All the Ways to Here
Page 9
Actually, it is different. Because by the time Willa returns from the pantry with a packet of spaghetti in her hand, Finn’s up there too, dancing in the sunshine that glides through the glass doors, hamming it up with her little sister. She’s laughing hard, clearly enjoying being this ridiculous. But, of course, she doesn’t look that silly, because she’s Finn, and she’s endless charm. She’d be adorable dancing with a bucket on her head. Riley shrieks with laughter and dances even harder. Even Jack’s smiling.
“You two are nuts,” Willa says.
“Yup.” Finn darts over and grabs Willa’s hand. “I’d ask you to dance with me, but I bet I know what you’ll say.”
“And you are one hundred per cent correct.”
Finn sidles up close, smiles flirtatiously, and then shimmies away. And it’s everything Willa can do not to abandon the pan and follow her.
Willa doesn’t hear the doorbell. All she knows is that Jack suddenly says, “I’ll get it!” and dashes from the room.
When he returns, his eyes are saucers. And trailing him is that familiar figure, a large navy bag slung over his arm.
She stares. They all stare. Even Finn, though she must have no idea who he is.
Suddenly, the music disappears, and the silence only makes the moment stranger. And like too many times lately, Willa has absolutely no idea what to do with this moment. With the fact that he’s here already.
Her father looks the same as always. Scary-thin and deeply tanned in that outdoor-work way. His blue eyes beam out of the dark hair and whiskers. The only difference from last time is that his wiry black hair is now shot through with a scatter of white.
“Hey, Dad. I didn’t think you’d get here until tomorrow.” She knows she sounds wooden. But that’s how it feels, confronted with a man she sees once a year and still has to call Dad.
“I got an early ride into town this morning, so I caught an afternoon flight.” He leans on the doorjamb, one leg crossed at the ankle. The place he stands in every room, like he’s ready to edge out of it if necessary.
Willa can hear the rolling boil of the pasta water behind her, and she feels this sudden itch to turn her back on him and just go about the business of dinner, pretending this isn’t happening. To go back to the dancing and the stupidity and the promise of herby pasta and sitting elbow to elbow with Finn. Why isn’t that an option? Where did that blissful moment disappear to?
Riley’s the first to break rank. She traipses over and gives him a ginger, one-armed hug. “Hi, Dad,” she says, all casual, like he usually drops in around at this time on a Thursday.
“Hey. You’re taller.” He holds the flat of his palm just above her head.
“Yep. My hair’s longer too.” She pulls out a strand and drops it, letting it float back down as she slides back over the kitchen floor in her socks. “That’s Finn,” she says, pointing.
Before Riley can say anything awkward, Willa hurries over and gives him the barest of hugs. “Hi.”
“You look well,” he says, holding her at arm’s length for a second. “Tall too.”
“So do you.” What else is there to say? You look the same only older? You look the same, even though I can’t remember exactly the last time I saw you?
“I just dropped by the hospital to see your nan,” he says. “Surgery next week, she said.”
Willa nods, trying not to think about knives slicing into her grandmother. “Do you want some tea? I can put the kettle on.”
“I think I might just go have a quick shower.” He shoulders his bag. “I came straight off night shift.”
“Towels are in the linen cupboard in the hall.”
“Righto.”
Willa watches him walk away, relieved. It’s so awkward acting familiar when he’s not. He’s little more than a birthday phone call. He’s distant memories of being taken fishing and camping because he couldn’t stay inside. He’s the figure driving while her mother sits in the back seat with her when she was carsick. He’s the hand securing hers and Riley’s while her mum holds Jack up high at an air show. He’s never just standing in their kitchen, a full-bodied being, playing at being part of the scenery.
A hand squeezes her wrist, wrenching her back to the room.
“Hey.” Finn’s expression is both curiosity and concern. “I think I might go home.”
“What about dinner?”
“It’s weird me being here now. And besides, then you’ll have enough food.”
