by T. S. Simons
Returning from Mousa with the rescued women, my concerns at that time had been for Cam, dangerously ill and grieving for his wife, and then for myself, learning I was pregnant. I hadn't known Isla then.
'Was she traumatised about what happened?'
'I can't believe you are even asking that. She had the three girls then. She spent those days on their boat, petrified, believing she would never see any of them again, knowing precisely what they would do to her when they reached Mousa. Watching her best friend be murdered and knowing they wouldn't hesitate to do that to her. Then Jorja arrives, and she learns they may be keeping your sister captive, for equally repulsive reasons. It isn't a stretch.'
Isla was competent and sharp. Strong-willed and highly intelligent. I had rarely seen her vulnerable side. But having been held captive myself, with a young child, I understood.
'I'll speak to her tomorrow,' I promised as I turned out the light, and we padded down the hall. 'Not that it will do any good.'
'It will.' Cam turned to face me. 'Just knowing that you struggled with the same emotions after being held captive at the farm. She adores you.'
'What?' I asked incredulously. 'No, she doesn't!'
'And you tell me I am blind.' Cam yawned. 'Can you not see that she would do anything for you?'
Unsure how to start the conversation with Isla the next day as we wormed sheep, I muttered, 'I am so sorry to be leaving you with all the work and our kids.'
She glanced up at me, her mouth opening slightly.
'What if they have her?' I asked, letting the fear creep into my voice as I turned to reach in my bag and avoid eye contact. 'I keep seeing her lying there. Even after all these years, I still get flashbacks of being tied up myself in that filthy shed, helpless, with a baby at home, and knowing what they wanted to do to me. Well, the sexual stuff. I had no idea about the cannibalism at that point.'
Isla exhaled audibly through pursed lips.
'It took me years to stop having nightmares,' I confessed, and saw the fear darken her beautiful, tanned face. 'That absolute terror of being restrained and knowing I had a baby at home, depending on me.'
'Me too,' she admitted, tears filling her soulful brown eyes. 'Why have we never had this conversation before?'
'I am sorry, Isles. I should have checked in. On all of you.'
'I don't think I have ever thanked you enough for what you did. I know you feel awful that you couldn't save… Laetitia.' She faltered on the name. 'But you saved the rest of us. Cam too. He would never have survived that time if it wasn't for you.'
Waiting for me to give the signal, Isla released the sheep and grabbed the next one.
'Can I ask something?' she asked softly, her glossy black hair falling forward and obscuring her face momentarily.
'Anything.'
'Katrin is his child, isn't she?'
'She is.'
Isla nodded knowingly as I administered the dose.
'It is complicated…' I started to say, lest she think ill of me, but she cut me off.
'There is no judgement from us. We thought Cam and Laetitia were made for each other. They were so happy…'
My heart lurched as she spoke, a lump of vomit coming into my mouth, and I needed to turn away.
'… until we saw him with you. Fraser and I have spoken about it many times. Cam loved Laetitia. You know that. But he is whole because of you. He worships you, and together you are a formidable team. You challenge him, bring out the best in him. It is you that makes him the man he is. We can see why he chose you.'
'Thank you,' I whispered.
'The way you love Louis,' she continued, flicking back her hair and looking directly into my eyes. 'We worried about that initially, especially after you had Katrin. But you just accepted him and treated him like one of your own.'
'He is mine,' I confessed. 'He is one of my own heart. I know I didn't give birth to him. But Cam and I wanted children all those years ago when we lived on August. We were torn away from each other. But Louis has always been mine.'
'I can see that. Well…' she slapped the sheep on the rump, and it ran off bleating, 'we will happily share the load until you get back.'
'Can I push the friendship and ask that you feed Jam?' Although they had a cat of their own now, one of Jam's kittens from a few years ago, Isla was always willing to feed our beautiful girl.
'Of course. She will be the easier one. Did you hear we are caring for Ally and Summer? You might need to bring back a stash of Prozac!'
