In the meantime, the two girls from earlier had dragged Byron away to a dark corner so that they could fawn all over him again. This time, he let them play with his hair and clutch at his arms, but he didn’t seem as focused on them as they were on him. He stared into space, somewhere above the entrance of the pub, as if he wished he were someplace else.
Part of me was glad he was ignoring them, and another part was jealous that those girls had dared to get close to Byron when I had chickened out. I should have said yes when he’d offered to walk me home. But the largest part of me felt a cold trickle of unease running down my back.
I’d seen Byron’s despondent look before…on my own mother. It was the face she wore when she thought nobody was looking.
The hairs on my arms stood on end. I had to leave.
I didn’t even bother saying goodbye to Martin. I just wanted to be out of there. I needed to shake the unsettling vibe clinging to the back of my neck.
The warm breeze that hit me as soon as I stepped out was far from refreshing, but still, it was better than the stale air inside. While I walked, Byron dominated my thoughts. Was he going home with those hot-spot girls? Who was he anyway? How old? And where was he from? Why on earth had he chosen to come to Donny Vale and how long was he truly planning on staying? And more importantly, what was he thinking about, just now, that had made him look so sad?
As I turned onto my street, the strums of an acoustic guitar grew louder. For a second I envisioned Byron at my window serenading me, but, one, it was impossible as he was still at the pub; two, he played electric guitar; and three, why on earth would he serenade me? Just because the guy spoke to me for a few minutes didn’t mean he was in love with me.
My fantasies were getting right out of hand.
Get a hold of yourself, Ruby.
It was Derek. Mum’s Derek. He was just strumming though, not singing. I used to love hearing his voice, as imperfect as it was, before I found out that he was Mum’s secret lover. He was probably my first real crush. Funny that. Mum and I’d had similar tastes.
Sometimes, late at night, with the window open to cool my stifling hot room, I could hear him sobbing, a low, tortured animal sound. It was awful to listen to a grown man break like that. And it always made me feel like some sort of heartless monster—a heartless, tearless monster—because I hadn’t yet let go like that. He must have truly loved Mum.
The street was dark. Ours was a small, dead end road with only eight, old federation style houses on it. What light we had was the glow from the neighbouring road’s streetlights. However, a half-moon was up and gave a somewhat silvery edge to the blackness.
As Derek’s dry lawn crunched beneath my feet, I could see his hunched form through the Terylene hanging over his living room window. Pain, the kind that Mum had sprinkled liberally in her wake, was something I wouldn’t wish upon anybody, not even Derek. The past months had numbed my anger towards him.
Everyone in Donny Vale knew Mum and Derek were having an affair before she went crazy, everyone except Dad, and they liked to think that he was the home wrecker. It gave them somebody to blame instead of ‘poor, beautiful Portia.’ And though I blamed him too, I blamed Mum more. She was married with kids. She had a responsibility. Derek was the single guy with no strings attached.
The music stopped and a few seconds later, the veranda light came on. Hanging my head, I quickened my pace. But when the screen door creaked open I knew it was too late.
“Ruby…”
The sound of his voice, so raw and gravelly, stopped me in my tracks.
He waved at me from his front veranda, his lit cigarette making Zorro signs in the night.
“Hi,” I mumbled, and paused to catch my breath for a second, taking note that, under the yellow citronella light, Derek looked terribly thin, his eyes were hollowed out and he had what had to be sixty-day growth, and his hair stuck out in all directions.
“Look. I know you don’t want anything to do with me anymore. But…” He sighed and took slow steps towards me, the grass noisy beneath his feet. That was when I saw that he carried an old round biscuit tin in his heavily veined hands.
“Here…” He offered it to me. In the moonlight I could see the sprinklings of rust along the rim of the tin.
I frowned and stared at it, my heart beating wildly, as if I half expected Mum’s heart to be in there.
“These are your mother’s letters and poems she wrote…while I was away at the mines.”
