Evergreen Falls

by Kimberley Freeman

  “So, you’re going to sit out here all night, are you?” Tony asked.

  Flora listened at the door. It was quiet. “Perhaps I won’t need to. It sounds like he’s finally sleeping.”

  “He’ll start groaning again soon enough, no doubt,” Sweetie said. “Probably right when I’m trying to get to sleep.” He stalked off towards his room and closed the door hard behind him.

  Flora asked Tony to listen by the door while she went to bathe and then dress in her nightgown and robe. She returned twenty minutes later to find Tony sitting on the floor, his head against the door, his eyes closed.

  “Has he stirred?” she asked.

  “No. That’s a good sign, isn’t it, that he’s quiet?”

  “I think so. Maybe it means the worst is over. It’s been three days. The other times he’s tried, he’s lasted only one or two. I love the thought that he’s sleeping. Now perhaps I’ll get some sleep, too. What a horrible few days we’ve had.”

  Tony touched her hand. “I’m glad it’s over, too. Do you think he’ll stay off it now?”

  “It’s to be hoped. He can be very pigheaded, but surely he won’t want to go through such awful withdrawing pains again.” She smiled at Tony. “You don’t mind, do you? That your future brother-in-law is an opium addict?”

  He shrugged. “Every family has a black sheep.”

  She yawned. “I think I’ll have an early night. Should I look in on him?”

  “Better to let him rest, maybe.”

  “I can be very quiet.”

  Tony climbed to his feet. “Go on, then.”

  She cracked open the door as quietly as she could. The room was dark, so she waited a few moments for her eyes to adjust. She could see Sam on the bed, the dark splash of his hair against the pillow, his body sprawled on top of the covers.

  Something was wrong. Her heart knew it before her head did. Her pulse quickened, but she wasn’t sure why. Then she listened. Really listened.

  He was far too quiet. Too still.

  “Sam,” she said loudly, imagining that it would wake him, and she wouldn’t care because that would simply mean that he was breathing but she couldn’t hear it over her own thundering pulse. “Sam!” she shouted, kneeling at his side and shaking him. Tony came blustering in with the hurricane lamp, and she could see Sam properly then, spread on the bed in a pose of languor, free from the torment of his withdrawal at last.

  With skin as cold as a stone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  2014

  I was stepping out of the shower, getting ready for a morning shift, when the phone rang.

  For once, I didn’t assume it was my mother and groan. For once, I ran, towel loosely held over my wet body, trailing damp footprints behind me. Because Tomas was back today.

  “Hello?” I said breathlessly, feeling water drip down my neck.

  “I’ve just landed in Sydney,” he said.

  “We’re in the same country,” I replied. “That feels nice. I’m working until three.”

  “I’ll come by the café at three, then.” A moment of silence, then, “I can’t wait to see you. I missed you.”

  “Same,” I said, relieved. Given that most of our relationship had been played out in late-night, long-distance phone calls and text messages, I wasn’t sure how much of a claim I had on him, whether it was acceptable to confess to missing somebody after two dates.

  The day crawled. I watched the clock, and it didn’t seem to move. Work was beset by grumpy customers, and a blocked steam nozzle on the coffee machine meant Penny and I had to spend a large portion of the day tripping over workmen and apologizing for slow coffees.

  But then the lunch trade started to thin out, and right on three the front door opened, letting in the cool air from outside. Tomas stood there.

  My heart lifted into my throat. “Hi,” I said, from across the café.

  Penny gave me a little push in the back. “Off you go.”

  I untied my apron and stuffed it in my bag, let my hair out of the tight ponytail I wore it in for work, and crossed the floor to meet him.

  We stood, six awkward inches apart, and he said, “It’s nice to see you.”

  “Yes,” I said. What was the protocol? I had no idea.

  He grasped my hand and said, “Come with me.”

  I waved to Penny, who gave me two thumbs up, and followed Tomas outside.

