Let Her Go

by Let Her Go (retail) (epub)

  Nadia nodded, then leaned into him. She was full of pity for her father, and shame for the way she had acted. He was right, she needed to cherish everything that she did have. And she had a lot. They were both silent, thinking of the woman who was gone, and yet was everywhere around them.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Zoe and Lachlan drove east on the highway out of Fremantle, passing the massive road trains rolling down the hills towards Perth, their containers caked with blood-red dust from the desert. Zoe gripped the door handle as the car shook with the roar of a truck that passed too close to them. She swallowed, glanced at Lachlan, then looked forward again. They turned off the highway and soon they were climbing up into the hills, along a winding road surrounded by thick bush. A flock of black Carnaby’s cockatoos flew over them, screeching.

  As soon as the court case had ended last month, Nadia and Eddie had packed up and moved back to the hills. Their tenants had moved out and their house was lying empty, so they’d given up their rental in Perth straight away. Zoe had been relieved in a way that there would be some distance between Louise and Nadia, but sad, too, for her sister, that she was retreating back to the country.

  ‘I wonder why they wanted to meet us at the weir,’ Zoe said. ‘Do you believe that she really wants us to all have an amicable picnic together?’

  Lachlan shrugged. ‘They can’t even have unpacked yet; maybe Nadia’s embarrassed about the state of the house. Or maybe she’s honestly trying to make amends, patch things up again between us all. In a way I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be nice for us to see the girls and Harry again too, I’ve missed them.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, they’re growing so quickly. Although it can’t be good for her kids, all this moving around. I wonder if she’ll move them back to their old school?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Lachlan said.

  Zoe leaned back in her seat, looking out of the window. ‘I was always envious of Nadia living up here. It’s so … peaceful. Imagine if we lived somewhere like this, Lach, with Louise. Far away from everyone, just us …’

  ‘In the height of summer?’ He looked over at her and smiled.

  Zoe frowned, looking at the thick bushland all around them. ‘Bushfires?’

  He nodded, slowing down to turn a tight corner. Zoe imagined the crackling and snapping of the dry branches as the fire took hold, the oils from the gum trees hissing and spitting as they started to smoke and then explode. She shuddered. ‘Do you think Louise will have missed us?’

  Lachlan reached over and put his hand on her knee. ‘Of course! Zoe, you’ve got to stop thinking of Nadia as a threat; there’s nothing else she can do to us now. We’ll get used to it. It’s just like Louise is going for a sleepover with her cousins, that’s all.’

  She sighed, and turned around to look at the empty baby seat. ‘I know.’

  They drove for another ten minutes, largely in silence. Zoe looked down at the green fields in the valley below where a few horses grazed, and then she saw the glint of the lake through the trees ahead. Minutes later, they pulled into the car park. They were at the top of the weir, and she gazed down at the water, twenty metres below. The air was still, quiet except for the chirps of cicadas and the occasional call of a duck. There was one other car there, a four-wheel drive with empty bicycle racks on the back. Nadia’s car wasn’t here yet; she was probably savouring every minute she could before she had to hand Louise back. Zoe couldn’t help but feel nervous.

  ‘The picnic area’s on the other side,’ Zoe said.

  Lachlan nodded, and they got out of the car and locked it. They walked in silence up the short flight of steps to a paved lookout. Zoe leaned on the fence and looked down. The water barely moved, except for the odd ruffle when a whisper of a breeze skimmed over the surface and blurred the sharp reflection of the clouds above.

  Zoe felt a flutter of anxiety as she slowly followed Lachlan onto the narrow path that formed the top of the concrete dam wall. She looked down on either side of her. The dam level below them was low, with puffs of algae in the milky green water. Zoe staggered, feeling her head swim with vertigo.

  She made herself look straight ahead, to the other side of the dam, where blackened wooden railway sleepers twisted their way up the steep grassy slope, the only remnant of the days when people would catch the steam train here from the city to swim on hot summer days. You couldn’t swim here any more; it was drinking water, at the start of its journey through the Golden Pipeline, across the desert to the goldfields.