When I looked at the box again, I didn’t see a tin containing love letters, I saw only Dad’s glazed, out-of-it eyes, and Jay’s cherubic face twisted up during one of his many nightmares. A sudden rage swept through me.
“Keep them. I don’t want to know.”
I kept walking, but when I reached our mail box, Derek ran ahead and blocked my way.
“Portia was a human being, not just a mother and a wife. She wasn’t well, Ruby. Something happened to her after she had Jay and she turned to me because I was her closest friend.”
I stared at the box and before I could control myself, knocked it out of Derek’s shaking hands, spilling my mother’s illicit words across the lawn.
“Don’t you blame Jay,” I said, my voice a strangled whisper. “He’s just a little baby.” I wanted to tell him that I’d lost Mum years ago, that one day, when I was little, she came home without her smile, and how I’d tried for years to find that smile, to bring it back, but I’d failed.
Derek fell to his knees and scrambled across the lawn, doing his best to salvage the love letters from the midnight breeze. I could hear his heaving breaths between ragged sobs and they twisted at my heart like a jagged knife.
“Ruby, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Derek gazed up at me with huge, wet eyes, and once again offered me the tin. For the first time I noticed that he was going bald at his temples. “Please take them.”
I wanted to explain why I couldn’t take the letters and I wanted to tell him I was sorry for hating him, but instead I bolted across the lawn and inside the house.
Later on, however, after I’d seen to Jay’s night frights and checked on my snoring dad and thanked Mrs. Simich profusely for coming over, I ran back outside to check if Derek was still there. He wasn’t, of course.
I thought perhaps he’d leave the tin in the mailbox. But he hadn’t.
The lid of the mailbox shut with a squeaky bang that echoed down the quiet street.
Derek’s house was now as dark and as hollow as my insides felt. I should have taken those letters. Of course I wanted to know, or to at least try to understand the other, alien side of my mother, the woman who could leave her husband and children behind without a single thought for how they would fare without her.
A warm breeze tickled the hairs on my arms and I rubbed at them, thinking about how tired I was. The beach, finding Dad drunk in his beige underwear, Byron’s gig—the day’s events had finally caught up with me.
Yawning, I threw myself down onto the dead yellow lawn and rolled onto my back so that I could gaze up at the ocean of stars above me.
The breeze grew stronger and blew my hair across my face. At the same time I heard a faint scraping sound travel down the road.
I rolled over and rested my weight on my elbows, the grass cutting into my skin.
The wind was tossing a scrap of paper about, beating it against the road again and again.
Mum…
I leapt to my feet and chased the scrap as it scuttled down the road.
Finally, after it snagged against a bush in Mrs. Simich’s front yard, I plucked the piece of paper free with trembling fingers. The half-moon spilled silvery light across the letter and as I traced each curve of Mum’s swirly writing with my fingertips my pulse whooshed loudly in my ears.
Perhaps I was meant to find out who Mum was after all.
Chapter 7
Dearest Derek,
God, I miss you. It’s been hard. I walk out the front door to check the mailbox and the
n, forgetting that you’re gone, go over to your house, knock on the door, and wait.
Jeremy has been painful. The more he tries to be nice and do things for me the more smothered I feel—and guilty. The guilt is the worst. If you could see the eyes Ruby makes at me. She’s judging me. She’s only sixteen and there she is, judging me with Jeremy’s eyes. I try to remember, years ago, the way her little face used to light up whenever she saw me, but I can’t. It feels like she has never loved me like she loves Jeremy. And as for baby Jay, well, he just screams at me, screams like I’m a stranger who’s just walked up and snatched him. It’s so embarrassing at the shops.
And there it is—my daily grind.
Please come back to me, Dez. I’m dying of loneliness here. I listen to your demo CD every night because your voice makes it bearable.
Portia—just Portia xo
The letter slipped from my grasp and gently weaved its way down to the floor like a feather. I made no move to pick it up. My chest felt tight and compact, as if all the air had been sucked out.