  “I’ve missed the view,” he said. “Can we go over to the deck?”

  “Sure.”

  We crossed the road, still hand in hand. The afternoon sun was behind us, making our shadows long. We waited for a busload of tourists to exit the car park and then we stepped onto the large wooden viewing platform that had been built out of the escarpment, affording a full, magnificent view of the mountains and valleys under shifting cloud shadows.

  “Ah, that’s beautiful,” he said, finally releasing my hand.

  “More beautiful than Copenhagen?” I still held out hope that he’d want to stay in Australia.

  “There are places in Denmark even more beautiful,” he replied with a twinkle in his eye, and then he seized me in a hug, and I surrendered to it gratefully. The smell of him, his heat and his hard body, were intoxicating. I turned my face up for a kiss, and he pressed his mouth against mine. A breeze whipped up, sent dry leaves scuttling over the wooden boards. Goose bumps stood out on my arms.

  Tomas let me go. “Let’s sit down and talk,” he said. “There’s a lot to talk about.”

  I folded myself up on the bench next to him, knees under my chin. “About our mystery? That letter from Eugenia Zander has me utterly baffled. If only I could get back into the hotel—”

  But he was already shaking his head. “Sorry. I’ve been in to work today, and my visiting privileges for the west wing have officially been revoked.”

  “Ah. That’s my fault, isn’t it?”

  “Technically, it’s mine. I gave you the key and told you to go in. I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”

  “I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”

  He shrugged. “That kind of thing doesn’t bother me. They pay me a lot of money and will continue to do so. The developer has simply said it’s an occupational safety hazard, and so that’s that. Until I start on the design, I’m not going back in.” He touched my cheek softly. “Besides, what else could you find that would help?”

  “Letters. Records. Anything that tells me what happened to Violet Armstrong. I need to know if she and Sam lived happily ever after.”

  “If she did, I doubt the hotel would have the records. In any case, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

  I heard the serious note in his voice and shifted so I was looking directly at him. “Go on,” I said, and his eyes became solemn and unhappy. That was the moment I was certain he was going to break it off with me, that he would tell me it was all too hard or that he was going back to his ex-wife. I told myself to sit there and listen and not interrupt, and maybe just treat it like an anthropological experiment: this is what it feels like to be dumped. It was new to me. All of it.

  “I need to explain something to you about Sabrina and me. I expect it might have seemed unusual to you that I . . . went so far for a woman I divorced five years ago.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to say or do.

  He rubbed his chin with his palm. “I would have told you all this eventually. When we were a little more established. When we’d got to know each other better. But, Lauren, I really like you. I really see some kind of future with you, as mad as that sounds after a relationship built on text messages.”

  This was unexpected. Now I was utterly perplexed, and it must have shown on my face because he said, “I’m sorry. I’m not making sense and I need to get to the point. There is something significant about me that you don’t know, and I am going to tell you now.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to look encouraging. The wind was in the eucalypts, making them shake and shiver above us. It would soon be too c
old to be out. I wished I’d packed a cardigan when I’d left home this morning.

  “Sabrina and I were married when we were twenty-two. We married because we . . . sort of had to.”

  For a second I didn’t know what he meant, but then suddenly I understood. “Oh. She was pregnant?”

  “Yes. In fact, we had a baby. We had a daughter.” His face knotted, and I realized he was trying to stop himself from crying.

  My whole body shivered with heat: he’d had a daughter, but he’d told me when we first met that he had no children. So that meant . . . “Oh, no,” I said. “She died, didn’t she?”

  “She was just a little thing,” he whispered. “Only a week short of her third birthday. Her name was Emilia. Emmy, we called her. She fell from a window at her creche. The cleaner hadn’t locked it properly; the carer had a moment of inattention. It was a cascade of bad luck. Nobody’s fault, really. We didn’t blame anyone.”

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I said, and I felt as though I had stepped into a vast ocean that I couldn’t feel the bottom of. It was adulthood, a place where people had pain and histories and consequences. I reached for his hand and squeezed it tightly.