  ‘Lachlan, wait for me!’ she shouted, noticing how far ahead he was. Her voice echoed in the still air, and she recalled the childhood stories of the spirits trapped in the shells, chanting. There was something here, a memory in the air, a voice trapped in the valley, echoing between the cliffs. She walked faster, but not so fast that she risked stumbling, catapulting over the wire fence, her limbs flailing, looking up at the clouds and down at the clouds with no sense of whether she was falling or flying.

  * * *

  As expected, there was no sign of Nadia, Eddie or the kids at the picnic area either. Zoe paced around the paving stones below the formal lawns and old rose gardens.

  Lachlan took her hand and squeezed it. ‘We’re early, Zoe, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not.’ But she was. What if she doesn’t show up? she thought. What if she’s taken her?

  Zoe looked back across the weir, but she couldn’t see the road clearly. She put her bag down at the bottom of the steps and sat down below the handsome bust of C.Y. O’Connor looking out over the lake. Lachlan sat next to her. She knew they were both thinking of the last time they’d seen a statue of this man, that day on the beach when they had watched the dark figure slowly submerging as the tide came in, waves lapping over the body of his horse, moving up towards his face. This was where it had begun, O’Connor’s dream; the beach was where it had ended. They sang, Lachlan had said that day on the beach. The Noongars had sung to make him crazy, to curse him for destroying their sacred waters, the estuary that fed them, when he built Fremantle harbour. She had dismissed it then as just a legend. But here, she could almost believe it.

  ‘You OK?’ she asked, seeing the haunted look in Lachlan’s eyes.

  Lachlan nodded, gazing out. ‘It’s so sad that he spent his life working on such an amazing thing but he never saw it, you know? He never saw that first drop of water drip into the pipe and trickle all the way, through the scorching desert, to pour out into the driest place you can imagine, frontier country. He never lived to see that what he did made such a difference to everyone who lived there, to the entire country. We couldn’t have mined without it, and that’s the money that built this entire state. All he knew was blame, anger.’

  Zoe took Lachlan’s hand and stroked it. ‘No one ever knows the effect on the future of the things we do now; we just have to do what we think is right at the time. And that doesn’t get forgotten. And it’s no different to what happens now: people protest about mining in the Kimberley, farmers complain about gas being drilled on their land. There’s always opposition to change.’

  ‘But the anger wasn’t directed at a company, or at a government, it was all thrown at him. They singled him out.’ Lachlan’s voice broke and he looked at her, his eyes damp. ‘He was trying; he was just doing his job, he did everything he could, and still it wasn’t good enough.’

  Zoe saw the tear trickle down his face and knew that, like that first drop of rainwater that had entered the pipeline, it had to roll through the dust, colour to ochre as it washed clean the memories from the desert. She reached up and wiped his cheek gently.

  ‘You are good enough, Lachlan.’

  * * *

  Nadia stood on the path atop the dam wall, Louise in her arms, and looked down at the lake. The kids had run on ahead, with Eddie hurrying along behind them carrying the esky for the picnic. She wanted everything to slow down. It had been wonderful having Louise stay with them overnight, with the other kids. It really felt as though sh
e was part of their family, back in the house where the kids had grown up. But Louise had been unsettled all night, waking, crying, fussing to be held. Then this morning, when Nadia had explained again to the children that Zoe and Lachlan were meeting them to take Louise back to their house, they had cried. Nadia longed for one more minute with Louise; their time together was so short that it seemed as if all she could do was count it down until the moment when she had to hand her over again. And thinking about that felt as bad at it had on the day when Louise was born.

  ‘Eddie!’ she shouted. ‘Wait!’ Her cry echoed around her and she gripped Louise a little tighter.

  He stopped and looked back. ‘What?’

  She beckoned to him. He dropped the esky then walked back towards her. ‘What is it?’ He turned around and shouted, ‘Kids, be careful!’

  Nadia reached into her handbag for her camera. ‘Can you take a picture, of Louise and me?’