'Thank you. It means so much to me that I can do this, knowing my family is taken care of.'
'Frey, I still have a family because of you. They still have me. I would do anything for you.'
As we kissed the children goodnight, they stalled terribly, knowing it was our last night. Louis was stoic. It wasn't the first time we had left him, although he barely remembered the last time. Being strong-willed and determined, Katrin jutted her chin out and promised to watch the younger two and not let Xanthe bring random animals into the house. She would relish the role of surrogate parent. Thorsten didn't understand what was going on, but sensing his siblings' change in demeanour, took longer to fall asleep than usual. It was Xanthe who cried until I thought her heart would break. I lay beside her in her tiny bed, stroking her hair, talking to her, reassuring her until she finally wore herself out. Slipping out of bed and closing the door as softly as I could, it was late when I closed the door to our room.
As soon as I entered, I sensed something was up.
I watched him pacing as I slipped out of my clothes and prepared to pull on the old t-shirt I wore to bed.
'What is it?'
He reached out his hand and took the top away. I couldn't read the dark look on his face as he backed away from me. I stood at the side of the bed, naked.
'Is something wrong?'
He was sombre. Something was eating at him as he started pacing again. Cam had Asperger's syndrome and struggled to read emotion. It took him more time than most people to process his conflicts and communicate what he was thinking.
Making a split-second decision and vaulting over the bed, I was at his side in a shot.
Anxiety had taken over. I could see it. But he couldn't form the words from the maelstrom in his mind. Jerky in his movements, he couldn't maintain eye contact or communicate his thoughts.
Dropping to my knees in front of him, I forgot my kneecap still hurt when I knelt on it. Too late now. Running my lips and tongue up the insides of his leg, I felt him quiver and gasp. His hands came down to rest on the top of my head as I forced him to take his mind off his troubles. A soft moan escaped his mouth, and I doubled my efforts. His strong arms lifted me and spun me around, finding my mouth as he pinned me to the wall.
As we lay on the floor, covered in our doona and cushioned by pillows, he whispered, 'You know, we are about to spend months on a boat. We should probably sleep in the bed.'
'I don't care where I am as long as I am with you. We have slept in caves, in dead forests soaked in our own blood, and on yachts. Even on hideous hospital beds beside each other. No matter where you are, I feel safe.'
'I needed that.'
'I know. But why?'
Cam exhaled like a deflating tyre as he sought the words. 'I hate goodbyes. They never used to bother me. I used to want to get away from people, from events and return home. But now, after losing you, after Laetitia, leaving my parents, and what happened to us in Inverness… I am always fearful of what could happen. Saying goodbye to the kids tonight and watching them so distressed… I am scared I will never see them again. That something will happen to you… to us. I'm not sure how many more people I can lose.'
'We will be fine. They will be fine. We are doing it together this time,' I soothed as I massaged the tension from his shoulders. 'I won't leave you again.'
'Promise me?'
'I promise.'
'I can't believe I have never noticed that yo
u still wear a wristwatch!' Cam teased as Luca reached for his water bottle. 'Didn't the battery die years ago? Mine snuffed it when I lived on August. I still wore it out of habit for a while, but I have no idea where it ended up.'
I saw the flash of pain in Luca's eyes before he responded. Illy placed a hand on his arm. She had seen it too.
'Before I left for my first international deployment, my mum bought me this watch. It is nothing flash. But it was far too expensive for her to afford. I suspect she went without food to pay for it. She said she wanted me to have a little piece of her. She knew I couldn't take much, but I could wear a watch even when in uniform. It was perfect. I would always wear it when I was on patrol. Just a touch through my jacket would remind me of her strapping it on my wrist. It stopped running years ago, and I keep it in a drawer, but I still put it on sometimes and think of her, just for a moment. It felt right, searching for Freyja's family, that I bring this token of my own.'
'Your father?' Cam asked. Illy and I glanced at each other. We knew this story. After several weeks at sea together, we were comfortable enough with each other to ask almost anything, even family secrets.