  “When Emmy fell,” he continued, “she was still breathing, her little heart still beating. Sabrina and I saw her at the hospital.” He waved a dismissive hand. “You don’t need me to tell you how distressing it is to see somebody you love like that. Little Emmy fought on, day after day, and not once, not for one second did Sabrina leave her side. She said, I will be here until she wakes up or until she dies, and she kept that vow. I was wild with grief. I could barely be persuaded to go to the hospital. I couldn’t look at Emmy. She didn’t look like my little girl. I stayed out late, I went to work as though nothing had happened. I quite literally lost my mind. For six days. Just six days. Then Emmy died.” He shook his head, wiped away tears. “Fifteen years have passed, and it’s still as fresh and as awful,” he said.

  “That’s why you went to Sabrina,” I said.

  “Yes. I felt that somebody had to be there with her, until she woke up or until she died. Just as she had been for our daughter, when I couldn’t be.”

  “I can’t even imagine what such a loss feels like,” I said.

  “Much like your loss,” he said. “Only with a little dash of helplessness and self-blame.” He gave a wry smile.

  “So, after that, your marriage couldn’t survive?”

  “Sabrina and I grieved very differently. I cried and raged. She tried to make sense of it, as though if she could make sense of it, she wouldn’t have to feel it. She went down a path I couldn’t follow. Spiritualists and crazy religions and gurus who took her money and gave her false hopes that she could contact Emmy on the other side. We were still young, really. We didn’t make it.” He spread his hands apart. “We didn’t make it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Life is like this, Lauren. Maybe you haven’t realized yet because you have been so folded away within your family, with one inevitable outcome that took all your focus. But it’s a big mess out here. A big, unpredictable mess, and there’s no telling what will happen next.” He shook his head. “Sabrina woke up, about fifteen minutes before I left to come home. I got to speak to her. She couldn’t talk, but I could tell by looking in her eyes that she knew why I was there. She’ll be fine.”

  “I’m glad.”

  He smiled. “It feels good to have that off my chest.”

  “Tomas, you can tell me anything.”

  He squeezed my hand, and his eyes went to the view. I watched him for a while. I had no idea what I was supposed to do or say after such a big revelation, but I remember after Adam died wanting people just to sit with me, not ask questions or offer comfort. Just sit with me and be another beating heart close by. So I did that.

  I sat beside him and let my heart beat.

  * * *

  As the afternoon moved towards evening, jet lag began to get the better of Tomas, and he needed to go home, so I went home, too. It was very quiet, and I had a lot to think about. Tomas’s message about the unpredictability of the world ran so opposite to my mother’s lifelong teachings that it almost made me breathless. I had lived a life on a one-train track: keep Adam alive for as long as you can. While I understood why Mum wanted us all to think that way, it meant I had fallen into line and stopped looking sideways. I had missed a lot. Adam had missed more. Adam had missed something in particular, something associated with the Blue Mountains. And Anton Fournier knew what it was. If only I could convince him to tell me.

  * * *

  Terri-Anne Dewhurst called me later that evening to tell me she’d received the letters and to express her thanks again.

  “You were right, they really are a bit saucy,” she said.

  “There’s certainly a lot of passion there. Look, after we last spoke I found a copy of a letter the hotel manageress wrote to your great-grandmother. Can I read it to you?”

  “Of course.”

  I read her the letter, making sure I paused for dramatic emphasis on the part about everyone involved never speaking of it again. But Terri-Anne didn’t need dramatic emphasis to get excited.

  “A cover-up!” she cried. “How thrilling!”

  “Any ideas?” I said, falling onto the couch and lying back to look at the ceiling. The waistband of my pajamas had lost its elastic and hung down unflatteringly. I was glad Tomas was home in bed sleeping off jet lag.

  “No, but I’ll bet Grandma knew and never said a word. She was like that.”