  ‘Here?’

  She nodded, glancing over her shoulder at the lake behind her, then handed the camera to him before Louise could grab it.

  Eddie took a few steps back from her then held the camera to his eye. ‘OK, ready?’

  Nadia glanced up at him. She didn’t want to smile at the camera; instead she looked back down at her daughter, into eyes that were her own. I see you, she thought, and I know you know I see you. She began to hum softly to Louise, as they gazed at each other. A tear dripped onto Louise’s face. Nadia wiped it away quickly, then looked up at Eddie. ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘The photo? Yes.’ He frowned and put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her and Louise. ‘Are you OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You sure?’

  No! she wanted to scream, loud enough that it would bounce off the walls of the canyon and be screamed here for ever more. No, I’m not sure at all.

  But instead she nodded again, knowing that she had to let Louise go.

  Chapter Thirty

  By the time her parents returned from lunch at the boat harbour, Lou had stopped crying. She had examined everything in the box over and over again until she had absolutely no doubt. Everything made sense now. She had thrown herself down on her parents’ bed and sobbed, pummelled her fists into the mattress, gripped her hair in her hands and pulled, but then she had stopped. She hadn’t gone further, hadn’t reached for something sharp, because she knew now that she hadn’t been imagining things. The whispers, the loaded glances, the disconnection in her home. She – Lou – wasn’t the problem. The problem had existed long before she was even born.

  Lou had taken the box through to the kitchen, and arranged the documents and photos on the table in neat piles. Then she had gone to her bedroom and lay on her bed listening to music until she heard the car pull up outside. She was calm as she stood up and walked out of her room to meet her parents.

  ‘Lou!’ her mum shouted through the door as she tried to open it against the security chain. ‘Lou!’

  ‘Coming!’ Lou walked slowly to the door. She still had time to gather up the contents of the box, close it and put it back in her parents’ wardrobe, and keep from them a powerful secret – that she knew. Her parents were no longer in control. She clenched her fists again. How dare they? They had no right to lie to her about how she came into the world, about how she was passed backwards and forwards like a toy. Or, if she was to use the language she had just read, commissioned and relinquished.

  She stood with her hand on the chain, the door slightly ajar. It took all her self-control not to slam it in her mother’s face; instead she closed it softly, slid off the security chain, then swung it open.

  ‘Thank God we’re home,’ her mum said, walking straight past her. ‘I’m exhausted.’ Her dad followed, and closed the door behind him. Lou walked behind them into the kitchen.

  ‘What’s — Oh!’ Her mum clasped her hand over her mouth as she stared at the open box on the table, the pile of photographs and court documents.

  Lou’s dad stopped too. ‘Oh, Lou,’ he said.

  ‘When were you going to tell me?’ Lou said quietly.

  Her parents looked at each other, their faces pale, trying to communicate with their eyes, ask the other what to do, what to say.

  Her dad cleared his throat, took a step back towards Lou, put his hand on her shoulder then steered her into the kitchen. ‘Sit down.’

  Her mum was breathing quickly, and her hands shook as she sat on a dining chair, still clutching the car keys.

  Lou let herself be guided to the table. She sat opposite her mum, with her dad on her right-hand side. None of them looked down at the documents. They didn’t need to; they all knew what was written there.

  Lou’s mum reached for her hands, but she pulled them away. ‘Is this true?’ she asked.

  Her mum nodded, her face pale. ‘Louise, we wanted to tell you before, but you’ve been going through so much lately and we thought it would be too much for you right now, when you’ve been so upset —’

  Lou raised her hands in front of her in exasperation. Didn’t they understand that she was the way she was because of them? Because of their lies? ‘Upset? Seeing as you’ve dragged me to counsellors and therapists, I think it’s fair to say that the way I’ve been feeling is a bit more than upset! But it all makes perfect sense now, don’t you see? You’re the reason I’m like this, why I’m your problem child. I always knew there was something!’ She paused to take a breath.