Luca half-smiled but answered readily enough. 'That knob? I don't know who he was. I mean, I know his name, of course. It is on my birth certificate. There were some photos, so I knew what he looked like. But I never knew him. He walked out on us when I was a few months old, and we never heard from him again. Went back to Italy, mum thinks. As I grew up, I made up all sorts of stories to fill the void—a war hero who died in battle. A god from another realm and had to return home to protect his world. A foreign diplomat who travelled all the time and did important work. Most of the kids at school had two parents, and I desperately wanted a father. Mum never spoke negatively of him, not once. She just said that we should all follow our own path in life, and he was following his. He was just a loser. The idea of caring for a child was too much, putting someone else's needs above his own. So he bailed.
My mother, though. She was my everything. It was just the two of us. She worked three jobs to care for me and provide me with opportunities. Pay for my schooling, my sports, camps, the enormous amount of food I ate. Never once did I feel like a burden. I changed my name from his to hers, Cadman, before I enlisted. He had never been part of my life, so I didn't want to wear his name on my uniform. See it every day. I bought her a brand-new car with my pay from my first international deployment. It was no Audi convertible,' he flashed a cheeky look at me, 'but new. It was the very first new car she had ever owned. I still remember the look on her face when I arrived at her flat and handed her the keys. Her eyes sparkled like diamonds. She used to sit in it, just to breathe in the new car smell. She was my world…' Luca stared off in space.
Illy touched his arm. 'We named Ally after her,' she said, although Cam and I already knew this. Allison after Luca's mother, and Summer as Luca's nickname for Illy was Sunshine, often shortened to Sunny, which suited her personality perfectly.
'What happened to her?'
'When I was on my second deployment, she passed suddenly of a heart attack. Got up in the night and collapsed on the bathroom floor. With no one to help her, she died there. When she didn't show up for work, they sent someone around to check on her. She was never late. Rarely took a sick day. I never got to say goodbye. By the time I heard, her friends had already planned the funeral. We had very little family. My CO woke me in the middle of the night. I thought we were under attack, and I just about shattered his nose in the dark. He broke the news, then left. I was gutted. I was lying in my bivouac, feeling like my heart had been ripped out. It took me a long time to accept that she would have passed, whether I had been there or not. It was out of my control. But I wasn't there to say goodbye, and that was the part I couldn't deal with.' Luca touched the face of his watch again and stared out the window.
The pain carved in Luca's face made my heart hurt, and I spoke to change the subject.
'For my father's fortieth birthday, my mum bought him a hideously expensive watch—a Breitling. I was about ten. I still remember the party at the yacht club, the jazz quartet playing in the far corner, looking glamorous, all wearing black. Adults were standing in small groups, talking, many out on the deck that overlooked the ocean. Men in black tie, women in beautifully coloured dresses, swishing around elegantly. From where Kat and I sat, on chairs at the far wall, watching everyone, it looked like a rainbow had exploded and the room filled with colour interspersed with black. Fairy lights hanging from the roof. Servers were flitting around, looking like penguins, serving food from silver platters around the room, but ignoring us. One server made sure she brought us food as she made her rounds, but the rest acted like we weren't even there. What I remember most, and vividly, even now, was dad showing it off, proudly—the light sparkling on the glass. The look on his face was one I had never seen before. He was beaming at my mother. He was happy. He didn't look at her like that. Never looked at Kat or I like that. My parents rarely showed emotion, and absolutely never in public. To show emotion was poor form. Everyone gushed over it, and I remember thinking that it must be important to give expensive gifts, so people knew you loved them. Maybe that was why he had never looked at me that way. I didn't have money to buy him something to make him proud. All the art projects I made at school and gave him. He smiled, but it never reached his eyes. I never saw them displayed, or on his desk. Not like that watch, which he wore daily. It took until I met Cam on August to realise that the value doesn't matter. It is the thought behind it.'
