by Anni Taylor
My fingers closed tight on the boat’s railing. God, were they all there? Luke, Pria, and Jessie? The island seemed hostile and vulnerable to the elements at the same time.
What had Pria called it? Ab ovo. Her new beginning with my husband.
Detective Gilroy spotted the yacht next, through his binoculars. He told us he’d seen it, then he said something I couldn’t catch to Annabelle, glancing back at me with a tense expression.
As we drew closer I saw what he did.
The yacht listed on its side, water spilling in and out with the rock of the waves. One sail flapped uselessly.
The wind caught my cry, snatching it away.
My lungs felt raw as the police roped the yacht in.
Had Jessie been on there? Luke?
Luke was a question mark in my mind. I didn’t know him anymore or whether I should care. What had he done? What had he known? What was he responsible for?
Police Rescue jumped on board, clad in wetsuits. They searched inside the cabin. And came out shaking their heads. No one on board, came the shout.
All of us scanned the sea on the way into shore.
Looking for survivors.
Or bodies.
We sailed onto the beach in two inflatable dinghies.
Immediately as I stepped onto the island, it seemed hers. Pria’s. The island she’d drawn and dreamed about. Her Ab ovo.
There were footprints up and down the beach, vertically.
They’d made it. Either something had made them leave again, or the weather had destroyed the yacht and blown it away.
Bernice walked onto the beach. She tilted her head back, her eyes sweeping the scene before us. She made a low whistle. “Pria’s island, hey? Who would have thought?”
Faint trails of smoke rose from between the thick, gnarled trees up on the ridge.
“You two stay here on the beach.” Trent had a hand inside his jacket, on his gun holster. He glanced behind him at Annabelle.
She nodded at him.
The police rushed away.
Were they all up there, in that house? They would have seen us land on the beach.
I wanted something to do. Someone or something to look for. But this was the end of the line—that invisible thread I’d sensed that connected it all—and there was nothing for me to look for anymore. There was nothing to do but wait.
Bernice and I jumped from foot to foot, trying to keep our faces from the path of the biting wind. At least the sand wasn’t blowing about and whipping us. It was damp and coarse and crunchy underfoot.
A basketball blew along the sand.
Jessie loved playing netball. I retrieved the ball. Her initials, JS, were written on the ball in black marker. Jessie-sized footprints were here everywhere.
Bernice crouched down to the sand. “It looks like they’ve got a little person with them.” She swivelled her head back, squinting at me. “Tiny footprints.”
I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t. I’d built a castle wall against thinking about that possibility. Armed the turrets. Dug a moat.
“You’re not going to look?” she said. “I’m not saying it’s—”
High above at the house, something was happening. Police were moving back. Giving room.
Detectives Gilroy and Yarris brought a woman out from the house. Pria. Her body rigid but calm.
Jessie’s ball dropped from my hands. Without a word, without realising what I was doing, I was sprinting. Across the sand. I was on the stairs and charging all the way to the top.
The police didn’t try to stop me. There was no danger here. Pria wasn’t a woman with a knife or a gun. But she was dangerous. And I needed to know exactly what she’d done.
Avoiding my eyes, she stared past me, out to the sea. Her thick hair damp and back in a headband. Dressed in ordinary clothes, like the mothers you saw walking to pick up their children from the local schools. You wouldn’t pick her out in a crowd or a video as a danger to anyone. Her clothing was also damp.
“Why?” I’d found my voice. The intensity of it fearful. I was capable of murder in this instant. “Why?”
Her eyes didn’t shift to me, but her mouth turned down. “Someone had to rescue him.” Her voice grey, ashes. So unlike the Pria that I knew.
“You stole him away from me. It was you that day at the playground.”
“I saved Tommy from you. You didn’t appreciate him—or Luke—the way you should have. You had everything. But it wasn’t enough for you.”
I recoiled, knowing what Pria had done but still shocked at my first glimpse of the scorched earth inside her head. The real Pria, the person she’d hidden so well.