“Um, okay,” Willa stutters, slightly relieved she won’t have to juggle an extra level of social awkwardness.
When her schoolbag is packed, Finn turns back to Willa and gives her a you’ve got this smile. “I’ll call you later, okay?” Then she frowns. “Unless, of course, you just want some time w—”
Willa grabs her hand. “Call me later. Please?”
Finn’s responding smile is small, but Willa feels it like sunlight. “Okay, I will.” She waves at the kids before turning down the hall. “Bye, guys.”
And now there were four.
CHAPTER 20
Finn
Given the choice, Finn would have spent her spring school holidays lying around in the sunshine, reading and hanging out. Hopefully with Willa.
But these are not options. Instead, she is third wheel to last-minute marital crisis talk arrangements.
This means flying to Tasmania with her mother for eight long, windy, and Willa-less days. Finn doesn’t even bother trying to get out of it when her mother springs the newly hatched plan. Because she knows there’s no way her mum is leaving her alone that long. And Anna’s housemate is going through some personal crisis and won’t want little sisters around, so Finn knows she’s along for the angsty ride.
So are the dogs. Their usual kennel was full, and Fatima, their neighbour, will happily look after Son any time they go away, but she’s terrified of dogs. Even small, white, lazy ones. Banjo and Patter emerge from their airline crates, dazed but frantically excited to see her. Finn feels the same. She gets the feeling she’ll be hanging out with them a lot in her role as genetic appendage to this “holiday”.
They don’t go to the tiny east coast town where her dad has been staying. Instead, they have created some kind of neutral territory in a rented three-bedroom cottage by the sea. It’s a rugged, rocky place a mere fifteen-minute drive to the city. Apparently, you can have it both ways in Tasmania.
During daylight, they go on nature walks or into the city for food and culture. During daylight, they play nice and normal. Then, at the end of the day, they come back to the cottage. A bottle of wine is opened, and her parents reconvene on the deck and talk for hours. Or sometimes they’re just silent. They don’t fight, but Finn can sense the intensity every time she passes them on her way to the bathroom or the fridge.
Later, when it gets dark and cold, they move to the living room by the fire and switch the TV on, attempting to resume nuclear family status. But when they try to draw Finn out of hiding, the air still feels too thick, so she plays up adolescent apathy and floats back to her room. There, she curls up with the dogs and watches old movies on her laptop.
Even worse, the internet is wiggy to nonexistent. Especially when there’s weather. And there’s weather all the time in this elemental place. Sometimes she just sits there and watches the reception bars on her phone come and go, looking for a window to get a text through to Willa, dogged by that electric longing she always gets when she wants to be near her and can’t be. Nan’s having her operation this week, and it’s an obnoxious hurt that Finn is stuck here, unable to be there for Willa.
Poor Will. She was paralysed the afternoon her father arrived. So was Finn for a moment. Willa may resemble her mother in skin colour and hair and eyes, going on the photos Finn’s seen, but Willa’s father is the framework that props it up. He is the genetic material that squared Willa’s shoulders, widened her mouth, and granted her the gift of long legs. No one would ever believe for a second they weren’t father and daughter.
“Are you getting used to him yet?” Finn asks her when she finally gets a call through.
“I guess. It’s all just kind of weird,” Willa says. “You know, I didn’t even know that he drank his tea black or that he’s allergic to eggplant.”
Finn knows by now that what Willa really means is by that is that he’s still a total shock to her, and she hates it. Finn’s getting used to Willa’s need to downplay everything, like she thinks she doesn’t have the right to feel bad or conflicted about things, that she must always be the stoic one.
She’s even stiff with Finn at first on the phone, like she’s already forgotten in just a few days how to be the Willa she lets herself be when they’re alone. But Finn just waits it out, and Willa finally comes back to her.
“I miss you,” Willa says softly as they say their goodbyes.
And Finn smiles, because she always feels this exquisite radiance when Willa uses her words with her. “I miss you too.”
