Where the Light Falls

by Gretchen Shirm

  27

  When his mother was at work that night, he borrowed her car without telling her. He found himself thinking she owed this to him. Sometimes he thought she would always owe him some debt she could never repay, because the life she had given him felt like a weight he had to carry rather than a blessing to be enjoyed.

  He drove across the Harbour Bridge and up the Pacific Highway to Gordon. He hadn’t given much thought to what he would do when he got there, he wasn’t sure what he would say, but he felt he was driving towards a sort of clarity; that when he reached his destination he would finally understand Kirsten, what she had done, her lingering silences and what was hidden beneath them. This was what he had come back to Sydney to learn, and he needed to find out the truth so that he could leave again.

  He parked opposite the Rothwells’ house. The light from inside, through the sheer curtain in the window, was a pearled light that illuminated but did not expose. He could see the two of them through the window, sitting at opposite ends of the table, like two children on the opposing sides of a seesaw. They must have been eating dinner, their bodies tipping forwards occasionally to take food to their mouths. What did they speak of over their evening meals? Something made him think it wasn’t their absent daughter, that the things spoken of at their dinner table were surface details; the type of things people spoke about when their thoughts were much more difficult.

  He wanted to enter that house again, to stand between walls that were a shade short of white, surrounded by photos that suggested a pleasant family life. He wanted to know what it was about those walls that made him uneasy.

  He kept thinking of Kirsten, sitting in her car at Lake George that afternoon, with no-one she could talk to but having something important to say. It was hard for him to believe that a person’s life could end that way and he somehow felt the answer to the question of why was held between the four walls of the house across the road from him now.

  Renee’s shape rose from the dining table first. Her movements were fluid, her limbs moved along lines that were as curved and smooth as a figure skater’s. She disappeared from the window and reappeared near her husband, stooping to collect his plate. For the next ten minutes, Saul Rothwell sat in that room with the lights out and Andrew could see the lights from the television wending their way over the ceiling.

  Andrew was sitting with his hands on the steering wheel, holding it with both hands, and there was a tightness in his body as though the car was still moving and he was bracing for an accident. He kept his eyes on the house, worried that if he looked away, he might miss something crucial, some vital clue. Everything seemed to hold some significance: the switching off of a light, the orientation of their bodies away from the windows, the front door closed and left in shadow.

  When he saw a light from beneath the garage as it opened, he glanced at the clock on his dashboard. It was 8.25 pm. The door rose and the light yawned out, shining onto the street, a corridor of light. The car moved slowly, easing from the driveway and turning smoothly onto the road. It was the same car he’d seen when Renee had visited him in Darlinghurst the day before. As soon as the taillights disappeared out of the street, he unclipped his seatbelt and stepped from the car. The night was cool and still.

  There was a knocker, closed and round like a fist, and he struck it twice against the door. It made a hard noise of metal against metal. There was no sound from inside the house. Perhaps they had left together in the car.

  Then Kirsten’s stepfather opened the door. He readjusted his glasses on his face and peered at Andrew as if he was trying to remember his name.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you. We met a couple of weeks ago. My name is Andrew Spruce?’ he said, trying to smile and sound as though it was natural that he was there, that he ought to have been expected.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember. You’re the old boyfriend.’ Saul looked relieved that the mystery of Andrew’s sudden appearance had been solved. He relaxed back into himself. ‘Renee’s gone out for a little while. To do some grocery shopping, I think.’ It seemed strange to Andrew that he might not know where his wife had gone at 8.30 on a Sunday night.

  They stood staring at each other and it occurred to him that Saul wasn’t used to having visitors; that he didn’t realise that the appropriate way to proceed from this point was to invite Andrew inside.

  ‘I wondered if I could ask you a few more questions about Kirsten? I’m sorry to take up more of your time.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, you can ask me about Kirsten,’ he said and he pushed his glasses up his nose. He stayed standing there, as though he was expecting Andrew to ask him where they both stood.

  ‘Should I come in?’ Andrew asked.

  Saul took a step backwards. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Though I wasn’t really expecting anyone tonight. My wife’s out.’

  Andrew couldn’t decide whether the man’s confusion was real or contrived.

  He followed Saul to the lounge room, noticing a patch of pink at the back of his head where his hair had thinned. They sat down on the couch. The television was turned off and he wondered what Saul had been doing since Renee had left.

  ‘I went to see Kirsten’s sister,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Lydia?’

  Andrew nodded.

  ‘Oh yes, Lydia. We don’t get to see her very often. She works in Canberra, you see. She went to university at ANU. She’s quite senior in the public service.’

  ‘It sounds like Lydia and Kirsten were quite close?’

  Saul nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, they were very close.’

  ‘Lydia mentioned that there might be some—’ he stopped and looked at the bookshelf, where the spines of the books were aligned so neatly they looked never to have been read ‘—some differences between you and Kirsten.’ He decided that the only way to speak to this man, a man who sought to hide behind confusion was directly.

  ‘Differences?’ His cheeks were sunken, nestling into the space under his cheekbones as he’d aged. ‘We had . . . Kirsten was . . .’

