell him it was him pushing me away. Maybe I am guilty too.

  ‘It is. So were you, Maya? Were you having an affair with her?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  He scoffs. ‘Veronica says you were. She said I wasn’t enough for you, never was. That you were going to move into her house. That you loved each other.’

  ‘She said I loved her?’ Something lifted inside of me. I’d never told her. Maybe she knew.

  David sneers. ‘So, it’s true?’

  ‘We didn’t have an affair. She asked me to move in, I never gave her an answer. There was nothing physical, David. Believe me, I have nothing to gain by lying.’

  He nods, breaking his gaze away from me. It’s hard to tell if he believes me. That’s up to him, though. I’m not going to argue over it. There are more important things.

  ‘Did you hurt her?’ I ask.

  ‘I didn’t lay a finger on her.’ His voice is steady. He’s telling the truth.

  ‘What did you do then? Why did you keep it a secret you were at her house?’

  ‘I went there, I knocked on the door. I thought you were in there, maybe you’d hidden your car or something. Veronica came to the door. Told me to
piss off, basically. So I just asked her outright what was going on.’

  And it sounded like Veronica gave him the exaggerated version. She hadn’t lied to David, but she had stretched things.

  ‘I said some things after that. I made her angry.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  He takes a deep breath. ‘That I might not be enough, but that she was less. She was all front and no substance, and I’d thought it since the moment I met her. I told her she was trying too hard because she would never be the person she liked other people to think she was. She could never be what you thought she was.’

  What did she want me to think she was? I always thought of our relationship as honest. I knew she could put pressure on people, and that she knew how to manipulate. But she never did that to me. Did she?

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘She laughed at me. She was angry, but she laughed at me. She said that she would fix all that tonight and some things were about to change.’

  ‘Change,’ I repeated. I thought about our conversation in the park. Isn’t that what she said then? That she had a big deal coming that would make things happen for us?

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I didn’t say another word. I went home. I saw her get in her car as I left.’

  He’d fought with her only hours before she had died. That night, he’d never spoken to me. He’d gone to bed alone, steaming in his silent anger. The next morning he’d gone off to work without a word to me. Before he came home again, he’d have gotten word she was dead. No wonder he was so shaken in the days afterwards.

  It feels like he is telling me the truth, but there is still a huge unanswered question. If David didn’t hurt her, who else is there? How was she going to fix things? Where did she go that night after I went home?

  36

  Isobel

  I bang on the door of my parent’s house as hard as I can.

  ‘Mum!’ I yell. ‘Open the door!’

  Dad locks the van and walks up the path behind me. ‘Calm down, Isobel. I’ve got a key. She doesn’t move fast.’