“How could you do it, Pria? We were friends.” My voice grew gravelly, stones lodging in my throat. “What did you do with him? Where’d you put him? Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“Where’s he gone?”
She pointed out to sea.
I twisted around at the thrashing waves then turned to face her again. “He’s not out there. You tell me what you did with him.”
“Luke took him. He took Tommy, and he went. I saved both of them, but he didn’t care. He left me here.”
Trent Gilroy nodded at me, his strange expression making me terrified. “Phoebe, we found nappies and little-boy clothing inside the house. And this.” He produced a plastic object from inside his jacket.
A toy yacht.
Tommy’s.
I cried out, my fingers trembling as I reached for it.
Pria watched me take the toy. “If you were trying to find Tommy, you should have come sooner. Luke took him and my daughter on that yacht. He should have known not to sail in that weather. Now I’ve lost all of them. Do you understand? I’ve lost my whole family.”
Inside my chest, my heart jolted.
My castle walls came crumbling, smashing down. “Tommy?”
“We brought him here on the yacht,” she told me in a matter-of-fact voice. “We fed him and bathed him and sat around the fire, like a real family.”
Detective Yarris grabbed Pria’s arm. “Tell us exactly what happened. Where’s Luke and the children?”
Pria’s eyes grew anguished and then dulled again just as fast. “It’s too late. The yacht tipped, and I saw them fall out. They were way, way out. Is it my fault? Would anyone blame me? I don’t know. I couldn’t stop him from leaving. I tried to give them a better life here, but Luke didn’t want that. Even Jessie turned against me.”
“How long ago?” I screamed at her. “How long?”
For the first time, she looked directly at me. “About an hour before you came.”
“Did they have life jackets on?” Annabelle asked desperately.
Pria hesitated, then shook her head.
“Everyone move out!” Trent bellowed.
One of the officers took hold of Pria, putting her in handcuffs. Annabelle spoke on the phone, calling for more boats.
For a moment, I was alone in my terror. Not knowing which way to head.
My jaw shook as I turned to face the ocean.
Bernice stood behind me.
“They were in the yacht, Bernice.” I didn’t recognise my own voice.
Bernice spun around, watching two of the police head for the boat. The others were organising themselves, shouting, running in opposite directions along the sand. I didn’t know which way to head.
“Wait,” Bernice said. “I don’t know everything about yachts, but I did it as a job for a while. Seems the current’s pushing left. Look, maybe they grabbed hold of something from the yacht and they’ve stayed afloat. We can try cutting straight across the island. Pointless following the police anyway.”
I knew from the look in her eyes that she didn’t believe that. They’d fallen out. They had no time to grab anything. For me to almost have Tommy and then lose him again in the same instant made me want to run to the topmost part of the island and throw myself from it. But I nodded. I needed to see this to the end. “Let’s go.”
She eyed Bernice coolly. “I haven’t had time to explore. I’ve been busy making food and settling in. We had everything set up. Everything we could possibly need. Why are you even here?”
“Because Tommy could use another friend. Rather than an enemy like you.” Bernice walked on past her.
I followed, stepping up alongside her.
“Please,” Pria said, making us stop and look back. “I don’t want to see Jessie. You tell the police. I don’t want to see my daughter . . . dead.”
I didn’t answer. I had no sympathy. Not an ounce. If Jessie had drowned out there, my sympathy lay entirely with Jessie.
Bare rocks punctuated the hilly landscape, no trees daring to exist on the uppermost points of the island. Gasping and driven back by the wind, we climbed the slopes. Once we reached the tree line, we were protected from the storm, but the trees were dense, the ground soft and muddy in places. Rabbits scattered ahead of us through the scrub.
“Here!” I yelled. I glimpsed the ocean through the straggly bunches of native palm trees. The island had to be far longer than it was wide, as it had taken us only twenty minutes to get across.