  Andrew wondered for a moment whether Kirsten’s stepfather was trying to work out how much he already knew. All he could think of was the night they had all had dinner together, the way Kirsten had jumped when Saul had said her father’s name, as though in response to a threat. He felt somehow that this response and her death must be connected in a way he could not see yet. Some invisible line drew them together.

  Saul finally finished his sentence. ‘She was seven when we married.’

  ‘Seven?’ It took him a moment to understand that he was speaking of Kirsten’s age.

  ‘Yes. She was very upset, you know. About the divorce. Her father had only been gone for a year before we met. Kirsten couldn’t move on.’

  Andrew thought of the words moving on and how they sounded more like words that would be spoken about an adult than a seven-year-old girl.

  ‘Lydia was better; she was three when her father left and couldn’t really remember him anyway.’

  ‘Her father lived in Townsville, didn’t he?’

  ‘For a time, yes. More recently he moved to Western Australia and was working in the mines over there. But we don’t hear very much from him. He couldn’t make it to Kirsten’s funeral service.’ Saul nodded sagely. If he had any opinion about this, he didn’t disclose it. He looked at Andrew as though trying to determine whether he had said enough to satisfy Andrew’s curiosity.

  When Andrew didn’t speak, he sighed. ‘She always hoped Renee and her father would get back together. Even after Renee and I married. I mean, it didn’t matter how often we told her he wasn’t coming back.’ He sat up straighter, as though possessed of a new idea. ‘Would you like to see her bedroom? Some of her things are there. She kept them there for when she stayed here.’

  ‘Sure,’ Andrew said. He felt tired. All he wanted was to have his question answered and to leave again, but this man was speaking in circles.

  They walked down the hall and Andrew felt his resolve crumble. Perhaps he was seekin
g to discover something that could never really be understood. When he opened the door, there was nothing about the room from which he could have identified the woman he once loved. It looked like a spare room, in which a bed had been set up for visitors.

  ‘Oh,’ Saul said softly. ‘I keep forgetting that Renee took Kirsten’s stuff to the charity bin last week. Sometimes I sit here, on the bed.’ He moved to the bed and sat down on it, slumped. It looked like a position he had often assumed.

  He imagined Renee moving through the room in a fury, picking up Kirsten’s belongings, tearing things from the walls, disposing of everything that had once belonged to her daughter, losing control for a moment and then regaining her composure and walking back out into the hall.

  ‘Did something happen to Kirsten? When she was young?’ he asked. It was strange hearing those words aloud. It was something he had often wondered.

  The question lingered between them.

  ‘Kirsten and I, we didn’t see eye to eye. It happens, sometimes. I wasn’t her father,’ he said.

  Looking at Saul sitting there on the bed, Andrew thought he didn’t even look like a man; he looked more like a boy.

  Saul shifted. Something in him was stirring. ‘After Renee and I married, I told Kirsten not to talk about him anymore.’ He pressed his knuckles against each other and the grooves didn’t quite align. ‘I thought it would be easier for her mother if Kirsten didn’t speak about her father.’ Those silences of Kirsten’s, so long and deep she often seemed lost in them. ‘Don’t tell Renee, though, will you? She doesn’t know about that.’ He looked up fearfully, as though telling the truth might be something that brought this clean and quiet life around him to an end.

  •

  Andrew showed himself out. As he walked across the Rothwells’ lawn, he was thinking about silence. How it made a person skirt around what they couldn’t speak of like the rim of a deep pit. The way it limited a person.

  He knew now that this was what he had really seen in Kirsten that day they first met: this common trait between them. That in their own ways they were both struggling against this instinct they had not to express their feelings.

  He didn’t notice Renee’s car parked on the street as he walked past. He had taken the keys from his pocket when he heard his name called out from behind him. He spun around and his heart gave a few hard knocks. Renee was standing at the edge of a beam of streetlight like a person trying to avoid exposure.

  ‘I saw you sitting in your car when I drove out earlier,’ she said, and he wondered how long she had been sitting there, waiting for him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but he didn’t want to lie and he didn’t want to hurt her with the truth.

  ‘Did you speak to my husband?’

  Andrew nodded.

  Renee folded her arms around her waist. She was standing on the high edge of the gutter and her car was between them.

  ‘Thank you for the photos of Kirsten,’ he said.

  ‘Did you come about those?’

  He shook his head. What he thought now was maybe it was easier to understand someone else’s life than it was to understand your own and maybe that was why he had come all the way back to Australia. He needed to decide what sort of a person he was. Was he a good photographer but a failure as a human being? He wasn’t sure it was possible to be good at both things.

  He looked at Renee and wondered whether she had ever felt this, if she was someone who had ever really tried to understand herself. Or whether she was as she appeared to be: someone who lived her life skating across the surface of the world as though it were a lake of ice.

  ‘I still can’t understand it,’ she said and her voice assumed a new tone, one that was natural, honest, that he hadn’t heard her use before. She must not use this voice very often in the life she led here. ‘I know Kirsten always had her problems, but I always thought these sorts of things didn’t happen to people like us. She never wanted for anything, you know.’ She gestured to the house behind her, as though the only thing a person needed in life were these physical comforts. ‘Not since I remarried, at least.’