So there it was. I had burdened Mum with my disapproval, Dad had smothered her with his love, and Jay had stirred feelings of failure inside of her.
A low, guttural sigh escaped my lips as I wrapped my arms across my chest.
Mum blamed us. My theories had been spot-on.
Emotion surged through me, making my body tremble, but instead of ripping the letter into satisfying little shreds, I surprised myself by scooping it up from the ground and tucking it beneath my pillow before collapsing into a heap against my mattress. Maybe I’d need to read it again in the morning, in case I thought this all a dream.
I stared up at the ceiling, at the hieroglyphics I’d drawn myself and the huge fold-out poster of the Egyptian pyramids I’d torn out of a travel mag and stuck up there three months ago when I first entered my Egyptian phase, back when I believed I’d one day travel. Back when I had dreams. Back when I was a reasonably normal teenager without an alcoholic father and a dependent little brother who needed me like nobody had needed me before.
A shaky sigh escaped my lips. I rubbed at my burning eyes. A new bedroom theme was needed. Something different that would help me to forget the past few months, like…the Greek Islands or even the Croatian Islands—the island of Korcula, where Mrs. Simich’s family came from—even though I knew I’d probably never get there.
My bed squeaked as I rolled onto my side. My body felt so heavy, as if I was made of granite. If only I could just sink through the mattress, through the wooden floorboards and the earth, all the way to China.
Maybe I should have been happier around Mum and ignored the time she’d started to spend over at Derek’s. Maybe I should have helped more with Jay, rocked him at night when he woke up screaming so that Mum didn’t have to get so sick of his crying. I should have told Dad to back off and stop being so smothery—because I’d noticed, I knew, and yet I did nothing. In fact, it was me who encouraged him to buy her more flowers, to cook more dinners, to woo her back.
Gathering my pillow between my hands, I stuffed my face into it, wondering if I was finally ready to bawl over my mother’s death.
But I didn’t get to find out, because something or someone tapped against my window.
With my breath held, I listened.
There it was again.
And then I remembered. My phone. Martin hadn’t given it back.
The window was already a third of the way open.
“That’s not the secret knock,” I whispered harshly through the gap, not sure if I wanted company right now.
Silence met my ears and I gasped. It wasn’t Martin. Martin would have responded to my movie line with another.
“I have your phone, Ruby.”
That voice. My heart rate immediately kicked into high-gear.
Byron…
He was here, at my window, just like in my late night fantasies. Quickly, I charged around my room—like some kind of speed-cleaning freak—shoving my dirty laundry basket into my wardrobe and spraying deodorant about like air-freshener. Then, after a brief glance in the mirror, I returned to the window.
I drew the heavy curtains back and hitched the window right up and found myself face-to-face with Byron, the soft light giving his face and hair a silver lining. He was so beautiful it almost hurt to look.
“Here.” He fished my phone out of the back pocket of his dark jeans and lightly threw the slick, shiny object at me. I managed to catch it against my chest. It made an embarrassing clunk sound.
“How did you end up with it?”
“Long story short, your Martin was going to run out and chase after you with it. His girlfriend got upset, so I offered.” He grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, I needed an excuse to get away from those scary women.”
Though I didn’t like the way he’d referred to Martin as ‘your Martin,’ my little heart leapt. Byron had chosen to deliver me my phone over those girls.
“How did you find out where I live? Did you follow me?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault you move so fast. I would have given it to you back at the pub.” He shrugged again and plucked a glossy dark leaf from the rosebush that grew beneath my window. “I followed you, hoping to catch up before you got home.
“But by the time I turned into your street, you were talking pretty heavily to that guy next door and so I hid behind a tree.” He met my eyes and dipped his head. “That sounds creepier than it was. Sorry. I didn’t want to interrupt you and then you ran inside before I got the chance to give you your phone.” He screwed the leaf up and rubbed it between his palms. “By the time I mustered up the courage to knock on your window, you came bursting out of the house and lay on the lawn or dirt, or whatever, and, again, I didn’t want to interrupt because you looked pretty upset.”