We walked out onto an outcrop. The curve of the beach entirely composed of smooth, rounded rocks. A small cove. Hundreds of geese occupied the left end of the shore—all a pale brown with small beaks.
The waves in the cove were far calmer than they’d been on the other side of the island.
There was nothing in the water. No sign of bodies. They were either far out at sea or under the water. The nightmare drowning deaths I used to dream of Tommy were haunting me now, reaching up into my throat and taking my breath from me.
“They’re not there.” My head went faint.
“Phoebe. Don’t stop. We keep going, okay?”
“They’re not there,” I repeated. “Do you see?”
“Just keep moving,” she ordered. “We’re here now.” She sounded just like her mother, ordering Nan to go and see a doctor.
Her words brought me back.
I sprinted ahead of her, trying to shake off the nightmares. Those images had been tightly wrapped around me like a shawl, for months and months.
When I first saw the smoke, I thought it was mist.
But mist didn’t curl upwards in a column.
I cut across the forest to the right, trying to get in a straight line with the smoke. Small rocky hills pushed into the trees here, making me climb again.
Bernice followed silently. She didn’t have to push me on anymore.
I stood at the edge now, the beach below littered with dead palm fronds. I made my way down between the boulders, jumping the last few feet onto the sand.
The smoke ribboned upward from a small cave. Barely a cave at all. Shallow, but deep enough to keep a couple of wooden crates and old fishing rods and gear dry. There was no fire either. Just smoke in a pile of mostly damp palm fronds.
I imagined Pria smiling to herself right now.
She’d lied again. She had been to the other side of the island. And she’d done this.
Did she guess we were coming and she wanted to play one last trick?
When I turned around, they were between me and the ocean.
Two children.
A girl with a small child on her hip, both of them bedraggled in wet underwear.
It was Jessie. And a boy with bleached-white hair and six months of growth I hadn’t witnessed.
Tommy.
Tommy, alive and staring at me curiously.
A sobbing cry tore from deep inside me.
“Phoebe?” Jessie ran halfway to me, then she stopped still, nervous and uncertain as she held Tommy out to me.
I rushed to them, encircling both of them in my arms. Tommy’s little face pressed against mine. I cried openly. I didn’t want to scare him, but I couldn’t stop myself. They were here, and I didn’t understand why, but they were here. I kissed him, kissed Jessie, kissed Tommy again.
Tommy held out his arms to me. He was shivering. As was Jessie. Stripping my overcoat off, I pulled it around Jessie’s shoulders. I shrugged off the jacket I wore underneath that, bundling Tommy in it and taking him from Jessie.
“How did you get here?” whispered Jessie, wrapping the oversize coat tightly around her.
“I finally found out what I should have known all along.” I kissed her forehead, rubbing her arm. “Let’s get you two out of the wind.”
We headed into the cave, the weight of Tommy’s body in my arms seeming strange as much as it was a remembered thing. He was bigger, his features slightly changed and matured. He’d lost the baby look, his legs losing their dimply knees. He was wearing a saturated disposable nappy. I removed it from him.
“I couldn’t get the fire started.” Jessie pointed at the crates. “There’s matches and firestarters in there, but they’re crumbly. I’m sorry. I had to take our clothes off. We got wet.”
“Don’t you be sorry.” My voice shook. “Don’t you ever be sorry.”
“I had to go to the toilet, and I took Tommy with me. I couldn’t leave him.” She looked behind her fearfully. “Mum is—”
“I know,” I told her. “Don’t worry. The police are on the island. They’re with your mum now.”
I heard her panting quietly in relief then, and it broke my heart.
The fire was never going to start. Everything was too damp. It was a wonder she’d even got a spark out of the pile she’d made.
Tommy twisted his head to stare up at me, a hint of doubt in his brown eyes. Pria had had him for the last six months. I needed to give him time to know me again. And this time, I’d be different.
“Where’s Luke,” I asked Jessie in a gentle tone. “What happened?”