  ‘Lou, please …’

  She looked at her mother’s bloodshot eyes, her smeared mascara. She knew now, looking into that face, that this was why she felt so alone, because this woman was nothing to her. There had always been something blocking the relationship between them, she had thought, but now she knew it was the opposite – it was a lack of something. How could she have missed it? They looked nothing alike. Who was this woman who called herself her mother?

  Lou snorted with laughter, though she wanted to cry. ‘Now I know why Grandma always used to say to me, “You’re your father’s daughter”: she was trying to tell me! No one ever said I was my mother’s daughter, did they? Because I never was. I was my aunt’s daughter.’ She turned to her dad. ‘How could you keep this from me?’

  He looked up. ‘You heard your mum, Louise. We did what we thought was best for you. We were always going to tell you, but it didn’t seem like the right time …’

  ‘Did Ross know about this? Is that why we always had to have secret sessions, why I wasn’t allowed to know what you were whispering about in his room? It all makes sense now, all the questions he asked me about my childhood. He was trying to see what I knew! Did you put him up to it? Did he come running to you afterwards and reassure you that I knew nothing?’

  ‘No, of course not. He didn’t tell us anything about your sessions. Those sessions were for you, to help you!’

  Lou pointed her finger at her dad. ‘I’ll tell you how you could have helped me – by being honest with me! By telling me this years ago, not waiting until I found out! You … you lied to me!’

  ‘We didn’t lie …’ Her mum stood up and moved around the table towards her.

  ‘Yes, you did! You lied to me every day by calling yourself my mother!’

  Zoe froze, then retreated back to her side of the table. She nodded a few times, and spoke quietly. ‘I’m sorry. Louise, I’m sorry we didn’t tell you. But it doesn’t change anything.’

  Lou shook her head. ‘Of course it does! This is my life. This changes everything!’

  ‘Lou …’

  She swiped away her dad’s hand and swivelled in her chair to face him. ‘Don’t! You were in on this too! You all were!’ She stood up, her chair scraping on the floor, and pushed past him towards the kitchen door. She stopped there and turned around to face them. ‘This is my life, I’m not your little project!’

  Lou expected them to stand up and run to her, to grab her and stop her from leaving, but they stared at her, stunned. Zoe’s face was deathly pale and she looked like she was going
to pass out; Lachlan didn’t move except for the rapid pulsing of a vein in his temple. Lou hesitated for a moment, giving them one more chance, then shook her head at them and ran to her room.

  She kept her door closed all day, all evening. She ignored her mother’s pleas for her to come out and eat something, and let the scrambled eggs that her mother left outside her room go cold. She felt that old familiar numbness, but now at least she knew why she felt that way. There was a part of her missing. Her aunt – no, her mother – had given her away. She had been traded, a commodity to be commissioned and relinquished. Lou had also seen, in the box, letters to and from the lawyers, showing that Nadia and Eddie had tried to fight for her, to get her back, while Zoe and Lachlan did everything they could to keep her. Who could she blame for this: Nadia, who had given her away then fought – and failed – to get her back? Or Zoe, who had been her mum since the start, but had lied to her all these years? The court order had said that Nadia and Eddie should be involved in her life, and that Lou should have spent every second weekend with them, getting to know them and Charlotte, Violet and Harry, but that had never happened. Her aunt and uncle and cousins had lived overseas, and then in Sydney, for years, sometimes coming home for Christmas, but more often not. Why had Nadia given up on her so easily, after all that?

  They were all as bad as each other: Nadia, Zoe, Eddie, Lachlan. They had all kept this from her. Had they thought about her when they sat in a lawyer’s office and wrote her life story into a contract?

  She took her school dictionary from her bookshelf and flicked through the pages. Relinquish – such an awful word. To voluntarily cease to keep, or claim. To give up. And that’s why she should have been told. Because she was the one who was given up, given up on, the one whom someone – her own mother – ceased to keep. There was someone else waiting to claim her, to keep her, someone who didn’t want to give her up, but that didn’t matter to Lou as much as the fact that her mother – her real mother – had let her go.