“Nora. You have to come home with me.”
I’m so close to her face that my lips brush hers, scratched and perfect. A puff of warm air reaches my skin, and I shudder with relief. She’s alive.
NORA
Tiny splinters of words reach my ears.
A ghost of a kiss.
“Nor… rah… Nor… rah,” they whisper. Gentle fingers press into my shoulders and shake, nudging me to life. Reminding me to live. “Kite,” he whispers. I pull my legs up. I could be a kite. Wind punching me through, colors and shredded tails. I could fly away. Live in the sky…
Reel me in.
The sharp corner of the Polaroid digs into my chest. Words scrape my lips like sand. “Tell me where she is,” I whisper, hoping someone can hear me.
Kettle reaches under me, his hands bumping things he shouldn’t be touching, but it doesn’t matter now. He rolls me over, sits me up, holds my face in his hands, and tilts it from side to side. Those dark blue eyes hold me together. I see an emotion I don’t recognize in them, a feeling I want to learn.
He takes the photo still pressed to my chest, stares at it, and then shouts up to my father, who is spilled concrete, splattered all over the landing. Unable to move. Kettle’s voice rumbles and fills the space. “Where is Frankie?” He waves the photo back and forth in the air and then stills. The image is a scar on paper. Christopher Deere about to stab a Japanese boy with a letter opener. It’s clear. My hands were so steady in that moment. I could almost laugh, if my ribs weren’t pinching my lungs.
A number and a street name tumble from the sky, slide under my flattened body and lift me up.
I will get up.
I’m a miracle about to happen. I’m a star that refuses to die.
Leaning heavily on Kettle, I get to my feet, slipping on the splash of red marking the pristine tiles.
I glare up at my father. “If the address doesn’t check out, you’ll regret it,” I say firmly, my bones made of steel, my leg dripping blood.
He nods. Nothing else. He doesn’t try to stop me. Doesn’t threaten me.
It’s over.
Kettle’s arm wraps around my waist as he half drags me across the threshold, across the common area, and into the cool, autumn air, the sun hitting us with pale gold light. I stop on the step, straighten my clothes, and smile.
“I’m okay, Kettle,” I say, turning to his warm, copper-colored face.
He looks down at my leg and then back to my face. I’m radiating something new. I’m a solar flare. I’m heat and determination. He releases me, a hand hovering at my back, just in case.
“You’re better than okay,” he says, smiling, pushing my heart in at funny angles until it hurts to breathe. “You’re a King.”
I’m a King.
I wear his crown. Wear the blue of his eyes, the kindness in his voice. I want more. More words, more time, more light shining on dark places. I want him.
It should, but this change growing between us doesn’t throw me off balance. It doesn’t take up space that should be Frankie’s. It opens me up and anchors me. It sinks roots to the ground and stretches up to reach the sun. It is good. Nourishing and pure. It is things I never thought I could have.
I take his hand, hold it tight, and together, we step down and away from the brownstone. I picture my father standing, static on the landing just once, and then he becomes fire-cracked clay, an ornament easily broken. In my mind, he will be frozen that way forever and my brain flicks his image to the side, toppling his wooden likeness as if he were the chess piece. All the power he had over me… gone.
My bones crack, my skin splits, my leg drags behind me, but the pain seems to shatter and shed from my body the further away we get and the closer we become, until it evaporates into the clouds. I look up and watch the bad parts of me shrinking to dots in the wide blue.
We’re going home.
Together, we write words across the sky in giant, messy script, full of mistakes and crossed-out letters. And I am filled with hope as I watch them dance and clash and poke at my fears, because although I know I can do this on my own, now I am sure I don’t have to.
Frankie, we’re coming.
Acknowledgements
This book is primarily about love and survival. So I want to thank the people who taught me about these two things. The way they work together. How they are inextricably linked in times of adversity.
Love comes in many forms as everyone knows. Romantic love, love of family, of friends, and of oneself. To me, it is the backbone of getting through, the thing that holds us up when the world is trying to pull us down to the dirt. And even if we do fall, I think it somehow stops the dirt from clinging.
My inspiration for this novel came from two people who survived some of the most appalling conditions during their internment during World War Two, my grandparents, John (Grandad) and Jeanne (Nanna).
During the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, they were thrown into two separate internment camps in Singapore. Grandad was beaten severely, starved and forbidden from seeing his wife and baby. Nanna, still nursing her young infant at the time, was forced to eat rodents and insects just to survive. They were just nineteen, newly married and in love, facing conditions no one should ever have to face.
But they got through, and if you asked Nana how, her answer, in her very vibrant and animated way of speaking, was love, the hope she would see Grandad again, and that they would get out, make a life for themselves, and never look back on the muddy, razor wire-surrounded grounds of those camps again.
They did get out. They had another child (my father) and went on to live fulfilling lives—ones full of love, grandchildren, color, and laughter. But they were shortened lives, which makes me even more thankful that they shared their stories with me.
There isn’t much I would wish for in this world, but to have them back, to have had more time with them than I did, would be my biggest one.
For surviving, for your love, hope, and beautiful souls, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I wouldn’t be here without you.
About the Author
Lauren Nicolle Taylor lives in the lush Adelaide Hills. The daughter of a Malaysian nuclear physicist and an Australian scientist, she was expected to follow a science career path, attending Adelaide University and completing a Health Science degree with Honours in obstetrics and gynaecology.
She then worked in health research for a short time before having her first child. Due to their extensive health issues, Lauren spent her twenties as a full-time mother/carer to her three children. When her family life settled down, she turned to writing.
Author of the best selling Woodlands Series, she is also a 2014 Kindle Book Awards Semi-finalist and a USA Best Book Awards Finalist.
Table of Contents
1. WINGS NORA
2. ACCIDENTS NORA
3. SUPER KETTLE
4. AFTER NORA
5. HOME KETTLE
6. GOODBYE NORA
7. FAMILY KETTLE
8. STRANGE NORA
9. WORK KETTLE
10. UNEXPECTED KETTLE
11. THE PRIZE NORA
12. ORDINARY LIFE KETTLE
13. FIELD TRIP NORA
14. BEGINNING NORA
15. TRUST AND FAIRY DUST KETTLE
16. HIDE ME NORA
17. GUARDIAN KETTLE
18. THE START OF A FIRE NORA
19. TOO MUCH KETTLE
20. THE LIGHT NORA
21. WHAT HAPPENED? KETTLE
22. OLD FRIEND, ANOTHER LIFE NORA
23. BETTER OFF KETTLE
24. ONCE AGAIN NORA
25. BAIT KETTLE
26. MEN KETTLE
27. THE WAVE NORA
28. ESCAPE NORA
29. THE KING KETTLE
30. THE DEVIL NORA
31. I DON’T CARE NORA
32. THANK YOU KETTLE
33. RUNNING KETTLE
34. AN AGREEMENT NORA
35. BLINDED KETT
LE
36. THE LOST BOYS AND ME NORA
37. UNLOCKED KETTLE
38. CAN’T HIDE NORA
39. WORK NORA
40. MEMORIES KETTLE
41. INDEPENDENCE NORA
42. SLEEP KETTLE
43. BUILDING KETTLE
44. KIN NORA
45. BLAME NORA
46. PRETEND KETTLE
47. A GIRL NORA
48. GONE KETTLE
49. WHAT I NEED TO DO NORA
50. I DO BELIEVE IN FAIRIES KETTLE
Nora & Kettle Page 27