She drew her knees up to her chest, her eyes grown distant. “He took Tommy and me onto the yacht. To call for help on the radio. And . . . to get away from my mother. She tried to stop us, but Luke pushed her, and she fell. What we didn’t know is that she’d already wrecked everything when we first got to the island. She never wanted us to leave. She’d even ripped the lifejackets on the dinghy. But Mr Basko said it was just a short trip to the yacht, and so he took us. When we got onto the yacht, we found out the rest of what Mum did.”
I hugged her, brushing wet hair back from her face.
“She smashed the radio,” Jessie told me. “And untied and cut the sails. The storm got a lot worse. Mr Basko said we had to go back to shore. It wasn’t safe. There was an extra set of lifejackets in the yacht and he put them on us. He was about to put Tommy and me back on the dinghy. I was holding Tommy while he got it ready. Then the sail swung around and hit us. We all fell into the water.”
“No . . .” I breathed. The visual was too much to bear. Pria hadn’t been lying about seeing them all fall out of the yacht.
Jessie chewed her lip, her expression tense and afraid. “It was freezing. Mr Basko must have got knocked out by the sail, because he just floated away. I didn’t see him again. The waves were scary. I pushed Tommy to the dinghy. I couldn’t get him in. So I held him up as far as I could and shouted at him to crawl in. He did it. Then I climbed in. The yacht was filling with water, and I was worried that if it went down, it’d pull us down too. I found a knife on the dinghy, and I cut the rope. I tried to paddle the boat in, but I wasn’t strong enough to lift the paddles. The ocean took us to the other side of the island. The waves dumped the dinghy onto the rocks. I jumped out with Tommy. The boat took off again. I got our life jackets off and brought Tommy up here. I wanted to take him back to the house, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Because Mum—” Her eyes shone wetly. “So I looked for somewhere to hide.”
“You were brave, Jessie,” I told her. “So very brave. What you did—”
I could barely comprehend it. I was holding Tommy in my arms, flesh-and-blood Tommy, not a dream Tommy. I’d almost lost him for a second time, on
ly I hadn’t known it. While we’d been sailing to the island, Jessie and Tommy had been fighting for their lives.
What had happened to Luke? If he was unconscious and out in an ocean in a wild storm, he couldn’t survive it. I prayed he’d woken, that the police rescue boat would find him quickly. For Tommy. I didn’t know yet if it was for me, too. My feelings towards Luke were numb, broken. And I hated him for bringing the children here.
I looked over my shoulder at the crunch of footsteps on the rocks and palm fronds.
Bernice wiped her wet eyes. I’d never seen her cry. But then, I’d shut her out of my life all these years. I hadn’t seen it because I hadn’t been there to see it.
Distant shouts carried on the wind.
The police were almost here.
53.
PHOEBE
Thursday
PRIA STOOD ON THE BEACH, her clothing still damp, the wind whipping her hair every which way.
Two officers stood by her, waiting for the police boat that was coming to collect her. She didn’t move an inch, as if she’d become a fixture of the island itself. I guessed the island had formed part of her over the past few months, when she’d been dreaming up her plan to take Tommy and Luke away from me, and then all the months after that when she was setting her traps. In her mind the island represented a new life, her end game.
I pulled the blanket that the police had given me around myself, heading across a sandy beach that had been scuffed by many feet. Tommy’s tiny feet had touched this sand, too.
Everyone else was already on the boat that would take us back to the mainland. Luke was on there, too. They’d found him far, far out, his face blue. In his life jacket—thank God for the life jacket—fully conscious but exhausted by the intense cold and his failed attempts to swim back and find Tommy and Jessie in the water. He hadn’t known they’d made it out. The rescuers had dried and wrapped him in a thermal blanket after they first found him. He’d been suffering cold exposure, but he’d recovered well. Luke had always been what my mother called an iceberg—in winter heading down for swims in the outdoor Olympic pool near Luna Park.