Finn can’t imagine what that would be like to have a stranger of a dad suddenly flung on you. Or to not know your own father to the point that when you see each other, it’s stilted and bloodless. Her own parents are being weird enough. One morning, she wakes to the absence of Patter in his usual spot at the crook of her knees. She leaves Banjo snuggling into the warm residue of her sleep and goes hunting.
Down the hall, her mum’s room is ajar, but when Finn edges it open, neither she nor Patter are there. Finn stands there, blinking away sleep, staring at the made-up bed, slowly finding the obvious in her mother’s absence. Anita doesn’t do early walks. And she definitely never gets up first on holidays. There’s only one place she could be. What Finn doesn’t know is what to do with the feeling it gives her.
She hunts down Patter in the living room, snatching the last of the heat from the dying fire. When they pile back into bed, sleep eludes her. She has no idea how to put the jigsaw of factors together: the civil family days, the tense evening conversations, the sharing of a bed. How is all that supposed to fit together into a cogent clue about what comes next? Because that’s all Finn wants—a spoiler on this life episode.
On the last weekend, her half-sister Anna flies over, and for one night, she fills the place with the kind of easy mood that exists wherever Anna is. She brings air and light, and Finn can breathe again.
On the Saturday, the two of them go to the city for a girls’ night.
“Thanks for saving me.” Finn flops backwards on the hotel bed. “There’s nothing like feeling like an intruder with your own family.”
“I’m so sorry you couldn’t come stay with me instead.”
“It’s been so weird.” Finn stretches her arms out across the wide, white spread of bed and counts the pillows. Four. “They’re deciding whether they want to be married still, but they’re sleeping together.” She tells Anna about Patter and the empty bed.
“Yeah, but you can be sleeping with someone and not be okay.” Anna slides open the balcony door and examines the view. “Sex is easier than the other stuff sometimes.”
Aside from the fact that Finn doesn’t want to think about her parents and the act, she doesn’t really get it. How can she? She hasn’t used sex for anything but sex yet. Well, she used it to lose her virginity, she guesses. And look how well that turned out.
“So, are you and Willa doing the deed yet?” Anna asks her later. They’re drinking hot chocolates outside the movie theatre after an insanely long French film about teenagers working at some beachside camp. It was chock full of romantic angst and the awkwardness of first sexual encounters. Totally cringe-y and real. Not that Anna needs a movie to prompt these questions. Her conversation knows no boundaries.
“Not yet.” Finn stares at the trickle of blinking, sun-dazed people coming out of the cinema and fights a blush. They could be, though. It’s between them all the time. Well, a lot of the time. Sometimes when they’re kissing, it’s all indulgence, a sweetness. Other times it turns to sex. But because they’re not having sex, it’s more a kind of delicious frustration, a friction. It’s not doing it. It’s all hot kisses, fingers dancing close to places but retreating quickly. It’s stealth touches of skin bared by clothes riding. It’s chaste, but the intentions are not. And when there are no more places they can go that wouldn’t cross the unspoken line that Willa never goes near and Finn knows that she drew, they falter.
They haven’t talked about it, but Willa seems to have absorbed the things that Finn told her that night at camp and is letting Finn lead. Finn doesn’t say anything or move the line, because she feels safe in this nowhere zone. Because she’s still stuck in the rut of knowing she stupidly rushed into something once when she thought she knew better. And she never wants to be that wrong again.
But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel the constant pull of it with Willa, a girl who is as inexperienced as her but who kisses like she’s been making girls feel like this all her life. A girl whose hands always know the right places to go, and how to make Finn feel hot and liquid and electric all at the same time.
But there’s always a moment when Finn’s brain kicks in, taking over from the greedy instincts of her body. And before she knows she’s going to, she calls an end to it by pulling away or pretending she’s scared to miss her curfew.
She doesn’t tell Anna this. It’s too raw and way too confusing. She just lets her sister accept the “not yet” as a simple fact of not arriving yet at what’s supposed to be an inevitable destination. Because Finn doesn’t know how to choose the words she’d use to describe the conflict between the feelings she gets when she thinks about being naked with Willa and what she does when it’s actually a possibility.