Heat prickled my cheeks. I didn’t like that he’d seen all of that. The pants-less feeling I’d experienced in the bookstore two weeks ago returned.
Byron held my gaze, but it wasn’t intrusive, it was unspoken understanding, as though he knew how I felt, as though he too had felt this broken before. Then I remembered the scars and the way he seemed to be in pain up on stage and that despondent look before I left. I knew nothing about him other than that he could sing and play the guitar, and that he was named after a poet, but I so desperately wanted to know more.
“Okay, so…” He rubbed the back of his neck before saying, breathlessly, “Goodnight, Ruby,” then drew away from the window, tearing another leaf from my rose bush as he went.
Anxiously, I chewed on my bottom lip and watched him disappear into the night. What if this was it? What if he left town tomorrow and we never shared words again? I would never know the truth behind the unspoken understanding in those beautiful eyes of his. Byron might just be the single most exciting thing to happen to me in the space of the next twenty years or so of looking after Jay and Dad. Maybe, when I was middle aged and wrinkled and nobody wanted or needed me, I’d sit in my backyard on a loveseat out in the afternoon sun, and fondly remember the night I’d let a hot, mysterious stranger into my room.
“Byron,” I whispered, but loud enough for him to hear.
He stopped walking, bowed his head, and then turned around.
“Yeah?”
I beckoned him back to my window with a wave of my hand.
“Do you want to come in?” I asked in a shaky voice when he reached the sill.
He leaned forward, over the rosebush, gripping the sill with his hands, his forearm muscles flexing.
“You mean for coffee?” He raised his eyebrows in a suggestive manner.
Lucky for the darkness because I was blushing like crazy.
“More like tea,” I replied in a haughty voice, trying to hide my smile, “with no sugar.”
I held the curtains back while he climbed in, bringing with him the pub’s beery smell mingled with that irresistible woody and earthy scent of the male species.
We stood in silence for a minute, me liste
ning out for Jay’s cries, Byron steadying his breath. Standing this close, my face was level with his neck and that scar of his. I had a weird urge to touch it, but of course I didn’t. I didn’t have the confidence of those girls from the pub.
“We have to be quiet. Jay’s back in his own bed but if he wakes up he’ll want to come in here again.”
Look away from the scar. I turned away from him and faced my embarrassing Egyptian themed room.
“How old is your little brother?”
I spun back around.
“How did you know he was my brother and not some hot boyfriend?”
Byron shrugged. I thought I could see colour flood his cheeks but he turned around and moved to my dressing table before I could be certain.
“Did you look through my photos on my phone? Now that is creepy!”
“No way!” he called over his shoulder. “Martin told me.” Byron was staring intently at a picture of Martin and me that I’d stuck up on my mirror.
“So is Martin an ex-boyfriend or something?’
“He’s my friend. Why?”
“I don’t think he liked the idea of me coming here.” Byron rubbed his face and stretched out his arms, his t-shirt pulling across his chest in a complimentary fashion. After a long yawn, that made him wince for a split second, his eyes rested on my bed.
“Do you mind if I just lay down for a bit? The hotel mattress is pretty rough.”
Before I could even protest he was sprawled out on his back, his long, lean body spreadeagled and taking up most of my bed. It took me a while to find my voice. Apart from Martin, who didn’t count, I’d never had a boy other than Jay in my room. And right now he was all over my bed.
“I like your room.” He scanned the walls and ceiling. “Ahh a traveller, I see. So…I’m guessing you visited Egypt?” He frowned as if he couldn’t imagine me in Egypt. He was right.
“Actually, no.” I shrugged and started to tidy up my bedside table, shoving my little golden cat statue and pyramid-shaped eraser in my top drawer. “I just like to…” Pretend. But I couldn’t say something so lame, so instead I lied and said, “Plan. I like to plan ahead for when I do go…one day.”
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