'How expensive is expensive?' Illy asked curiously.
'Oh, around twenty-five thousand dollars Australian. I overheard mum telling people. Even as a child, I knew it was a lot. And I readily admit I didn't know the value of things back then.'
'For a watch?' Cam was incredulous. 'That is more than my first car!'
It was Luca who responded. 'Luxury goods have ridiculous price tags. It is a whole other world. They are of exceptional quality, but ultimately it is a status thing. I was planning to buy a Mont Blanc watch myself after my third deployment. Fortunately, I didn't make it that far.'
'Well, we can likely find you one in Perth. There were luxury shops there,' I noted.
'A flat one,' Illy chipped in cheekily.
'No.' He lifted Illy onto his lap and lay her back against his shoulder. 'It took a pandemic for me to work out what is important. My Sunshine and my daughters. Possibly my coffee machine. I'm happy just to look at this one,' he waved his left wrist in the air. 'Just for old times' sake.'
'My mum always made a fuss of my art projects,' Cam said, smiling at me. 'I remember a hideous clay coil pot I made in art in primary school. Fired, and painted yellow on the outside, bright blue on the inside. Badly painted, I should point out. Lopsided and wonky, but she kept it on her desk and stored pens in it. By my teen years, I begged her to throw it out. It was embarrassing. She refused. Said she loved it.'
'My parents did the same,' Illy said. 'Dad ran a cord with pegs on it along a hallway in our house. Mum would pin up my artwork from school and only take it down when the whole thing sagged or was coated in dust. I made a painted plate one year. Mum used it as a spoon rest in the kitchen. The painting on it so bad I could barely tell what it was. One of our cats, apparently. But mum used it every day. I packed it in my storage unit when they passed. She loved it, and I couldn't bear to throw it away.'
'Goodness, my parents always looked like I was handing them a gift-wrapped cat turd when I produced my school artwork,' I said, making them all laugh uproariously. 'By late primary school, I just ditched it on the way home so I wouldn't need to go through the rigmarole of them pretending to like it. Kat kept trying to impress them, though. Paintings, craft projects, mother's and father's day gifts. It was almost a game in the end, trying to get them to gush over something you could tell they found cringeworthy.'
'Oh, what about home economic classes?' Illy laughed. 'I remember taking home a sunken, sogg
y apple tea cake and my parents telling me how delicious it was!'
Cam added, 'Overcooked baked pretzels for me. Rock hard, they were awful, but my parents ate them anyway. I'm surprised no one chipped a tooth.'
Luca, returning to the conversation, added, 'We weren't quite so posh. It was just called Cooking at my school. Most of ours was learning how to cook a basic meal, and we ate them at school. Lots of vegetables, I recall. But the paper-thin chocolate chip biscuits I still remember. I misread the recipe and put in a cup of butter instead of half a cup, so they spread in a single thin layer across the tray. I failed, but mum still ate them.'
'I served my mum undercooked merengues once,' I confessed. 'I had spent too much time chatting and didn't give them enough time to cook. Because we had to finish up and clean the kitchen before we left for our next class, I had no choice.'
'What did she do?' Cam asked.
'Took one bite, and it stuck to her teeth. She tried to maintain a smile and placed the rest on the plate, telling me she would save it for later.'
'Binned?' Luca guessed.
'Definitely. Mum rarely ate sugar anyway. Sugar was the devil in my house.'
'Really?' Illy asked. 'I loved baking with my mum on weekends. We often made cupcakes or something for me to include in my school lunch. For every special event, we would bake a cake. It was our time. Something we did together.'
'You know, we should introduce mother's day and father's day,' Luca announced. 'I'd love to see what our kids come up with.'
'Well, at least there are no kilns, so no crappy clay pots,' Cam breezed. 'I'm safe.'
'Oh, I might have a chat with Di and see if she can think of something creative,' I twinkled at him. 'Then we will all watch your face as your darling children hand it to you.'