If she knew that, she’d know how to talk to Willa about it too.
CHAPTER 21
Willa
Willa was eight when they went to live with Nan. They’d spent the year after her mother died living in a house on a winding road that led to the forest and, beyond that, the mines.
She missed their small flat in the northern town they’d lived in before, with the yellow-wallpapered room she shared with both Riley and Jack. Her favourite spot was the tiny balcony. She’d hang her arms and legs through the gaps in the railing so the wrought iron pressed against her chest, holding her in place in the sky. This is where she liked to eat fruit, dripping juice onto her feet and the garden below.
“How did you get such sticky toes, little one?” her mother would chide as she held Willa’s small brown feet under the tap.
The new house was rangy and weatherboard and too big for the four of them. Jack and Riley were tiny still, and the rooms so big they looked lost in them. Spiders loved the corners, and Willa spent her days leading her brother and sister from tight, dark spaces where they’d inevitably wander. The backyard was a jungle, and out the front a poinciana tree littered its rage of red petals all over the lawn.
Every day, their father went to work early, and they’d go next door to the corpulent, indulgent woman who dropped them at school and crèche each day and picked them up later and fed them their tea. They’d watch TV at her house until he came home, smelling of earth and smoke.
Willa doesn’t remember knowing they were going to leave. What she does remember is her father staring at them. On weekends, he’d sit on the edge of the veranda’s sprawl and smoke and tap his foot and watch them play. Or he’d take them to the safe water and let them paddle. Even when they were quiet, and they’d just draw or read or collect up petals together, he’d stare. Somehow, she knew he was trying to solve a problem. And her eight-year-old brain knew the problem was them.
Then, one day, there was a rush of packed bags and the roar of a plane and Jack crying in Dad’s lap. Probably because his ears hurt, the woman sitting in
front of them told them. She handed them boiled lollies from a plastic bag. Willa sucked hers dutifully and felt her ears snap, crackle, and pop as the plane bounced its way south.
That first night at Nan’s, she sat in the kitchen with Jack pressed to her side, eating toasted sandwiches made of Nan’s baked bread and the tomatoes that she let Willa pick from the yard. When Willa pulled the ruby fruit from the vine, they smelled dusky, like sun dust might. Her small brain reasoned that if there was moon dust, there surely could be sun dust. But the bright-red flesh inside her sandwich tasted like the place she’d left behind, rich and sun-drenched.
The back door was wide open to the yard as they ate. Sunlight hit Riley where she crouched on the rug, tired and listless and refusing a chair. Nan didn’t seem to care; she just handed her a placemat and her plate and let her pick over her dinner on the floor. Outside, her father smoked, staring at the sky over the tall fences that divided Nan’s yard from the world.
After dinner, Riley erupted into tears for no reason that Willa could fathom.
“Poor thing’s tired,” Nan said to no one. She picked her up and rocked her in her arms, Riley’s long legs dangling from Nan’s hip. “A bath. That’s what you need. A bath and your bed.” Riley pressed her face to Nan’s neck, and her crying became a quiet grizzle. “You three are going to be good and do what your Nan says, aren’t you?” She said it like it was a fact, not a question, and Willa nodded. It had never occurred to her not to be.
When they were done with their sandwiches, Nan replaced their empty plates with bowls. All Willa could do was blink at the bouquet of riches before her. One small, perfect scoop of each of the Neapolitan ice cream flavours.
Nan’s house was like that. The perfect combination of treats and rules. It was fresh fruit, and it was ice cream, and it was greens gathered from the garden. It was clean sheets and being tucked in to bed early and one hour of TV doled out after school. It was scented cuddles and chides to pick up after themselves. It was everything life had not been the last year. Dinners were meals, not toast and orange spaghetti from a can. School lunches were thick sandwiches and crisp apples eaten from plastic boxes they washed themselves after school every day.