  “I keep wondering if it was as simple as Sam and Violet running off together.”

  “But that’s not tragic,” Terri-Anne said. “She specified ‘tragic events.’ ”

  “And for your family at that time, it wouldn’t be tragic if Sam had run away with a waitress?”

  She paused for a while, thinking. Then she said, confidently, “No. Tragedy had a specific meaning back then, not like now when news reporters use it for everything. It meant something awful—death, ruin. I think somebody died.”

  “Violet?”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s nothing more I can do at this end,” I said. “I kind of got in trouble, sneaking around in the hotel.”

  “Leave it with me. I have lots of contacts and lots of resources. I’ll see if I can find out anything about Violet Armstrong: where she was born, what became of her. Perhaps if I can find Violet, I can find Sam.”

  “Let me know the minute you find anything interesting,” I said. “I’m invested.”

  “I will,” she said. “I promise.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Tait’s operation was the following morning, and I phoned the hospital after the café’s lunch rush and was told she was awake and “resting.”

  After work I walked to the flower stand outside the grocery store to pick up a gift to take to Lizzie. As I approached, I noticed two whippets tied up to a yellow bicycle rack out the front. Anton Fournier’s dogs.

  I stopped and crouched to pat them. They went mad with happiness, wagging their tails and licking my hands. They were obviously spoiled and happy, which was the sign of a good-hearted owner. If Anton was good-hearted, surely he would talk to me. Eventually.

  I peered through the shop door, but I couldn’t see Anton. I stood, made still by indecision until a man exited the shop and bent to untie the dogs—and it wasn’t Anton.

  “They’re lovely dogs,” I said, trying to hide my curiosity as I looked him over. Lizzie had mentioned a “young fellow” who house-sat for Anton, but I had presumed he was younger, perhaps a teenager, whereas this man was about my age, with short, neat hair and a soft face.

  “They are,” he said with a smile. “They like you.”

  “I’ve met them before,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

  I took a deep breath and offered him my hand. “My name’s Lauren. Anton kicked me off his front porch last week.”

  The man smiled, took my hand, a
nd shook it warmly. “I’m Peyton. I heard all about it.”

  His smile made me relax enough to ask, “Do you know why he hates me so much?”

  He released my hand and went back to untying the dogs. “I know everything. I know all about Adam, about the past. The whole story. But it’s not for me to tell you.”

  “Anton won’t.”

  “Of course he will. In his own time. That’s what Anton’s like.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Peyton wrapped a dog leash around each wrist. Romeo and Juliet strained against him, ready to get going. “The letter you sent had a strong impact,” he said. “He’s considering it.”

  “Really? Can you tell him you saw me? That I begged you? Because I swear, I don’t know a thing. I have no idea what happened between Adam and Anton and my family, but I really, really want to know. Will begging help?”

  He smiled again. He had a lovely smile, so warm and relaxed. “I will tell him you begged, but I don’t know if it will help him make up his mind quicker. He doesn’t like being told what to do. Now, I’d better get these dogs home before they pull my arms out of my sockets.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Bye.” He turned and began to walk away from me, then stopped and looked back. “He will talk to you eventually. Don’t worry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re Adam’s sister. That means more to him than you can imagine.”

  I watched him go. Other people emerged from the shop, looked me over, and went on their way. I must have been standing there a long time. Then I selected a bunch of flowers for Lizzie and went inside to pay for them.

  * * *

  I arrived at the hospital just as the afternoon was turning towards evening. Lizzie’s daughter Genevieve was sitting in a pink chair by Lizzie’s bed, worrying the edge of her thumbnail with her teeth. Lizzie was half reclined, looking dozy and blissed out.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Genevieve looked up. “Pain meds,” she said, indicating Lizzie. “She’s a bit sleepy and away with the fairies.”

  “Ah. Hello, Lizzie,” I said, leaning over to kiss Lizzie’s powdery cheek. “I brought you flowers.”