  And then she did something he was not expecting. She sat down on the grass as though the weight of her words had dragged her there. He moved around her car and sat down beside her. Through his jeans, the lawn was damp and wetness seeped through to his skin. She sat with her legs stretched out in front of her, her hands behind her, her feet loose, the way a defiant teenager might sit.

  ‘My first marriage was hard,’ she said. ‘I really loved Kirsten’s father. I mean, Saul—’ she waved her hand behind her ‘—it was different with Saul. Our marriage was more . . .’ She paused and sighed heavily. ‘I made a good marriage.’ He knew what she meant. She meant in a material rather than an emotional way. Saul had supported her, and was she wrong to have wanted that?

  They were silent for a moment and he knew the less he said the better, that the natural inclination of most people was to try to explain themselves.

  ‘The separation from my first husband affected me as much as it affected Kirsten. I was devastated by it, actually. I had to completely cut off contact with him in order to recover from it. Kirsten suffered from that, and I found I was better than Kirsten was at living behind a veneer.’

  A car drove past slowly and its headlights came on.

  ‘Do you have another girlfriend now?’ she asked, looking at him.

  He was surprised to hear her ask. In their previous conversations, she had shown no curiosity about his life. He looked at her, but couldn’t see her face—the streetlight was too far away from them—and he almost preferred it that way, the two of them sitting there, unable to look upon each other, like two people sitting inside a confession booth.

  ‘I love someone,’ he said. ‘But I’ve treated her unfairly. I don’t know why I keep hurting the people I love.’

  She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think it’s easier if you don’t love the person you marry. Sometimes I think the more detached you are the better.’ It was obvious that she was speaking of herself. ‘The day they told me they’d called off the search for her body, I knew my life was over.’ Her voice turned low and knowing. It was the voice of a person whose mind is made up and seeks no input from anyone else. ‘When there’s no more love in your life, it might as well be over.’ She looked up. ‘My other daughter and I, we don’t speak very often anymore. She’s much more savvy than Kirsten and better at looking after herself. She left home and never really came back. Saul might as well not speak to me. Kirsten was really all I had. She suffered a lot. In the past few years she was always angry at me and I hardly saw her in the end, but she did let me love her and that was all I could ask of her.’

  He looked across at her and saw her eyes glistening like two dark pools. ‘Her father drank, you know. He worried a lot. I see now that Kirsten had that same problem too. I guess I thought she had to learn to be less sensitive. And I thought I was the one who had to teach her that lesson. I was too hard on her. On both my daughters. Sometimes you don’t realise what you’re doing until after it’s done.’

  ‘What do you think happened to Kirsten that day?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Somehow, I feel this would all be much easier to understand if they’d just recovered her body. I still wonder some days whether she’ll walk back through the door.’

  ‘Do you think it was deliberate? What she did?’

  She shook her head, but not strongly enough to indicate disagreement. She exhaled a long draught of air. She said nothing and he felt the sadness of the large-limbed woman sitting beside him. To most people’s sadness there is a sort of disbelief. Most people’s sadness is a thing they try to fight; they think if they struggle with it enough they will eventually overcome it. But Renee’s sadness was something different. It was a state that was permanent, that had set in like rot. She pressed her face into her hands. The street was quiet and all he could hear were the sounds of Renee beside him as she sucked back her tears.

  ‘Yo
u know, I used to believe in God,’ she said, looking upwards to where the moon was peeking out through a crescent gap in a sheet of deep blue. ‘And in heaven and all those hopeful beliefs. But now what I think is that when I die, I would forgo a death and an afterlife if I could go back to the start of this life, armed with what I know now. I would relive it and I would execute it perfectly. I’d be aware of every second. I wouldn’t need an afterlife. I think I could just about get my life right the second time around.’

  When she’d finished speaking, she stood up in stages, pushing herself up from the grass with her hands. There was something desperate about the way she heaved herself from the lawn, lifting herself away from her strange, discordant and impossible words.

  •

  He drove back over the bridge and the harbour expanded out below him with a blackness that didn’t seem to move. He knew, now, about Kirsten. Was it his fault? It was true he had hurt her, but clearly her problems had started well before they met.

  This uneasy attraction he felt towards Kirsten, the way he had been drawn to her, he understood where it came from now. He had mistaken the deep sense of empathy he felt towards her for love. As children they had both been made to keep silences and they took their silences with them as adults. The only difference between them was he had found a way to speak.

  It was much more than a self-indulgence, this strange thing he’d chosen to do with his life; photography had kept him alive. His need to take photographs was an expression of his deep need to be heard.

  28

  The night before he left for London, he invited his mother over to his apartment. They hadn’t spoken properly in the past two weeks. He wondered if he’d been too hard on her and he didn’t want to leave Sydney while there was still this rift between them.

  He was cooking a Spanish omelette; it was Dom’s recipe. The trick to making a Spanish omelette, she had told him, was in the seasoning. He reached behind him for the salt and pepper grinders. He poured the eggs into the pan in long glistening strands.